A Religious Confrontation

...An American Dialogue is (and let there be no mistake about it) an important book, because it has at least defined the ground rules...

...There is no question but that Brown is a Protestant, but this does not disable either his charity or his intellectual capacity to deal fairly and intimately with the realities of Catholic history and faith...

...In a real sense, however, (and I say this with irony) this is an American dialogue...

...Obviously, Buber intends this form of dialogue as a rehearsal of self-deception...

...Weigel raises few, if any, of the real Protestant fears...

...It is upon him that the obligation of transforming debate into dialogue falls...

...This, however, is the basic difference between Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church...

...Now that the term "dialogue" has become fashionable, it is appropriate to recall its origins...

...There is dialogue, in a genuine sense, in Brown's presentation—but it is self-dialogue...

...He speaks well of the nature of fear, but the real issues that beset Protestants in the face of "Roman Catholic power" are never raised...

...Robert McAfee Brown—although he is not addressing Father Weigel directly—comes nearer to the standard of genuine dialogue...

...One recalls the specific resonance of the term in Platonic literature — the confrontation of teacher and disciple, the evocation by anemnesis of truths which are clear and intelligible, but which require dialectical educement to bring them to the threshold of speech...

...Seeking more than the objective foundations of understanding, Brown makes the courageous effort—always as a Protestant—to enter into the spirit and dimensions of the Catholic mind and the Catholic tradition, to interpret Catholic claims to Protestant fears, and to press beyond the foundation of fear to historical, theological and eschatological foundations...

...It is an American dialogue because, although the thinkers do not enter into dialogue with each other, they do enter into dialogue with the reader, who is privileged to overhear a pacific debate...

...The difference between their two views is clearly indicated in the form in which both authors quote the well-known phrase, ecclesia reformanda est...

...There is no objection to Weigel making clear his view of Protestantism (this is certainly indispensable to any dialogue, whatever its quality of intensity or significance...

...The third form of dialogue, genuinely rare in our time, occurs where each of the participants really has in mind the others in his presence, and turns to them "with the intention of establishing a living, mutual relation between himself and them...

...whereas Weigel is content to affirm the classic formula that the church is always reformed by itself and from within itself...

...It has, to be sure, a long history in Western philosophic discourse...

...It is the effort of one man to pose to himself the fears and challenge which the outside and alien throw up, to meet them, to assess their significance and historical origins and to offer interpretation and mollification...

...Writing in 1929, in his essay Zweisprache, Buber distinguishes among three kinds of dialogue...

...The later history of dialogue as a literary form is well-known, in its illustrious forms (Jehudah Halevi and Peter Abelard) recalling the standards of Plato, in its degraded forms (Bishop Berkeley) disguising little more than one-sided exposition...

...The second kind of dialogue— characteristic of modern existence— is merely technical...

...Editor, "Anatomy of Faith" IN A PECULIAR sense, An American Dialogue is no dialogue at all...

...The utility of this particular confrontation between Brown and Weigel is enormous, for at long last the level of debate has risen from social and political complaints to essential theological disagreements...

...Its contemporary usage, however, is immediately traceable to the thought of Martin Buber, whose influence on European thought in the 20th century, and more particularly on Protestant and Catholic thinking in the United States, has been well-documented...

...On the whole these men do not meet each other...

...Although Brown makes clear that Protestantism is prepared to go a long way in understanding and accommodating the spirit of its Catholic ancestry, there is still a conviction regarding the providential role which Protestantism is called upon to play in the history of Christianity...

...Of course (and perhaps it is a sufficient explanation), Weigel sallies forth from a nearly impregnable fortress of authority and tradition...

...It is unavoidable, therefore, that Weigel should adopt a rather more Olympian, simplistic and essentially uncomprehending view of the Protestant reality...

...It has become clear that Protestantism is distressed with the caricatures of Roman Catholicism which it has inherited and maintained...

...It is equally clear that Weigel, however anxious he might be to establish para-ecumenical activity with Protestants, is nevertheless convinced (as he should be) that Protestantism will only be reunited with the Church when it converts to it...

...Whatever his irenicism, it cannot mask his conviction that Protestantism is a deviant sport cast up by the solid stock of Roman Catholic parentage...

...At its highest reaches, however, it may be said that at every moment in the exposition of Protestant anguish before Roman Catholicism Brown has before him the image of Catholic sensibility and its legitimacies, and Protestant concern and its historical foundations...

...In one sense, Brown's irenicism is indicative of his concern for moderation, clarity and the making of peace...

...This is all well and good, but is it dialogue...

...In these crucial chapters of his essay it becomes clear that Weigel's capacity to apprehend the nature of Protestantism is compromised by his rather evident conviction that he considers it essentially incomprehensible...

...Brown modifies this phrase, placing emphasis not on the past history of reformation but on the continuing future of reformation...

...It is prompted more by the need of objective understanding than by the passion to apprehend another's inner world of conviction and conscience...

...What I object to in his presentation is that he believes it sufficient to the task of comprehension that he illuminate (always conscious that he is an outsider to Protestantism) his understanding of what he calls the "Protestant stance," the "Protestant fear" and, finally, the "Protestant principle...

...However Protestantism may consider itself normative, it is an outgrowth and response to historic Catholic tradition...

...And this is always the situation with the American dialogue: It is the individual, that silent, unconsulted and often lonely recipient of public rhetoric, upon whom descends the responsibility of translating debate into the private resources of understanding and moderation...

...There is internal dialogue in the one and technical dialogue in the other...

...Roman Catholicism, Weigel makes clear, cannot really consider Protestantism a reformation of the church, but rather a reformation run away with itself...

...It is equally clear that there is renascent in Roman Catholicism a spirit of inquiry and concern for its "separated brethren...

...But this is not the spirit in which Weigel writes...

...There is, however, a difference between his treatment of Catholicism and Father Weigel's interpretation of a Catholic image of Protestantism...

...There is a monologue as dialogue, in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak, each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways, and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources...

...The very fact of his inability to "understand" Protestantism allows him to exhibit the peculiar paradoxes which Protestantism presents to the world: the conflict of Biblicism and scientific empiricism, the spirit of scriptural authority as contrasted with sectarian liberalism, the passion for knowledge and historical accuracy contrasted with Protestant abhorrence of intellectual formulation and reliance upon the sufficiency of the pure will...