Jean Khoury

Summary: Every theological generation receives revelation through a particular set of philosophical tools and a particular theological method. Extending the Gospel image of new wine poured into skins, this article argues that the skin is never a neutral container: the instruments a generation adopts to think and to teach the faith do not merely package revealed truth, they actively shape its reception, and can limit, distort, or illuminate it. Taking as its principal case the sudden and largely unreflective abandonment of the Thomistic synthesis in the decades following the Second Vatican Council, the article traces how a change of philosophical and theological “skin,” undertaken with genuine pastoral motives, produced consequences that were never fully weighed: an autonomous historical-critical exegesis dissociated from theological judgment, an unchecked penetration of psychological categories into dogmatic and moral theology, and a widening fracture between academic theology and the spiritual life it exists to serve. Drawing on the diagnosis and the constructive proposals developed within the work of the School of Mary, the article proposes practical criteria for discerning when a philosophical or theological instrument serves the wine of the Gospel and when it silently reshapes or diminishes it.

Introduction

“No one pours new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins are ruined” (cf. Mk 2:22). The Gospel image is usually read in one direction only: new wine needs new skins, the new reality of grace outgrows the old, brittle forms. There is, however, a second and equally important truth hidden in the same image, one to which theology has paid far less attention. A skin is never a passive vessel. It is porous. It communicates its own texture, its own temperature, its own limitations to whatever it holds. Wine left in a skin takes something of that skin into itself; it can be nourished, aged, and clarified by it, or it can be tainted, flattened, and diminished by it. The relationship between the container and what it contains is never one of simple neutrality.

This is precisely the relationship between theology and the philosophical instruments, and indeed the theological methods, that any given generation employs to understand and transmit revelation. The form theology takes, the intellectual tools it borrows, do not merely clothe the Gospel; they condition our very perception of it, often without our being aware of the fact. This article proposes to examine that claim by returning to a decisive moment in recent theological history, and by drawing on constructive work already undertaken within the School of Mary to identify what a “good skin,” one capable of carrying the new wine without deforming it, might look like.

I. The Parable Reconsidered: Skin and Wine in Theological Method

Theology is never done in a vacuum. Every theologian, whether he admits it or not, works with philosophical presuppositions concerning the nature of the human person, of knowledge, of history, and of language, and with a theological method that determines how Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium are to be read, weighed, and related to one another. These presuppositions and this method are the skin. The deposit of faith, “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), is the wine.

The temptation is to imagine that the skin can be changed at will without consequence for the wine, as though method were a purely instrumental, disposable choice with no bearing on content. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each philosophical system and each theological method possesses real strengths and equally real limitations. Each is concerned with truth and can rightly claim to serve it; yet each is also partial, capable of disclosing certain aspects of the mystery of God while leaving others obscured, undernourished, or altogether unreachable. A tool that is good for one task can be inadequate, even harmful, when asked to perform another for which it was never designed.

The corollary is sobering: if the philosophy underlying a given theological synthesis is not proportioned to its object, dogmatic theology itself is shaken at its foundations. Original Sin, the Immaculate Conception, the nature of the priesthood, the Real Presence, the very possibility of the beatific vision for Jesus’ human nature, all these can be asserted or denied with equal facility once the instrument used to think them has ceased to be adequate to what it is handling. Pope Paul VI’s decision to promulgate the Credo of the People of God in 1968 was itself a symptom of this crisis: a felt need to reaffirm, in simple and stable propositions, truths that a shifting theological instrumentarium had begun to render unstable.

II. When the Skin Was Changed Overnight

The period immediately following the Second Vatican Council offers a striking illustration of how quickly, and how uncritically, a change of skin can occur. The neo-scholastic and neo-Thomist manner of doing theology, of drafting theological documents, and of forming seminarians was not gradually developed or organically completed; it was, in large measure, simply set aside. A handful of voices, Garrigou-Lagrange OP and Labourdette OP among them, questioned the swiftness of the change in their reply to Jean Daniélou’s celebrated article; but the wider theological world barely paused to consider what was being lost, or what exactly was replacing it.

This shift did not begin at the Council; it had been maturing for decades through the liturgical movement, the patristic ressourcement associated with Daniélou, de Lubac, and Balthasar, and a growing sense, articulated with particular force by Yves Congar, that the Church’s manner of presenting her faith had become increasingly opaque to the modern world. The Council Fathers, faced with this preparatory work, largely set aside the neo-Thomist draft documents prepared by the Curia in favour of a mode of expression closer to Scripture, to salvation history, and to the language of the human person. Understood in this light, the initial impulse was not a betrayal of Tradition but a legitimate and even overdue deepening of it.

What followed the Council’s close, however, was not the organic development of that impulse but something closer to an explosion. The neo-Thomist synthesis was not merely superseded; it was rejected with a force proportioned to decades of pent-up methodological frustration. In its place there emerged a theological culture markedly sceptical of metaphysics, of the analogy of being, and of the very language of nature and grace that had structured Catholic thought since the thirteenth century. Historical-critical exegesis, a genuinely valuable tool within its own proper limits, was in many faculties elevated to the status of methodological sovereign, excluding by principle categories, such as divine authorship, inspiration, and the sacramental and contemplative reception of the text, without which Scripture cannot be received as the living Word of God addressed to the Church today. Meanwhile, psychology penetrated dogmatic theology, and especially Christology and Mariology, seriously unsettling as well the Church’s traditional understanding of confession, sin, hell, and purgatory. Every theological subject, moreover, came to be presented almost exclusively through the lens of its historical development, from the Old Testament, through the Fathers and the Middle Ages, to modern theologians, a genetic method with real merits but one that, taken alone, cannot by itself answer the properly theological question of what a given doctrine means and demands of the believer today.

None of this happened after careful discernment. It happened spontaneously, almost unanimously, and largely without anyone asking whether the tools being adopted were proportioned to the realities they were now being used to handle.

III. What a Skin Can Do: Illuminate, Limit, or Deform

It would be a mistake to conclude from this history that the new instruments were simply bad, or that the older Thomistic synthesis was simply good. Each philosophical and theological system carries its own light and its own shadow. The historical-critical method has yielded real and lasting gains: a sharper sense of the literary genres of Scripture, a more accurate grasp of the compositional history of the biblical books, and a more nuanced appreciation of the human mediations through which God’s Word has come down to us. What that method cannot do, by its very design and not by any failure of its practitioners, is disclose the divine Author who speaks in and through the human text. When historical criticism forgets this limit and presents itself as the sole and sufficient arbiter of what Scripture means, it does not merely overstep its competence; it actively obstructs the reception of the Bible as the living voice of the living God.

Psychology offers an instructive parallel from a different quarter. When Carl Jung speaks of truth, he is not concerned with the conformity of the intellect to being in the classical or Thomistic sense, nor with revealed truth in the theological sense, but with what is psychically real: with whatever effectively integrates, unifies, and matures the human soul in what he calls the process of individuation. On his own careful account, a dogma or a religious symbol can rightly be called “true,” in this restricted sense, when it corresponds to the deep archetypal structures of the psyche and fosters their healthy integration. This is a real and, within its proper limits, a legitimate form of verification “from below”: one can observe, empirically, whether a given doctrine builds up or dissociates the human soul that receives it. Jung explicitly refuses to pronounce on the ontological status of God or of dogma; his restraint here is not hostility to faith but a form of methodological discipline proper to his own science.

The danger arises when this psychological “skin” is asked, without correction, to bear a theological weight it was never built to carry, that is, when the wholesome integrative effect of a doctrine on the soul comes to be treated as though it were itself the criterion, or even the substance, of that doctrine’s truth. Dogma is not true because it integrates the psyche; it integrates the psyche, when it does, because it is first true in itself and rooted in the objective economy of grace by which the Word became flesh so that all that is his might become ours. A theological method that borrows psychological categories without subordinating them to this prior theological order does not enrich the wine; it quietly changes its taste.

IV. Two Skins Compared: Historical-Critical Exegesis and Psychological Reading

Placed side by side, historical-critical exegesis and the Jungian reading of religious symbols illustrate the same general law from two different directions. Both disciplines are capable of real service to theology. Both, when granted an autonomy they do not possess, distort what they are meant to serve. The historical-critical method, confined to the letter of the text, tends to reduce the polyphony of Scripture’s spiritual senses to a single, retrievable historical meaning, thereby draining Scripture of the very inexhaustibility that follows from its divine authorship. The Jungian reading, confined to the observable effects of a symbol upon the psyche, risks reducing dogma to whatever proves therapeutically effective, thereby draining dogma of its properly objective, revealed, and gratuitous character.

In each case, what is missing is not the tool itself but a properly theological method capable of receiving the tool’s genuine contribution while situating it within a wider and higher light, namely the light of faith, under which alone theology can be theology and not merely history, philology, or psychology practised on religious material. Both disciplines are best understood, in this sense, as necessary but subordinate instruments: valuable servants that become distorting masters the moment they are granted final authority over a domain, the transmission of divine truth to the human soul, whose deepest coherence they cannot, by their own proper light, perceive.

V. The Missing Skin: A Method Proper to Spiritual Theology

The deepest reason the twentieth century could diagnose this problem so clearly and yet do so little to resolve it lies, paradoxically, in the very theologians who saw it best. De Lubac, Congar, Daniélou, Chenu, Rahner, and Balthasar each perceived, with remarkable clarity, that theology had drifted away from the concrete process of transformation in Christ; each, in his own idiom, lamented the divorce between theology and holiness. Yet not one of them succeeded in constructing an explicit, transmissible method of spiritual theology capable of reuniting the two. De Lubac’s recovery of the spiritual senses of Scripture is a real advance, because it shows that the text is ordered to transformation and not merely to conceptual knowledge; but it stops short of a systematic account of the stages of purification, illumination, and union, and so remains a theology reflecting on spirituality rather than a spiritual theology as such. Balthasar could assert that the saints are the true interpreters of Scripture and that theology must be a kneeling theology, yet he never built the discipline, with its own epistemology and pedagogy, that such an assertion implies.

The result was that twentieth-century theology inherited the old definition of its own task, faith seeking understanding, fides quaerens intellectum, without ever articulating the further step that its own best instincts pointed toward: faith seeking union, fides quaerens unionem, a theology in which the exercise of the mind serves not only to grasp who God is, but to show, concretely and pedagogically, the path by which the soul reaches him. Because spiritual theology never achieved sufficient methodological maturity, it could never function as what might be called a theological interlocutor: a discipline mature enough to say to dogmatic and historical theology, your manner of knowing is no longer proportioned to your object. Lacking that interlocutor, theology continued to develop according to inherited intellectual habits, while spiritual life was left to exhortation, private reading, and pious practice, unable to draw on the very science that should have been its natural ally.

VI. Weaving a Skin That Serves the Wine: Integral Theology and Sapiential Formation

The constructive response developed within the School of Mary begins precisely at this point of methodological absence. Its central proposal, Integral Theology, takes its point of departure from the Council’s own aspiration that the theological disciplines be taught in such a way that students draw Catholic doctrine correctly from revelation, penetrate it deeply, make it the food of their own spiritual lives, and are thereby equipped to proclaim and defend it (Optatam Totius, 16). Rather than treating spiritual formation as an appendix to an otherwise unchanged curriculum, Integral Theology reconceives the whole enterprise by placing the five principal theological disciplines, Scripture, Dogma, Liturgy, Moral Theology, and Pastoral Theology, in systematic correspondence with their proper dimension in Spiritual Theology, so that what dogma affirms about the Trinity, for instance, is matched by an account of how the soul actually receives and is transformed by that truth.

The complementary proposal of Sapiential Formation approaches the same problem from the side of priestly and religious formation itself. It distinguishes eight layers present within any single theological subject, from homiletics and exegesis through biblical and spiritual theology to contemplation and the Living Word himself, and insists that a properly sapiential formation must weave these layers into a single chain of transmission rather than allow them to remain disconnected specialisms. Understood together, these two proposals constitute an attempt to fashion a skin, a method, an instrumentarium, genuinely proportioned to the wine it carries: one that receives the legitimate gains of historical-critical exegesis and even, within careful limits, of psychological insight, without allowing either to usurp the properly theological and spiritual judgment that alone can hold doctrine and life together. At the heart of this method stands Lectio Divina, understood not as a devotional supplement to serious study but as the properly theological act by which the believer receives the text as the living Word of a living God, an act that is, in the fullest sense, meta-critical: it does not bypass scholarship, but it refuses to be reduced to it.

Practical Conclusions

For those responsible for theological formation, whether in seminaries, religious houses of study, or lay formation programmes, several concrete implications follow from the foregoing analysis.

Treat method as a theological question in its own right. No philosophical tool or exegetical method should be adopted merely because it is current or fashionable. Its adequacy to the specific object it will be used to study, revealed truth, the sacraments, the moral life, the life of prayer, must be examined explicitly and not simply assumed.

Restore the primacy of spiritual formation without diminishing intellectual rigour. Sapiential Formation does not ask for less study; it asks that study be reordered so that spiritual life leads, irrigates, and gives meaning to every other discipline, rather than being confined to occasional talks or left to the private initiative of the student.

Use historical-critical exegesis, and legitimate insights from psychology, as servants and not as masters. Both disciplines can and should be received gratefully for what they genuinely disclose. Neither should be permitted to define, on its own authority, what a biblical text or a doctrine ultimately means for the life of the believer.

Make Lectio Divina a properly theological practice, not merely a pious exercise. Its systematic integration into the study of Scripture, dogma, liturgy, and moral theology is one of the most concrete steps a formation programme can take to reunite intellect and heart.

Build explicit bridges between each theological discipline and its corresponding dimension of spiritual life, following the model proposed by Integral Theology, so that dogma, liturgy, moral theology, and pastoral practice are each shown, concretely, to lead toward union with God rather than remaining self-contained specialisms.

Form formators. The renewal described here cannot be achieved through curriculum revision alone; it requires spiritual directors and teachers who themselves possess a mature spiritual theology capable of guiding others through the stages of growth.

Final Conclusion

The wine of the Gospel does not change; it is Christ himself, given whole and entire, “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8). But the skin in which that wine is received, thought, taught, and handed on is always a human artefact, philosophical, exegetical, psychological, or pedagogical, and it is never without consequence for how the wine is tasted. The history of theology since the Second Vatican Council shows, with unusual clarity, how swiftly a skin can be exchanged, how partial the discernment that governs such an exchange can be, and how real the resulting deformations, or impoverishments, of doctrine can become. It also shows, in the work already undertaken to reunite theology with spiritual life, that a better skin can be woven: one humble enough to receive the genuine contributions of history, exegesis, and even psychology, yet disciplined enough to keep each in its proper, subordinate place beneath the higher light of faith. The task before the Church today is not to return to any single perfect method of the past, but to do, with patience and rigour, what the last century did not quite manage to do: to build an instrument, a theology, capable of carrying the new wine of the Gospel to its full flavour, undiminished and undeformed, into the life of every believer.

Bibliography

The four foundational articles used in this study, and the use the reader may make of each:

1. “When the Old System Collapses, Will the New One Appear?” (School of Mary, schoolofmary.org). Use: the principal historical source for this article’s account of the post-conciliar rupture: the pre-conciliar preparation, the “explosion” of 1965–1985, and the present impasse. Readers wanting the fuller historical argument, together with the constructive proposal of Integral Theology and its five-discipline structure, should consult this article directly; it also contains an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources on the divorce between mysticism and theology.

2. “The Meaning of Sapiential Formation in Priestly Formation” (School of Mary, schoolofmary.org). Use: the source for this article’s treatment of seminary formation, the distinction between fides quaerens intellectum and fides quaerens Deum/unionem, and the eight-layered “chain of communication” running from exegesis to the Living Word. Readers responsible for the practical design of a formation programme, seminary, novitiate, or diocesan course, will find here the most detailed proposal for implementation.

3. “Theology, Spiritual Theology, and the Question of Method” (School of Mary, schoolofmary.org). Use: the source for this article’s account of why the great twentieth-century theologians (de Lubac, Congar, Daniélou, Balthasar, Rahner) diagnosed the theology–spirituality divorce without resolving it, and for the concept of spiritual theology as a missing “theological interlocutor.” Readers interested in the deeper epistemological argument, why historical-critical method alone cannot found a theological method, should consult this dialogue in full.

4. “The Incarnated Truth: From the Church Fathers to Jung” (School of Mary, schoolofmary.org). Use: the source for this article’s treatment of Jungian “verification from below” and its careful, limited comparison with the patristic and Thomistic understanding of truth. Readers wanting to understand precisely where psychological categories can and cannot legitimately serve theological reflection, and how the Fathers’ distinction between theologia and oikonomia clarifies the “incarnability” of dogma, should read this article in its entirety.

Related works by the same author, referenced or presupposed above:

Khoury, Jean. Encountering the Word: The Theology and Spirituality of Scripture. School of Mary, 2024.

Khoury, Jean. Reading Scripture in the Spirit: Studies in Biblical Spiritual Theology. School of Mary, forthcoming.

Khoury, Jean, and Mgr Keith Barltrop. Integral Theology. School of Mary.

Khoury, Jean. Spiritual Direction Formation Programme. Diocese of St Augustine. School of Mary, 2024.

Magisterial and classical sources presupposed above:

Second Vatican Council, Optatam Totius, §16.

Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, §2.

Paul VI, Credo of the People of God (1968).

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.1, aa.2, 6; q.16.

Benedict XVI, “Monastic Theology and Scholastic Theology,” General Audience, 28 October 2009.Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini (2010), §§86–87.