My last Synod Diary!
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/letters-from-the-synod-2024-12
Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary
October 27, 2024
I’m back home from Rome and am trying to offer some final words on the Synod. I have to say from the outset that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find things to say about the Synod that have not already been said by many others from all sides of the theological spectrum. And the risk is very real that one begins to sound like a broken record that is stuck in a single groove on the vinyl, endlessly repeating the same deprecatory remarks, much to everyone’s annoyance.
But that is itself grist for the mill since it raises the question of just what in the heck this Synod actually was. Was it something novel and unparalleled in the recent history of the Church, breaking new ground and boldly going where no Synod has ever gone before? Or was it just more of the same post-Vatican II wrangling we’ve seen for the past sixty years over who controls the ecclesiastical narrative? Or perhaps in the end it was neither of these things, but just the babbling incoherence of a “dialogue” without any teleological orientations: the ecclesial equivalent of a rage room with padded walls.
Personally, I think that, for the most part, the answer is behind Door Number Two. As I followed the synodal deliberations, I could not help but be struck by the Groundhog Day quality of what I was observing. Or, to date myself even further, it was a David Byrne, “Same as it ever was” moment, with a spinning of ecclesiastical wheels in the mud of interminable debates that have been ongoing since the end of Vatican II.
There it all was, just as it has been for six decades: debates over sexual morality, women’s ordination, democratization of the Church, and the role of the laity in Church governance. Underneath it all is a set of largely unexamined issues, far deeper in theological content, that never seem to get addressed, even though the debates on topical points cannot be resolved until these deeper issues are brought into the light of day. And therefore, from where I sit, my chief complaint about the Synod is that it represents a missed opportunity to bring into the open the often-incommensurate theological starting points that animate the various factions.
For example, left unresolved is the single most ambiguous, and therefore contentious, issue of the modern Church: What, exactly, is a “development of doctrine” and what are the criteria for determining a true development from a false one? As far back as John Henry Newman (and probably before), on through the “Modernist” crisis, the Syllabus of Errors, Pascendi, the Nouvelle Théologie and Humani Generis, and then on through Vatican II, Humanae Vitae and its aftermath, this same question of the development of doctrine is left dangling like a hanging chad, without resolution. The proper relation between the immanent and the transcendent, the relation between nature and grace, the relation between objective truth and subjective appropriation, the grand debates between de Lubac and Garrigou-Lagrange, are all matters left unresolved.
And lurking underneath the question of development is the even more foundational issue of the proper relationship between the Church and the world and how to adjudicate between a true prompting of the Holy Spirit via a prophetic response to the “signs of the times,” and a false spirit of cultural accommodationism masquerading as true prophesy. Traditionally, it is the role of the magisterium to make those judgments. However, that well is poisoned from the start, since one of the putative “developments” on the table is precisely whether the magisterium is itself as definitive and authoritative and binding as the conservative wing of the Church claims. In other words, does the development of doctrine always involve controlling the ecclesial narrative from above, hierarchically, or is it to be more determined “from below” in an almost Hegelian fashion, as the Holy Spirit bubbling up from within the immanent processes of history, with all the subjectivist implications that implies?
Just as Nicaea I and the Christological controversies of that time required centuries to resolve, so too here. We are in a centuries-long process of debate over the issue of development, and the Synod skirted all of that in favor of the trite, sound-bite theology of the internet age.
But these are no idle questions. And as anyone involved in the theological guild can tell you, they’re questions that still burn with the same fires that have been smoldering for centuries now. Notre Dame theologian John Betz, in a magnificent articl in Word on Fire’s journal The New Ressourcement, is deeply critical—and rightly so—of both traditionalists and progressives in their attempts to answer the question of the proper concept of the development of doctrine. But he views the progressive approach as the deeper danger. Leaning on the analysis of Cyril O’Regan, Betz states:
But it is precisely at this point, having identified the danger of traditionalism, that we need to be especially wary of the opposing danger of progressivism, lest a genuine progress of the living tradition become a progressivist hijacking of the tradition or what Cyril O’Regan has termed a metaleptic transformation of the tradition. The dangers here are indeed great, to the point of potentially subverting the whole tradition in the name of “perfecting” it (whether as regards its doctrines or morals).
“Metalepsis” is a fancy term used by academics to describe the process of taking older terms and narratives and placing them in a new context. We see this all the time in Scripture, where the re-narration of events, taken up into a new moment and a deeper narrative within the economy of salvation, is a commonplace. Indeed, the New Testament makes no sense outside of this typological relecture of the Old Testament in the light of Christ.
But there is also a form of metalepsis that is the deformation of the older narrative, hollowing out its inner meaning and replacing it with a novel meaning that has no bearing on the original narrative. In this form of metalepsis, there is nothing latent in the older narrative that is now being “teased out” and organically developed in the light of new insights, but rather a bit of linguistic legerdemain intended to subvert the old from within.
This is the ecclesial issue of our time. Whose relecture of the Tradition is correct, has been the debate in the Church since the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. And just as we saw during the lead-up to the Council and during its deliberations, there was a powerful “raising of expectations” for this Synod: The progressive re-narration was finally going to win the day. And, just as after the Council, the failure of the Synod to explicitly adopt the progressive relecture has caused “disappointment,” but with yet another call to keep the revolution going—“No turning back!”—in “the spirit of synodality.”
Therefore, in the end, the Synod was a failure and a yawn-fest. It provoked and then retreated. And, depending on your own theological leanings, it was either a monumental disappointment, or a gigantic distraction and a waste of time. I think it was the latter.
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