I was just easing myself into a chair at a book launch for Eschatology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium and Introducing Communio Theology last week on the Broadway campus of the University of Notre Dame Australia (UNDA) when I heard, or rather felt, a dull thud.
I recognised it instantly. It is the noise that the phrase “eschatological victory or Apokatastasis of the universe” makes when it collides with two short planks. “Uh oh,” I thought, “this is definitely going to be above my pay grade.”
However, as I settled in under the gentle rain of polysyllabic theological discourse, ideas began to sink in. Both books, in their own ways, are effectively about engagement with modern culture.
First, eschatology. This is all about the afterlife – for each of us personally and of the world around us. It’s a challenging topic, for funeral planning is not top of the pops on talkback radio. As Woody Allen, an eloquent spokesman for our deeply secularised society, put it: “I am not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
The book launch opened the sixth conference in the Theology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium series held at the University of Notre Dame: Christology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium.
Eschatology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium is a collection of essays on various aspects of debates on the afterlife, presented at the previous conference and edited by Kevin Wagner, of UNDA; Peter John McGregor, of the Catholic Institute of Sydney; and Danijel Uremović, of UNDA. They range from discussions of purgatory and the possibility of punishment after death to the technological afterlife of transhumanism.
Fr James Baxter OP, parish priest of St James Forest Lodge and St Bede’s Pyrmont, who launched the book, observed that 14 per cent of Australian atheists believe – paradoxically – in life after death.
“It’s figures like those that prompt me to suggest that the area of eschatology is one of the most fertile seed grounds for evangelisation,” he said. “We need a book like this to take serious questions seriously. Speaking as a preacher, I found it a very helpful book to read; lots of future homilies going are around in my head.”
Introducing Communio Theology is the work of Tracey Rowland, who may be Australia’s most distinguished theologian.
In 2020 the Vatican awarded her a Ratzinger prize, which is widely regarded as a kind of Nobel Prize in theology. She is a member of the International Theological Commission and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
The “Communio” of the book’s title is a magazine founded after Vatican II in the early 1970s by the theologians Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger – who, of course, became Benedict XVI.
Rowland explains their approach to urgent theological questions such as the influence of Vatican II, how to assess the Bible, moral theology, feminism, the priesthood, ecological stewardship, and the causes of secularisation.
In launching the book, Fr Greg Morgan, parish priest of Gymea, recalled that in the fifth year of his seminary studies, he had been scolded for quoting Tracey Rowland too much and the controversial German theologian Karl Rahner too little in an essay. “If you had told me, some 17 years ago, that I would one day be asked to launch a book by her, as Australia’s leading theologian, I would have laughed hysterically,” he said.
One theme in Rowland’s 400-page introduction to the Communio theologians is that the church has sometimes become beige, boring and bureaucratic.
Fr Morgan agreed.
“One reason why this trio (of theologians) is so important, she writes, is simply that they were the best and brightest of their generations, and thus they could have so easily sought the honours and baubles of secular academies or ecclesiastical safe spaces.
“The reason why their theology remains profound and prolific is because they refused to be company men dressed in beige cardigans, imbued by equally beige and boring institutional personality, always smiling, but too afraid to say anything that might rock the ecclesial boat.”
Catholic leadership and cultural engagement should never be beige, said Fr Morgan.
“In fact, it should always be the most generative and prophetic discourse in existence, because it’s inspired by communion with God. The Communio scholars insisted that the church must never lose sight of our eternal destination, and together with theology, it must develop an anthropology which gets to the heart of the matter. This is what Rowland’s book does, and what the world is looking for, not a bureaucratic Leviathan, but a courageous counter-cultural communion.”
Despite more dull thuds when “epiphenomenal prophylactic”, “anthropological extrinsicism” and “ontologically distinct telos” dropped out of the heavens, I left feeling relieved. There may be a culture war, but our generals are well-armed and whip-smart. We foot soldiers can be optimistic.
