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

Introduction

An aftermath of Vatican II is still going on. Some say that Vatican II is a remarkable breakthrough in the history of the church, while others demur at these opinions strongly and not a few people have left the Roman Catholic Church unfortunately. On the verge of coming third millennium, Ormond Rush tries to clarify what determines the orthodoxy from three theological spheres; theology of religious language, theological epistemology and theological hermeneutics.

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 …show more content…
After discussing the drawbacks of these positions, he makes a decision that an appropriate access to orthodoxy is situated along a via media. Then, he tries to attribute these inadequacies to insufficient understanding of three areas of theological inquiry: a critical theology of religious language, a critical theological epistemology and critical theological …show more content…
First of all, he attributes the orthodoxy’s ultimate guardian to the Holy Spirit, not to magisterium. Additionally, it is not only magisterium but also whole people of God and theologians who make a decision about orthodoxy in different ways; no one can proclaim that the Spirit of Truth is mine. He supports his idea by citing Ratzinger and passages from Dei Verbum. Additionally, he accentuates that orthodoxy cannot be determined without dialogue and consensus among these three groups, whose ranks or standings are equal before divine pedagogy; therefore the church is still leaning forever in dialogue with God.

The third concern of Rush is an inadequate theological hermeneutics, which result in a non-historical and an historicist approach to dogmatic statement. He admits that human beings have various limitations, such as language, culture and moment in history; hence, meaning and truth (and orthodoxy) should be re-interpreted and still be revealed with the help of the Spirit of Truth because divine truth is disclosed in human history. He also characterizes orthodoxy as a future-oriented dialogue between question and answer with the quotation from Williams since only future generation can evaluate our