One faith, centred on Jesus, has many expressions. Most obvious are the many Christian denominations. Within Catholicism, spiritualities such as the Benedictine, Franciscan and Jesuit traditions have grown up over the centuries.
In the mid-20th century, Neo-Scholasticism collapsed. Since then there has been an explosion of research, study and writing on every aspect of Christianity.
Theology can no longer be a single, stand-alone system. Thomas Aquinas could still pull it together in his Summa Theologiae. Back then, people knew nothing of evolution and had little sense of how history unfolds.
That kind of synthesis is no longer possible.
Beyond old certainties
Medieval theologians, and the neo-scholastics after them, could lean on metaphysics and the authority of earlier thinkers. Empirical science, along with existentialist and personalist philosophy, challenged this.
We now want real evidence, and theology needs firmer ground if it is to answer the questions of our time.
The human sciences, such as psychology, anthropology and sociology, help here. They give the symbolic, story-telling language of scripture a new voice that can reach wider audiences.
Three developments
Three developments mark the contemporary landscape:
- the discovery of evolution,
- a new awareness of historical development, and the
- “turn to the person” and “turn to interiority”.
Knowing how the universe, the Earth and humans have evolved helps us understand our place in a constantly changing world that is complex, beautiful and powerful.
The turn to the person
Since the mid-1900s, people have become more aware of their own autonomy and agency. Carl Jung called this movement individuation.
It is not simply individualism. It does not reject community. It corrects an imbalance, recognising that both the individual and relationships are essential to human development.
It also pushes back against the earlier overemphasis on “objectivity”, and the belief that we must avoid anything subjective to reach the truth. Bernard Lonergan put it this way in Method in Theology: “Genuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.”
Jung, Maslow, Rogers, Frankl, Rahner, Lonergan, Gandhi and Pope Francis all helped bring this shift about.
The turn to interiority
The turn to interiority is about noticing what goes on inside us when we experience, know, decide and love. It begins with a question: “What am I doing when I am knowing?”
Most of the time, we do these things without noticing how. Yet these are the very processes by which we gain wisdom, shape our character and grow as persons. When we understand them, we have a real structure for thinking critically and discerning what is right and good.
Lonergan details these processes in Insight and Method in Theology.
As we grasp our own interiority, the emphasis shifts from theory to lived experience. Coherence and unity are found in our common drive toward transcendence and in building relationships of love.
What this means
Because the emerging theology is grounded in personal experience, insight and values, it will inevitably bring a variety of understandings of God, faith, revelation, Jesus and much else long treated as settled.
In practice, this brings into the open something that has always been true: Catholics differed widely in how well they understood and accepted handed-down doctrines.
- Kevin Liston is a Co-chair of ACCCR (Australasian Catholic Coalition for Church Reform), Convener of SACEC (SA Catholics for an Evolving Church), a State Council member of St Vincent de Paul Society (SA) and active in a local Vinnies conference. Following retirement, he completed a Master of Theological Studies at ACU and a Graduate Diploma in Psychology at Monash University. This article is written in a personal capacity.