Theology and Political Society/Catholics and Canadian Socialism
Coleman, John A.
Books: A NEW POLITICAL THEOLOGY? I PICKED UP Charles Davis's Theology and Political Society with great expectations. He promised to deliver in this recent book a new, fresh approach to political...
...But these individual insights do not really add up to a coherence...
...Their bishops condemned it...
...It remains a prolegomenon to a political theology, concerned with methodological issues and formal properties and neglecting substantive discussions of specific forms of polity, economics, or culture...
...He scores J.B...
...I missed, however, any truly insightful discussion of the political function of religious language as a double entendre - for example, the kingdom of God as the real power, glory, culmination of history...
...Judging from such critical disclaimers one would expect the author to provide a new kind of political theology...
...Catholic movements of the thirties and forties...
...It is still too directly biblical and theological...
...He also devotes a chapter to the social thought of the Antigonish cooperative movement which was influential on U.S...
...Davis's preferred theory for this latter is Jurgen Haber-mas's notion of a society of non-distorted communication...
...This is the so cial tragedy of any religion as it faces what the late Thomas O'Dea called the dilemma of institutionalization...
...John A. Celeman, the need to understand any religious tradition in reference to the social location of the group which carries it...
...Despite the fact that Canadian socialism was (and is) democratic, civil libertarian, populist, and moral, Canadian Catholics, for the most part, steered away from the CCF...
...Throughout, Baum's social location in Canadian realities is clear...
...CATHOLICS AND CANADIAN SOCIALISM Gregory Baum Paulist Press, $9.95, 240 pp...
...Baum is a member of the socialist New Democratic Party whose origins in the 1920s through the 1940s as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) he studies...
...The Quebec bishops decided in 1934 despite its unobjectionable character that no Catholic could join CCF...
...Davis's criticism of Liberation Theology centers on its lack of a coherent political theory...
...What a delight, on the other hand, to turn to Gregory Baum's Catholics and Canadian Socialism...
...Not that Davis's book isn't interesting, full of many wise, even profound remarks about politics, religion, and society...
...That is a large order...
...As a result, his talk about religion and politics is always bound to remain airy...
...In its concreteness it delivers, beyond the specific history, a critical appropriation of the tradition of Catholic social thought...
...Or do we simply tackle, ad hoc, disparate issues...
...He asserts THEOLOGY AND POLITICAL SOCIETY Charles Davis Cambridge Univ...
...His chapter on Catholic social teaching is critical, balanced, rich in historical perspective...
...As the British sociologist of religion David Martin contends in The Dilemmas of Contemporary Religion, the kingdom language - in a comic/tragic dialectic reflects the principalities and powers even as it subverts them...
...In effect the book is a philosophico-theological disquisition...
...In the case of the United States, a fresh look at the social thought of the Catholic labor schools of the thirties and forties should prove similarly illuminating...
...He originally published the book with a Canadian publishing house distinguished for its volumes on Canadian socialism (James Lorimer and Company, Toronto...
...a universal identity in an emancipat ory process...
...Metz) or Latin American Liberation Theology...
...What is clear, as Baum suggests, is that a political theology will remain wholly abstract unless it backs (or at least tilts toward) an existing political movement or gives rise to some concrete political strategy...
...Even as political philosophy, Davis's book is very abstract and general...
...There is no attempt by Davis to discuss how this highly abstract, neo-Kantian ideal gets translated into in stitutional realities...
...Its unmediated move from biblical symbols to politics leads to interventions which remain "politically incoherent, voluntarist, and baldly opportunist...
...His summary judgment is worth citing: "The difficulty of Catholic social teaching was that it did not correspond to any actual historical movement . . . Catholic social teaching . . . was idealistic in the pejorative Marxist sense, inasmuch as it was a pure creation of the mind, outlining what ought to happen according to an abstract idea of justice, and not a social theory based on the actual historical experience of people struggling for emancipation...
...Metz for "substituting conceptual analysis for concrete history and attempting to explain the modern world simply in terms of thought...
...It would not be until 1943 that this gross political injustice, based on an unfair reading of the CCF, was rescinded...
...Does United States Catholicism have any real strategy or program for an American society based on the common good...
...Despite trenchant criticisms of Metz - for example, "Christian talk on politics has become unreal, stripped of both theory and programme, because it is the free ranging speech of the disengaged" - Davis himself provides neither social theory nor a program...
...He promised to deliver in this recent book a new, fresh approach to political theology, something distinct from either German political theology (especially that associated with J.B...
...Alas, Davis's book disappointed my hopes...
...The goal of politics, in this view, would be - pardon the jargon...
...Baum traces the Catholics' animus against the socialist movement of the thirties (which in so many respects was similar to the ideals of social Catholicism) to the papal condemnation of socialism in Quadragesimo Anno...
...Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is Baum's study of Catholic nonconformists, those who stayed with the CCF despite episcopal disapproval...
...Strangely enough - in a book on political theology - there is really no attention anywhere to institu tions, Davis is generally good if unoriginal in his treatment of the authority of tradition, religion, the critique of domination, and his discussion of the respective languages of religion and politics...
...Press, $19.95, 196 pp...
...Secondly, he argues that political theology must render an adequate account of the conditions which make for freedom and oppression (to which I want to respond, "Whew...
...I recommend Baum's lively history as a model of the kind of history needed to discover an appropriately North American political theology...
...But Charles Davis has little sympathy for in stitutional religion...
...Davis functions best as a critic...
...There is hardly a clue in it to Davis's own social, cultural, and political location in Canada...
...Like Metz he relies on the thought of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School...
...His book could have been written almost anywhere in the industrialized West, but most likely by a philosopher in Germany...
...From this English-born Canadian I had hoped for a critical social theology appropriate to Anglo-Saxon and North American societal and political realities...
...Perhaps pots should be wary of calling kettles black...
...Davis's thesis is that an adequate political theology must incorporate a general theory of society and history...
...Struggling with them could generate the beginnings of a distinctively North American political theology.inctively North American political theology...
...But he provides none...
...The papal social teaching, on its part, is dismissed as "hortatory generalities upon social matters" which circulate only among church members...
...These are the kinds of questions ' Baum's excellent historical study raises...
Vol. 108 • October 1981 • No. 19
