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Rector’s Reflections
Tuesday 25th March 2025
A Theologian for the Modern World: Edward Schillebeeckx
In yesterday’s reflections, I shared some introductory thoughts on the role of theology and theologians in the modern world. What do theologians actually do? Does the world of academic theology have any relevance for the life and work of the typical parish, or the way in which most of us try to live out our Christian faith in our day to day lives? Or are academic theologians simply a caste of privileged intellectuals who spend their lives in ivory towers, thinking deep thoughts and expressing them in impenetrable prose?
I’m going to look at this topic through a study of the life and writings of the Roman Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009). Edward was in many ways the quintessential modern theologian, and much of his theology was an attempt to make Christian theology relevant and understandable to the men and women of his day. He took the theology which the Church had inherited from the Middle Ages, and gave it a jolly good shake.
So who was Edward Schillebeeckx? He was born in Antwerp, into a middle-class Catholic family. He was the sixth of 14 children. Yes, you have read that correctly – the sixth of 14 children. It must have been quite an experience growing up in such a large family. One of Edward’s brothers was a Jesuit missionary in India, and Edward considered becoming a Jesuit himself. But he decided instead to join a different religious order: the Dominicans.
Founded back in the 13th century, the Dominicans have specialised in pursuing a life of prayer, poverty, and preaching. Their preaching is rooted in prayer and in intellectual study. Dominicans are usually highly trained in philosophy and academic theology, and it would probably be fair to say that they are the brains of the Catholic Church. It would also be fair to say that they have tended to use their intellectual gifts to defend the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church, especially as these traditional teachings have been set out and defended in the works of Thomas Aquinas (d.1274), who was himself a member of the Dominican Order.
So Edward became a member of the Dominican order, and he was ordained priest in 1941. One might have expected that he would then have spent the rest of his life defending traditional Catholic teaching as set out in the works of Thomas Aquinas. But God had other plans.
In 1945, Edward went to Paris to start postgraduate theological studies. Here he came under the influence of a fellow Dominican, Marie-Dominique Chenu, who taught Edward about the importance of putting texts in their historical context, and relating theology to the social and political movements of the day. Edward’s later writings also show the influence of another French Dominican, Yves Congar, who argued that Church Tradition is not some immutable fixed deposit from the distant past, but rather a historical process by which the Church hands on the life of Christ from generation to generation. In other words, modern theology and the Church it serves aren’t simply stuck in the past. Theology has to move on, in dialogue with the social and political movements of the day. The task of Christian theology is to keep the Church faithful to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and this means that there will be times when theologians have to challenge the official teaching and practice of the Church. When theologians issue such challenges to the Church, it is not they are being disobedient, arrogant or just difficult. It is that theologians are holding the Church to account. It is the task of theologians to ask the simple question : is the current teaching and practice of the Church faithful to the reality of the Risen Lord Jesus, who is alive and active in our world today? Or has Church teaching and practice become out of date?
Edward continued to ask this question for the rest of his life. Sometimes the question was addressed solely to the Catholic Church itself. At other times, he addressed the question to all Christian churches. Sometimes Edward tended to work behind the scenes, for example in some of the discussions at the time of the Second Vatican Council, and at other times he was very much in the limelight, publishing books and going on a lecture tour. Although Edward continued to hold a University post as a professor of theology, he wanted to communicate with everyone, whether they were an academic or not. And what did he wish to say? We shall look further at this in the days ahead.