The Theology of Disclosure
- The Theology of Disclosure
When Fr. Anselm Ramelow invited me to participate in this colloquium on faith and reason, he suggested that I discuss what I have called the theology of disclosure. I have used this term to name a way of reflecting theologically on mysteries in the faith of the Church, such as Sacred Scripture, the Eucharist, the theological virtues, and especially the distinctive Christian understanding of God, both as Creator and as the Holy Trinity.1 This approach makes use of the philosophical style of thinking called phenomenology, which exercised a great influence on European thought during the twentieth century. There were many authors in this movement, but I have primarily used the work of Edmund Husserl, its founder and primary inspiration. I have not simply taken over his thoughts and used them in theology. Rather, I have adopted, adapted, and supplemented them in my own philosophical and theological work, just as other writers, both major and minor, have done in their writings in other fields of inquiry. I might have called my approach “a phenomenological theology,” but this would obviously be an unwieldy name for it. Furthermore, such terminology might link this theological style too closely with a particular philosophical movement, and I think it would be better to let it [End Page 409] stand on its own, even though it will use some ways of thinking that have originated in phenomenology.
Philosophical Resources
Why should anyone be interested in this philosophical approach in theology? What contribution can phenomenology offer to our reflection on the mysteries revealed in Christian faith? It can help us clarify how Christian things come to light for us, but how it does so can best be shown by going into specific issues, which I will do later in this article. Phenomenology can also help us deal with some problematic theoretical positions in modernity. Modern thinking, the kind that has dominated Western thought for the last five centuries, was inaugurated as an explicit rejection of what went before it. It defined itself as decidedly new and different over against what was in place, whether Scholasticism or Greek thought, and by this rejection it fragmented the history of philosophy into the periods of ancient, medieval, and modern. We no longer had philosophy pure and simple. Instead, we had the philosophy of a certain period, where it was rendered radically historical and relative to its time.2
This modern rejection of the past occurred in two areas. The first was the domain of human conduct, that is, politics and ethics. This project was initiated by Machiavelli and systematized by Hobbes. Other political philosophers, such as Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel, worked in the space opened up by these two modern founders, and they have given us the modern state as a replacement for the ancient city. The second domain was that of science, nature, and truth: the area of ontology and epistemology. This project was introduced by Francis Bacon and Descartes. Hobbes and Leibniz made contributions, and Kant and Hegel were its great synthesizers. In both instances, the political and the scientific, modernity turns to the subject—we might say it constructs the modern subject—and it does so in two corresponding ways: it establishes the political subject, that is, Machiavelli’s prince or Hobbes’s sovereign; and it fabricates the epistemological subject, the subject tailored to mathematical science, the isolated ego cogitans who carries out such science and measures everything in its terms.3 [End Page 410]
I think that there are resources in phenomenology, and especially in Husserl, that can be used to loosen the grip of modern thinking and help us to reactivate both ancient philosophy and the medieval Christian blend of philosophy and theology. It can open a way for us to recover philosophy as such, as opposed to philosophy divided into periods. It is something contemporary that can be blended with the perennial. Perhaps Brentano’s work helps explain why these resources can be found in phenomenology; for he exercised a great influence on Husserl, and he was versed in both medieval and Aristotelian thought. I would, however, also want to credit Husserl’s...
