The Church in the Modern World by Michael G. Lawler Todd A. Salzman & Eileen Burke-Sullivan

Author:Michael G. Lawler, Todd A. Salzman & Eileen Burke-Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Published: 2014-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

3. Human Experience

We fully agree with Servais Pinckaers that human experience has “a very important function in moral theology.”78 Gaudium et Spes emphasizes, and Pope John Paul II fully affirms, the relevance of human experience for theological reflection. Critically and theologically interpreted human experience, of both past and present, helps to construct a definition of human dignity and to formulate and justify norms to facilitate its attainment; experience serves as a window onto the morally normative. To deny the validity and moral relevance of human experience for assisting in the definition of human dignity and the formulation and justification of norms that facilitate its attainment reflects a reductionist methodology where the only legitimate human experience is that which conforms to, and confirms, established norms. It was such a methodology, in large part, which allowed the magisterium’s approbation of slavery until Pope Leo XIII’s rejection of it in 1890 and the denial of religious freedom until the Second Vatican Council’s approbation of it in 1965. John Noonan comments with respect to the magisterium’s late condemnation of slavery: “it was the experience of unfreedom, in the gospel’s light, that made the contrary shine clear.”79

A legitimate question at this point is, whose experience is to be used in the formulation of a definition of human dignity and the formulation and justification of norms that facilitate its attainment? We emphasize again that human experience is only one part of the moral quadrilateral and never a stand-alone source of moral theology. “My experience” alone is never a source at all. Moral authority is ecclesially granted only to “our experience,” to communal experience, as a source of moral theology, and only in constructive conversation with the three other sources, Scripture, tradition, and reason, as well as with the theological reality called sensus fidelium, the sense of the faithful and their lived experience. First, however, we must clarify what we mean by experience.

There is little to be gained from simply encountering the world in which we live; many people have many such encounters and learn little from them. The experience we speak of in this chapter, with Neil Brown, intends “the human capacity to encounter the surrounding world consciously, to observe it, be affected by it, and to learn from it.”80 It is of the essence of such experience that it is never raw, neutral, pure, unadulterated encounter with the world. It is always interpreted, construed, socially constructed by both individuals and communities in specific sociohistorical contexts. It is, therefore, also dialectical, differently construed, perhaps, by “me,” by “you,” by “us,” and by “them,” by neo-Thomist and neo-Augustinian theologians, for instance. For genuine human experience as we have defined it, the dialectic is necessarily a “dialectic of reason and experience” and never a dialectic controlled by either reason or experience alone. It is also a dialectic that results not in an absolutist moral code but in “various revisable rules.”81 In a Church that is a communion of believers, the resolution of different construals of experience to arrive

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