Reason and the Rule of Faith by Thompson Christopher J.;Long Steven A.; & Steven A. Long

Author:Thompson, Christopher J.;Long, Steven A.; & Steven A. Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UPA
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

FIDES ET RATIO AND THE ENGLISH CATHOLIC REVIVAL: CLASSIC APOLOGISTS ON FAITH AND REASON

David Paul Deavel

INTRODUCTION: THE INSPIRATION OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN APOLOGETICS

“Theological work in the church,” Pope John Paul II tells us, “is first of all at the service of the proclamation of the faith in catechesis” (FR, §99). Apologetics and evangelization are two activities incorporating catechesis. The early-and mid-twentieth-century was not only a startling, flowering period of theology in the Catholic Church. England, despite producing little high-level Catholic theology (Anscar Vonier’s A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist being a prominent counter-example) primarily experienced a flowering of popular apologetics at a high level, with figures like Robert Hugh Benson, Ronald Knox, and Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward gaining popular audiences for Catholic topics with their witty yet wise presentations of Catholic faith, as well as with their success in other genres. Knox wrote mysteries and Benson wrote popular novels. Sheed was the only “non-literary” character of the group, yet his wife Maisie Ward’s biographies of people like Newman and Chesterton, as well as the publishing company he and she owned together, provided the two with a certain amount of comparable public exposure. (It did not hurt, either, that Benson was the convert son of an archbishop of Canterbury and Knox’s father was the Anglican bishop of Manchester).

Despite the literary and popular quality of this movement, Cardinal Dulles characterized the mood of this apologetic movement as “at once rationalist and authoritarian” (A History of Apologetics [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971], 219), contrasting their writings negatively with those of continental apologists like Louis Bouyer and Heinrich Schlier. Yet the Anglo-American movement of Catholic apologetics that revived after the Second Vatican Council still finds its most popular models in the former group. While two of Louis Bouyer’s apologetics books have been reprinted recently,1 Schlier is almost unknown in America and England. Robert Hugh Benson, though not prominent, is gaining popularity again.2 Catholic Answers, the largest Catholic apologetics organization in North America, looks to Knox and Sheed especially for their examples, and their catalogue includes numerous books by both men, as well as the Catholic Evidence Guild Training Outlines compiled and introduced by Sheed and Ward. Karl Keating, the founder of Catholic Answers, has written the introduction to Ignatius Press’s 2000 edition of The Beliefs of Catholics and refers to Sheed and Knox constantly on “Catholic Answers Live,” the organization’s daily call-in radio show.3

In short, the North American apologetics scene shows much more influence by the English Catholic revival authors than by the continental writers. These writers, claims Cardinal Dulles, shared a “rationalist and authoritarian” streak, that is, perhaps an imbalance in their understanding or presentation of the relationship between faith and reason. Being somewhat authoritarian, it is obvious that these writers, mostly converts, took their lead from authoritative teachings of the Church, most obviously from Vatican I’s declaration Dei Filius. I want to examine more closely my selected apologists’ treatments, both explicit and implicit, of the relationship between faith and reason. I

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