‘You Will Be Like God’ – Original Sin and Ideology Critique

The Second Vatican Council was and continues to be a source of transformation and inspiration for many Catholic theologians, and this is even more the case for those who lived through it and even helped guide the Council’s progress. Schillebeeckx was shaped both by formation and promulgation of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, in 1965, and through his subsequent reflections on its meaning. The Constitution’s confrontation with the perceived divide between ‘church’ and ‘world’ prompted Schillebeeckx to take up the question of theological intelligibility in contemporary culture, and it also helped form the way that he envisioned God’s transcendence and associated it with the eschatological future of humanity. In this article, the author traces some of the ways that Schillebeeckx, following Gaudium et spes, approached the problem of ‘mutual intelligibility’ between society and the church. As his theology matured, this primarily took shape in his appropriation of hermeneutics and critical theory. The author shows how this led him to a future-oriented recovery of God’s transcendence, and reapplies Schillebeeckx’s eschatological-hermeneutical structure to the meaning of the doctrine of Original Sin in the present context. Next, the author briefly engages with basic elements of St. Augustine’s reading of the Genesis narrative that can aid in this task. His intent is to show that this doctrine, when interpreted in light of some of Schillebeeckx’s critical insights, holds serious potential as a powerful critique of social and structural sin within contemporary culture, and can continue to allow ‘church’ and ‘world’ to carry on a meaningful, mutually-critical dialogue. Finally, the author explores the eschatological dimension of this approach as both a gift and a challenge for Christian faith as a structural-linguistic reality. This study seeks to retrieve Schillebeeckx’s structural framework, not through historical exegesis alone, but also through systematic reflection on the signs of our time in dialogue with elements of past tradition.status: publishe