Michael Sharkey (editor) - ITC Documents Vol 2

INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL COMMISSION
TEXTS AND DOCUMENTS, 1986-2007

INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL COMMISSION

TEXTS AND DOCUMENTS
1986-2007

Edited by Reverend Michael Sharkey
and
Father Thomas Weinandy

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Cover photograph by istockphoto/Roberto A. Sanchez

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

Published in 2009 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved by the International Theological Commission

ISBN 978-1-58617-226-8

Library of Congress Control Number 2007928865

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Indices

FOREWORD

The International Theological Commission is now in its fortieth year. It was first established by Paul Vl in 1969 at the suggestion of the first Synod of Bishops in 1967. The cooperation between bishops and theologians during the council years had been so successful that many bishops wanted that cooperation to continue in an institutionalised manner. Suggestions for nominations to the membership of the Commission are sent in by Episcopal Conferences throughout the church. Thirty are then chosen and appointed for a period of five years. They are drawn from all over the world, represent the various branches of theology, and, indeed, the various approaches to theology. They are served by a General Secretary, and the Commissions President is ex officio the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Commission meets annually for a weeks plenary assembly, whether to choose a new topic, advance one in progress, or to finalise it. Work on a topic is usually delegated to a sub-commission whose members share their draft texts (by email these days) and who meet on an ad hoc basis to improve and polish them. When the text is finalised, all the members vote on it: if it receives an absolute majority and is approved by the Prefect, it is published in specific form, which means that it can be taken as an authoritative presentation of the state of the question examined, even if some individual members would have liked to have gone further, but agree to the consensus; however, the Commission reserves the right to approve the text only in generic form, accepting the principal ideas of the document, the rest remaining the responsibility of individual author(s).

The theological method employed by the Commission is largely the one that emerged in Vatican II. Prior to the Council, students of theology were presented with theses explaining the teaching of the Church, illustrated by proof texts from the Scriptures. For example in the 1950s, students in Rome, following a four year course for a licence in theology (S.T.L.), completed the whole of moral theology at the end of the second year before even opening the Bible at the beginning of the third.

The Council changed all that. Sacred Scripture comes first: studied reverently, systematically and critically (in the academic sense); then the historical development so that the student can grasp the import of a decision or an idea in its historical context. In this way a student appropriates the teaching of the Magisterium in a more profound manner. This is now the norm. It is what we expect; and it is what we get in the documents of the International Theological Commission.

Monsignor Michael Sharkey.

Lichfield, U.K., 18 October 2008.

FAITH AND INCULTURATION

INTRODUCTION

1. The International Theological Commission has had, on several occasions, the opportunity to reflect on the relationship between faith and culture.

2. Today the International Theological Commission intends to continue this reflection in a more profound and systematic manner on account of the importance assumed by this theme of the inculturation of faith throughout the Christian world and on account of the insistence with which the Churchs magisterium has considered this theme since the Second Vatican Council.

3. The basis is furnished by the Conciliar documents and by the synod papers which have continued them. Thus, in the constitution Gaudium et spes, the council has shown what lessons and what tasks the Church has drawn from its first experiences of inculturation in the Greco-Roman world.

4. Pope John Paul II himself has taken to heart in a special manner the evangelization of cultures: In his view, the dialogue of the Church and of cultures assumes a vital importance for the future of the Church and of the world. To assist him in this great work, the Holy Father has created a specialized curial body: the Pontifical Council for Culture. It is moreover with this dicastery that the International Theological Commission is happily in a position to reflect today on the inculturation of faith.

5. Relying on the conviction that the incarnation of the Word was also a cultural incarnation, the pope affirms that cultures, analogically comparable to the humanity of Christ in whatever good they possess, may play a positive role of mediation in the expression and extension of the Christian faith.

6. Two essential themes are bound up with this view. First, that of the transcendence of revelation in relation to the cultures in which it finds expression. The Word of God cannot, in effect, be identified or linked in an exclusive manner with the elements of culture which bear it. The Gospel quite often demands a conversion of attitudes and an amendment of customs where it establishes itself: Cultures must also be purified and restored in Christ.

7. The second major theme of the teaching of John Paul II revolves around the urgency of the evangelization of cultures. This task presupposes that one would understand and penetrate with a critical sympathy particular cultural identities and that, in the interest of a universality corresponding to the truly human reality of all cultures, one would favor exchanges between them. The Holy Father thus bases the evangelization of cultures on an anthropological conception firmly rooted in Christian thought since the fathers of the Church. Since culture, when pure, reveals and strengthens the nature of man, the Christian impregnation presupposes the surpassing of all historicism and relativism in the conception of what is human. The evangelization of cultures should therefore be inspired by the love of man in himself and for himself, especially in those aspects of his being and of his culture which are being attacked or are under threat.

8. In the light of this teaching, and also of the reflection which the theme of the inculturation of faith has aroused in the Church, we first propose a Christian anthropology which situates, one in relation to the other, nature, culture and grace. We shall then see the process of inculturation at work in the history of salvation: in ancient Israel, in the life and work of Jesus and in the early Church. A final section will treat problems at present posed to faith by its encounter with popular piety, with non-Christian religions, with the cultural traditions in the young Churches and finally with the various characteristics of modernity.

I. NATURE, CULTURE AND GRACE

1. Anthropologists readily return to describe or define culture in terms of the distinction, sometimes even opposition, between nature and culture. The significance of this word nature varies moreover with the different conceptions of the natural sciences, of philosophy and of theology. The magisterium understands this word in a very specific sense: The nature of a being is what constitutes it as such, with the dynamism of its tendencies toward its proper ends. It is from God that natures possess what they are, as well as their proper ends. They are from that moment impregnated with a significance in which man, as the image of God, is capable of discerning the creating hand of God.

2. The fundamental inclinations of human nature, expressed by natural law, appear therefore as an expression of the will of the Creator. This natural law declares the specific requirements of human nature, requirements which are significative of the design of God for his rational and free creature. Thus all that misunderstanding is avoided which, perceiving nature in a univocal sense, would reduce man to material nature.