Catholicism Today
A Time to Build.
by Michael Novak.
Macmillan. 493 pp. $8.95.
Michael Novak is a Roman Catholic, a layman, and a theologian. In America that combination has till now been rare enough to claim attention. What is more important about this edited collection of essays on many subjects, however, is that it gives us an inclusive picture of the range and direction of the change taking place in the thinking of Roman theologians. The author is a scholar who has assimilated the insights and implications of current Protestant theology, notably as expressed by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. He has taken a good look at the anachronism of the forms of Christianity—intellectual, institutional, and ethical—in the modern world. A disciple of Bernard Lonergan, he has begun to put his learning and fresh understanding to critical and constructive use in his own scene and for his own purposes.
Mr. Novak is undaunted by the crumbling of the intellectual and cultural structures of Christendom—for which he uses the circumlocution “Judaeo-Christian tradition.” He greets with relief the waning of the proud institutional spirit of Romanita, which trusted in their perpetual adequacy. Nevertheless, he has not become a Protestant; that is, he has not changed his inherited views about the role of structures for faith. Even his title suggests that; this is the time to build—new structures: intellectual, institutional, and ethical. Standing amid the ruins, he does not fault their ancient architects for any basic error in vision, conception, or design. Rather, he is impressed by the ravages of time, which wastes all human works. His Protestant tutors and sources may have helped Novak see more clearly or quickly that all religious structures, whether of thought, administration, or conduct, are, indeed, also always man's work. But the logic of that discovery does not lead him to question the function of the work of man in the context of his apprehension of the work of God; it simply teaches him to expect periodic decay and to be prepared to build anew.
Virtually all Christians call themselves “catholic.” All say that the whole world, in all its parts, is relevant to their faith, and that their faith, in turn, is of relevance to the whole world. Thus all agree that there is a Christian way as well as a human way of talking about man's responsiblity for it; and all seek the reconciliation of the two. But there is a characteristically Protestant style for this catholicity, and an equally characteristically Roman one. The two are in constant tension, and each needs the contrast of the other to make its own point. For centuries now, institutional division has tended to push them to opposite ends of a continuous line. The Protestant catholic makes much of God's initiative and freedom; the Roman catholic presupposes these but concentrates on the availability of his action to man's understanding and communication. The Roman stresses God's constancy and faithfulness; the Protestant remembers His mystery and unpredictability. As Novak says about Bonhoeffer, the Protestant “attempts to speak’ from God's viewpoint,’ ”directly; the Roman strives for, and with, a human perspective that incorporates this viewpoint. In all of these essays, Novak exhibits the Roman style, with great sensitivity and with all sorts of qualifications designed to narrow the distance between the two foci of the tension. But the tension remains, as it would even if the institutional breach disappeared, for it is inherent to all biblical faith, Jewish and Christian alike.
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Undaunted as he is, the author is aware of the bleak prospects for the Church. Humanly speaking, it has “reached the end of the line,” he says. Its motions have become stiff with age, so that its communication with today's secular culture is inarticulate and superficial. He has even pondered the possibility that the Christian faith itself may be on the way out, along with its anachronistic embodiments. “Christianity Renewed or Slowly Abandoned?” he asks. Nevertheless, Novak faces the future hopefully, relying on the biblical theme that things unseen are finally more powerful than those seen. He banks on a new era in Christian history in which faith will once more provide men with a cogent and compelling definition of their world and in which the processes and structures of nature and culture will again serve the faithful as exemplifications of their faith.
What grounds does Novak have for this optimism? In the nature of the case, at the deepest level his “reasons” are spoken “from faith to faith” and cannot be assessed from without. For example, he says, “. . . in the darkness it is the Lord who builds”; and, “God lives yet in the understanding and knowing of his people among whom the Word of God is spoken.” But however sincere and decisive this language of faith may be, the man of faith who speaks it also feels the need for more objective reasons. In order to rationalize his hope that the capacities for rebirth in Christianity are still equal to its current needs, Professor Novak offers at least three considerations. First, Christianity has changed before. Secondly, as a revelation of God, the historical Jesus Christ—as distinct from the cosmic Christ of faith—is incomparable. Finally, “nontheists in our society have appropriated so many Jewish and Christian values.” This reviewer finds a fourth reason, not given in the book, more persuasive than any of these; namely, the rise within the Church of men of faith and learning, of whom the author is only one, who are able and ready to deal trenchantly and critically with the situation, men who not only know that this is a time to build but consider it most important to do so.
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What shall we say about Novak's reasons? First, Novak is right: Christianity has changed before, more than once, and not just in the way of progressive development. There have been changes that constituted the sort of radical reconception which the author has in mind as the only and inescapable way by which Christian faith can come to terms with, and assimilate, the secular world into itself today. One could add that it was just this capacity for radical reconception that sent the faith on its way into the world, established it as the formative spiritual center of Western civilization, and enabled it to retain its initiative into the beginning of the modern period.
The first radical reconception of Christianity occurred at the very beginning, as the faith still lay in its Jewish matrix. The New Testament reflects the change. Arthur Cohen has observed that the amazing thing about Christianity is not that it began, but that when it discovered it had been wrong it was capable of beginning again. The change was radical. The apocalyptic announcement that the old world had lost all worth and meaning and that a new one would take its place began to make way for a progressive accommodation with the old and a revaluation of it. The Hebraic theme of the one God, Creator of heaven and earth, was salvaged, at least in principle. The temporal and cosmological perspective of apocalypticism was demythologized, and the faith began its long process of assimilating the Greek heritage, using neo-Platonic categories and biblical symbols.
With Constantine, the Church extended this return to the old world. The reconception was radical, though mainly political and institutional. But the imperial theocracy of the Church impressed itself so deeply upon the Christian vision of self-understanding that Mr. Novak describes Roman renewal in our day as a liberation from it.
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In the Western Church, the intellectual reconception of the faith by Aquinas raised still higher the valuation placed upon the old world of time, space, and matter. This radical 13th-century restatement of the faith either launched the Renaissance or made it possible for the Church to contain and nurture it, perhaps both. In profound ways, it set the stage for the modern world. Taking his cue from Bernard Lonergan, Novak begins his own rebuilding for today by restating the Aristotelian categories in modern terms.
There has, then, been more than one Christianity; the faith's capacity for radical renewal and the integration of new cultural movements in the past make an impressive record. Does it still possess the same creative vitality? As the author well knows, the record cannot answer that; it can only illustrate his hope. A lot has happened. The Reformation did not really issue in a reconception of the faith that reintegrated Christianity and culture, at least not in Novak's way. If that was its intent, the result was abortive and counts as a bad omen. And if it was not, its legacy of division would nevertheless seemed to have increased the hazards.
I find Novak's appeal to the historical Jesus Christ even more problematical. In no way has modern secularity triumphed more completely than in establishing the contingency of every thing and every one in time. This also holds for the New Testament and Jesus. Today, Christians disagree about Jesus. Some hold we can never rediscover what he really taught. Increasingly, more converge toward the conclusion which holds that he was a compelling prophetic preacher, a Jew who did not think of himself as the Messiah and who may not even have shared the apocalypticism of some Jewish sects in his time. Christian scholars who propound this view say that the messianic and apocalyptic features rest on the interpretation the followers of Jesus gave to his death: that is, on “the experience of the resurrection.” The old antithesis of the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” seems to stand on firmer foundations than ever.
If the Christian faith in its quest for reconception were to make the historical Jesus the focus of its concern, it would probably have to engage in a more radical reassessment than it has ever attempted of the adequacy of its oldest interpretation of the meaning of the career of the man Jesus. An endeavor of this kind would seem to imply dealing de novo with the tenability and adequacy of such central dogmatic features as Christology, Eschatology, and Trinity. One feels in one's bones that it must and will come to this. But does the faith possess the vitality to pass through this inevitability creatively?
How about Novak's third reason for hope? He says non-theists have appropriated Christian values. What does that mean, and is it a help? Can one distinguish values in this way? In what sense is Christianity, or any other faith, a source of human values? That Christianity, in the long run, undertakes to protect and deepen human values is commendable; that it often speaks as if it had invented them seems arrogant. Nor does one get to the heart of the issue by saying that Christianity has always been “defective” in implementing its own best insights.
Novak is keenly aware that many of the values we prize most today had to contend with the fiercest opposition from Christianity before they could establish themselves. One thinks of the appreciation of the human person, with its implications for social freedom and religious liberty; and one thinks of the meaning of human sexuality, which Novak restates so admirably for the sake of the Church. Who is indebted to whom? He quotes with approval a statement in which Emil Fackenheim expresses his dismay and sorrow that Christianity or Judaism should ever have been “lukewarm . . . or downright hostile” to the liberal ideal. In some sense, at least, the Church has caught up with the humanists, not the humanists with the Church.
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Well then, is this a time to build? Can Christianity begin again? One is reminded of Ezekiel and the valley of dry bones: “. . . Can these bones live?” And the reply, “Thou knowest.”
Novak's vision of the reconception of Christian faith in our era includes a prescription for a further shift toward secularity. That is in harmony with the whole story of redefinition and development, as already noted. One can applaud the author all the more because he also believes that the intellectual transformation should be American, that theologians today must build within the context of the empirical and realistic interpreters of American social and technological culture. He properly faults American Protestant theology's persistent addiction to the legacies of German idealism by recalling how Reinhold Niebuhr finally discovered that he had an ally rather than a foe in John Dewey.
His concentration on this-worldliness and on America makes it all the more regrettable that Novak does not show any awareness of the spirit and meaning of Judaism, either for what it is in itself or as a resource for his undertaking. He does, to be sure, speak with great admiration of the Jewish capacity for creative cultural achievement in the common life. But it does not seem to occur to him that this vitality is rooted in the spirit of Judaism, let alone that Jewish faith may have something crucially important to say to Christian faith as the latter sets out to redefine itself in the modern world. Novak seems to feel no need for dialogue.
The stages and ways by which Christianity has moved toward secularity have always involved a progressive reappropriation of many facets of the Jewish tradition, not only an assimilation of the Graeco-Roman legacy. But for dogmatic reasons this reclamation has almost always happened surreptitiously. By now, this procedure amounts to a fixed habit. One can only hope that the ever-growing indebtedness may begin to be acknowledged openly, as Harvey Cox is ready to do, and detailed systematically.
The Judaism Novak talks about is subsumed under Christianity. It is, to be sure, possible that there is something that can be called the Judaeo-Christian tradition. There is certainly a distinguishable Jewish component in Christianity; Hans Jonas has recently shown us something of its cultural role in Western history (COMMENTARY, November 1967). But in recognizing the Jewish component in Christianity one has not faced or listened to Judaism in its own right. Judaism's problems and ways of relating to the modern world are not identical with those of Christianity, as the author seems to assume.
Despite all Christian teaching, Israel still lives, outside of the Church as well as within it. In rebuilding, Christians should begin to absorb that fact, notably in America which, since the Holocaust, has become the new center of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Christianity teaches that it superseded Judaism; what it must learn is that it is renewed by it. For almost two millennia it has read the Old Testament in the light of the New; but in order to achieve and retain relevance in time, it has repeatedly had to re-interpret the New in the light of the Old. Once this state of affairs penetrates Christian consciousnes, the frustrated “dialogue” of Jews and Christians will become possible and important; and the radical transformation of Christianity, the need and course of which is so admirably set forth in this book, will have a brighter future.
