Theologians' meeting sets tone of reconciliation
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- There was uncertainty among the theologians who gathered June 9 for the opening of the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America. In the weeks leading up to the conference, relations had soured between the U.S. bishops and theologians.
Now San Jose Bishop Patrick J. McGrath was set to welcome the theologians to his diocese and he would be the first person to address the entire group, possibly setting a tone for the sessions to come.
It was last March that relations between the bishops and scholars turned south. The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine had quietly examined a 2007 book by one of the society’s most respected members, St. Joseph Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, former society president and professor of theology at Fordham University in New York. The committee found the book, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God to contain theological errors and to undermine the Gospel, heavy judgments against the work of a theologian.
Making matters worse, it soon came out that the committee had adjudicated without communicating with Johnson.
Within weeks the Catholic Theological Society of America’s 10-member board shot back, charging the bishops had misrepresented the book’s intention and contents, had misunderstood its arguments, and had failed to follow U.S. episcopal guidelines aimed at resolving conflicts between bishops and theologians.
The back-and-forth continued. The committee’s head, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, defended its action. Johnson, meanwhile, came forward with a meticulous defense of her own (see story on Page 11).
Now it was McGrath’s turn -- and he was stepping behind a podium ready to say something to the more than 325 theologians in the audience. It took the soft-spoken and self-deprecating prelate less than two minutes to break through any tension in the room, telling his audience he respected their work and found it vital for the health of the church.
Noted McGrath: “There was a time when the church’s best theologians were bishops.” He paused and then added, “But that was a long time ago.”
His audience burst into laughter. McGrath then praised one of Johnson’s books, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints , reading a passage from it while emphasizing his personal respect for Johnson.
By the time he finished his welcoming address, the theologians were on their feet offering a lengthy standing ovation.
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“It is the church and not individuals who are called holy in the New Testament.” This model worked well early on, she continued, but it eventually ran into problems as the church grew and clearly members within it were not acting in “holy ways.
and a Russian Orthodox church built in 2008. About a thousand inmates are held in the main section of the prison, with another 300 in a nearby higher-security section. An official at the camp's production department, asking not to be quoted by name,
My parents really were married in the Swedenborgian church in San Francisco and the map shown in the movie is right in that they lived very close to where Ginsberg wrote "Howl." He was director of the Oakland Art Museum from 1954 to 1970,
In fact, any good harmony has lots of different voices, just like that early Church. What's just as important as Pentecost is what happened after Pentecost. The early Christians started sharing everything they had. Former enemies became friends.
Eventually, fire marshals and sheriffs condemned the "campus" as unfit for habitation, pushing the student body into transience in church foyers and public parks. The teachers were mostly in their early 20s. An afternoon for the high school students
SOLA SCRIPTURA AND THE EARLY CHURCH : Apprising Ministries
Is the teaching and belief that there is only one special revelation from God that man possesses today, the written Scriptures or the Bible, and that consequently the Scriptures are materially sufficient and are by their very nature as being inspired by God the ultimate authority for the Church. This means that there is no portion of that revelation which has been preserved in the form of oral tradition independent of Scripture. The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, on the other hand, declared that the revelation of God was not contained solely in the Scriptures.
It was contained partly in the written Scriptures and partly in oral tradition and therefore the Scriptures were not materially sufficient. This was the universal view of Roman Catholic theologians for centuries after the Council of Trent and is the predominant view today. It is interesting to note, however, that in Roman Catholic circles today there is an ongoing debate among theologians on the nature of Tradition. There is no clear understanding of what Tradition is in Roman Catholicism. Some agree with Trent and some don’t. But the view espoused by Trent is contradictory to and is a repudiation of the belief and practice of the Church of the patristic age. The early Church held to the principle of sola Scriptura in that it believed that all doctrine must be proven from Scripture and if such proof could not be produced the doctrine was to be rejected.
From the very beginning of the post apostolic age with the writings of what we know as the Apostolic Fathers we find an exclusive appeal to the Scriptures for the positive teaching of doctrine and for its defense against heresy. The writings of the Apostolic Fathers literally breathe with the spirit of the Old and New Testaments. With the writings of the Apologists such as Justin Martyr and Athenagoras in the early to mid second century we find the same thing. There is no appeal in any of these writings to the authority of Tradition as a separate and independent body of revelation. It is with the writings of Irenaeus and Tertullian in the mid to late second century that we first encounter the concept of Apostolic Tradition that is preserved in the Church in oral form.
The word Tradition simply means teaching. But what do these fathers mean when they say this Apostolic Teaching or Tradition is preserved orally. All they mean is that the Bishops of the Church preach the truth orally and anyone interested in learning the true Apostolic Tradition could learn by simply listening to the oral teaching of the Bishops of any orthodox Church of the day. Irenaeus and Tertullian state emphatically that all the teaching of the Bishops that was given orally was rooted in Scripture and could be proven from the written Scriptures. Both fathers give us the actual doctrinal content of the Apostolic Tradition that was orally preached in the Churches and every doctrine is derived from Scripture. There is no doctrine in this Apostolic Tradition that is not found in Scripture.
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