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The presupposition of the argument of this paper is that all Catholic theology occurs in the first place within the context of some Church-mediated experience of God. This does not mean reducing theology to spirituality or to the conceptual elaboration of personal piety. It is simply saying that theology requires a starting-point, a source of intelligibility, which is encounter with God himself: for without some prior relationship to its ‘object’ theology can never be anything more fundamental than the philological investigation of more or less ancient documents. What we are therefore taking to be theological understanding (hermeneutic), even of classical texts in theological tradition, depends radically on some personal or anyway epochal (in a sense to be explained) experience of what theology is about in the first place: that is, on somehow being addressed by God himself. Doing theology at all depends on hearing the word of God: God must be allowed to speak to us before we can begin to speak about him. It was on the basis of this presupposition, and in the context of collective reflexion on the challenge to theological renewal facing one of the older religious orders at the present time, that the following observations were originally adumbrated.
‘The Church must enter into dialogue with the modern world’: this is a phrase and a programme with which we are familiar today. It is not always noticed, however, that all the terms of it are very obscure. We are not at present very clear about the nature of the Church nor about the nature of the modern world, and any dialogue between the two is consequently very difficult to visualize. It may be said that we are at least aware that we are not very clear about the nature of the Church; the real difficulty is that we tend to suppose there is no problem about the nature of the modern world.
