A Protestant look at the dogmatic timidity of the current Roman Catholic Synod

Oct 26, 2018 by Andrew Symes

By Carl Trueman, Public Discourse

Few Christians would deny that listening is important, but it cannot be an end in itself, nor can it be the implicit justification for dogmatic timidity. For example, if a neighbor has lost, say, a child to cancer and is wondering how a God of love might allow such a thing to happen, it is absolutely appropriate first to listen to the agony of the one who has been bereaved. But the task of the church does not terminate in such compassionate listening. She is not simply a corporate therapist, nor is her task fulfilled when she has shown empathy for the one suffering. A doctor who says “I know exactly how you feel” to a cancer patient may be appropriately empathetic, but if he offers no treatment, he is criminally negligent. And so the church is not simply to listen but to provide answers to people’s deepest need—not merely the sociological or psychological symptoms of the same—and those answers are to be based on God’s revelation in the Bible. However, IL never makes this point. So many questions and needs are thrown up by the listening process; and nowhere is the gospel—the dogmatic gospel—explicated as providing an answer. Perhaps the authors hope that this will regain the church some authority, but church authority is useless if the church has nothing to say.

For all of the listening that the document highlights, and all of the empathy that it enjoins, the lack of explicit theology is therefore a lethal lacuna. The results are diagnoses of the problems that fail to rise above the material and the immanent, and an outline of a strategy that has all the pious trappings of a Christian response without any distinctly Christian content.

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