The Church, the Modern World, and the Spirit of Vatican II

In the late summer of 1977, I made my way to New Haven, Connecticut, not yet twenty-two years old and afire to study theology at Yale Divinity School. At that innocent dawn of my theological life I was surprised to discover that not everybody at YDS shared my passion for theology. People had other reasons for going to seminary besides wanting to read more Augustine and Luther, to say nothing of more Kant and Hegel. "If you're interested in that sort of thing," I was advised, "take Lindbeck." I did.

The course George Lindbeck offered that term was "Comparative Doctrine," which focused on the historic doctrinal disagreements among Christians. The Second Vatican Council featured heavily in the course. Lindbeck, I learned, had been an official Protestant observer at Vatican II, which had concluded only a dozen years before. As I found out a good deal later, he had in fact been much involved in the complex goings on at the Council through all four of its "periods," from its surprising opening sessions in the fall of 1962 through to its conclusion in 1965. His main interest in "Comparative Doctrine," as it turned out, was not simply the differences of doctrine among Christians, but their possible resolution, especially those between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. This was not my first taste of Vatican II—that had come in an undergraduate church history course—but it was my first exposure to the difference the recently concluded ecumenical Council might make to the thought of theologians and in the lives of Christians, not least those outside the Roman Catholic Church. At the time I was one of the interested outsiders, and I listened.

There is a conventional narrative about Vatican II, a dramatic story about what happened at the Council and the impact it had. This story was already current in my theological youth. In its simplest form, the standard narrative goes like this. With a clarity he himself attributed to an unanticipated illumination of the Holy Spirit, the newly elected Pope John XXIII announced in early 1959 that he intended to summon an ecumenical council. The coming council, he insisted, was to have three purposes: the spiritual and pastoral renewal of the Catholic Church, the updating of the Church's outlook and institutions so as to make her proclamation of the Gospel more effective in the modern world, and ecumenical reconciliation with non-Catholic Christians. Inevitably, the massive work of preparing for the council fell mainly to officials of the Roman Curia, who were uniformly entrenched traditionalists and designed a council that would produce none of the changes the Pope hoped to see. Indeed they aimed, in drawing up the schemata that would be discussed by the council fathers, at raising to the level of permanently binding Catholic doctrine the broad rejection of modern developments in biblical scholarship and theology that had been the norm in Rome since the modernist crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. But in the dramatic opening sessions of the Council in the fall of 1962, the assembled bishops and other leaders of the Catholic Church, headed by those from Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, refused to follow the agenda set by the traditionalist Curia, repudiated their reactionary schemata, and unexpectedly showed themselves to be, in the majority, progressives open to John XXIII's agenda of sweeping pastoral renewal.

All was not smooth sailing from there on out. Pope John died in the summer of 1963, and the curial traditionalists retained their powerful positions. But John's successor, Paul VI, largely embraced the progressive intentions of his predecessor and of the Conciliar majority. The result, by the time of the Council's conclusion a little more than fifty years ago, was the irreversible triumph of a progressive Catholicism open to the modern world. At least for a time, traditionalist elements would remain in the Church, hoping to blunt, if not roll back entirely, the impact of the progressive victory. But they had, and always would have, the weight of this ecumenical Council against...