Edward Schillebeeckx and Mary Daly, RIP

In case you missed the news, two of the most Catholic church's most restless and controversial figures have passed away: the influential post-Christian feminist thinker Mary Daly died on 3 January, and the great Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx died on 23 December.

I guess it would be fair to say that, before his death, Schillebeeckx was the world's greatest living theologian, the last remaining figure of a generation of gigantic thinkers (we had a post here a couple months back to mark his 95th birthday). With his death, a whole theological generation has now passed away.

Happy birthday, Edward Schillebeeckx

A reader informed me that today is the 95th birthday of the great Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx. So in his honour, I'm re-posting a short piece from a couple of years ago:

Among modern Catholic theologians, there’s no one I like better than Edward Schillebeeckx. I pay visits to Rahner and Balthasar and Ratzinger, but I come home to Schillebeeckx.

Why do I love Schillebeeckx? There are many reasons. His whole theology is worked out amidst a momentous wrestling with the biblical texts. He has an extraordinary way of perceiving exactly what Christian faith and practice really mean, what they really demand. In contrast both to unthinking conservatisms and sentimental progressivisms, he forged a profound and unflinching christological revision, issuing in a rigorous and tough-minded theology of liberation.

Besides that, he also has the most delightfully cumbersome name in the whole history of theology – his full name is Edward Cornelis Florentius Alfonsus Schillebeeckx (and, as a novice of the Dominican Order, he added Henricus as an additional name). No one with fewer names could have written so many – or such gigantic – books.

I leave you with this quote from the Birthday Boy himself:

“The crucified but risen Jesus appears in the believing, assembled community of the church. That this sense of the risen, living Jesus has faded in many [churches] can be basically blamed on the fact that our churches are insufficiently ‘communities’ of God…. Where the church of Jesus Christ lives, and lives a liberating life in the footsteps of Jesus, the resurrection faith undergoes no crisis. On the other hand, it is better not to believe in God than to believe in a God who minimizes human beings, holds them under and oppresses them, with a view to a better world to come.”

—Edward Schillebeeckx, The Church with a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1985), p. 34.

Why I love Schillebeeckx

Among modern Catholic theologians, there’s no one I like better than Edward Schillebeeckx. I pay visits to Rahner and Balthasar and Ratzinger, but I come home to Schillebeeckx.

Why do I love Schillebeeckx? There are many reasons. His whole theology is derived from a direct wrestling with the biblical texts. He has the most extraordinary way of perceiving exactly what Christian faith and practice really mean, what they really demand. In contrast both to unthinking conservatisms and sentimental progressivisms, he develops a profound and unflinching christological revision which issues in a rigorous and tough-minded theology of liberation.

Besides that, he also has the most delightfully cumbersome name in the entire history of theology – his full name is Edward Cornelis Florentius Alfonsus Schillebeeckx (and, as a novice of the Dominican Order, he added Henricus as an additional name). No one with fewer names could have written such enormous books, or written so many.

Anyway, here’s a quote:

“The crucified but risen Jesus appears in the believing, assembled community of the church. That this sense of the risen, living Jesus has faded in many [churches] can be basically blamed on the fact that our churches are insufficiently ‘communities’ of God…. Where the church of Jesus Christ lives, and lives a liberating life in the footsteps of Jesus, the resurrection faith undergoes no crisis. On the other hand, it is better not to believe in God than to believe in a God who minimizes human beings, holds them under and oppresses them, with a view to a better world to come.”

—Edward Schillebeeckx, The Church with a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1985), p. 34.

Two views of miracles

Here are two quotes on miracles by Roman Catholic theologians—I agree strongly with one, and disagree just as strongly with the other!

“There is, no doubt, nothing more in the miracle than in the least of ordinary facts. But also there is nothing less in the most ordinary fact than in the miracle.”
—Maurice Blondel, Action (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 365.

“The special quality of the miracle is that, because of the entire context within which an incident of this kind takes place, God himself wishes to communicate something to us in the miracle—in it, he really addresses us. There is an intention in the event and this personal intention transcends the normal possibilities of nature. For anyone who is open and listens to it, the natural event expresses more than it is able to express in itself—it is the visible aspect of the free act of God.”
—Edward Schillebeeckx, World and Church (London: Sheed & Ward, 1971), pp. 255-56.

The God of history

“Jesus, who was Israel’s son, reveals God’s power over history, but he does not do this in one or another form of rule or supremacy, such as kingship, priesthood or even abstract human ideals. He does it rather in the form of impotence—the impotence of one who was crucified. God identified himself with someone who was crucified, someone who died as one who had been rejected by society and by the religious leaders of that society. That history is liberating.... God’s last word about human history is not a word of condemnation or anger—it is a word of mercy and liberation.”

—Edward Schillebeeckx, God Is New Each Moment (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), p. 51.

The incarnation

“[T]he incarnation of God the Son is a reality which grows. It is not complete in a matter of a moment; for example, at Jesus’ conception in Mary’s womb or at his birth. The incarnation is not merely a Christmas event. To be man is a process of becoming man; Jesus’ manhood grew throughout his earthly life, finding its completion in the supreme moment of the incarnation, his death, resurrection and exaltation. Only then is the incarnation fulfilled to the very end.”

—Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (London: Sheed & Ward, 1963, pp. 18-19.

Born of a virgin?

As Schleiermacher had already perceived, the idea of the virgin birth “must be considered from a twofold point of view: first, with reference to the available New Testament testimonies on the subject; next, with reference to its dogmatic value” (The Christian Faith, p. 403). And Schleiermacher also noted that “anyone who cannot accept [the New Testament birth narratives] as literally and historically true is still quite free to hold to the doctrine” (p. 406).

So any consideration of the virgin birth must face two main questions: is the virgin birth historical, and does it have any theological meaning? Here’s how a list of modern theologians and scholars have answered those two questions:

		Historical?		Theological meaning?
F. Schleiermacher		No		No
E. Brunner		No		(emphatic) No
K. Barth		No		(emphatic) Yes
H. Küng		No		Yes
E. Schillebeeckx		No		(tentative) Yes
W. Pannenberg		No		No
J. Macquarrie		No		Yes
R. W. Jenson		(tentative) Yes		Yes
Raymond Brown		Yes		Yes
Gerd Lüdemann		No		No
N. T. Wright		Yes		Yes

So, to sum it up, we have two-and-a-half votes in favour of the historicity of the virgin birth, and six-and-a-half votes in favour of the doctrine’s theological value. In spite of this diversity of opinion, most modern scholars share one thing in common: virtually no one anymore thinks that the miraculous birth narratives in Matthew and Luke should be interpreted as biological explanations of the origins of Jesus. To do so would be to impose foreign scientific categories on to the ancient texts, and it would only obscure the theological intention of the ancient writers.

Edward Schillebeeckx: the resurrection reality

“The resurrection in its eschatological ‘eventuality’ is after all nowhere recounted in the New Testament; nor of course could it be, because it no longer forms part of our mundane, human history; it is, qua reality, meta-empirical and meta-historical: ‘eschatological.’”

—Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (London: Collins, 1979), pp. 380-81.