Matthias Joseph Scheeben - Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics 5.1

When the 90-year-old German philosopher and political scientist Jrgen Habermas, in his late work Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie [Also a History of Philosophy], elaborates a monumental, 1,700-page genealogy of post-metaphysical thinking with reference to the area of faith and knowledge, then it is high time for Catholic theology to awaken from its pastoral slumber. It must once again focus its energies on the task of making the central mysteries of the Christian faith intellectually presentable. The beacon of Catholic theology in recent times has shifted to the English-speaking world. And therefore the translation of the Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics by the greatest speculative theologian of the nineteenth century into the modern lingua franca is an invaluable service to the future of the Church in the secular age. With his speculative penetration of the mystery of the Incarnation in the present volumeenriched by a comprehensive knowledge of patristic, scholastic, and modern theologyMatthias Joseph Scheeben preserves the mystery of Divine Revelation from attempts to naturalize it, and defends the Church from the tendency to reduce it to a merely functional civil religion. He proves that even on the highest level of rational reflection the believer can give to modern man an account for the hope that is in him (cf. 1 Peter 3:15), which puts us in a position to clarify definitively our understanding of ourselves and of the world in light of the knowledge of God.

CARDINAL GERHARD MLLER
Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

A landmark study... This book is undoubtedly one of the most important works of Christology composed by a Christian theologian in the modern era. Scheeben points us toward the integral unity of theology. In the sweep of his reflection, he is able simultaneously to engage delicate questions of scriptural interpretation, conduct rigorous patristic and conciliar exegesis, and offer profound ontological perspectives on the mystery of Christ in light of highly relevant scholastic disputes. He treats in robust depth a number of the most challenging topics in Christology: the motives of the incarnation, the hypostatic union, the relation of the two natures, body-soul composition in Christ, the communication of idioms, grace and headship of the man Jesus, and the Christological foundations of Mariology. This is a work every aspiring theologian should read.

THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, O.P.
Pontifical University of St. Thomas

Matthias Scheebens Dogmatics is one of the most rich and intoxicating vintages of nineteenth-century Catholic learning. In Michael Millers wonderful translation Scheebens master work can take its rightful place as one of the very best modern introductions to Catholic teaching. In this volume Scheeben bores down into the mysteries of Christs person, ever attentive to the complex resources of the Churchs tradition, and constantly mindful of the centrality of this doctrinal nexus to the broader mystery of how the Father restores the creation in and through the Incarnate Son. From Athanasius to Petavius, the range of earlier writers that Scheeben has at his fingertips offers a veritable bibliography for todays dogmatic theologian seeking signposts back to the best voices of the Catholic world. Historically there are places where more recent scholarship can supplement; theologically this volume offers a sure and certain guide to the heart of Catholic Christology.

LEWIS AYRES
Durham University & Australian Catholic University

HANDBOOK
OF
CATHOLIC
DOGMATICS

HANDBOOK
OF
CATHOLIC
DOGMATICS

BOOK FIVE
SOTERIOLOGY

PART ONE
THE PERSON OF CHRIST THE REDEEMER

MATTHIAS JOSEPH SCHEEBEN

Translated by MICHAEL J. MILLER

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Emmaus Academic

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2020 St. Paul Center

All rights reserved. Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

Translated from Handbuch der Katholischen Dogmatik, Fnftes Buch: Erlsungslehre. Second edition. Edited by Carl Feckes (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1954).

Editors note: In several passages the authors discussion of human generation and ensoulment is encumbered by 19th-century physiological theories, which lead him to write some very odd things.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Applied For

ISBN: 978-1-64585-034-2 (hc)

Layout and Cover Design by Emily Demary and Margaret Ryland

Cover image: The Resurrection, by Jacopo di Cione, 1370, The National Gallery, London, England

TABLE OF CONTENTS

BOOK FIVE: SOTERIOLOGY
PART ONE: THE PERSON OF CHRIST THE REDEEMER

FOREWORD

Here is translated, for the first time in English, the entire fifth Book of Matthias Joseph Scheebens Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics. Book Five embraces the whole of soteriology, or the theology of redemption. This includes the person of Christ the redeemer considered under a very wide range of aspects (Scheebens Christology), and a comprehensive account of the mysteries of his life and his work of redemption. The fifth Book concludes with Scheebens Mariology, his elaborate treatment of the Virgin Mother of the Redeemer and her relation to the work of redemption.

The result is a colossal dogmatic treatise on Christ, his saving work, and Mary the Mother of God so substantial that it has to be published in two physical volumes. Here the whole of the Catholic faith can be seen from the vantage points, as it were, of the incarnation, the paschal mystery, and the cooperation of Mary in the work of redemption. This was the last Book of the Dogmatics that Scheeben completed, though he did write and publish a substantial part of Book Six, on the theology of grace, before his death in 1888 at only fifty-three years of age.

It is said that while there are prodigies in music and mathematics, there are no prodigies in theology. The labor of study and reflection theology requires admits of no shortcuts, and it is no accident that theologians, if they produce important work, often do so only in their 60s and 70s. All true, but Scheeben comes as close to being a prodigy as any theologian in modern times. He completed his doctoral studies in Rome while still in his early twenties, and his first major dogmatic work, Nature and Grace, was published when he was only twenty-seven. This was followed just three years later, in 1865, by the book for which he is best known, The Mysteries of Christianity. Both are works of penetrating insight, rigorous argument, and enormous learning, and neither is a mere essay. In fact, The Mysteries is (in its English translation) over 800 pages long. At the request of the German Catholic publisher Benjamin Herder, Scheeben began work, not long after, on his Dogmatics. He would spend close to half his life on it, and this Book on the redeemer and the redemption may fairly be regarded as the richest complete expression of his mature theological vision, as close to a testament as anything we have from the hand of this extraordinarily gifted theologian.

Nonetheless, it is fair to ask why this work of late-nineteenth-century German Catholic theology is now being rendered into English, a hundred and forty years after it first appeared. Scheeben wrote his Dogmatics very much in the wake of the First Vatican Council, the teachings of which he passionately defended. This is especially clear in the first Book, where Scheeben, unusually for a Catholic theologian of his time, offers a highly ramified theological epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Much of this is taken up with a quite technical discussion of the Catholic Church not only as the recipient of divine revelation but as the divinely authorized transmitter to each generation both of revelation itself and of truths intrinsically connected to revelation but not themselves revealed. Late-nineteenth-century Catholic debates about the true nature and limits of the Churchs authority, especially her teaching authority, are very much in play, though not always in an explicit way. Despite being the literal beginning of the project, the opening sections of Book One are thus a difficult way into Scheebens