"Despoiling the Egyptians"

The first great inculturation of Christianity was into the Graeco-Roman world.
The basic transculturality of Christianity. A translation of the Koran, for example, is not the Koran. The Koran is the Koran only in the original language.
The call to a second great inculturation (by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio) - which is not to say that this begins with this call!
The caveats: the second inculturation will not and should not take place by abandoning the first great inculturation. The permanently valid achievements of the latter should be transposed into the new inculturation.
The great question is, how?
We find a model in Aquinas: wisdom and discernment, not without controversy (the Franciscan bishop wanted to condemn him posthumously).
Lonergan: objectivity as fruit of authentic subjectivity, where authentic subjectivity involves intellectual, moral and religious conversion.
The core problem here: judgment and truth. Is everything fine? will all things be okay? Can just any interpretation do? Or is there a limit, a boundary?
Gadamer has a spontaneous criterion of truth.
Perhaps also others like Ricoeur.
Lonergan offers an explicit, methodical criterion of truth, which, in Method in Theology, is found in the functional specialty dialectic.
In our Indian context: we cannot reject in principle the Brahminic contribution. See Newman's advice to Despoil the Egyptians. It is time to retrieve the great contributions of the past. (De Smet says somewhere that it is time. Search for the bibliography of Indian Christian Theology in an early issue of Indian Theological Studies, I think.)
Study the Calcutta School of Indology. It is the before of De Smet. Study also the after of De Smet.
See also my blog ICW.

The Christian faith and truth

“Martin Buber has pointed out that, for Christian faith, the act of conversion and, with it, the act of ‘holding as true’ are fundamental. However much we may criticize his reflections in other respects he is undoubtedly right when he says that affirmation – saying Yes – is a constant element of Christian faith; that it is true that Christian faith, in its most basic form, has never been a formless trust but always a trust in a particular Someone and in his word – that is, an encounter with truth that must be affirmed in its content. Precisely this marks its unique position in the history of religion.” [325.] [Though I would have thought Judaism and Islam share this uniqueness in different ways.]

(Ratzinger, Joseph. Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology. Tr. Mary Frances McCarthy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. Part 3: The Formal Principles of Christianity and the Method of Theology. Ch. 1. Questions about the Structure of Theology. B. The Church and Scientific Theology.)

Postmodern theology and the tradition-innovation dialectic

Postmodern theology: actually one more aspect of the tradition-innovation dialectic. But one that is quite different, insofar as one tendency in it tends to eschew the notion of truth taken for granted in earlier theology. This itself is qualified by the fact that Radical Orthodoxy, post-liberal theology, post-secular theology, and post-postliberal theology perhaps do retain the traditional notion of truth.

Development of doctrine, hermeneutics, postmodernism

For the best history of the problem of doctrinal development, we have Aidan Nichols, From Newman to Congar. Nichols brings us up to the Council, and, in his conclusion, adds a note on the post-conciliar situation. The work of Newman, Blondel, Congar, Schillebeeckx and Rahner comes to fruition in the Council, but begins rapidly dissolving after the Council thanks to certain developments which Nichols sums up in the words pluralism, hermeneutics and reception.

Nichols conclusion is something like a teaser: he opens up a new problematic, but does not really get into it. Further, writing in 1990, he has no mention at all of postmodernism.

Dan Stiver, in his introduction to Theology after Ricoeur, takes up postmodernism as well as pluralism. His attitude to postmodernism is sympathetic; it is revealing, however, that he includes Gadamer and Ricoeur among the proponents of postmodernism.

Stanley Hauerwas begins with a scathing attack on postmodernism, but does know how to draw out the best in it (it has to be taken seriously, he says), while still insisting on the cognitive component of doctrines.

On hermeneutics, we need to see Claude Geffre.

The post-conciliar Schillebeeckx also begins with hermeneutics, abandons the cognitive meaning of doctrines, and proposes a political and a narrative theology. Caputo, despite drawing from the postmodern Derrida, does not seem to have much more to offer than a narrative theology that sidesteps the question of cognitive meaning to concentrate solely on the constitutive and performative meaning. Felix Wilfred too seems to be largely an Indian reading of Schillebeeckx: the same attention to hermeneutics and the privileging of the hermeneutical position of the oppressed, political and narrative theology, and the sidestepping of cognitive meaning.

Hauerwas calls postmodernism the bastard child of modernity. From what he says, it might not perhaps be too much off the mark to call both modernity and postmodernity bastard children of Christianity, a Christianity that has 'lost its story'. Strikingly attractive bastards, as often happens.

We should probably not find great difficulty in accepting the emphases brought by Schillebeeckx, Caputo,  Wilfred and the like. The key question is: do we need to jettison cognitive meaning in order to incorporate constitutive and performative meaning? And: can we really jettison cognitive meaning, and yet remain faithful to the Gospel? So the key question is truth: how are we to understand this?

Aristotle on art and truth

Aristotle takes pains to link art to truth. Thus he notes that mimesis is innate to human beings, that we take our first steps in learning through it, and that we take pleasure in instances of mimesis because we enjoy getting to understand something. (Poetics 1443b)

Art and truth

It is only when one recalls Plato's repudiation of art, one of the grounds being that it is doubly removed from the real and the true, that one begins to appreciate the significance of Gadamer's turn to art in order to discover there an approach to truth.

But then Gadamer, Plato scholar though he was, is relying here on Aristotle's phronesis, and Aristotle was, according to David Cooper, the first philosopher on record to appreciate the distinctive functions of art, and its value and claim to truth.

Heidegger and truth

I am reading Lonergan's Regis course on the Method of Theology (1962), and the section on immanentism in that course. He points out there that Husserl is certainly an immanentist, but perhaps also Heidegger. Heidegger, he says, may be heading towards realism, but he is still heading...

So it just struck me that what I have been saying about Heidegger in my Hermeneutics course may be quite wrong. I have been saying there that Heidegger has shown us the way beyond the subject-object split, that he has shown how we are always already beings-in-the-world. That, it seems to me now, is true as far as it goes, but the problem is that it does not go far enough. Heidegger rejects the presumption of enclosed subjectivity, and that is fine. But does he reach truth as something more than aletheia? Does he truly get beyond phenomenology, experience? Lonergan seems to be saying: as long as he does not acknowledge the significance of true judgment, he does not reach truth.