The Moral Heart of Vatican II

The background of Vatican II’s pastoral and missionary concerns cannot be separated from what is arguably the Council’s most unexpected and far-reaching document, Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the relationship of the Church to non-Christian religions. While very often interpreted as changing, not to say reversing, traditional Church-centred soteriology, this chapter argues that Nostra Aetate needs to be understood primarily as an event, a moment of self-understanding on the part of the Church which provokes a radical conversio morum. By calling the Declaration the ‘moral heart of the Council’, the chapter focusses specifically on its original purpose. That the Declaration has opened up a broader interreligious perspective to which all the major religions of the world can relate is testament less to the power of particular theological ideas than to its central conviction that the Church finds its own origins not apart from but through the faith which it shares with the people of the Sinai Covenant.

‘A Reminder of God’—a Summons to Speak

According to Abraham Joshua Heschel, the prophet is inexorably drawn into the pathos of God—sensing something of God’s own desire to enter deeply into the inner consciousness of suffering human beings. In keeping faith with her own ‘dangerous memory’, Edith Stein witnesses to the prophetic effort to respond to the Word of God by forever seeking more imaginative ways of keeping alive the hope of a new creation. This raises the possibility that it is the figure of the prophet who provides Jews and Christians with a strand of interpretation with which to trace the continuities between ‘Old’ and ‘New’. As a creative force within the community of faith the prophet feels most deeply experiences of tragedy, loss, and crisis, responding with words of praise and lament, thanks and complaint, hope and repentance that are forever interacting with the wider world.

Introduction

The book opens with a particular experience of learning ‘in the middle of things’—in the middle of a library. The experience of finding something unexpected (and in some sense ‘finding oneself’ in the act of searching) opens up an introductory consideration of the ‘Jewish matrix’, the religious world of the people of Israel, which forms the inner life of the Church through its liturgy and prayer and structures all its relations, both within the Church and without. The proposal for a theology of dialogue is set within the context of the Shoah as the dominating religious event of the twentieth century which has had an enormously important influence not just on contemporary Jewish–Christian relations but on theological reflection more generally. A theology of dialogue begins here, with intrinsically Jewish ways of thought about God’s presence to human beings.

Learning New Vocabularies

This final chapter begins by contrasting the opening sketch of Jewish-Christian relations as practised in the London East End of the 1930s with the very different multiculturalism of today. It seeks to apply lessons learned from the ‘new dialogue’ between Jews and Christians to further dialogues and conversations. In the light of the forces of secularization and globalization which have created a ‘post-Christendom’ world, all theology—and a fortiori theology of dialogue—has to be what David Tracy calls ‘public theology’. If Martha Nussbaum teaches us to take seriously the all-too-limited efforts of human beings to build just and cohesive communities with love and compassion, Simone Weil takes us more deeply into the experience of loss and affliction and thus to confront the sheer messy reality of human living with confidence and equanimity. She acts as an icon of patience and empathy for all persons of faith as they wait upon the movements of grace in a contested pluralist world.

Keeping Faith in a post-Shoah World

Christians share with Jews the conviction that, after Auschwitz, any approach to theology that extracts people from their concrete history is no longer possible. The challenge for both traditions is to find ways of narrating memories which keep faith with the past and generate hope for the future. There is more to the task of ‘re-membering’ than repeating the old story with as much exactness as possible. When the links with the past are challenged by trauma and silence, there is also a crucial role for the religious imagination; the challenge is not to conjure up a more consoling vision but to find ways of staying with the very brokenness of things. This chapter engages with the thought of J.B. Metz and his evocative theme of ‘dangerous memory’ and with the iconic witness of Edith Stein, born a Jew and murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, who shows how in times of crisis memories become more not less intense.

Reading the Mystery

The task of this chapter is to draw a theology of dialogue out of the ‘primary relationship’ with the people of the Old Covenant. How does the experience of encounter that underlies all dialogical activity disclose something that can in some way be universalized across the spectrum of religions? Some introductory remarks from Raimon Panikkar focus on the tension noted in the introduction, between the particular moment of clarity or discovery, what makes sense now, and the struggle to understand, to get a fuller and broader picture of the whole. The argument is based on the claim that Christian identity is not self-subsistent but relational: it is to be found not apart from but in relationship with the living faith of Israel—and can only be maintained through further intensifications of the Paschal Mystery as the Church goes on translating its faith into new expressions.

The Mission of Dialogue

The first chapter is concerned with spelling out a theological context common to both a ‘theology for’ and a ‘theology of dialogue’, namely a Church called to witness to its faith. While the ‘new way’ of dialogue is sometimes understood as replacing traditional forms of missionary witness like proclamation, mission remains central to any account of Church and Christian faith. According to Vatican II, the Church is ‘missionary of its very nature’. These familiar words from Ad Gentes, the Council’s decree ‘on missionary activity’, lead to a discussion of the Roman Catholic contribution to the ecumenical consensus on mission which has coalesced around the Trinitarian theme of the Missio Dei. The typically Catholic principle of ‘inculturation’ or translation into new languages and cultural forms is a response to the Father’s work of sending the Word and the Spirit for the creation and redemption of the world, a work in which the Church is invited to participate.

Unity of Word and Spirit

This chapter expands on the teaching of Nostra Aetate by enquiring into the ‘unity of life’ that gives Christianity its proper coherence—not apart from but precisely in dialogue with Judaism. The Church is inseparable from the beliefs, practices, and institutions which constitute ‘Second Temple Judaism’. In an important sense Judaism was, and in many ways still is, determinative of the nature of Christian faith; it is impossible to understand Christianity without some reference to Judaism. This perspective changes our view of Christian origins—or at least of the way they are read in dialogue with Judaism and raises some important questions, not least about the specificity of Christian faith—especially when and how it can be said to have begun. To put the question at its starkest: how can Christians talk about the newness of the New without consigning the Old to some secondary irrelevance?