Showing papers in "New Blackfriars in 2000"

‘Fides et Ratio’, articles 64–79

Abstract: Two things ought to be said at the outset. The first is that it is an event of some significance far beyond the confines of Catholicism that the Bishop of Rome should address his fellow bishops on matters of the relationship of theology and philosophy. Whatever else we may say about the document before us, it emerges from a style of church leadership which refuses to absolve itself from the task of addressing questions of the intellectual articulation of the faith. Thereby it (quite properly) asks us some hard questions about those modern conventions whereby serious intellectual work is thought to be properly located only in the open fields of free enquiry (that is, in the institution of the university) and not in the cramped domestic culture of the church. I wonder if what has made some academics cross about Fides et Ratio is that the document refuses to stay behind the sanitary cordon with which institutions of higher learning sometimes surround themselves in order to protect their interests. That is the first thing to be said. The second is this: it's a pity that an episcopal judgment on these issues doesn't do a better job of staking its claims. Partly it's a matter of style: at times the document adopts the threateningly paternalistic tone of communications from the Kremlin in the 1940s and 1950s, urging Socialist realism in art or music: not the sort of thing to provoke thinkers to do their best work, so much as a summons to produce the goods to an officially-approved set formula. Partly, again, it's a matter of method: there are points at which the document adopts one of the familiar tactics of intellectual terrorism, namely, labelling something as an '-ism' ('eclecticism,' 'modernism,' 'relativism,' and so on: see arts. 52, 55, 86-90), characterising it with a few broad strokes of the brush but naming no names, pointing out its dire faults and then leaving us worrying whether we or our colleagues are examples of it. It's a poor way of handling ideas in public, one which breeds an atmosphere of distrust and lack of curiosity, and inhibits real conversation. Although someone outside the Roman Catholic church can't speak with real authority on the pastoral politics of the document, it is worth saying that Anglicans who cherish misty-eyed visions of universal primacy might pause and ask themselves if this really is the only alternative to near (but not total) absence of episcopal theological leadership. Strategy aside, however, I want to try to engage what I think are some weaknesses in the central claims of the 68

Theology and the Culture of the Sciences

Abstract: This is a PDF version of an article published in New Blackfriars© 2000. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.