Abstract
‘Without a doubt Prof. Mad. Dr Edward Schillebeeckx O.P. (1914–2009) is one of the most creative and influential theologians of the 20th and 21st century.’ This statement is made in the introduction to all eleven volumes. I usually find such claims off-putting, but for once it is justified. This is a magnificent collection of the theological works of a quite extraordinary person. In the second half of his long life Edward Schillebeeckx established a new and deeply challenging theological agenda. Despite the cost this is an essential purchase for any serious theological library.
I will look at the collection in three clusters: volumes 1–5 establish the theological context in which Schillebeeckx wrote; volumes 6–8 contain his Jesus project; and volumes 9–11 set out his proposals for ministry and church in the modern world.
The first cluster shows the dramatic shift that Schillebeeckx made in responding to the theological ferment of the 1960s within Western theology. As everyone knows this was a time of post-war urban renewal, cold war politics, sexual liberalization and (arguably) secularization. Within the churches it was a time of Pope John XXIII (followed less favourably by Paul VI), Vatican II, Honest to God and ecumenical enthusiasm.
In 1959 the forty-five-year-old Dominican theologian published the largely conventional Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God in Dutch (Vol. 1). There are many signs in this book of an orderly and enquiring mind, but it is still a conventional and eirenic work of Catholic theology with abundant references to Augustine and Aquinas, biblical references with little mention of critical commentaries, fleeting and largely negative or defensive references to ‘Protestant’ theologians, and little or no mention of the social sciences (except a few generalized allusions to anthropology). Nine years later, with the publication in English of God the Future of Man (Vol. 3), all of this had changed radically. Here was a Catholic theologian engaging with the writings of Bultmann and Tillich, taking hermeneutics very seriously, reading sociology, addressing the crucial issue of secularization, energized by Vatican II, and questioning his own church. For the next four decades of his long life he was to remain a radical ecumenical theologian, challenging his church to live up to the spirit of Vatican II, and increasingly risking the wrath of the Vatican’s hierarchy.
The second volume Revelation and Theology, first published in Dutch in 1964 and translated into English three years later, contains a mixture of essays, some written in the 1950s and others in the early 1960s. However, it is the final essay, ‘The Present Trends in Present-day Theology’ (1961), that most clearly shows the dramatic changes that Schillebeeckx was undergoing. He still used Newman’s concept of ‘the development of dogma’, and made allusions back to the changes that Aquinas made in response to new knowledge, but it is clear that he now envisaged something far more radical. Following his mentor Karl Rahner he saw human existential experience as central to theology, but he added an account of the socio-historical character of human life, insisting that ‘God accomplishes his revelation in a dialogue with mankind’ (pp. 311–12). He also placed secularization and ecumenism firmly on the agenda for (Catholic) theology. Here speaks the voice of the theological advisor to the radical Dutch Bishops attending Vatican II. At the age of forty-seven he was becoming internationally recognized as a new voice within theology.
This change is reflected more strongly in the third, fourth and fifth volumes. In common with other contemporary non-Catholic theological books these volumes offer repeated attempts to address what is meant by ‘secularisation’. Remarkably for a theologian at this time he noticed the nuanced literature that was developing among sociologists of religion, not only echoing Peter Berger’s account of secularization as a lengthy historical process but also making a very early reference to David Martin’s dissenting views (which Berger eventually followed). In addition he set out the challenge of hermeneutics: First, how can a Christian who believes in the biblical message of the kingdom of God understand this message in the twentieth century and how can he justify this new, contemporary interpretation of the world as a Christian understanding? Secondly, how can he, within the many different religious and non-religious interpretations of the world and of human life which surround him, justify his Christian interpretation of reality with regard to modern thought or at least when faced with the legitimate demands of modern thinking? (Vol. 3, p. xix)
In his Introduction to the fifth volume, The Understanding of Faith (1972), Ted Mark Schoof notes that a polemical transition point had been reached for Schillebeeckx: His ‘looking back’ essays after the Council [Vatican II finished in 1965] were full of hope, as was his nature, but he was also able to point to the possible complications in the years that were to follow: the growing inflexibility of the ‘aggiornamento’ brought on partially by the too diplomatic formulations in the Council documents and the possible range of reactions in traditionalist circles. (p. xv)
It was the sixth volume Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (1974) that provoked serious suspicions within the Vatican. Like Hans Küng he took up the challenge of Vatican II seriously to engage with critical biblical exegesis. Küng’s On Being a Christian first appeared in German in exactly the same year and is of similar length. The books are very different, however. Küng’s was wide ranging and popularist in style. Unlike Schillebeeckx he did not devote the first ninety pages to a discussion of method or offer any of Schillebeeckx’s detailed critical exegesis. Yet both theologians did engage extensively with the fruits of non-Catholic biblical scholarship with an energy and determination that had been noticeably absent in pre-Vatican II Catholic theology. As a result both argued that the various forms of Christology within the Synoptic Gospels fitted uncomfortably with, say, the ‘authoritative’ Christology contained in the Nicene Creed. Schillebeeckx, ever more tactful than Küng, expressed this as a gap between the ‘Christology from below’ of the Synoptic Gospels and the ‘Christology from above’ of John and, later, Nicea: From the Council of Nicea onwards a particular Christological model – the Johannine one – was developed as a strictly circumscribed norm and was actually the only tradition that made history in the Christian churches. Consequently history has never done justice to the possibilities in the synoptic model; its distinctive dynamics was [sic] arrested and the model relegated to the ‘forgotten truths’ of Christianity. (p. 532)
Such a formulation raises obvious problems about the relationship between ‘experience’ and ‘belief’ and the following lengthy seventh volume, Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World (1977), sought to address these. Schillebeeckx’s focus was now less upon the so-called ‘historical Jesus’ of the Synoptic Gospels and more upon the ‘Christology from above’ of the Pauline and Johannine writings and especially upon concepts of ‘grace’. He continued this discussion about ‘experience’ in the much shorter eighth volume, Interim Report on the Books Jesus and Christ (1978). He acknowledged that he had received encouragement and helpful criticism from biblical exegetes, but despaired of some of his theological critics. Of one theologian who argued that he had turned the resurrection simply into a subjective experience of the disciples, he responded bluntly: ‘One rubs one’s eyes when one reads something like that’ (p. 68)! (The translation into English of both of these volumes and the two subsequent volumes was done by the formidable Anglican scholar and Director of SCM Press, the late John Bowden. They remain, alongside his other translations, as evidence of another very remarkable person.)
Coming now to the third cluster (vols 9–11) it is here that we see Schillebeeckx at his most embattled and, in my view, most formative. Instead of an intended third substantial volume on the Holy Spirit – a substantial volume that also eluded Paul Tillich – he focused instead upon ministry and church in the modern world. In 1980, aged sixty-six, he published a short book (expanding articles published earlier) in Dutch with the title Ministry: Leadership in the Community of Jesus Christ. It too was translated into English by John Bowden and published the following year with a more provocative title by SCM Press, Ministry: A Case for Change. It soon became a key book in ecumenical circles. It was deeply critical of individualistic and sacerdotal understandings of priesthood, tracing their origins to Roman imperial power and authority and contrasting them with the less differentiated and communal models of ministry present within the New Testament. It also concluded that ‘both priestly celibacy and women [excluded from] the ministry seem to me at root to be of a pseudo-doctrinal kind’ and indeed ‘a hindrance’ to the church (p. 98). Most offensive of all to the Vatican, he suggested that, in the absence of ordained priests, lay leaders of local church communities should be allowed ‘to preside over a community and thus over its eucharist’ (p. 139).
Sadly the original version of this short book is not included in this collection, but only the revised and expanded version written five years later, The Church with the Human Face (vol. 9). The central critique of sacerdotal priesthood is still present, but the specific proposal for lay presidency had been removed under strong pressure from the Vatican. It is hardly surprising that the now retired Schillebeeckx wrote in the preface to the following volume, Church: The Human Story of God (1989): Delight in belonging to [the Roman Catholic] church, a delight which increased greatly during the Second Vatican Council and the years immediately following, has been sorely tested over the last decade. (p. xxi)