Reading and Rubber Ducks

My son who works at a software company brought the term "rubber duck" to my attention.   Apparently it's a method of debugging where you explain your coding logic to someone (or something) and in the process clarify it to yourself.   I guess this blog is my rubber duck or support llama or something like that.    I am writing to learn what I'm thinking as I read, mostly, and to see if there are glitches, unexamined assumptions or whatever.  I am learning as I go.  

I am not a trained theologian -- but I don't think theology is the province only of those with degrees, though the training process is probably helpful to some extent... at the very least you are admitted into a community which has its helpful aspects.   This is true of a lot of academic professions -- philosophy, theology, psychology, education, actually any of them -- where at the most specialized levels they have a specific language and method (and guild of a sort) but at the general levels everyone who gets beyond survival level living will have an investment in the field, some assumptions and opinions that are usually informed by even deeper convictions about life.   

Yesterday when waiting for the repairman I read a few articles I had printed out.   They were connected to the topic of hermeneutics and historical consciousness.  

•  A Theologian's Challenge to Liturgy by Walter Burghardt SJ 
• 5 Things to Know About the Pope, Vincent de Lerins and Doctrinal Development
• Poverty of the Church—Poverty of Culture: A Contribution of Giuseppe Dossetti to Vatican II

Jimmy Akin's post on Vincent de Lerins contains useful quotes from the 5th century theologian's work on doctrinal continuity.   This post from Unam Sanctam Catholicam also contains quotes plus a link to the source:   Commonitory For the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith Against the Profane Novelties of All Heresies.   The question of doctrinal development is obviously closely related to that of hermeneutics -- how you understand or interpret something deeply affects what you do or think as a result.   This incidentally is another one of those underlying issues affecting all discourse in our time, both secular and religious.   And Vatican II, both in conception and in reception, brought it to the foreground of Catholic discourse.

I read about Dossetti because he was a heavy influence on the Bologna school of historiography.   And he is a very interesting person -- I'm guessing I will keep reading about him because he is kind of a pivotal figure.

But mainly I focused on the Walter Burghardt article, written in 1974, because it contains a lot of quotes from John O'Malley, and O'Malley is one of the Vatican II specialists that Echeverria briefly discusses critically in his hermeneutics article.   The source for Burghardt's quotes is O'Malley's Reform, Historical Consciousness, and Vatican II’s Aggiornamento from 1971 which is also available in pdf online.  But I haven't read that one yet, so I'm relying on the Burghardt excerpts, and on Echeverria's in his article.   They both refer to the same article, and Burghardt says of it:

Few Catholics have grasped what John O'Malley expressed so strongly in one of the most significant articles ever published in Theological Studies

Echeverria, while critiquing O'Malley's theory of history of Vatican II,  says:

Still, O’Malley raises important objections that must be addressed. In sum, D’Costa explains these objections: “O’Malley argues that an essentialist/classicist view that holds dogma to be immutable and irreversible avoids the fact that dogma is always expressed in historical and cultural contexts. The essentialist position cannot (a) account for the need for new expressions; (b) defend the notion that dogma is immutable and irreformable, for historical expressions are always mutable and contingent and not divine truth per se, which is God  in Christ; and (c) explain these ‘essences’ apart from the particular historical expression of it. If the medium is the message, then the message is changing, as is the medium” (VII, 31). What, then, is the import of this distinction for understanding the continuity and material identity of dogma over time? 

That is where I will leave it for now.