“Modernism and Evolution of Dogma” – William H. Marshner
Mr. Malloy introduced Dr. Marshner very well. Dr. Marshner has since proven out Mr. Malloy’s predictions!
Malloy’s Introduction:
Now our next speaker, who has temporarily deserted us, I think is known to all of you who have read The Wanderer in the past few years. You may have noticed that although he’s not missing from the masthead as a contributing editor, he has been missing from the pages of The Wanderer. Well that is due to the fact that he decided to pursue his doctor’s degree in theology at the University of Dallas. So he is pursuing that in theology and I would say that The Wanderer’s loss has been the gain of authentic research in theology, which Bill has been undertaking these last two years.
And it will be also the gain of Christendom College beginning in September. Bill will be one of the faculty members handling theology at Christendom College in Triangle, Virginia, about 35 miles south of Washington. So if you know any young people ready to start in on their college education, they could scarcely get a better theology teacher, a more inspiring teacher than Bill Marshner. So I recommend that you give consideration to that. You will find the information concerning Christendom College outside in the Hall of Exhibits.
I would also like to point out an interesting fact that Bill was working for his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at Yale University. But after he started working for The Wanderer, he found that this was not sufficiently, I hate to use the word, relevant to the crisis in the Church. And he realized that he would not be able to make use of that doctor’s degree in the way he wanted.
So he therefore decided to take his degree in theology at the University of Dallas, where he would be able to make a much more important, a much more profound contribution to the Church and to what needs to be done in meeting the theological error of the present time. So despite the fact that The Wanderer has had to give up his services for the past two years, I am certain that it is going to be richly rewarding for the Church in general in the United States.
So we have then in Bill Marshner one of our young and enterprising young theological scholars from whom we can expect a great deal in the future.
Bill?
And Dr. Marshner’s speech:
Thank you very much, Mr. Malloy.
Ladies and gentlemen, the topic which has been given to me is modernism and the evolution of dogma.
The word modernism can be taken in two ways. It can be taken to refer to an historical movement by a relatively small group of people who held modernism in the second sense, namely, modernism as a theory, or if you will, as a heresy. Those who held modernism as a heresy were vastly more numerous than those who ever participated in modernism as a movement. As a matter of fact, many of those who at the turn of the century held modernism as a heresy believed that the movement was futile, refused to have anything to do with it on the ground that the Roman Catholic Church was incorrigible. It’s the sort of modernist I could almost like.
In any case, I will use the term modernism in this talk to refer to the heresy or the system of ideas rather than the movement. So when I say that someone is a modernist, I’m attributing to him certain ideas rather than a role in history. Now the topic before us is partially about the past. We want to know what were some typical modernist views on the origins, growth, and development of dogma as well as on the authority of dogma within the church. So how does dogma arise and what is it worth in the opinion of men like Loisy, von Hügel, Blondel?
Our topic is also partially about the present. We want to know what are some currently influential views on the development of dogmatic formulas and on their irreformability. Again, how does dogma arise and what is it worth in the opinion of men like Henri Bouillard, Karl Rahner, Avery Dulles, Raymond Brown, and many others.
Finally our topic is partially theoretical. If we find that certain contemporary views resemble the older and condemned views, then we want to know whether this resemblance is important or superficial. After all, it is often admitted that modern theologians have reopened questions studied by the original modernists and that today’s theologians sometimes sound a little bit like modernists. But this resemblance is dismissed as trivial and indeed misleading. It is said that the original modernists were more or less wild men, given to extreme views, held statements about the meaning or origin of certain biblical documents which no one would today defend and so forth. Not that, therefore, in the decisive respect, today’s theologians are not like those modernists. On the other hand, it will be said that the modernists were interested in the scholarly investigation of certain important questions and that the Pascendi of Pius X shut the lid on the questions but didn’t resolve them. Those were pushed underground, which the modernists, in their own way, misguidedly, were at least trying to face.
So that what has now happened is simply this, that theologians have looked around and seen that the modernist danger is long over and therefore it is time, once again, in a patient way, to reopen the consideration of those great questions which were prematurely closed by Saint Pius X. So while we are dealing today with the same questions, we are not coming to the same answers and therefore it would be misleading and indeed vicious to characterize today’s theologians as modernists.
Now insofar as this theoretical task is laid on us then of determining whether the resemblances between today’s theologians and the turn of the century theologians is an important one or a trivial one, we are bound to inquire just exactly what modernism is. We need to know what is the core of it, what exactly makes modernism tick. Once we have found the core of it, then we will be in a position to say whether the resemblances between what goes on now and what happened then are indeed superficial or whether they are simply the rebirth of that thing which back then ticked in just the same way. That’s what we want to find out: the core of it and then establish the validity of the comparison.
Now in order to by some sort of rational procedure lead us into an insight into what the core of modernism is, I propose that we can start by asking. I propose that we can start by asking the question, what did modernists think about the evolution of dogma?
Well, oddly enough, the evolution of dogma, that phrase, really refers to two quite different problems. The first thing that we want to do is distinguish and keep apart those two different problems.
The first problem, I’m gonna call this overall problem, and the first overall problem is this: How did the set of dogmas expand over time? What accounted for the multiplication of authoritatively taught statements? That’s the first overall problem.
Now here, let me anticipate by giving you the second overall problem. It goes as follows: How was the whole set of dogmatic statements, as it existed at various times, interpreted? What is, in other words, the history of the understanding of the meaning of dogma?
You see how those two overall questions are distinct?
The one simply asks the question, how come back in the time of Jesus, there were only a handful of dogmas, and how come today they compose a fact book? Now you could presumably come up with some sort of convincing answer to that question without even facing our second question, which is, never mind how many of them there are, what are they?
How are we to take these statements that we call dogmas? Are they statements of fact? Are they revelations of feeling? Distillations of sentiment? Metaphysical truths of a revealed sort? What are, you see the difference between the two questions?
Now, having distinguished the two questions, let’s go back to the first one and see what the modernists had to say about the evolution of dogma in that sense. What did they think about how the expansion of the set of dogmas over time could be accounted for? Well, first of all, I should point out that long before modernism came on the scene, there was an answer to this question. A very traditional answer, it may be found in germ in St. Thomas himself. It is expanded in the great commentators on St. Thomas, particularly by John of St. Thomas in the 17th century. And then it will be given, I think, a new twist and a new setting by Newman.
But fundamentally, this classical scholastic position and Newman’s position on our first overall question are, I think, ultimately one in the same position. Anyway, here it is. Let’s call this theory number one in answer to our first overall question of why does the set of dogmas expand?
This first theory might be called the explication theory. It says that the set of dogmas expands by virtue of an application of exegetical and logical analysis to the original data of scripture and tradition. Now, this application of logic, of exegesis, to scripture and tradition will be stirred up, will be provoked and motivated by many different kinds of historical experiences, such as the rise of a new heresy. Somebody comes along and says something outrageous that was never said before, then it’s time to go back to the scripture, see if it’s true, where we can find it, where we can find a way to refute it, and so forth. But the set of dogmas itself grows by virtue of this application of exegetical and logical analyses to the original data of our faith, scripture, and divino-apostolic tradition. Now, as you can see, a theory of this kind stresses the logical continuity of the later and larger set of dogmatic statements with the earlier and smaller set.
The key is logical continuity.
Newman, in his famous essay on the development of dogma, put it, I think, in a nutshell this way. He said, “The question is whether the Catholic faith “of today is logically as well as historically “the continuator of that ancient faith of the fathers.” That was his question. Is it logically the continuator as well as historically? That’s the question he wrote a whole book to try to answer.
But as we’re going to see, that question couldn’t even arise for Alfred Loisy or a typical modernist. In any case, then, this was the standard, I would say the only orthodox theory of why the set of dogmas expands. We have called it the explication theory.
Now, let me propose to you a second theory, a theory which was held by some modernists, but which was already considered a bit old-fashioned at the time modernism burst upon the historical scene. This second theory of why the set of dogmas expands, we shall call the organic growth theory. The organic growth theory takes the church as a relatively closed system like a plant. And it accounts for growth of dogmas as a manifestation of the plant’s or organism’s unfolding life. In other words, the church would sprout dogmas the way a geranium sprouts flowers.
Interior to this unique supernatural sort of plant, the church, is some hidden life, some hidden wellspring of experience or grace, which in a mysterious and vital way causes the Christian church to put forth new propositional expressions of what it believes, just as the sap, the “elan vital”, perhaps, of some geranium causes that lovely thing to put forth on a regular basis blossoms fair to look upon. Now, this theory is a non-logical theory. It’s a vitalist theory, but it’s an old-fashioned vitalist theory.
It was invented, by the way, I think it would be safe to say invented, by the German theologian of Tübingen in the early 19th century, Johann Adam Möhler. This theory is a vitalistic theory, but it doesn’t deny that there might be logical connection between one set of propositional blossoms and another. No, doesn’t consider the question, but doesn’t deny it. However, this, shall we say that this organic growth theory involves some difficulties.
If you consider a plant or an animal or some other biological organism, considering it now as a closed system, you will have to regard it as passing through stages. Ah, infancy, then youth, then after the toils, perhaps, of a certain adolescence, maturity, and what comes beyond that? Well, the broadening of middle age. Ah, decay, and finally death.
Now, the end terms on that list, the decay and the death part, are left out of this theory, presumably because our supernatural, because our church is a kind of supernatural organism. So the decay and the death, that’s left out. But we still have the stages of infancy, youth, and maturity. Thus, each stage of dogma corresponds to a certain status of maturity. And that stage will be looked upon as causing the next stage. Stage following stage, according to a time-directed law of development. This will have dangerous and difficult consequences.
When this old-fashioned organic growth theory of Möhler‘s is replaced by a Darwinian one. And this, we shall call our third theory. The third theory, then, to explain our first overall question. Why does the set of dogmas expand over time? I call this the Darwinian, or quasi-Darwinian theory. Here, the church is no longer looked upon as a single biological organism, a living substance, as it were, considered as a relatively closed system, and developing through orderly stages according to an internal law writ within its own constitution.
Oh no. Now, the church will be made similar to a biological species. Not an individual, mind you, but a species. A species living out its career over millions of years, perhaps, under the impact of successive environments. Now, why? Why does a biological organism change, according to Darwin? It changes because of the impact of the environment.
Ah, the climate changes!
Therefore, the poor scaly dinosaur must, in order to survive, find some way to sprout either one of two things, either hair or else feathers. Depending upon which way this choice is resolved, the dinosaur will come into the new and colder age in the new guise of a mammal or a bird. But one way or another, the mysterious spring of life, which has manifested itself in warm and swampy times as dinosaur, will continue, evolve, adapt to environment, find a new knee, find the new technologies, biological technologies, to survive in the new and colder age as mammal or bird. So the church, keeping still this idea of a mysterious internal principle of life that’s driving her on, yes, but no longer now like a single animal, but like a whole, well, I don’t know, you don’t wanna call it a species because it’s trans-specific, it changes species on you over the years as the glaciers come and go. It changes species on you.
Now, the Church of God, of course, does not respond to change in climate, change in the availability of certain food supplies, change in the ranges of predators and so forth, but she does have an environment. Oh yes, she changes because of the impact of an environment, but what is that environment? What are the relevant factors? Not climate and food supply, but the several cultures of man. The cultures of man, or the Greco-Roman perhaps, the Latin Tridentine might be another one, the 19th century modern culture of progress and mechanical technology might be a third, perhaps our own present day wraparound of electronic technology might be a fourth.
Well, you can set them up any way you want, but in any case, these different cultures are considered as relatively closed systems like total states of the environment. What they do is act upon the church and force in it certain mutations. These mutations will be on many levels. Some of the mutations which appear in the church will be on the level of mere discipline and so forth and bureaucracy and whether or not the bishop owns vast holdings in real estate or whether he owns stock, you see.
That’ll be one kind of thing, but another kind of equally possible mutation will be the mutation of dogma. Because remember, when you conceive a culture as an environment that acts, remember that culture includes ideas. It’s mental and not simply physical. So there are going to be ideas working upon the church which will force her to change her way of speaking. And perhaps also her way of thinking.
Now this then I call not only the quasi-Darwinian theory, but also and simultaneously the cultural purification theory. It has two forms. Well, it has many forms, but at least two. Namely, that the church adds to her dogmas because, okay, the church adds to her dogmas because as time goes on, her environment has changed and in order to speak, no, in order to communicate her life to the new generation of modern man, she must find a way to express that life of hers in his symbols, his words, his thoughts. Ah, then by finding that mysterious conceptual translation, life can be communicated to a new generation which has been shaped by a new social environment. Now that can be strung out over time, see.
First there was Aramaic Christianity. Ah, Jesus, in his original Semitic and Aramaic setting.
Then, however, when Christianity began to get out of its Palestinian womb, it began to encounter the larger phenomenon of Hellenistic Judaism, which was a brilliant ferment of ideas and caused Christianity to mutate, or rather caused Aramaic Christianity to mutate into Johannine Christianity on the one hand, or perhaps Pauline Christianity on the other, which may or may not be the same thing, see.
Then as the church continues in her career, she will encounter the cultural environment of pure Hellenism. This will force her to enter into metaphysical dialogue with the Greek philosophers. Philosophers will become converts, and Christianity will mutate again into patristic Christianity.
Then along will come the Huns, the barbarians, the Latin West, various goodies of that kind, and first thing you know, the poor church will have to mutate into Latin Christianity, and then into post-Tridentine Christianity, and then, after I’m afraid many factors which slowed things down, she will be ready to mutate again into modern Christianity of the sort which we have many people around to design. Now, that’s stringing it out over time, but you can also string it out in space, see.
What happens to the Church [when strung out in space]? Well, she encounters Greek culture. Then she moves over and encounters Syriac culture. Then after a while, she gets carried to India, and there she acquires the experience of Hindu culture, and then gets down to black Africa, and first thing you know, what we need is an African theology, see.
What we need is an authentically Indian, an indigenous theology. In other words, the idea now is that in each place, the dogmatic structure of Christianity has been an expression relative to a culture. So the whole work of evolving, the whole work of laying down and expanding the set of dogmas must be done again, and can be radically redone in each culture.
So then, of course, why not have an Afro-American theology, presumably with its own set of dogmas, more or less similar, no doubt, to other sets, but distinctive in some ways, hmm?
And if an Afro-American theology, why not a Polish-American theology?
Indeed, why not a Minneapolis-Polish-American theology? (audience laughing)
And pretty soon, why not the theology which articulates the experience of this parish council, as it tries in concrete community to express, yes, the life which is in us, very good. All right.
Now, if we have sufficiently examined the quasi-Darwinian theory, which also turns into the cultural purification theory, I will give you a last theory under this first general question, which I call the history-happening theory. Now, here, the essential point is this. It is somewhat a more abstract theory than the two I just gave you. It’s this: it simply insists that the connection between later dogmas and earlier ones was not logical, but simply historical. The question of what caused dogmatic development is solved simply by looking at church history and concomitant world history. This is to say that the work of theologians and even the work of the magisterium is, to use a technical term, epiphenomenal.
It is, if you will, thinking after the fact. What really is causative is what happens. Now, this is identically the theory of Alfred Loisy, the parade case modernist, and also of his German Protestant counterpart, Harnack. Once again, it is simply this: It is simply the assertion that the question of what caused dogmatic development is solved simply by looking at church history and the concomitant world history.
All right, now watch: What’s crucial now becomes your theory of world history. Do you have a philosophy of history? Then you will have an attitude about how dogmas developed. For example, if this total world history has an organic structure, if it is all, as Hegel thought, the self-unfolding through time of the world spirit just as the sprouting of the geranium is the self-unfolding through time of the geranium seed, if all world history has this kind of organic structure, then this last, this fourth theory of ours will simply be a variation of that second one we gave. Or indeed of the third one, perhaps.
But if history has no such structure, well, we could give up old-fashioned theories like that. That kind of philosophy of history is a little bit unpopular these days. Suppose world history as a whole does not have this kind of overarching pattern. If history has no such structure, then dogmatic development will be as accidental, as surprising, as discontinuous as history itself. And this is the currently fashionable theory. It is known as the discontinuity theory of doctrinal development.
It jumps all, Ray Brown had a version of this theory in the speech which Mr. Malloy alluded to at Rivergate. (audience laughing) In that Rivergate speech, in New Orleans, yes. In that Rivergate speech, Father Brown told us about how theology goes all by fits and starts. An idea comes along which is fruitful, and my goodness, the channels of theology run in riot for a while. And then we get into a dry spell, like the one we’ve had since 1600, until I came along, you see. And then, theology is a mere rivulet, and dogmas don’t develop any much. Everything becomes frozen and fixed. But then great minds come along, and the dams are burst again. But this has an accidental, surprising, and discontinuous pattern to it. That is to say, no pattern at all.
Now, I have given you four theories which one way or another explain, or try to explain how it happened that the set of dogmas got bigger over time.
Now, having taken you through all of this, and perhaps pointed out some interesting comparisons with modernism old and new, I now want to disappoint you by telling you that the solution to this question is not really crucial to modernism. Oh, no. It’s true that most modernists, at the turn of the century, held that quasi-Darwinian position. They did, that’s true. They held it without sharply distinguishing it from what I’ve called the history happening theory, because they all thought that history happening was the continuation of evolution by other means.
Now, Teilhard got the world press for saying that when his stuff was finally published after his death in ’55. By that time, the idea was absolutely novel. But in 1900, it was the common coin. That’s what everybody thought. That’s why we had social Darwinism, ideologies of that kind. History was evolution continued by other means.
So they didn’t distinguish at the turn of the century between that third position of mine and that fourth one. They didn’t need to. But frankly, the interest of modernism did not lie here. The answer to this first general problem could be taken for granted by them. They just assumed that the Darwinian and the history happening hypotheses were matters of fact. Now, if you could have proved the truth of the first position, that dogmas expand by logical and exegetical explication of the data of faith, they wouldn’t have cared. All right, if that’s the true answer to the question, fine. That wouldn’t really destroy things too much.
Because the whole interest of modernism really centers in that second and distinct overall problem, which, remember, was this: Never mind how many of these things called dogmas there are, and never mind how it came about that there was one time less and another time more. Never mind that. The question is, how do we interpret the set of dogmas? What is the history of the understanding of the meaning of dogma? Now, here, there is a life and death decision.
Because so far as I can see, there are really only two answers to this question or problem, this second overall question, really only two answers to it. Now, here they are. Once again, I’ll give you the orthodox answer first. It’s very simple. It is, you asked, what is the history of the understanding of the meaning of dogma? Well, there is no such history. There is no such history in an important sense because there is no such development of understanding. Rather, from the beginning of the church in Jerusalem to the present day, there has been one and only one acceptable, correct understanding of the nature or meaning of dogma, namely, the set of dogmas is a set of factually true statements revealed by God, which must be taught by the church without omission and which must be professed by the faithful of all epochs without variation in meaning. [ed. note: i.e., the Deposit of Faith] In other words, this first answer to our second overall problem says, it’s very simple what a dogma is, and there is no history to how the matter has been understood because it’s always been understood the same way.
A dogma is a sentence or proposition or statement, huh, which cannot vary in meaning and which is factually true. Now, it may be true of a realm of fact that you cannot get at with your earthly eyes, but that’s neither here nor there. It is, in the crucial sense, factually true. It is descriptively true, that’s what a dogma is, a statement descriptively true of a certain part of reality, namely, that part of reality which God had to reveal to us, which we could not acquire by our natural reason.
So it would always be false, absurd, and ridiculous to say that a dogma is an expression of sentiments, such as a thank you note. In other words, instead of saying, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, and interpreting that to mean that there is such a thing as a God who is one and who is the Father Almighty, as a matter of fact, we would be interpreting this credal statement to mean, thank you, God. Isn’t it nice that I am today? (audience laughing)
I conceive feelings of dependence upon greater things than I can touch, and so I say to whatever it is that inspires in me this feeling of dependence upon greater things than I can touch, thank you. Now, all right, is that clear?
So the first theory, then, is that dogma, the word, what we’ve understood the set of dogmas to be has always been the same thing, namely, a set of true propositions, descriptive of reality, which must be professed in a way which is invariant over time, it can’t change meaning. As a matter of fact, that very point was solemnly defined at the Council of Vatican I. Very important proposition. The Council condemned, as a heresy, the claim that dogmas of the faith could, by virtue of the progress of science, acquire a meaning different from that which the Church has always held, you see, or holds and has always held. All right, so now that’s the first answer.
Now let’s consider the second answer to our second overall problem. What is the history of the understanding of the meaning of dogma? Oh, there is such a history, by all means. (audience murmuring) Dogma, the understanding of dogma may be said to have passed through at least three stages, at least, maybe more, but at least three.
There are always at least three stages in these things. First of all, we may speak of the kind of the period of infancy. In this period, there is the stage of the generation of religiously powerful myths, the stage when man expresses powerful symbols, which he conceives to be the symbols of otherworldly realities. The expression and organization of these symbols is guided in this infancy period by the imagination rather than by reason.
Now, thus in the first stage, the Church’s teachings, the Christian dogmas, were understood to be religious symbols, symbolic of the invisible world, and thereby religiously significant, having a profound, vital, and moral import.
Then came the second stage. In the second stage, the system of symbols is gradually rationalized by means of philosophy until the faith becomes, if you will, a revealed metaphysics. The great, wonderful words of the Bible and of St. Paul, which were such powerful religious symbols, are taken by this new stage no longer as symbolic, but as somehow literally true, philosophically true statements about a metaphysical realm. The religiously significant God of Abraham is denatured into the prime mover of Aristotle, but the names are not changed. Abraham still hangs in the system. But you see, the religious guts have been lost.
Now, this second stage, of course, begins in the patristic period and culminates sometime after the Council of Trent. Now, even before the time of Trent, just before Trent, this problematic of reinterpreting Christian religious symbols in terms of metaphysics is losing its interest for man. Ah, yes, in the heyday of the schools, that was indeed, oh, that’s what everybody wanted to do. Good heavens, yes. By all means, let us have a systematic and complete revealed metaphysics. But this interest, this hobby, if you will, begins to wane, and the Christian mind, beginning in the Renaissance, forces itself to face new challenges. This second age, the age of revealed metaphysics, had been an age when the mind and the heart of man was fascinated by philosophy.
But now we enter a new age. Now the mind becomes fascinated with history and with the critical determination of facts. The new age being entered, therefore, is the age of critical historical consciousness. And the Christian mind forces itself to face historical facts, to face biblical criticism, and so forth. Now, once one enters this new framework of thought, one sees that dogmas will be interpreted as statements about historical realities. The crucial battle will become the battle between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, no longer between Thomists and Scotists. Between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, the question will be, does the dogma of the resurrection refer to an historical fact? Or does it refer to an event, if you will, of a transcendental character, one which no movie camera could have captured had it been in front of the stone, and so forth.
And which, therefore, for whatever reality it may have, oh, transcendental reality, no doubt, is not historical. And similarly, of course, the issue between the fundamentalists and the non-fundamentalists will be whether the virgin birth, or rather, the virginal conception of Jesus, is literal fact, historical fact, or not. Now, the modernist says that as soon as one faces the difficulties, the problems of biblical criticism, you see that dogmatic statements cannot be taken to be statements of historical fact. That’s out. Won’t work. Oh, there was an historical Jesus, but He never did much. There He’d become very mysterious, therefore, why anybody ever followed Him. But, so far as we know, He did practically nothing: Did not multiply the loaves, did not feed anybody with the fishes, did not predict his passion and death, maybe never went to Jerusalem, well, in any case, never did much of anything, see?
So, then, as soon as you understand that dogmas can no longer be taken as statements of historical fact, which is now the kind of fact which is interesting for man, see, man is no longer interested in whether dogmas might reflect somehow great transcendental metaphysical facts. Now, that’s no longer, no, come on, that’s school, man, that old stuff, that’s over with.
Now, the question is history, self-consciousness, the critical problem, and so forth, the question is, does dogma stack up as statement of historical fact, and by the time we get through rummaging through the sources it looks like the answer is no.
So, what do we do? Well, there are two possibilities. The first possibility is that you give up with this religion business and you join the Lodge. (audience laughing)
Or in Italy, the Carabinieri. (audience laughing) Religion is bunk. Ah, it becomes clear that the church, the Catholic church, was an ages-long deception. Ungrounded myths were foisted upon, millions of people locked in superstition and darkness, but now, thank goodness, some textual critic has come along and liberated us from all of that, and we are ready to build a bold and new future based upon secular values.
Now, there is a problem, as you all know, with that sort of person. That sort of determined, militant, anti-clerical, determinately secular sort of chap. Usually an out-and-out atheist. You know what’s the problem with them? They are boorish.
Now, you may think that’s an awfully trivial observation on my part, but it isn’t. In the 19th century, they were considered extremely boorish by cultivated people. You see, a cultivated person could distinguish between the beauty of religion and the so-called problem of the truth of religion. Now, a boorish, atheist-type, anti-clerical rabble-rouser is one who can’t make that simple distinction. The cultivated man, the man who has read too much literature to be really very comfortable in a meeting of the Masonic Lodge, which is, after all, not all that different from the Moose Club locally. Huh? A man who has read enough literature to appreciate, he sees that religion is fundamentally valuable. It is beautiful. Religious people are the interesting people.
Now, look, ask yourself, would you rather have dinner with St. Francis of Assisi or with Robert Ingersoll? (audience laughing) Well, it answers itself. You see, the religious people are the beautiful people, the interesting people. They have values of poetry and mysticism, which they can bring to their statements about the world.
And therefore, it’s perfectly silly to think that all of that should be thrown away because of a few little scraps of parchment and scratches on a page in some archive somewhere that prove that the resurrection never happened. Put that aside. Oh my goodness, don’t get hung up on that.
So this allows a new stage. We’ve been through two so far. There was the first stage of religious symbol when dogmas were taken to be symbols of an otherworldly reality, a messianic reality, an eschatological reality. Then, oh my goodness, came that nasty intermediate stage of revealed metaphysics when dogmas were taken as metaphysically true statements about reality.
Now, our experience of the critical problem has brought us to a new position. It is, here it is: Dogmas are symbols of man’s own religious consciousness or the exigencies thereof. Dogmas are symbols of something about man, not the next world, not the eschaton, and certainly not some realm of timeless metaphysics, but symbols of something important about man. Thus, modernism proposes that a new stage in the understanding of what a dogma is possible. And this new stage is defended in curious ways. Modernists always tell you that they are restoring the authentically religious sense of dogmatic statements, restoring the original symbolic value against all of that rationalism that came in between. So the modernist pretends to be at once a restorer of authentic religious value and a settler of embarrassing problems by way of a wonderful new theory.
Now, this last stage we’ve got three now, huh? This last stage, which we might call the neo-symbolic stage, the stage of restored symbolism. This new stage, my goodness, it can be further rationalized as anything you want depending on what interests you about man. Remember, in this stage, dogmas symbolize something interesting about man. If you are a modernist at the turn of the century, what interests you in man is his religious potentiality, his religious experience. Dogmas are symbols of that religious experience in its encounters with the several cultures through which it has lived. However, let’s call that classical modernism.
But suppose what interests you in man is not his religious potential, but his need to decide, his need to assert himself through existential decisions. (speaking in foreign language) Ah, existential decisions. This will produce existentialistic modernism, as in Bultmann. The dogmas of the New Testament, the symbolic language of the New Testament is a series of symbols about man’s existence, man’s existence as a self-actuating decision-making being.
Now suppose that that sort of continental existentialism leaves you cold. Suppose you think that the most important thing about man is his capacity to fashion out of the misery of this world that we have always known, a just society. Man’s greatest potential is his ability to take hold of himself, become the master of his destiny, and make a new world in which freedom, justice, and equality will prevail. Then the result is a Marxian modernism. The dogmas of Christianity become symbols of the revolution or of something connected with the revolution. Jesus becomes a revolutionary leader. The poor of the gospel who are called blessed are a symbol of the proletariat, and so forth.
And if that in turn seems to leave you a little cold, if you think revolution’s a little too rough and tumble, then it might be that what interests you about man is the phenomenon of love, community, togetherness, growing together as we experience one another in authentic encounters. Well, if that’s what interests you, then your modernism will be a sociological modernism. The statements of Christian dogma will be symbols of life in community. See? God and the dogma that God is love will be a symbol of the fact that we realize ourselves in love, that it’s in loving one another that we find our being as persons, that we come to be. So the secret of personal being is love. So the Bible says that God is love. You see how this works?
Now, what am I getting at? What am I telling you here? I’ve invented just off the top of my head at this moment five or six kinds of modernism. Am I telling you that modernism is not one thing? Am I telling you that we’ve got out all our butterfly nets here at this forum to go after one single gaudy colored beast, and what we find out is we’ve got a field full of different ones?
(audience laughing)
Well, in a way, yes, and in a way, no. And it’s on this point that I wish to close. Over time, oh my.
If you are looking for that one thing which modernism is on the level of what modernists believe, you’re not going to find it. It is not essential to modernism to believe that the dogmatic statements of Christianity are symbols of togetherness. Oh no, or symbols of the revolution. That is immaterial.
The essence of modernism, what makes it tick, what makes it one, is to believe that those dogmas of Christianity can be taken as symbolic language. In other words, what makes a modernist distinctive is not those ersatz or substitute dogmas which he really believes, because they could be anything. It’s up to any sort of taste. No two school principals in your local disastrous Catholic school system really hold the same commitments when it comes to that.
And as a matter of fact, von Hügel and Loisy and Tyrell fought all the time, cat and dog, over what was really real. So no, that’s not the issue.
The issue is what do you say dogmas are? If you say that they can be symbols, if you say that what was previously taken to be their literal meaning need not be their real meaning, if you say, in other words, that a dogmatic proposition can lose its original referent, what it was about, say God. See, look, God is love, it’s about God, right?
If you say that a dogmatic proposition can lose that original referent and become about something else, revolution, or togetherness, or religious sensibility, then you are a modernist. It doesn’t matter what you say it’s about so long as you say it can be about something other than what it was originally and always taken to be about.
In other words, modernism, I will, I’m really, I’ve got 30,000 more things to tell you, I can’t. I’m already over time. I’ll just close with this.
Modernism is unique in the history of heresies. It is the first purely metalinguistic heresy. Now let me explain what I mean by that word. There is object language and there is metalanguage. Object language is the language you use to talk about things. Metalanguage is the language you use to talk about language. When you talk about propositions, that’s metalanguage. When you talk about things, that’s object language.
Every other heresy in the history of Christianity had denied something in the object language. Had denied that God really was this way or that way. Had denied that the Pope is sovereign in the church. Had denied that man needs interior renewal to be saved. Had denied whatever it was, or had insisted on something false in the object language such as that God predestines many to damnation. Yeah.
Modernism, however, had the unique proposal to deny nothing in the object language of Christianity. To leave every dogmatic statement standing just as it was, but somehow to change the meaning of it all. Every item in the creed stands letter for letter the same, the only thing different is the creed is no longer about facts. It’s a symbol of dispositions or togetherness or something.
Therefore, modernism is the first purely metalinguistic heresy. That’s why it touched everything at once. That’s why Pius X could notice that it was like the amalgam of all heresies. It’s as though everything had gone screwy all at once. On every question, everyone had all of a sudden gone mad. It’s very simple.
Because the point of error centers on the very meaning of what we do when we say that this proposition P is a dogma. That’s where the heresy lies.
Now, if I had time, I would show you that the article, the famous article by Raymond Brown on the virginal birth of, a virginal conception of Jesus repeats exactly this fundamental metalinguistic thesis of modernism. I could show you the same for various key passages in Avery Dulles‘ book, The Survival of Dogma. I could show you the same in the 1940s French school of the Nouvelle Theologie. I could prove to you, did I have the time, that the current crisis in theology is in the crucial sense, namely, in the sense of its metalinguistic theory of what dogma is, exactly, exactly modernism. The resemblance is not superficial, it is essential. The differences are superficial.
Our current batch is in many respects less radical in some more radical than the old batch was. That’s not the point. The point is the very nature of dogma.
And the one proposition that you want to remember to combat modernism is that one defined at Vatican I, extraordinary magisterium, general counsel, infallible, the canon which says that it is a heresy to suppose that dogmas of the church can acquire, through the progress of sciences, a meaning different from the one which the church has always held.
That’s the one.
Thank you very much.
Marshner, William H. “Modernism and Evolution of Dogma.” Speech delivered at the Thirteenth National Wanderer Forum. St. Paul, MN 1977
