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| The Rev. Fr. Eberhard Schockenhoff |
According
to Edward Pentin, “the ‘mastermind’ behind much of the challenge to settled
Church teachings among the German episcopate,” and “the leading adviser of the
German bishops in the run-up to the synod” is Fr. Eberhard Schockenhoff, professor of moral theology at
the University of Freiburg, about whom we
have had occasion to report in the past. It is a sign of the state of
theology in the German speaking world that Fr. Schockenhoff is considered a
theological “moderate.” He is careful to quote the Fathers and Doctors of the
Church to support his positions, and always makes a show of respect for
magisterial teaching. This is probably the reason why the German bishops have
chosen him, and not one of his more extreme colleagues to help them make the
case for changing the unchangeable teachings of the Church on sexual morality.
Fr. Schockenhoff’s moderation is, of course, only a matter
of style; an examination of his work shows him to be a dedicated neo-modernist.
He lays out the fundamental principles of his theology in a remarkably clear
and short book, Erlöste Freiheit [Redeemed
Freedom], to which we refer in the page and section numbers below.
The fundamental principle of Schockenhoff’s theology is a certain
understanding of revelation. According to Schockenhoff’s tendentious reading of
Dei Verbum (which follows that of Max
Seckler), Vatican II abandoned the traditional understanding of revelation as
divine instruction and adopted a new understanding of revelation as
“dialogical-communication” between God and man. This dialogical communication
is a personal encounter with God, in which God communicates not truths that
could be expressed in propositions, but rather simply His love. This entails a
clear rejection of the definition of faith in Pope St. Pius X’s Oath Against
Modernism: “a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by
hearing from an external source.” For Schockenhoff, faith is not assent to
propositional truths proposed from without, but rather a personal encounter
with God’s love
From this basic principle Schockenhoff draws some rather
astonishing consequences. He argues that God’s dialogue of love with creatures
implies a limitation of God’s omnipotence.
God in creating free creatures to share His love allows Himself to be determined by human freedom (p. 54).
This frankly blasphemous conclusion is part of a complete reworking of the
relation between three terms that Schockenhoff takes to be the “fundamental
values of Christianity”: freedom, truth, and love. He argues that abandoning
the traditional understanding of revelation as divine instruction means that
one can abandon the traditional idea that freedom and love both depend on truth (p.42). Instead, freedom and truth
have to accompany each other:
The interior relation to the freedom of the subject follows necessarily from the epistemic presuppositions of revelation theory. Religious truth exists only concretely as the freely grasped subjective conviction of individual persons, and not as an abstract quantity, toward which the human person could have moral duties such as assent, acknowledgement, and obedience. (p. 44).
Thus religious truth takes on a particular personal form for
each believer (p. 45).
The moral life on this account does not consists in ordering everything to God as final end, and thus in conforming to God’s will. Rather the moral life is a free
dialogue of love with God, in which human persons freely cooperate in
building up His creation (p.97). It is obvious that this approach can do away
with the whole structure of traditional Christian morality. Moreover,
Schockenhoff is quite clear that it excludes the traditional understanding of a
great many doctrines of faith as well. Thus Schockenhoff explicitly states that
his theology is not compatible with the teaching that Our Lord died in satisfaction
for our sins (p. 58).
The case of Schockenhoff shows that present crisis is only superficially about sexual morality.
The real issue is the nature of revelation and of faith. The fundamental
problem with theologians such as Schockenhoff is a neo-modernist understanding
of revelation. We are thus in full agreement with the
insightful analysis recently offered at the traditionalist blog Laodicea:
Most of the particular controversies that have devastated the vineyard over the last hundred years are corollaries of the basic dispute, proxy wars for the real conflict. The basic question is this: is faith “a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality” or is faith “a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source”?
As a kind of test to see how someone understands faith Laodicea offers the question as to
whether explicit faith is necessary for salvation:
“can someone be justified after the age of reason without explicit faith in the Trinity and the Incarnation?” If you answer ‘yes’ to that question you are ultimately forced into accepting Modernism, if ‘no’ into rejecting it.
If one applies this test to Schockenhoff the result is entirely clear. In his discussion of eschatology, Schockenhoff argues that universal salvation is possible, but that God will make it depend on whether the victims of injustice freely choose to forgive those who harmed them. Only if the victims forgive will all men be saved (section 14.3). He makes no attempt to square this bizarre fantasy with the words of our Lord in Mark 16:16: “He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned.”
