Schillebeeckx’s Eschatology as Political Theology

This specialised retrieval of Edward Schillebeeckx’s ‘eschatological hermeneutics’ unto a more thorough-going understanding of Schillebeeckx’s ontology for anthropology is timely not only for Schillebeeckx studies, but also for the field of theology and ethics at large. Not only has Minch effectively argued for the primarily eschatological interest inherent to Schillebeeckx’s mature hermeneutical thought, especially as such concerns Schillebeeckx’s later ‘recovery of the ontological structure of the human subject’ (p. 3), but Minch ultimately goes on to demonstrate the value of this retrieval in face of the fundamentalist traditionalisms and overly optimistic progressivisms that are still found in different renditions of Christianity today (pp. 1-3). In ‘thinking with’ and ‘further with’ Schillebeeckx, Minch specifically brings a Schillebeeckx-inspired ‘eschatological imagination’ into critical dialogue with the recent economic narrative of neo-liberal ‘marketization’, so as to ground new creative possibilities for a truly salvific future in which Christianity’s eschatological horizon is no longer disappeared but is instead able to prominently orient human self-understanding and action in a meaningful and consequential way in the present (pp. 7-10). Minch begins his argument in chapter one with an examination of how Schilibeeckx’s thought evolved between the years 1956-1969 with an eye toward how the eschatological turn towards ‘hope’ during those years also mutually overlapped with the Catholic Church’s broadening understanding of the church/world relationship circa Vatican II (p. 11). In chapter two, Minch then surveys Schilibeeckx’s theologicallymotivated engagement with the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer and the critical theory of Habermas for the purpose of showing how Schilibeeckx eventually came to see an explicit link between hermeneutics and this ‘new’ eschatology of hope (pp. 50-51). Chapter three serves as a bridge to describe Schilibeeckx’s ‘definitive turn to experience’, arguing that Schilibeeckx made a ‘clear break’ with his mentor, Dominicus De Petter, on the question of whether the ‘total meaning’ of ‘universal history’ is ‘participated’ or ‘anticipated’ by human subjects (pp. 96-99). On this, Schilibeeckx’s recognition of how the ‘negative contrast experiences’ of suffering, sin, and evil need to be accounted for causes Minch to describe Schilibeeckx’s view as an open-ended ‘narrative historicity’ in which universal meaning is ‘praxically anticipated’ rather than ‘participated’ (pp. 113-120). Chapter four builds upon these insights by teasing out how Schilibeeckx interpreted the ‘experience of reality’ as that of ‘limits’ by which ‘human subjects become themselves’ as they hermeneutically ‘transcend [their own] finitude from within’ unto an ‘ultimate limit from which total understanding is possible’ (pp. 134, 149-150). These insights find ethical application in chapters five and six, where Minch recounts how the rise of secularization and the ‘new economic master narrative’ of ‘marketization’ occurred before arguing that Christian eschatology is necessarily a ‘realized eschatology’ that can not only counter the unfortunate logic of ‘economic apocalypticism’ maintained by some Christian groups, but where the risk of eschatologically-motivated and Christologically-patterned human action in the present is salvifically graced by God (pp. 193-197). Overall, Minch’s brief yet dense exposition and constructive application breaks new ground for Schilibeeckx studies while also serving as a formidable example of political theology’s attempt to overtake fundamental and systematic theology moving forward (p. 203). Along such lines, Minch’s work deserves wide readership, even by those not inclined towards such a thorough-going political turn for theology.