By Larry Chapp, Catholic World Report, September 26, 2023
Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology. He taught for twenty years at DeSales University near Allentown, Pennsylvania. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. Dr. Chapp received his doctorate from Fordham University in 1994 with a specialization in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He can be visited online at “Gaudium et Spes 22”.
Wohin ist Gott? (Where is God?) — Friedrich Nietzsche
Part One: Nemo dat quod non habet (You cannot give away what you do not possess)
The currently raging white-hot debates in the Church are merely the eruption into full view of a deeper theological and spiritual confusion in the Church. And that confusion is the result of an almost total lack of imaginative, intellectual, artistic, philosophical, theological, and literary depth, or even curiosity, among Catholics of all kinds. And as the old Latin adage goes, nemo dat quod non habet (“you cannot give away what you do not possess”), by necessity the contemporary Church obsesses instead over things she does possess, such as bureaucratic structures and sexual sinners, with the former now being reconfigured in order to be more accommodating to the latter through the alchemy of synodality.
However, theologically speaking, the only thing that the Church truly possesses as her own is the crucified and risen Lord and the moral praxis of martyrial witness that following “the Lamb who was slain” entails (Rev 5:6). And it is precisely this proclamation of, and witness to, the crucified and risen Lord which has inspired most of the great intellectual and artistic achievements of the past 2,000 years. And the Kingdom logic of this new regime of grace and martyrial charity ushered in by Christ was the only real and true revolution the world has ever seen. All other so-called revolutions were merely permutations of either the libido dominandi or attempts at fleeing its tyranny via the path of spiritual withdrawal and apophatic negation. Only Christ, because He was truly God Incarnate in full union with a real human nature, could achieve, as St. Athanasius pointed out centuries ago, the full radicalization of creation as being most “natural” and most “worldly” precisely insofar as it is also most intimately united to what is “above.” And what is above is the Lamb who was slain and who is now in glory at the throne of God as a slaughtered Lamb who is yet still “standing.” Here we see the precise nature of the Christian revolution in the conjoining together of the images of butchery and glory, of death and its transformation into. ….
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