The Faithfulness of God in the Theology of Walter Kasper

Cardinal Walter Kasper is an important figure in contemporary Roman Catholic theology and church politics. His critics, however, lead one to ask whether his theology presents a viable option in the contemporary theological landscape. This dissertation proposes to analyze and evaluate Kasper's theology from the vantage point of the theme, Gottes Treue, or the faithfulness of God. It shows that a notion of faithfulness qualifies Kasper's understanding of history and freedom, categories basic to his theological thinking. Moreover, the faithfulness of God to creation revealed in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit expresses for Kasper the central content of the Gospel. That the reality of salvation consists in divine fidelity implies for Kasper that the Church, as universal sacrament of salvation, carries out its mission through dialogue, which includes ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. Conversely, other Christians and Jews bear witness to divine faithfulness in their communities through dialogical encounter with Catholics. Kasper argues that God's fidelity is constitutive of the object of faith and of theological inquiry, namely, theological truth. This correlates with Kasper's "postmodern" conception of tradition as an open system consisting in a dialogical interplay among several loci: scripture, the artifacts of the spiritual and intellectual traditions of the Church, the authoritative rulings of its leaders, the supernatural sense of faith common to all the baptized. Kasper's reflections on truth also suggest that the truth of faith will remain essentially beyond our grasp until the end of history. In this regard, however, Kasper's theology has developed. Whereas his early writings emphasized the eschatological dimension of revealed truth, more recent writings make room for a substantial apprehension of truth in the present through the habitus of faith. To this extent, Kasper's thought proves to be compatible with the Thomistic theological tradition. The present study argues for an expansion of the basic categories of Kasper's theology to make explicit its openness to deeper reflection on the truth of faith as already present in the believing subject.