The next intervention by Andrés Torres Queiruga at the Santiago de Compostela seminar, on the occasion of the feast of Saint Thomas, and the overreaction of Infovaticana condemning such presence, has reinforced my conviction that the best way to respond to this type of reaction is by providing -beyond disqualifications- truthful and verified information. That is why I offer to the reader, who wishes it, the debate, held some time ago, between Andrés Torres Queiruga and Olegario González de Cardedal. With this I hope to contribute -perhaps naively- a little bit of common sense amidst this type of reactions, in my opinion, obsessed, passionate and authoritarian.
1.- Truth, goodness, and beauty
I deem it necessary to indicate, first of all, that there are, at least, three legitimate and “orthodox” ways of approaching and speaking about the mystery of God revealed in Jesus (“unum”): from truth (“verum”), from beauty (“pulchrum”), and from goodness (“bonum”).
These are legitimate and complementary accesses, while also needing articulation with each other. They are legitimate, first of all, because they emphasize an aspect of the mystery of God based on the way it is revealed: as truth, as life, and as the way. And they are complementary because none of them –by itself- is capable of bringing the concept or the experience of that mystery.
Whether they like it or not, those from Infovaticana, “this is going to Mass,” at least, the one celebrated on the feast of Saint Thomas in any theology faculty in the world. I would like that to also be celebrated in Infovaticana.
When this last point—regarding complementarity—is not taken into account, there is a risk of incurring extrapolations. For example, a sole focus on truth without any articulation with the “truth” revealed by access to beauty or the goodness of the mystery of God presents many difficulties in avoiding docetism. And a unilateral bet on beauty that does not contemplate the “beauty” that those who are more attentive to a noetic (truth) or practical (goodness) perspective are focused on will have many difficulties in avoiding aestheticism and fideism.
And the same must be said of an absolutizing decanting for goodness without properly attending to the “goodness” of truth and beauty: it will have many difficulties in avoiding the risk of falling into Pelagianism.
**Every legitimate theological accentuation in the attention of the mystery of God and his revelation is in need of articulation with the remaining perspectives.** Only thus will a proposal be formulated that is moderately respectful of the mystery of God revealed in Jesus. And only thus will the mystery of God continue to be life, way and truth, while at the same time being an unfathomable mystery, of which, nevertheless, one can speak.
Therefore, the risk of fundamentalism (the famous “heresies” or, better said, the extrapolations) is not something that only some theologians have to be attentive to, but everyone; including those who are the source of inspiration for Infovaticana. Hence the importance of “articulation,” a fundamental word and attitude in all Catholic thought; something that has nothing to do – as it seems to me – with such authoritative and overbearing perspectives as lacking arguments and due respect for the mystery of God given in Jesus.
2.- Three veritative theologians: J. Ratzinger, A. Torres Queiruga or W. Pannenberg
And should what has been said so far seem irrelevant to them, I want to remind them that it is normal for different –and complementary- accentuations of the same revelation and of the mystery of God to also emerge within the bosom of all and each theological perspectives (the veritative, the aesthetic, and the practical). This is the case, for example, of the contributions of J. Ratzinger, A. Torres Queiruga, or W. Pannenberg.
It is true –in accordance with what J. Ratzinger maintained- that in the revelation of God in Jesus, truth bursts forth and is given, which orients and illuminates human existence and the world. Theological knowing consists of a “remembering” that is activated before the historical revelation of God.
But it is also true that the enlightened or modern subject can account for revelation to the extent that it helps bring them to light with the aid of reason and history. For **A. Torres Queiruga**, to know is to “actualize” in the present the truth given in Jesus.
And it is equally true that the human person is rationally capable of finding anticipations or traces of the presence of God in his or her own life and in history. This is the thesis of “revelation as history” that **W. Pannenberg** defends because he understands that to know is to “anticipate” the truth that will only be fully known at the end of time.
Andrés Torres Queiruga
Therefore, J. Ratzinger, W. Pannenberg, and A. Torres Queiruga have in common their veritative approach to revelation, without such a finding preventing the recognition of the existence of their own starting points and emphases.
Obviously, this adherence to a single theological perspective does not eliminate or dilute the legitimate differences between them or with other theologians more sensitive to aesthetic or practical perspectives. An example of this is the debate that Andrés Torres Queiruga has maintained with J. I. González Faus, B. Forte, and O. González de Cardedal.
And as I don’t want to bore the reader any longer, I bring, to those who intend to continue reading, the dialogue held between Andrés Torres Queiruga and Olegario González de Cardedal, leaving for another occasion and moment the rich and fruitful critical debates held with J. I. González Faus on how to reconcile the existence of evil and a reasonably “modern” God, and with B. Forte, among other points, on the prayer of petition, the gratuitousness of salvation, the silence or (im)possibility of miracles.
3.- The debate of A. Torres Queiruga with O. González de Cardedal
For the theologian from Avila, Andrés Torres Queiruga’s contribution ultimately leads to “an intellectualist reading of Christianity” and “a religion of the Enlightenment, where reason, the analytical discoverer of reality, is almost everything.”
Principle of contradiction versus principle of identity
O. Gz. de Cardedal points out, first, that in the proposal of the Galician theologian, one can appreciate lucid intuitions, but also the disappearance of all dialectical tension between the message and the messenger and a null attention to the disproportion between the Gospel and the mediator who presents it. And when one is not sensitive to such distance and disproportion, the guarantee of freedom and faith disappears.
The Galician theologian acknowledges that he finds this statement difficult to understand. He does not recognize himself in it in any way. And especially when – as is his case – he has devoted his entire life to reflecting on the divine mystery as it has been revealed in Jesus Christ, “with the intention of helping to make his understanding and experience a little more accessible in the conditions of current culture.”
Reduction or legitimate pluralism?
Subsequently, O. Gz. de Cardedal praises A. Torres Queiruga’s manifest interest in overcoming dualisms between nature and grace, history of the world and history of salvation or natural religion and historical religions, which hinder Christian understanding. However, this interest does not come to fruition because what it ends up doing is reducing –attempting to reinsert- the particular history of Jesus into the universal nature of humanity; the specific word of Israel and of Christ into the horizon of all human history; salvation -derived from the action of the Holy Spirit within the Church- into the searches and discoveries of culture and different religions.
In his reply, Andrés Torres Queiruga indicates that the theological contribution of O. Gz. de Cardedal is presided over by the interest in showing the continuity of Christian tradition throughout history and in highlighting its cultural richness. It is a worthy and even laudable aspiration. However, his – that of O. Gz de Cardedal – is an aspiration that has many difficulties in avoiding ending up emphasizing – sometimes, excessively – the contrasts between “the culture of faith” and “the culture of disbelief.” And what is more worrying: it runs a high risk of identifying his own theological contribution with “the” theology and, even, with the same “faith” of the Church.
Unlike the theologian from Ávila, my starting point -points out A. Torres Queiruga- is the earthquake that the modern project has inflicted upon most of the fundamental foundations on which Patristic theology and medieval scholasticism were forged. Obviously, adopting such a starting point does not necessarily involve an uncritical attitude towards modernity, but rather the recognition that some acquisitions brought about by the Enlightenment are irreversible. And by the conviction that faith is put in mortal danger when these are not kept in mind.
And I do so trying to recover as much as possible the original experience that feeds it. It is a task in which I am committed to clearly differentiating the level of faith and that of its theological interpretation. Thus, I do not intend to perform a deconstruction of the traditional understanding without first having found a constructive answer that, while “rethinking” the content brought by tradition, “recovers” its original experience and makes it meaningful today.
Therefore, there is no disregard for tradition whatsoever, but rather an effort to breathe life into it and make its saving richness accessible within the framework of our culture. Consequently, the overall assessment of O. Gz. de Cardedal lacks objectivity and I reject the false image it conveys of my theological contribution.
Revelation and interreligious dialogue
The theologian from Ávila addresses, thirdly, the conception that A. Torres Queiruga has of revelation and its impact on interreligious dialogue. For the Galician theologian –as O. Gz. de Cardedal points out– revelation is not a miraculous dictation, but “a realization” of the founding Presence and always active: “God was here and I didn’t know it.” It is a presence that is “there” and is discovered –sooner or later- by a prophet or by a founder. The latter is something secondary. What is truly relevant is that God is “there” wanting to manifest himself to all with identical love. This is the key point. In its light, one must understand the role that A. Torres Queiruga grants to proclamation as “maieutics.”
But that’s not where it ends either. A. Torres Queiruga’s proposal doesn’t just involve reinterpreting the revelation, but a revision of the fundamental mysteries of Christianity (Trinity, incarnation, Eucharist, grace, eschatology); mysteries that remain in a suspension of judgment until their turn for revision arrives. However, the turn that this pretension implies is very radical and the problems it generates are “too serious to be resolved so easily, as a first reading of this author suggests.”
In all of O. Gz. Cardedal’s criticism, as A. Torres Queiruga points out, there is not a single word about the arch of the vault that helps to understand and makes intelligible what the heart of the Christian revelation is, as he understands and proposes it: the creation by love and the infinite tenderness of God’s love that is given to all without restrictions or favoritisms.
Just as there is no word about how to address the apparent discrimination inherent in the particularity of biblical revelation and the infinite tenderness of divine love for all humanity: the obscurities and even delays of the biblical letter are not the result of a possible stinginess on God’s part, but rather signs of the infinite patience of his love in an “amorous struggle” to overcome the constitutive incapacity and guilty resistances of finite human beings.
One of the most important theological challenges today is the one that invites us to think about how it is possible to confess the centrality of Christ without being obliged to think that God abandons the rest of humanity. The recognition that there are also “defects” and inevitable limitations in the Bible – like fruit that are a product of the time in which they are written and of human history – does not cloud their progress towards the luminous mystery and their culmination in the Abba of Christ Jesus. This is how a respectful, open, and fraternal dialogue with other religions is made possible.
And, finally, there is also no word about his claim to surpass an extrinsicist mindset of revelation that would help in dialogue with culture and support the intimate experience of the believer. This is a claim that he channels with the help of the expression “historical dialectic.” Historical, to emphasize its character as a free and gratuitous divine initiative. And dialectic, despite everything, because the revealed word comes to us from history, but does not alienate us. Rather, it acts as a midwife, helping to give birth to the ultimate truth of our being and of being of the world as created, sustained, promoted, and illuminated by the loving and saving presence of God.
“Falling to realize something or Someone” and “Mere falling to realize”
Finally, O. Gz. de Cardedal recalls that –faced with the proposal of the Galician theologian- the “episcopal commission on faith has excluded a comprehension of Christian revelation as ‘falling into the account of’’.”
Andrés Torres Queiruga responds that the theologian from Burgos forgets something very important: that the cited document repeatedly speaks of “merely” falling into the account, something that does not at all reflect the conception he has of revelation as historical dialectic. To label his conception of revelation as pure and simple subjectivism is something unfounded and impossible because “I have always spoken and speak of falling into the account of the living and revealing presence of God.”
Therefore, it is impossible for revelation as a form of midwifery to be merely subjective, as it consists of “realizing something.” Obviously, this is a “realization” that is impossible if that “something” does not exist. In the words of the same Galician theologian: “I have always spoken and speak of realizing the living and revealing presence of God,” something that is the opposite of any subjectivist conception of revelation.
4.- Different and Complementary Interlocutors
The preferred interlocutor of O. Gz. de Cardedal and A. Torres Queiruga is the same: it is the enlightened lover of freedom and supporter of a reason autonomized from any authority or revelation, and who asks to be treated as an adult, free, and rational.
O. Gz. Cardedal’s interest leads him to focus his effort on critically showing the fragility of the enlightened pretense: salvation as self-salvation – he argues – will ultimately have to deal with death as a dramatic failure of modern pretense.
Andrés Torres Queiruga prefers to show not so much the inconsistency of the enlightened pretense as its closeness to the revelation of a God who wants the full realization of human beings and not their condemnation. And for that reason, he also rows in favor of his intellectual and personal majority and helps him to give a name to what is germinally present in him.
Final recommendation
It is up to the interested reader and not one “ideologized” to first read the authors directly. I hope these lines contribute to that. And secondly, to form a judgment that, putting aside sensationalist statements like those of Infovaticana, allows him to glimpse into this -and other debates- with arguments. That’s what I kindly recommend.
**Jesús Martínez Gordo**
Religion Digital
English version translated with AI