Evangelical and Catholics Coming Together- It Wasn't Just Politics- Thoughts on Father Neuhaus Part II

This is part II of what are going to be three posts on matters related to Father Neuhaus and his passing. See Are Catholics The Brains of Religious Right ? Thoughts on Father Neuhaus Part I .

The American Catholic Church within just weeks lost two of its leading lights. That is Cardinal Avery Dulles and Father Neuhaus. Both were converts by the way and both made ecumenical work a huge of their life.

Cardinal Dulles was correctly lauded and recognized for this work. Father Neuhaus is too but the tone is different in now countless obits and and articles I have seen. One gets a sense that the media sees Dulles work in a more pure Holy sense. Father Neuhaus work in this area is mentioned ( Such as in the famous Catholics and Evangelicals Coming Together Statement) but people sort of taint it. There is Dulles the ecumenical Saint on one hand and Father Neuhaus the ecumenical political union boss or ward captain rounding up the votes on the other. Worse than that he is some religious boss getting the votes in for the GOP (Gasp)

This is disappointing. This comes across a tad in very nice piece that Michael Winters wrote on Nehaus in Slate Magazine called Father Richard John Neuhaus Remembering the theologian. Winters who is to the "left" of Neuhaus on many issues has also written two tributes over at America magazine. to Father Neuhaus.

These parts I sort of take issue with and the tone is something I see repeated all over the place.

After his conversion to Catholicism in 1990, Neuhaus tried to forge an alliance with evangelicals to address shared areas of moral concern. The effort caught the attention of, among others, Karl Rove, and the GOP improved its share of the Catholic vote in both 2000 and 2004. That effort was misguided from the start, and Neuhaus should have known better. He once wrote, "Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed." But to Catholics, evangelicals are not orthodox and vice-versa, and the differences are not small. Catholic social doctrine, including opposition to abortion, is rooted in a dogmatic belief in human dignity. Evangelical political theology is rooted in Calvin's belief in human depravity. Both groups may oppose abortion, but their approaches to the role of religion in society are vastly different.

When religion is reduced to ethics, the church is permitted to enter the public square under the guise of a moral authority. But once you sever the link between the central animating dogmas of faith and the moral teachings that flow from there, you invite a cheap moralism, a religion of external conformity to prescribed norms rather than an internal assent of faith. You are a Christian if you believe certain things about events on a hillside in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. It is that belief that has inspired believers and generated culture. Just last September, Pope Benedict XVI said that Christianity "is not a new philosophy or a new form of morality. We are only Christians if we encounter Christ." Neuhaus knew this, but he never found a way to translate it politically.

I encourage people to read the whole Slate piece and I do not wish to give the impression I am bashing Mr Winter's tribute here. But I think the above has some problems.

First as a former Evangelical and for countless ones I know theirs and my former political viewpoints were not " rooted in Calvin's belief in human depravity." As I stated in part I of these posts Evangelicals are a huge group of folks with many diverse groups. There is a danger of trying to make them all alike because well that is false. On a related note I can't help but note as to Evangelicals as a whole the term Calvinist has been thrown around a lot more than it used too. Why this is occurring I don't know. While it is true the Reformed have had some considerable influence in Evangelical circles there was also opposition to it. Those battles that continue today are legend. In essence there is no one Evangelical political theology.

Getting back to my main point Neuhaus efforts here were not at its core for poiltical reasons. As was noted in World Magazine's very nice obit on Neuhaus :

In 1994, Colson and Neuhaus convened a group of Catholic and evangelical leaders to produce a manifesto called "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium." The document drew criticism from both sides. Cromartie said the manifesto grew out of a meeting attended by Colson and Neuhaus on Latin America, where both became aware of the violence there between Catholics and Protestants. "He would disagree with those who saw the manifesto as a political coalition or social coalition,” Cromartie said. “It was first and foremost a theological conversation among people committed to the Apostle's Creed and historical orthodoxy."

It is true that Neuhaus was trying to bring Christan's together to cloth the Naked Public Square. However that was not his only purpose. Neuhaus to my knowledge never tried to water down doctrines to get along. He would ruffle a few feathers with his bluntness. He in my estimation was doing ecumenical work in the tradition of John Paul the II and Pope Benedict.

It is sad that his works with his former Lutheran Communion on issues that divide us and unite us has strangely gone untalked about the last few days.

While his political work was important I think it is needed to not only see that or view everything through that prism.

People are not just political animals and the conversation between Catholics and others would focus on things besides abortion and other pressing public matters. Neuhaus was helpful in that regard as we got to better know each other. I will end with this nice piece of a advice he gave a Catholic that started getting when were you saved questions

A seriously Catholic friend whose line of work has him hanging out with equally serious evangelical Protestants has a problem. “I’m not very good,” he says, “at giving the kind of formulaic ‘personal testimony’ that they seem to expect.” I know what he means.
For many years I’ve been responding to evangelical friends who want to know when I was born again or, as it is commonly put, when I became a Christian. “I don’t remember it at all,” I say, “but I know precisely the time and place. It was at 357 Miller St., Pembroke, Ontario, on Sunday, June 2, 1936, when twelve days after my birth I was born again in the sacrament of Holy Baptism.” (I was baptized at home because the chicken pox was going around.) That usually elicits a wry smile, and then the question, “Yes, but when did you really become a Christian?” In sober truth, there have been not one but several moments in my life that would no doubt qualify as what most evangelicals mean by a conversion experience. In circumstances appropriate to the disclosure of intensely personal experiences, I have told others about these moments. And some day, in pathetically pale imitation of Augustine and other greats, I might write about them in detail. My public testimony, however, is not to my experience but to Christ. It is not upon my experience but upon Christ that I rest my confidence that I am a child of God.
The same set of questions is addressed from a Calvinist viewpoint in a recent issue of that mordant publication, Nicotine Theological Journal. The article includes this from the 1902 Heidelberg Catechism, Twentieth–Century Edition: “Nor need you doubt your conversion, your change of heart, because you cannot tell the day when it took place, as many profess to do. It did not take place in a day, or you might tell it. It is the growth of years (Mark 4:26–28), and therefore all the more reliable. You cannot tell when you learned to walk, talk, think, and work. You do not know when you learned to love your earthly father, much less the heavenly.” The editors add, “This is the Reformed doctrine of ‘getting religion.’ We get religion, not in bulk but little by little. Just as we get natural life and strength, so spiritual life and strength, day by day.”
Of course, some do get it in bulk, and with a bang. One thinks, for instance, of the zealot from Tarsus on his way to Damascus. —Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, April 2000