It’s rare for me to hold a fashionable position but I am delighted to be in the company of high-profile people, from the historian Tom Holland to Bishop Robert Barron and the authors Michael Frost and Nijay Gupta, who all recommend making Christianity “weird” again.
For Catholics, this means putting our way-laid ecclesial car into reverse and backing out of the correlationist ditch theologians—notably with Flemish surnames—got us into in the 1970s.
“Correlationism” was the pastoral strategy of correlating the faith to the culture of modernity. In the 1970s it took such banal forms as festooning Catholic classrooms with posters featuring cute animals declaring “Jesus is cool.”
More recently, I read a report of the homily given at the parish church attended by the British royal family this Christmas. The vicar was reported to have held up a Terry’s Orange chocolate. This is a popular chocolate in the UK that is made in the shape of an orange with shards of chocolate that fall apart like the segments of a real orange. According to the report, the Vicar then explained to the congregation that Christianity is like a Terry’s chocolate. The spherical shape of the chocolate reminds us that the Christian message was intended for the whole globe, and the individual chocolate shards are like the good news of the Gospel to be broken and shared like the segments of an orange. Christian revelation was thus correlated to a Terry’s chocolate.
The intellectual argument behind such strategies to market the faith by correlating it to something popular and mundane was that the culture of Catholicism appeared weird to the modern sophisticated secularist. White First Communion dresses, Holy Angel sodalities, rosary beads, fast days and feast days, patron saints, confirmation names, eating fish on Fridays, holy hours of adoration, novenas, not to mention concepts like chastity and the virgin birth, certainly look and sound weird to the modern rationalist.
Thus, the idea arose that the way to bring the modern rationalist back to Christianity was to find something in the secularized culture that the rationalist liked and then tie the faith to it. So Jesus became a “cool” political activist, interested in social justice. His divinity was elided, his relationship to the other two persons of the Trinity rarely ever acknowledged, and those who wanted to bring in his mother, and especially the circumstances of his birth, were the subject of ridicule.
Moreover, whole academic departments engaged in projects to translate Catholic teachings into the idioms of the culture of modernity. Even the Catholic opposition to abortion was defended on the secularist ground that the developing infant had a right to life—not on the theological ground that all human life is sacred. The realm of the sacred had to be sidelined, since no common ground could be found in that quarter. The natural law tradition found itself transposed into the language of political “rights.”
However, somewhere between the late 1960s and late 1980s, modernity itself ceased to be fashionable. Some sociologists locate the moment of change in the cultural earthquake year of 1968, which marked the end of the Western elite’s enthusiasm for concepts like “pure reason” or “pure nature.” Reading Nietzsche persuaded the generation of ’68 that there are “myths” (theological presuppositions) lurking beneath all appeals to reason, and the view arose that nature was also relative since it could be changed by scientific advancements. In time, nature could be whatever we desired it to be. We just needed to develop the technology to fiddle with DNA.
Other sociologists and intellectual historians located the shift from the modern to the post-modern sometime around 1989. This is because faith in the pseudo-science of Marxism lingered on until 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down and one Communist government after another collapsed. The triumvirate of St. John Paul II, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and President Ronald Reagan put the Soviet system under enough pressure that it buckled when Archduke Otto von Hapsburg encouraged the Hungarian government to open its border with Austria. Over the course of one European Summer, thousands of academics re-identified themselves as “post-moderns” rather than remain on the wrong side of history as defeated Marxist moderns.
With the post-modern turn, concepts like “difference” and “identity” advanced to faddish status. No longer was there only one way to present oneself as an educated member of the professional classes. “Identity” was now linked to one’s preferred mythology. Taking an interest in religion was okay, but being a bourgeois conformist was not okay. Social conformism is intellectually boring. It cuts no ice on the university campuses of the world unless the form of conformism is conforming to the canons of post-modernity itself or what is today described as “wokery.”
Ironically, the correlationist project was precisely designed to turn Catholics into bourgeois conformists, lock-step in time with the movements of the Zeitgeist. Its guiding purpose was to close the gap between Catholic culture and the secularist culture. Karl Rahner famously argued that Catholics emotionally attached to pre-modern elements of ecclesial culture would need to be left behind in the Church of the future. They would be, in effect, collateral damage in the project of modernization.
Nonetheless, consistent with the post-modern turn, pastoral strategists who spent decades promoting sacro-pop music and folk liturgies and modernized prayer books and manuals of ethical behavior devoid of any reference to God, grace, or sacrality, just “principles”, woke up to find themselves surrounded by a generation who want to study scholasticism, attend liturgies in Latin and, in the context of ethics, want to know how this or that act impacts upon their relationship with God.
The very “weirdness” of things pre-modern is part of what makes them different and thus attractive to those of post-modern sensibilities. It’s a little like the difference between going into a coffee shop on some cobbled street of old Catholic Europe, with its not-to-be-found anywhere-else-in-the-world ambience and picking up a coffee at Starbucks. Those who were young in the 60s may have been excited by the proliferation of modern chain stores, replicated in every town in the country, but today’s youth are bored by this. If, for example, it’s the Feast of the Epiphany, they like receiving a little packet of blessed chalk from their parish priest so they can write the initials of the three magi—Caspar, Melchior,and Balthasar and Christus Mansionem Benedicat (May Christ bless this house)—above their doorposts. It might look weird to the atheist or neo-pagan neighbors, but it’s an affirmation of one’s Catholic identity and so playfully pre-modern!
However, there is obviously no virtue in being weird for the sake of weird itself. The reason that Christianity needs to become weird again is simply that it needs to be seen as a radical alternative to what we have now as our dominant social, political, and media-driven mythology. This is some kind of materialism—mere matter in motion—that contains within itself no telos, no inherent purpose and meaning. Today, the cosmology is not even Aristotelian let alone Christian.
Making Christianity weird again entails the suggestion that there is some logic, some order, within Creation. We then need to explain that the Creator of this order is God the Father, in unity with the Son and the Holy Spirit. In other words, we need to have the courage to acknowledge that our understanding of God is Trinitarian. While Kant said that it did not matter whether there are three persons in the deity or ten, he was dead wrong about this!
We must also have the courage to explain that God the Son did truly become incarnate of a virgin in ancient Israel. This proposition is super-weird, but why bother about Christianity if this is not true?
This second person of the Trinity was subsequently crucified by the Roman occupiers of Israel because he got the local Jewish leaders off-side by daring to say that he was the son of God. He also failed to garner the support of the Roman governor, who did not want to be seen protecting a potential rival authority to Caesar and, in any case, the governor had a mob baying for Christ’s blood—a mob that could prove difficult to control. This part of the narrative is not so weird because these political factors are easy to imagine; but then the weird returns with the claim that this really existing historical figure rose from the dead and, after spending some forty more days with his followers, ascended to God the Father.
These are certainly the most-weird elements of Christian teaching, but it doesn’t stop here.
We also need to bring back a sacramental imagination. This was one of the biggest casualties of the Reformation. A sacramental imagination means the ability to approach the whole of creation as revelatory of the divine, the ability to see how the material and the spiritual intersect. This, in turn, requires a belief in grace. We need to talk about grace more than we need to talk about social justice. Social ethics is a long way down-stream from anthropology. If our youth don’t have the faintest clue about Christian anthropology, then they won’t be able to tell the difference between a Christian conception of social justice and other conceptions on the political smorgasbord.
To approach the whole of creation as revelatory of the divine means explaining to people that every part of nature has been marked with the form of the Trinity. As the late Stratford Caldecott argued, “the ‘unity-in-distinction’ of the Trinity is the basis for an analogy that runs right through creation as a kind of watermark: the analogy of ‘spousal’ union between subject and object, self and other.” This particularly weird concept is the best way to account for the difference and the equality of the sexes—far better than anything feminist ideology has been able to devise.
Finally, of all the dimensions of the sacramental imagination, two of the weirdest are that the Body of Christ is really present in the Eucharist and that this presence is effected through the agency of a priest. Moreover, such priests acquire their spiritual power through another sacrament called Holy Orders. Priests are not glorified social workers, professional grief counsellors, or other styles of community elder easily understood by the mind of the rationalist, but agents of grace.
Such ideas are now gaining momentum. At least since the late nineteenth century there have been Catholic scholars who have argued that the project of marketing Christianity by reference to its ability to meet the goals of eighteenth-century philosophy is a doomed project. Newman called it promoting the religion of the age. Instead of looking over our shoulders at books by Immanuel Kant—the “Aristotle of Protestantism” as Ratzinger called him—Theodor Haecker suggested that we need to fight on sacramental ground. This is the ground upon which the earliest Christians fought during the Roman Imperium. In those times people across Europe gave up praying to the Roman gods and presented themselves for baptism.
Theodor Steinbüchel, a theology professor of the young Joseph Ratzinger, echoed Haecker. He said: “we must fight by amplifying the dimension of Christian mystery.” Gottlieb Söhngen, another of Ratzinger’s theology professors, observed that “the supernatural and the natural order do not lie next to each other, but the supernatural order encompasses and also penetrates the natural order.” Indeed, a Christian culture is precisely one where there has been a high degree of penetration of the natural by the supernatural.
The penetration of the natural by the supernatural is not banal, is not boring, is not a matter of bourgeois conformism. For the Catholic, it’s beatific and for the unbeliever fascinatingly weird and different—and it’s what we need now as an alternative to a bland materialist cosmology.
(Editor’s note: This essay was published originally on the “What We Need Now” Substack and is republished here with kind permission.)
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The most excellent piece ties in nicely with the recent one on these pages regarding the theology of deification. We need to speak to that modernist culture around us in words that they can understand our Catholic understanding that Christ came to deify man…by grace.
“Truth exists…the Incarnation happened.”
This declaration, by Warren Carroll (founder of Christendom College), is a brilliant distillation of the ultimate reality, of which Ms. Rowland has written above.
When I was a boy, in Long Island, NY, over 60 years ago, we finished every Mass with the recitation of the prologue of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God….”
“Modern theologians” like Cardinal Walter Kasper, and a local priest at a church we occasionally attend, think themselves profound in “de-mythologizing the New Testament,” as Kasper describes his life’s work. Their special emphasis is dismissing the testimony of the miracle accounts in the Gospels, and the authenticity of the Gospel of John. This gives them lots of “room to manuever.”
One might wonder about the miraculous overconfidence of men who expect to be believed when they tell the faithful “we probably don’t need to believe…” (to quote Kasper) the testimony of the apostles and evangelists. Which recalls to mind “the weirdness quote” of St. Paul: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied.”
Cardinal Avery Dulles once recounted (in First Things some 15-20 years ago), that he or a friend had seen a felt banner in a Church which read: “God is other people,” and he quipped in response: “Oh…for want of a comma.”
Psalm 19 gives answer with the testimony of the cosmos: “The heavens are telling the glory of God….”
Or as the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins writes: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
Stay weird, everyone.
As usual, great analysis from Tracey. The intellectual and pastoral bankruptcy of the 20th century Catholic correlationalist project is by now almost self-evident. And the remnants of that movement appear as an absurd self-parody. Sadly however, it lives on in the “Synodal Way”. Fortunately, this path is only of interest to a dying breed of professional ecclesial hand-wringers who remain fixated on “saving” the Church precisely by dissolving it and who think that the best way to reform the Church is to just get rid of it and replace it with some ersatz modern construction.
Let’s work on making Christianity humble again–less condescending and more ecumenical.
Mr James, Christians should be humble but Christianity itself is glorious & Christ is King.
Indeed, and yet:
“The really serious thing, in my view, is this fundamental breakdown in liturgical consciousness [where] distinctions between liturgy and conviviality, liturgy and society, become blurred [….] liturgy can only be liturgy to the extent that it is beyond the manipulation of those who celebrate it” (Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, “Feast of Faith,” Ignatius, 1981).
Instead, let’s make it more ascending, and less ptofane.
Great article. The subtitle might better read
“The penetration of the natural by the supernatural is neither banal, nor boring, nor a matter of bourgeois conformism.”
I agree we should rejoice in our weirdness (the Trinity, the Resurrection, the Eucharist — everything Ms. Rowland mentions) and that we should not be shy about proclaiming that weirdness! I might add that we should also jettison the weirdness that isn’t healthy — like unconfessed masturbation and missing Mass being mortal sins that will put us in hell.
To be fair Maria, unrepented mortal sin is exactly what can endanger our Salvation. We can’t read anyone’s heart & mind nor know how much consent they may have given in any instance, but objectively those are serious sins. And certainly nothing healthy for our souls.
About the incomprehensibly weird “intersection” of nature and grace, in their writings Benedict XVI called this biblical intersection “alarming” (incorrectly translated as merely “astonishing”), and von Balthasar called it a “collision.”
Also in his writings, Benedict explains why, as the advisor to Cardinal Frings at the Second Vatican Council, he rewrote the preparatory document for Dei Verbum to center directly on the historical “event” of the Incarnation, rather than on commentaries about the event found on Vatican letterhead. (The start of a lot of conciliar rewriting, which he insisted was not a “revolution” as some Johnny-come-latelies would have it.)
More than a cerebral “idea,” but a concrete “fact”: the “event” of the infinite Creator freely entering into the finiteness of his own and fallen creation! The humility of God?! The singular and only real “paradigm shift” in all of universal human history…
And yet, today we strangle under the un-weird weight of process-theology word merchants and marketers of bogus paradigm shifts, who would do better to simply reflect on the worldly wisdom of Winston Churchill:
“Men [walking together] occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
According to the report, the Vicar then explained to the congregation that Christianity is like a Terry’s chocolate. The spherical shape of the chocolate reminds us that the Christian message was intended for the whole globe, and the individual chocolate shards are like the good news of the Gospel to be broken and shared like the segments of an orange. Christian revelation was thus correlated to a Terry’s chocolate.”
****
Those were a part of my Christmases growing up, too. I still buy Terry’s chocolate oranges for my children. I don’t think it’s such a bad analogy. Assuming that one actually believes in the saving power of the Gospel in the first place.
A former pastor explained to us years ago that if you imagine the teachings of Christ to be a pie, the Catholic church has the fullness of His teachings, in other words the entire pie. Some of our separated brethren have varying amounts-some might only be lacking a slice, some several.
For someone like me, a non-theologian who bakes pies & enjoys Terry’s chocolate oranges at Christmas, the analogies work.
Since my little dog went on to his reward I have only myself to carry on conversations with at home & this morning I was actually thinking to myself about eccentricity & oddness in some Catholics I know. I suppose “weirdness”, too. I can do eccentric & weird, but I can’t do conspiracy theories & anti Semitism. Those are a bridge too far.
One comment: as I understand our history, the reason for eating fish on Fridays was grounded in the need of fishermen who, because of the increase of the population eating more meat, suffered a declining income. If this is accurate, fish on Friday was a direct connection to the culture of the time. It only became ‘weird’ over time as the justifying reason was forgotten.
That’s a myth. There’s a version claiming fish-on-Friday started because the popes made money from the fish trade in Rome. The point of meatless Fridays is not to eat fish but to not eat meat. Fasting and abstinence goes back to the earliest days of Christianity when meat was a special indulgence for most people. Ancient and medieval standards of fasting also forbade dairy and eggs. Even oil was off the menu in the East.
Last week I was watching an old Western TV show from the 1950s. The plot hinged on a bandit masquerading as a priest being exposed because he was caught eating meat on Friday. It was taken for granted that viewers would understand the point because “everybody” knew Catholics couldn’t do that. How times change.
Fish was cheaper too & more common years ago.
Saltfish used to be an inexpensive way of feeding slaves on plantations & because it was dried & salted it would keep even in tropical climates. Ackee & saltfish is one of the best loved dishes in Jamaica. Today salted cod is extremely expensive. Overfishing & cost of production I guess.
We used to enjoy salt herring for breakfast. You could buy it in a big plastic bucket & it didn’t require refrigeration. I miss that. A very few old timey restaurants still serve it but I’m afraid it’s really a taste of the past these days.
Instead of fish market economics, now about this?
…The fish, or ichthys, is a Christian symbol whose Greek lettering signifies “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” The fish was used by early Christians as a secret symbol to identify fellow believers during times of persecution.
Too often today, the fish is no longer such a symbol, and the Eucharist is only a symbol. These are the real Dark Ages.
“’Correlationism’ was the pastoral strategy of correlating the faith to the culture of modernity” (Professor Rowland).
“Correlationism” was (and still is) much more than an easily backed-away-from, ill-advised “pastoral” gimmick to entice those ensconced in “modernity” back into the Church.
Better known as “Modernism” in recent Church history, “correlationism” is the Heresy that that was defined and condemned by Pope Saint Pius X back in 1907.
Catholics in my octogenarian age group will likely remember that the Heresy of Modernism surfaced big-time in documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church changed. Shortly after the close of the Council, the Catholic Mass changed. The Catholic Church and the Catholic Mass “modernized.”
My memory is that most Catholics greeted the changes as surprisingly new and interesting developments in their age-old and seemingly never-changing Catholic Faith. It seemed as if many Catholics agreed with the thought that there had been something wrong with the Church—something that needed fixing, or at least modernizing.
Most Catholics welcomed the “New Mass” because it was in the vernacular, and they accepted their new participatory role of happily and loudly giving what had been the altar boys’ muffled responses to the priest in the “old Mass”—not fully realizing that the “New” Mass was not simply the “old Mass” translated into the vernacular, but rather was a subtly changed “Liturgy”.
The “old Mass”, known as the Tridentine Mass, was understood to be the non-bloody re-presentation of Jesus’ Sacrifice on Calvary—the “old Mass” had always been referred to, throughout the ages, as the “Holy SACRIFICE of the Mass.”
The New Mass, known as the “Novus Ordo” Mass, focused then as it still does now on celebrating the commemorative-meal theme in remembrance of the Last Supper, and it is punctuated by a participatory, communal “Sign of Peace” in which the people attending the Novus Ordo Liturgy exchange hand-shakes and pleasantries with their neighbors for about half a minute just before getting in line to be HANDED their Lord and Savior (God Himself) in Holy Communion.
Accompanying the changes in the imposition of the New Mass—perhaps not surprisingly—has been the cessation of belief in the Real Physical Presence of Our Lord Jesus (body, blood, soul, and divinity) in the consecrated host, among a clear majority of the Catholic laity—a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center concluded that two-thirds of Catholics no longer accept the doctrine of the Real Presence.
As a result of all the changes, after a decade or so of credulous enthusiasm among the laity, the downward trend toward the Church of today began to take hold.
Churches were no longer full. Sunday Masses began to decrease slowly in numbers and in attendance. Saturday Confession lines slowly shortened and finally disappeared. As vocations to the priesthood slowly dried up, parishes slowly became understaffed. Nuns slowly disappeared from Catholic parochial-school faculties. References to the old Baltimore Catechism became guaranteed laugh-lines in sermons. Slowly, as the initial credulousness and enthusiasm waned, the Church began to seem alien to some Catholics who remembered the Church of their youth. The Church was no longer thriving. It really wasn’t.
Nor is it thriving today, steeped as it is in the Modernist Heresy imposed on it by our current “Holy Father” Pope Francis. For the sake of our Catholic Faith, wake up and smell the coffee!
Indeed Catholic weirdness was and is in apposition to the modernist spiritually vacant mentality.
“The penetration of the natural by the supernatural is not banal, is not boring, is not a matter of bourgeois conformism. For the Catholic, it’s beatific and for the unbeliever fascinatingly weird and different—and it’s what we need now as an alternative to a bland materialist cosmology.”
Yes, this is the “target” to shoot for. This is certainly a search for the transcendent, for the “supernatural”, in the Zeitgeist so to speak. However, if the noetic is not exercised how can one “see” the supernatural? If “mystery” is ruled out by one’s anthropology and world view, how can one perceive its presence?
We, who profess to be, in essence, Catholic, recognize Christ “In The Breaking of The Bread”, thus the only thing strange about this Time in Salvation History, is the refusal to apply The Charitable Anathema to the usurper in The Papacy, who The Faithful can know through both Faith and reason, could not possibly be a “Vicar of Christ”, for Jorge Bergoglio, has demonstrated, at least from the time he was a cardinal, perhaps even before, that he does not have the ability or the desire to accept The Office Of The MUNUS and thus The Ministerial Office, having denied Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and The Teaching of The Authentic Magisterium, grounded in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, The Deposit of Faith Christ Entrusted to His One, Holy,Catholic, And Apostolic Faith, for The Salvation of souls. If it is true that Vatican II did not change any Dogma, then why are The Faithful reluctant to say, let the counterfeit church, with its counterfeit pope, and its counterfeit magisterium be anathema for the sake of Christ, His One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, all who will come to believe, and the multitude of prodigal beloved sons and daughters who, hopefully, will soon return to The One Body Of Christ, outside of which, there is no Salvation, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque).
There is nothing in our Catholic Faith that precludes us from being Disciples of Jesus The Christ or from being Good Citizens, for The Catholic Faith can only serve to enhance the value of The State. No, what is so weird about this point in Time in Salvation History is that we are in the midst of a Great Apostasy due to the fact that so many Baptized Catholic, having rejected God’s Gift Of Grace and Mercy, still claim to be, in essence, Catholic, while deny The Unity Of The Holy Ghost and thus the fact that “ It s not possible to have To Have Sacramental Communion Without Ecclesiastical Communion“, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost; “It Is Through Him, With Him, And In Him, Oh God Almighty Father , In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost” (Filioque) , that Holy Mother Church, outside of which, there is no Salvation, due to The Unity Of The Holy Ghost (Filioque), Exists.
The failure to use The Charitable Anathema, which comes from Christ, Himself, has created a situation where a counterfeit church is attempting to subsist within The One Body Of Christ, while denying The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, and thus The Divinity Of The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity, which makes that counterfeit church the church of The Great Apostasy, and a blasphemy against The Holy Ghost.
You can only have a Great Apostasy from The True Church Of Christ.
At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved.
“Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
“Blessed are they who are Called to The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.”
“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”
“Behold your Mother.” – Christ On The Cross
“Penance, Penance, Penance”.
Pray that those “whose competence it is”, will call for a Council to anathema this apostate church.
With respect, bishop Barron is a suprise given that he is a bit uncomfortable regarding traditional aspects of the faith and unlike him, Dr Tom Holland was one of the many who signed a 21st century “Agatha Christie” plea over the 1962 Missal!
I liked most of this article, but the relation of the divine to creation is not like “the difference and equality of the sexes”! Creation and Creator are utterly unequal and different. Man is in the image of God due to his possession of a soul, something creation does not have. Even the adoptive divine filation of men does not put them in relation to God as the persons of the Trinity are related.
Using Stratford Caldecott as an authority only explains where this notion came from; he was very much a gnostic, wedded to esoteric concepts that distort Catholic belief. At the base of all this is the revival of pagan animism that sees the material world as sacred in itself, and a subject of good and evil forces. For the Christian, the material world is good, because it was created by God, and can lead to him, but it has NO personality. It has no agency. It can’t engage in moral action, good or bad.
Animism is not an analogy for the seven sacraments, any more than paganism is a figure of Christianity, as ALL the “Christian” Gnostics around today allege. Here is a danger that many Christians cannot see coming, unlike “woke” values, which all can see a mile off.
Correlationism, as introduced in the 20th century by figures such as Edward Schillebeeckx, was not a mere attempt to “sell” the faith by modernizing it but an invitation to engage the intellectual and existential questions of modernity while remaining faithful to the core truths of Christianity. It sought to build a bridge between the timeless message of the Gospel and the evolving questions of human experience. Schillebeeckx, in particular, championed a theology that genuinely responded to the suffering and challenges of modern existence, thereby addressing both the spiritual and material needs of individuals.
Tracey Rowland overlooks the role that correlationism plays in creating a relevant and dynamic encounter between faith and culture. Her criticism that correlationism dilutes the distinctiveness of Christian revelation misses the point: it is not about conforming the faith to culture but about finding the language and concepts within culture that can most authentically carry the depth of the Christian message. Far from weakening the faith, correlationism seeks to make it more understandable and accessible, especially when faced with the complex issues and secular ideologies prevalent in today’s society.
Additionally, to equate correlationism with a theological “dumbing down” or compromise of doctrine is a misreading of its intent and significance. Schillebeeckx’s work, for example, affirmed the full mystery of God, the incarnation, and the sacraments, while also asserting the necessity of a theology that could respond to real-world experiences. Rowland’s critique of correlationism as overly focused on modernity’s language does not take into account that this approach can still uphold the integrity of doctrine while providing a means for evangelization in an increasingly pluralistic world.
To equate correlationism with aggiornamento (Vatican II’s “todaying” of the Gospel) is unconvincing, especially by citing Schillebeeckx.
Just to back up a bit – Flemish surnames of the ’70s drivers-into-the-ditch theologians, please.
Things went to the dogs when the Holy Ghost was morphed, rebranded?, in the English language as the «Holy Spirit»; a liquor confected by monks maybe?
The rationale appears to have been that English speaking children thought it had something to do with trick or treat.
The biblical Hebrew translates as the «Holy Wind», when you «tinker to improve» there is no telling what might result.
I still say Holy Ghost.
🙂
Thank you. For weird, witness the saints.
Said Cardinal Koch in Valencia, whilst accepting an honorary doctorate, “the so-called conversion to the world did not allow the leaven of the Gospel to permeate modern society more, but rather led to a broad conformism of the Church with the world.” That conformism of the Church to the world could be interpreted as a negation of the Church’s mission to wierdness.
It could also be named Apostasy.