The greatest danger I perceive to the new evangelization of the West, including of Germany, is the return of the doctrine of double truth, a belief that is of Gnostic origin and which Irenaeus of Lyon already refuted with Catholic hermeneutics. The unified wholeness of revelation is held and conveyed by the Church through sacred Scripture, apostolic tradition, and the magisterium of the bishops. Accordingly, the Second Vatican Council, in its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), affirmed the supernatural nature of faith and the sacramentality of the Church. It asserted these against the immanentization of faith and the secularization of the Church, as well as against Enlightenment rationalism, which reduced Christianity to a natural morality (Kant), and Romantic irrationalism, which distorted rational faith into mystical sentimentalism (Rousseau).
It is popularly held that religion is a matter of individual and collective feeling and that all historical religions are merely culturally dependent expressions of these feelings. In this vein, no religion is deemed to have a monopoly on truth. But the Church positions itself as the authority appointed by God precisely because it understands itself as the divinely mandated teacher of the revelation given once and for all in Christ and, therefore, as the sacrament of salvation in him.
In his final major work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, the new Doctor of the Church John Henry Newman gave Catholic hermeneutics a modern form. Today, however, the error of double truth often reappears under the guise of a “paradigm shift.” While such shifts may be appropriate for theory formation in the natural sciences, where hypotheses are provisional, their application to theology is disastrous, as theology is grounded in the definitive fullness of truth and grace revealed in Christ. Modern philosophies such as those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which make truth dependent on perspective or on its disclosure within a particular historical epoch, render truth time-bound. Christ, by contrast, is the truth in person, revealed in the fullness of time. In him, all epochs of salvation, ecclesiastical life, and doctrinal development are united within the Church’s consciousness of faith across past, present, and future. By assuming human nature, the Son of God brings every believer and the whole Church into direct communion with the one true God, who in the unity of his divinity and humanity encompasses all ages.
One destructive consequence of the doctrine of double truth is the demand that pastoral care take precedence over the revealed truths of faith and morality, such that what is dogmatically true can be pastorally false, and vice versa. For example, marriage between a man and a woman is recognized to be grounded in the Logos of the Creator and Redeemer, in whom all things came into being. Yet, for supposed pastoral reasons (namely, the subjective well-being of individuals), homosexual couples may be led into the illusion that their objectively sinful relationship is nevertheless blessed by God.
To provide another example: On the one hand, the Church professed in Vatican II the hierarchical and sacramental constitution of the Church (Lumen Gentium). On the other hand, the Synod of Bishops is at times treated as a forum of participants from all and any areas of the Church, whose opinions are then, contrary to genuine episcopal collegiality, endowed by the pope with the authority of the ordinary magisterium. Yet the ordinary magisterium properly refers to the regular proclamation of revealed truths by the bishops in communion with the pope (for example, preaching the Incarnation of the Son of God at Christmas), not to the promotion of their private political views. Nor can the Church in Germany call itself Catholic while the Synodal Council, a humanly constituted decision-making body, undermines the teaching authority and jurisdiction of the bishops under divine law (iuris divini) and effectively allows the episcopal office to dissolve within an Anglican-style parliamentary structure.
One cannot separate Christ as teacher of truth from Christ as good shepherd in a neo-Nestorian manner, for he is one and the same divine person who both teaches divine truth and grants his disciples the divine life of grace, conversion, and renewal in the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, we must overcome the dualistic opposition between dogma and pastoral care, between truth and life. We must also guard our thinking and judgment against ideological categories that divide the one and undivided body of Christ, the Church, into traditionalists and progressives, conservatives and liberals.
Apostolic tradition recognizes progress under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the Church’s understanding of revelation, especially through the preaching of those who, in succession to the apostolic office, have received the sure charism of truth. Only in the one and same Christ, however, is the full depth of truth about God and the salvation of humanity revealed, since he is “both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation” (Dei Verbum).
