Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

THE BASIC GOODS THEORY AND REVISIONISM 177
history of the Church and can be defended through recourse to
the documents of Vatican II. Historically, FRANCIS SULLIVAN notes
that whereas the roots of the infallibility of ecumenical councils
and pope date back to the ninth and thirteenth centuries respectively,
“the conviction that the consensus of the universal
church in its faith is an infallible norm of truth goes back to the
second century, with Irenaeus, and is a consistent element of
Christian belief.” 16 GRISEZ challenges this revisionist perspective
on history and authority within the Church. Instead, he defends
the kind of teaching authority the hierarchy claims for itself in
Lumen Gentium 25 and Dei Verbum 10 as stemming back to Jesus’
authorizing the apostles to teach with authority. He writes,
“the fact that supreme teaching authority, however exercised and
articulated, is vested in the pope and bishops as successors of the
apostles goes back to the origin of the Church herself.” 17 Furthermore,
support for both models can be deduced from Vatican
II’s documents, especially Lumen Gentium, depending on one’s
interpretive lens. In fact, there is a dialectic between the ecclesiological
model one espouses, the documents of Vatican II, and
the hermeneutical lens one develops in order to interpret those
documents. Revisionism interprets those documents as expressing
ecclesiological innovations that departed significantly from
the ecclesiology developed in the Middle Ages, and that continued
up until Vatican II. AVERY DULLES refers to this perspective as
a “hermeneutics of discontinuity.” 18 The BGT would opt for a
hermeneutics of continuity whereby Vatican II merely reaffirmed
the traditional hierarchical ecclesiology. 19
16
SULLIVAN, Creative Fidelity 97; and, Magisterium: Teaching Authority in
the Catholic Church (New York: Paulist Press, 1983) 84-99.
17
GRISEZ, Christian Moral Principles 882-83 (emphasis added).
18
AVERY DULLES, S.J., “A Half Century of Ecclesiology,” TS 50 (1989) 419-
42, at 430-31.
19
GRISEZ critiques DULLES’revisionist ecclesiology (Christian Moral Principles
894-97). In so doing, he posits that this ecclesiology is untenable because
it posits a view of revelation and faith that are inconsistent with
Church teaching (481-85). His critique, however, is both an oversimplification
of DULLES’ position and utilizes the very tools of a hierarchical ecclesiology
that are being debated.