A Critical Review of Ormond Rush, 1999, “Determining Catholic Orthodoxy”, 123-142.

■ summary

To begin with Rush defines orthodoxy as God’s revelation. According to him, there are discrepancies in comprehension of orthodoxy between “Dei filius” and “Dei verbum”; the former can be characterized as “monologic”, while the latter as “dialogic”. After explaining the characteristics of these two models, he clarifies what revelation is ; it “is the primary referent, authority and criterion of revelation. But how one models that revelation will determine the approach one take to orthodoxy.”(p. 126)

Following this, Rush outlines the six extremist approaches to orthodoxy; dogmatic maximalism, maagisterical, maximalism, dogmatic ahistoricism, dogmatic minimalism and dogmatic historicism. After discussing the drawbacks of these positions, he made a decision that an appropriate accessto orthodoxy is situated along a via media. Then, he tries to attribute these inadequacy to insufficient understanding of three areas of thelogical inquiry: a critical theology of religious language, a critical theological epistemology and critical theological hermeneutics. …show more content…
According to him, the extremists tend to believe that all statements of the magisterium have the same emphasis. Additionally, citing commentary by Ratzinger, he suggests that it is also wrongly believed that all statements of magisterium claim the same authoritative weight. Thus, he underscores the importance of considering the “hierarchy of