Dr Tina Beattie on Jon Sobrino SJ

I bring to your attention a letter written by Dr Tina Beattie, President of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain that was published in The Tablet 24 March 2007. She writes:

“Fr Sobrino has always made clear that his primary concern is not to do with technical questions about the nature of Christ, but with questions about the significance of Christ for the lives of the poor and oppressed. While no theologian’s work is above criticism, the Notification fails to demonstrate convincingly that Fr Sobrino’s Christology is doctrinally unorthodox, or that any errors in his theological thinking are sufficiently serious to justify this intervention by the CDF. Neither does it make a clear enough distinction between doctrinally binding claims about the nature of Christ and interpretations which properly belong within the sphere of theological debate, for example, concerning the self-consciousness of Jesus. Moreover, in its appeal to historical, scriptural and doctrinal sources, the document fails to address hermeneutical and exegetical questions which should inform the theological interpretation of texts”.