The March 24 edition of the Tablet of London contains reader responses to Robert Mickens's article on Jon Sobrino's "notification" by the CDF. The full letters pages are available only to subscribers, but here's an excerpt from the best of the bunch.

We used to have a complex system of Theological Notes:criteria for assessing the soundness or unsoundness of theological opinions andthe weight with which they had been taught or disapproved of all the way fromdogmatic definition, through probable opinion and offensive to pious ears,to heresy. The structure became ludicrously cumbersome, but we need to rememberthe principles that it enshrined. According to the CDF, the aforementioned worksof Father Sobrino contain notable discrepancies with the faith of the Church.Is he being accused of heresy or merely holding opinions unpopular in Rome? The same sloppinessis evident in the Notifications use of authorities, as if passages in theCatechism had more or less the same doctrinal weight as deliverances of generalcouncils.

According to Fr Sobrino (the Congregation charges) the majorCouncils of the early Church have moved progressively away from the contentsof the New Testament. A little later: Although he does not deny the normativecharacter of the dogmatic formulations, neither does he recognise in them anyvalue except in the cultural milieu in which those formulations were developed.Not only is no evidence offered, in either case, in support of thesecontentions, but the passages that are cited from Jon Sobrinos work suggestthat both charges are incompetent and possibly malicious misreadings of histheology. Father Sobrino, we are told, reflects the so-called theology ofthe homo assumptus, which is incompatible with Catholic faith. Moreover, theCongregation disapproves of Fr Sobrino speaking of the faith of Jesus,because: If Jesus were a believer like ourselves, albeit in an exemplarymanner, he would not be able to be the true Revealer showing us the face of theFather. The issues here are complex, but that assertion is, to say the veryleast, questionable and its formulation tendentious.

 I chose those last two examples because readers of TheTablet might care to turn to pages 327-8 of Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory ofthe Lord, Volume I: Seeing the Form, where von Balthasar insists that the manChrist is a human being who has been assumed into God and that he possesses archetypalfaith.

(Professor) Nicholas Lash