History Test by Michael Sean Winters
It is difficult to overstate the theological importance of the grace-versus-nature debate--an argument akin to that between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists on the creation of a powerful central government. That is to say, depending on how you resolve this one issue, every other theological issue is affected, altered, colored, changed. Precisely because of the radical challenge de Lubac's thought represents, implementing it has been slow going, even for a man as forceful as John Paul. Patterns of interreligious dialogue, moral reasoning, and even core notions of what it means to be a Christian priest or a spouse are affected. This theological experiment is still in a very early stage, and conservative opposition to it has been effective. Much work remains to be done in applying de Lubac to moral theology. Because "natural law" theory has been the basis of Catholic moral teaching for several centuries, and because de Lubac's thought throws the whole idea of a "natural law" distinct from notions of grace into question, it is obvious just how experimental this theological experiment is. The previous legalism may have been dry and not specifically Christian, but it had this advantage: You can dispense from a law, but not from a truth.
What is clear about the de Lubacian agenda, carried forward by Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, is that it issues in a radicalized sense of Catholicism. This theological radicalism was at the heart of the "new evangelization" John Paul called for, an evangelization aimed at the secularized religion of the West but even more at the Third World. This was not a call to a "culture war" in the vulgar manner of contemporary right-wing U.S. politics, but it was clearly a call to a Catholic cultural renaissance. The de Lubacians see modernity's paradigms collapsing, and they seek to provide the theological soil from which a different, more mystical, and more Christocentric culture may be born. John Paul's embrace of a more Christ-centered theology is exciting and accounts for some of the dynamism of Catholicism in the Third World. But there have been costs. For example, the parameters of interreligious dialogue are more constricted when you posit that creation itself is ordered to Christ...
That humanism, which once underpinned and shaped the Enlightenment values of Western societies, seems so utterly absent from the spread-eagle capitalism of the West today, in which the market is the sole vehicle for assigning worth and resources. If the good of concrete human persons is not the criterion for social, political, and economic life; if the value of subjective freedom is so predominant as to trump all other values; if the moral life of the human person is consistently evaluated in utilitarian terms, is humanism still even possible? John Paul's consistent solidarity with the poor could not stand in sharper contrast to the predominant cultural ethos of the West.
Nowhere was the Pope's disappointment on social justice issues more obvious than in his native Poland after the collapse of Communism. There, the very same people who had flocked to see the Pope on his pilgrimages, who had sustained Mass attendance records unparalleled in Europe, who had produced the greatest share of Europe's priests--those same people ignored the Church's teachings on birth control, divorced in record numbers, and, given the chance, flocked to purchase CDs and BMWs and cell phones. The disheartened pontiff turned his gaze from Eastern Europe to the impoverished southern part of the globe, trying to stem the tide of Western materialism and utilitarianism. John Paul's numerous visits to the Third World were attempts to demonstrate the Church's solidarity with and presence among the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It is on these continents that the Church is now looking for its springtime.
Indeed, Catholicism is becoming a Third World religion, and the structures and priorities of the Church will have to change even more than they did under Pope John Paul to accommodate this basic shift. In Africa and Asia and Latin America, the Gospel--with its call for solidarity with the poor and the suffering and for understanding the Church as a community of solidarity between God and man--has a different ring from Western Catholics' call for sexual liberation: It is the ring of authenticity. For all of its traditionalism, there is a whiff of newness in the Church today, a newness that was emphasized again and again in the writings and policies of Pope John Paul II. He was fascinated by the approach of the Third Millennium and wanted desperately to live long enough to usher it in, believing that it would herald a new day for the Church, a Church he tried to reawaken to its radical vision of God and the dignity of the human person.
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