RENEWING THE AMERICAN COVENANT
Toolan, David S.
BOOKS' RENEWING THE AMERICAN COVENANT Time Toward Home: The American Experiment us Revelation RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS Seabury, $9.50 Pastor Neuhaus's bicentennial offering is a call to revival, the...
...And no doubt familiar with the vicissitudes of the original Israel in keeping its part of the bargain, he is less inclined than many to expect more of the American version of the Second Israel...
...But this is just the answer that Kissinger & Co...
...With proper qualifications, Neuhaus is still one who assumes that politics is sovereign in making history, and one for whom making history is a religious duty...
...Neuhaus's post-deluge meditations have not seized on our broken promises, perhaps because as one of the founders of Clergy and Laymen Concerned he was earlier than most to detect the betrayal, issued his grim prophecies before the time of judgment, and is now readier than many to forgive and get on with the task...
...One has only to visit the National Gallery's "European Vision of America" to vividly recapture the power the New World held for the Old, how mightily the experiment here spoke to the pent-up dreams of weary and oppressed millions...
...How do we know...
...The Culture Watch ROBERT BRUSTEIN Knopf, $7.95 Singularities JOHN SIMON Random House, $12.95 Uneasy Stages JOHN SIMON Random House, $15.00...
...Neuhaus's answer is that hopes are justified by the future...
...Perhaps the structural critics are mistaken, but before being dismissed as Utopian dreamers who have never studied Augustine, they deserve a response...
...If this wintry season of our discontent conceals growing things deep down in the subsoil, I find no clue to them here...
...The cov-enantal undertone of what we are about in our social contracts, he argues, supplies the criteria for redefining our flagging national purpose and setting new agenda for politicians and churches concerned with a livable human future...
...Finally, for all the talk of promise, the book breaks no new ground...
...But home, Neuhaus insists, is a place to which Americans have never been...
...There is abroad in the land, as Neuhaus observes, "a sense of journey's end," and hence the temptation to repudiate that Pilgrim assurance "that God hath more truth yet to break out of His Holy Word" and it was to happen preeminently here in America...
...the epic design which the Pilgrims gave to the experiment and the hope our immigrant parents found in it, he believes, were sound...
...In the process of laying this out, we are also treated to sharp critiques of just about everybody, Enlightenment liberals, behaviorists, doomsdayers, privatizing religionists, "neo-philiacs," John Rawls' theory of justice, Bellah's "civil religion" from whom all, Neuhaus is anxious to distinguish himself...
...A problematic area like the hold of the "circle of faith" is introduced...
...In this dark time, his advice is Luther's semper incipere "to begin again always...
...In fact, the criticism across so wide a spectrum of disciplines and topics tends to produce a splayed effect in the work as a whole...
...In the midst of the pessimism awakened by Vietnam and Watergate and against the ongoing realpolitik that still dominates our internal and external affairs, Neuhaus wishes to remind "those with ears to hear" of then* Covenant with the Lord who threw his lot into our history and awaits the redemption of our promises...
...It does not seem a time for giving birth, but rather a time for mourning, dying, or throwing away...
...Neuhaus' forte is criticism, not digging in and reconstructing...
...Moreover, for all his concern for the poor and oppressed, Neuhaus pays scant attention to those in our society who have not found hope in the experiment (they don't write books or own TV stations), nor is there much evidence in his pages that he examined the minority scholarly voices who may well share his vision of the escbaton, but find structured flaws in his operant system that no reformist tampering here and there will quite remedy...
...Coming from one of the principal architects of last year's "conservative" Hartford Manifesto, however, this book should correct apprehension that that document was meant to encourage a withdrawal from the political arena...
...need to hean It gives them an indefinite lease and this may be the lethal flaw in Neuhaus's futuristic verification principle...
...What seems all too manifest in our erstwhile destiny is the intolerable human cost exacted by the get-and-grab-what-you-can policy the Protestant ethic degenerated into and so the impulse to "go home," stripped of our pretensions to singularity in the cosmic game...
...we are informed this deserves imaginative attention, but is not directly to the author's purpose to handle, and so on again and again...
...DAVID S. TOOLAN But here we are, the not necessarily wiser but certainly sadder inheritors of those grandiose hopes, contemplating after Vietnam, as Neuhaus is, the shattered pretense, the "arrogance of power," and feeling perhaps more like Qoheleth that all is vanity, that for all this toil, what does man gain by it...
...BOOKS' RENEWING THE AMERICAN COVENANT Time Toward Home: The American Experiment us Revelation RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS Seabury, $9.50 Pastor Neuhaus's bicentennial offering is a call to revival, the revival of that chastened and never-quite-so-manifest destiny that in its promise spoke to the despair of our immigrant parents and moved them to so many an epic adventure...
...At least for those to whom this book is primarily addressed, those who still dwell within the charmed cricle of Judaeo-Christian conviction and Neuhaus thinks this not-so-secular America represents many home lies not behind but forward, in the incompleted task set by the transcendent covenant that once inspired even as it restrained all our social and political "contracts," our promises to each other and other nations...
...No matter the delusions and perversions which riddle the American Dream...
...To see and absorb that exhibit, with its manifold promise of new beginnings, may offer a glimpse of what Abraham may have imagined and felt as he departed the doomed city of Ur, and little wonder the founding Puritans saw their venture as a second chance for the ancient convenant of promise...
Vol. 103 • April 1976 • No. 9
