Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth’s “Ad Limina Apostolorum ed. by Matthew Levering, Thomas Joseph White and Bruce L. McCormack (review)

Why should a bunch of Roman Catholic theologians meet to compare and contrast the teaching of an ecumenical council with the private judgment of a Protestant theologian? First, quite simply, because they can thereby enjoy the company of many distinguished students and heirs of the thought of this theologian. Second, the theologian in question is Karl Barth. Third, the ecumenicity of Vatican II is open to the future, and the tradition of its reception should most of all engage a thinker whose chief criticism of the council pertained to the chapter on tradition in Dei Verbum.

This criticism is contained in Barth’s Ad Limina Apostolorum, the account of his visit to Rome in 1966 at the invitation of the Secretariat for Christian Unity. His preparatory study of the conciliar constitutions and decrees included composing questions both clarifying and critical. It is around these questions that the essays of Dogma and Ecumenism are organized, products of a 2016 symposium sponsored by the Barth Center at Princeton University and the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. The symposium engages Barth’s questions touching on Dei Verbum, Lumen Gentium, Nostra Aetate (the Decree on Non-Christian Religions), Gaudium et Spes, and Unitatis Redintegratio (Decree on Ecumenism), lining up a Protestant and a Catholic interlocutor for each of these documents. Matthew Levering contributes an opening, framing essay, and Richard Schenk bats last, looking to the future after a consideration of the uses of history for Church and theology.

In “Holy Scripture as a Mirror for God,” Katherine Sonderegger addresses the question of the inerrancy of Scripture using the council’s image of Scripture as a "mirror" in which God is to be beheld (DV 7). Just as the material of the mirror may produce a flawed image of what is mirrored, so the human form of the word of God may also state errors. Sonderegger thus puts Scripture under the same eschatological proviso that Barth puts Church doctrine. In “A Theology of Tradition in Light of Dei Verbum,” Lewis Ayres undertakes to show the sacramental quality of the act of tradition, arguing by analogy from Lumen Gentium. The perceived ecclesial acts of interpretation in the teaching of the gospel manifest to the eyes of faith the agency of the Spirit.

Christoph Schwöbel and Thomas Joseph White provide model essays in bringing Lumen Gentium and Karl Barth in close proximity to one another. They agree that the chief issue is the relation between the divine agency and the agency of the Church in maintaining access to God’s revelation and participation in salvation. They agree also in finding in Barth’s Christology guides to the solution of ecclesiological problems. Schwöbel points out that just as God’s Word becomes visible flesh in Christ, so the invisible Church of those who live by the Spirit in faith is located in history in the visible Church. Nor are these two Churches, but two aspects of only one Church (102–4), as Lumen Gentium 8 says. If in Christ the humanity of Jesus is the organ or instrument of his divinity, as Barth recognizes, why, White asks, cannot other created realities similarly be taken up by God as reliable instruments? So, for Catholics the magisterium is the stable and trustworthy instrument by which God maintains the truth of his revelation in the world of many sometimes conflicting interpretations of Scripture; habitual grace that justifies the sinner is intrinsic to the justified, a reliable foundation used by the Spirit to elicit the Christian’s real cooperation in sanctification; and minsters can be used by God infallibly to...