One of those days…
April 5, 2006, 11:10 am
Posted by J. Peter Nixon
Yesterday was an interesting day. I spent the afternoon in an upper level graduate seminar hearing presentations on feminist, womanist, tribal, post-colonial and queer theology. Then I came home and found the latest catalog from Ignatius Press sitting in my mailbox.
I suppose I could just shrug my shoulders and say “It’s a big church, eh?” But I do sometimes wonder whether we will get to a point where Christians from various traditions are going to lack a common theological language because we proceed from such radically different starting points. Something to think about I suppose.
Peter, we are already in that situation.
The difference between the average UCC and Southern Baptist congregations is so vast that it would take direct divine intervention to bridge the gap. Anglicanism and Presbyterianism are quickly approaching a point schism. Can Roman Catholicism be too much farther behind? However, I think the average (not the St. Blog’s types) Catholics don’t bother to fight that much; if they are unhappy they simply leave.
I have been doing some serious reading of Scripture lately, and I have come to have a great admiration for Raymond E. Brown S.S. My own background is also in reading and interpretation of texts from antiquity and he seems to me eminently sensible in a field in which outlandish opinions abound. Recently my wife pointed out to me that he is in the Wikipedia. The article is quite ordinary, but at the end are some references, all to other Catholics–I am not sure whether I ought to say scholars– who have very different views from Brown’s. I am sure they think, but I doubt they would articulate the thought, What hath Pius XII wrought? After all it was Pius who undid the didastrous strictures on Catholic Biblical scholars and among other things endorsed translation from original languages. Now there seems to be a countermovement. In the bad old days the existence of controversy was pretty much concealed from the laity by a combination of censorship, silencing, and caution. Now it is out in the open.