Schillebeeckx’s New Look at Secularity: A Note

SCHILLEBEECKX'S NEW LOOK AT SECULARITY: A NOTE ""ZEALOUS attempts at refutation never get us on a thinker's path." 1 This statement of Martin Heidegger will serve to set the tenor of the following reflections upon a new and searching investigation by Edward Schillbeeckx into the problem of Christian secularity. The fullest crystallization of his thought appears in an essay appended as an Epilogue to God the Future of Man/ a collection of lectures delivered by Schillebeeckx throughout the United States during 1967. This essay is an English translation of an article written shortly after his return to the Netherlands and published in Tijdschrift voor Theologie (1, Jan.-Febr.-Mrt., 1968, pp. 44-66) . It is a noteworthy study for at least three reasons: (1) it represents an advance and a qualitatively new phase in Schillebeeckx's own thinking on what has been the central concern, if not the very nerve, of nearly all his recent theological endeavors; as such it is perhaps the most thoroughly thought-out and closely reasoned study from a Catholic viewpoint yet to appear on the problem of secularity.3 (2) It is 1 Martin Heidegger: "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? ", Review of Metaphysics (March, 1967), p. 4~7. 2 Edward Schillebeeckx, 0. P., God the Future of Man, trans!. by N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968). 8 The study by Robert L. Richard, S. J., Secularization Theology (N. Y.: Herder and Herder, 1967), largely confines itself to the Protestant terms of the debate; that of M. D. Chenu, 0. P. ("The Need for a Theology of the World" in "Should Christianity be Secularized? A Symposium" published in The Great Ideas Today, 1967, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.) is content to base itself on the distinction between religion and faith, although a more profuse approach to the general problem can be found in his two-volume work La Parole de Dieu (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1964); Eric Mascall's The Secularization of Christianity (N. Y.: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965) , while written by an Anglican, is one of the few critical studies, but it envinces little sympathy for the Secularization project; a Catholic study with similar strong reservations is Jean Danielou, L'Oraison probleme politique (Paris: Fayard, 1965) . 16~ SCHILLEBEECKX's NEW LOOK AT SECULARITY: A NOTE 163 carefully nuanced so as to preclude or answer the serious objections that have been forthcoming all along against the secularization project; most notably this is done by insisting upon distinguishing secularization in its limited theological meaning from its much broader sociological acceptation.4 (3) But, most significantly, it represents less a qualification of Schillebeeckx's earlier thinking than the adoption of a more radical stance. • The new point of departure lies with the very concept of God. How he is viewed in the objective conceptualization of Christian faith, then, will determine the validity of the secularization project. This is clear recognition that it is the reality of God himself and man's intellectual "hold " in faith thereupon that is determinative of the proper religious response and not existential concerns about man's existence or socio-religious concerns about relevancy. What Schillebeeckx proposes is a de-emphasis upon those conceptualizations of God that have been traditional within Catholic theology, allowing them to be replaced by one that designates God as man's future. This gives his thinking a point of convergence with both the newer theologies of hope, best represented perhaps by Jorgen Moltmann , and the efforts of the Pannenberg Circle to structure theology as history; at the same time it marks an initial disassociation from existential theology. Such a proposal, however, does raise questions of its own, the first of which is whether this overriding envisagement of God as man's future does not constrict God conceptually within a human perspective. To be sure, there is no other perspective out of which he becomes available for man, but it is one thing to conceive of him by means of concepts deriving from and representing creatures, with the explicit recognition that he " lives " far beyond the reach of any of our concepts, and on the other hand, to give primacy to a concept that locates God, gnoseologically...