389 - The Schillebeeckx Reader

The Schillebeeckx Reader
By Edward Schillebeeckx
New York, Crossroad, 1984. 334 pp. $22-50.

It is a talented individual who can introduce and assemble a coherent anthology from a bibliography covering twenty-five pages, forty years, and a landscape of theological topics replete with exotic forms. Fortunately, Robert Schreiter, the editor of this volume, has a predatory instinct for substance and a disarming ability to allow the configurations of Schillebeeckx' intellectual and spiritual adventures to appear in clear English. This is no small task given an occasionally labored style palpably present in the Dutch theologians writings.

In each of the six sections, there is an evident progression with Schillebeeckx' thought, a rhythmic growth combining tradition with innovation. The latter, of course, has brought worldwide publicity to the writer. A careful reading, however, suggests that while the innovative aspects of Schillebeeckx' thoughts have brought him some publicity, the talisman that makes him part of the classic Christian tradition is very likely the strong sense of belief and hope that he brings to his theological tasks, two virtues that are of their very nature creative.

The megastructure of the eighty essays is chiastic experience (Part One), the experience of God (Part Six). In between experience and the experience of God are set the interpretation of the Christian experience (Part Two) and Jesus and the Church (Parts Three, Four, and Five). Thus, we encounter a work that seeks to analyze human experience and transform it by making visible divine realities, the accessibility of the ever hidden God.

Schillebeeckx was born in 1914, entered the Dominicans in 1934, did his doctoral work in Paris, taught at Louvain, published his dissertation in 1951, taught dogmatic theology to Dominicans until 1958, and then occupied the Chair of Dogmatics and the History of Theology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In the sixties, he served as advisor to the Dutch bishops at Vatican II. Many readers may have heard the gentle voice of this white-haired figure in the mid-1960s in the United States at one of the many symposia that characterized that era.

The greatest intellectual (and, I suppose, spiritual) influence on him was Chenu, who insisted on combining solid historical research with concern for the present status and influence of the Church. This may seem to be an insignificant and trivial observation. But anyone who studied Catholic theology from the time of the Syllabus Errorum to the modern era is fully aware of the difficulty, particularly in seminaries, of holding solid historical research and the de facto situation of the Church in an equipoise that would satisfy intellectual integrity and ecclesiastical authority simultaneously. Schillebeeckx was certainly not the first, but he was among the most outspoken of those who noted the inadequacy of textbook theology to deal with the realities of belief in the modern world.

390 - The Schillebeeckx Reader

Human experience was simply out-distancing theological explanation. Schillebeeckx' contribution was to articulate the authority of the common human experience and to interpret this experience with the religious resources capable of elevating and transforming the experience. He is part of what he calls a critical community within the Church, a community that should be informed and judged by charity as an informing principle. Like Aquinas, he has perceived thinking as a form of service, service to the truth, and, therefore, service to the community. Such an understanding is more than mere ceremonial idiom, as this volume readily demonstrates.

P. Joseph Cahill
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta