World and Sacrament Foundations of the Political Theology of the Church Stephan Van Erp1

World and Sacrament Foundations of the Political Theology of the Church Stephan van Erp1

Abstract. — Fundamental theology has undergone a radical change in recent decades, which is best described by a shift from the epistemological to the political. In this article, the author describes the shared history of politics and theology, starting with the apologetics of the early church as it was connected to the politics of martyr- dom. This close connection of apologetics and political action can still be found in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. In modern theology however, apologetics became of a more epistemological nature, which constituted knowledge as the prime focus of fundamental theology. As a consequence, modern theologians have ignored an important aspect of apologetics: authority (of Scripture, tradition, and the magisterium). This has given way to fundamental theology losing some of its tasks to philosophy and religious studies, which, the author argues, suffer from similar fallacies as an epistemologically reductionist fundamental theology. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church developed in her documents since Rerum novarum (1991) an apologetics that was distinctively political, rather than epistemological. Therefore, the author of this article argues that contemporary fundamental theology should be revised, and include political theory and the Church’s social teaching as foundations for understanding faith and revelation. He proposes to use insights from sacramental theology to pursue a politically orientated fundamental theology, in which the Church is not taken as a political instrument for social change – as is the case in many political and liberation theologies – but as a sign and instrument of God’s political ordering of the world towards his Kingdom.

When Pope Francis visited the island of Lampedusa on July 8th 2013, he started his homily by voicing two questions: “Adam, where are you?” and “Cain, where is your brother?”2 These are the two questions that God asks at the dawn of human history in the Book of Genesis, one

1. This article is based on my inaugural lecture, held on October 8th 2015, at the occasion of my appointment as Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. 2. Pope Francis, Celebration of Holy Mass at the Arena Sports Camp (Lampedusa, 8 July 2013), (last accessed 24 April 2016).

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about being lost and hiding in God’s own world – not being present to God and therefore not being accountable – and one about neglect and the lack of responsibility. In his homily for the people of Lampedusa, the pope added a third and similar question to these two: “Has anyone wept? Today, has anyone wept in our world?” and then he asked for forgiveness for what he described as “the globalization of indifference,” our culture of comfort in which we have become insensitive to the suffering of others. These questions, ancient and new, about sin and forgiveness have proven to be powerful instruments of the Church in the world of today. Some might think this is due to the personality and the charism of Pope Francis. This claim is not unfounded considering the impact he has had on believers and non-believers alike. No doubt his public performance strengthens the ruling conviction that individual authenticity makes belief believable, and that the test area of credibility should be the public sphere.3 In this article, I will demonstrate that the appeal of the pope’s public lament is much more than a matter of a convincing style, or a form of pastoral or merciful prudence. Credibility also presupposes a theology that can and should be critically explored if it does not want to be left to the dubious mercy of personal preference or public approval. I will claim that the pope’s questions and prayers in Lampedusa addressed to the world resonate with a theology that represents an ongoing development in the Church during the past century, but which has not gained much attention in fundamental theology. That development is best described as a refocus- ing on the political as a sign and instrument of becoming Church in the world. This, as I will explain, does not entail an ecclesiology with a double focus on Church and world, one that calls for a Church that communi- cates its messages to the public, or speaks out for the transformation of social and political structures. Instead, I will show that the political theology of the Church is a sacramental theology with the Eucharist at its heart, the celebration of God’s forgiveness, which has transformed the world and of which the Church is becoming sign and instrument. Pope Francis’ questions in Lampedusa are not only expressions of a call to act, but also of the call to allow oneself being confronted with human sinfulness: Is the Body of Christ, that has become present on “the altar of the world,”4 broken again in the refugees, the poor and the

3. Cf. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 473-504. 4. Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 8: (last accessed 24 April 2016).

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drowned? And who has the authority to heal it, and represent God’s power on earth? Besides moral questions, these are also questions for the field of fundamental theology. The credibility of the Christian faith is certainly challenged by these particular political situations, which lead to questions on the where and when of the loci theologici. In what follows, I will argue that to be believable at this moment of history, in the face of those who are persecuted and on the move, the Church needs to reformulate the foundations and implications of the political power of its Eucharistic heart, and the theology behind the performance of Pope Francis is an example of how this can be done. In the question why we did not weep, and in the tears that did follow, lies the start of this theological project.

I. Apologetics: From the Political to the Natural

In the history of Christianity, the credible and the political have always gone hand in hand. Christian apologetics has been political from the very beginning in a variety of ways. In his Letters, Paul argues against an all too obedient dependence on the Mosaic Law in favour of human interdependency and vulnerability. In Pauline theology, these form the cornerstones of a rather more universal politics that, as the philosopher Alain Badiou has recently shown, refuses to submit to the order of the world, but argues for a new one instead.5 Similarly, the writer of Luke and Acts presented the Church as a messianic society of mutual charity, but instead of envisioning it as a universal ideal, it was developing as a community that sought good relationships with secular powers. The author of the gospel of John makes his politico-apologetic intention explicit when he writes that he “recorded [the signs that Jesus worked] so that [one] may believe that Jesus is the Christ” (John 20:31). Like Paul, the writer of John also claims that Christ’s redemptive power is universal, as it extends “not only to the Jewish nation but gathers together in unity the scattered children of God” (John 11:52) including the sheep not of Israel’s fold (John 10:16). This political universalism of the New Testament has informed the history of apologetics. Justin Martyr, one of the Apologists of the second century, was concerned with advocating civil toleration for Christians and urged the authorities to investigate more closely whether the Christian

5. Cf. his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Redwood City, CA: Stan- ford University Press, 2003).

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faith was indeed partisan such that it would lead to civil disobedience, and argued that this not necessarily need to be the case.6 Augustine, by contrast, praised the disobedience of the Christian martyrs, “whose blood, as he writes, watered the seeds of hope implanted in the world by Christ rising from the dead.”7 Augustine’s own political theology emerged from his polemic with pagan religion, and contends that the Kingdom of God is a present reality, an actual polity, even though the visible Church, according to him, is a corpus permixtum, a community of saints and sin- ners.8 Being a believer in Christ not only had the political consequence of persecution, it was also the adherence to the event of the resurrection that was itself regarded as inherently political, and as such also became a measure of the world that is, embodied by its faithful followers, and especially the martyrs. Thomas Aquinas reflects in his Summa contra gentiles, after dealing with natural reason in the first three books, on the Trinity, the Incarna- tion, the Sacraments and the Resurrection in book four, in which he appeals to the authority of revelation that he sees at work in the poverty and persecution of believers in the past. Thomas assumes that although certain aspects of the content of faith are not demonstrable through natural reason but are made known through divine revelation, these have also become manifest in the history of the Church and especially in the lives of the faithful. He writes: The wonderful conversion of the world to the Christian faith is the clearest witness of the signs given in the past; so that they should be further repeated, since they appear most clearly in their effect. For it would be truly more wonderful than all signs if the world had been led by simple and humble men to believe such lofty truths, to accomplish such difficult actions, and to have such high hopes.9 According to Thomas, from whom one would have expected a meta- physical and logical rigor of a different kind, with which he would draw a sharper distinction between the natural and revelation, certain moments in the political history of the Church function as a sign, and as a foundation of the credibility of faith.10

6. Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1999), 26-27. 7. This is a metaphor Augustine borrowed from Tertullian. Augustine, City of God 22,7 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), 1033, n23. 8. Augustine, City of God 18,49. 9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles IV, transl. by Charles O’Neil, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith (New York: Hanover House, 1955), 72-73. 10. Cf. Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni- versity Press, 2013), 100-144.

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With the emergence of the field of fundamental theology from the seventeenth century onwards, the history of this close connection of apologetics and politics seemed to be put on hold. A concentration on the praeambula fidei, the preconditions of the judgment of credibility, was accompanied by a rationalist approach, which was directed against revelation as a supernatural foundation of faith. Epistemology was seen as first philosophy, and expected to provide the philosophical certitudes for the content of theology. This way, the key motivation of apologetics seem to have definitively shifted from politics to knowledge. From its establish- ment as a separate discipline within the theological curriculum in the nineteenth century, fundamental theology had the task to secure the rational and scientific character of theology as a whole, with philosophy as its main instrument, the common language of science, regarded as most autonomous, and therefore increasingly more authoritative. For a long time, this modern and epistemological type of Catholic fundamental theology was divided into the three so-called demonstrations: a) demonstratio religiosa: of the existence of God and the rationality of religion; b) demonstratio Christiana: of Christ being the unique revelation of God; and c) demonstratio Catholica: of the Catholic Church as the true form of the Christian religion.11 Despite the prevailing rejec- tion of neothomism in the twentieth century, this division into three separate demonstrations or treatises is still being employed, especially in German fundamental theology, although one could acknowledge that religious studies and philosophy of religion have taken over some of the tasks of the demonstratio religiosa, and the other two demonstrations are quite often, and perhaps rightly so, integrated in dogmatic theology, in particular Christology and fundamental ecclesiology. Nowadays, in an attempt to do justice to secularisation and pluralism, fundamental theologians might want to consider reorganising the field, thereby emphasising its communicative and dialogical nature. Con- sequently, fundamental theology should nowadays perhaps be divided into three conversations with distinct dialogue partners, which in practice appear not always as distinct once the conversation has started. These conversations would then be: a) Conversation with believers in the Church: on the dialectic between revelation and faith, and on the authority of Scripture, tradition and the magisterium; b) Conversation with philosophers

11. Cf. Heinrich Fries, Fundamentaltheologie (Graz, Vienna, and Cologne: Verlag Styria, 1985); Rino Fisichella, ed., Dizionario di Teologia Fondamentale (Rome: Cit- tadella Editrice, 1990); Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Grundkurs Fundamentaltheologie: Eine Einführung in die Grundfragen des christlichen Glaubens (Munich: Don Bosco Verlag, 1999).

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and scientists: on language, truth and rationality, and on the criteria and methods of theology; and c) Conversation with other- or non-believers: on the conditions and principles of ecumenical dialogue, interreligious dialogue, and the debates with atheists.12 These proposed conversations should then not to be isolated from one another, and the results of one particular conversation will undoubtedly have ramifications for another. In our time, in which religious indifference, religious transformation and religious fundamentalism dominate the agendas of both theology and religious studies, one would expect that the field of fundamental theology, being the theological sub discipline in which foundations and positions of faith are accounted for, is thriving. The opposite however seems to be the case. Even though fundamental theology belongs to the first cycle of the Catholic curriculum, the term is conspicuously absent from recent literature, with the work of Gerald O’Collins as a notable exception.13 A possible explanation is that the field has education as its main goal, since its task to give a rational account of faith fits the purpose of teaching rather well. As a teaching discipline, it has always remained Catholic and European, and did not reverberate with a more practically and contextu- ally oriented Anglo-American audience. Another explanation might lie in the fact that philosophy has made its theological turn, and performs part of the tasks of fundamental theology refreshingly well, even though not many philosophers would be keen to admit that they seek to give an account of faith for God’s sake. Furthermore, fundamental theologians might not have recovered from the Barthian and postmodern critiques of foundationalism, which questioned the field’s key assumptions in the 1980s and 1990s.14 There is no doubt some truth in all of these

12. This ordering of the field is not unlike David Tracy’s proposal for an organization of all theological disciplines, based on the three audiences of theology: Church, academia, and society, although his categorization is based on the differences in method instead of differences between conversation partners and their relationship with the Christian faith: David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (London: SCM Press, 1981), 1-46. 13. Gerald O’Collins, Fundamental Theology (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981); Gerald O’Collins, Retrieving Fundamental Theology: Three Styles of Contemporary Theol- ogy (Sydney: Geoffrey Chapman, 1993); Gerald O’Collins, Rethinking Fundamental Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Recently, the field has been retrieved in three publications: Ivana Noble, Tracking God: An Ecumenical Fundamental Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010); Neil Ormerod and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer, Foundational Theology: A New Approach to Catholic Fundamental Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015); Matthew L. Becker, Fundamental Theology: A Protestant Perspective (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015). 14. Cf. John Thiel, Nonfoundationalism (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000); Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).

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explanations, but I expect it is rather fundamental theology’s ‘naturalism’ – its ultimate foundation in natural theology – or transcendental-Kantian meta-formalism (not its formalism – all academic disciplines need to be formal to a certain extent) that has brought it to the margins of the current theological enterprise. Furthermore, its isolation from dogmatic, moral and practical theology, its stubborn and self-defining reiterating of the sharp distinctions between philosophy and theology, between self- understanding and the communication with others, and between reason and revelation – distinctions that are formally not necessarily incorrect or unhelpful, although the circumstances in which they have emerged from have changed. Currently, colleagues of several faculties of theology and religious studies have started research programmes with the word ‘lived’ – as in ‘lived theology’, sometimes even in ‘lived practices’ – prominently in the title, which is perhaps a signal that scholars who have employed philosophical and doctrinal methods, have failed to communicate the (practical) relevance of their approach. But there might also be a more fundamental issue at stake here. In a recent report on the future of religious studies and theology of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the committee members recommended to promote the study of new forms of spirituality, new religious institutions, the material aspects of religion, and the socio-cultural implications of religion.15 To some, it is a worrying fact that the word ‘theology’ does not feature in this list of recommendations. The study of contemporary religion however, of which mainly the material and socio-cultural aspects of its new forms will be explored in the future, as the writers of this report seem to suggest, could suffer even more from a so-called ‘practical’ approach. ‘Lived religion’, ‘material religion’ and ‘religion as a socio-cultural phe- nomenon’, these – relatively and self-declared – new perspectives, although justifiably focused on the concrete and contextual instead of the formal, are ultimately the result of a concept of the natural, which is distinct and devoid of revelation or grace, and of a relationship with Scripture and tradition, and thus, ironically, they form the heritage of modern fundamental theology, a new version of a depoliticised and epistemological apologetic, which is far less the expression of a ‘lived’ or ‘practical’ faith then intended.

15. KNAW, Klaar om te wenden: De academische bestudering van religie in Neder- land: Een verkenning (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschap- pen, 2015): (last accessed 13 May 2016).

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II. Sign: Church in the World

The study of the foundations of faith, I wish to argue, should, instead of choosing a material or empirical approach, rather retrieve its political origins, and choose its starting point in the living faith of the Church, in its critical questioning of the world’s sinfulness, and in its faith in the resurrection, even or precisely when the world manifests the contradic- tions of its redeeming power. Now, that statement would fall into the same foundational fallacy as its modern predecessors, if it were not for the Church herself having made a radical turn to the world, and its social and political aspects. The social practice of the Church gives sufficient reason for a new apologetic, which chooses the political rather than the epistemological as its starting point. The Church’s turn to the world happened shortly after the intellectual framework of neoscholastic fundamental theology became the official philosophy of the Church at the First Vatican Council. Twenty years later, with the publication of the encyclical Rerum novarum in 1891, the Church made a decisive move towards the design of a theology of social engagement.16 It was the first church document of this order that offered a description and a critique of modern life in the cities and the abominable circumstances in the factories. In his encyclical, Pope Leo XIII exposed the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century workers were exploited and human lives treated as capital. He called for bet- ter working conditions, a minimum wage and one day off work every week. Moreover, he showed himself to be a supporter of trade unions, and argued for a specific role and responsibility in society for Catholic organisations. The significant consequence of this social approach was that the Church strengthened her ties with the working classes and the poor. Rerum novarum quite explicitly mentions a preference for the poor: God Himself seems to incline rather to those who suffer misfortune; for Jesus Christ calls the poor “blessed;” He lovingly invites those in labour and grief to come to Him for solace; and He displays the most tender charity toward the lowly and the oppressed. In doing so, the church did not only express a preference for a certain group, she also indicated that the concrete circumstances of the workers and the poor belonged to the responsibility of the Church and that her

16. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum novarum: On Capital and Labor, 1891, (last accessed 13 May 2016).

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message of salvation concerned the lives of all, a notion that she would make progressively more explicit during the twentieth century. Like the Church in many of the encyclicals that would follow after Rerum novarum, and which together would form the body of Catholic Social Teaching, theology also made a turn from the epistemological to the social. The French Jesuit Henri De Lubac, among others, played a significant part in redefining fundamental theology by criticising the view of the Real Presence in the Eucharist as being a miracle, and the misrepresentation of tradition and the magisterium as being authoritarian of structure. De Lubac believed that these views of the Catholic faith after the First Vatican Council, just as the type of Catholicism that had accommodated itself to fascism in the Second World War, were symp- tomatic of an extrinsicist ontology, which posited grace as something that came from the outside with no intrinsic connection to the world and human nature, emerging from a rigid distinction of the natural and the supernatural. This particular doctrine, De Lubac claimed, had eroded the tradition of the early Church, which conceived itself as simultane- ously sacramental and social.17 By retrieving this earlier, patristic tradition of thought, De Lubac developed what Hans Boersma has called the “sacramental ontology,” underlying the ecclesiology of the Second Vati- can Council, a vision of the Church shaped by the Eucharist as a social reality.18 After De Lubac, Edward Schillebeeckx pursued this idea of the Church as a social reality, and he translated it into a theological hermeneutics in which the Church became a salvific sign of the world.19 In one of his commentaries on Lumen gentium – the council’s constitution on the Church – Edward Schillebeeckx explains that the Church’s new relationship with the ‘world’ is based on its retrieval of the concept of grace in nature, which has turned ‘world’ into a theological concept that may refer to a secular reality with its own autonomous structure and laws, but only to the extent that God’s Spirit in Christ reveals itself in it, and as such is an “objective expression of the life of grace.”20 Schil- lebeeckx argues that because the incarnation is the revelation of God’s

17. Especially in Henri De Lubac, Catholicisme: Les aspects sociaux du dogme (Paris: Cerf, 1938). 18. Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mys- tery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 19. As Hans Boersma has also articulated, there are more similarities between De Lubac and Schillebeeckx than is usually suggested. Cf. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 206-258. 20. Edward Schillebeeckx, “Church and World,” in Edward Schillebeeckx, World and Church, Collected Works IV (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 73-88.

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love which has redeemed all of human history, one has to acknowledge that salvation is a reality before people are confronted with the Church, even though the Church is a visible sign and fulfilment of this reality. That is why, according to Schillebeeckx, the Church’s task is not primar- ily to preach the Gospel to the world. Instead, her preaching should be regarded as a result of the sacramental embodiment of Christ’s presence in the world: orthopraxis comes before orthodoxy. The Church can be called ‘sacramentum mundi’, because she discerns the work of Christ as a sacrament in the world, which she seeks to embody.21 In the end, the theological life (in Dutch: het theologale leven) of all of humanity is the foundation of the sacramental unity of Church and world. It is only because of this foundation that Schillebeeckx can write that at the heart of Gaudium et spes there is the idea of humanity “with [its] transcendental, absolute destiny, though living in an earthly history with its own plans for the future.”22 Schillebeeckx’s reading of the council brings him to the conclusion that the autonomy of the world and its people is not in contradiction with the promise of the Kingdom of God, but instead a place in which the faithful can freely become a sign of the Living One. So, in the Church and the theology of the twentieth century, the modern world became a common work place for Christ and the people of God. This had important consequences for fundamental theology, which now had to answer why and how this particular and concrete history – including its darker moments – could become a time of redemption. In a recent document of the International Theological Commission, Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria, one can find a start of the answer to these questions.23 The document mentions “dialogue with the world” explicitly as one of the six sources of theology. The other loci are the study of Scripture, fidelity to the Apos- tolic Tradition, attention to the sensus fidelium, responsible adherence to the ecclesiastical magisterium, and the collaboration with other theologians. The writers of the document stress the importance of knowing “not just the loci but also their relative weight and the relationship between them.”24

21. Edward Schillebeeckx, “The Sorrow of the Experience of God’s Conceal- ment,” in Schillebeeckx, World and Church, 59-72, esp. pp. 69-72. 22. Edward Schillebeeckx, “The Sorrow of the Experience of God’s Conceal- ment,” 70. 23. International Theological Commission, Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria, 2011, (last accessed 13 May 2016). 24. International Theological Commission, Theology Today, 20.

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Ever since Philip Melanchthon and Melchior Cano proposed their lists of theological loci in the sixteenth century, theologians have had disputes about which theological sources should be on such a list and which not. Contrary to Melanchthon, who interpreted Luther’s theology by proposing an organization and list of principal theological themes, Cano constructed his list systematically based on the theological authority of the sources, and decided on seven proper and three additional ones.25 After Cano, the list of theological loci became shorter rather than longer, because the dispute shifted from theological to divine authority, and the ongoing polemics on the authority of Scripture and the magisterium inhibited that other sources were considered to be authoritative whatsoever. In Catholic fundamental theology however, a notable exception was made for human reason, which was ascribed a separate persua- siveness, thus giving way to the nineteenth-century apologetics of evi- dences, proofs, and probabilities, either to warrant a natural theology founded on its own logical and epistemological principles, or to protect these principles against a natural theology that claimed to know the things that belong to God, or to safeguard divine revelation against the confusion that would be the inevitable result of human reason. In view of the history of Christian apologetics, one could argue that the debate on reason, revelation and authority has received a new impulse with the document Theology Today, because it mentions “signs in today’s world” as one of the six loci. With reference to Gaudium et spes 11, the authors of Theology Today acknowledge the theological value of “the events, the needs and the longings of today’s world that may truly be signs of the Spirit’s activity.”26 In its relatively short history, fundamental theology has had the exploration of divine signs in the world as its specific task, which resulted at certain moments in time in the study of miracles as proofs of the Christian faith. The French philosopher Mau- rice Blondel famously contended against the extrinsicism of the supernatural argument from miracles, and claimed that they should be considered as signs of God’s extraordinary goodness in extending his offer of friendship to people.27 Hence, the credibility of faith does not need the support of visible signs as ultimately unintelligible, and therefore divine facts, but as the sacramental events of God’s grace in the world. To see with the eyes of faith is not an anomalous or enigmatic faculty

25. Melchior Cano, De Locis Theologicis (orig. Salamanca, 1567). 26. International Theological Commission, Theology Today, 51. 27. Dulles, A History of Apologetics, 206; See also Ormond Rush, The Eyes of the Faith: The Sense of the Faithful and the Church’s Reception of Revelation (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009).

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of the human mind, but a liturgical event. To believe is to make signs: is to receive God’s blessing, is to celebrate. In Theology Today, the world is defined as “the place in which the Church, following in the footsteps of Christ, announces the Gospel, bears witness to the justice and mercy of God, and participates in the drama of human life.”28 One can easily see that some of the other loci – Scripture and the Apostolic Tradition – get mentioned in this definition, to reaffirm their interconnectedness. Noticeable however is the prominent place of the Church in this definition of the world. The Church is in the world, where it witnesses – prays, reflects, acts - and participates in human history, and thus discovers and reconfirms the world as locus theologicus. This might not have changed the task of fundamental theology compared to its early stages as a response to the Enlightenment, its working ground and perspective certainly have. Fun- damental theology used to be an epistemology of the natural, in which the natural is either defined or limited by the conditions of possibility of human reason. Because the world, according to Kant, exists as an end in itself, it should be distinguished from divine revelation to be intelligible. Following the description of ‘world’ in Theology Today however, fundamental theology has become the epistemology of the secular, in which the secular is defined by the presence – or experienced absence – of a self- giving God. This is not the social or phenomenological ‘secular’ as the opposite of what some people call ‘the religious’, but the secular in which the Church dwells, its people sin, and God forgives. Consequently, the intelligibility of this world – God’s world – should not be limited to a formal concept of the natural. Nor should knowledge of God’s revelation in the world depend on an epiphany or construction of meaning to the transcendental subject. This does not need to be the end of ‘natural theology’. Henning Tegtmeyer has argued that natural theology should and could include the incarnation as an act of God’s self-giving love.29 Indeed, contrary to transcendental and phenomenological concepts of the world, a theological concept is marked by the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, and should be rationally accounted for accordingly. In his version of natural theology, Tegtmeyer offers a description of the world not characterized by a transcendental limit, safeguarding the otherness of revelation, but by the incarnation, which is itself an apophatic sign of

28. International Theological Commission, Theology Today, 54. 29. Henning Tegtmeyer, Gott, Geist, Vernunft: Prinzipien und Probleme der Natürlichen Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).

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otherness, of contradiction and hiddenness, a Mystical Body. This Mys- tical Body is the reality of the world, informs its metaphysics, and should therefore form the foundation of fundamental theology.

III. Instrument: Political Theology

While the Church uncovered the world as a locus theologicus during the twentieth century, the study of the political became a prominent new field in modern theology. Not everyone however agrees on what has motivated that synchronism. There are sufficient reasons to presume that a growing political awareness is a response to the separation of Church and state, or to the marginalization of Christianity in a secular age. Yet, political theology seems to have become the new apologetics, as it once was in the early Church.30 As such, it has not always been able to avoid the dangers of modern apologetics, in which faith becomes prone to religious fundamentalism or secularism. In any way, although sometimes accompanied with the resentment of a reactionary mentality – which is present in both conservative and liberal fractions – the Church has unde- niably made a shift towards the political in the past century. To illustrate this, I could mention the following, quite diverse set of examples: encyclicals like the already mentioned Rerum novarum – On Capital and Labor, Quadragesimo anno – On the Social Order, Pacem in terris – On Peace and Justice, Populorum progressio – On the Development of Peoples, or Laudato si’ – On Care for our Common Home. Another example of the Church’s political turn is the social work of rapidly growing lay move- ments, such as Focolare, Comunione e Liberazione, or Sant’Egidio. And perhaps the clearest example of the Church’s political turn is the rise of liberation theology, black theology, public theology or feminist theology; all are signs and manifestations of practices and reflections of a faith that shows an increasing political awareness, either or not intentionally.31 Apart from the emergence of new theological themes and approaches, this political turn has had an impact on the nature and content of Catho- lic theology as a whole, not least because the Second Vatican Council gave the growing political awareness an ecclesial, intellectual and dialogical framework. Since then, the theological landscape has changed drastically.

30. Cf. Allen Brent, A Political History of Early Christianity (London: T&T Clark, 2009). 31. Cf. Elizabeth Phillips and Craig Hovey, The Cambridge Companion to Chris- tian Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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Biblical exegesis has gained a more prominent place in the theological curriculum. The fields of moral and pastoral theology have expanded and grown in importance. Political perspectives in both Biblical and historical research have had substantial, corrective consequences for the development of doctrine. Ecumenical and interreligious dialogue has changed the often aggressive and polemical attitude of the old apologetics into an openness for, as for example expressed in Dominus Iesus, the universal “economy of the Word that is valid also outside the Church.”32 Not all theologians might have heard faith’s political calling in the modern world, the field of theology as a whole has certainly uttered a response to it. Systematic theologians have profited from these developments, but at the same time they increasingly struggled with the hermeneutical problem of the universality of dogma and the particularity of the present: How can the truth be found in new forms that bear the mark of the cultural and political situation in which they emerge? This question has been treated differently in recent decades. What has been addressed as a hermeneutical problem of understanding in the 1960s and 1970s, and of difference – either historical, cultural or religious – in the 1980s and 1990s, has turned out to be a problem of revelation. This shift from the hermeneutical via the postmodern towards the theological is best illustrated by the development of Schillebeeckx’s theological hermeneutics, who notably expressed having made a conscious, radical shift from metaphysics to history for political reasons, in his words: “to do justice to the human world and society.”33 That shift was also a “clear break,” he claimed, with the Thomist worldview of the participation of the totality of meaning in every particular experience, embedded as it was in a monocultural society. Therefore, he thought, a pluralist society should be supported by a theology of anticipation, one that accommodates Jürgen Habermas’ ideal democratic society with its non-coercive communication, allowing critical reasoning to do its work based on historical and particular human experiences rather than on a single, perennial metaphysic. In his valedictory lecture in 1982 however, Schillebeeckx asked the question of how our concrete situation can be the revelation of the universal message of the Gospel, quite differently: “Only in concrete

32. Pope John Paul II, Dominus Iesus: On the Unity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, 2000, 9, < http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congrega- tions/cfaith/ documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html> (last accessed 13 May 2016). 33. Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, Collected Works VI (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 580 [618].

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particularity can the gospel be the revelation of the universality of salvation coming from God.”34 The hermeneutical question had become a universal answer about revelation, even though it stressed the particular. This had fundamental theological consequences. He writes: theological reason can therefore not be the so-called unbiased theoretical reason of the Enlightenment, or Kantian purely practical reason, or Hegel’s personified reason. All it entails is theoretical reason which, prompted by the memories of the stories of human suffering, becomes practical in the sense of liberating.35 What started as a problem of the understanding of truth in history, turned into the question how revelation could be seen as a response to and a liberation from suffering in the here and now. A question which called for a political theology. As we know, political theology became a central theme and approach in the theology of the 1970s. Schillebeeckx borrowed his notion of anam- nesis from the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, who developed his so called ‘new political theology’ to counter Carl Schmitt’s from the 1920s.36 Schmitt famously identified modern concepts of the state as secularised theological concepts. To protect the modern state from legit- imising itself with an immanent concept of God, he proposed a vision of a sovereign state, which would embody both the will of the people and the will of God, as the performance of a sovereignty that would be prior to the law and prior to democracy. Conversely, and in response to Schmitt, Metz wished to maintain an equilibrium between Church and the state, in which the Church would act as an institution of social and political criticism, amidst a secular and autonomous world that, according to Metz, was the decisive point of Christ’s dominion in history. Building on this image of the Church as a body for social criticism, Gustavo Gutié- rrez suggested that the Church, seeing the poor as the sign of the times, could initiate and pursue processes of transformation of social structures.

34. Edward Schillebeeckx, Theologisch geloofsverstaan anno 1983 (Baarn: H. Nelis- sen, 1983), 9. (My translation is different from the new one in Edward Schillebeeckx, “Theological Interpretation of Faith in 1983,” in Edward Schillebeeckx, Collected Works XI [London: Bloomsbury, 2014], 51-68, 57.) 35. Schillebeeckx, Theologisch geloofsverstaan anno 1983, 20. 36. Johann Baptist Metz, “Kirche und Welt im Lichte einder politischen Theolo- gie,” in id., Zur Theologie der Welt (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1968), 99-131; Johann Baptist Metz, Glaube in Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Studien zu einer praktischen Fundamentaltheologie (Mainz: Mathias Grünewald Verlag, 1977) (English translation: Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology [New York: Cross- road, 2007].) For a recent interpretation of Metz’s political theology, see: Péter Losonczi, “The New Political Theology as Political Theory,” in id. and Aakash Singh, From Political Theory to Political Theology (London: Continuum, 2010), 162-174.

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These particular positions in political theology, became heavily contested, also by the Church. The anticipated consequence of the thought of Metz and Gutiérrez, in which the Church would become merely a political organisation among others, with a specific political programme over against others, strengthens the common objection against their types of political theology, that this would make the Church partisan or sectarian. Schmitt’s position triggers a similar criticism, as William Cavanaugh has pointed out, because it would turn the nation state into a ‘catholic’, all embracing body, with equal sectarian consequences for the Church.37

IV. The Politics of Sacrament

Exit political theology, at least that is what it looked like for a short while. In the past decade however, there seems to be a resurgence of political theologies, which not only critically stir the margins of theology, but rather have started to dominate the field, at least of systematic theology: William Cavanaugh’s politics of the Eucharist,38 Charles Mathewes’ theology of public life,39 Elisabeth Johnson’s theology of creation,40 Vincent Lloyd’s theology of race,41 and Walter Kasper’s theology of mercy,42 to name but a few current, significant examples. In a recent collection of lectures, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza notes that, despite the reduction of the Church to the private sphere within a market economy, the public exercise and political influence of the Church could take on a new role in the public sphere.43 In a Metzian fashion he asks how new political philosophies – he mentions Jürgen Habermas, George Lukacs and Niklas Luhmann – have taken the Holocaust as an appearance of modernity, and as such as a new starting point for theology. This has called for an

37. William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: Church, State, and the Political (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 123-140. 38. William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). 39. Charles T. Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2008). 40. Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 41. Vincent W. Lloyd, Black Natural Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 42. Walter Kasper, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2014). 43. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Prospects for Political Theology in the Face of Contemporary Challenges,” in Political Theology: Contemporary Challenges and Future Directions, ed. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Klaus Tanner and Michael Welker (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 37-60.

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anthropology that is aware of sin, Fiorenza argues. Not to use it, as Schmitt has done, as an argument for an authoritarian government, but as an impetus for social and political practice. The theological perspective, according to Fiorenza, provides a framework that undercuts the self-interest of nations and goes critically beyond the friend/enemy dichotomy that is used by the state to justify the neglect of important human rights. The Pauline vision of a universal politics, the Augustinian view of the Church as an actual polity, the Thomist understanding of Aristote- lian political virtues, all these positions have returned to the heart of the current theo-political debate. One would have thought the tension between Church and state got settled in modernity. Instead, in this world on the move, we experience the limits of that precious balance. Rowan Williams, once heavily under fire for making space for religious laws within secular law, recently wrote: in many settings, the rule of law is a sorry fiction, with an adminis- trative elite exploiting public process to advance private interest; and even in less corrupt environments, the law loses credibility when the social order manifestly fails to protect the poorest.44 Following up on the critique, political theology today is challenged by new questions: Should the Church criticise this social order, as any other political party or pressure group does, should it voice a moral authority that stands above all parties, or should it bring its theology of sin and forgiveness into practice, and become a sign of the law that has been ruling the world in Christ’s resurrected Body? In order to explore these questions further, I propose to look at the critical power of the Church’s sacramental practice. In the document Theology Today, the Church was imagined as witness of God’s world and the drama of human history in it. This calls on believers to be a sign of what makes them recognise that drama and to reflect on how it affects them, a hearing of the command of grace that calls to become a sign.45 The failure of modern fundamental theology lay in the fact that it sought to demonstrate that certain signs in our knowledge of the natural world, could be regarded as expressions of a sacramental principle, a divine presence in all things. In a sacramental practice however, the world does not get reaffirmed as a place of divine presence, or divine presence

44. Rowan Williams, “Embracing Our Limits: The Lessons from Laudato Si’,” Commonweal Magazine, 23 September 2015. 45. Cf. Stephan van Erp, “Seeing Christ on the Battlefield: Sign-Making, Sacra- ment and Conversion,” in Conversion and Church: The Challenge of Renewal, ed. Stephan van Erp and Karim Schelkens (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 65-85.

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evoked by an act of remembrance. The sacrament makes manifest that it is not merely the natural that forms the foundation of theology, but the salvific in the secular, God’s becoming in the world, of which we can become sign and instrument. Rowan Williams has argued that in the Eucharist, the sacramental community makes manifest that the world is a place of loss and need, not necessarily the place where we want to be, let alone have chosen to be.46 He writes that the sacramental community is not a community of choices and rights, and that it does not form a court where one can claim what is mine. To him, it is rather a community of fundamental interdependency, which all share, and in which human desire is a desire for the same good in all, a freedom that seeks to create a space in which others have the freedom to return that space.47 The political consequence of that practice is that the sacrament could be at the heart of a citizenship that does not enslave others. It is a sociality of a different order than that of negotiation and manipulation. The sacrament could be regarded as the politics of sign making, in which not the gift – whether as the act of supply and demand or as the act of pure disinterested generosity – but the ongoing given becomes the economy: a common humanity, the vulnerability and the poverty of our reality.48 This common humanity is not an onto-theological precondi- tion, but a condition of profound uncertainty and neglect, acknowl- edged in the penitential beginning of the Eucharist: “we are not wor- thy.” In the Eucharist, a community of hospitality is given, in which vulnerability and mutual dependency are recognised, in which the hun- gry and the poor, the criminal and unworthy even, can trust that the common resources of a society will work for their good, a sign and instrument of the enabling of others to become givers to the power that gives. It is that particular, universal power that has become the new starting point of fundamental theology. In his recent encyclical, Laudato si’, Pope Francis quotes Patriarch Bartholomew, and writes: “As Christians, we are called ‘to accept the world as a sacrament of communion, as a way of sharing with God and our neighbours on a global scale’, which is reminiscent of 1 Cor 10:17: ‘The fact that there is only one loaf means that, though there are many

46. Rowan Williams, “The Nature of a Sacrament” and “Sacraments of the New Society,” in id., On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 197-208, 209- 221. 47. Rowan Williams, “The Church as Sacrament,” International Journal of the Study of the Christian Church 10 (2010): 6-12. 48. Cf. Stephan van Erp, De onvoltooide eeuw: Voorlopers van een katholieke cultuur (Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers, 2015).

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of us, we form a single body, because we all have a share in this one loaf’.”49 This world that we share, is itself already always a political event, and as such it forms a critique of how we live in our cities, a political theology that is incarnational, and as such shaped by the eminent foundation of theology. When Pope Francis visited the United States of America, he phrased that incarnational political theology in a sermon at Madison Square Garden in New York as follows: beneath the roar of traffic, beneath ‘the rapid pace of change’, so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no ‘right’ to be there, no right to be part of the city. They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the home- less, the forgotten elderly. [But] knowing that Jesus still walks our streets, fills us with hope. A hope which liberates us from the forces pushing us to isolation and lack of concern for the lives of others, for the life of our city. God is living in our cities. The Church is living in our cities, and she wants to be like yeast in the dough.50

Stephan van Erp is professor of Fundamental Theology at the Faculty of Theol- ogy and Religious Studies of KU Leuven. Before he came to Leuven, he was a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford and King’s College London, and taught Fundamental Theology, Dogmatic Theology and Ethics at the universi- ties of Tilburg, Nijmegen, and Groningen (The Netherlands). His research interests concern the fields of Fundamental Theology, in particular the relationship between faith and reason and the role of theology in the academy, and Dogmatic Theology, in particular the doctrines of God, the Incarnation and Revelation. His specific expertise concerns 20th- and 21st-century systematic theology, especially the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Rowan Williams, and Edward Schillebeeckx. He is the Chair of the scientific board of the Thijmgenootschap, Managing Editor of Tijdschrift voor Theologie, Editor of the Schillebeeckx Series (Bloomsbury Press) and of Studies in Philo- sophical Theology (Peeters Publishers), and of Brill Research Perspectives in Theology (Brill). Among his recent publications are: De onvoltooide eeuw: Voor- lopers van een katholieke cultuur (2015); A Happy Theologian: A Hundred Years of Edward Schillebeeckx (2014, with M. van den Bos). Address: Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Sint-Michielsstraat 4/3101, BE-3000 Leuven (Belgium). Email: [email protected].

49. Pope Francis, Laudato si’, (last accessed 7 May 2016). 50. Pope Francis, Homily at Madison Square Garden, 25 September 2015, (last accessed 14 May 2016).

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