Abstract
With this work, the German-French Jesuit Christoph Theobald completes his magisterial two-volume study of the reception of the Second Vatican Council. The first volume outlined the hermeneutical rule provided by the Council in its emphasis on the pastoral and missionary vocation of men and women. This second volume emphasizes the presence of the Church in history and society. Where the first volume focused on the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum as the key to and the intersection of all the questions treated by the Council, the second volume focuses on the diptych Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, and finishes with Sacrosanctum Concilium and Ad Gentes.
The second volume consists of three long chapters. The first chapter consists of a synchronic structural study of Lumen Gentium in its relationship to Scripture and the other conciliar texts, and shows that LG offers a perspective that unifies the plurality of ecclesiologies represented in the New Testament. T. maintains that both Benedict’s “hermeneutic of continuity” and the new approach to biblical canonical criticism open the way for a new phase of reception of the Council even while this ongoing reception navigates four fault lines: the question of the foundation of the Church, the relationship between Church and synagogue, the relationship between the local and the universal Church, and the relationship between charisms, ministries, and ways of life.
The second chapter is a diachronic study of LG with respect to the dominant ecclesiologies leading up to the Council of the Church as a perfect society and the Mystical Body of Christ. T. convincingly argues that the category of the sacramentality of the Church as well as the christological treatment in LG 8 of the analogy with the two natures of Christ were instrumental in reorienting the ecclesiology inherent in the Body of Christ ecclesiology in Mystici Corporis (1943). This reorientation de-centers the Church with respect to Christ and results in a re-orientation of ecclesiology to history and the world.
Chapter 3 considers the reception of the results of the first two chapters in the post-conciliar period up to the present. T. asks whether John Paul II and Benedict XVI represent the last popes of a Gregorian Church. Francis, with his polyhedric view of the Church and his emphasis on pastorality, represents a new way of proceeding in the Church. T. argues that this present paradigmatic shift represents a new moment in the reception of Vatican II, a shift occasioned by a changed context—best understood as a plurality of contexts—governed by a logic of inculturation and discernment, and characterized by ecumenical openness and missionary pastorality. T. shows that reception oscillates between taking the conciliar texts as normative rules to be applied and taking them as rules for discernment, a compass for the open road of the future. This reception further oscillates between an analytical approach that situates the unity of conciliar texts on a doctrinal or canonical level and an interpretation sensitive to the relational interplay begun by the Council and summarized by the pastoral and ecumenical principle that envisions a reform of Catholicism, but not a change in doctrine. Despite the paradigmatic shifts he outlines, T. maintains that the novelty of Vatican II represents a profound continuity of the Council with both the experience and concept of tradition, when taking into account both the kerygmatic and doctrinal levels of tradition.
The trajectory traced by T., from a societas perfecta to the people of God, reveals the orientation of LG towards universalism in its openness to the world and inclusivity of other Christians as contrasted with the ecclesio-centrism and more insular and self-protective posture characterizing the Church prior to the Council. Under Francis, the new way of proceeding and communicating in terms of synodality and discernment, the practical pneumatology implied in these practices, and the cultural and geographical diversity of those who receive the kerygmatic announcement of the Gospel represent a new reception of Vatican II. This is the “lived ecclesiology” which T. distinguishes from “thought ecclesiology.”
The prevalent category in this tome, as in all of T.’s. recent works on the Council, is the pastorality of doctrine serving the evangelistic mission of the Church. In concluding, T. distinguishes between the “sacred” and the “holy,” finding the relationship between the Gospel and the Church embodied in those Francis calls “the saints next door,” the lived ecclesiology.
T.’s meticulous examination and reframing of the texts in their intertextuality and historical development take their interpretation to a new level. While massive in scope and complex in design and execution, this is essential reading for any serious student of Vatican II.