New Languages
for Faith
A lecture in
Santiago de Compostella (September 2006) published as La
fe a la bsqueda de nuevos lenguajes hoy in Cre, por eso habl: retos para
la transmisin de la fe: VII Jornadas de Teologa,
Instituto Telogico Compostelano, Santiago de Compostela, 2007,
159-171.
My theme concerns one of the
perennial tasks of theology. As David Tracy has put it, theologians in each
period of history offer a reinterpretation of the tradition for the present
situation.[1] In other
words changing languages of faith are not only a matter of inculturated
communication of faith, but have to do also with the central task of systematic
theology to understand revelation anew in the light of the sensibilities and
questions of our changing history. This does not mean a passive correlation
which would allow the culture to dictate the agenda. Instead it is part of the
long adventure of the church from Acts 15 and Act 17 onwards, where we find the
fundamental option to open the early community to the gentile world and then
the generous outreach of St Paul on the Areopagus. The Church from the
beginning has embraced the challenge of translating the good news, literally
and culturally, in order to become all things to all people (1 Cor. 9:22).
This
paper will fall into four sections of unequal length. An introductory part will
outline something of the particular contexts and challenges of todays culture.
Then the argument will unfold in three other stages, entitled preambles,
proposals and practices.
CONTEXTS AND CHALLENGES
Let
me dedicate some time to the contemporary cultural context which, as we shall
see, calls forth new languages of faith. It is now widely accepted that in most
of Europe we have moved from a situation of inherited or sociological faith,
passed on from one generation to another, to a situation of
detraditionalization where faith identity needs to be constructed as a
decision against the tide.[2] Unlike the pre-modern situation in our
various countries, maturity of faith is rarely received today simply through
the mediations of family, parish
and school. Nevertheless, few of the younger generation fall into the
old category of atheists or explicit unbelievers. Indeed it is too simple to
say that Christianity has been replaced by a secular culture. Where thirty
years ago sociologists were writing about an irreversible secularisation, now
they are commenting on the return of religion. Of course this trend can be
narcissistic and often allergic to church forms of faith. Nevertheless it
represents a genuine hunger in people, a post-materialist quest for anchors of
meaning. So we find ourselves with a complex plurality of lifestyles where the
oft-repeated phrase Im spiritual but not very religious seems a significant
slogan to sum up a new moment of culture. This is not the same as old-style
religious indifference even though many people seems apathetic and untouched by
institutional expressions of faith.
We
like to say that we are in a situation of postmodernity but the fallout of
European modernity remains strongly with us and from a religious point of view
its inheritance remains ambivalent. The two pillars of early modernity were the
rationality born from the new science and the subjectivity born from the new
humanism. The new empirical epistemology underlies many of the positive
technological achievements that have transformed our world, but when it claims
a monopoly of the roads towards truth, a whole wavelength of religious wisdom
is ignored and even despised. In addition, the sense of the modern self led to
a new awareness of the dignity of the individual person, something totally in
harmony with the Christian vision. But gradually this discovery of subjectivity
narrowed into an isolated individualism and this disengaged self, according
to Charles Taylor, found itself without any larger frameworks or narratives of
meaning. On both these fronts, to say nothing about the political upheavals,
modernitys achievements caused a new vulnerability in the language of faith.
If
we turn to the postmodern situation we find other challenges. Here I am more
interested in lived cultural postmodernity than in philosophical postmodernism.
To put it simply, within our postmodernity of the everyday two tendencies are
emerging. Perhaps a majority of people fall into fragmentation and rootlessness
and lifestyles of alienated immediacy. From a pastoral point of
view, this postmodernity of the street wounds people in three important
dimensions of their humanity: a wounded imagination, a wounded memory, and a
wounded sense of belonging.
Imagination, which according to Newman is the highroad of faith, can
become colonised by junk food and shrink into superficiality. Memory, which is
the receiver of the Word through a living tradition, can be replaced by
imprisonment in an a-historic present. Belonging with others in some kind of
community is undermined when spiritual lostness goes hand in hand with a
frenetic life-style. In this light I think the expression cultural desolation
a fruitful one.[3] Desolation,
in its spiritual sense, involves an impotent restlessness, an inner paralysis
in spite of outer mobility. When
it becomes a cultural paradigm, it can numb the roots of imagination, memory
and community belonging, and thus make Christian faith not so much incredible
as unreal and unreachable. When desire become blind and affection lacks
commitment, even religion can be reduced to self-fulfilment and the logic of
the supermarket.[4] This new
secularisation is not a just a matter of loss of social influence, nor is it
mainly a question of ideas. It is a secularisation of sensibility and of
self-images, where our potential for compassion for suffering is diminished and
avenues to faith become blocked.
However, there is a second
and more hopeful tendency present in contemporary culture, one that seems to
search for something more beyond the emptiness of secularised life. This more
creative postmodernity is retrieving forgotten or neglected dimensions of our
humanity, such as imagination, affectivity, the feminine, the aesthetic, and,
as already mentioned, what they call the spiritual. It is tempting for
believers to dismiss this as ambiguous and sub-Christian. But St Paul on the
Areopagus would invite us to discern the seeds of the Spirit even in this
uncertain groping towards mystery. And it will be part of my argument later
that in this creative or searching sensibility of postmodernity, in spite of
all its potential superficiality, we can find some important signposts towards
new languages of faith.
PREAMBLES
Having outlined, some
features of the new cultural contexts that require languages of faith, I will
now structure my argument in three sections. These will explore three families
of pastoral and theological emphasis emerging in recent decades. The first has
to do with the field of pre-evangelisation or ministry of disposition and
openness. The second looks at ways of proclaiming faith that seem in tune with
todays sensibility. The third will examine faith in action and the special relevance
of community lifestyle and witness.
An
older apologetics focused on the philosophical preambles of faith. Today we
need spiritual preambles of a different kind, to awaken the often soporific
spirit within people. When a previous sociological faith has given way to a
culturally accepted marginalisation of faith, how are we to overcome the
alienation and the apathy? If the blockage to faith is on the level of a
cultural disposition, then a directly religious proclamation may prove
unfruitful and even counter productive. The normal language of believers and
preachers can sound not only like a foreign tongue but worse, like a grammar
book which one had to learn as a child but which now seems boring and hollow.
In such a context some creative forms of pre-evangelisation are essential
before any language of evangelisation can come alive. This is a John the Baptist ministry that prepares the way of
the Word in todays culture. It engenders hope for faith before arriving at a
more explicit language of faith. Its motto could come from Shakespeares Hamlet
who said that the readiness is all. Echoing Rahners proposal for a
substitute for traditional apologetics, we are in need of a pastoral
mystagogy, a gradual initiation of people into a sense of mystery situated
not only in special moments of quiet wonder but also within their daily
exercise of freedom.
On this point let me
offer a classic example. When he was only in his early twenties, the future
Cardinal Newman had a series of painful arguments with his younger brother
Charles who had become atheistic. We know the content of these exchanges from a
series of eight letters written by John Henry to Charles between 1823 and
1825. What emerges is the crucial
role of disposition for any journey from unbelief towards faith. He told his
brother bluntly, you are not in a state of mind to listen to argument of any
kind. Since internal evidence depends a great deal on moral feeling,
rejection of faith arises from a fault of the heart, not of the intellect. In short the younger brothers
intellectual position was influenced by a prior existential stance. We survey
moral and religious subjects through the glass of previous habits. This early
and unsuccessful attempt to persuade an unbeliever of the truth of Christianity
seems to have confirmed Newman in his suspicion of external proofs for God or
religion. More positively, it gave him confidence in his natural tendency to
give special attention to dispositional interiority as a spiritual preamble for
faith.[5]
In
this regard one simple axiom needs to be stated. Faith is never fully
intelligible from outside itself. Only from within a certain attitude and a
threshold of prayerful openness can one begin to recognise the inner call of
faith. Just as stained glass windows cannot be seen properly from outside the
building, but only from inside with the sun shining outside, so too a persons
spiritual stance determines what they will be able to see. To insist on this
inner perspective is in tune with what Jesus quoted from Isaiah concerning
those who remain on the outside: they listen but never understand (Mk. 4: 12).
It is also the logic of the Magnificat with its insistence that God scatters
the proud of heart and sends the rich away empty.
Translating
these insights for our postmodern situation, if many people are unfree for
faith and if their dominant culture is wounded in the ways we have suggested,
then a new existential apologetics is required in order to heal those wounds
and to nourish a new receptivity for the gospel. Just as Jean-Luc Marion has
spoken of the conversion from idol to icon, our initial ministry of disposition
would hope to liberate a wavelength of wonder in people. Rather as the parables
of Christ surprised people and invited them into a different perspective, a new
preambles for today would awaken people to their suppressed hungers.
Such
spiritual or existential preambles would involve a shift from rationality to
affectivity, which important theologians today (such as Pierangelo Sequeri) are
taking seriously. This focus implies inviting people towards faith through
different doors than in times past. Sacraments and doctrinal teaching remain
crucial but are no longer in the front line of a pastoral pedagogy capable of
meeting the Western crisis of faith today. For a postmodern new sensibility,
what is needed is a pre-evangelisation of people to liberate their imagination,
to awaken their spiritual antennae, to initiate them into ways of prayer and of
listening to the Word. Then the richness of the Churchs sacramental life can
enter to crown a longer and slower journey of faith. Among the emerging
languages of faith that seem fruitful in todays culture, three in particular
can be highlighted: contemplative skills of stillness as an initiation into
personal prayer; new forms of community where gradual growth in faith is
fostered; practical service of the wounded of the world. And these will
dimensions will return in our treatment of proposals and of practices.
PROPOSALS
Such
a quotation serves as an excellent bridge between what I am calling preambles
and the necessity for specific evangelisation or proposals. Since faith is
not mainly a question of doctrine or knowledge, it needs the existential roads
of imaginative and spiritual preambles. But, as Cardinal Ratzinger often
stressed, the Church should be a context of experience where the art of
living is learned. When this happens people can move from a second-hand
knowledge of religion or a vaguely spiritual wavelength to a living encounter
with Christ. As John Henry Newman insisted in one of his Anglican sermons,
When faith is said to be a religious principle, it is the things believed, not
the act of believing them, which is peculiar to religion.[6]
How can we find new languages to propose faith for
today? One French-language school of pastoral theology has stressed the
radically different situation in which the Church finds itself in Europe today
and the need to engender faith from zero.[7]
This entails an honest abandonment of older assumptions and methods. The simple
transmission of faith as an inheritance or reproduction through traditional
catechesis and sacramental practice is no longer fruitful. Even the emphasis on
welcoming the inquirer and on proposing faith as an existential choice may no
longer be culturally relevant. The anthropology of believing has changed in
the few decades since Vatican II.[8]
Since personal authenticity is such a key value today, authority as such has
little impact. Hence one has to start the search for a faith language from
older fundamentals, allowing the story of the gospels gradually to awaken
people to a possible new identity. In particular they long to believe in the
possibility of real love.[9]
Faith needs to be an event of transformation born from the witness of those who
have already found Christ. At first their faith challenges the unbeliever to a
re-reading of his or her own experience and then gradually to discover the
paschal mystery at work in the depths of each life. From this new self-image it
is possible to engender the further and crucial step of a recognition of
Christ as Lord.
Christoph Theobald has
commented that the humanism implied in Gaudium et Spes is no longer
actual for todays culture.[10]
In a similar spirit Antonio Jimnez Ortiz has recently argued that the
old-style question of philosophical meaning has given way to a more everyday
quest for a thread in a fragmented life.[11]
In particular the younger generation, behind the protective mask of their
indifference, hide a shy hope for affective fulfilment and for affective
generosity in the service of others. They are more pragmatic than metaphysical,
more concrete than existential. Their spiritual path, if they can escape from
drifting, starts from a new imagination. Some deeper quality of relationship
has to break into the prison of loneliness concealed behind all their frenetic
interacting with others. There are various doorways that can unite preambles
and proposals: seeing the other as offering the possibility of real love;
aesthetic experiences such as music or poetry or any space for wonder; the cry
of anothers need when it is concretely present; the surprise of encountering
an alive and honest community of believers. What was previously impossible – a trust to express
the hearts culturally smothered questions – becomes possible in a new
space of friendship. Were not our hearts burning?: that Emmaus insight found
words only afterwards but the fire was enough to cause them to invite the
stranger to supper. Meaning
reveals itself as a person, a gift, a call, not simply a conclusion from our
thinking. In todays culture this will seldom happen without the human ground
out of which grace can emerge. Instead of being a dramatic discovery, it can be
a gradual awakening within the everyday: if the spiritual quality of the
quotidian can be liberated, the victims of postmodern cultural desolation find
credible hope for faith.
Of course pre-evangelization
needs to arrive at evangelization, and there is a risk of remaining so long in
the preparatory awakening of the humanum that one never reaches the
real mysterium, the surprise of Christ. It is surely right to
explore the continuity between human desire and the word of God, but there is
also a rupture or at least interruption of human hopes when the full cost of
discipleship is confronted.[12]
Indeed it is notable that the structure of the gospel of Mark is shaped to lead
catechumens from the positive wonder of parables and healings through the
central recognition of Christ as Lord into a whole second half of purification
of pride, power and our nave identification of religion with personal comfort.
The road to Jerusalem is the counter-cultural part of the gospel. In short, the
emphasis that I have placed on disposition is an important initial language of
faith for today but it is only a preparatory initiation.
If pre-evangelisation
focussed on disposition, evangelisation seeks to communicate the specific Good
News of Christ. In our postmodern moment this entails surprising people with a
gift they dont know they need. If becoming aware of that need was the
essential task of our existential preambles, the surprise of the gift is at the
core of our proposal of faith. How can that surprise be mediated in todays
culture? Let me briefly indicate two shifts in emphasis that are being explored
with new seriousness in theology today, and which have been implicit in our
argument here. I have in mind the fields of imagination and affectivity. To
quote Newman once again: in 1841, while still an Anglican, he argued that human
beings are made for action, moved by feeling, and therefore the heart is
commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination.[13] For our
postmodern sensibility this prophetic insight is even more true. If imagination
enables us to open up to new
possibilities, it is therefore a most powerful carrier of religious meaning. It
is on this level of images that our deepest battles take place and hence to
propose or engender the Christian vision involves a transformation of our
imagination of life. Indeed. For Walter Brueggermann the drama of the Old
Testament is a struggle between the safe religious stability of the kings and a
prophetic imagination recalling people to the more ambitious liberating hopes
of God.[14]
To speak of affectivity as a
language of faith is to retrieve another dimension that was neglected in our
excessively academic theology, even though its role was recognised in different
ways by such major theologians as Balthasar, Lonergan and Rahner. As a more
contemporary example, I want to refer to recent reflections of Pierangelo
Sequeri. In his 2006 book, entitled Non ultima la morte, Sequeri develops
what has been a frequent focus of his earlier writings. In his view theology of
faith became unbalanced through its focus on the rationality of the
Enlightenment. The assumption was that the mind is trustworthy, the heart
not.[15]
Thus the typical discourse on faith-and-reason often forgot the other
revolution represented by Romanticism and hence undervalued the role of feeling
in the adventure of faith. In Sequeris view we need a new anthropology of
affectivity to do justice to fundamental dimensions of human believing: the
liberation of desire, the relationship to the Other, the awakening of trust,
the need for recognition, and the power of witness. Just as Sequeri proposes a positive rereading of the value
placed on affectivity today as a potentially fruitful language of faith, so too
Juan Antonio Estrada has written recently about inteligencia emocional as
opening a motivating non-philosophical wavelength for faith today, and one that
is faithful to the reception of the Word as found in the Bible.[16]
What emerges from this
discussion of new wavelengths for the communication of faith is a convergence
of priorities in tune with the deeper aspects of postmodern culture. Where
newness in needed in the language of faith, it is often will be due to three factors. It may
try to meet a new question that arises from the reflective horizons of today.
Alternatively it can seek to respond to emerging aspects of the spiritual
sensibility of the age. Yet again it may want to indicate some aspects of the
culture that seem dehumanising and hostile to faith. In all three cases a new
language of faith can be classified as a form of inculturation, with the
understanding that inculturation includes a critical discernment of the
negative as well as the potentially positive characteristics of the surrounding
culture.
What has been said in this
section on proposing faith has been present in the reflections of recent Popes.
A strong note of personalism was part of the religious vision of John Paul II
and it is present also in Benedict XVI. Both of them stressed the need for a
larger and sapiential version of reason in order to do justice to our
reflections on faith. This implies that any new language of faith will need to
unite two wavelengths: an appeal to a non-abstract logos of love and a sense of
the drama of personal decision involved in arriving at Christian faith today.
PRACTICES
What we have seen in this
paper is a converging set of tendencies within the languages of faith. The
convergence is vital because any one of these elements on their own could
suffer from isolated emphasis and become a source of distortion. The frequently
voiced axiom that faith has to be a personal decision to survive in the
pluralist complexity of today is true but not the whole truth. This personal
focus needs the mediation of a community and to be in touch with the
sacramental tradition of the Church. However, it is equally true that Church
rituals without personal formation can remain empty. As is often said, we put
the cart before the horse in terms of languages of faith if we give priority to
sacramentalisation to the detriment of evangelisation. That sacramental
language of faith may have been powerful and fruitful in a pre-modern and
traditional culture, but without una espiritualidad comprometida[19]
it can be a source of religious malnutrition in todays postmodern environment.
Behind these questions about
priorities of one language of faith or another there lie some of the major
tensions of contemporary theology. Are we to trust in the universal and active
presence of the Spirit and hence remain open to gospel fruits even without
explicit faith? That, in very simple terms, would be the Rahnerian school.
Should we instead stress the uniqueness and centrality of Gods revelation in
Christ, with its call for faith and conversion and its promise of fullness of
life? That, in equally simple terms, would be the Balthasar school. Or do we
present faith as action, because without works it is dead, and in todays world
it is the witness of social love that is most needed and most eloquent. That,
again in simple terms, is the emphasis of Metz and the liberation theologians.
All three languages of faith are crucial: a theology of the spiritual
preparation for faith, a theology of the surprise and beauty of Gods Word, and
a theology of faith as passionately involved in the service of our suffering
history. They correspond approximately to what I have explored here under the
three headings of preambles, proposals, and practices.
In case this map that I have
offered seems too easy, let me end by evoking some of the inevitable challenges
in any language of Christian faith. In Henri de Lubacs words Christ is the
great disturber but also the friend of humanity who brings refreshing newness
into our tired world.[20]
Therefore any genuine language of faith will invite us into a lightness and
peace, because we are no longer alone with the burden of making sense of
ourselves. But it would also travel the road to Jerusalem, in the sense of
inviting us also towards an erosion of the ego and a transforming enlargement
of the heart in active love. Besides we need to be humbly hesitant about all
our theological clarities – faced with the scandal of human tragedy and
the strangeness of Gods seeming silence. All our languages of faith are doomed
to radical inadequacy because what we try to speak is Mystery. No language is
worthy of God but some, as I have tried to suggest, are worthier than others
today because they reach peoples imagination and because they invite people
towards attunement with the inner word of the Spirit, which leads them in turn
to the outer word of Christ our Lord.
[1] David Tracy,
The Analogical Imagination, New York,
1981, p. 64.
[2] See Lieven
Boeve, Religion after Detraditionalization: Christian Faith in a Post-Secular
Europe, Irish Theological Quarterly 70
(2005) 99-122, especially p. 105.
[3] A theme developed in my book Clashing
Symbols: an introduction to faith and culture, second edition, London, 2003, p. 107.
[4] Jos Frazo Correia, Incio e os
Exerccios Espirituais em tempos de morangos com acar, Brotria 162 (2006), 509-526.
[5] Quotations from The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al., Vol. I, Oxford, 1978, pp. 212, 214, 219, 226.
[6] Religious Faith Rational in J. H.
Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. I, London, 1879, p. 191.
[7] This paragraph draws on Une
Nouvelle Chance pour lՃvangile: vers una pastorale dengendrement, ed. P. Bacq and C. Theobald, Lumen
Vitae, Bruxelles, 2004.
[8] J. M. Donegani, ibid., p. 37.
[9] This is also the argument of Gilles
Lipovetsky, Le bonheur paradoxal: essai sur la societ dhyperconsummation, Paris, 2006.
[10] Une Nouvelle Chance pour lՃvangile, p. 63.
[11] Antonio Jimnez Ortiz,
Posmodernidad y Jvenes: la niebla cae sobre la pregunta por el sentido, Proyeccin:
teologa y mundo actual, 53 (2006) 48-66.
[12] Boeve, art. cit., 119.
[13] John Henry Newman, An Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent, London, 1909, p. 92.
[14] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic
Imagination,
Philadelphia, 1978.
[15] Pierangelo Sequeri, Non ultima
la morte: la libert di credere nel Risorto, Milano,
2006, p. 54.
[16] Juan Antonio Estrada, La crisis de
la fe en Dios, Revista Latinoamericana de Teologa,
22 (2005), 275.
[17] Dorothy Bass in Practicing
Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, ed. M. Volg and D. Bass, Grand Rapids, 2002, p.
6.
[18] Michael Warren, Youth and
Confirmation, The Furrow, 56 (2005), 215.
[19] Estrada, art. cit., 279.
[20] Henri de Lubac, The Drama of
Atheist Humanism,
London, 1949, pp. ix, 5.