ABSTRACT
In early 2000, Walter Burghardt, who edited the distinguished Jesuit journal Theological Studies for over 40 years, and is one of the most sought-after preachers in the United States, published, at the age of 85, a volume of autobiographical reflections entitled Long Have I Loved You. A Theologian Reflects on his Church.1 In a chapter on ‘crisis in the Church’, he characterized ‘the conception of authority under which [he] grew up’ as follows:
Notice two features of this account: first, it collapses all authority into governance; second, it thereby substitutes, for teaching, proclamation construed as command. In the decades since I published a small book entitled Voices of Authority,3 I have
become increasingly convinced that the subordination of education to governance is at the very heart of the crisis of contemporary Catholicism. We speak of ‘magisterium’, of ‘teachership’; and most of us at this conference are engaged, in one way or another, in educational activities – but do any of us know of any context whatsoever in which the good teachers are those who pride themselves on not having any duty to ‘explain, prove, convince, appeal to human intelligence’? My argument in this chapter has five steps. First, I shall rehearse the suggestion
that Christianity, like other faith traditions, is best understood not as a ‘religion’, in the modern sense, but as a school, an educational project. Second, it is more accurate to say not that there are three ‘offices’, or duties, in the Church, but rather a single threefold office. From this it follows, for example, that education is not part of what we do (the other parts being governance and growth in holiness) but one of three ways of understanding everything we do. Moreover, whereas governance in the Church is for the sake of education and growth in holiness, the converse is not the case. Third, I shall turn to two texts of St Augustine, in order to consider how ‘teaching’ may best be understood, and what its purposes might be. Some brief reflections, fourthly, on the relations between Christian discipleship and the ‘macro-metaphors’ shaping contemporary culture will lead, finally, to the suggestion that, knowing the world to be legible, Christianity (in common at least
with Judaism and Islam) has a duty to ensure that all authority is exercised and understood as service of that utterance, that exercise of authorship, through which the world is made and healed.
