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Modernity as a Stimulus of Reconciliation Between American Evangelicals and Catholics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2013
Extract
In my day in the New York Archdiocesan seminary there was a room in the library dedicated entirely to anti-Catholic literature, with four walls, ceiling to floor, of books and pamphlets exposing the various shortcomings and infidelities of the Romish Church. That collection in the New York seminary was more extensive than the collections I found in the Buswell Library at Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Center, and in the library of Westminster Theological Seminary forty years later. In the last ten years I have closely studied only a small fraction of the extant material. Even so, the literature I have plowed through is huge, and the literature of evangelical criticism and Catholic response which I will never get to study is vaster still.
While all of the material belongs in a collection of some sort, not much belongs on a library shelf. Much of it is literary and historical junk. Some of it borders on the savage: for example, H.G. Wells' Crux Ansata with his suggestion that the allied bombers in World War II obliterate the Vatican. Wells and Jack Chick will sit in the same circle of Purgatory. But some of it is intellectually respectable, even if panic-ridden. Some of it is serious and responsible in its attempts at theological and historical criticism.
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- College Theology Society Fiftieth Anniversary Essays
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- Copyright © The College Theology Society 2004
References
1 Many an afternoon study period, when I needed a release from the blinding truths of my scholastic theology manuals, did I spend hunched over these dark tomes. The child is father to the man.
2 The original of this paper was read at the Wheaton College Conference on Evangelicals and Catholics in April 2002.
3 Wells, H.G., Cruz Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Agora Publishing, 1944)Google Scholar; and see the many books of Paul Blanshard's British counterpart, Manhattan, Avro, prominent among them Vatican Imperialism in the 20th Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1965).Google Scholar
4 Beecher, Lyman, Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman and Smith, 1835)Google Scholar and Strong, Josiah, Our Country, ed. Herbst, Jurgen (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963 [1886])CrossRefGoogle Scholar are good examples of well-intended popular propaganda flavored with a dollop of paranoia.
5 The prime example is Boettner, Loraine's Roman Catholicism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Press, 1962).Google Scholar Boettner undoubtedly worked hard on this book over many years and gave what he thought was a measured critique of Catholic doctrine and political practice. He is dealing with real theological problems that remain dividers between the communities. Morse, Samuel's Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1977 [1835])Google Scholar, on the other hand, is based on a fantasy. It is a classic in the genre described by Richard Hofstadter as “the paranoid style of American politics.”
6 Among them: Kenrick, Bishop Francis P., The Primacy of the Apostolic See Vindicated (Philadelphia: M. Fithian, 1845)Google Scholar; England, Bishop John, “Address Before Congress,” in Messmer, Sebastian G., The Works of the Right Reverend John England, First Bishop of Charleston (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1908), 7: 9–43Google Scholar; Gibbons, James, Faith of Our Fathers (Baltimore: J. Murphy and Co., 1876).Google Scholar
7 See a list of reactions and a summary of their content in O'Neill, James M., Catholicism and American Freedom (New York: Harper Bros., 1952), 224ff.Google Scholar On the current crop of apologists for the Catholic Church, many of them converts from evangelicalism, see Huff, Peter, “New Apologists in America's Conservative Catholic Subculture,” Horizons 23/2 (1996): 242–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Archbishop Lefebvre see Dinges, William, “Quo Vadis, Lefebvre?,” America 18 June 1988, pp. 602–06.Google Scholar
8 See Casanova, Jose, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Heft, James, ed., A Catholic Modernity: Charles Taylor's Marianist Award Lecture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bokenkotter, Thomas, A Concise History of the Catholic Church (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1990 [1976]).Google Scholar
9 It was certainly my specter, and I know I did not make it up. I absorbed it in parish grammar school and diocesan high school as World War II raged and the Cold War heated up, while Pius XII reigned.
10 Murray, J.C., “Governmental Repression of Heresy,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America (1948), 260ff.Google Scholar Murray was ordered silent for several years because of his abandonment of the ideal of Christendom. See Komonchak, Joseph A., “Crisis in Church-State Relationships in the U. S. A.,” Review of Politics 61/4 (Fall 1999), 675–714CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Silencing of John Courtney Murray,” in Cristianesimo nella Storia: Saggi in onore di Guiseppe Alberigo,” ed. Melloni, A. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), 657–702Google Scholar; and “The Catholic Principle and the American Experiment,” U. S. Catholic Historian 17 (1999): 28–45.
11 Glendon, Mary Ann, “The Sources of Rights Talk,” Commonweal 12 October 2001, pp. 11–13.Google Scholar
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13 Marsden, George chronicled the process and the reaction of conservative evangelicals, first in reference to the culture in Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar and then with regard to the schools in The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). For other comments on the schools, see the essays in Marsden, and Longfield, Bradley, eds., The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar For Mark Noll's view of the unfortunate side of the evangelical reaction to modernity, see The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).
14 Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981 [1923]). Machen here and in his exegetical masterpiece, The Virgin Birth, expressed some admiration for Catholics and their church. Machen followed in the footsteps of Charles Hodge. See Reynolds, Mark, “Charles Hodge's Ecclesiastical Elenctics: His Response to Catholicizing Tendencies in the Churches, 1837–1860”, unpublished dissertation, Saint Louis University, 2000.Google Scholar See a discussion of Machen, and Hodge, in Shea, W., The Lion and the Lamb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
15 See Machen's, sermon at the first General Assembly of his Orthodox Presbyterian Church (as it later became known), “The Church of God,” Presbyterian Guardian 2 14 June 1936, 98.Google Scholar On Machen, see Hart, Daryl, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), 157–58Google Scholar; and Longfield, Bradley, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 211–13.Google Scholar To my way of thinking Machen was a fine man, a very determined Christian, far more understanding of his opponents than either Luther or Calvin, an admirable soul in most respects but one of the sort whom history wrecks without a quiver of guilt.
16 The phrase is from Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Amereon House, 1977).Google Scholar It is put to brilliant use in explaining bourgeois modernity by Berman, MarshallAll that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Viking, 1988).Google Scholar
17 Carpenter, Joel, Revive Us Again! The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 141 ff.Google Scholar
18 The documents of the meetings are discussed in Shea, The Lion and the Lamb, as well as in Carpenter.
19 See Marsden, George, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987).Google Scholar
20 Dinges, William, In Defense of Truth and Tradition: Catholic Traditionalism in America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).Google Scholar
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