Theological Education In The Catholic Tradition: Contemporary Challenges

Theological Education In The Catholic Tradition: Contemporary Challenges. Edited by Patrick W Carey and Earl C. Muller, S.J. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997. 423 pp. $29.95 (paper).

The title of this book is somewhat misleading to Protestants who use the term "theological education" to refer to graduate level training for the ordained ministry. Two of the twenty-six essays in this collection are indeed about the vexing issues of seminary training. The rest of the essays touch upon the teaching of theology within Roman Catholic colleges and universities. The organizing theme for the collection is the role and use of "Catholic" theology in the maintenance and development of a distinctively Roman Catholic ethos and identity in higher education. Most of the papers contained in the collection were given at a conference on the subject at Marquette University in August of 1995.

This book will be relevant to Anglicans for the issues it raises. Some of these issues are peculiar to the Roman Catholic church, such as the relationship between professional theologians and the official magisterium of the church, but it does not take much imagination to identify the parallel issues in our own church life. The fragmented and hyper-professionalized nature of much academic theology, the polarization of approaches to the theological task, the divorce of theology from spirituality and from ecclesial life-these problems manifest themselves in particular ways within the Roman Catholic World but they are problems with which all of the mainline churches are familiar. It is particularly interesting for Anglicans to overhear Roman Catholics attempting to answer the question of what constitutes "Catholic Theology" and what ought to be the commitment of Roman Catholic institutions to the teaching of that tradition. The theological ethos of many faculties is generically neo-Kantian. In many places there is a lack of interest in and skill for the kind of historical investigation that can sustain a dynamic tradition. Some of the authors in this collection are asking whether there is enough competent knowledge of the tradition and understanding of what is historically distinctive about Roman Catholic philosophical and theological investigation to make the teaching of "Catholic Theology" possible in the American context.

Matthew Lamb of Boston College sounds the alarm in a sobering essay on the "Challenges For Catholic Graduate Theological Education." "A survey of all the Ph.D.s in theology at Catholic universities completed over the past fifteen years indicates that 75 percent of them have been studies of twentieth-century figures or questions. If the nineteenth century is added, it will account for almost 90 percent of all the completed Ph.D.s. There is a dangerous lack of balance in terms of the expertise required to carry on the long Catholic intellectual tradition" (p. 125). Lamb fears that without this expertise contemporary Catholic Theology will succumb to the Enlightenment opposition between faith and reason and that the teaching of theology will degenerate into the repackaging of contemporary secular methodologies. The distinctive and indispensable categories of sin and grace are in danger of being lost, to be replaced with behaviorism and Pelagian pep talks.

There are certainly parallel questions which Anglicans could ask themselves. Historically we have seen ourselves as heirs to the same Catholic tradition of which Lamb speaks. (When reading Hooker recently I was struck again by his high estimation of "the schoolmen.") We have also depended on a determinative reading of this tradition through the English Reformers and Caroline Divines. While the theological situation in Episcopal seminaries is not as dire as that in Roman Catholic colleges, it is worth asking if there is sufficient competence and commitment in our academic centers to make possible the transmission of the Anglican tradition as a living tradition. Or shall the word "Anglican" become a shibboleth used to describe a trendy antipathy to doctrine? One thinks of Eric Mascall's lone quest to renew the Anglican commitment to Natural Theology at a time when most of the theology faculties in England were mesmerized by Bultmann and Barth and more recently of Bishop Sykes's attempt to articulate an Anglican doctrine of the church. N.T. Wright's recovery of English teaching on the historical dimension of the resurrection also comes to mind as well as Michael Ramsey's plea toward the end of his life for a distinctively Anglican theological education. But these teachers are notable because they appear against a backdrop of indifference to the classic texts and insights of Anglicanism. Here Matthew Lamb sums up the challenge for Roman Catholic teaching of theology and also I think for those Anglicans who claim to be heir to a long, distinctive and intellectually rich theological tradition. "Without the linguistic and philosophical habits to learn from the primary texts, the students are not really equipped to be able to judge for themselves the adequacy of this or that translation, this or that recent interpretation. Without the intellectual, moral, and religious practices, and the virtues engendered by those practices, the students are not able to have a real apprehension and knowledge of the realities to which the texts are referring. Today we need Augustine's concern, expressed in the first three books of his De doctrina Christiana, for the appropriation of the theological virtues, along with the intellectual and moral, in order to discover and be in tune with the true realities revealed in Scripture and Christian teachings" (p.125).