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52 Hans Boersma 3 RessourcementofMystery The Ecclesiology of Thomas Aquinas and the Letter to the Romans Ressourcement of a Sacramental Ecclesiology Yves Congar (1904–95), in a 1974 Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford, on the topic of “St. Thomas Aquinas and the Spirit of Ecumenism,” held out the Angelic Doctor as a source of inspiration for discussion between Catholics and Protestants.1 While recognizing the tension between “the ontological and sapiential point of view of Thomas and the existential-dramatic approach of Luther ,” Congar pointed out that nonetheless not just Catholics but also Protestants were looking to Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–74) as a source of inspiration.2 With some degree of relish, it seems, Congar quoted Karl Barth (1886–1968): An attentive reading of the works of the Doctor Angelicus permits one to verify in him certain lines of force which, even if they do not lead directly to the Reformation , do not tend, any the more, towards Jesuitical Romanism. Thus when one knows how to use intelligently this immense compendium of the previous tradition which constitutes the Summa, one remarks that its author is, on many issues, an evangelical theologian useful to know.3 I wish to thank Darrell W. Johnson and Matthew Levering for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1. Yves M.-J. Congar, “St Thomas Aquinas and the Spirit of Ecumenism,” New Blackfriars 55, no. 648 (1974): 196–209. Cf. Fergus Kerr, “Yves Congar: From Suspicion to Acclamation,” Louvain Studies 29, nos. 3–4 (2004): 273–87, at 280–87. 2. Congar, “St Thomas Aquinas and the Spirit of Ecumenism,” 200. 3. Ibid. The quotation is from Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. 1, bk. 2, Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes: Prolegomena zur kirchlichen Dogmatik (Zollikon: Evangelischer Verlag, 1938), 686. I have retained Congar’s own translation. Cf. idem, Church Dogmatics, vol.1, bk. 2, The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 614. Ressourcement of Mystery   53 Congar, along with other ressourcement theologians in the decades leading up to the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), engaged in just the kind of “attentive reading” to which Barth alluded. What is more, Congar came to conclusions rather similar to those of the Protestant Swiss theologian. Particularly Thomas’s ecclesiology—one of Congar’s key areas of interest —came out looking remarkably evangelical in the writings of the Dominican scholar from Le Saulchoir. This is not to say that Congar painted St. Thomas as an evangelical Protestant. Congar was genuinely Catholic in his convictions, and his strong ecumenical inclinations did not cause him to ignore the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. Protestant ecclesiology, Congar was convinced, did not take the structures of the Church sufficiently seriously—the result, he believed, of the Protestant lack of focus on the sacramental means of salvation in the economy of redemption. But Congar was equally convinced, along with Barth, that Thomas did not tend toward what Barth termed “Jesuitical Romanism.” One of the main reasons for Congar’s interest in Thomas was that he saw in him an ally in his own opposition to the juridicizing that he believed had increasingly put its stamp on the Church’s structures since the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform.4 These juridicizing tendencies had resulted, argued Congar, in the manuals De ecclesia , which had originated in the early fourteenth century and had set off an approach to ecclesiology that, according to Congar, suffered from juridicizing and intellectualizing tendencies. The result had been a loss of the Church as mystery of faith. In order to recover a sense of mystery, Congar believed it was necessary to work out a doctrine of the Church that would focus on the communion of the Church as the fellowship of believers, the assembly of the faithful (congregatio fidelium), and so on the unity and peace of the Church. He maintained that the neo-Thomist establishment had focused on the Church as sacramental means (sacramentum), whereas Thomas’s own primary interest was the sacramental reality (res). Put differently, Congar argued that a ressourcement of St. Thomas’s ecclesiology required a shift from a one-sidedly juridical to a more spiritual view of the Church.5 As I already indicated, Congar realized that his reading of Thomas Aqui4 . Yves M.-J. Congar, Tradition and Traditions: The Biblical, Historical, and Theological Evidence for Catholic Teaching on Tradition, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas...

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