August 10, 2014

The Understanding of Revelation in “Dei Verbum” and the Response of Faith

by Tom Gourlay

What Constitutes Revelation?

For the Christian, what constitutes God’s revelation, and how that revelation is mediated and perceived by man, is a long-standing problem that continues to reframe established principles of metaphysics and epistemology. What can be known of the unknowable God, and what kind of creature is it that has been given the capacity to experience and know not only things about God, but to know God in himself?

The Scriptures themselves tell of God’s revelation, his own Divine pedagogy, and his ultimate self-communication in the person of Christ Jesus. The author of the letter to the Hebrews opens by stating that, “In many ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son…” (Heb 1:1-2). Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the incarnate Word of God, is both the object and the medium of God’s Self-Revelation. St. John of the Cross, commenting on the aforementioned opening passage in the letter to the Hebrews, wrote that:

In giving us his Son, his only Word (for he possesses no other), he spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word—and he has no more to say … because what he spoke before to the prophets in parts, he has now spoken all at once by giving us the  All, Who is his Son. Any person questioning God, or desiring some vision, or revelation, would be guilty not only of foolish behavior, but also of offending him, by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ, and by living with the desire for some other novelty. 1

While this notion of revelation, understood as the manifestation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Christ himself, has been with the Church since the very beginning. There have been many confusions and reductions over time that have altered the very essence of the faith. Many of these misunderstandings were addressed as part of the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council (Vatican II), 1962-1965.

Dei Verbum and the Ressourcement Movement

In the teachings of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum,the council fathers sought to address certain veins of thought running through Baroque and Neo-scholastic theology, then popular in Catholic seminaries and universities, and “debunk” the Scriptures coming from liberal protestant theologians and Scriptural exegetes, which were slowly infiltrating Catholic academia. Hearkening back to the Fathers of the Church, and the great medieval theologians, Sts. Thomas and Bonaventure, they attempted to reclaim a broader, and more personal notion, of revelation.

One of the goals of Dei Verbum was to correct a misunderstanding of the nature and content of revelation which had come to permeate the Neo-Scholastic seminary training and theological manuals of the 19th and 20th centuries. The misunderstanding, as it stood, was built on the teaching of the influential Jesuit theologian, Francesco Suárez (1548-1617), who saw revelation less as the person of Christ, and more as a simple list of propositions about God. This concept of revelation, which was formally taught in a variety of theology manuals, used in seminaries throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, had a direct impact on the understanding, and subsequent practice of, faith and faith sharing. “For Suárez, revelation does not disclose God himself, rather it concerns pieces of information which God has decided to disclose and, whereas, for Saint Thomas, things revealed led to faith, for Suárez faith confirms what is revealed.” 2

As mentioned above, according to this Suárezian understanding, revelation points the faithful to facts about God, rather than actually revealing God himself. This notion of revelation was, among other things, the cause of much consternation amongst many of the most prominent of Catholic theologians in the 20th century. 3 These theologians sought the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the ancient writings of the Fathers of the Church, in a more direct fashion, rather than through the lens of the various manuals which formed the basis of their seminary training. In doing so, they attempted to recover a more spiritual dimension to the reading of Sacred Scripture, and an understanding of God’s self-revelation. Their methodology was to attract some significant criticism, as it was perceived by many, including some within the pontifical Holy Office, as a further manifestation of the modernist heresy, and a revolt against the Angelic Doctor. For many of these theologians, however, the aim of this academic work was not to debunk the Scriptures, nor to usurp St. Thomas, but rather simply to recover a more ancient tradition—reading Thomas and the Fathers in their original setting without the commentary of the manualists.

Chief amongst these scholars of the ressourcement movement, as it came to be known, was the Jesuit priest, Henri de Lubac. De Lubac’s work concerning the understanding of revelation in the Fathers, most notably Origen of Alexandria, led to a recovery of the understanding of the five different senses of Scripture. 4 De Lubac’s “return to the sources” fuelled an increasingly spiritual understanding of revelation than what was presently popular in the seminary theology manuals of the time, and became tremendously influential amongst a growing circle of young scholars. Most notable among this group was the then Jesuit Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar and, also, the young Fr. Josef Ratzinger, who later became Bishop, Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and eventually Pope Benedict XVI.  In a footnote of his book on the work of de Lubac, theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar highlights that for de Lubac, as for many of the great thinkers and saints of the Church throughout history, “Christianity is not, properly speaking, a ‘book religion’; it is the religion of the Word, but not uniquely, not even primarily, of the Word in its written form; it is the religion of the Logos, ‘not written and mute, but the incarnate and living Logos’” (Bernard). 5 This quote points out the Christocentric nature of the traditional understanding of revelation, which was the understanding of revelation that de Lubac sought to reclaim. As highlighted above, this is a concept that is, by no means, foreign to the great spiritual writers of the faith down through the ages, but which somehow was lost to the world of Neo-scholastic theology that followed Suárez. The impact of this understanding of revelation on the practice of theology, in itself, is tremendous, and recovers something of the ancient understanding of St. Evagrius Ponticus—the theologian as being one who prays, and the one who prays as being a theologian.

 

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