Hope and History: The Communio and Concilium Alternatives [Hardcover]

This book enables readers to understand contemporary divisions in Catholic theology.By examining a case study of issues in Catholic fundamental theology, Collits charts a path forward by advocating a rootedness in the Revelation of the Person of Jesus Christ. He does so by exploring metaphysics, the history-ontology and nature-grace relationships, soteriology and Christology. Furthermore, in examining the hope-history debate, this book tackles fundamental political and philosophical questions.

Collits approaches this by examining the competing schools of post-conciliar theology. On the one hand, the Concilium school of Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, JB Metz and Gustavo Guti?rrez; on the other hand, the Communio school of Josef Pieper and Joseph Ratzinger.

The book exposes the rift in Catholic fundamental theology by examining the hope-history debate prosecuted by the Communio and Concilium schools.David Collitsis an independent scholar and lawyer based in Australia. He was awarded a PhD in Theology from the University of Notre Dame, Australia, in 2021.

WithHope and History, David Collits has done the current and future Church a tremendous service, carefully laying out the fundamental division that arose after Vatican II between the Communio and Concilium perspectives, one that has only become more divisive and will undoubtedly continue to mark the fault lines in Catholic theology for the foreseeable future. The two have long been compared and contrasted, but as the author shows, the choice between them is not simply a matter of taste or emphasis, for they are not theologically, philosophically, anthropologically, or morally equivalent. Collits has traced, in detail, the radically different sources that give rise to divergent trajectories that end in visions of the human persons and their relation to God that are ultimately incompatible. At the same time, it is not simply a question of a contradictory either/or, as if one mulsJ