By Caroline Smith
Described as a book providing a ‘map of the territory’ of Catholic belief and associated debates, Catholic Theology, by Professor Tracey Rowland, was last week launched in Perth at The Dawson Society for Philosophy and Culture Speakers Forum.
Professor Rowland, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame Australia is one of the country’s most eminent theologians and a member of the International Theological Commission.
Launching the book on Wednesday 26 April, University of Western Australia, Associate Professor, John Kinder said it was an ideal introduction for those who have lived the faith but not studied theology, giving himself as an example.
“I have lived a lifetime of faith in Jesus Christ and along the way have read fairly widely and picked up, you might say, an amateur’s understanding of what theology is and what it offers the life of the Christian,” Assoc. Professor Kinder said.
“Here is a book that in just 200 pages of text puts all that into a context that acts as a sort of map of the territory,” he said.
“The book describes the field, shows what are the major points of agreement and the major points of disagreement, what the historical reasons for them are and what are the implications of different choices and positions.”
One of the key discussion points, he added, was the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, and its challenge to the Neo-Scholastic style of theology, which had dominated since the 19th century.
“By the mid-twentieth century, the Neo-Scholastic style had, in the opinion of many, reduced the faith to a set of logically impeccable statements of timeless philosophical truth,” Assoc. Professor Kinder said.
“Most of the important theological work in the Council, and since, starts from a rebellion against this way of living Christianity as a ‘philosophical straight-jacket’ of eternal, almost unworldly, truths.”
Following this presentation, Professor Rowland regaled listeners with her experience of writing the book, including the challenge of documenting such varied information and explaining ‘how Catholics do theology’.
“It’s very difficult to do that because there isn’t just one approach, there isn’t just one methodology. There are quite a few, and the Church herself recognises that it’s quite legitimate for there to be more than one approach,” she said.
“But there are some approaches that do fall off the edge as it were and part of the work of the International Theological Commission has been to write some articles… about what are the baseline principles, what principles can’t you violate when trying to formulate an approach to Catholic theology.
“So in the end, I came up with a metaphor of the theological zoo, and what I tried to do was describe the main approaches that are operative in Catholic Academies today, and I thought of the different theologians as different animals in the zoo.”
Using this approach, she was able to categorise theologians in terms of their ideas: for example, how they related faith to reason or nature to grace.
It had also been imperative, she added to consider the background of theologians, and how this had influenced their approach.
“I think that when studying Catholic theology, it’s important to understand something of the personalities of the great theologians,” Professor Rowland said.
“So that you don’t just approach a text and say, well Edward Schillebeeckx wrote that. It’s important to understand Edward Schillebeeckx’ life, the fact that he was from Belgium and the institutions in which he studied and who his friends were, and who influenced him and how they influenced him, and why they influenced him.
“I think all of that is important in trying to understand the intellectual life of the Church and so I tried to put in some of the more colourful details.”