1. Divided Authority
Some great theologian-pastors of the church of the past
exercised their authority by teaching what
they professed and practising what they
taught. They were both teachers of the church and
witnesses to the Faith. They were doctors of the
church and professors of the faith.
This teaching office degenerated into sectarian politics.
The early Christological debates were marred by a
theological obsession with doctrinal precision and episcopal
entanglements. Personal animosities and power struggles had
infected the episcopate. Her are two examples of bishops
drunk with power and therefore bereft of authority. One was
Nestorius who invited dissidents to his palace and
had them beaten up. The other was Cyril (a saint!) was
biased against non-Christians who was involved in the murder
of pagan philosopher Hypatia in a church ans also 'bribed
the mperial officials with gold worth several million
dollars at today's prices'. Things did not improve as the
centuries rolled by.
Another development was the emergence of universities as
new centres of learning in which professors of
theology or Chairs of Canon Law proved themselves more
learned than the bishops. As a result the authority of the
bishops lost its lustre. St Thomas Aquinas referred to two
distinct teaching authorities - the pastoral authority of
the bishops and academic authority of the theologians - a
division that still operates today in the way theology is
taught.
Increasingly, the theology taught in the universities
distanced itself from the lives of the people and became
'scholastic' (academic) in the centuries that followed. The
Protestant reformers totally rejected scholasticism.
2. Fondness for dry doctrinal
formulations
Today there is an excessive concern for doctrinal
accuracy. The Catholic church runs the risk of producing
experts in doctrine who may not be professors of Faith. In
January 1997, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
decided to excommunicate Fr Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lankan
theologian, for having misrepresented certain faith issues.
This Congregation serves as a watchdog (in the manner of the
former Inquisition) for preserving doctrinal purity
among theologians. The act of excommunication was in breach
of sacred tradition whereby only the Popes or the Councils
have this authority and it cannot be delegated to others.
It is true there must be a doctrinal
dimension in the expression of our faith. Articulating our
beliefs through the medium if well chosen words is
legitimate and necessary. Academic rigour and accuracy of
expression should be accorded a high priority. But all
theoretical formulas must be given popular expression ie
complemented (and even redeemed of dogmatism) by recourse to
various artistic and literary means such as poetry and song,
dance and drama, painting and sculpture, narrative and
parable - these are more appropriate vehicles to convey our
insights and intuitions into the mystery of the uncreated
wisdom. Furthermore, they are better appreciated in
non-European cultures than dry intellectual formulations.
A formulatory theology, unless aided
by the evocative idiom, can run into the claws of
idolatry. Such a theology should not be pre-occupied by the
unholy desire to invent precision instruments to
fathom the Wisdom of God using human concepts. Those who
accuse the Asian Christians fo reducing theology to poetry
are precisely those who prefer to use the mathematical
method to understand the Salvific Truth. Again, those who
have absolutised the relative have branded us 'relativists'
for having respected the iconic nature of all dogmas. The
Latin Church's own theological tradition demands that we
relativize every formula of faith before the one
absolute Truth. This is what the mystics have taught the
dogmaticians.
According to Giuseppe Alberigo, a
distinguished church historian of our times, the Salvific
Truth has been gradually degraded into a series of doctrinal
propositions and dogmatic formulas which could not be
maintained in their rigour without a powerful clerical
class armed with punitive powers to maintain purity of
doctrine.
3.
The Poor have been forgotten
A major consequence of this
intellectualisation and depersonalisation of the Saving
Truth is that we have lost a significant dimension of
patristic theology - justice for the poor. 'Poor' is
biblical shorthand for people that have been marginalised,
dispossessed and victimised. Christ has identified such
persons as his own 'me' (Matt 25:31-46 etc). When the
Saving Truth loses its identity as a Person in a maze of
abstract and depersonalised doctrines, then the poor who are
the visible extension of that person disappear from the
central concerns of theology.
The resulting decadent scholasticism
forget the the historical & contemporary realities of
poverty and tend to spiritualise poverty. My plea is
that the body of bishops, theologians and mystics humble
themselves before the magisterium of the poor. In the
bible, the Poor form a social category of people opposed to
and by the Powerful and Wealthy and are chosen by God as the
vehicle of God's presence and action and transforming
history into the history of God's salvation.