The Christian Understanding of Freedom and the History of Freedom in the Modern Era: The Meeting and Confrontation between Christianity and the Modern Era in a Postmodern Situation

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The Christian Understanding of Freedom and the History of Freedom in the Modern Era : The Meeting and Confrontation between Christianity and the Modern Era in a Postmodern Situation Páere Marquette Lecture in Theology ; 1988 Kasper, Walter. Marquette University Press 0874625432 9780874625431 9780585141565 English Freedom (Theology) , Liberty--History, Civilization, Modern. 1988 BT810.2.K37 1988eb 233/.7 Freedom (Theology) , Liberty--History, Civilization, Modern.

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The 1988 Père Marquette Lecture in Theology

The Christian Understanding of Freedom and the History of Freedom in the Modern Era: The Meeting and Confrontation between Christianity and the Modern Era in a Postmodern Situation by Dr. Walter Kasper Professor of Dogmatic Theology University of Tübingen Marquette University Press Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53233

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Title of the original German manuscript: "Das christliche Verständnis der Freiheit und die moderne Freiheitsgeschichte. Zur Begegnung und Auseinandersetzung zwischen Christentum und Moderne in einer postmodernen Situation." Translated by Joseph A. Murphy, S.J. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 88-60190 © Copyright 1988 Marquette University Press ISBN 0-87462-543-2

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Preface The 1988 Père Marquette Lecture is the nineteenth in a series inaugurated to celebrate the Tercentenary of the missions and explorations of Père Jacques Marquette, S.J. (1637-1675). The Marquette University Department of Theology, founded in 1952, launched these annual lectures by distinguished theologians in 1969. The 1988 lecture was delivered at Marquette University on April 10, 1988, by Dr. Walter Kasper, Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the University of Tübingen and one of the leading Catholic theologians in the world. Professor Kasper was born in Heidenheim, Germany, in 1933 and ordained in 1957. He began his formal theological training under Joseph Geiselmann at Tübingen and, after teaching dogmatic theology at Freiburg and Münster, he returned to Tübingen in 1970. He is a member of the International Theological Commission and co-editor of four scholarly journals. He was special secretary for the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in 1985. His publications include more than twenty books with translations extending into fourteen foreign languages. Among the more widely acclaimed titles are: Jesus the Christ (1976),

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An Introduction to Christian Faith (1980), Faith and the Future (1982), and The God of Jesus Christ (1984). His newest work, Wahrheit und Freiheit. Die "Erklärung über die Religionsfreiheit" des II Vatikanischen Konzils, is now in press. In this lecture Professor Kasper explains the concept of freedom as it developed in the modern era and compares this kind of freedom with its biblical counterpart in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. He discusses the limitations on freedom stemming both from the emphasis of the Enlightenment on autonomous reason and from the exaggerated humanism, the colonialism and the industrial and technological advances of recent centuries. Professor Kasper shows how the Christian freedom of the Gospel precedes and transcends the modern view without losing the advances in freedom that resulted from modern culture and without returning to a premodern world view. The Père Marquette Lecture Series is supported by the Joseph A. Auchter Family Endowment Fund. Mr. Auchter (1894-1986) was a native of Milwaukee who excelled in business as a banking and paper industry executive and who was very interested in and supportive of education throughout his life. The fund was established through the generosity of his children as a memorial in his honor.

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The Christian Understanding of Freedom and the History of Freedom in the Modern Era: The Meeting and Confrontation between Christianity and the Modern Era in a Postmodern Situation I. An Old Problem in a New Context When we search for a concept by which to characterize the modern world, we keep hearing that key term "freedom". 1 "The freedom of the Christian" was an important slogan of the Reformers. Political and spiritual freedom was the issue at stake in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Freedom of religion was an essential motive of the Pilgrim Fathers and is still one of the spiritual foundations of North America today.2 On the other hand, the modern idea of freedom was and still is the central point of controversy between the Catholic Church and the modern world. The popes in the nineteenth century repeatedly,

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and sometimes in quite strong pronouncements, protested against the liberalism of their time and condemned the modern ideas of freedom. 3 The relationship between the Christian and the modern understandings of freedom is therefore one of the most important theological questions for the modern world. The Second Vatican Council took up this question with determination. On December 7, 1965, after dramatic confrontations, the Council completed the Declaration on Religious Liberty and publicly proclaimed it the same day.4 North American bishops and theologians made an essential contribution to this document. We need only remember John Courtney Murray.5 And so in our own century the Catholic Church, through this document, came to accept, after long delays and many reservations and objections, some essential concerns of the political Enlightenment in the modern era. The declaration on religious freedom, therefore, is rightly considered a milestone in the long and controversial history of the relationships between the Catholic Church and the development of the concept of freedom in the modern era.

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This opening produced almost by necessity some considerable conflict within the Church. On one side we now have the resistance from the Traditionalists gathered around the retired archbishop Marcel Lefèbvre. Their opposition is not primarily centered around liturgical reforms and Latin in the liturgy; it is directed against ecumenical openness and above all against the Declaration on Religious Liberty. For the Traditionalists the recognition of religious liberty means nothing less than an imposition of the "godless" ideas of the French Revolution onto the Church. They see in such a recognition a profound break with the teaching of the popes in the nineteenth century. 6 On the other side of the ecclesial spectrum we have the so-called progressive movements. By enthusiastically latching onto modern understandings of freedom, some from liberalism, some of a utopian-socialist origin, they want to overcome the schism between the Church and the modern world.7 Thus has arisen the battle over the issue of freedom, human rights, democratization, pluralism and dissent in the Church. In addition, the challenge of liberation theology is responsible for further conflicts not yet fully evident.

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Obviously, one must beware of using models that oversimplify. Between the two sides we just described there are many connections and subtle distinctions. Nevertheless, looking at the twenty-three years since the Council as a whole, we are still unsuccessful in working out and making fruitful the Council's new definition of the relations between the Church and the modern world and between Christian and contemporary understandings of freedom. The situation has clearly changed since the Council. The modern idea of freedom and the modern belief in progress that is tied to it have fallen into crisis. The original optimism is long gone. We know more exactly today, based on the experiences of our own century, that freedom can be tragically abused and that not all progress is an advance toward the better. Meanwhile, many speak of a postmodern or post-liberal age in which the old alternatives and the customary clichés no longer hold. 8 A new situation looms on the horizon, although we can grasp its contours only in vague outlines. The concept "postmodern" applied to this new configuration is an excuse for a concept and a stab at naming a time which has yet not found its real name.

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Still, today we must inquire anew after the wellsprings, the foundation and the goal of human freedom and determine in a new manner the relation between Christian and modern freedom. It is time to raise an old problem in a new way. II. The Christian Message about Freedom For Christianity freedom is not a foreign term. 9 One of the great speculative thinkers of the modern period, the German philosopher Hegel, stated in various ways that the principle of freedom was born together with Christianity.10 One can grant that, in the classical Greek world, freedom was conceived as the determining power of existence and as the ideal of human life. But in the same world freedom was restricted to a few individuals. In Athens only the free citizens were truly free, not the slaves or the foreigners. That man as human is free and that freedom constitutes the deepest nature of the human person is first known, according to Hegel, only through Christianity. For, so he argues, it was Christianity that first regarded each person as the image of God and an object of God's

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love, and recognized the infinite worth of each person. In fact, right on the first page of the Bible we find the statement: ''God created man in his image and likeness''. 11 This statement signifies an epoch-making revolution. To be in the image of God was, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the glory and the prerogative of the king. The Bible "democratized", so to speak, this common oriental view of kingship. Since then, the inviolable worth of each person is the ordinary Judaeo-Christian heritage. It is the great dowry of Judaism and Christianity to human civilization. The modern representation of general human rights owes its existence to this Judaeo-Christian tradition. It would be admittedly anachronistic and utterly simplistic if we wanted simply to equate the biblical understanding of freedom and the modern concept of freedom. Christian life and the modern world are not so easily reconciled. As soon as we contemplate the biblical presentation of freedom more closely, we stumble upon profound differences. First of all, the biblical understanding of freedom is quite foreign to the modern man. This becomes clear when we realize that neither

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the Old nor the New Testament poses the philosophical question of freedom. Free will is not a biblical issue. The usual philosophical concepts of that period are missing from the Bible, especially the concept of liberum arbitrium (freedom of choice). Nowhere in the Bible is there any discussion about the relation of freedom to necessity or of freedom to fate. Nevertheless, what we call free will is, in the Bible, presupposed without being mentioned, and is taught implicitly. The Bible speaks indeed of sin and punishment, of obedience, defection, conversion and repentance, and thereby presupposes freedom and the human capacity for responsibility and decision. This presupposition is important. In the Bible man is the one who is called by God; through his power of decision he must answer to the Word of God that has confronted him. The Bible knows that what is properly human consists in man's free stance before God and in his being God's partner and the "other" for God. What admittedly sounds alienating for us today is that the New Testament insists that this freedom that is essential to man has been displaced, perverted and destroyed. The New

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Testament sees man as simultaneously locked in a prison, as a slave; namely, a slave of sin, of the Law, of untruth and of delusion, and ultimately as a slave who has fallen victim to death. 12 For all that, the New Testament does not say that the original freedom of the human person is totally nullified. That would be a Gnostic claim; the New Testament contradicts such a view. For St. Paul man is accountable for his behavior both before and after the Fall.13 Paul speaks of a deep yearning for our original freedom and sees in all of creation a groaning and sighing in hopes of being liberated from slavery and despair for the freedom and glory of the children of God.14 Thus the New Testament recognizes our original freedom but sees it now captive and powerless. We would say it thus today: the freedom is there but in a state of estrangement. Given these conditions, the very freedom of man must be set free. This happens through Jesus Christ.15 Christian freedom, for which Christ has freed us, is therefore the freedom of the sons and daughters of God, a freedom we have only in Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Thus the New

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Testament always speaks of freedom in an eschatological context, as a characteristic of the end time. 16 This Christian freedom is as far removed from legalism as it is from libertinism. Legalism turns freedom into a law and acts as if we could realize freedom by our own energies. A principle from idealism applies to legalism: "You can, because you should" (Kant). In the spirit of the New Testament this is a horribly excessive demand. Here the New Testament is neither optimistic nor pessimistic but simply realistic, for it recognizes that with our own freedom we do not balance our account but remain in a hundred different ways trapped or bound in knots. And at this point libertinism, which says: "Everything is permissible for me," also collapses.17 Such self-seeking and selfempowerment is, according to Paul, equally an illusion. The self-seeking, self-empowering man remains bound to himself, to his arbitrary interests, needs, strivings and moods, a slave to self. Against such a person Paul contends that true Christian freedom does not consist in that self-centeredness by which one is only about his own affairs, seeking the actuation of a selfish

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freedom. For we are really free when we are so free that we are also free from our own selves and can leap over our own shadows and give ourselves to God and neighbor in an unselfish love. 18 This freedom out of love corresponds to the model of Jesus Christ. In the famous Christ-hymn in Philippians 2:5-11 Paul says of Jesus Christ that he did not claim or use his own divine being for himself but rather opened himself outward and completely handed himself over to us in obedience to God. With Jesus Christ as model, Christian freedom manifests itself in love. Selfless love is the actualizing of freedom. Thus we can say in summary: the biblical understanding of freedom is above all complex. One must distinguish between the formal freedom essential to man, which he never loses even as sinner, and the material or concrete, existential experience of freedom.19 The formal freedom essential to use and presupposed by the New Testament confronts us concretely as a captive freedom. Only in the following of Jesus Christ and in his Spirit is it released to become the freedom of the sons and daughters of God. It is achieved in following Jesus, not in self-seeking, but in love. For

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of love one can say with Augustine: "Dilige, et quod vis fac" (Love, and do what you will). 20 Of course, love does not simply do what it wills; it does whatever corresponds to love. In this sense love is the inner law of freedom. One must keep this complex and differentiated biblical understanding of freedom in the back of his mind if he wishes to grasp the drama in the confrontation between Christian and modern freedom. But, we ask first: What do we mean when we speak of the modern era, in German Neuzeit or Moderne, and of the history of freedom in that period? III. The Wealth and the Misery of the Modern Era The modern period or, as one might also call it, the Moderne, is a thoroughly difficult concept.21 It is even difficult to determine the start of the modern era. Did it begin with humanism and the Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries or with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth? Opinions vary. And it is even more difficult to determine the content of the period. To this era belong not only the Reformation but also the Counter-Reformation, and not only humanism and the

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Enlightenment but also the baroque, the mystical, and the romantic periods; not only the American and French revolutions belong to it but also the attempts at restoration. Not only the natural sciences, technology and the industrial civilization of the masses, but also the noble strains of art and culture belong here, for it is the age of Shakespeare, Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven. In philosophy the period includes not only the idea clara et distincta of Descartes, whom one customarily designates as the father of the modern era, but also the logique du coeur of his counterpart Pascal; not only the mechanical world structure of Newton but also the philosophy of nature of the Romantics. Thus, most of the motifs offered by current critics of the modern period are basically as old as the period itself. The modern era always included criticism of itself. Hence it is difficult to say that today is the end of the modern period and then to announce a post-modern age, or a new age. The modern era is, above all, many-sided, even contradictory in many respects. Still, there is a common denominator for the modern culture: the turn to the human. Mankind in its freedom and its worth becomes the point

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of departure, and the middle and end point, of thought. 22 The insight into the worth of the human always belonged to Judaeo-Christian tradition. This tradition, nevertheless, takes on a new quality in the modern period. At the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era the reigning religious and political orders, which to that time had given mankind stability and direction, fell apart. Through the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo the old picture of the universe collapsed. Suddenly mankind was on its own and was now no longer supported by a great cosmological, metaphysical and theological network of ordering principles. Since there was now no preestablished order, man had to create his own. He made himself the point of departure and the norm. Thus, freedom became autonomous, that is, self-ruled. It was from now on something unconditioned and ultimate, the calculus by which all else was to be measured. The magnitude of this modern idea of freedom is incontestable. The idea of human rights, tolerance, and equality before the law; the idea of the free political structure, which takes the dignity of mankind as its norm; the

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idea of the freedom of the sciences and arts, of information and communication all belong, one can hope, to the permanently valid heritage of the modern era. As Christians we have no reason to reject all of this. On the contrary, we have, precisely as Christians, every reason to preserve this heritage of the modern era and also, where necessary, to defend it. In this modern heirtage the original Judaeo-Christian tradition lives on. 23 Along with the greatness of this modern concept of freedom, however, we also perceive its misery and deep interior ambivalence.24 That is, to the extent that human freedom understood itself as not only unconditioned, but also as absolute, it faced the necessity of playing the role of God and even of Providence itself. And that was an unbearable presumption. This "Almighty God" complex led to a restlessness and disquietude, to a continuous heightening of tempo and achievement and finally to still further disappointments. The challenge of the modern era cannot be fulfilled. And so the path of self-justification led finally to the abyss of nihilism. Friedrich Nietzsche is the one who truly executed the last will and testament of the

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modern era. At the end of the era Søren Kierkegaard finally recognized anxiety, Angst, as the constitutive ground of human existence. It is not an anxiety about "some thing", but anxiety without object, a dread that has eaten into a freedom that has become bottomless. This dread has become the very constitution of human existence. 25 It continues to keep human life in a state of tension and can in its essence be projected onto arbitrary, ever-changing objects. On the other hand this anxiety is man's self-absolutizing freedom, characterized by the willto-power. And Nietzsche and Heidegger diagnosed this will-to-power as the basic direction of modern thinking.26 Man, having placed himself at the center of things, now no longer contemplated and reverently admired nature but understood himself to be the lord and owner of nature. Scientific and technical progress doubtless brought many advantages, which none of us would care to do without and which, basically, we cannot do without. Still, the price we pay for this is high. Modern progress is a highly ambivalent affair. Is it truly progress if today, instead of slingshots and bows and arrows, we use atomic bombs? We must recognize the

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inner dialectic of the Enlightenment and of progress itself. Uncontrolled interventions into nature destroy and pollute our environment; we ultimately disrupt thereby the natural environment of human life. Our new technological world has given rise in the large cities to huge densities of people, groups that did not form naturally and that can only be governed centrally and bureaucratically. The individual has become lonely in a crowd. The reduction of thought to the objectively certifiable and to the technically producible has ultimately revolutionized the traditional system of values. The crisis of the family is one of the most significant and most painful consequences of this decay of traditional values. The relative advantages that modern development has brought to western civilization become quite questionable if one looks at the third world. The western history of liberation also contains, through imperialism and colonialism, a history of oppression and suffering for the peoples of the third world. Somehow we all live at their expense. Such is the basis of legitimation for the criticism many liberation movements make, liberation theology

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included, against modern western civilization. There is more still: The uncontrolled will to dominate led mankind itself to become dependent on that will. Mastery over nature also leads to new and not yet evident forms of mastery over man and to manipulation of human beings. If all is reduced to numbers, then in the end man also becomes a faceless number, a little cog in the huge machine of modern society. Does the history of liberation in the modern era end with new estrangements and dependencies? Some people today openly proclaim the suppression of the so-called traditionally European human rights. After the death of God comes the announcement of man's death. 27 One may say: The revolution feeds on her own children. The Neuzeit suppresses itself; the Moderne destroys itself from within. What is left? We can hope that in spite of all this disillusionment one thing remains: the progress in the consciousness of freedom and in the structures of freedom fought for with such effort. They give us a heritage whose worth is much too little appreciated by the representatives of the theology of liberation. On the other hand, it is still valid to look at the limits and dangers of the modern era.

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As Christians we have no excuse at all for retaining, regardless of the cost, all the failures of the period, as many liberal Christians and theologians have in mind to do. We must rather protect the modern period from self-imposed destruction and tame its destructive powers. Today we as Christians have a new responsibility, little recognized before now, for the future of our western civilization. We can only take it seriously if we reconcile the modern understanding of freedom with its Christian origins and bring it again into the comprehensive vision of the Bible and the Christian tradition. The modern era has yielded good fruits from the tree of Christian tradition. But insofar as the period stressed only one aspect of things and separated itself from the larger picture, these fruits are like those that fall from the tree: they rot and even become poisonous. Therefore let us ask fresh questions about the relation between Christian and modern freedom. IV. Beyond Restoration and Secularization Against the background we have given so far we can understand that the history of the relationship between Christianity and the

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modern development of freedom has progressed with great difficulty. Basically, two reactions were possible for the Church and for theology: the positive appropriation of the modern era or the rejection of its emancipating tendencies. Both approaches were taken. Nevertheless, both reactions are one-sided because neither one comes fully to grips with the complex totality of the Christian understanding of freedom and with the differentiated phenomenon of freedom in the modern period. First of all, the Church had dealt with the concept of freedom in the modern period very severely for quite some time. Of course, there do exist some very early roots of a Christian understanding of democracy; but the principal reaction from Church circles consisted above all in restoration. 28 The nineteenth-century popes, from Gregory XVI to Leo XIII, time and again sharply criticized the modern idea of freedom as it was in fact presented at that time.29 Gregory XVI portrayed freedom of conscience as an erroneous position and a madness and freedom of opinion as a plague-ridden mistake.30 And Leo XIII, who was otherwise in many ways open to modern

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ideas, saw in the liberalist understanding of freedom the diabolical temptation of a non serviam at work. 31 The First Vatican Council, too, viewed the modern era as a grand history of decline and decay.32 The tragic confrontations with Modernism and Americanism, socalled, were the result. In our century, between the wars, this view persisted among otherwise progressive theologians. In his widely read book, The Spirit of Catholicism, Karl Adam wrote: ''It is the mark of the modern man that he is torn from his roots . . . . The sixteenth-century revolt from the Church led inevitably to the revolt from Christ of the eighteenth century, and thence to the revolt from God of the nineteenth. And thus the modern spirit has been torn loose from the deepest and strongest supports of its life, from its foundation in the Absolute, in the self-existent Being, in the Value of all values.'' 33 In 1950 Romano Guardini, in his widely regarded The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation, spoke of the "revolutionary faith in autonomy."34 The Catholic Church and the theological community deliberately and decisively countered the modern principle with the principle

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of authority. In this way the modern Church was and is much more authoritarian and uniformist than the Church of the Middle Ages ever was. It was first during the modern era that "dogma" and "teaching office" became the technical terms they are today. 35 The high point of this development was the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), which specified the relation between faith and knowledge and proclaimed its two dogmas about papal primacy of jurisdiction and papal infallibility. In spite of this counter-position, the Catholic Church remained thoroughly a captive of the thesis it disputed. Absolutism, which derives and orders everything from a single principle, is a particularly modern phenomenon.36 Thus, one can characterize the Catholicism of the modern period with the principle of "Engagement through Resistance." This method of "Engagement through Resistance" was thoroughly effective. It made possible a Catholicism both inwardly and outwardly secure and one that was a powerful spiritual and political refutation of the totalitarian claims of modern reason. Thus the Catholic Church, in its own way, was consistently a treasure house for freedom. The

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tie with Rome was for many local churches the only possible means of protecting and defending, to some extent, the freedom and independence of their own regions against the absolutist states. Moreover, the internal and external security gave the individual Christian a strong place to stand. The Church was experienced as a homeland. Yet this security increasingly proved to be a weakness. The Church could increasingly react to the modern challenges only defensively and apologetically. This reaction was most clearly evident in the unfortunate confrontations with Modernism and Americanism at the beginning of this century. The Church and modern culture became ever more estranged. Pope Paul VI named this estrangement the drama of our epoch. 37 In this way Christianity began to lose its worldwide influence even further. The resulting crisis was smoldering well before the Second Vatican Council. The Council did not introduce it but only made it known. After the Council the problems, long stored up, tumbled down upon the Church like an avalanche. In the long-term view the Second Vatican Council, principally by its Declaration on

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Religious Liberty, 38 completed a new chapter in the relation between the Christian understanding of freedom and the modern history of freedom. In this way the Council reacted to the changed historical situation of the twentieth century. The challenge now was no longer a liberalism fostered by lay Catholics, but totalitarianism. In this situation of extreme danger for freedom the Church took a decisive position on the side of freedom. This development was long prepared for.39 There were already statements about the inalienable rights of the human person in the encyclicals of Pius XI against the totalitarian ideologies and regimes of the early twentieth century, against Italian fascism (Non abbiamo bisogno, 1931), against the Mexican Revolution (Firmissimam constantiam, 1937), against German National Socialism (Mit brennender Sorge, 1937) and against Soviet communism (Divini redemptoris, 1937). Pius XII clearly and systematically developed this teaching about the worth of human persons and their inalienable rights at the high point of the Second World War in his famous Christmas address of 1942. John XXIII was able to build from here in his encyclical Pacem in terris (1963) and thus lay the foundation for Vatican II.

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It is not possible in this connection to enter into the thorny and dramatic history of the Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty. We already indicated the decisive contribution of the American theologian John Courtney Murray. The traditional position had been traumatized by the French Revolution and fixated on the anti-Church liberalism of the nineteenth century. Murray began to speak and write about an American tradition for which the principle of religious freedom stood not under the European anticlerical banner of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but under the encouraging and advantageous principle of separation of Church and State. Another equally important fact is less well-known, or at least less attended to. An exact study of the texts and sources reveals above all that the Council did not simply accept and canonize some already existing liberal or other understanding of freedom. Rather, it inserted the idea and practice of religious freedom, as understood by the modern era, into the larger context of the Christian understanding of freedom. 40 Interventions by the then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla,41 by Carlo Colombo,42 theologian for Paul VI, and by the

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well-known worker bishop Alfred Ancel of Lyons 43 made it clear that truth in no way includes force and can only be recognized and acknowledged in freedom, but that, seen from the opposite direction, freedom exists for the sake of truth and only finds its inner fulfillment in the realization of the true. Cardinal Wojtyla explicitly quoted the statement from the Gospel of John: "The truth will make you free".44 These and other contributions made their way into the final text.45 But, in the rush and the drama of its final sessions, the Council did not succeed in integrating religious liberty into a comprehensive theology of Christian freedom. In this regard the Council provides a beginning and an impulse but not a conclusion. In post-conciliar theology, the Council's statements contributed to determining a new relation between the Church and the modern era. The progressive idea of secularization replaced the theory of decline and decay from the age of the restoration.46 It made the Christian heritage aware of the modern era and therefore interpreted the autonomy of the era no longer as a decline from Christian theonomy but as its secular realization. This

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view was not substantially new. It has its roots in Hegel's philosophy of history, wherein the idea of freedom and of the worth of each person was born with Christianity but found its secular realization only in the modern era. Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Carl Schmitt, and others took up these theses and interpreted the basic categories of the modern era as secularized forms of Christian conceptions. The secularization thesis found a dogmatic strain in Karl Löwith, who interpreted the totality of modern philosophies of history and utopias of history up until Marxism as secularizations of Christian eschatology. 47 Theology then addressed these theses. The Protestant theologian Richard Rothe began to do so in the last century.48 Starting from the theses of Hegel on the philosophy of history, he interpreted the secularization of the modern era as the secular realization of Christianity. Thus he became the forefather of liberal cultural-Protestantism, which also developed in the United States, but under different historical presuppositions. A Protestant Christianity understood as liberalism was the recognized social religion of the bourgeois class. Such an identification led German Prot-

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estantism into a serious crisis at the beginning of the Third Reich. Specifically, the "German-Christians" (Deutsche Christen) attempted a similar reconciliation with the National-Socialist movement. The "Confessing Church" (Bekennende Kirche) reacted against this. In the spirit of neo-orthodoxy, as represented particularly by Karl Barth, the basic distinction between God and the world and between Church and society was stressed again. Nevertheless, in the fifties and in the beginning of the sixties the old attempt, now with neo-orthodoxy as the new means, was made again. This took place on the Protestant side principally through Friedrich Gogarten, Trutz Rendtorff and (with important differences) Wolfhart Pannenberg. 49 On the Catholic side there was the Rahner school, principally in the work of Johann Baptist Metz, who developed a theology of the secular world before he later turned to political theology.50 To justify this process these theologians appealed on the one hand to the biblical faith in creation and on the other hand to Christology. The biblical faith in creation distinguishes sharply between Creator and creature, between God and the world. The ancients held

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that everything is full of gods, according to the famous saying of Thales of Miletus. The Bible proclaims God's transcendence over the world. It says that the world is not divine; it is just the world. It de-divinizes and desacralizes the world. One can also say that precisely the belief in creation with its distinction between God and the world leads to a secular understanding of the world. And one can even ground this secularizing process Christologically. According to the Christological dogma of Chalcedon (451), divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ remain unmixed and unseparated. In Jesus Christ there exists the closest possible union between God and man. But this union also implies the most radical distinction between God and man and thereby radically releases man into his own world. Thus Karl Rahner could posit the axiom whereby unity and difference in the relation of God to creature increase not by inverse proportion but in direct relation. 51 The greater the unity with God, the greater the difference. Metz concluded from this: "The struggle for God and the struggle to enable all men to be free subjects does not operate in the opposite direction but proportionally

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in the same direction." 52 Put more simply: Precisely when we take God seriously as God, we must inevitably stand up for the capacity-tobe-subject of each person, of all people. There is no question that this secularization thesis means an essential step forward for a relevant determination of the relation between Christianity and the modern era. It took seriously the Christian heritage inherent in the modern principle of freedom, sloughed off the old restorative condemnation of the period, and made possible a new, positive relationship between the Church and the modern era. Many open and eager Christians found this thesis to be a genuine liberation. Secularization theology was in fact an essential contribution to overcoming the breach between Christianity and modern culture. It brought about a new climate in the Church and in the relation between the Church and the world. It was the basis for a new encounter and dialogue between the Church and the modern world that particularly got under way after the Council. In spite of its great influence in Western Europe and North America and its positive elements, this neo-liberal theology of the world surely cannot be the last word. For the

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sake of brevity we shall raise only the three following points: 1. The old theory of decline misunderstood the Christian heritage of the modern era and therefore one-sidedly judged the period as negative. But the secularization thesis also has tunnel vision. It correctly recognizes the Christian roots of the period but overlooks the antiChurch and anti-Christian protest-and-conflict character of many modern secularization processes. 53 It has to reduce the many conflicts that arose during the period to harmless misunderstandings. Above all, it overlooks the fact that the modern era seeks to legitimate its understanding of freedom not on theonomous grounds, beginning with God, but on deliberately autonomous grounds. And it overlooks the emancipatory power of freedom while making too much of the indisputable loss of effectiveness suffered by Christianity in the course of the modern era. Moreover, the thesis misunderstands the limitations and misery of the modern history of freedom which led to new dependencies. Instead of forming the world and healing it according to the message of Christian freedom, it leads to accommodation to what the

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modern era understands freedom to be. Christianity thus risks becoming indistinguishable from the modern world, of becoming one point in the process of a societal whole, and of no longer taking its proper mission seriously. 2. The secularization thesis arises too rapidly from the historical irreversibility of the secularization process. It presumes that what is at stake is an inevitable on-going historical process. To counter this idea some American sociologists have already led the way in opposing the thesis of the persistence of religion in our society to the thesis about the end of religion 54 and thereby alluded to the phenomenon of civil religion.55 This argument can be reinforced. Indeed, today we are experiencing a new surge of religious consciousness and a revival of myth that twenty years ago would have been unthinkable.56 What is involved in this so-called new religiosity is an extremely wide-ranging phenomenon; one can only explain its quick spread by noting that secularization has created a vacuum for all the possible new claims of religious absolutism to rush into. It is more than just questionable whether secularization is an irreversible process and whether it is appropri-

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ate as the universal category for interpreting the present. Currently there seems rather to be a growing awareness that a neglect of the religious dimension of life leads to a life-endangering amputation of the person and that a purely secular order cannot last for long. 57 Today is the right moment for the helping and healing power of the Christian message of freedom. 3. The Christian distinction between God and world means that there is a properly religious element, and hence a properly Christian one, which is not absorbed into its secular manifestations and functions. If the term ''God'' no longer refers to something genuine, which is not simply another part of the world, even the modern one, but which has something real to say to the world which man alone cannot say by himself, and to which he is unconditionally related, then the word "God" becomes content-less or object-less, an ideological empty formula, a symbolically overarching paraphrase for whatever happens inevitably anyway. With such an understanding, in such an event, a merely functional manner of contemplating religion falls apart and eventually destroys the very thing it

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seeks to ground. The relativizing of the Absolute is indistinguishable from its disappearance. 58 The naive strategies of accommodation in the last two decades of the Church's life have been more harmful than useful. But if the term "God" really stands for something specific, something indeed decisive for the world and for mankind, then there must also emerge from God's revelation some concrete particulars which not only confirm and surpass the movements toward autonomy of the modern era, but also critically judge these processes and productively go beyond them. There must be a "Christian difference" which in a transformative way takes hold of the world critically and creatively. The new political theology and the various theologies of liberation are animated by such critical motives. Therein lies their kernel of truth. Yet, starting from such considerations, they have for their part adopted some essential elements of the Marxist anti-bourgeois, modern critique. Thus they are frequently beset with new, no less problematic identities. In addition they are blind to the legitimate concerns of the modern idea and structures of freedom. For all the attention accorded to

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many of their motives and to their involvement, they still do not offer any viable theological alternative within the western world. But we cannot go into great detail on this point at present. The Christian understanding of freedom is not identical with any culture or any political system. 59 Hence, the Christian faith permits neither a stubborn anti-modernism with a restoration of the pre-modern relationships nor a modernism that claims to be liberal and accommodates itself to the contemporary western civilization, which presently is itself in crisis. A differentiated, but also critical and creative, specification of the relationship between Christian freedom and modern freedom is now advised. This newly determined relationship must grasp the positive impulses of the modern era, even defend them, but surely without lapsing into their impasses and destructive tendencies. Such a preservation of the positive heritage of the modern idea and structure of freedom, to which we as Christians today are called, is from a theological standpoint only possible if we start with the original, rich and complex message of Christian freedom and make it our

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norm. In this situation, removed both from restoration and secularization, the Gospel itself, as the Instruction from the Congregation for the Faith of March, 1986, says, can appear as "a message of freedom and a power for liberation." 60 V. The Church as Sign and Instrument of Freedom Christian freedom is the freedom that Jesus Christ has freed us for.61 It has its foundation and its norm in Jesus Christ. Hence it is bound to the truth which he himself is. It is this truth that frees.62 One cannot detach this truth from the proclamation and the confession of faith without exposing it to all the ambiguities which characterize the history of freedom in the modern period. Christian freedom and commitment to the Gosepl message belong inseparably together. This is what the Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty basically intended to say. This necessary connection between truth and freedom was misunderstood after the Council by the Traditionalists; they wanted truth without that freedom in which alone the truth can be known and recognized. The con-

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nection between truth and freedom was also misunderstood by those who called themselves liberals; they wanted freedom without its foundation in the truth. Finally, the connection between the two was misunderstood by those who derive an immanent utopia or Messianism from the Christian message of freedom. But the Gospel is the proclamation of the New Creation and the new humanity and not a script for the improvement of this world. No formula for healing the world's ills can be deduced from it. This does not mean that the message of Christian freedom has no significance for our present existence. The Church and individual Christians are, as the fourth Gospel says, not of the world but are living in it and have a mission on behalf of this world. 63 They should be, according to the vision renewed by the last Council, at once a sacrament, that is, a sign and an instrument.64 In the framework of such a specifically sacramental relationship between the Church and the world, the Christian message of freedom inspires us to insert ourselves into the world for the freedom of the world. Toward such a specification of the relationship between Christian and human freedom, the

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old axiom applies: "Grace presupposes nature and completes it." 65 To apply this to our question we can say: Christian freedom presupposes human freedom, gives it its final determination and provides it with its final fulfillment. We want to develop this two-fold thesis in what follows. Let us turn first of all to the first part of this thesis: The Christian message of freedom presupposes human freedom. The Christian message certainly speaks of obedience, sin, and conversion. It confronts us in the manner of an address, an encouragement, a claim upon us. God has a partner already there whom he can address in freedom and who can answer him in freedom. Being a Christian rests upon the free decision of faith. This makes Christianity the religion of freedom par excellence. Thus, the Church Fathers said that no one could or should be forced to believe.66 This axiom had its effect in the Middle Ages and even down into present canon law.67 The Fathers resisted not only ancient fatalism and determinism, but also political pressure to confess and practice any other religion than the one their consciences convinced them was right. During the persecu-

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tions of the Christians in the early centuries the readiness for martyrdom was the chief test of this freedom grounded in faith. Through it early Christianity split apart the concept of the unity of state and public religion that antiquity assumed. The distinction between Church and State and the freedom of the Church within the state became the basis of the western idea of freedom. 68 This distinction is also, materially, the basis for what we call today freedom of religion. Even though the churches long fought against it, it is a legitimate result of the history of Christianity. At the same time it is the relevant historical ground for all other human rights. Standing up for freedom of religion and of belief necessarily means standing up for the freedom of all the people, for freedom of information and communication in general. On this point the Church's teaching since Vatican II has taken an essential step beyond the teaching still put forth by Pius XII whereby only truth, and not error, has a right to existence, promulgation and enactment.69 The current teaching affirms the free, pluralistic order of society.70 Therefore Christians today must also stand up for the freedom and

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rights of those who do not confess Christianity. This distinction of the Church from the state, society, culture, the economy, and other things might outwardly appear as a loss of power. But a free society gives the Church at the same time new possibilities for functioning, which she possesses in no other "system". In the long run, such a society frees the Church from secular limitations, validates original Christian impulses and sets free once again the proper spiritual powers of Christianity. When the pope put aside the tiara, he increased his moral and spiritual authority. Today we must struggle anew to determine this Christian uniqueness. We may not view the relationship between Church and world too harmoniously, with an unrealistic optimism. Especially in the relationship with totalitarian systems it makes no difference whether they lean "left" or right" confrontations leading even to martyrdom are not out of the question at present or in the future. As a Christian one should not fall victim to deceptive dreams of harmony. The same could be said for defending the trend toward accepting Christianity in liberal fashion as a part of the ensemble of "societal powers.'' This would be

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possible for Christianity only at the cost of abandoning its claim to truth and of selling out the Gospel. The proclamation of the Gospel of Christian freedom is the primary service the Church can offer to the world. In the face of the risk built into the modern principle of freedom, the emphasis on the proper spiritual power of Christianity is an urgent necessity. For the free society that has become secular is, in spite of all its great achievements, threatened at its very roots. A purely emancipatory understanding of freedom, by the logic of its own development, severs itself from the roots out of which it once grew tall. The secular society cannot give itself any definitive grounding or final meaning. The result is the erosion of the values and goals that sustain our free order. Today one cannot overlook this. Society, for the sake of its own survival, is reliant on authorities independent of it that stand for the meaning of freedom and encourage freedom for all. In the past it was sometimes necessary to fight for freedom against a theological or clerical absolutism. Today a new situation has arisen. Religion belongs today to the conditions for the survival of our free culture.

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I have come to the second half of the thesis: Christian freedom bestows on human freedom its inner fulfillment. Christian freedom, as we already made clear, does not allow itself to be described only negatively as a freedom from external and internal forces; in the end it is freedom for God and for one's neighbor. It is freedom in love. In this way Christian freedom transmits to human freedom, which by itself is open and undetermined, its final positive specification. It gives human freedom, which by itself is empty, the content which is alone adequate for it: That which completes freedom cannot be something less than freedom; that which fulfills freedom can only be freedom itself. The recognition of the absolute freedom of God and of the unconditional freedom of the neighbor is the only fulfillment humanly possible. Human freedom finds its completion by accepting the love of God and affirming freedom among human persons. Irenaeus of Lyons captured this in his beautiful expression: "The glory of God is a living man." 71 Insofar as the Christian message determines that the meaning of freedom is love, it gives human reason an orientation, a defi-

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nite direction and a prophetic inspiration. It serves both a critical and a constructive function. The critical function is already evident in the Old Testament prophets. They mount an attack against false gods for the sake of worshiping the one true God, Yahweh. Today we find those false gods wherever immanent values get absolutized, values like nation, people, money, race, class, consumption or national security. This absolutizing blocks off and ties up freedom, turning human beings into slaves. Insofar as Christianity relies on the one thing necessary, on God, it sets itself off from all those other prized values. It clears the deck for reasoned and balanced deliberations and for responsible decisions. It teaches the priority of the person and of all persons over things, over work or capital. With determination it evaluates all systems from the viewpoint of human dignity and freedom. 72 And in particular it stands in solidarity with all who have no lawyer and no lobby: with the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the victims of discrimination, the small, the sick, the old, and, not least of all, with the unborn child. The preferential option for the poor (in the

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broadest sense) serves as a critical function over against unjust practices and structures. Of course, one should not misunderstand this critical function and separate it from its positive function. The Christian message of freedom is not a revolutionary principle which calls into question the essence of the secular order of law. Recognizing the freedom of the neighbor includes recognizing the law, the purpose of which is to protect the freedom of the individual against attacks from individuals, from groups, and from the force of the state. Wherever law loses this meaning and its raison d'être or even becomes a means of oppression, one must obviously criticize it. But whoever considers Christian freedom to be a fundamental liberation from the law in the interest of some utopian society without authority, or whoever uses law as a pretext for destabilizing legal structures, to the extent that they are free and proper structures, and who in this sense, even if it is only a rhetorical one, manufactures revolutionary changes, can rely neither on the Old nor on the New Testament, and not on the testimony of the early, pre-Constantinian Church, either. He has misunderstood the Christian message

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of freedom and has placed it at the service of alien ideological purposes. Such a position has nothing to do with underwriting the status quo. On the contrary! The Christian message of freedom must be positively viewed as an appealing and motivating power. It can be the public conscience which awakens, forms, and highlights our duty for the common good over against organized interests. This happens not only through what the Church says in papal addresses and episcopal pastoral letters but above all through what she herself does. The Church itself cannot immediately alter the life of society. But she can and should in a signal way develop the social forms of authentic Christian living which respond to the problems of the time. In the past this often happened through the founding of new religious orders. Today, throughout the universal Church, similar beginnings are evident in many small societal groups and in various spiritual movements. They are a hope for the Church universal and for the world. 73 Doing something right that is also exemplary can at once give the Church a new credibility and society a new direction.74

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The most important service the Church can offer, especially in our situation, dominated as it is by material goods, and which the Church must offer to be true to its mission, is the witnessing to the truth of the Gospel and the celebration of the liturgy. This is the truth which liberates from the powers of this world. In this freedom the Church possesses its only right to exist and its unique legitimation for taking a public stance and for defending the inalienable rights of man. A Church, on the other hand, that leans left or right, becomes replaceable; it loses its proper basis for legitimation. Only if she is grounded in transcendence and so oriented can she be the sign and protection of the transcendence of the human person. 75 Only a Church which is not of the world and which draws its norms only from the Gospel can be effective in the world as a sign and instrument of salvation which also means as a sign and instrument of Christian freedom. VI. Toward a New Humanism If one understands the Church as the ''institution of Christian freedom", then there are consequences for the way the Church itself

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appears in history. We are touching on a very broad theme and one often treated very controversially since the Second Vatican Council. It is the background for many conflicts in the Church. We obviously cannot treat this topic exhaustively in this context. A few general perspectives must suffice. 76 If the Church since Vatican II accepts the legitimate heritage of the modern era, then she ought not behave in a pre-modern way. Rather, she should respect the subject-status of her faithful and have an eye out for structures which allow for participation of all Church members. This is all the more true as the Church today maintains a presence in a pluralistic society not primarily through her official representatives but through the laity. They, individually or in groups, and guided by their Christian consciences, permeate society from the inside out. The ecclesial office must mediate its light and strength to them for their mission but still respect their particular competence and freedom. The decisive norm for either the laity or for the Church's office cannot be some liberal concept of freedom; it must rather be Christian freedom itself, which we possess in Jesus

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Christ that is, as members of the one Body of Christ which is the Church. Christian freedom presupposes the personal freedom of the individual and fulfills this latter. It may not, however, be misunderstood in an individualistic way. We have it only in the Church. While personal freedom and its rights are older and more original than society, the Church and its message are older and more original than the individual Christian. The individual becomes a Christian by becoming a member of the Body of Christ, the Church. This thesis is of essential significance for the discussion of the rights of freedom in the Church. It permits neither a restoration of authoritarian, pre-modern structures, nor any modern liberal conception of the Church. One could call what is meant here a post-liberal or post-modern ecclesial form. I prefer, following Vatican II and the synod of bishops of 1985, to speak of a renewal of the communio structure of the Church. 77 Unfortunately, we are just beginners in appropriating Vatican II in this regard. Johann Adam Möhler, the great prophetic theologian of the Church in the nineteenth century, described this communio structure in his brilliant work,

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Die Einheit in der Kirche (The Unity of the Church) (1825): "Two extremes in the life of the Church are possible and both can be called egoism. They are: when each person wants to be everything, or when one person wants to be everything. In the latter case the bond of unity is so narrow and the love so warm that we cannot protect ourselves from suffocation. In the former case everything disintegrates and becomes so cold that people freeze. One form of egoism begets the other. But neither one person, nor all persons, must wish to be everything. Only all people together can be everything, and the unity of all can only be a whole. That is the idea behind the Catholic Church." 78 This kind of Church, which is a communio through the spirit of Christian freedom itself and which thrives thereon, can be a sign and instrument of freedom and reconciliation in the world and can contribute to a new humanism. In order to attain this, we should not fail to measure up today to the intellectual courage of the Church Fathers and the great theologians of the Middle Ages. They collected the logoi spermatikoi, the fragments and seeds of the truth which appeared in its fullness in

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Jesus Christ, from the heritage of antiquity and molded them into the Christian tradition. In this way they founded Christian humanism. The movements of freedom in the modern era continue in their own way much from this heritage; therefore they are even richer in their logoi spermatikoi. As fruit that falls from the tree they can become poisonous and life-endangering. They need a critical momentthe discernment that the Christian faith can make. When they are critically and creatively linked with the hope of the Christian faith and transformed and integrated into the totality of the Christian tradition, they can liberate the Church from some of its old encrustations and be the basis for a humanism yet to come, determined by Christian freedom. This new humanism, given its form by Christianity, will be to a great extent more sober and more realistic than modern humanism. It will thus be all the more societal and universal. For it must be characterized by the freedom which Jesus Christ himself lived and for which he has made us free. It must therefore be a humanism of freedom whose characteristics are justice, love and reconciliation. In this sense I am convinced of the following:

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The authentic message of Christian freedom is today of decisive significance if the path of humanity into the third millennium is to be a journey into freedom and into peace. The authentic Christian message of freedom is in our new situation the very condition under which our freedom will survive.

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Notes 1. Cf. the summary of the modern idea of freedom in R. Spaemann, ''Freiheit IV," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, vol. 2 (1972) 1088-98; T. Pröpper, "Freiheit," in Neues Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe, ed. Peter Eicher, vol. 1 (1984) 387-403; H. Krings, "Freiheit," in Staatslexikon, ed. Görres-Gesellschaft, vol. 2, 7th ed. (1986) 696-704. 2. Cf. Sidney Earl Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). 3. Cf. chap. 4. 4. Cf. chap. 4. 5. Cf. R. Sebott, Religionsfreiheit und Verhältnis von Kirche und Staat. Der Beitrag John Courtney Murrays zu einer modernen Frage (Rome, 1977). 6. Cf. Yves Congar, Der Fall Lefèbvre. Schisma in der Kirche? Mit einer Einführung von Karl Lehmann (Freiburg, 1976). 7. Cf. for example, the various presentations by Langdon Gilkey, Catholicism Confronts Modernity: A Protestant View (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); James Hitchcock, Catholicism and Modernity: Confrontation or Capitulation? (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987). 8. Cf. P. Kolakowski, R. Spaemann, T. Löw, eds., Moderne oder Postmoderne? Zur Signatur des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Weinheim, 1986); W. Welsh, Unsere postmoderne Moderne (Weinheim, 1987).

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9. For the understanding of freedom in the New Testament cf. Heinrich Schlier, "eleutheros," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Gerhard Kittel, ed., and Geoffrey W. Bromiley, ed. and trans. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964), vol. 2, 487-502; idem, "Über das vollkommene Gesetz der Freiheit," in idem, Die Zeit der Kirche. Exegetische Aufsätze und Vorträge I, 2nd ed. (Freiburg, 1958), 193-205; idem, "Zur Freiheit gerufen. Das paulinische Freiheitsverständis," in idem, Das Ende der Zeit. Exegetische Aufsätze und Vorträge III (Freiburg, 1971), 216-233; Kurt Niederwimmer, Der Bergriff der Freiheit im Neuen Testament (Berlin: A. Töpelmann, 1966); Dieter Nestle, Eleutheria. Studien zum Wesen der Freiheit bei den Griechen und im Neuen Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 1967); Ernst Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom, Frank Clarke, trans. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969). 10. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, (H. Glockner, ed., vol. 11), 45f.; idem, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 1 (H. Glockner, ed., vol. 17), 79f.; vol. 3 (H. Glockner, ed., vol. 19), 114. 11. Gn 1:27. For the explanation, cf. C. Westermann, Genesis, Bibl. Kommentar Altes Testament, vol. 1, part 1 (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1974), 196-222. 12. On freedom from sin, cf. Rom 6:12-23; Jn 8:30-37; from the law, cf. Rom 7:3f; 8:2; Gal 2:4; 4:21-31; 5:1, 13; from false speech, cf. Jn 8:32; from death, Rom 5:21; 6:21f; 8:21; 1 Cor 15:56. 13. Cf. Niederwimmer, op. cit., 90f. 14. Cf. Rom 8:18-22. 15. Cf. Gal 5:1, 13. 16. Cf. Rom 8:2, 18-22; Gal 4:1-7, 21-31; Mt 17:24-27; Jn 8:30-36.

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17. 1 Cor 6:12; 10:23. 18. Gal 5:13f: "My brothers, remember that you have been called to live in freedom - but not a freedom that gives free rein to the flesh. Out of love, place yourselves at one another's service. The whole law has found its fulfillment in this one saying: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" NAB (1970). Cf. 1 Cor 8:9; 1 Pt 2:16; and Schlier, "eleutheros," 500f., in these passages. 19. Cf. Niederwimmer, op. cit., 89f., for this distinction. 20. St. Augustine, Tr. in I epistolam Iohannis 7, 8 (PL 35, 2033). 21. Ernst Troeltsch, (Das Wesen des Modernen Geistes, vol. 4 of Gesammelte Schriften [Tübingen: Mohr, 1925], 297-338), has best described the complexity of the modern era: "Die moderne Welt ist kein einheitliches Prinzip, sondern eine Fülle zusammentreffender, aber auch sich stossender Entwicklungen," 334. For the more recent discussion, cf. H. Ebeling, ed., Subjektivität und Selbsterhaltung. Zur Diagnose der Moderne (Frankfurt, 1976); Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985). 22. This is found earlier than Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" in Nicholas of Cusa in his De visione Dei (1453). Cf. W. Schulz, "Cusanus und die Geschichte der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik," in idem, Der Gott der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1957), 11-30. 23. Cf. W. Kasper, "Autonomie und Theonomie. Zur Ortsbestimmung des Christentums in der modernen Welt," in idem, Theologie und Kirche (Mainz, 1987), 149-175. 24. Cf. especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

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25. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. with intr. and notes by Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), no. 40: "The basic state-of-mind of anxiety as a distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosed," 228235. 26. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols., trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979-82). Concerning the phenomenon of power as the basic problem at the end of the modern era, see the contribution by Romano Guardini, Power and Responsibility. A Course of Action for the New Age, trans. Elinor C. Briefs (Chicago: Regnery, 1961). 27. Cf. B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1971); Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pensée 68: Essai sur l'anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 28. Cf. Hans Maier, Revolution and Church. The Early History of Christian Democracy, 1789-1901, trans. Emily M. Schossberger (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame, 1969). (Third German edition, 1979). 29. This was already the reaction of Pius VI in Quod aliquantum in 1791 to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy passed by the French National Assembly. The pope writes here about an "absurdissimum libertatis commentum." In Utz-Galen, Die katholische Sozialdoktrin in ihrer geschichtlichen Entfaltung, vol. 3 (Fribourg, 1961), 2652-2729. 30. Gregory XVI, Mirari vos (1832) in Claudia Carlen, ed., The Papal Encyclicals, 5 vols. (Raleigh: McGrath Publishing Co., 1981), 1: 238; DS 2730f; Similar statements are found in Pius IX, Quanta cura (1864) in The Papal Encyclicals, 1: 382; DS 2915, 1777-79, 2903f.

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31. Leo XIII, Libertas praestantissimum (1888) in The Papal Encyclicals, 2: 173; DS 3247. 32. Vatican I, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith in The Decrees of the Vatican Council, ed. Vincent McNabb (London: Burns and Oates, 1907), 15f. 33. Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism, trans. Justin McCann, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 8-9. 34. Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation, trans. Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke, ed. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 104. 35. Georg Söll, ''Dogma und Dogmenentwicklung" in Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. I, 5 (Freiburg: Herder, 1971); Yves Congar, "Pour l'histoire sémantique du terme 'magisterium,'" Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 60 (1976): 85-98. 36. Hermann-Josef Pottmeyer, Unfehlbarkeit und Souveränität. Die päpstliche Unfehlbarkeit im System der ultramontanen Ekklesiologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1975); N. Luhmann, Die Funktion der Religion (Frankfurt, 1977) 72-181. 37. Paul VI, On Evangelization in the Modern World. Apostolic Exhortation "Evangelii Nuntiandi" (Dec. 8, 1975), (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1976), no. 20. 38. Selected literature includes Karl Rahner et al., Religionsfreiheit (Munich, 1960); E. W. Bökenförde, "Religionsfreiheit als Aufgabe der Christen. Gedanken eines Juristen zu den Diskussionen auf dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil," Stimmen der Zeit 176 (1965); Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow (New York: Association Press, 1960); John Courtney Murray, The Problem of Religious Freedom (Westminster, MD:

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Newman Press, 1965); Pietro Pavan, Libertà Religiosa e Poteri Publici (Milan, 1965); René Coste, Théologie de la liberté religieuse. Liberté et conscience, liberté de religion (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1969); A. M. Neophistos, The Legal Limitation of Religious Liberty: An Historical Study of the Documents of the World Council of Churches and the Second Vatican Council (Rome, 1974); Jérôme Hamer and Yves Congar, eds., Die Konzilserklärung über die Religionsfreiheit (Paderborn: Bonifacius, 1967); L'herméneutique de la liberté religieuse. Actes du colloque organisé par le Centre international d'études humanistes et par l'Institut d'études philosophiques de Rome, Rome, 7-12 Janv., 1968, aux soins de Enrico Castelli (Paris, 1968); P. J. André-Vincent, Liberté religieuse droit fundamental (Paris, 1976); idem, Liberté religieuse. Question cruciale de Vatican II (Paris, 1978); Pietro Pavan, "Il Cardinale Bea e la libertà religiosa," Communio, n.s., 14 (1983): 116-147; B. Dufour, La liberté religieuse comme immunité dans l'élaboration de la Déclaration du Concile Vat. II "Dignitatis humanae" (Rome, 1980); Gwendoline Jarczyk, La liberté religieuse. 20 ans après le Concile (Paris, 1984). 39. In fact, this was in effect before the modern era began. More exactly, from the beginning of modern colonization, the popes insisted on the rights of the person, particularly when they condemned slavery and slave trading. The corresponding documentation is from Eugene IV (1435), Paul III (1537), Urban VIII (1639), Benedict XIV (1741), Gregory XVI (1831), Leo XIII (1888). Cf. Utz-Galen, op. cit., vol. 1. 40. The fruit of my own investigations into how the Declaration on Religious Liberty arose is to appear in the following work now in press: Wahrheit und Freiheit. Die "Erklärung über die Religionsfreiheit"

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des Vatikanischen Konzils (Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philos.-hist. Klasse). 41. Cf. Acta synodalia Concilii oecumenici Vaticani II, vol. 3, part 2, 530-532; cf. vol. 4, part 2, 11-13. 42. Ibid., vol. 3, part 2, 554-557. 43. Ibid., vol. 3, part 2, 616-617; cf. vol. 4, part 2, 16-20. 44. Jn 8:32. 45. The reporter for the official subcommission, Bishop E. de Smedt, of Bruges, explicitly took up these suggestions. Cf. Acta synodalia, op. cit., vol 4, part 1, 432; vol. 4, part 5, 100-102. In the final text this idea of the connection between truth and freedom is linked to St. Thomas, most clearly in nos. 2 and 3. 46. For what follows cf. the sketch by U. Ruh, "Säkularisierung," in Christlicher Glaube in moderner Gesellschaft, ed. Franz Böckle et al. (Freiburg, 1982), vol. 18, 59-100; W. Kasper "Säkularisierung," in Staatslexikon, ed. Görres-Gesellschaft, 7th ed. (1988), vol. 4 (in press). 47. Cf. K. Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heislgeschichte. Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichts-philosophie, 4th ed. (Stuttgart, 1961). 48. Cf. R. Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Wittenberg, 1867-1871). 49. Cf. Friedrich Gogarten, Despair and Hope for our Time, trans. Thomas Wieser (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970); Trutz Rendtorff, Church and Theology. The Systematic Function of the Church Concept in Modern Theology, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971); idem, Theorie des Christentums (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1972); Wolfhart Pannenberg, Gottesgedanke und menschliche Freiheit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1972).

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50. J. B. Metz, Theology of the World, trans. William Glen-Doepel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969); Walter Kasper, Atheismus, Marxismus, Christentum (Innsbruck, 1976); David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); idem, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981). 51. Karl Rahner, "Current Problems in Christology," Theological Investigations I, trans. and intro. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), 162. 52. J. B. Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 62. 53. See also Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); idem, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). 54. Andrew M. Greeley, Unsecular Man: The Persistence of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1972). 55. Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 168-189; also, Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Civil Religion? Religionsfreiheit und pluralistischer Staat: Das theologische Fundament der Gesellschaft," in Die religiöse Dimension der Gesellschaft, ed. P. Kolakowski (Tübingen, 1985), 63-75. 56. Cf. L. Kolakowski, Die Gegenwärtigkeit des Mythos, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt, 1974); Kurt Hübner, Die Wahrheit des Mythos (Munich: Beck, 1985). 57. Cf. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1984); Die religiöse Dimension der Gesellschaft, ed. P. Kolakowski (Tübingen, 1985); Hermann Lübbe, Religion nach der Aufklärung (Graz: Styria, 1986).

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58. Cf. R. Spaemann, "Funktionale Religionsbegründung und Religion," in Die religiöse Dimension der Gesellschaft, 17. 59. Cf. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World "Gaudium et Spes" in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter Abbott (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), nos. 58, 74-76. 60. Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1986), no. 43. 61. Cf. Gal 5:1, 13. 62. Cf. Jn 8:32. 63. Cf. Jn 17:11, 14-16, 18. 64. Cf. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church "Lumen Gentium", nos. 1, 9, 48, 19; Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World "Gaudium et Spes", nos. 42, 45. See also Walter Kasper, ''Die Kirche als universales Sakrament des Heils," in idem, Theologie und Kirche, 237-254. 65. For the history and meaning of this axiom, cf. Juan Alfaro, "Gratia supponit naturam," in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 2nd ed. (1960), vol. 4, 1169-1171; Joseph Ratzinger, "Gratia praesupponit naturam. Erwägungen über Sinn und Grenze eines scholastischen Axioms," in Einsicht und Glaube, ed. Joseph Ratzinger and Heinrich Fries (Freiburg: Herder, 1962), 135-149; Bernhard Stoeckle, "Gratia supponit naturam". Geschichte und Analyse eines theologischen Axioms (Rome, 1962). 66. Tertullian, Ad Scapulam 2 (CCL 2, 1127f); cf. Apologeticum 24, 6; 28, 1 (CCL 1, 134; 139); Lactantius, Divinarum Institutionum, 5, 19 (CSEL 19, 463-465); Ambrose, Ep. ad Valentianum Imp. (PL 16, 1005). For further references cf. DH 11, note 8.

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67. Code of Canon Law: c. 23 q. 5 c. 33; CIC (1917) can. 1351; CIC (1983) can. 748. 68. Cf. A. A. T. Ehrhardt, Politische Metaphysik von Solon bis Augustin, 3 vols. (Tübingen, 1959-1969), especially vol. 2 Die christliche Revolution (1959); Hugo Rahner, Kirche und Staat im frühen Christentum (Munich: Kösel, 1961); Ulrich Duchrow, Christenheit und Weltverantwortung (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1970); Kasper, "Freiheit VI," in Staatslexikon, ed. Görres-Gesellschaft, 7th ed. (1986), 2: 713f. 69. Pope Pius XII, Address to the Participants in the Fifth National Convention of the Union of Italian Catholic Jurists (Dec. 6, 1953) in Amer. Eccles. Rev. 130 (1954): 129-138. 70. Cf. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Kirche, Ökumene, Politik. Neue Versuche zur Ekklesiologie (Einsiedeln, 1987). 71. Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses IV, 20, 7. 72. Cf. Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis (1979), no. 17, in The Papal Encyclicals 5: 260; idem, Laborem Exercens (1981), no. 12, in The Papal Encyclicals 5: 310. 73. Cf. Pope Paul VI, On Evangelization in the Modern World. Apostolic Exhortation "Evangelii Nuntiandi" (Dec. 8, 1975), no. 58. 74. Cf. F. X. Kaufmann, with J. B. Metz, Zukunftsfähigkeit. Suchbewegungen im Christentum (Freiburg, 1987), 87f. 75. Cf. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World "Gaudium et Spes", no. 76. 76. Cf. Kasper, "Freiheit VI," 715f.

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77. Cf. W. Kasper, ''Kirche als communio. Überlegungen zur ekklesiologischen Leitidee des II. Vatikanischen Konzils," in idem, Theologie und Kirche, 272-279; J. M. R. Tillard, Église d'églises. L'ecclésiologie de communion (Paris, 1987). 78. Johann Adam Möhler, Die Einheit in der Kirche (1825), ed. J. R. Geiselmann (Darmstadt, 1957), 237.

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The Père Marquette Lectures in Theology "The Authority for Authority," 1969: by Quentin Quesnell Professor of Theology Marquette University "Mystery and Truth," 1970: by John Macquarrie Professor of Theology Union Theological Seminary, New York "Doctrinal Pluralism," 1971: by Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Professor of Theology Regis College, Ontario "Infallibility," 1972: by George A. Lindbeck Professor of Theology Yale University "Ambiguity in Moral Choice," 1973: by Richard A. McCormick, S.J. Professor of Moral Theology Bellarmine School of Theology "Church Membership as a Catholic and Ecumenical Problem," 1974: by Avery Dulles, S.J. Professor of Theology Woodstock College "The Contributions of Theology to Medical Ethics," 1975: by James Gustafson University Professor of Theological Ethics University of Chicago "Religious Values in an Age of Violence," 1976: by Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum Director of National Interreligious Affairs American Jewish Committee, New York City

Page 64 "Truth Beyond Relativism: Karl Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge," 1977:by Gregory Baum Professor of Theology and Religious Studies St. Michael's College "A Theology of 'Uncreated Energies'" 1978:by George A. Maloney, S.J. Professor of Theology John XXIII Center For Eastern Christian Studies Fordham University "Method in Theology: An Organon For Our Time," 1980:by Frederick E. Crowe, S.J. Research Professor in Theology Regis College, Toronto "Catholics in the Promised Land of the Saints," 1981:by James Hennesey, S.J. Professor of the History of Christianity Boston College "Whose Experience Counts in Theological Reflection?" 1982:by Monika Hellwig Professor of Theology Georgetown University "The Theology and Setting of Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark," 1983:by John R. Donahue, S.J. Professor of Theology Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley "Should War be Eliminated? Philosophical and Theological Investigations," 1984:by Stanley Hauerwas Professor of Theology Notre Dame University