Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today 5: Vatican II and “The Great Leap Forward”

Here are the first four parts of this series:

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 1: “New Territory” (0:00 to 6:50)
Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 2: “The Advent of Modernism” (6:50 to 15:55)
Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 3: “John Henry Newman” (15:55 to 21:42)
Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today 4: The Nouvelle Theologie Opens the Door to Modernism (21:42 to 27:20)

The opportunity for the nouvelle theologie to change the official face of Roman Catholicism came with the election of a new pope on October 28, 1958. His personal name was Angelo Guiseppe Roncalli. He took the papal name John XXIII. Unlike his predecessor, Pius XII, the new pope, although already an old man, was susceptible to the modernizing agenda of the nouvelle theologie. (27:20)

John XXIII profoundly believed that for a church living in the second half of the twentieth century, it wasn’t sufficient to stand still and just repeat everything it had said in the past. It was necessary, instead, to embark on a radical process of what he called, aggiornamento, that’s an Italian word meaning something like “bringing things up to date”. His instrument for achieving this would be a second Vatican Council. (27:52)

Thus when John XXIII summoned Vatican II, in 1962, his specific intention was not merely repeating or even clarifying what had been taught in the past, but rather, bringing about a religious leap forward, making Roman Catholicism more open to the transformed situation of twentieth century man. (28:16)

As the pope made clear in his address which inaugurated the council, his justification was that the “substance” of the ancient doctrine of the “deposit of the faith” is one thing, and the way which it is presented, is another. This distinction between “the substance of the faith” and “the way it is presented” was amenable to a “nouvelle theologie” interpretation. “The substance” was the person of Christ. “The presentation” was “changeable theological ideas”. (28:50)

The result of Vatican II was a clash of theologies and their representatives, with the neo-Thomist traditionalists fighting the modernizers of the nouvelle theologie. As David Wells recounts, when the two parties came to conflict with each other, three outcomes were possible. On rare occasions, one side prevailed unequivocally. Sometimes, when neither side backed down, a reconciling statement was drawn up, which was ambiguous enough to mean different things to the two parties. And sometimes, no such reconciling statement could be devised, in which case, the two opposing positions were simply recorded alongside each other. (29:41)

Perhaps the most important single victory of the nouvelle theologie modernizers was the rejection of the old traditional Roman Catholic doctrine of Scripture as verbally inspired and infallible. Vatican II instead teaches that Scripture is inspired only in terms of those things which God wishes us to believe for our salvation. In other words, of salvation. [It seems as if there was a bad edit in the recording at this point.] Matters of cosmology, history, geography, etc. (30:17)

Vatican II did a number of other things in its pursuit of aggiornamento, or updating the church, notably getting rid of Latin as the language of worship, and reforming the shape and the content of Roman Catholic worship, to make it more “people-centered”. As a result, a modern post-Vatican II service of worship, in, say, a British Roman Catholic church will now be little different from a traditional Protestant service. Hymns, Bible readings, sermons, all in English. (30:50)

This has all contributed to the view that what happened at Vatican II was a genuinely biblical reformation, such as the sixteenth century Protestant Reformers had called for. But the theological background to Vatican II’s work was, as we’ve seen, very different. Not an acceptance of Reformation theology, but the nouvelle theologie with its modernist ideas. (31:17)

So then, the problem that Vatican II bequeathed to Roman Catholics was a set of council documents which could often be interpreted in varying ways; an ambiguous blend of more traditional notions with the more progressive philosophy of the nouvelle theologie thinkers and reformers. Rather than resulting in clarity, what Vatican II did in many ways was to produce theological uncertainty within the Roman Catholic communion. (31:50)

I don’t imagine any of this is too different from what most of you would have expected. One of the primary things that has occurred in Roman Catholicism over the last 50 years, then was to try to work out these “ambiguities.” Given that Pope Paul VI was largely an ineffective pope after Vatican II, this task fell to Pope John Paul II, and his theological watchdog, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who was Prefect of the Congretation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office, and prior to that, the Inquisition).

The next installment talks about that process.

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today 4: The Nouvelle Theologie Opens the Door to Modernism

Here are links to the first three parts of this series:

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 1: “New Territory” (6:50)
Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 2: “The Advent of Modernism” (15:55)
Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 3: “John Henry Newman” (21:42)

Again, I’m continuing to post these, even though the audio version is available, because not everyone will have an hour to listen to it. (There are links to the audio and an outline in the first part of this series.) Needham’s lecture provides an excellent overview of the way that Roman Catholicism adopted liberalism into the heart of its structures at Vatican II.

Now Newman didn’t write his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine to justify modernism, but his ideas on how Christianity has changed and developed through the centuries were eventually to give comfort and inspiration to those Roman Catholics who wanted to reject the rigid theology of neo-Thomism, and instead promote modernist thinking. If Newman was right, and Christian doctrine had undergone this long process of development, then why should the church canonize the doctrine of one limited time period, the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century? Could things not develop still further? Could modernist thinking not be the development needed to meet the challenges of the 19th and 20th centuries? (21:42)

Now the official condemnation of modernism, by Pope Pius X in 1907, and the entrenchment of neo-Thomism in the official theological training of Roman Catholic priests, did not entirely halt the spread of modernist ideas. And after the first World War, a new generation of Roman Catholic thinkers emerged, who began to grapple again with the same sorts of ideas which had been condemned in 1907. Among this new generation, outstanding figures included the German theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984), the Swiss Hans Us von Balthasar (1905-1988), and the French thinker, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), and Yves Congar (1904-1995). (22:46)

The activities of such men gave rise to a broad school of thought known as the nouvelle theologie, “the new theology”. The movement is also known as ressourcement, which has the idea of “going back to the original sources and making them live again”, the sources being the Bible and the early church fathers. In fact, ressourcement was the name preferred by the practitioners of this school of thought. It was their neo-Thomist enemies who called it nouvelle theologie, “new theology”, meaning a novel, unheard-of theology, an invention never before seen. But nouvelle theologie was the name that stuck. (23:35)

Now the goal of these theologians was a reformation of the whole approach to theology in Roman Catholicism. In particular, they questioned three things:

1. the reigning orthodoxy of neo-Thomist scholastic theology;
2. the negative, defensive attitude of their religious communion toward modern civilization; and
3. its negative, defensive attitude towards other faiths, including both other forms of Christianity, and non-Christian religions. (24:14)

The nouvelle theologie thinkers tried to correct these errors, as they considered them, by exposing Roman Catholic theology to the liberating influences of the Bible and the early church fathers. However, what this often really meant, it must be said, was, the Bible, and the fathers, as interpreted by the nouvelle theologie. Together with this, they also advocated and practiced a broad openness to dialogue with the modern world, especially on matters of religion. Other aspects of the nouvelle theologie were a fresh interest in art, literature, and mysticism. (24:57)

Essentially, what the nouvelle theologie was seeking to do was free Roman Catholics from the strait jacket of neo-Thomist orthodoxy by making all theology relative rather than absolute. The Truth revealed by God, they argued, was not a set of ideas, but a person, Jesus Christ. Ideas were a human response to Christ, and these ideas were always inadequate, always caught up in the flocks of time and culture. There were different theologies held by different people at different times in the rich, diverse history of the church. Therefore, no one single theology, such as Thomism, could be canonized, and made absolute. (25:50)

Rather, theologians ought to engage with the different historical varieties of theology, and find tools there to construct a positive response to present-day challenges. Well, here were many of the themes of late 19th century modernism, in a new dress. This criticism was expressed in the encyclical, Humani Generis, of Pope Pius XII, issued in 1950. (26:20)

However, as Reformed theologian David Wells said, the encyclical was so mild its wording, it can hardly even be seen as a rebuke. The work of the new theologians was not imperiled, still less consigned to the graveyard of heresy. After a further decade of study, their conclusions seemed sufficiently safe and fruitful to be given papal approval. (26:48)

The opportunity for the nouvelle theologie to change the official face of Roman Catholicism came with the election of a new pope on October 28, 1958. His personal name was Angelo Guiseppe Roncalli. He took the papal name John XXIII. Unlike his predecessor, Pius XII, the new pope, although already an old man, was susceptible to the modernizing agenda of the nouvelle theologie. (27:20)

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 3: “John Henry Newman”

Here are the first two parts of this series:

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 1: “New Territory” (6:50)
Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 2: “The Advent of Modernism” (15:55)

Again, I’m continuing to post these transcripts, even though the audio version is available, because not everyone will have an hour to listen to it.

... the seeds of Modernism had been sown. And looming in the background stood the titanic figure of Cardinal John Henry Newman, (1801-1890). (15:55)

Newman had of course been a prominent Anglican, and he had converted to Rome in 1845. Now Newman was not really a theological liberal, or modernist at heart, but in the process of his conversion to Rome he wrote what was to become a key text for many liberalizing Roman Catholic theologians, both in the modernist crisis, and later, at the time of Vatican II. (16:32)

This was Newman’s “An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine”. Now Newman’s purpose in this essay was to put forward a new argument for the truth of Roman Catholicism. Prior to Newman, Roman Catholic apologists had maintained that Rome was the unchanging church founded by the apostles and carried on by the early church fathers. That modern Roman dogma and practice accorded precisely with the apostolic and patristic church of the first few centuries, including such things as the papacy, indulgences, purgatory, Rome’s Mariology, etc. Protestantism, by contrast, was marked by continual change and development, and therefore could not be in possession of the truth. (17:25)

Now for any Protestant who knew the history of the first 400 years of Christianity, this Roman Catholic thesis was laughable. Newman perceived this, and turned the argument on its head. “Development,” he argues, “is actually the sign of the fruit.” Ideas are like seeds. When first planted, they have a primitive simplicity about them. Their full meaning and potential are unfolded as they grow, in conflict with opposing ideas. When Christ and his apostles planted the seed of Christianity, therefore, one would expect to see a growing organism, which evolves and changes through the centuries, bringing to maturity more and more of its hidden potential. This, Newman contends, is precisely what we see in the Roman Catholic Church, which, of course, he identified, with the apostolic and patristic church. But, we see no such organic process of growth and development in Protestantism, which is wedded to the sterile and stagnant idea of reproducing first century primitive Christianity. (18:40)

Newman knew that his, for example, with its doctrine of the Virgin’s “Immaculate Conception,” was for Newman, not a betrayal, but a “development,” an unfolding of a seed idea, found in Scripture and the fathers, although made explicit only later. In this way, Newman turned on the edge the Protestant critique that Roman Catholicism did not look much like the church of the apostles or the early fathers. Does an oak tree look philosophy of development could justify all those features of Roman Catholic theology, piety, and worship, which Protestants had historically regarded as betrayals of the early church. Roman Catholic Mariology like an acorn? (19:30)

Now to be fair, Newman recognized that there could be illegitimate developments, corruptions. And he outlined a complex scheme of seven tests by which to distinguish these from proper developments. But in his own mind, he was perfectly convinced that 19th century Roman Catholicism was the historical continuation of first century apostolic Christianity. The early church was the primitive, undeveloped infant; Roman Catholicism is the mature and majestic man. (20:04)

Now Newman’s philosophy of development has won the day in modern Rome. Very few defenders of the old view can now be found. A cursory reading of modern Roman Catholic histories of the church and of theology will reveal Newman’s assumptions at work. It has liberated Roman Catholics from the unenviable burden of trying to prove that everything they believe and practice today was believed and practiced by the apostles (emphasis added). (20:33)

Of course Newman’s development thesis also chimes in with the pervasive evolutionary mindset of 21st century man. Like life itself, church and theology have evolved. (20:47)

Now Newman didn’t write his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine to justify modernism, but his ideas on how Christianity has changed and developed through the centuries were eventually to give comfort and inspiration to those Roman Catholics who wanted to reject the rigid theology of neo-Thomism, and instead promote modernist thinking. If Newman was right, and Christian doctrine had undergone this long process of development, then why should the church canonize the doctrine of one limited time period, the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century? Could things not develop still further? Could modernist thinking not be the development needed to meet the challenges of the 19th and 20th centuries? (21:42)

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 2: “The Advent of Modernism”

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today, Part 1: “New Territory” (6:50)

I’m going to continue to provide transcriptions from the lecture, Roman Catholicism Today, by Nick Needham, because he summarizes so well the evolution in Roman Catholic theology and dogma from, say, Vatican I to Vatican II, and not everyone has the opportunity to sit and listen to an hour-long lecture.

Now in order to understand what happened at Vatican II, we need to step back and take a bird’s eye view of Roman Catholic theology in the hundred years or so that preceded the council. No important event in history suddenly pops into being without causes or a background. There were streams of influence flowing within the Roman Catholic communion that finally burst forth at the Second Vatican Council and its decisions. (7:23)

Part of the problem for the great majority of Protestants and evangelicals, is that we know little or nothing of the history of Roman Catholicism after the turmoil and the conflicts of the Reformation era in the 16th century. We could, each of us, no doubt, without difficulty, name six Protestant theologians, preachers, or devotional writers who have lived and worked since the days of Luther or Calvin. How many of us could name six Roman Catholic theologians, preachers, or devotional writers, who’ve lived and worked since that time. Therein lies the problem. It is not our history, and perhaps inevitably, most of us know little or nothing about it. And consequently, we tend to view all Roman Catholicism through the distorting lens of the 16th century conflict. (8:23)

But you see, Roman Catholicism no more stood still than Protestantism did. It “developed” in all kinds of ways. It had its internal problems and struggles. It interacted with the changes in society brought on by such events as the rise of science, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the French Revolution, the advent of the modern secular democracy, and nationalism. It had its own distinguished men and women, theologians, philosophers, poets, humanitarian workers, and missionaries, whatever we may think of them. (9:00)

So, let’s try in broad brush strokes, to paint a rudimentary picture of what was going within Roman Catholic theology, in the century that led up to the Second Vatican Council. Prior to Vatican II, the official theology of the Roman Catholic communion was “neo-Thomism,” named after Thomas Aquinas, greatest of the Catholic theologians of the middle ages. “Thomism” [was] the theology of Thomas, and hence “neo-Thomism” the “new” Thomism. Neo-Thomism was a revamped Thomism, adapted and fine-tuned for the purpose of rescuing the church from an increasing diversity of ideas and theologies that had emerged in the early 19th century. Because Thomas and the theologians of the middle ages were known as “scholastic” theologians, you’ll also come across the term “neo-scholasticism” to describe this 19th century movement within Roman Catholicism. (10:07)

So then there was this attempt within the Roman Catholic communion to revive, to rehabilitate medieval scholastic theology in general and Thomism in particular, from around 1840 onward. Neo-Thomism especially, was given the official seal of approval in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Aeterni Patris of 1879, where Leo named Thomas as the great theologian of the church. (10:42)

Now this is the kind of Roman Catholicism still portrayed in popular Protestant books on the subject. For example, in the classic 1962 volume, Roman Catholicism, by the reformed writer, Lorraine Boettner. It was published during the early stages of the Second Vatican Council. But rather misleadingly, it describes the theology which had prevailed in Rome, up to that point. This is the theology that was essentially neo-Thomist, and also committed to upholding the teachings of the great Council of Trent, a 16th century Roman Catholic council which had reacted to the Reformation, and formulated its views in opposition to it. (11:29)

However, even during this era [the 19th century], when neo-Thomism was the official Roman theology, liberal ideas in various forms were circulating within Roman Catholicism. And these liberal ideas were collectively known as “modernism”. The leading modernist theologians within Roman Catholicism at that time were the German Baron Friedrich von Hugel (1852-1925), the Englishman George Tyrrell (1861-1909), and the French thinker Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), and Maurice Blondel (1861-1949). (12:15)

Now the essence of Roman Catholic modernism was to reshape Roman Catholic theology much along the lines of liberal Protestantism, and its leading thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher had radically reinterpreted and reformatted Protestant theology in this way. Rather than the teaching of an infallible Bible, Schleiermacher made man’s religious experience the heart of his theology. He was trying to respond to the challenges of the 18th century enlightenment, which saw the traditional arguments for the existence of God rejected by leading philosophers. It also saw the historical reliability of the Bible questioned within the church by critical scholars. Schleiermacher thought he could rescue Christianity from these assaults of skepticism. His method has been described thus: “Take heart, all is not lost. Religion does not need outside evidence to justify its existence. Religion is not knowledge, whether in the form of creeds, doctrines, or the content of sacred books. It does not need philosophical reflection either. The essence of religion is piety, and piety is feeling. If you have a feeling of dependence on God, you have all that is necessary to make you a member of the worldwide communion of saints or company of the truly religious. The separate beliefs and practices of the various religions scattered through time and space are simply different ways, all more or less valid, of cultivating and expressing this fundamental instinct or attitude or feeling of dependence, which by itself is sufficient.” (14:22)

Now Schleiermacher was eminently successful in persuading many Protestants to follow his program for reformatting Christianity, and so this human religious feeling and experience. The Roman Catholic modernists pursued a similar path, often with explicit reliance on Schleiermacher. Baron von Hugel, for example, was a disciple of Schleiermacher’s, and he introduced the great English Roman Catholic modernist George Tyrrell to Schleiermacher’s writings. These modernist ideas then, parallel to liberal Protestantism, were circulating among Roman Catholics, even during the heyday of neo-Thomism. (15:09)

But they didn’t escape criticism and censure. Pope Pius X, pope from 1903-14, condemned modernism in his decree, Lamentabili, and his encyclical letter Pascendi Dominici Gregis, both issued in 1907. He described modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies”. The Roman Catholic modernist thinkers, such as von Hugel, Tyrell, Loisy and Blondel, thus become the object of official scorn, and rejection. Tyrrell and Loisy, indeed, were excommunicated. However, the modernist seeds had been sown. (15:55)

And looming in the background stood the titanic figure of Cardinal John Henry Newman.

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today: “We are genuinely in new territory”

What follows is a transcription of about the first seven minutes of an hour-long lecture by Nick Needham on the state of Roman Catholicism today. Needham is the author of a series of works on the history of the Christian church.

This lecture is available at Monergism.com and also at ROCHE, (the Repository of Church History, etc.), where a brief outline is also available.

Nick Needham on Roman Catholicism Today
Martin Lloyd Jones gave a lecture back in 1967 at the British Evangelical Council Conference. The lecture was entitled, “Luther and His Message for Today.” Inevitably, in the course of the lecture, Lloyd Jones strongly criticized seven aspects of Roman Catholic teaching. He then anticipated the following objection. I quote:

“But someone may object at this point and say, ‘but are you not forgetting that Rome is changing? Are you not yourself falling back to the 16th century? Have you not been carried away by Luther? Are you forgetting that you’re living in 1967 and that Rome is changing?’”

All right, let us examine the change. The Church of Rome today is not identical with the Church in Luther’s day. Lloyd Jones then pointed out several ways in which Roman Catholicism today has indeed changed and is different from what Martin Luther faced in the 16th century. (1:17)

The most important difference that Lloyd Jones highlighted, I would suggest, was his final one. And again, I quote:

“Then others say, ‘what about their new attitude to the Bible?’ Let us face it. Did you know that the new attitude to the Bible, in the Roman Church, is mainly the higher-critical attitude? And that what is coming into the Roman Church, is modernism, liberalism and higher criticism. Not evangelicalism. Do not be deluded my friend. Those are the facts concerning the Roman Catholic Church. (1:58)

Now my talk this evening is really an exploration of the two basic points that Lloyd Jones made in 1967. Both points are crucial if we’re to have anything like a right understanding of present day Roman Catholicism.

First, Rome has changed since the time of the Reformation. It is pointless pretending that it is not so, and refighting the battles past, when the battle lines have been redrawn. That would be like Britain basing its defense policy on threat of a new conflict with Nazi Germany. Laughable, you may think. Yet something akin to that would be what we were doing if we based our attitude to Roman Catholicism on the obsolete battle lines of the 16th century. (2:53)

Those battle lines were seriously and fundamentally redrawn by the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962-65. This was a global assembly of Roman Catholic clergy and theologians that met in Rome to enact reform within their religious communion. The Second Vatican Council was undoubtedly the watershed that marked the birth of modern Roman Catholicism. It’s called “the second” in succession to the First Vatican Council of 1869-1870. The two councils are often referred to in shorthand simply as “Vatican I” and “Vatican II”. (3:40)

Vatican I was the council that for the first time defined the nature of the infallibility of the pope and made this a positive dogma binding on “the faithful.” That council broke up without being officially dissolved, owing to the invasion and occupation of Rome by the army of Victor Emanuel, king of the newly united Italy. The second Vatican council, Vatican II, was therefore perceived by many as a sort of continuation of Vatican I, resuming and completing its work. When Vatican II undertook that task, however, the whole climate of thought within Roman Catholicism had changed, and the result would undoubtedly have shocked most of those who had taken part in Vatican I. (4:34)

Martin Lloyd Jones, then, speaking in 1967, only two years after the conclusion of Vatican II, recognized very clearly what winds of change that council had unleashed within the Roman Catholic communion. If we today would grapple truthfully with modern Rome, I suggest as a matter of urgency that we must follow in Lloyd Jones’s footsteps. We must candidly acknowledge the reality of the change that took place in Roman Catholic theology, and seek to understand its nature and implications. That’s the first point. (5:15)

And then second, the most significant aspect of this change, lies in a new attitude to Divine Revelation on the part of Roman Catholic theology. A new attitude to Divine Revelation. Lloyd Jones expresses this in terms of Rome’s attitude to the Bible, embracing liberal Protestant ideas that limited inspiration and accuracy. We can perhaps expand Lloyd Jones’s point by asking about Rome’s attitude to “truth”. In what sense does the Bible contain “exclusive religious truth.” And in what sense is that truth necessary for salvation? These two related questions take us into the heart of modern Roman Catholicism. (6:05)

Now we’ll see later what this involves. But here is a real and critical change in mainstream Roman Catholic thinking, and it has rendered most of the past controversies redundant. We are in genuinely new territory in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, as Lloyd Jones rightly perceived. I reiterate his cry, “do not be deluded my friends, those are the facts concerning the Roman Catholic Church.” A new appreciation and a new critique are called for on the part of Christians who still resist the claims of Rome, if we’re to be honest and not live in the past. (6:49)

More to follow, Lord willing...