Abstract
Essential to the full reception of Lumen gentium is a recovery of that document’s doxological ecclesiology, which presents the Church—even on earth—as most fully itself when it praises God. This article proposes that acknowledging the priority of doxology in the life of the Church will foster a more effective evangelization, service, and mission. It first surveys Lumen gentium’s context, achievements, seeds, and incomplete reception. It then argues for the centrality of holiness and doxology in ecclesiology, looking at both several theologians (Frans Jozef van Beeck, Khaled Anatolios, Joseph Ratzinger) and exemplary passages from Lumen gentium. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the importance of Lumen gentium’s doxological ecclesiology for addressing contemporary challenges.
One sometimes wonders whether anything new can be said about Vatican II in general and Lumen gentium in particular. It is easy to get the impression that discussions and debates concerning the Council have for some time resembled a game of tic-tac-toe played by adults: each player knows the other’s moves, and the result is invariably deadlock. You say People of God, I say hierarchy. I say dialogue, you say proclamation. You say episcopal collegiality, I say papal primacy. You say ‘Copernican revolution,’ I say ‘hermeneutic of reform.’ I say ‘spirit of Vatican II,’ you say ‘show me the text.’ You say Gaudium et spes, and I say Lumen gentium. And so it goes, with the result of an often-sterile hermeneutical stalemate.
There are no simple solutions to these kinds of impasses, but I want to argue in this article that—to borrow T. S. Eliot’s line in Four Quartets, ‘In my end is my beginning’—we will understand rightly and fully Lumen gentium—and the Church itself—only if we are clear about the end of the Church. By ‘end,’ I mean not the extinction of the Church, but rather its purpose and its destiny: holiness. Everything that the Church does is ordered to leading human creatures and human communities to holiness: a sharing in God’s own Trinitarian life. The Church evangelizes not as an end in itself, but rather to arouse and sustain the conversion that leads to true, eternal life with God. The Church serves humanity, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, so as to give them a share in God’s own abundant life. The Church celebrates the sacraments, precisely to lavish God’s life on humanity. The Church has institutions and a hierarchy only in the service of fostering holiness. When God is ‘all in all,’ as St Paul writes in chapter 15 of his First Letter to the Corinthians, there will be no more evangelization, no more mission, no more service, no more sacraments, no more institutions. All that will remain are the saints—the holy ones—praising and worshiping God in Jesus Christ eternally in the new creation. The Church’s deepest, most intrinsic identity—even now—is doxological: precisely this communion of saints praising God and sharing in his undying life.
The late Dutch Jesuit Frans Jozef van Beeck argued that Christianity has a doxological essence and a soteriological structure. 1 I will return to this claim later in this article. But, for now, one might say that doxology precedes soteriology, or, more precisely, that we are saved precisely by and precisely for the praise and worship of God; as the Second Eucharistic Prayer proclaims, ‘It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Father most holy.’ This priority of doxology, I will argue, is an indispensable key to unlocking Lumen gentium’s deepest meaning, and it is one that has often been lost in the last 50 years as the Church has tried to receive Vatican II. 2 Doxology, not mission or soteriology, must be the center of ecclesiology. When it is so, mission and soteriology will flourish.
This article on the priority of doxology as a key to the fruitful reception of Lumen gentium will unfold in three parts: an overview of Lumen gentium’s accomplishments and its still-outstanding tasks; an argument for the centrality of holiness to Lumen gentium and the consequent need for a more doxological ecclesiology; and a brief, concluding reflection on some implications of such a conciliar, doxological ecclesiology for a fuller reception of Vatican II. 3
Lumen gentium: Context, Achievements, Seeds, and Incomplete Interpretations
Lumen gentium’s emphasis on the primacy of holiness and doxology was made possible by the ressourcement theologies of the 19th and especially 20th centuries. The ecclesiological-historical context for Lumen gentium might be seen as a tension, even a clash, between two types of ecclesiology. 4 The first is a juridical, authority-driven ecclesiology in which power and initiative came to be centred in the person of the Pope; the second is a more communional, resourced one, which drew upon scriptural, patristic, and liturgical sources. 5 Yves Congar symbolically dates the rise of this first, juridical ecclesiology to be the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073–85), who sought to defend the freedom of the Church against the encroachment of secular authorities. 6 Such juridicism was accentuated in later centuries by the medieval challenge of conciliarism, the early-modern challenge of the Protestant Reformations, and the modern challenge of what Hermann Pottmeyer has called 19th-century papal Rome’s ‘three traumas’: (1) the ecclesial trauma of the after-effects of conciliarism, the Reformation, and the challenge of Gallicanism; (2) the political trauma of the French Revolution and the rise of state-controlled Churches; and (3) the intellectual-cultural trauma of the Enlightenment’s rationalism, liberalism, and secularism—all of which sought the neutering and even destruction of Catholicism. 7 In addition, Joseph Komonchak has noted the ecclesial effects of Catholicism’s engagement with modernity: bureaucratization, centralization of power, greater surveillance of intellectual life. 8
There were exceptions, of course, to this juridicizing trend in the 19th century, which sought instead to return to the sources of Christian tradition: the Tübingen School in Germany, above all Johann Adam Möhler, joined a recovery of the Church Fathers to an engagement with modern philosophical thought; John Henry Newman, who yoked devotion to the papacy and ecclesial authority to a keen historical and spiritual sensitivity; and, not least, the Roman School—so influential at Vatican I—whose ecclesiological vision was both deeply Christological and thoroughly institutional, but which nonetheless did not integrate sufficiently these dimensions. 9 One thinks as well of the nascent liturgical movement that began in the 19th century.
The early- and mid-20th century saw a distillation of a juridical ecclesiology in the various theological manuals, and a flourishing of ressourcement ecclesiologies through the renewal of biblical, patristic, and liturgical studies. In the first place, there was a renewal of interest in the Church as the mystical body of Christ, due to the scholarship of exegetes such as Emile Mersch and Lucien Cerfaux, and which received papal approbation in Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical, Mystici corporis Christi. Beginning in the late 1930s, especially in Germany, there emerged a conception of the Church as the People of God, which envisioned the Church as a pilgrim, repentant, ecumenical, and historical community ever in need of reform; it also highlighted Christianity’s continuity with Judaism. From the late 1930s into the 1960s, one also sees the development of the Church as itself a sacrament of Christ and the sacrament of salvation; Henri de Lubac, Otto Semmelroth, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx are the prominent names here. Alongside these ecclesiologies there also emerged communion ecclesiologies, which affirmed the Eucharistic heart of the Church and saw the universal Church as a communion of local churches built upon the Eucharist; de Lubac is foremost here, along with Ludwig Hertling, Yves Congar, and Jérôme Hamer. Lastly, we see ecclesiologies that present the Church as servant, which bore fruit at Vatican II in its vision of ecclesial authority as service and in its promotion of the renewed diaconate.
Achievements
The tension and even conflict between these two types of ecclesiology—one more juridical, the other more resourced and ‘communional’—bore fruit in the drafting and the promulgation of Lumen gentium. 10 Lumen gentium reflects the conciliar search for consensus. That consensual instinct frustrated more partisan types on the ideological extremes, such as Hans Küng, who regarded Lumen gentium as ‘fatally compromised’ by what he considered to be its unbiblical and unhistorical teaching on the Church’s hierarchical nature. 11 In contrast, Congar—the single most influential theologian at Vatican II—was intimately involved in the drafting of Lumen gentium and was remarkably positive about its achievements.
Those achievements are many, so I will highlight only a novena of teachings that I consider most significant. First, Lumen gentium’s opening chapter—‘The Mystery of the Church’—heralds a different type of ecclesiology, one focused more on images than on definitions and bringing out more prominently the Church as an essential part of the mystery and the history of salvation. Second, its opening paragraphs present a radically theological-Trinitarian ecclesiology: Number Two on the Father’s plan for the salvation of his creation, Number Three on the Son as the one in whom the Father will redeem and gather up all humanity and creation, and Number Four on the Holy Spirit as the one who makes the Church holy and endows it with charismatic and hierarchical gifts. Third, it is thoroughly Christocentric, revealed in Lumen gentium’s opening line: ‘Christ is the light of the nations’; 12 this primacy of Christ, and the subordination—but not separation—of the Church to him, forestalls any move to triumphalism or self-sufficiency. Fourth, it presents the Church as ‘the seed and beginning of the kingdom on earth.’ 13 Fifth, at the literal heart of the Dogmatic Constitution is the universal call to holiness and a consequent emphasis on the laity’s high vocation; the bonds of baptism precede the distinctions of holy orders and religious profession. Sixth, Lumen gentium affirms episcopal collegiality and the sacramentality of the episcopate; bishops are no longer regarded as priests with added administrative-jurisdictional powers granted by the Pope, but true ‘vicars and legates of Christ’ 14 in their own dioceses who have been given the fullness of holy orders and who—always with the Pope—govern the universal Church. Seventh, Lumen gentium presents an expansive understanding of the Church as the People of God, both as embracing in equality laity, clergy, and religious, and as extending into ecumenical and even interfaith relations; think of the concentric circles of belonging in nos.14–16: Catholics in no. 14, other Christians in no. 15, and other religious believers and indeed all humanity in no. 16. Eighth, this expansive conception of the People of God is bookended by nos. 13 and 17, wherein Lumen gentium presents an equally expansive conception of catholicity: the Church both extends to the ends of the earth and ‘redemptively integrates’ in Christ the diversity of human cultures in every age; 15 everything is destined to be gathered up in Christ the Head of humanity and all creation. Finally, in a concise, but unmistakable, manner, Lumen gentium articulates a humble, contrite ecclesiology; no. 8, for instance declares, ‘the Church, containing sinners in its own bosom, is at one and the same time holy and always in need of purification and it pursues unceasingly penance and renewal.’
Seeds
Alongside these substantial achievements, I see three areas in which Lumen gentium planted seeds that are still germinating. First, in no. 26 it spoke briefly about a theology of the local church, in which the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church is fully present where the faithful are gathered together with their bishop to proclaim the Gospel and to celebrate the Eucharist. We await the unfolding of the implications of this theology of the local church for (1) the Eucharistic form and life of the Church, (2) the relationship of collegiality and synodality to the exercise of primacy in the Church; and (3) an inculturation of the Church in which the riches of God and the riches of humanity’s response to those divine gifts interpenetrate. The work of the late French Dominican Jean-Marie Tillard has much to offer here. 16
Second, we still await a better integration of the Church’s nature and mission in ecclesiology and in magisterial teaching. Despite Lumen gentium’s clear statement in its first paragraph that it seeks to set forth teaching on ‘the nature of the Church and its universal mission,’ it must be admitted that it did so insufficiently. One sees here the limits of the distinction drawn by Cardinal Suenens of Belgium and adopted by the Council, between the Church ad intra and the Church ad extra. Lumen gentium, however unwittingly, became the ad intra document and Gaudium et spes the ad extra one—a bifurcation that has had harmful theological and pastoral effects, not least when some Catholics call themselves ‘Lumen gentium Catholics’ or ‘Gaudium et spes Catholics.’ This kind of polarization or ecclesial schizophrenia needs to be overcome.
Third, through the labors of the ‘Church of the Poor’ working group of bishops and theologians, 17 Lumen gentium offered a renewed sense of evangelical poverty in the Church: ‘The Church surrounds with love all who are afflicted with human infirmity, indeed in the poor and the suffering it recognises the face of its poor and suffering founder, [and] endeavours to relieve their need and in them it strives to serve Christ.’ 18 The Church as a whole, however, has a way to go in shedding what Congar called the ‘trappings’ of a Church too influenced by ‘imperial, feudal, [and] courtly’ conceptions of power and prestige. 19
Incomplete Reception
In addition to Lumen gentium’s achievements and its still-germinating seeds, one must also consider the ways in which Lumen gentium has been subjected to distorted and reductive interpretations that either emphasize one truth to the exclusion of a corresponding truth or that draw a sharp line between the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Churches. These less-than-catholic interpretations tend to view the Council’s teaching through a zero-sum or tug-of-war hermeneutic, in which one group’s gain is the other group’s loss. We see this, for instance, in the way that Chapters II (‘The People of God’) and III (‘The Hierarchical Constitution of the Church’) are played-off against each other, as if one can exalt the laity—wrongly identified at times as the ‘People of God’ tout court—only by demoting the hierarchy, or vice versa. We see it, too, in the ways that some have used Lumen gentium no. 5’s teaching on the Church as ‘the seed and the beginning of the kingdom on earth’ to relativize or even dichotomize the Church vis-à-vis the Kingdom of God; that division is deepened in ‘regnocentric’ theologies which, intentionally or not, undercut normative teaching on the unique saving role of Christ and his Church. Third, the finely balanced teaching of no. 8 that the Church of Christ ‘subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and the bishops in communion with him, although outside its structure many elements of sanctification and of truth are to be found which, as proper gifts to the Church of Christ, impel towards catholic unity,’ is upset by the ecclesial relativism of the Left and the ecclesiological absolutism of the Right; the Left sins against Catholic uniqueness, the Right against Catholic ecumenism.
Fourth, some readings of Chapter VII—‘The Eschatological Character of the Pilgrim Church and Its Union with the Heavenly Church’—rightly highlight its striking teaching that ‘the pilgrim Church in its sacraments and institutions, which belong to this age, carries the figure of this world which is passing and it dwells among creatures who groan and till now are in the pains of childbirth and await the revelation of the children of God,’ 20 but do not sufficiently connect the Church’s ‘not yet’ historical pilgrimage to its ‘always-already’ heavenly-eschatological dimension in which all humanity and all creation will be recapitulated in Christ to the glory of the Father; how often, for instance, are contemporary Roman Catholics aware that the Mass is a participation in the heavenly liturgy, and that our worship is always enveloped in that of the angels and saints of every age? This eschatological impoverishment has serious consequences for worship and life. In like manner, some interpretations of Chapter VIII on Mary focus more on the Council’s seeming ‘demotion’ of Mary to a mere chapter rather than as a stand-alone document, than on its finely-balanced Christological and ecclesiological teaching; the Council’s Marian teaching can thus appear as an afterthought—even as a slight embarrassment or pietistic embellishment—rather than as a capstone in which Christology, ecclesiology, and discipleship intersect and culminate in the doxology of Lumen gentium’s concluding lines, a hymn of praise ‘to the glory of the most holy and undivided Trinity.’ 21
And, finally, in a rightful desire to emphasize the fundamental unity and continuity of the Church throughout time, some theologians, church leaders, and other believers can lose sight of the immense distance travelled between October 1962 (when the Council began) and November 1964 (when Lumen gentium was promulgated by an overwhelming majority). John O’Malley is right to insist that something really happened at Vatican II. A true hermeneutic of reform, such as Pope Benedict XVI has proposed, 22 has nothing to fear from an acknowledgment of change and even of a certain discontinuity (within a deeper, broader continuity) in Church life and teaching.
The Primacy of Holiness and Doxology in Lumen gentium
With this overview of Lumen gentium’s context, teaching, and reception complete, my task now is more modest: to explore one area in which we have failed to receive the riches that the Council placed before us: the largely neglected Chapters V–VIII, which speak of holiness as the ‘inner reason’ of the Church. 23 It is decisively important to grasp this primacy of holiness and a consequent primacy of doxology in the Church’s life and mission. I contend that only a properly doxological ecclesiology will foster a more effective mission, and help us to receive more fully and fruitfully the conciliar teaching of Lumen gentium.
Vatican II was a council that was preeminently and unprecedentedly about holiness. John O’Malley writes in his What Happened at Vatican II: Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Lumen Gentium is chapter five, ‘The Call to Holiness.’ Lumen gentium thus set the agenda, leading the way for the call to holiness to become one of the great themes running through the council. (.…) Holiness, the council thus said, is what the church is all about. This is an old truth, of course, and in itself is not remarkable. Yet no previous council had ever explicitly asserted this idea and certainly never developed it so repeatedly and at length.
24
O’Malley argues elsewhere in his book—in a way that resonates with Ratzinger’s claim for holiness as Lumen gentium’s ‘inner reason’—that this chapter on the universal call to holiness ‘imbued’ both Lumen gentium and the Council itself with its ‘finality,’ that is, its end, its purpose, its destiny. 25 Lumen gentium itself speaks of holiness as being expressed in many ways: service of neighbor, martyrdom, self-denial, relationships such as friendship and marriage, the life of the evangelical counsels, and as the ‘fullness of the Christian life’ and the ‘perfection of charity.’ 26 And, the Dogmatic Constitution says that the Church itself is ‘indefectibly holy’ by virtue of being the bride of Christ, the body of Christ, and by being endowed with ‘the gift of the Holy Spirit to the glory of God.’ 27 Holiness’s deepest essence is a sharing of God’s own life and holiness, above all in our worship of God, for it is in such worship that we ecstatically transcend ourselves and encounter the living God, thereby receiving back our transformed selves. 28 And, it is this worship that is the Church’s deepest essence and reason for being: the sanctification of humanity through the glorification of God. Friedrich Wulf expresses this reality nicely: ‘Christian holiness is not primarily—much less exclusively—moral perfection, heroic human virtue, but primarily and in the deepest sense the glory (δόξα) and the love (άγάπη) of God given to the redeemed without any merit on their part.’ 29
I want to set the stage for our treatment of a doxological ecclesiology by beginning with some comments from Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. In early 2004, a few months after he was installed as coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, Archbishop Martin gave an address, ‘A Listening and Humble Church,’ in which he made the perhaps surprising claim that the Irish Church—a Church, he noted, not only of saints and scholars but also of builders devoted to helping people—had ‘perhaps ended up doing too much (…) and have run the risk of becoming over-attached to its works and structures and buildings.’ 30 Martin then claimed that the ‘Irish Church is to move from being a doing Church to a listening Church. We must never be obsessed with doing. There must always be an element of abandonment in our activities, of seeking first the kingdom.’ This primacy of listening and abandonment, he suggested, could be seen even in the founders and foundresses of the apostolic religious orders founded in the 19th century: ‘They were great doers (…) but very often also mystics.’ One might say that Archbishop Martin, while calling the Church in Ireland to renewed, creative forms of evangelization in a rapidly changing culture, was also warning against the dangers of a busy Church. And, it is this temptation to moralism—that Pelagian virus that reduces faith to ethics, and Christianity to what we do for God rather than what God first does for us—that can be countered by a renewed attentiveness to the concluding, often-neglected chapters of Lumen gentium.
I want, therefore, in this section first to look at some theological foundations for a doxological ecclesiology and, second, to examine some key passages in Lumen gentium that offer precisely such a vision of the Church as a doxological community of worship.
Three Contributions to a Doxological Ecclesiology: Frans Jozef van Beeck, Khaled Anatolios, and Joseph Ratzinger
Frans Jozef van Beeck held that Christianity has a doxological essence and a soteriological structure. His multi-volume systematic theology, God Encountered, places worship at the heart of Christian life and thought. He begins his treatment of doxology by noting that the Romans identified early Christians by two traits: worship as the center of their common life, and Jesus Christ worshiped as divine. 31 Jesus Christ is himself the perfect worship to God, his Father; and, in this self-offering and self-abandonment to the Father, he ‘receives, and indeed is, in his very person, the plenitude of God.’ 32 He is ‘unconditional praise of God and total abandon to God.’ 33 Personhood and worship are one in Christ.
The Church’s worship is possible only through a participation in Christ’s own worship, which does not substitute for the Church’s worship but represents it before the Father and so invites its participation. 34 Only in Christ is the Church assured that it worships God worthily and justly. Furthermore, the Church’s worship is characterized by an interplay of intimacy and awe before the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as well as by an ‘ecstatic immediacy’ that both ‘lifts the Church out of itself and identifies it, and prompts it to respond to God by sharing in the living encounter between Christ and Father.’ 35 A truly doxological ecclesiology, one might say, far from engendering a narcissistic, self-absorbed Church, does precisely the opposite: it leads the Church outside of itself, reminding it of its orientation to God and its openness to others. The Church is most fully itself when it is taken by God out of itself. A doxological ecclesiology, such as van Beeck proposes, generates ecstasy, not introversion.
Van Beeck draws at least two consequences from this doxological Christology and ecclesiology. First, true worship—and, a fortiori, the Church itself—must be resolutely and primarily theocentric. As he puts it, ‘the only adequate and lasting reason for worship is: that God is God.’ 36 The Church’s worship, therefore, must not be instrumentalized. It is an end in itself.
The Church’s essential identity, therefore, is not self-established but responsive: it comes about by ecstasy. Only to the extent that the Church responds to God in Christ risen does it share, and therefore mediate, the divine life, holiness, and glory. Any true attractiveness or effectiveness the Church may have in the world is predicated on this worship-encounter. Yet the inner value of worship lies neither in attractiveness nor in effectiveness, no matter how real they may be. For worship resists reduction. Worship is abandon, not cultivation, of self. Its focus is away from self, on God.
37
Second, the primacy of worship and doxology demands that one resist the temptation to reduce Christianity to a system of salvation, an autonomous ethic, or a philosophical anthropology: The essence of the Christian faith is humanity’s worshipful encounter with the living God. In this encounter, humanity attains the ‘vision of God’ (that is, participation in the divine nature: 1 Jn 3, 2) and thus comes fully ‘alive’ to ‘the glory of God.’ There are a hundred admirable ways to become better, more just, and more humane, but only one way (Jn 14, 6) to become gods.
38
Van Beeck’s intent here is not to deny the value of soteriology or of morality—he follows up his treatment of doxology in Understanding the Christian Faith with chapters on the inseparability of ‘cult,’ ‘conduct,’ and ‘creed’ 39 —but rather to order them rightly so as make them more effective. ‘Worship,’ he writes, ‘is not the only activity by which the Church is caught up in the very life of God, but it is the activity in which this is most manifestly and most irreducibly the case.’ 40 If the Church gets the primacy of worship right, the rest will follow. 41
The second witness is the patrologist Khaled Anatolios. In a recent paper on the paschal mystery in Byzantine liturgy, Anatolios has offered what might be called a doxological soteriology. 42 He argues that sin be conceived of as ‘doxological incapacity’—an inability both to praise God and to behold divine glory. In contrast, one is saved through ‘doxological contrition,’ a paradoxical movement in which repentance is manifested in ‘a lamentation over one’s estrangement from the glory of God that is nonetheless experienced in the very midst of the retrieval of that glory.’ Anatolios suggests that Jesus Christ is our savior precisely because ‘he alone knows how to render perfect glory to the Father in the Spirit and enables us to give glory with him and in him and because He alone, as the only sinless One, knows how to be perfectly contrite in expiation of human sinfulness and enable us to repent with him and in him.’ One sees the parallels to van Beeck: the Church worships the Father only in and through Christ—himself the perfect worshiper—and that Christ’s doxological mediation of salvation does not exclude, but invites and requires, our participation. We are lost by our inability to praise God rightly (that is, orthodoxy in its most radical sense), and we are saved insofar as we, in Christ and only in Christ, praise him rightly. To be saved—to be fully alive, fully holy, fully participating in God’s own life—is precisely to praise his glory and to repent for one’s estrangement from that glory. 43
A third voice, Joseph Ratzinger, complements those of van Beeck and Anatolios in providing orientations for a doxological ecclesiology. In a lecture delivered in 2000 on Lumen gentium’s ecclesiology—a lecture perhaps known best for its contribution to his debate with Walter Kasper concerning the relationship of the universal Church and the local Church—Ratzinger argued that Vatican II ‘intend[ed] to subordinate what it said about the Church to what it said about God and to set it in that context.’
44
All of its four Constitutions reflect in their own ways this priority of God. Lumen gentium, he suggested, proposed that ‘the Church derives from adoration, from the task of glorifying God. Ecclesiology, of its nature, has to do with liturgy.’
45
The Greek and Latin words for adoration, he says elsewhere, bring out its full meaning: the Greek proskynesis refers to our submission to God as our true norm, while the Latin adoratio highlights ‘mouth-to-mouth contact, a kiss, an embrace, and, hence, ultimately love.’ In adoration, our submission becomes union, because we are submitting to love.
46
In the Church’s worship and praise, this union is expressed in the interpenetration of the earthly and heavenly liturgies.
47
‘Earthly liturgy,’ he writes, ‘is liturgy because and only because it joins what is already in process, the greater reality [of the heavenly liturgy].’
48
This greater, heavenly worship discloses the Church’s end and ‘inner reason,’ which is holiness: Holiness is more than a moral quality. It is the dwelling of God with men, of men with God, the setting of God’s ‘tabernacle’ with us and among us (Jn 1:14). This involves the new birth—not of flesh and blood, but of God (Jn 1:13). This orientation toward holiness is identical with the eschatological orientation of the Church, and that is, in fact, on the basis of Jesus’ message, of fundamental importance for the Church. The Church is there in order that God may come to dwell in the world and in order that ‘holiness’ may come about: that is what we should be competing for in the Church, not competing for more or less privilege, about sitting in the best places.
49
Finally, Ratzinger highlights that doxology gives rise to mission, not in the sense that liturgy ‘fuels us up’ for our ‘real,’ ‘worldly’ activities, but that in directing our adoring gaze to God we become aware of his descent to us and of our ascent to communion with him. We become pleasing to God and seek to help others see him as the measure of their lives. True worship—true doxology—therefore does not lead to self-absorption or to aestheticism, but to their exact opposite: the most generous and most selfless service and mission. 50 Mission and love of neighbor are most fruitful when generated by the worship of God. Holiness is fostered by and in divine worship and praise.
‘Monuments’ of Lumen gentium’s Doxological Ecclesiology
These voices—van Beeck, Anatolios, and Ratzinger—help us discern Lumen gentium’s doxological ecclesiology. Both the form and the substance of the Dogmatic Constitution reveal that the Church’s end is holiness, and that this holiness is manifested above all in the Church’s doxology and worship. On the level of Lumen gentium’s form, it is not accident or mere pious custom that the Constitution begins with a chapter on the Church as mystery—a word that evokes sacrament—finds its center in its fifth chapter on the universal call to holiness in the Church, and concludes with two chapters on the eschatological Church and Mary. The Church’s origin in divine mystery, its deepest essence as holiness, and its destiny, its finality, its end as doxology all point to holiness and to the praise that the Church offers to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit. 51 I wish now to look at three ‘monuments’ of Lumen gentium’s doxological ecclesiology: No. 17, Chapter VII, and Chapter VIII.
Our first ‘monument’ is Lumen gentium no. 17, which concludes the second chapter on the People of God. This section, which together with no. 13 bookends nos. 14–16 on the various groupings in the People of God, begins by recalling Christ’s Great Commission to make disciples of all nations, teaching and baptizing. These lines on evangelization are followed by a summa of catholicity: ‘The result of [the Church’s evangelizing] activity is that the good seed that is found in people’s hearts and minds, or in their particular rites and cultures, is not only saved from destruction, but is made whole, raised up, and brought to completion to the glory of God, the confusion of the devil, and the happiness of humanity.’ Evangelization is inherently catholic; the Gospel is intended for all peoples and does not destroy, but perfects, their humanity and their diverse cultures. Most significant, though, is that Lumen gentium goes still further and concludes this section and the entire second chapter on the People of God with a remarkable doxology: So the Church prays and works at the same time so that the fullness of the whole world may move into the people of God, the body of the Lord, and the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that all honour and glory be rendered in Christ, the head of all, to the creator and Father of all.
Everything that the Church receives, does, and is, climaxes in the assimilation and divinization of all creation in the life of the Holy Trinity. As Gérard Philips writes, ‘The final phrase [of no. 17] gives us a résumé of the first two chapters: the missionary task of the Church flows from [découle] the mystery of the Holy Trinity.’ 52 Evangelization, catholicity, and mission find their purpose, their end in doxology: ‘The primordial goal of mission is the glory of God and of Christ who desires to promote the salvation of souls by the implanting of new ecclesial communities.’ 53 Everything is gathered up, recapitulated in Christ the head, to the glory and honor of the Father. Humanity and all creation are saved for and by this worship. 54
The second doxological ‘monument’ is Chapter VII, on the eschatological nature of the Church. Marked by a recurrent, productive tension between the ‘already now’ and the ‘not yet’ of the Church’s journey through history, 55 this chapter is perhaps the most doxological in all of Lumen gentium. It begins with a meditation on the Church as receiving its completion ‘only in the glory of heaven,’ when humanity and the entire universe ‘will be established perfectly in Christ.’ 56 This cosmic, recapitulative vision structures the entire seventh chapter. The pilgrim Church on earth always-already shares in this glory (‘already on earth the Church is adorned with true though imperfect holiness’), but also ‘carries the figure of this world which is passing’ and so groans with labor pains. 57 This pilgrim Church, though, remains always united to the communion of saints: the Church pilgrim on earth, the Church being purified in purgatory, and the Church glorious in heaven—all, though in different degrees, ‘communicate in the same love of God and our neighbour and sing the same hymn of glory to our God.’ 58 It is in the ‘sacred liturgy,’ above all, where the earthly, pilgrim Church realizes its deepest union with the Church in heaven: ‘we celebrate together in common exultation the praise of the divine majesty.’ 59 This seventh chapter concludes by proclaiming that, when Christ returns in glory, ‘the whole Church of the saints in the supreme happiness of love will adore God and “the lamb who was slain.”’ 60 The Church, then, is most fully itself when it ‘with one voice’ adores God in Jesus Christ. 61 Philips captures well the tension of the Church’s doxological vocation: ‘This hymn of praise has already begun, but it has not yet reached its culmination [point d’orgue]. We are always en route, but with a view of the finish line and the unwavering confidence of getting there. There is the dynamic force of the catholic conception of the Church. There is the bulwark of our confidence along our hard earthly pilgrimage.’ 62 The Church’s unity, holiness, and catholicity originate from, and are completed only in, doxology and worship. The Church on earth lives and fulfills its mission only by participating in such worship. Lumen gentium’s ecclesiology is doxological from beginning to end.
The third and final doxological monument is Lumen gentium’s eighth and concluding chapter on Mary in the mystery of Christ and the Church. 63 One of the greatest losses in the interpretation and reception of Vatican II has been the relative neglect of the ecclesiological substance and the implications of this chapter’s teaching. 64 A good deal of commentary, for instance, has been devoted instead to the Council’s decision to include its Marian teaching within Lumen gentium rather than to present it as a stand-alone document. 65 But, much less commentary has been devoted to the ecclesiological content of that teaching. Gilles Routhier has written of his ‘regret’ that post-conciliar ‘ecclesiologists have not contributed in a significant way to Mariology.’ 66 A recent, otherwise-insightful book that highlights 20 of Vatican II’s central themes or ‘keys,’ for instance, never mentions its Marian teaching. 67 One gets the sense that Mary is optional or, at most, of secondary importance to contemporary ecclesiology. 68
Lumen gentium’s teaching on Mary, however, is very finely balanced in its Christological and ecclesiological framework. It avoids both the inflated, overheated ‘maximalism’ criticized by Congar, wherein Mariology can become fixated on privileges and titles, thereby turning into an end in itself; and it avoids a Marian ‘minimalism’ that would reduce Mary to a mere example and thereby obscure her uniqueness and pre-eminence within the communion of saints. Lumen gentium instead presents Mary in resolutely soteriological terms as the Mother of the Redeemer and as the model of saving faith, but it also culminates doxologically: ‘as already glorified in body and soul in heaven she is the image and beginning of the Church which will receive fulfilment in the age that is to come.’ 69 The chapter on Mary—and, indeed, Lumen gentium itself—concludes with a final doxology, invoking her intercession that all peoples—Christians and all others—‘may be happily gathered together in peace and harmony into one people of God to the glory of the most holy and undivided Trinity.’ 70 Mary’s doxology is salvific, and her Magnificat embodies the identity of doxology and soteriology.
Van Beeck perceptively observes that Lumen gentium’s Mariology exemplifies the interplay of doxology and soteriology in Christian life. Doxologically, she is venerated as Theotokos and thereby ‘inseparably associated’ with the Church’s profession of belief in, and praise of, Christ; soteriologically, she is joined to the Church as a fellow believer and as a unique model. And, it is the first—doxology—that grounds the second—soteriology. 71
Conclusion
Lumen gentium, in its structure and its substance, presents a thoroughly doxological ecclesiology that is both the source and the summit of the Church’s saving mission in the world. I want in this conclusion to mention briefly three outgrowths of this ecclesiology: the compenetration of doxology and mission, the necessity of theocentrism and the danger of ecclesiocentrism, and the potential idolatry of a ‘busy’ Church engaged in well-intentioned activism.
Firstly, one sees the imprint of the Council’s doxological ecclesiology, for instance, in Ad gentes divinitus’s affirmation that mission culminates in doxology, wherein ‘the design of the Creator, who created human beings in his image and likeness, will be truly realized, when all who possess human nature, reborn in Christ through the Holy Spirit, will be able to say, as they behold together the glory of God: “our Father.”’ 72 This doxological cast of the Church’s missionary-salvific activity is echoed by, among others, Joseph Ratzinger and Jean-Marie Tillard. In a paper prepared in January 1965 for the drafting sub-commission for what would become Ad gentes divinitus, Ratzinger wrote, ‘[T]he final goal of the Church’s mission among the Gentiles [is], namely, that God be adored by living worship, in a cosmic liturgy, by which the human race becomes an offering acceptable to God, a living temple of God in which he dwells. (…) One carries out mission so that the glory and power of God may be shown forth in the world. Mission is done so that God may be glorified.’ 73 Similarly, 30 years after Ratzinger, Tillard wrote that, in the light of the catholicity revealed in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, a theology of mission ‘ceases to be a theology of the Church’s extension and becomes a theology of the entry of all human richness and of all creation into Christ.’ Such a conception of mission ‘concerns the breakthrough of the plérôma of Christ into time and place, of the movement which actualizes in the rhythms of history and in the variety of spaces the ephapax of the paschal glorification, of the dynamism of the Spirit by which Christ is effectively “filled by this world.” (…) Mission is doxological.’ 74
Tillard’s comment on the synergy of human and divine riches points further to the possibility of a doxological ecclesiology to foster a deeper integration of worship and praise with other, seemingly disparate dimensions of human existence. Lumen gentium no. 10 affirms precisely such a bond in its vision of the baptismal priesthood as one in which ‘through all the activity of Christian living [the Christian faithful] may offer spiritual sacrifice,’ sacrifice which is offered in ‘receiving the sacraments, in prayer and thanksgiving, through the witness of a holy life, by self-denial and by active charity.’ Doxology, mission, and salvation all cohere in the council’s teaching.
Second, a rightly understood doxological ecclesiology fosters a more effective ecclesial mission through its reminder of the priority of God, as well as of the consequent danger of a self-absorbed ecclesiocentrism. Walter Kasper in this regard contrasts a properly theological conception of the Church as the People of God from a merely socio-political one. The Church, he writes, is ‘not an earthly people, but God’s people, whose purpose is to proclaim and to praise the great deeds of God.’
75
It comes together ‘not to decide what to do, but to hear and to celebrate what God has decided and done.’
76
Kasper consequently writes: This doxological aspect of the People-of-God theology ought to free us from a false ecclesiocentrism and from a recent fixation on the community. We are much too concerned with ourselves and imagine that people are interested in us before all else. That is a huge self-deception. People, if they are religiously interested, do not ask first about the Church, they ask about God. They ask about the Church only insofar as in it something shines out of the reality of God and insofar as the Church has something to say about that [reality]. We should take to heart the hymn: ‘Praising God, that is our duty.’
77
Kasper may oppose too sharply here the human and divine dimensions of the Church, but he rightly affirms that a Church aware of its doxological character is one whose divine-referentiality (and not self-referentiality) will foster a more truly evangelical and diaconal outreach. Prayer makes possible a more effective ecclesial mission.
Third, such a doxological ecclesiology might also help believers respond to the subtle danger of what might be called a ‘busy’ or ‘useful’ Church. The challenges—and opportunities—facing the Church today are immense. There is much work that needs to be done in our parishes, families, dioceses, schools, neighbourhoods, and social-service agencies. My argument for a more doxological ecclesiology is not a call to quietism or to indolence, any more than Archbishop Martin’s call for a ‘listening Church’ is. Students need to be taught, parish bills and diocesan assessments need to be paid, the hungry need to be fed, children need to be nurtured.
And, yet, does our genuine zeal for good deeds—as Titus 2 says—perhaps conceal doubt and temptation? Do we have a sense that what is truly real is what is ‘out there’ in the ‘real world,’ not ‘in here’ in liturgy? That worship and prayer are somehow ‘churchy’ and ‘introverted,’ and at best a fuelling up for the ‘real’ work of service and mission? What does prayer really do, after all?
Perhaps most deeply and most subtly, does our ecclesial activism—even our zeal for good deeds—conceal a desire for self-justification and control, which is really another name for idolatry? We can have a certain measure of control when it comes to pastoral planning, school curricula, synods, social-service agencies, even liturgy planning. The pastor can say that giving is up, that a new parish center has been built, that membership has increased. The theologian can point to the books and articles he or she has written, the fellowships one has won. We can succumb to a blessed rage for assessment that quantifies things that can be quantified but also things that cannot. But, when we open ourselves to God in prayer, any vestige of control vanishes. He cannot be controlled, and who knows what he will ask us to do and where to go?
Prayer makes us vulnerable to God and to each other, which is perhaps why we avoid it. And so it goes with worship and doxology: do we perhaps prefer a controlled liturgy that we can shape to our ends and can manipulate to keep us in our comfort zones, as opposed to the ecstatic abandon of the contemplative and the charismatic?
I have sometimes thought that Catholic worship should be deeply contemplative or thoroughly charismatic—the first dropping us to our knees in adoration, the second lifting us up out of our pews in praise—but nothing in-between. Yet, we often wind up with worship that is neither contemplative nor charismatic, but tepid and cheaply stimulating; the mysterium tremendum et fascinans is too-little encountered. And, as the Church worships, so it is: a Church that—nearly 50 years after the Council’s close—is in various places too little contemplative and charismatic, often zealous for good deeds but weary and perhaps despairing of the future.
Lumen gentium, however, offers a way forward. The Church, as it reminds us, is called to be that school of holiness and prayer, that communion of saints where all people encounter the living God. It is not accidental, I have argued, that Lumen gentium ends in doxology, in a prayer for Mary’s intercession that all people may be gathered together salvifically by and for the praise and glory of God. When the Church opens itself to God in prayer, when it ecstatically abandons itself in worship and praise, then it is most fully itself—even here and now—and bears its most effective witness to Christ, the light of the nations.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
1
Frans Jozef van Beeck, God Encountered, Volume 1: Understanding the Christian Faith (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 167.
2
See, for instance, Massimo Faggioli’s apposite comment in 2008: ‘For the moment the subject of “Vatican II ecclesiology” is still interpreted mostly in the sense of a debate about collegiality and ecumenism.’ (Massimo Faggioli, ‘Council Vatican II: Bibliographical Overview 2005–2007,’ Cristianesimo nella Storia 29 (2008): 567–610, at 602.) This overview and others in Faggioli’s ongoing bibliographic bulletins are essential reading for scholars of Vatican II: ‘Concilio Vaticano II: bolletino bibliografico (2000–2002),’ Cristianesimo nella Storia 24 (2003): 335–60; ‘Concilio Vaticano II: bolletino bibliografico (2002–2005),’ Cristianesimo nella Storia 26 (2005): 743–67; ‘Council Vatican II: Bibliographical overview 2007–2010,’ Cristianesimo nella Storia 32 (2011): 755–91.
3
Although Laurent Villemin has rightly argued for an ‘intersecting’ (croisée) rather than ‘siloed’ (segmentée) hermeneutic of the conciliar documents, a study of the relationship of Lumen gentium and Sacrosanctum concilium is beyond the scope of this article. (Laurent Villemin, ‘Principes ecclésiologiques de la réforme liturgique de Vatican II,’ Lumière & Vie 279 (2008): 71–79, at 71.) For two such ‘intersecting’ arguments, see Pietro Damiano Scardilli, I Nuclei Ecclesiologici nella Costituzione Liturgica del Vaticano II (Roma: Gregoriana, 2007), esp. 334–45; and Massimo Faggioli, True Reform: Liturgy and Ecclesiology in Sacrosanctum Concilium (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012).
4
Antonio Acerbi, Due Ecclesiologie: Ecclesiologia Giuridica Ed Ecclesiologia Di Comunione Nella ‘Lumen gentium’ (Bologna: Dehoniane, 1975). One should resist, however, the temptation to dichotomize these two types of ecclesiology or to see the first type as superseded or presently irrelevant; see Christopher Ruddy, ‘Ressourcement and the Enduring Legacy of Post-Tridentine Theology,’ in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Theology, eds. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 185–201.
5
For often-polemical references to this contrast and even conflict, see Yves Congar, My Journal of the Council, trans. Mary John Ronayne and Mary Cecily Boulding, ed. Denis Minns (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier–Liturgical Press, 2012), 47–48, 143, 184, 282, 415, 417, 483, 484, 492, 595, 651, 658–59, and especially 143 (3 November 1962): ‘[M]y intuition about the history of ecclesiological doctrines, of the tension between the PAPA pole and the ECCLESIA pole is closer to the truth than I realised. This tension is latent in the Council and it is more than likely that one day it will come out into the open.’
6
Fifty Years of Catholic Theology: Conversations with Yves Congar, ed. and intro. Bernard Lauret, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 40–41. For further analysis, see Yves Congar, L’Église: de saint Augustin à l’époque moderne (Paris: Cerf, 1970), 102–12.
7
Hermann J. Pottmeyer, Towards a Papacy in Communion: Perspectives from Vatican Councils I & II (New York: Herder & Herder, 1998), 36–50, at 36.
8
Joseph A. Komonchak, ‘Modernity and the Construction of Roman Catholicism.’ Cristianesimo nella Storia 18 (1997): 353–85.
9
For an overview of 19th-century Catholic ecclesiology, see Congar, L’Église, 413–58.
10
The five-volume History of Vatican II, under the direction of Giuseppe Alberigo, is indispensable for understanding Lumen gentium’s genesis, even if one differs from some of its conclusions. Some of the more directly relevant contributions are: Joseph A. Komonchak, ‘The Struggle for the Council during the Preparation of Vatican II (1960–1962),’ in History of Vatican II, Volume I: Announcing and Preparing Vatican Council II Toward a New Era in Catholicism, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 1995), 167–356; Giuseppe Ruggieri, ‘Beyond an Ecclesiology of Polemics: The Debate on the Church,’ in History of Vatican II, Volume II: The Formation of the Council’s Identity—First Period and Intersession, October 1962–September 1963, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 1997), 281–357; Jan Grootaers, ‘The Drama Continues Between the Acts: The “Second Preparation” and Its Opponents,’ in History of Vatican II, Volume II: The Formation of the Council’s Identity—First Period and Intersession, October 1962–September 1963, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 1997), 359–514, esp. 391–412; Alberto Melloni, ‘The Beginning of the Second Period: The Great Debate on the Church,’ in History of Vatican II, Volume III: The Mature Council—Second Period and Intersession, September 1963–September 1964, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 2000), 1–115; Evangelista Vilanova, ‘The Intersession (1963–1964),’ in History of Vatican II, Volume III: The Mature Council—Second Period and Intersession, September 1963–September 1964, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 2000), 347–490; Joseph A. Komonchak, ‘Toward an Ecclesiology of Communion,’ in History of Vatican II, Volume IV: Church as Communion–Third Period and Intersession, September 1964–September 1965, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 2003), 1–93; Luis Antonio G. Tagle, ‘The “Black Week” of Vatican II (November 14–21 1964),’ in History of Vatican II, Volume IV: Church as Communion–Third Period and Intersession, September 1964–September 1965, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 2003), 417–52.
The early accounts of two conciliar experts remain essential: Gérard Philips, L’Église et son mystère au IIe Concile du Vatican, Tome I (Paris: Desclée, 1967), 13–68; Umberto Betti, ‘Cronista della Costituzione,’ in La Chiesa del Vaticano II, eds. Guilherme Baraúna and Samuele Olivieri (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1965), 130–54.
11
Hans Küng, My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs, trans. John Bowden (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 353; also 413 (‘fatally ambiguous compromise’); see also Küng, Disputed Truth: Memoirs, trans. John Bowden (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 17 (‘fateful compromise’), 72 (‘pernicious compromises’). On the charge of Lumen gentium’s Chapter III as unbiblical and unhistorical, see My Struggle for Freedom, 352–54.
12
All citations in this article from Vatican II’s documents are from Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils Vol. II (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990).
13
Lumen gentium, no. 5.
14
Lumen gentium, no. 27.
15
Joseph Komonchak, ‘Ecclesiology of Vatican II.’ Origins 28 (April 22, 1999): 763–68, at 765.
16
Jean-Marie R. Tillard, L’Église locale: Ecclésiologie de communion et catholicité (Paris: Cerf, 1995).
17
For a brief history and background, see Hilari Ruager, ‘An Initial Profile of the Assembly,’ in History of Vatican II, Volume II: The Formation of the Council’s Identity—First Period and Intersession, October 1962–September 1963, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 1997), 200–203. For the group’s work at the Council, see Norman Tanner, ‘The Church in the World (Ecclesia ad Extra),’ in History of Vatican II, Volume IV: Church as Communion–Third Period and Intersession, September 1964–September 1965, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll/Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 2003), 382–86.
18
Lumen gentium, no. 8.
19
Yves Congar, Power and Poverty in the Church, trans. Jennifer Nicholson (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1964), 127.
20
Lumen gentium, no. 48.
21
Lumen gentium, no. 69. John O’Malley, incidentally, has noted the identity between the titles of the first and last chapters of both Lumen gentium and de Lubac’s The Splendor of the Church. See John O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA; Belknap/Harvard, 2008), 163, 188.
22
Benedict XVI, ‘Interpreting Vatican II: Address to Roman Curia,’ Origins 35 (January 26, 2006): 534–39.
23
Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Constitution Lumen Gentium,’ in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 123–52, at 149. See also Claudio Delpero, La Chiesa del Concilio: L’ecclesiologia nei documenti del Vaticano II (Firenze: Fiorentina, 2004), 105–138.
24
O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 50–51. See also Friedrich Wulf’s observation that, in the very existence of a chapter dedicated entirely to the universal call to holiness, ‘We catch sight here of an astonishing process. The Church is in the throes of a portentous transformation. She is changing her whole countenance and bearing. One has to search the Constitution on the Church prepared for the First Vatican Council with care indeed to find so much as an implicit reference to the vocation all Christians have to holiness.’ (‘Chapter V: The Call of the Whole Church to Holiness,’ in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vol. I, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 261.)
25
O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 174–75, 310. See also Vicente Bosch, ‘El valor programmático de la santidad. Una clave hermenéutica del Concilio Vaticano II, a 40 años de distancia,’ Annales theologici 19 (2005): 171–211. Bosch argues that the universal call to holiness is the ‘fundamental hermeneutical key of the entire conciliar teaching’ (174) and that it is the ‘heart’ of Lumen gentium, ‘giving life and strength’ (188) to that Constitution’s theological concerns. See also, Avery Dulles, ‘The Sacramental Ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium,’ Gregorianum 86 (2005): 550–62, at 561–62.
26
Lumen gentium, no. 40.
27
Lumen gentium, no. 39.
28
Lumen gentium no. 10’s description of the baptismal priesthood helpfully unites the Church’s and the believer’s liturgical and sacramental worship to the ‘witness of a holy life, by self-denial and by active charity.’ Worship, in this sense, must always be embodied, both corporeally and ascetically-diaconally. Priesthood and worship, in the Council’s teaching, embrace the entirety of human existence.
29
Wulf, ‘Chapter V: The Call of the Whole Church to Holiness,’ 263.
30
31
Van Beeck, Understanding the Christian Faith, 148; also, 151.
32
Ibid., 154.
33
Ibid., 167.
34
Ibid., 155.
35
Ibid., 162.
36
Ibid., 162.
37
Ibid., 162.
38
Ibid., 168.
39
Chapter 9 of Understanding the Christian Faith is entitled, ‘Cult as the Matrix of Conduct and Creed,’ and Chapter 10 is ‘Christian Witness: Conduct and Creed.’ Van Beeck sums up this threefold relationship as follows: ‘Both the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin vocabulary of the tôdâh-tradition and our reflection on the relationship between worship and witness serve to argue that the central, naked faith-encounter with God subsists in three moments: worship, conduct, and profession of faith. The core of the Tradition is doxological. In the naked encounter between God and humanity, God is glorified as God, and humanity attains to the glorious summit of its native potential. At this doxological center stands the risen Christ who is, in person, the “Admirable Exchange” between God and humanity and the world: in him, God encounters humanity and the world for their salvation and glorification, and humanity and the world come to glorify God. Those who believe in Christ risen share in his worship, which unites them with God, in the Spirit; they also share in his witness, which commits them to the world, in conduct as well as teaching, again in the Spirit. Thus the central encounter with God, played out in the Christological narrative of sin and salvation, carries the three constitutive moments of the Christian faith: cult, conduct, and creed.’ (Understanding the Christian Faith, 220–21)
40
Ibid., 160.
41
For an overview of van Beeck’s theology, see Robert P. Imbelli, ‘Catholic Identity after Vatican II: On the Theology of Frans Jozef van Beeck,’ Commonweal 121 (March 11, 1994): 12–16.
42
Khaled Anatolios, ‘The Liturgical Mind of Christ: The Paschal Mystery in Byzantine Liturgy.’ Unpublished paper delivered at the 67th Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, June 8, 2012. All quotations in this paragraph are taken from this paper.
43
For further insight into the primacy in Christ of doxology to soteriology, see Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011), 289–90. Anatolios writes: ‘A dominant strain in modern theology, going back to Melanchthon’s famous dictum, “To know Christ is to know his benefits,” tends to reduce the primacy of Christ to functional, soteriological categories. It has become a prevalent form of theological piety to reduce the “real meaning” of any theological system to its soteriology. However, it should give us pause that Nicene theology tended to be emphatic about restricting the Christological pro nobis to Christ’s humanity. To properly construe the primacy of Christ is not simply to know his benefits “for us” but to know his glory, for whose sake creation itself exists (cf. Col. 1:16). Retrieving the Nicene account of the primacy of Christ involves extending the range of soteriology into doxology. Of course, ultimately, even the glory of Christ is “for us” inasmuch as its content is a love that is freely shared with creation.
‘But there is still an important distinction to be made between the glory of the divine nature for the sake of which creation exists and the self-humbling pro nobis, which takes place in the human nature so that humanity might rejoice in the glory of the divine nature that Christ shares with the Father and the Spirit.’ (Retrieving Nicaea, 290)
44
Ratzinger, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Constitution Lumen Gentium,’ 125.
45
Ibid., 126.
46
Benedict XVI, ‘Eucharist: Setting Transformations in Motion,’ Origins 35 (September 1, 2005): 202–204, at 202–203.
47
See Joseph Ratzinger, ‘“In the Presence of the Angels I Will Sing Your Praise”: The Regensburg Tradition and the Reform of the Liturgy,’ in A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today, trans. Martha M. Matesich (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 164–87, at 164–66, 172–76.
48
Ratzinger, ‘In the Presence of the Angels,’ 166.
49
Ratzinger, ‘The Ecclesiology of the Constitution Lumen Gentium’, 149–50.
50
See Ratzinger, ‘Eucharist and Mission,’ in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 90–122; and ‘The Ecclesiology of the Constitution Lumen Gentium,’ 126.
51
Gérard Philips notes that Lumen gentium can be divided into four pairs of two chapters each: Chapters 1 and 2 on the mystery of the Church in its transcendent and historical dimensions, Chapters 3 and 4 on the organic structure of the Church, Chapters 5 and 6 on the Church’s essential mission of sanctification, and Chapter 7 and 8 on the eschatological development and goal-end of the Church. This ordering, he writes, is logical but ‘perhaps unexpected.’ (L’Église et son mystère, Tome I, 57–58.)
52
Philips, L’Église et son mystère, Tome I, 219.
53
Ibid., 217.
54
Aloys Grillmeier concludes his commentary on Lumen gentium no. 17 (and the first two chapters of the Dogmatic Constitution) thus: ‘An eschatological vision manifests the ultimate and all-embracing meaning of the prayer and work of the Church: the whole world is to be brought into the people of God and so be offered to the Father in Christ its head.’ (‘Chapter II,’ in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vol. I, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 185.
55
Philips, L’Église et son mystère, Tome II, 167.
56
Lumen gentium, no. 48.
57
Lumen gentium, no. 48.
58
Lumen gentium, no. 49.
59
Lumen gentium, no. 50.
60
Lumen gentium, no. 51.
61
Lumen gentium, no. 51.
62
Philips, L’Église et son mystère, Tome II, 204. Italics added.
63
Drawing upon the Acta of Vatican II and other sources, Eloy Bueno de la Fuente argues that this chapter is ‘not simply another chapter which adorns the building,’ but is ‘the unification [plasmación] and the concretization of the consummation that animates and attracts all ecclesial becoming.’ (‘La Arquitectura de “Lumen Gentium” Como Síntesis Eclesiológia,’ Burgense 48 (2007): 9–44, at 43.) The chapter’s consummative placement indicates a deeper synthesis of Lumen gentium’s emphases on the universal call to holiness and on the Church’s eschatological nature: ‘in Mary the Church contemplates the holiness and the consummation to which it aspires itself.’ (33)
64
See Walter Kasper’s admonition: ‘True renewal of the Church is not possible without a renewed Mariology and a renewed veneration of Mary.’ (Katholische Kirche: Wesen, Wirklichkeit, Sendung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2011), 222.)
65
Gilles Routhier notes that this decision was in no way due to a desire to devalue Mary, but rather a merely ‘apparent reserve’ that sought to overcome the excesses of a maximalist ‘baroque Mariology,’ in favor of a more soteriological and scriptural-patristic approach. See his ‘Quarante ans après Vatican II, qu’est devenu le Mouvement marial?’ Istina 50 (2005): 306–36, at 307.
66
Routhier, ‘Quarante ans après Vatican II,’ 326.
67
Richard R. Gaillardetz and Catherine E. Clifford, Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teaching of Vatican II (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012).
68
A notable exception is Peter Hünermann, ‘Theologische Kommentar zur dogmatischen Konstitution über die Kirche: Lumen gentium’ in Herders Theologisicher Kommentar zum Zweiten Vaticanischen Konzil, Band 2, eds. Peter Hünermann and Bernd Jochen Hilberath (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2004), 265–563, at 512–39. He describes Lumen gentium’s chapter on Mary as the ‘crowning of [its] ecclesiology.’ (513)
69
Lumen gentium, no. 68.
70
Lumen gentium, no. 69. Hünermann notes that Lumen gentium nos. 1 and 69 form a thematic unity; the former speaks of the Church as a sacrament of intimate union with God and the unity of all humanity, while the latter speaks of a humanity fully united in its praise of God—the sacrament has become fully real. (Hünermann, ‘Theologischer Kommentar,’ 535.) Gérard Philips likewise notes that ‘the Constitution Lumen gentium begins and ends with the announcement of the mystery of the Three [Persons] united in charity.’ (L’Église et son mystère, Tome I, 62.) Philips goes so far as to say that ‘Lumen gentium could equally have been entitled: De Mysterio, without any determinative. Because, in the Church, all begins and all ends with the Holy Trinity.’ (L’Église et son mystère, Tome II, 330.)
71
Van Beeck, Understanding the Christian Faith, 177.
72
Ad gentes divinitus, no. 7.
73
See Jared Wicks, ‘Six texts by Prof. Joseph Ratzinger as peritus before and during Vatican Council II.’ Gregorianum 89 (2008): 233–311, at 287.
74
Tillard, L’Église locale, 93–94.
75
Kasper, Katholische Kirche, 188.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.