TS Home

From the Editor's Desk

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. . . .

– W. B. Yeats

And though the last lights off the black West went
     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

In the aftermath of the Great War and at the dawn of the jazz age, Yeats sensed that the hoary metanarratives that had bound religions, cultures, and nations had lost credibility. Many sense this even more keenly today as a multitude of micronarratives springs up, each demanding allegiance—although global capitalism bids fair as the dominant new metanarrative.

We live in an age of accelerated change. In a brief span we have lurched from premodernity to modernity to postmodernity, each shift shocking our collective psyche with a weird experience of space and time. Technological developments—from the still to the movie camera, to Einstein’s theories of general and specific relativity, to increasingly rapid ground, air, and space travel, and to the computer chip that has collapsed the world into people’s living rooms—have effected change at such a pace that some cultures relatively untouched by massive electrical grids now find themselves leapfrogging to the wireless capabilities of new computer and communications systems. These developments have enabled global possibilities for both good (realizing a world community of persons) and ill (terrorizing and/or eliminating whole populations).

This is the context in which theologians today must ply their craft. In his last homily before being elected pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger characterized the West as suffering “a dictatorship of relativism,” by which I think he meant that the postmodern culture, if not confronted by religiously astute and stout forces, will steamroll everything in its path, including the Church that has carried Christianity through the ages. John Paul II, at the close of Jubilee Year 2000, issued a letter tellingly titled Novo millennio ineunte (January 6, 2001), in which he argued that at least one thing will perdure in our world, the word of God. Of course, the word needs to be heard and preached in a way that enables today’s peoples—premodern, modern, and postmodern—to embrace it. The letter was a call to heed his previous summons to a “new evangelization” (Redemptoris missio, December 7, 1990) that would make accessible the original truths of revelation to a profoundly changed and changing world.

John XXIII had called the Second Vatican Council to do just that. The council’s first efforts to address the situation of the Church in the modern world teetering on the brink of the postmodern were inauspicious. The first draft of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church was rejected on several counts, not the least of which was its equating the Church with the hierarchy. The final draft underscored the image of the Church as the people of God. The subsequent Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World also broke with tradition by being the first conciliar document addressed to the whole world. Clearly Vatican II signaled an ecclesiastical sea change that was essential if the Church were to be faithful to its mission to proclaim the age-old yet ever new word of God.

In this new age, all the big questions of faith must be revisited and apologias for the creedal truths of revelation recast if they are to be received by profoundly different audiences.

• In a world that rejects Western Christian hegemony, what does it mean to believe in God as conceived by the Judeo-Christian tradition?
• In a world that conceives of the Inconceivable differently, what could it, should it, or must it mean for the Roman Catholic Church to sit side-by-side with other Christian denominations and faiths—not to mention intramural ideologies—at a round table?
• In increasingly secularized and consumerist societies, why do so many find Roman Catholicism irrelevant? Why should anyone invest or be invested in institutional Christianity?
• The biggest question of all: What is salvation? Who needs it? Who gets it?

We used to have clear answers to such questions. In this new age, however, the old answers fall on ears increasingly dinned by other messages.

• What sort of apologetic must the Church develop and exercise so that the message of Christianity gets at least a fair hearing?
• What new theological styles will prove fruitful? In the development of new, multiple apologetics and theological styles to meet different audiences, how can theologians work effectively and appropriately with the hierarchical magisterium?
• What is authentic reinterpretation of the tradition and what is not?
• May or may not theologians keep alive conversations on sensitive issues vital to the Church’s mission “until they mature”?

Of the articles in this issue of Theological Studies the first two are most germane to this discussion. John O’Malley challenges readers to ponder anew what did, does, and should Vatican II mean for the Church. And Thomas Guarino’s historical-theological study retrieves for today Vincent of Lérins’s two “rules” of engagement with culture.

In his “Farewell from the Editor’s Desk,” Michael Fahey ended his splendid retrospective with a “hope and a prayer” that the journal would continue to develop to meet the needs of a historical, necessarily evolving Church. For this to happen, the journal’s editor, board of directors, and editorial consultants, as well as the many theologians who submit articles and reviews, must become adept at discerning where the Spirit is leading the Church—this, of course, in close relationship with the Church’s magisterium and the whole people of God, as well as with the entire international community of nations newly conscious of globalization with its risks and promise, dangers and opportunities.

Not having a past in the editorial post, I must necessarily look forward. My hope and prayer is that theologians, already sensing an urgency about their mission, will respond with a renewed creativity as they revisit the big questions with a view to posing answers for today’s cultures, which will go forward with or without the Church. Postmodernism's relativism and the attendant collapse of structures of meaning can tempt even the stouthearted to retreat into a fortress of fideism and fundamentalism. Providentially, the Catholic theological tradition affords better tools to deal with the threat of chaos: the perichoresis of faith and reason. This and Hopkins’s vision of the Holy Ghost should warm our hearts to the work at hand.

David G. Schultenover, S.J.

Editor in Chief