Methodological Introduction

Abstract

Now that the critique in Part I has exposed the weaknesses in the Council’s pastoral strategy and conception of the lay apostolate, Part II (i.e. Chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11) aims to remedy those weaknesses by proposing an alternative framework by which the Catholic Church ought to be guided in its relations with political authorities. The purpose of this chapter is to set out the methodological parameters by which I intend to propose this framework. The framework to be proposed will be neither too specific with respect to place nor too general with respect to time. The framework will focus on the saeculum, meaning the age between the first and second comings of Christ, and will attend to the differences in church-state relations that follow from some political authorities continuing to bear signs of Christendom’s legacy. The ressourcement method will be used by returning to scripture, followed by an examination of how scripture was read by key figures in the history of Christian thought, in conversation with several non-Catholic theologians, thereby contributing to an initiative known as ‘receptive ecumenism.’

The Council chose, according to my argument in Part I, to change the church’s approach to states by a new pastoral strategy that placed great importance on the lay apostolate, as the apt medium through which church and state should meet. Now that the critique in Part I has exposed the weaknesses in the Council’s pastoral strategy and conception of the lay apostolate, Part II aims to remedy those weaknesses by proposing an alternative framework by which the Catholic Church ought to be guided in its relations with political authorities. The purpose of this chapter is to set out the methodological parameters by which I intend to propose this framework.

Russell Hittinger claims in his commentary on DH that from ‘1870 until the end of World War II’ (Hittinger 2008, p. 361) something ‘striking’ (ibid) became clear:

although the church was equipped on the one hand with philosophical and theological doctrines on the relationship between church and the states (in the abstract), and on the other with an ad hoc diplomatic policy realized via concordats, the church lacked a middle-level policy that could bring together the speculative and diplomatic poles. (ibid)

Building on certain overtures already made in the encyclicals of Pius XII, DH was meant, according to Hittinger, to make up for the lack of a middle-level policy, so that while DH ‘does not eliminate the need for diplomacy, it mitigates the ad hoc policies that so limited the church’ (ibid, p. 375). DH is meant, in other words, to speak in general terms, beyond the church’s relations with any particular state authority, but without being so general that it fails to take into account the historical situation in which the church found itself in the 1960s.¹ The abstractness of how church-state relations were understood in papal teachings in the nineteenth century until the 1930s seemed to be guilty of being too removed from the historical situation. As described earlier in Chap. 1 Part I, the dominant approach in papal encyclicals and among Catholic theologians would be simply to juxtapose the universal ideal of church establishment with the various modus vivendi arrangements that must be reached in less than ideal situations (e.g. in countries where Catholics are in the minority or where political recognition of the Catholic Church would threaten civil unrest). Trying to make sense of the church’s current situation by a simple juxtaposition of ideal and pragmatic reality seemed to overlook two things. It overlooked the role of particular historical circumstances (such as the Edict of Milan and conversion of Constantine) in making the close union of church and lay rulers come to be seen as a desirable state of affairs by Christians.² Moreover, failing to attend to those preceding historical circumstances meant that it was difficult for papal theology to account for why it had become so difficult to achieve the ideal of establishment when the political upheavals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave birth to regimes either hostile or indifferent to the church.

I mention Hittinger’s way of defining DH’s purpose not to agree or disagree with it but to use it to define what I intend to do in the following chapters. Similarly to DH, my concern is not with the wholly abstract or wholly concrete, but with the middle-level theological convictions that ought to guide how the Catholic Church’s clergy and laity should act in relation to political authorities in our time. Hence, I am not concerned with the Vatican’s current or potential diplomatic relations with any particular sovereign state or international body. Since theological reasoning is always carried out by someone somewhere, I also cannot deny that I am thinking about this problem in a given context and that my perspective is affected by contemporary political authorities. This does not mean that I am making the alleged mistake of some contextual theologians, who would treat ideas in historicist fashion as though they could tell us only what was true for their context, or as if they were the inevitable product of their context.³

However, I equally wish to avoid trying to elaborate an ahistorical ideal of how church and state should be related at any point in time and anywhere, regardless of changing circumstances. Talking about church and state at such a remove from history tends to subsume the church into the category of ‘religion’ or ‘religion sensibilities’ and then treats the distinction between our religious and political loyalties as a universal fact about the human condition. John Courtney Murray committed this mistake in his later writings at the time of the Council when the dyarchy of church and state ‘became civil societies and religious communities’ (Hooper 1993, p. 25) or were ‘formulated as the realms of the sacred and the secular’ (ibid, p. 34). Maritain’s distinction between our yearning for transcendent religious values as persons and our membership of social and political communities as individuals is another example of the same mistake (Maritain 1931, 1935; Smith 1995, pp. 6–37). I wish to avoid taking that route because using the term ‘religion’ to refer to Christianity, as one instance among many of interior beliefs and practices relating to something divine or sacred, is of dubious validity, as I argued in the fifth section of Chap. 4. More importantly, whereas the earthly political community appears to be the product of our natural need for sociality and authority, the church originates rather more obviously in a particular time and place in history, and continues encountering political communities and identities in various territories until the eschaton, when the need for the church’s sacraments will come to an end. The vis-à-vis of church and state only occurs between those two points in time between Christ’s first and second comings, and any discussion of church-state relations must attend to this particular period of time, instead of treating church-state relations as an instance of a universal and perennial conflict between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. I shall refer to the specific period for church-state relations as the saeculum. In using the term in this way, I acknowledge my debt to contemporary Augustinians who have reminded us that for Augustine and his mediaeval followers, the saeculum ‘was not a space, a domain, but a time’ (Milbank 2006, p. 9), ‘the whole stretch of time in which the two cities are inextricably intertwined’ (Markus 1988, p. 133). But it is also important to note that Augustine in some of his writings divided that entire stretch of time into

six ages of historical time: the first period runs from Adam to Noah; the second, from Noah to Abraham; the third, from Abraham to David; the fourth, from David to the Babylonian captivity; the fifth, from the captivity in Babylon to the coming of Christ; the sixth, from the incarnation till the end of the world. (Quinn 1992, p. 219)

Therefore, I shall use saeculum slightly differently from Markus and Milbank by using it to refer specifically to the last age, that is, ‘the sixth, the senescens saeculum’ (Voegelin 1997, p. 212) that lasts between the Advent of Christ and his Parousia. Choosing a narrower definition of saeculum ensures that we do not lose sight of the decisive alteration that was made to how we should relate to political authorities by ‘the mighty Christ-event’ (Cullmann 1962, p. 86). Cullmann famously compared Christ’s first and second comings to D-Day and V-Day.

The decisive battle in a way may already have occurred in a relatively early stage of the war, and yet the war still continues. Although the decisive effect of that battle is perhaps not recognized by all, it nevertheless already means victory. But the war must still be carried on for an undefined time, until ‘Victory Day.’ Precisely this is the situation of which the New Testament is conscious, as a result of the recognition of the new division of time; the revelation consists precisely in the fact of the proclamation that that event on the cross, together with the resurrection which followed, was the already concluded decisive battle [sic]. (ibid, p. 84; original emphasis; cf. p. xix)

We shall return to Cullmann in the eighth chapter when I argue that O’Donovan’s political theology has been influenced by Cullmann’s eschatology and conception of history. I do not wish to anticipate that argument here. I need, however, to specify further the timeframe within which my discussion of church-state relations is situated. We must draw attention to a particular era of history within the saeculum (as I have defined it) that now lies behind us and that cannot be ignored in any theological discussion of church-state relations: we are living after Christendom. I shall adopt the two moments O’Donovan chooses to mark roughly the beginning and end of Christendom: ‘AD 313, the date of the Edict of Milan, and 1791, the date of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, though these moments are symbolic only, and others could no doubt be found that would do as well’ (O’Donovan 1996, p. 195). Christendom can be defined as ‘the idea of a confessionally Christian government’ (ibid) and ‘the history of that idea in practice’ (ibid). Referring to the beginning, end, and enduring legacy of Christendom in Part II will require me to propose a framework of church-state attentive to the differences of place. As I mentioned earlier, I want to speak generally about how the Catholic Church should act in relation to any political authorities in our time. Nonetheless, my proposal will also be mindful of the differences between political authorities in territories that have no history of belonging to Christendom (such as the People’s Republic of China) and political authorities that do have an historic connection to Christendom, with varying degrees of repudiation of it in the present (such as France and the United Kingdom). Those differences entail different priorities for the church. For instance, in England there may occur the issue of whether and when there is a missionary purpose for the church to defend the institutional and symbolic remnants of Christendom in the forms, for example, of Christian worship in schools, the appointment of Bishops to the House of Lords, and the coronation ceremony.⁴ By contrast, no such remnants exist in China and the priorities of the Catholic Church in such a country should reflect the difference in its situation.

Having clarified the scope of my proposed framework by time and place, I shall briefly explain why my proposal is not a polemical repudiation of Vatican II, but rather a constructive response building on what the Council itself was doing to improve the pastoral and missionary practices of the church. As I mentioned earlier in the second chapter, the documents of Vatican II were enriched by the ‘various currents of ressourcement theology, [that were] concerned to rediscover forgotten or neglected dimensions of the great tradition found in the scriptures, the Fathers of the church, and the liturgy’ (O’Collins 2011, p. 372). Many of the theologians associated with the ressourcement movement ‘became periti or expert-consultants who collaborated closely with the bishops in producing the conciliar texts’ (ibid). The ressourcement movement’s influence can be seen not only in the conciliar documents’ use of biblical and Patristic texts and themes; its influence can also be seen in the inclusion of explicit recommendations in the documents to renew the church by the ressourcement method, i.e. by returning to the sources of its belief and practice. The decrees on the reform of consecrated religious life (Perfectae Caritatis), seminary education (Optatam Totius), and priestly ministry (Presbyterorum Ordinis) all refer to the crucial need for ‘a continual return to the sources of the whole Christian life’ (Perfectae Caritatis, n. 2; translation from O’Collins 2011, p. 373).

Without ignoring other sources that should be retrieved (liturgical sources, the writing of the Fathers and Doctors of the church, and, in particular, ‘the spiritual riches of the Eastern Fathers’), the conciliar documents repeatedly stressed the need to return to the scriptures, the pre-eminent source for Christian faith and life. (O’Collins 2011, p. 374, with an internal quotation from Unitatis Redintegratio, n. 15)

I argued in Chap. 2 that ressourcement theology can be credited for the progress made by the Council in overcoming the ‘clericalism, juridicism, and triumphalism’ (Dulles 1987, p. 39) of pre-conciliar ecclesiology. Nevertheless, as Part I’s critique showed, there was no such renewal or enrichment of how the state and the laity’s responsibilities vis-à-vis the state were being thought of before the Council, which was instead in substance embraced by the Council. It is clear, therefore, that the ressourcement movement remains incomplete. Although there was a return to the sources to enrich various other areas of doctrine, there has been no comparable return to the sources to understand political authority and the church’s appropriate relationship to it.⁵ Part II is meant to suggest how this overlooked task should now be carried out, thereby furthering the ressourcement project in an original way. Moreover, since Vatican II’s documents explicitly endorse the method of returning to the sources, Part II’s method of first interpreting scripture, and then examining Patristic and mediaeval Christian political thought, follows the method endorsed by the Council itself for the renewal of the church’s belief and practice.

Finally, my method is following a new approach to ecumenism, whilst making an original contribution to it. ‘Receptive ecumenism’ (as it has been called) has its origins in two conferences organised in Durham in 2006 and 2009 (Pizzey 2019, pp. 21–22). The Catholic theologian Paul Murray has been the driving force behind it, and according to him, the need for a new initiative stems from the fact that

the urgent hope for foreseeable structural unity—the mainstay of so much committed ecumenical activity from the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s and even into the 1980s—appears to have run out of steam. (Murray 2008, p. 9)

Since the goal of full visible unity between Christians ‘in the short-medium term is simply unrealistic’ (ibid) receptive ecumenism is meant to be a way for ecumenism not to abandon but ‘to live now oriented upon such goals’ (ibid, p. 12; original emphasis). It proposes

to place at the forefront of the Christian ecumenical agenda the self-critical question, ‘What, in any given situation, can one’s own tradition appropriately learn with integrity from other traditions?’ and, moreover, to ask this question without insisting, although certainly hoping, that these other traditions are also asking themselves the same question. (ibid)

‘As [a] necessary complement, then, to the important work of conceptual and grammatical clarification’ (ibid, p. 14) pursued in more typical forms of ecumenical dialogue, the hope of receptive ecumenism is that learning from other traditions will have a transforming effect. The result could be to

give rise to contexts in which issues of apparently irreconcilable difference … become genuinely navigable as all grow with creative integrity but non-linearly beyond the present impasse. (ibid)

Some may raise concerns about how to preserve the integrity of one’s own tradition when learning from others, and whether receptive ecumenism need necessarily be defined by Paul Murray’s vision for it, which draws on American pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty, and appeals to the need, as he sees it, for theology to adapt to our ‘pluralist, post-foundationalist, postmodern context’ (Murray 2006, p. 163). However, one need not share Murray’s interest in pragmatism or his vision of a post-foundationalist theology to accept that there is a prima facie plausibility to receptive ecumenism’s approach, especially if it is controlled by a joint effort to understand and interpret texts or practices authoritative for both traditions. Part II will be an example of receptive ecumenism, since the political theologians and biblical scholars I shall engage with are almost all Protestants: Hendrikus Berkhof (Dutch Reformed), Marva Dawn and Oscar Cullmann (Lutheran), and Oliver O’Donovan (Evangelical Anglican). Concentrating on what they can tell us about scripture and the history of its interpretation in the Patristic era will enable my argument to unite the ressourcement approach with receptive ecumenism.⁶

Ecumenical theology, regardless of its method, has tended to focus on areas of doctrinal disagreement. The agreed statements produced by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission are representative of this tendency, having covered areas of historic doctrinal disagreement, such as soteriology, Mariology, and the exercise of authority within the church. There have been, however, no comparable statements made about political matters, such as church-state relations, not even in the statement entitled ‘Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the church’ (ARCIC-II 1993).⁷ Therefore, by taking up these neglected matters using the approach of receptive ecumenism, I hope my book will make an original contribution to the dialogue between Catholic and Protestant political theologians. My conversation with the distinctly Evangelical Anglican thought of Oliver O’Donovan will be the first substantial engagement from a Catholic perspective with a thinker who has hitherto received only brief and cursory discussion by a handful of Catholic theologians.⁸

In summary, Part II will propose a theological framework to guide church-state relations in the present. It will avoid being too specific with respect to place or too general with respect to time. The framework will be focused on the saeculum, meaning the age between the first and second comings of Christ, and will attend to the differences in church-state relations that follow from some political authorities continuing to bear signs of Christendom’s legacy. My method of building the framework first by an interpretation of scripture, followed by an examination of how scripture was read by key figures in the history of Christian political thought before and during Christendom, emulates the approach of the ressourcement theologians (albeit looking at an issue that they have largely ignored) and is in accordance with how Vatican II itself intended for the church’s life and teaching to be renewed. Part II will articulate this framework in conversation with several non-Catholic theologians, thereby contributing to an initiative known as receptive ecumenism. The originality of my argument in part derives from using the approach of ressourcement theology and receptive ecumenism to tackle a subject (church-state relations) that ecumenists and ressourcement theologians have largely ignored, and doing so in conversation with O’Donovan (as well as others) whom theologians from the Catholic tradition have overlooked.