Reading the Signs of the Times, Speaking to a Changing World: An Overview of Catholic Theology from 1800 to 2000

Catholic Theology After World War II

About the nineteen thirties Joseph Comblin wrote: “It was during this decade that rose the preoccupations which were going to more and more obsess the theology to follow.” Thus, the Second World War, like the First, marked no radical break in the history of theology. Nonetheless, the profound psychological, social, and cultural transformation had consequences on Catholic thought.

A double movement of thought showed itself after 1945. One was a concern to find renewed vigor at the sources. The other was to present the Christian message in answer to the world’s aspirations. The “back to the sources” movement sought new life from the fountain of the word of God, proclaimed and explained in the Church, and showed itself in a triple renewal: biblical, patristic, and liturgical. As for the theologians’ search for a new response, from eternal principles to contemporary questions, a whole new series of chapters were written in a theology long considered immobile. There were the theology of the laity, the theology of earthy reality, and the theology of history. All of these were a rethinking of what it meant to live the Christian life in a desacralized world, and a rethinking of the issue of Christian unity.

Back to Biblical and Patristic Sources

As we’ve seen, familiarity with Scripture was not common among Catholics, and a concern about Protestantism and Modernism only added to this lack. But changes began, thanks to the patient and careful work of some scholars after World War I. Then Cardinal Tisserant (1938) and P. Voste, OP (1939) were appointed to the Pontifical Biblical Commission and Pius XII wrote Divino Afflante Spiritu, in which he encouraged careful use of modern methods in Scripture. In 1948, the Biblical Commission wrote Cardinal Suhard of Paris concerning the literary genre of the first chapter of Genesis and, in 1955, explained how to interpret its decrees.

With this encouragement, significant and widespread work was done. First, much clearer investigation was carried out using the historical-critical methods. Second, scholars were concerned not to reduce exegesis to philology and archeology but to give value to the religious interpretation of the biblical message.

In the first dimension, the sacred writers were acknowledged to be inspired but nonetheless human, writing with mentalities of the Middle East and using the multiple literary genres of their times. Scholars affirmed that a good number of biblical texts had several authors of different eras, each with different religious tendencies. Inspiration was considered to be affecting the whole. Some scholars added that this gathering of diverse texts reflected what happens in the Christian community when penetrating the Word of God doesn’t happen uniformly but creatively through the fruitful diversity of theology schools and schools of spirituality. Care was also taken to underline the essential role of the believing community in fixing and passing on the religious message, first expressed orally, then in written form.