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Catholic World Report has published a translation of an important lecture by German, Catholic philosopher Thomas Stark on the philosophical foundations of Cardinal Kasper’s theology. In our recent post on Schockenhoff we claimed that the key to the neo-modernist crises through which we are going today is an erroneous theology of revelation. Stark shows, with the example of Cardinal Kasper, how this erroneous theology of revelation is founded on an philosophical errors. Kasper’s adopts from Hegelian philosophy a false understanding of the relation of truth and history. Stark quotes many passages from Kasper to illustrate this, including the following:
For modern thought, [...] history is not a moment in an encompassing order; on the contrary, every order is a moment which the next instant makes it relative. In this view reality does not have a history; it is itself history through and through. [...] History could not be experienced as history until historical tradition was no longer an automatically lived reality, but was felt as a past which had to be surmounted, which people were striving critically to get beyond [….] This meant a relativization of the previous argument from authority, and presented a fundamental challenge to the absolute validity of sacred documents. [...] The things that happen in history are theologically not mere stirrings on the surface of an eternal ground of being, not a fleeting shadow of the eternal, but the real nature of “things” themselves. There is no metaphysical structure of order to be disentangled from all the detail of history and salvation history. […] History is the ultimate framework of all reality.
We urge our readers to read the whole of Stark’s essay on Catholic World Report. The first step toward’s combating the new modernism is to identify its errors. It is useful to re-read Pope St. Pius X’s Pascendi, which identified most of those errors, and to take The Oath Against Modernism. After taking the oath one can share the image featured above, created by traditionalists on Facebook (h/t Ecclesia Dei Strikes Back).
