LECTIO MAGISTRALIS AT THE AWARD CEREMONY FOR THE DOCTOR HONORIS CAUSA DEGREE
IN THE AULA MAGNA OF THE RECTORATE OF CHARLES UNIVERSITY IN PRAGUE
8 January 2025
BEING DISCIPLES OF GOD
On the sense and mission of Christian theology
Your Magnificence,
Spectabiles,
Honourable guests,
First of all, I would like to express my sincere thanks for the great honour you bestow upon me by awarding me the Doctor honoris causa. I am very pleased to receive this honour from the university founded by Emperor Charles with the privilege given by Pope Clement VI in 1348, which, like the city of Prague itself, represents an important bridge between East and West as well as between North and South, and thus has an atmosphere of universality. The awarding of an honorary doctorate by a theological faculty seems to me to be a welcome invitation to give an account of the sense and mission of Christian theology, especially at a university, in a short lectio magistralis. This is all the more appropriate as the initiative to award the honorary doctorate comes from three theological faculties: Catholic, Protestant and Hussite.
Centrality of the question of God
I know of no better and more adequate description of this than the one we owe to Jesus Himself, who, in His great address on the Bread from heaven in the synagogue of Capernaum, refers back to the prophets, in whom it is promised that all will be 'disciples of God' (John 6:45). This is a precise description of what a Christian is who studies or teaches theology. He is called and obliged to become, and to be, a ‘disciple of God’ more and more. He is already obliged to do so by the name of this science, which assigns theos to a logos and thus expresses the fact that theology ultimately has only one subject, insofar as it is, first and last, and at its centre, about the reality of God.
Theology is to be understood as the thinking and saying of God, more precisely as the science of God. The living reality of God is the exclusive one subject of the theological responsibility of the Christian faith. Of course, this does not apply in the sense of an abstract specialism. Rather, in recognising its one subject, namely God, the intellectual responsibility of faith must at the same time recognise all reality and, thus, everything that is in any way the content of human experience of reality as determined by God, bringing it to understanding, and addressing the generally experienceable and also extra-theologically reflected reality in its relation to God, namely ‘sub specie aeternitatis Dei’. Theology can only credibly take responsibility for the exclusive one subject of theology, namely the reality of God, if it simultaneously and inclusively addresses all objects of the experience and knowledge of reality. For anyone who deals with God as the all-determining and all-encompassing reality is also dealing with everything, as St Thomas Aquinas firmly emphasised in his ‘Summa contra gentiles’: ‘multa praecognoscere theologus oportet’.[1] In that theology takes place as an explication of the one theme of God, it simultaneously constructs itself as a theology of the universal reality. Only in this way can the term ‘theology’ truly be honoured.
This paraphrase specifically implies that, on the one hand, theology must address many things, including all questions of human existence, the organisation of the world, and the shape and order of the Church. On the other hand, however, the actual and, in some ways, the only subject of theology is God, because ultimately all major questions can be traced back to the question of God. In this elementary sense, God is, as it were, the only subject of theology, albeit in such a way that everything else that can and must also be a subject of theology must be considered in the light of God.
Recalling the theological centrality of the question of God is particularly pertinent in today's time and society, where many people can no longer perceive God as a present reality in their lives and in the world, but rather live as if God should not exist: etsi Deus non daretur. In this day and age, we suffer from a kind of deafness, or even an inability to hear God's presence. In such a context, there can be no greater priority for theology than helping people today rediscover access to God, His vitality, and His truth. The special responsibility of theology, therefore, is to nurture the passion and sensitivity for the question of God in today’s Church and society, and to do so in the service of the humanity of man, of whom we as Christians are convinced that he is created in relation to God and in whom therefore lives a thirst for the infinite.
Theology today can only fulfil this task in ecumenical community, as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out, especially in remembrance of the Reformation work of Martin Luther, who was driven both existentially and theologically by the question of a gracious God: ‘Our first ecumenical service in this time must be to bear witness together to the presence of the living God and thus give the world the answer it needs.’[2]
In addition to ecumenical responsibility, Pope Benedict XVI has also called on theology to engage in ‘intellectual dialogue between agnostics and believers’ and explained this during his visit to Prague on 26 September 2009: ‘They both need each other: the agnostic cannot be satisfied with not knowing whether God exists or not, but must seek and perceive the great heritage of faith; the Catholic cannot be content with having faith but must seek God even more, and in dialogue with others must re-learn God more deeply.’[3]
Theological dialogue between faith and reason
In order to fulfil this responsibility, theology must engage in a dialogue between Christian faith and human reason. This task arises naturally from the self-understanding of the Christian faith itself. For faith is, as the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury classically formulated, fides quaerens intellectum: it is a faith that seeks its own reason. Faith wants to know what it believes and why it believes it. Just as everyone who truly loves another feels an interior longing to better know that person, believers also strive to become familiar with the living God, by whom they know themselves to be loved and whom they love in return, and to recognise Him with their reason. For the Christian faith is convinced that God Himself is Logos, Word and Sense, Reason and Truth, and that He can therefore also be recognised by the powers of human reason.
It is rooted in the Christian idea of God that theology endeavours to prove the credibility and reasonableness of the Christian faith and thus the inner correlation of fides et ratio, of faith and reason. The Christian faith is by no means opposed to human reason, but rather opens up reason and thus the horizon of the thinking human being. Faith and reason are therefore interdependent, and only in mutual dialogue can both the maladies of faith and the pathologies of reason be overcome. For without reason, faith threatens to obscure its truth and become fundamentalist, just as, conversely, reason without faith threatens to become unilateral and unidimensional.
The fact that Christian faith seeks and cultivates contact and dialogue with the human thought follows from the very nature of this faith itself, namely that it seeks its own reason and therein the reasonableness of all that is real and claims to be true and expects people to be able to recognise truth. Just as St Augustine's theological thinking was based on the fundamental question of what man desires more than truth – "Quid enim fortius desiderat anima quam veritatem?"[4] – Christian faith regards man not only as a being capable of truth, but also as a being in need of truth, whose deepest longing is directed towards the knowledge of truth. For the question of truth and the question of man are ultimately identical.
This claim is the reason why the ecclesial awareness of faith must be open to the possibilities of thought, as was already expressed in an exemplary way in the theology of the early Church. Its greatness lay not least in the fact that it was inspired by the confidence that Christian faith and human reason cannot contradict each other, but rather that faith is in league with reason. This claim must also and especially be fulfilled in the exposed situation of faith and Church in today's public society.
In order for the symphony of faith and reason to be adequately considered and realised, Christian faith is fundamentally dependent on theology and, as a result, theology has a very high status in the field of Christianity than in almost any other religion. This characteristic of Christianity can be seen also in the fact that the first universities in the Christian Occident were founded on the initiative of the Church, that the mother faculty was always the Faculty of Theology and that the Church still has an interest to this day in ensuring that the Christian faith is represented at the university by the Faculty of Theology.[5] For when Christian theology speaks of God, it is not only talking about a theological truth, but is also thinking of the entire field with which the various sciences at a university are concerned.
Advocate for the transcendence of the human being
On the other hand, a university cannot just be a place for dialogue between the individual sciences, but must also and primarily be centred on the ‘universitas’ of everything real and its context of sense and thus about truth, as the important Catholic theologian Romano Guardini emphasised in a rather confused time as the essence of academia: ‘If the university has an intellectual sense, it is that of being the place where the truth is enquired into, the one truth - not for the sake of an purpose, but for its own sake: because it is truth.’[6] If a university no longer sought the truth, the university, as its name suggests, would no longer be a university, but would probably be more honestly called ‘diversity’. In order for the university to remain a university, theology must also contribute by making the most universal reality of all, namely the reality of God, its subject and bringing it into the academic dialogue with the various sciences.
In the conviction that religion is not simply an epiphenomenon of human being, but that human beings are religious by nature, so to speak, and that the religious dimension is a constitutive part of human being, theology must prove itself in the world of sciences as an advocate of sensitivity to transcendence in human life, in a double sense.
Firstly, it is about transcendence in the original religious sense of the reality of God. This reference to transcendence gives breadth to human life. Conversely, this is demonstrated by the fact that wherever religious transcendence is closed to people, they are tempted to seek heaven on earth, as it were. Admittedly, there are only a few fields of activity available for this endeavour in today's society, more precisely those of amusement, work and love. There is therefore a great danger that people will amuse themselves to death, work to death and love to death, as prominent experts on modern life diagnose. However, this threefold ‘to death’ shows how liberating and redeeming the true transcendent relationship is for man, insofar as it proves the unspent wisdom of St Augustine that man's heart is restless until it can rest in God. In fact, only the one and only immeasurable reality of God can give an immeasurable answer to the immeasurable longing of the human heart.
Whoever speaks of God also speaks of eternity and eternal life. This is the second transcendent relationship that is of inestimable importance for the success of human life. This is because the attitude towards the faith reality of eternal life is also about man's very own life programme. If the prospect of eternal life is possible and sustainable, then human life is given a larger and broader horizon; and then we gain more time, especially in this day and age of far-reaching time scarcity. Marianne Gronemeyer has diagnosed today's problem with time in the fact that although we are living longer and longer, we are actually living shorter and shorter: Earlier, people used to live forty years plus in eternity; today, however, they only live ninety years; and this is much less.[7] In this day and age of diminishing time, the belief in eternal life holds the gift of a marvellous increase in time that benefits human life.
Christian theology, as advocate, has to stand up for this eschatological transcendence as well as for the religious transcendence of God in the world of sciences, in the conviction that Pope Benedict XVI expressed in his welcoming address on the occasion of his apostolic journey to the Czech Republic with the words ‘The authentic progress of humanity is best served by just such a combination of the wisdom of faith and the insights of reason’.[8]
Faith as a pre-gift of theology
So far we have considered that faith is dependent on theology and needs it; but now we must also reflect on the fact that faith is pre-given to theology and in this sense theology needs faith. This fact comes to light when we draw attention to the specific characteristic of the theologian that distinguishes him from other scientists and ultimately from every thinking person.
A thinking person is characterised by the fact that thinking precedes speaking, and thought precedes words. People who have to hear themselves speak first in order to know what they should think are rightly not considered to be particularly intelligent and wise. The Christian theologian, however, is different. This is by no means to deny him sound thinking. But in the Christian theologian, who understands himself and his responsibility in the right way, the word always precedes his thinking. Of course, this is not the word of the theologian, but the word of God, which comes to the theologian and which he must first receive and accept. For the theologian cannot invent the word of God; he can only find it or, even better, allow himself to be found by it. The theologian cannot generate the Word of God: rather, he can only testify to it, and he can do so with the necessary interest in systematic coherence.
Since the Word of God always precedes human thought in theology, it is to be understood as the disciplined reflection of what God has pre-thought and pre-said to us. In this way, we encounter the originality from which Christian theology starts and which it reflects upon. In the words of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the special thing about Christian theology is ‘that it turns to what we have not invented ourselves and what can be the foundation of our lives precisely because it precedes and sustains us, i.e. it is greater than our own thinking’.[9] Christian theology consists of accepting this pre-gift, which is more than what it can imagine. Christian theology therefore presupposes authority, more precisely the authority of truth, which in the Christian faith bears the name ‘revelation’. The revelation of God is the word that precedes theological thinking and which Christian theology reflects on. It is therefore theology of revelation at its centre.
This specific characteristic of Christian theology, which distinguishes it from religious studies, is based on the fact that God is at its centre, but not just any God and therefore not a silent and hidden God, but God who speaks, who spoke to his people Israel above all at Sinai and most of all in Jesus Christ, and who showed his true face in his Son. Placing God, who speaks and shows himself to us in Holy Scripture, at the centre of human thought is the fundamental priority to which Christian theology must be and is committed. For Christian theology can only speak of God because God has first spoken to us humans.
The Church as the living space of theology
A further consequence arises from the precedence of God's revelation and the faith that responds to it over theology. The recipient of God's revelation and the realiser of faith is not simply the individual Christian or the individual theologian. Every Christian and every theologian owe their faith to specific fellow human beings who believed before them and believe with them today. This great ‘with’, without which there can be no personal faith, is the faith community of the Church. Christian theology as the thinking of faith is therefore always in and from the church and, in this fundamental sense, ecclesial theology.
The Church is not primarily, as it often seems today, the theme or object of theological reflection. The Church is much more fundamentally the subject and the living space where faith and its theological reflection occur. The Church and theology are therefore permanently related to each other and mutually challenge and support each other. This relationship is just confirmed by a glance at history, especially the great awakening of Catholic theology between the world wars in the last century. Here it has become clear that the truly fruitful new approaches in theology have never arisen from a detachment of theology from the Church, but always from a new orientation towards the Church. However, where theology has turned away from the ecclesial community, it has threatened to fall flat. For a theology that is detached from the living space of the Church dissolves into arbitrariness: and conversely, a Church that would do without theology would have to become impoverished.
It is fundamental to the ecclesial nature of theology that theology cannot be the measure and criterion of the faith of the Church, but that the faith of the Church is the measure and criterion of theology. Theology can therefore neither be carried out in a vacuum nor in the private arbitrariness of the individual theologian. Rather, it must be open to the entire faith community of the Church. In this sense, theology is actually an ecclesial ministry and - like any ecclesial ministry - can only be carried out authentically as a servant advocate on behalf of the entire ecclesial community of faith.
Just as theology must argue rationally in order to maintain a dialogue with human reason also in its scientific form, it is therefore required to be faithful to the nature of the Christian faith and thus to be integrated into the life and reflection of the Church. The reality of the Church can therefore not be regarded as a scientifically unrelated factor in theology. Rather, it is crucial to consider and prove the essential connection between the scientific and ecclesial nature of theology, so that theological thinking can be understood and carried out as thinking together with the whole Church and thus as an ecclesial service to the objectively predetermined truth of the Church's faith.
Only when it becomes tangible that theologians are truly ‘disciples of God’, namely of the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ, and theology is perceived in this way, will theology and thus also a theological faculty and, through it, the university be honoured: ‘theologia honoris causa’. Therefore, my last word should once again be a word of thanks for the high honour bestowed upon me by the Alma Mater of Charles University in Prague.
[1] Thomas von Aquin, Summa contra Gentiles I, 4.
[2] Benedict XVI, Address for the ecumenical prayer service in Church of the former Augustinian Convent in Erfurt on 23 September 2011.
[3] Benedict XVI, Interview with journalists during the flight to the Czech Republic on 26 September 2009.
[4] Augustinus, Kommentar zum Johannesevangelium, 26, 5.
[5] Vgl. K. Koch, Universität und Kirche. Zu einer notwendigen Beziehung mit Spannungen – Vorträge der Aeneas-Silvius-Stiftung an der Universität Basel XXXIII (Basel 1999).
[6] R. Guardini, Verantwortung. Gedanken zur jüdischen Frage (München 1952) 10.
[7] A. Gronemeyer. Das Leben als letzte Gelegenheit. Sicherheitsbedürfnisse und Zeitknappheit (Darmstadt 1993).
[8] Benedict XVI, Address at the welcoming ceremony at the International Airport in Prague on 26 September 2009.
[9] J. Cardinal Ratzinger, Was ist das eigentlich – Theologie? In: Ders., Weggemeinschaft des Glaubens. Kirche als Communio (Augsburg 2002) 26-33, zit. 28.