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The Certainty of Change: questioning Brown's answer to Dummett's problem
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The seductions of centrism
Professor Michael Dummett, in the New Blackfriars article last October which opened what is now quite a long debate, questioned the propriety of Catholic theologians espousing views which contradict traditional Catholic beliefs; to contradict such pronouncements in his opinion makes nonsense of belonging to the Catholic Church. It was Thomas Sheehan’s 1984 article, arguing that the ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars is irreconcilable with traditional or official Catholicism, which prompted Dummett to write in the first place, and it has been mentioned several times since then in the debate.
Here I would like to draw attention to the way an eminent scripture scholar, Professor Raymond Brown, responds to Sheehan’s charge. Brown is a particularly good example to consider, firstly because he has frequently addressed himself to precisely this issue, but mainly because among Catholic scholars his standing is unquestioned. Professor Nicholas Lash, in his response to Dummett, wrote—surely correctly—that Brown’s ‘massive erudition, unswerving loyalty to Catholic Christianity, and endless painstaking judiciousness of judgement have made him (in seminaries and elsewhere) the most widely respected Catholic New Testament scholar in the English-speaking world’.
Consider how Brown addresses this problem of the apparent contradiction between traditional Catholicism and what biblical scholars are now saying. First, he repudiates the picture of Catholic scholarship painted by Sheehan. The ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic scholars, says Brown, is a figment of Sheehan’s imagination. As he says again in a March letter quoted by Fr Timothy Radcliffe in ‘Interrogating the Consensus’, the vast majority of Catholic scholars are ‘centrists’, like himself.
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- Copyright © 1988 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Michael Dummett: ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, New Blackfriars (Vol 68, no. 809, Oct 1987), 424—431; ‘Unsafe Premises: A reply to Nicholas Lash’, New Blockfriars (Vol 68, no. 811, Dec 1987), 558—566.
2 Thomas Sheehan, ‘Revolution in the Church’, New York Review of Books (14 June 1984). 35—39.
3 Nicholas Lash, ‘A Leaky Sort of Thing? The divisiveness of Michael Dummett’, New Blackfriars (Vol 68, no. 811, Dec 1987), 554.
4 Timothy Radcliffe OP, ‘Interrogating the Consensus: a response to Michael Dummett’, New Blackfriars (Vol 69, no. 814, March 1987), 116f., quoting from a letter from Raymond Brown in The Tablet 5 March 1988, 272f. that commented on a report of this debate in The Tablet 9 Jan 1988, 34.
5 Raymond E. Brown, ‘Liberals, Ultraconservatives, and the Misinterpretation of Catholic Biblical Exegesis’, Cross Currents (Fall 1984), 318.
6 Ibid., 315.
7 R.E. Brown, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine (NY, Paulist Press, 1985), 48.
8 R.E. Brown, The Critical Meaning of the Bible (NY, Paulist Press, 1981), 86—7.
9 Ibid., 76.
10 Biblical Exegesis, 17. Brown also deals with this idea of ‘nuance’ in ibid., 29, 46, 57, 60—61. 143 fn. 135.
11 ibid., 65.
12 Ibid., 57.
13 Critical Meaning, 89.
14 Ibid., 18. fn. 41.
15 Robert L. Wilken, The Myth of Christian Beginnings (London, SCM, 1979). 43.
16 Prescription Against Heretics, 35; see Wilken, The Myth, 48.
17 See Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge, CUP, 1957), 17.
18 See T.M. Schoof, A Survey of Catholic Theology 1800–1900 (NY, Paulist Press, 1970), 163.
19 See Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integrism (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980). 15—17.
20 See Wilken. The Myth, 25.
21 For an admirable treatment of this whole question, see John Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Erile, London, DLT. 1986.
22 Nicholas Lash, Change in Focus: A Study of Doctrinal Change and Continuity (London, Sheed & Ward, 1973), 174—175.
23 Ibid.. IX.
24 J.L. Houlden, Patterns of Faith: A Study in the Relationship between the New Testament and Christian Doctrine (London, SCM, 1977), 15.
25 Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1979), 80.
26 Stephen Sykes, The Identity of Christianity (London, SPCK, 1984), 251ff., 262, 282.