Since When Is Doctrine Imprudent?

The subject of the West’s treatment of non-Christians has come up of late, if only because President Obama tried to walk delicately around questions of religious pluralism in his remark at the National Prayer Breakfast. At the time the President said this (and received blow back because he said it):

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

Various Christians tried to defend their faith, appropriately enough, from some sort of moral equivalence with Islamic terrorists. The defenses still go on and fairly recently Mark Shea tried to answer a question about the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching about the status of Jews in medieval European society. The way he deflected the problem of the Fourth Lateran Council’s prescriptions about the necessity of segregating Jews was to make a distinction between pastoral actions and doctrinal teaching:

That is why Pope declared that persecution (by, for instance, the fathers of Lateran IV) is a sin against the dignity of the human person and called the Church to penance. For the actions taken against Jews and heretics by Lateran IV were (like the actions taken by Trent to touch up Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgment”) prudential judgements not protected by infallibility. They are simply actions which, given the state of things at the time, seemed like the best course of action (and which are shown by subsequent reflection to be out of accord with the dignity of the human person). But admitting you are wrong when you were not ever claiming to be infallibly right is hardly a contradiction of infallibility. It is, rather, a confession of sin and an act of repentance, which the whole Church is called to practice in every mass.

Shea’s point also includes a defense of infallibility. Only in certain instances is the church acting infallibly, as in when it defines dogma or teaches doctrine.

But as much as I can understand the distinction between pastoral counsel and doctrinal conclusions, is Shea really correct to suggest that matters like the Fourth Lateran Council’s policies about Jews were merely prudential judgments or that the same bishops were not prudential when they defined the doctrine of transubstantiation? When the Council of Nicea sat down to reflect on Christ’s deity, were they not taking the “best course of action” available in the fourth century? My own sense of contemporary theologians and pastors who teach and preach is that they are every bit as prudential when planning a sermon or writing a theological paper as when they deliberate on counsel to give to a church member. In fact, to read the Bible and conclude its meaning (or to do the same for tradition in Shea’s case) is every bit as prudential as hearing a person describe his problem and recommend a course of action.

Or does Shea mean to suggest that when arriving at doctrinal truths, pastors, theologians, and bishops become like the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey and simply regurgitate propositional truths programmed from on high? This sounds like a very Protestant (as in logocentric) understanding of Christian truth, such that doctrine is important but pastoral judgments not so much. I for one don’t think Shea’s defense leaves the 13th-century bishops off the hook. Nor am I persuaded that doctrine is independence of prudence. But that’s just Protestant me.

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