RESSOURCEMENT A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth Century Catholic Theology

Oxford University Press 2012 £65

If I were a Roman Catholic reading this book of learned essays I would be both delighted and ashamed to belong to the Roman Catholic Church. What a great company it embraces even in modern times - Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac, to whom the book is dedicated, Teilhard de Chardin with his cosmic vision of all things in Christ, Etienne Gilson, Jean Daniélou, Louis Bouyer, Karl Rahner and many others carefully portrayed and discussed in the 31 chapters and 500 pages. I would be proud and thankful for the scholarship and conviction of its 30 or so different authors who aid our own curiosity by providing careful references for further research and avoid, for the most part, sitting in judgment on past history. I am excited to learn that Henri de Lubac was not only a great theologian but also active in the resistance in Nazi occupied France and a strong critic of anti-Semitism at a time when too many were silent. And if I were a radical Roman Catholic, I would be delighted to see a scholar like Joseph Komonchak, famous for his help in editing the excellent five-volume History of Vatican II, daring to criticise a rather reactionary Papal Encyclical Humani Generis as ‘confused and confusing’ though blaming possible authors like Garrigou-Lagrange rather than Pius XII who signed it.

But I would be ashamed to be reminded in almost every chapter, though in a gentle sort of way, that almost all the Roman Catholic theologians who were in any way adventurous and courageous and ecumenical in their thinking were at one time banished and silenced by Rome. They did not have their books burned but the faithful were told not to read them and they not to write them. The list is a terrible indictment: Beauduin, one of the early pioneers of dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, Congar whose books on unity were all for a time suspect, de Lubac for his ecclesiology, Teilhard, and in decades after 1960, outside the scope of this book 1930-1960, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Leonardo Boff and that witty editor of New Blackfriars, Herbert McCabe, who was once dismissed for daring to suggest that holy Church could sometimes act in a corrupt manner. There is a give away line in Humani Generis: ‘The most noble office of theology is to show how a doctrine defined by the Church is contained in the sources of revelation’. So now we know!

But much of this changed with Vatican II 1962-5 and thank God for that. And thank God for Roman Catholic theologians of ressourcement and renewal who pioneered the way for this great Council and great Decrees on the Word of God, the Church and Ecumenism et al. And thank God for non-Roman Catholic theologians who were invited to Vatican II as participant observers and supported the process of reform and renewal. They are underplayed in this book but not quite - with fine comments from John Webster about Karl Barth and from Orthodox theologian, Andrew Louth, who notes the influence of some famous Orthodox émigrés, such as Florovsky, Bulgakov and Lossky, many of whom settled in Paris and reminded their Roman Catholic colleagues that Eastern Fathers might have a different, less legalistic approach to doctrine.

Not being a Roman Catholic, I will go on learning much from this book and its authors, some of whom are friends, about a Church I long to have reunion with. But as a Reformed theologian I also see more clearly why even after the Reformation Rome can stand in desperate need of reform so as never again to stifle inspiration in the way it once did.