The New Theology was a dam built by Modernists to contain the mystery of faith on a proto-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion model where everyone was welcome to jump in and have a swim.
The mystery of faith is inexhaustible, an ever-flowing current of goodness winding between banks of beauty over the bedrock of truth.
The faithful who seek understanding aren’t attempting to contain mystery in a reservoir of knowledge like so many civil engineers constructing a dam on a free-flowing river in the American southwest.
The faithful surrender to the current and map its contours so they can learn to navigate the mystery as they become part of the process.
The faithful abhor dams.
Don’t buy the company line that Vatican II was all fine and dandy, and everything got skewed in the interpretation of the documents.
When confronted with what has become a cliché concerning the hermeneutics coming out of Vatican II—Rupture vs Continuity—one must ask how two hermeneutics came out of one Council?
Were the documents unclear or ambiguous? The only reasonable answer is yes, they must have been, if two distinct hermeneutics could be applied equally to the documents.
Either that, or there were a lot of political shenanigans going on during and after the Council, which continues to this day.
Perusing the course offerings in university humanities department from the 1960s to the present, you’d find classes on Marxism, Feminism, Gender Theory, Postcolonial Literature, and numerous other “hermeneutics” or lenses from which to read a text.
They all have one thing in common: they ignore the author’s intent and insert their own.
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