The previous chapters have examined several Modernists and several anti-Modernists. The overall argument of those chapters is that the theological position of neither group should be praised or blamed without first considering the following two questions: Why did the crisis develop when it did? Why did each individual involved in the Modernist crisis take the position that he or she did?

First, why did the crisis develop when it did? If one looks at the writings of the Catholic Tübingen School from the first half of the nineteenth century, it can be seen that the strictly theological issues had not changed very much in 100 years. What had changed was the cultural climate and the socio-political circumstances in which the church found itself. Various facets of that change have been explored in this volume, including the decreased temporal power of the Vatican, the development in France of a state-sponsored system of education which was independent of the church, the separation of church and state, and the declining credibility for many citizens of the church's claims to authority. The Modernists and the anti-Modernists both had to come to terms with these changes. The intensity of the crisis resulted from their radically divergent ways of undertaking the same task: while trying to convey the religious message of Catholic Christianity to the people of their day, the Modernists practiced selective accommodation, while the anti-Modernists practiced selective confrontation.