Catholic Identity after Vatican II: the theology of Frans Jozef van Beeck.

In a path-breaking article, written to commemorate the fifteen hundreth anniversary of the Council of Chalcedon, Karl Rahner posed his famous question: "Chalcedon--End or Beginning?" His answer was, of course, both; though in the Roman Catholicism of the early 1950s the second term of the disjunction was scarcely self-evident.

One might pose the same question regarding the Second Vatican Council; clearly, for Roman Catholics and others as well, the defining ecclesial event of our century. And the response would undoubtedly be the same: both an end and a new beginning. It brought an end to one period of Roman Catholic self-understanding and ushered in a new age. After all, the council was convened by John XXIII to undertake an aggiornamento: a bringing up to date of the Catholic vision and mission, of the changeless and changing Catholic enterprise.

Generalizations are, of course, hazardous; but the case can be argued that the pre-Vatican II Catholic self-understanding was unduly restrictive and reactionary; that it often viewed the surrounding culture in suspicious if not hostile fashion; that it lacked a discriminating historical sense; and that its zeal for unity too often satisfied itself with a rather rote uniformity. None of the above assessment gainsays the very real pastoral and missionary achievements of pre-Vatican II Catholicism nor disputes its ability to promote a magnificent witness of both homely and heroic holiness.

However, by the early 1960s both the ecclesial and cultural situations had made a fresh examination of Catholic identity imperative. Vatican II launched a truly courageous discernment of spirits on the part of the church and its millions of faithful. That the aggiornamento itself was, arguably, more than sixty years overdue is not a subject to be pursued here; but its mere mention affords some perspective upon the council's poignantly troubled aftermath, both pastoral and theological.

For the years subsequent to the council have witnessed an inordinately large measure of polarization within Catholicism, to the point where sometimes even civility, much less charity, has seemed a casualty. The antagonists have contended under the not always helpful banners of "traditionalists" and "progressives" or (more polemically) "restorationists" and "innovators." Like the erstwhile political designations "conservative" and "liberal," the labels seem to camouflage as much as they clarify. But they do point to tendencies and concerns that crystallize around themes like tradition and experience, universal church and local church, sacramental structure and justice advocacy, identity and openness, and even, ultimately, the transcendence and immanence of God.

In the heat of debate the unimpeachable legitimacy of many of the concerns that animate both parties can receive scant attention. But, even when acknowledged, what is often lacking is a sufficiently comprehensive framework to integrate the both/and of the Catholic vision and prevent its collapse into a polarized and less productive either/or. Hence I am always alert for theological writings that articulate and promote a catholicity of both scope and attitude, intellectual expansiveness wed to generosity of spirit. In this regard the achievement of Frans Jozef van Beeck is simply outstanding.

Van Beeck, a Dutch Jesuit, has been teaching in the United States since 1968, for many years at Boston College, and currently as the Cody Professor of Theology at Loyola University in Chicago. His inaugural lectures there, published in 1985 under the title, Catholic Identity after Vatican II, serve as an invaluable orientation to his thinking and to the exciting project in systematic theology that is unfolding in his multivolumed, God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology. Volume 1 of God Encountered, "Understanding the Christian Faith," appeared in 1989. Volume 2, titled "The Revelation of the Glory," will, when completed, comprise four parts. "Part 1" was published in 1993 as "Introduction and Fundamental Theology." Part 2, "One God, Creator of All That Is," is at the printers' and should appear later this year. Part 3, "Finitude and Fall," is almost completed and scheduled for publication in the fall of 1995, and will be followed, Deo volente, by part 4, "The Glory of God in the Face of Christ." Finally, the massive undertaking will be completed by a volume 3, "A World in Transformation," devoted to the return of all creation to its fount and origin, through worship, sacrament, church community, and mission.

Set forth thus schematically the project may seem dry and even daunting. On the contrary, I have found reading the available volumes a singularly bracing experience. Van Beeck's writing combines intellectual rigor and aesthetic elegance. It offers abundant challenge, but also ample delight. In many ways he is the Rubens of contemporary theology: working on a vast canvas, his work exhibits superb organization, but often arrests with vivid detail. His goal, as he states it in Catholic Theology after Vatican H, is to sketch "a new spiritual-pastoral-theological synthesis" as a theological response to the task set by Vatican II, which inaugurated "a significant rearrangement of the themes and emphases of the Catholic faith-experience." In what follows I shall highlight some distinctive features of van Beeck's synthesis.

Van Beeck holds that the theologian's primary and defining commitment and loyalty is to the church's tradition. In this "great tradition" Scripture has pride of place; but it embraces also creedal confessions and conciliar teaching, as well as the Spirit-inspired witness of martyrs and mystics, prophets and poets, activists and contemplatives through the ages. For this tradition is a living reality, avid to appropriate more fully its foundational vision and to integrate, with discriminating openness, the values of the new cultures it encounters. Hence ongoing discernment and interpretation are ingredient to the church's life and to theology's craft.

For van Beeck the church's worship is the privileged place where the living heart of the tradition comes to fullest expression. Here is celebrated that "wondrous exchange," wherein God and humanity are inextricably joined in the mystery of Incarnation, thus making possible humanity's intimate and awesome sharing in the very life of God. The lovely Latin antiphon from Evening Prayer for the Feast of Mary the Mother of God--"O admirabile commercium!"--serves as epigraph for each of the volumes of God Encountered, thereby sounding the leitmotif of the entire synthesis and rooting it securely in the great tradition's liturgical and doxological depth.

The very title of van Beeck's opus, God Encountered, deserves comment. The focus falls upon the objective realities of faith, and in particular the God whose initiative and agency originates, sustains, and transforms created reality. Thus, though he by no means repudiates modernity's "turn to the subject," so cogently claimed for Catholic theology by Karl Rahner, van Beeck characteristically stresses the Trinitarian essence of faith that evokes and structures Christian worship and praise, not the self-experience and expression of the worshiping subject or community. As he confesses, in words that challenge so much of the current dismal dwelling upon the therapeutic: "Worship is abandon, not cultivation of self. Its focus is away from self, on God. Elicited by God's presence, to God's presence it responds, with fruits beyond intending and thus beyond all telling. The only adequate and lasting reason for worship is: that God is God."

The worshiper is summoned, therefore, less to self-fulfillment than to self-transcendence, to ecstatic abandon in joyful praise and service. In the context of Christian worship this new life of grace is further specified as personal communion with God through the risen Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Christological center of Christian faith is manifest in the church's worship "through Jesus Christ our Lord," but it also permeates and "informs" all Christian reflection and action. As van Beeck forthrightly avers: "the Catholic church and her members can make no real sense, either of their identity or of their mission, unless they go back to their abiding foundation: the risen Lord."

Such emphasis upon the centrality of Christ for Christian vision and mission might appear tautological were it not that the Christological center (which Vatican II took as a given) needs today to be recovered in a way that is creative and compelling, in the face of and (one dares hope) as a reconciliation of the polarizations that have plagued the post-Vatican II period. Certainly one of the main attractions of van Beeck's synthesis is the centrality of the person of Jesus Christ in his theology and the clearly Christic form of his spirituality. "In Christ we see the original fullness of what is offered to the church by way of grace and participation. There is a depth here that must not be traded away for anything. It must remain at the heart of all Christian faith-experience."

Jesus Christ, through whom God is encountered, is, however, not a figure of the past whose words and deeds are subjected to an allegedly unbiased academic scrutiny, but the living and present Lord whose Spirit empowers discipleship and participation in the life of God. This "pneumatological" sensitivity is another hopeful and attractive note of van Beeck's synthesis and marks a further recovery of the great tradition of the undivided church of East and West. Like the second-century theologian Irenaeus, the author of the great tradition's first "spiritual-pastoral-theological synthesis" (and one from whose work he appreciatively draws), van Beeck robustly holds Christ and Spirit in tensive unity: the "two hands" with which God accomplishes all God's works. In representative fashion he writes: "The risen Jesus, present in the Spirit, therefore, evokes, not detached affirmation of, but participation in, his divine identity. Professing Jesus' divine Sonship involves us; involvement with God's Son makes us children of God .... The New Testament conveys this by having the risen Christ communicate the Holy Spirit .... "Such participation and discipleship do not constitute for the Christian a hindrance to openness and dialogue, but provide its positive basis. The creed itself, the symbol of the community's encounter with God, professes belief in the one God, who is creator of all that is seen and unseen; and the universal Christian hope anticipates the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Between creation and new creation, the Catholic vision celebrates and proclaims "the depth of God-given nature being encountered by the height of God-given grace." Here grace is by no means alien to nature; and nature is inherently open to graced transformation. Characteristic of van Beeck's synthesis is this affirmation of distinctions, coupled with the resolute refusal to allow them to harden into dichotomies.

Thus volume 2, part 1 engages issues of "fundamental theology." Van Beeck understands fundamental theology to be the perennial moment of the theological commitment to faith seeking understanding that, inspired by the essential openness and universalist perspective of the great tradition, ponders the sensitivities, insights, and values of a given culture and engages in respectful and discerning dialogue. Such fundamental theology may eventuate either in cultural critique or in the purification and advancement of the tradition or both. If all Christian theology of necessity mediates between faith and culture, fundamental theology undertakes the mediation most self-consciously and thematically.

By incorporating fundamental theology as a moment in the enterprise of systematic theology, van Beeck clearly opts for both "Jerusalem" and for "Athens:" for both the positive faith tradition symbolized by the city of David the King and of Jesus the Christ and for the native human integrity symbolized by the city of the philosophers. But clearly Jerusalem holds the primacy and provides the orientation: the revelation of the Glory, the very Word of God, became flesh there, recapitulating and transfiguring all the aspirations and intimations embodied in human nature and culture.

Within the concrete commitment of Christian faith, then, fundamental theology cherishes humanity's native yearning for communication and communion. In doing so it affirms the dignity of human reason and its attainments, even as it suggests that reason surpasses itself and finds its fullness in faith. Finally, it shows that the deepest desires of the human heart are freed, not stymied, by ecstatic surrender to the God who is greater than our hearts. Thus it attests that "[i]n the actual life of growth-by-desire, the essential features of native aspiration are laid bare: humanity is revealed as immanently, indelibly attuned to God, and that attunement turns out to be dynamic--a natural desire for God."

In fashioning his "spiritual-pastoral-theological synthesis," van Beeck has clearly consulted the saints and the mystics and has entered into attentive conversation with them. He is in fact accomplishing what so many have called for: a new integration of theology and spirituality that does not sacrifice either the exigencies of the mind or the realizations of the heart. One salient instance is his recovery of the spiritual tradition's reflection upon the three stages of growth in the Spirit (variously articulated, but generally construed as "beginners," "those making progress," and "the mature") and his correlation of these stages with the objective structures of faith: teaching, life, and worship. His quasi-technical designation for these "types of faith experience and identity" are the "pistic," the "charismatic," and the "mystic." It is stimulating to follow his weaving of this richly diversified theme through the published volumes and to appreciate how it helps clarify and further the

post-Vatican II search for an integral and open Catholic identity.

Like Friedrich von Hugel (whose three-fold differentiation of the institutional, the critical, and the mystical elements of religion his own usage resembles), van Beeck insists upon the validity and necessity for all three dimensions of faith experience. But he clearly privileges the depth and comprehensiveness realized by the mystic abandonment of self to God and neighbor, receiving through this paschal process the graced gift of a new relational self. "Thus dispossessed, divested, and disarmed, their souls more and more live beyond the ecclesiastical dilemmas and the judgments necessarily implied in them; they find their identity neither in the limits nor in the openness of the church, but most importantly, in its depth."

That depth, of course, is Christ. And the mystic is one who passes beyond (without bypassing) mere profession or even imitation of Christ to attain union. He or she (both Jan van Ruysbroeck and Teresa of Avila serve in the first part of volume 2 as crucial and exemplary witnesses) realizes the worshipful encounter, the wondrous exchange with the living God not only through and with the Risen Christ, but in him. For "the Risen Christ is the mystical source of identity and mission" and, therefore, "the ground that sustains the Christian mystic in everything is union with Christ."

For several years now, in speaking and writing about post-Vatican II polarization, I have suggested, in shorthand fashion, that it has tended to pit adherents of chapter 3 of the council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (on the church's hierarchical structure) against advocates of chapter 2 (on the church as people of God). And I have expressed my conviction that the identity experiences embodied in these sometimes contrasting narratives and commitments are valid, but that, in isolation, they represent only half-stories. Indeed, they remain rootless, not Christian stories at all, unless implanted in the soil of chapter 1 (the mystery of the church).

That mystery achieves transparency in Christ who alone is the light of the nations, the unique Lumen gentium. The church can do no other and no more than to reflect Christ's light; for only "in Christ" can it claim to be, in the words of the council, "the sacrament of unity of humankind with God." The church is the sacrament of the wondrous exchange, the admirabile commercium; Christ is its reality. It is the mystic who is rooted in the mystery of Christ and thus becomes attuned to the very heart of the church.

The merit of van Beeck's comprehensive synthesis in the making is that it is magnificently "mystagogic": it leads us ever beyond formulations and causes toward mystery and urges us to the mystical abandon that alone surrenders fully to mystery. And, wondrous to behold, "the mystery is this: Christ in you, the hope of glory!" (Col. 1:27).

ROBERT P. IMBELLI, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, teaches systematic theology at Boston College.