Not Catholic enough?:

...There may be a sense in which one can say, as Neuhaus implies, that church and world are related as grace and nature, redemption and creation, promise and present, but if there are other senses in which that is not true, the doctrine of justification, at least in certain Reformation forms of it, throws little light on the relationship between the concrete church and the concrete world...

...One can also agree that the public forum of contemporary America is empty and needs precisely to be filled by religiously based meanings and values...

...needs again to learn to respect the American political experiment, while at the same time having enough ecclesial self-confidence not to measure the meaning and value of the Gospel by its compatibility with the dominant and secularized culture...

...His severest criticisms fall upon those who are tempted to support politically liberal causes...

...For Neuhaus, only the latter is faithful to the central Christian doctrine of justification, classically expressed in the simul Justus etpeccator slogan of the Reformation...

...The moment may be propitious, but the response proposed here is not Catholic enough.here is not Catholic enough...

...He argues forcefully for the autonomy of the political and against its re-sacralization in a political theology...

...It is "the moment in which the Roman Catholic church in the world can and should be the lead church in proclaiming and exemplifying the Gospel...

...Above all, where justification is seen simply as the paradoxical assertion of apparently contradictory truths, irreconcilable short of the eschaton, the tendency is fostered, perhaps quite contrary to Neuhaus's own intention, to separate the religious and the political...

...The liberal establishment in the U.S...

...Here, too, I find the option not all that Catholic, since it leaves the church and modern culture over and against one another simply as incommensurate worlds defined by their own languages and truth-claims and without the possibility of a critical mediation of their differences...

...The book is obviously not the work of a detached and disinterested observer...

...Neuhaus slides far too easily from the one paradox to the other...

...And in Neuhaus's judgment, especially in the Congregation's "Instruction on Freedom and Liberation," Ratzinger has built on the doctrine of justification "the most intellectually impressive and potentially significant statement on theology and politics to have emerged from-any official church source in some years...

...He believes that the transformational type too easily collapses into the Christ of culture type...

...It is within this framework that Neuhaus makes his claim for the Catholic moment...

...At the same time, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger correctly stresses in his own writings the unholy holiness of the church...

...This theology has abandoned the sectarian "Christ against culture" em-phasis of preconciliar Catholicism, not in order to propose more acutely and more adequately the central Christian paradox, but to embrace the seductively comfortable positions of the "Christ of culture" type...

...Here the paradox is lost because the Kingdom is collapsed into a new society to be realized in this world...

...And there is no mention of David Tracy's attempt to construct foundations for a theology addressed to the three audiences of the academy, the church, and the public order...

...The closest Neuhaus comes to a description appears when he associates it with the adjective "postliberal" and invokes George Lind-beck's recent book on the nature of doctrine...

...If one may have serious reservations about Neuhaus's descriptions and prescriptions, they do make one think, and that is a rarer tribute than it ought to be...

...Bernard Lonergan's effort to explicate the personal and social implications of Christian conversion go unnoticed...

...His enthusiasm for the present pope and for Cardinal Ratzin-ger appears to wane when their criticisms touch upon the American political experiment, to which he implies they need to give greater attention...

...To be able to do this, however, the church must be a church of the Gospel, and this is the burden of the new book...

...But it does remain somewhat paradoxical, as Neuhaus himself notes, that the moment is thought to be "Catholic" because the pope and the prefect give such a fine statement on the Reformation doctrine of justification...

...It is thus the Catholic church, in two of its most important leaders, which is most intelligently and forcefully stressing the paradoxical character of the relationship between church and world...

...Neuhaus also has an irritating habit of pigeon-holing theological positions, so that if a theologian does not draw from his own statements what Neuhaus believes to be implied therein, it must be because of intellectual inconsistency or even bad faith...

...The movement has been from the absolutizing certitudes of the Tridentine church to the relativizing certitudes of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism...

...Read as a sequel to The Naked Public Square, this new book wishes to argue that a case can be made for the public significance of the central Christian Gospel without indulging the simplistic and unmediated claims of the evangelists of the new Right...

...Eight pages of selective quota-tion are considered to suffice for McBrien's two volumes and Segundo's 900 pages...

...These alternate and not necessarily reductionistic or accommodating options deserve far more attention than they have received here...

...The other popular vision is that of the theology of liberation, typified by the early works of Juan Luis Segundo...

...NEUHAUS'S VIEW OF AMERICAN CATHOLICS Not Catholic enough...

...In turn, Gustavo Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation, though described by Neuhaus as "the classic text of the movement," is discussed in a paragraph, Segundo's later multi-volume work is ignored, and the possibility that liberation theology may have entered upon a second phase is raised only to be dismissed as irrelevant to the contemporary North American scene...

...And one suspects that John Courtney Murray might find himself a little puzzled to find his own views associated with the same tradition...

...The theological argument is framed by counterposing two of H. Richard Niebuhr's famous types: "Christ of culture" and "Christ and culture in paradox...

...Neuhaus shares the in-creasingly popular view that the Second Vatican Council and the two popes who directed it indulged in a naive optimism about the possibilities of accommodation between the church and the modern world...

...This is the real issue, Neuhaus claims, behind the recent disputes about the Vatican and academic freedom for theologians...

...The neat convergence between his theological argument and a neoconservative political agenda should perhaps make Neuhaus more cautious in his criticisms of the alleged cultural surrender of other theologians...

...But on both the Thomist and the transformational types of church-world relationships, that autonomy need not be denied in order for the Gospel and its grace to be redemptive in the political sphere...

...I will simply note my impression that Neuhaus's theological argument at times appears to be subordinate to certain social and political options which he has made...

...He appears not to know quite what to do with the "Christ above culture" type, which he, following Niebuhr, associates, possibly incorrectly, with St...

...Finally, although the word "postmodern" appears in the subtitle of the book, Neuhaus offers no real description of what he means by "modernity" nor any justification for the implicit claim that the world is now "postmodern...

...Neuhaus defends this remarkable assertion by a review of the teaching of Pope John Paul II, who stresses the paradoxical nature of Christ's redemptive work and of Christian existence, and on this basis offers a powerful and attractive alternative to the competing ideologies of liberalism and Marxism...

...The problem with this book, and its predecessor, lies less here than on the proposal of how to clothe the naked public square...

...This increasingly popular notion means many things to many people...

...While Karl Rahner's name is introduced a few times, his massive effort at an anthro-pocentric rearticulation of Catholic faith is ignored...

...Thomas...

...The new knowledge class of American Catholic intellectuals has yet to pass into a genuinely "post-liberal" recognition that the faith is governed by different cultural-linguistic rules from those of the academy and of the culture it serves...

...In truth," he argues, "the Reformation understanding of the Gospel as God's justifying grace centered in the scriptural kerygma of cross and resurrection is today more boldly proclaimed by Rome than by many of the churches that lay claim to the Reformation heritage...

...Neuhaus offers as evidence the two theological visions that have proved most attractive to American Catholics...

...the church becomes simply one body among "the artisans of a new humanity," and the Gospel is abandoned in favor of the "works-righteousness" of an "unbridled Pela-gianism...

...Taking these two men as types leads Neuhaus to ignore other powerful theological options...

...It is impossible to deny Neuhaus's genuine concern for both the Gospel and the direction of American society...

...Moreover, even if one wishes to maintain that the simul Justus et peccator principle defines the church, it is quite another thing to say that it also defines the relationship between church and world...

...If nothing else, this review should indicate that this book is provocative...

...Some serious reservations, however, are in order...

...The need for the Christian churches to engage in the second of these tasks was argued at length in The Naked Public Square (1984), where Neuhaus saw little to hope for from the mainline Protestant churches, from his own Lutheran church, or from the religious new right and wondered if the Roman Catholic church might not be the most qualified to mediate religiously based values to the public debate...

...JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK teaches theology in the department of religion and religious education at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C...

...As obligatory as it may be to reach for some intellectual synthesis of the truths, the paradox they pose cannot be solved, but only superseded by the coming of the Kingdom...

...Then there are the theological criteria which Neuhaus brings to bear...

...Not only is this a disputable extension of the doctrine beyond its Pauline use, but it also promotes the tendency to see all differences in theology as exclusively religious, that is, as questions of starkly opposed faith or unbelief, grace or sin, etc...

...This can and should also be the moment in which the Roman Catholic church in the United States assumes its rightful role in the culture-forming task of constructing a religiously informed public philosophy for the American experiment in ordered liberty...

...Once again, the typically Thomist theological option is set aside...

...and it is their insistence on this necessary paradox that explains and justifies the internal policies by which they are struggling to restore a sense of Catholic identity and integrity...

...There is always something to learn about one's own church from interested observers...

...JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK Richard Neuhaus proposes that this is "the Catholic moment" in two senses...

...These choices are perhaps not surprising in a Lutheran theologian, and in an ecumenically sensitive age they should not be dismissed without serious consideration by Catholics...

...The first of these marks ' 'the progressive theological establishment" in the United States and is typified in Richard McBrien's book Catholicism...

...Two apparently contradictory truths must be asserted simultaneously...

...The church will always remain both holy and unholy, and the paradox in which it lives must also define its relationship to the world, to which it may never be completely reconciled and which it must always remind of its provisional nature...

...Even when John Courtney Murray's name is introduced, no serious effort is made to address the contemporary debate among rival claimants to his heritage...

...He offers us a theology of politics in place of a political theology...

...The argument is thus conducted in an arena in which Catholics traditionally feel at home...

...The council abandoned the simplistic anti-modern attitudes and strategies of previous Roman Catholicism, but its documents were not clear enough about the alternative to prevent progressive Catholies from simply capitulating to modernity...

...One does not need to deny the fundamental significance of religious conversion to maintain that all theological differences are not reducible to that question...

...Perhaps the basic problem is Neuhaus's assumption that the variety of ways of understanding the relationship between church and world can be judged by the sole criterion of justification...

...The "new humanity" is simply a new Christendom, this time on the left, but once again representing "the easy and false resolution of the essential paradox of Christian existence...

...With regard to the theological analysis, one must note first the many unfair and oversimplifying summaries Neuhaus gives of the theologians with whom he disagrees...

...This theology has "bought into the controlling theological presuppositions of liberal Protestantism" and mimics a culture marked by a loss of faith in the supernatural by reducing theology to anthropology...

...The legitimate autonomy of the political order must be respected and not dissolved into a new theocracy, as political and liberation theologies attempt to do...

...Neuhaus believes that Catholics need to learn again from John Courtney Murray's critique of monism and his reminder of the legitimate pluralism enshrined in Pope Gelasius's distinction between the spiritual and the temporal...

...Unlike Niebuhr, he appears to argue that only the paradoxical type of church-world relationship can be sustained...