Robert Barron - Exploring Catholic Theology: Essays on God, Liturgy, and Evangelization

When I was a philosophy student at the Catholic University of America many years ago, I had the privilege of studying under Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, one of the great contemporary interpreters of Husserls phenomenology. Sokolowskis master idea, grounded in the two-natures doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon, is that God is noncompetitively transcendent to the worldthat is to say, that God is so radically other than creation that he can enter into what he has made in a nonintrusive manner. Sokolowski construed this insight as foundational for understanding a wide variety of Catholic doctrines, including creation, divine agency, providence, the sacramental economy, the Eucharist, and so on.

As I have undertaken my own philosophical, theological, and evangelical projects, I have come back again and again to this seminal notion. I trust the essays in this collection on God make clear that the correct understanding of the nature of God is essential for both engagement with the new atheism and dialogue with the culture. As far as I can tell, every one of the spokespeople of the new atheism is busy swatting down the idolatrous notion that God is one important being among many, a denizen of the universe, the biggest thing around, competing with creatures on the same ontological playing field. If they had bothered to read Thomas Aquinas with even a modicum of attention, they would have seen that the mainstream of the serious theist tradition agrees with them in rejecting such a fantastic entity. The true God, who is the sheer energy of to-be itself, is not a threat to human flourishing but precisely the ground of human flourishing. St. Irenaeuss adage Gloria Dei homo vivens expresses this notion admirably, and the image of the burning busha creature rendered radiant by the presence of God but not consumedprovides the scriptural foundation for it. The Sokolowski clarification also illumines the faith-culture dialogue, for it allows us to see the unconditioned reality of God not as a fussy intruder into cultural endeavors but rather as the ground and lure of those various attempts to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful. Paul Tillich commented that the Christian ought to go out to meet the culture mit klingindem Spiel (with fife and drum). A correct understanding of God allows for such joyful confidence.

A number of essays in this collection suggest, however, that the faith-culture conversation within Catholicism had become skewed in the years following the Second Vatican Council. A correlational method had come to dominate Catholic reflection on fundamental theology, apologetics, and evangelization, and this in turn had allowed the questions surging up from human experience to dictate Christs position. But such a move is repugnant to the structuring logic of the New Testament, according to which Jesus, as the very Logos of God, is the norma normans sed non normata . Consequently, I have argued for an understanding of the faith-culture relationship along the lines suggested by John Henry Newmans theory of assimilation. The church, the body of Christ, takes to itself what it can from the cultural environment, even as it resists what it must. When Thomas Aquinas was critiqued for diluting the wine of the Gospel with the water of Aristotle, Thomas responded, No, rather I am turning water into wine.

Another major theme in this collection is liturgy, which is only natural for a Catholic theologian writing under the influence of the documents of Vatican II. In the magnificent text on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium , the council fathers said that the liturgy is the source and summit of the Christian life, implying that the Mass is the place where the Catholic thing is most thoroughly displayed and realized. If we want to understand who God is, who Christ is, who we are in relation to God, and what our mission and purpose might be, we look to the Eucharistic liturgy. This is, furthermore, precisely why the liturgy is so crucial in regard to the conversation with the culture. Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, the cofounders of the Catholic Worker Movement, formulated the adage cult cultivates the culture, implying that the central prayer of the church radiates outward and shapes the worlds of art, politics, economics, and so on. Both the rabbis of the intertestamental period and the fathers of the church interpreted Adam before the fall as the prototypical priest and the Garden of Eden as a kind of primordial temple. The right praise offered by Adam was meant to infiltrate every aspect of life, coming in time to Edenize the world. This is the central idea that shapes the essays on liturgy.