Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II
Donald W. Norwood
Eerdmans £23.99
(978-0-8028-7210-4)
Church Times Bookshop £21.60
ONE sign among many of the way in which the ages overlapped at the Second Vatican Council was that the early sessions were conducted wholly in Latin. This was disadvantageous for many bishops, who had flocked to Rome from the ends of the earth and had something to say, but faced difficulty in saying it.
The rumour soon got round the bars that the Danish Professor Kristen Skydsgaard, an observer from the Lutheran World Federation, was a distinguished Latinist. It is a small step from helping with translation to influencing content. God works in mysterious ways indeed, not least through the contribution of “separated brethren” (and they were all brethren then, not sisters) to the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century through the Council.
The experienced United Reformed Church ecumenist Donald Norwood puts us in his debt with this scholarly, fluent, and committed account of the part played by the ecumenical movement, by dilectissimi observatores, and, in particular, by Karl Barth. He was too old and ill to attend, but he did meet Pope Paul VI and was present throughout through his influence, not so much on the observers, as on the RC theologians who had been his students, interlocutors, and, above all, friends for years.
Pope Pius XII is reputed to have called him the greatest theologian since Aquinas, and his fellow Baseler Hans Urs von Balthasar said: “We have in Barth . . . the most thorough and penetrating display of the Protestant view and the closest rapprochement with the Catholic.” This may surprise some, but Barth saw himself as “a watchman in the service of the entire Church” rather than as a Protestant champion, and Reinhard Huetter comments shrewdly that he “engaged in sustained dialogue with Rome and confrontation with neo-Protestantism”. The distinction between “dialogue” and “confrontation” is crucial.
The contribution of Barth and the observers can be seen in several fields, which had been well tilled already by the World Council of Churches — scripture and tradition; Jesus Christ (rather than the Church) as Light of the World; Israel and the Jews; human rights; and the East-West conflict and Communism. In contradistinction to Vatican I and Trent, Vatican II issued no anathemas. Their influence may have been decisive in averting a separate document on Mary and attempts to have her declared Co-Redeemer and Mediatrix, though Paul VI did style her “Mother of the Church” on his own authority. There has been considerable agreement on Mariology since then.
Norwood acknowledges Barth’s vulnerability to friendly RC criticism for “allowing the Son to eclipse the Spirit”, but this is a standard charge by Orthodox theologians against the entire Western tradition, and it applies even more strongly to the ecclesiology of Dominus Jesus (2000). Other disputed questions have been satisfactorily taken up in subsequent ecumenical dialogues, notably The Joint Declaration on Justification and Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry.
Norwood is optimistic enough to claim that mainstream Christians do not now disagree substantially on anything except the Church itself. He points to convergence in the actual experience of Sunday worship, in hymn-singing, and in preaching, which Barth himself had noted in sermons on Swiss Radio. (I love the complaint that, given his predilection for preaching in prison, you had to commit a crime if you wanted to hear the great man himself.) And he is right to emphasise that our actual experience of ecumenical friendship and hospitality is of greater significance than any documents.
He notes the importance of the setting up after the Council of the Joint Working Group with the World Council of Churches; he might have added the Anglican Centre in Rome, which will be celebrating its jubilee next year.
The Very Revd Dr John Arnold is a former Dean of Durham.