Catholicism: Not Neo-Orthodox, Just Orthodox

Conservative Protestant (and some Catholic) responses to Liberalism have centred on Karl Barth’s insistence that there can be no human knowledge of God except in so far as He reveals Himself in Jesus Christ. This meeting between divine revelation and human response is regarded as dialectical: it is an encounter of opposites. In that dialectical encounter, Christ becomes the key to the believer’s otherwise impossible understanding of the Bible, which is seen very strongly as a unitary and coherent whole. All of this is utterly Catholic.

Where Catholics differ from Protestants in the inter-related neo-orthodox, dialectical theology and Biblical Theology movements is in objecting to the typically Protestant truncatedness with which each of those movements expresses itself in relation to its subject. Reason, religious experience and sensory or emotional perceptions are self-evidently means whereby God can be known by men and women; this does not in any way detract from the revelation of God in Christ, in that the illuminating grace which makes possible such knowledge is always and everywhere operative only because of the historically and geographically located saving acts of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, the supposed duality between “Reason” and “Revelation” is contrary to Catholicism’s inherent and constant realisation that all human knowledge is the finite apprehension of the Infinite, Who is known personally by faith as God. On that realisation is built what Protestants are wont to call “the pre-Reformation synthesis” (just as they also talk, with equal arrogance and inaccuracy, about “the Counter-Reformation”), but which is in fact the continuous and continuing Catholic synthesis of all human knowledge in terms of Theology.

In the dialectical encounter between God and humanity, the former calls the latter to active co-operation with Him; that is why He causes the meeting to take place at all. Such an encounter with Jesus Christ can only happen specifically and consciously within the context of the mission and ministry of His Body, the Church. That Body is thus the living and ongoing dimension of the revelation in history to which Scripture as a whole bears witness; it is not the Bible, but Christ (and thus, inseparably, the Church), Who is that revelation.

Being Protestant, the Biblical Theology movement has suffered from its reception of only the Hebrew Canon of the Old Testament and from the tendency to create a “Canon within the Canon”. Against the consequences of these deficiencies, its needs to be affirmed that the biblical literature is indeed a product of its culture, that it resembles contemporaneous works very strongly at many points, and that it sets the tone for the later Church in its successful synthesis of Hebrew and Hellenistic thought.

And the works of Barth and his school must be referred (including for correction) to the ressourcement theologians and to Hans Urs von Balthasar, themselves always read under Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition in obedience to the Magisterium.