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Lumen Gentium: The Unfinished Business
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Using Lumen gentium as a focus, what can we say about the unfinished business of renewal? How does it work, and how must we read Lumen gentium in order to grasp “what remains to be done”? We consider four issues, each of them in dialogue with one of four theologians who reached their 60th birthday in 1964, the year Lumen gentium was completed. Bernard Lonergan helps us come to terms with the historically conditioned nature of Lumen gentium itself. Karl Rahner points the way towards a better grasp of Lumen gentium's discussion of the place of other religions in the economy of salvation. John Courtney Murray's influence on the Council fathers is a case study in the importance of the local church. And Yves Congar's willingness to rethink his own positions testifies to the importance of not making Lumen gentium into unchanging truth. Overall, the unfinished business of the document on the Church is to learn to treat it, in Lonergan's words, as “not premisses but data.”
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- © The author 2009. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
References
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6 Planning is a temporal activity, and God the creator does not plan history, or there would be no human freedom. God's design allows for human planning, of course, but planning – like any activity in history, even that of God within history – is contingent, accidental, and open to failure.
7 A Second Collection, p. 58.
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9 A second essay in the O'Malley collection (see n. 1 above) brilliantly analyzes the Council as an event of twentieth-century history. In the midst of continuing difference and disagreement, symbolized in the more or less exact coincidence of the opening of the Council and the Cuban missile crisis, Lumen gentium sees the Church as a sign and focus of unity. See Stephen Schloesser, ‘Against Forgetting: Memory, History, Vatican II’ in O'Malley, pp. 92–152.
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