The Secularization of Christianity Part X - Moral Norms, Cultural Relativity, and Secularism

Before we delve into continuing to read Mascall's text, I wanted to make a couple of observations from last time and expand upon them.  One of them concerns Merold Westphal's notion that "tradition" is somehow subject to revision and change.  Westphal, a philosopher by vocation, is attempting in his book to tackle as an "expert" Biblical hermeneutics, and when he does so he, unfortunately, falls short.  Let's look for instance on page 108 of his book Whose Community? Which Interpretation?  Here, Westphal has appropriated hermeneutics to mean something it doesn't, namely that presuppositions can be revised or replaced based essentially on the present mindset of secular society (Westphal doesn't specifically delineate that, but it fits well into the context of his writing).  He says that although a meaning can be literal, it is also subject to revision based on translation of the same meaning in a variety of different contexts - this means, as he establishes beginning on page 119 of his book, that Westphal begins to see the political liberal agenda as a "model for the Church," which is the title of that particular chapter in his book. This leads him to later see virulently anti-Christian figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as being what he calls "prophetic voices to Christendom" as he writes on page 140.  This is problematic, in that God doesn't force people who oppose Him to be "prophetic voices" unless maybe they are the fruit of an error of neglect on the part of the Church itself - Westphal doesn't even try to establish that, which is why his logic here is very faulty.  Westphal's perspective is essentially a form of proportionalist reasoning, which as author Christopher Kaczor notes is characterized by arguing for different conclusions but presupposes the same question as what he calls a "manualistic account of the moral law" (Christopher Kaczor, Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition. Washington, DC:  Catholic University of America Press, 2002. p. 174).  As Kaczor elaborates, this manualistic account means that morality becomes a voluntary choice essentially (in this context, morality is subject to redefinition according to societal trends and is not subject to universal standards), and is defined by seeking exceptions to traditional moral norms and it also seeks to make a false distinction between goodness and rightness of action (Kaczor, pp. 175, 9).  If applied to Westphal's assertion that traditions can be revised and replaced at will, and that all of a sudden enemies of Christianity become "prophetic voices to Christendom," it means that a wrong intention for Westphal produces a good result (I think!) - or vise versa.  If I can sort this out, for Westphal, it matters little that Marx and Nietzsche formulated philosophies that ended up being responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, or that Freud would later inspire Kinsey and Margaret Sanger to turn sexual ethics on its ear opening the door for the radical redefinitions of marriage and family, and even of the idea of a "person," but their intention was sort of "prophetic" for Westphal - he would see Communism as "Christian," in other words, because of the "prophetic message" of Marx against materialism," and he would also see religious revisionism as necessary because hypocrisy drove Nietzsche to declare "God is dead" and therefore make deification of an ubermensch a goal of evolutionary progress.  This proportionalistic position of Westphal has proven time and again to be deficient, and no whitewashing, revision, or replacement of traditionally-held norms and standards will change it - sorry, Merold Westphal, but you are wrong!  Westphal's mistaken logic is nothing new - we have seen it play out in a more tragic scale with Jim Jones, for instance, who would have said the same thing based on both Macchiavelli's proposal that religion is a tool to manipulate the masses for political control, and the proportionalist understanding that goodness and rightness of action are unrelated to each other.  And, in November of 1978, we saw how that worked when over 900 of Jones's followers committed mass suicide in the remote jungles of Guyana.  So, what does the Church have to say about this?  Let's examine that briefly before continuing onto Mascall's text.

In response to Westphal's assertions that traditions can be redefined or replaced, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a couple of observations in response.  First, while no one can be forced to accept traditional morality - a right based theologically on the fact God endowed man with free will - and the dignity of personhood is always to be upheld (CCC 2106), it also means that these rights (specifically religious liberty in this context, but also applicable to morality as well) are neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error (CCC 2108).  In other words, freedom is a virtue, but it doesn't entail the right to say or do everything (CCC 1740).  If one chooses to take that direction, it is a deviation from moral law that actually violates personal freedom rather than expressing it, and it imprisons the perpetrator of such acts within oneself, as well as disrupting relationships with others and rebelling against divine truth (ibid.).   This means then that freedom makes man a moral subject (CCC 1749) and that despite both the positions of Westphal and the proportionalist, acts freely chosen can be morally evaluated, and also can be clearly classified as good or evil.  This means then that the mantra of many self-professed "Christians" who try to justify sin by using Scriptures such as Matthew 7:1-3 (the "judge not lest you be judged" passage) is in reality against what God has established, and Scriptures taken to justify bad behavior are out of context and do not even relate to what the Gospel writer was saying.  A good example of this happened yesterday with the passing of Stephen Hawking(1942-2018), the renown physicist. Hawking was a brilliant man, no doubt, and his tenacity at overcoming a major disability (ALS) is admirable.  But, throughout his life Hawking was also very anti-Christian, and although it has been debated whether he was a full atheist or merely agnostic, the fact is he lived a life unfortunately that denied Christ.  If perhaps he recanted of that and made his peace in his last moments, that would be wonderful.  But, based on his life, it is highly doubtful.  In social media discussion yesterday, a young and somewhat immature girl named April began to combat Christians who questioned Hawking's eternal state by throwing out this worn-out "judge not" premise, again totally out of context of what it said. She too embraced a proportionalist moral view that merely being a "good person" by intent, despite action, merits one's eternal salvation, and in doing so she was heretically denying the reality that salvation is only found in the person of Christ.  She also, by denying Christ and His role of salvation, embraced a quasi-universalist soteriology at odds with both Church teaching and Scripture, and she attempted to, like Westphal proposed, to redefine it based on her knee-jerk responses that asserted that somehow celebrity status guarantees one a place in Glory.   Unlike the ignorant rants of people like April though, the Church has taught, as the Catechism references noted above, that man is morally responsible for his actions which can be judged as good or evil, and in denying God's providence in his life, Hawking essentially was culpable of a bad moral action according to that standard.  What people don't realize is that when we start consigning celebrities to heaven based on how we like their singing, or their acting, etc., we are in a sense secularizing Christianity in a real way.  As Pope Pius X noted in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, modernism has as its foundation agnosticism, which many say Hawking embraced.  External revelation (meaning divine Revelation from a supernatural God) is done away with by the modernist because human reason for them is confined to the senses and what is perceptible to them.  A supernatural God that cannot be seen, then, is unthinkable (this idea is also reflected in Descartes as well) and therefore such a Being cannot be historical or real because the senses cannot perceive them.  The agnostic is faced with an issue then in that if things do elude explanation, then that means something must be at their origin, but human reason states this is not important for the agnostic because, and this is the real issue, presupposing the existence of a supernatural Being as the cause would conflict with their worldview.  The agnostic is one who struggles with that, but the atheist outright denies it.  This means then that the agnostic has the evidence and doesn't want to dismiss it, yet doesn't know what to do with it either because the thought of a supernatural God that proves them wrong is incomprehensible.  Yet, as Pius X notes, it means that the agnostic is essentially an atheist in denial for the most part (Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 1907, at http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html - Accessed 3/15/2018).  Likewise, Pope St. Leo XIII, in almost a prophetic refutation of Westphal's notions almost 100 years before, states in Libertas that "whatsoever is good in those (human - my add) liberties is as ancient as truth itself, and that the Church has always willingly approved and practiced that good; but whatsoever has been added as new is, to tell the plain truth, of a vitiated kind, the fruit of the disorders of the age, and of an insatiate longing after novelties" (Pope St. Leo XII, Libertas (On the Nature of Human Liberty), published June 20, 1888, found at http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_20061888_libertas.html - Accessed 3/15/2018).  It means, then, that contrary to Westphal's assertions that truth can be redefined and replaced,  morality and certain other things are universally defined as either good or evil, and it is their revision that is disordered, not their conservation! 

Back to Mascall's text now, on page 43 he poses a question that relates to all this - should he (meaning the Christian in Asia or Africa in this instance) first secularize himself to come into line with us, or should he accommodate his Christianity to his own inherited beliefs in pantheism, reincarnation, witchcraft, and so on?   Honestly, that is an excellent question, and it presents the dilemma - a Christian in another country is still a sinful human being, and looking at it that way it means that certain things in their own native culture are as damaging as those in secular Western culture.  Paul van Buren, the liberal Anglican theologian Mascall is discussing here, would deny, as any modernist would, the distinctive intellectual content of the Gospel and this means for him the necessity to adopt the secularist Godless outlook of the world around them.  Noting another writer, Harry Blamires, Mascall inserts a quote that says it all from his work The Christian Mind which says this - the Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift, with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history.   This quote, included on page 43 of Mascall's text, was written in 1963, but it is truer today.   Blamires, who was a very astute British theologian and literary scholar who was a close associate of C.S. Lewis, notes many years after the fact that this is even more evident - when he died at the age of 101 last year, he was still maintaining his original thesis (Kate Shellnut, "Died: Harry Blamires, The C.S. Lewis Protege Who Rediscovered 'The Christian Mind'", published 12/8/2017 and available at http://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/december/died-harry-blamires-author-christian-mind-cs-lewis-theology.html - Accessed 3/15/2017).   Having lived up until about 3 months ago now, I would surmise that Blamires noticed what he prophetically observed over 50 years ago more clearly than ever, and theologians like Blamires are a true credit to Christian thought. 

Dr. Harry Blamires (1916-2017)

An amusing note by Mascall at the bottom of page 43 expresses an important sentiment - Mascall notes that he doubts whether Blamires realized how someone like Paul van Buren would take the warning he gave in The Christian Mind as a guiding principle for his own secularization,  and this is indeed surprising.  I find it interesting that true "prophetic voices" such as Blamires (as well as Pope St. Leo XIII a generation earlier) give us fair warning, but some among us take it as inspiration to do the opposite.  I suppose it is just concupiscent human nature maybe to do so?  That is a mystery worth discussion at some point for sure.  As Mascall also notes on page 44 in regard to van Buren and those like him (including Merold Westphal, I will add) that these people have no theology of the secular, but rather are interested in secularizing theology.  Although Mascall gives a nod to Teilhard de Chardin in the next sentence, I differ here with Mascall in regard to de Chardin, and here is why - while Mascall states that de Chardin's purpose was the transformation of the created world in accordance with the purposes of God, de Chardin's actual work has quite the opposite effect.  Let's talk about Teilhard a little, since he has been referenced on occasion here, and show where he differs significantly from what Mascall thinks he is.

Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a French Jesuit priest and philosopher who is often noted as a paleontologist as well.  In his lifetime, his writings were rightly censored by the Church as heretical, due to his positions on original sin, although unfortunately he has had more insidious influence insofar as the blind acceptance by many Catholics of theistic evolution and other similar notions - one writer I have read recently even suggested that de Chardin's influence can be noted in Vatican II documents such as Gaudium et Spes (note particularly Hugh Owen's evaluation of de Chardin in his article "Teilhard de Chardin: False Prophet of a 'New Christianity,' at http://kolbecenter.org/teilhard-de-chardin-false-prophet-of-a-new-christianity/), and I want to clarify that now.  Vatican II has been somewhat controversial in the Church not so much for what its content is, but rather for its implementation by some.  As my good friend and noted Catholic monarchist scholar Charles Coulombe points out however, 80% of the content of the Vatican II documents does have continuity with historic Church teaching, and the amount that doesn't does not have to be accepted by orthodox Catholics.  If de Chardin had an influence in penning Gaudium et Spes or anything else, then that influence can and should be easily rejected while still retaining what is good in the documents.  De Chardin was also an early proponent of transhumanism, and for the Catholic this creates an issue in regard to dignity of personhood as upheld by the Thomistic tradition of the Church.  Teihard, much like renegade former Catholic priest Matthew Fox, also exerted an influence on the New Age movement, which itself should raise suspicions too - ironically, many New Agers see him as similar to Helena Blavatsky, who founded the occultic Theosophical Society.  Although more orthodox theologians of the Church, notable Henri de Lubac, were lifelong friends of Chardin, this doesn't mean that de Chardin should have credibility, and his work should be approached with caution.  This is why at times I find it somewhat mind-boggling that people such as Frank Tipler and Mascall, both of whom are fairly orthodox Christians within their respective traditions, would praise de Chardin while more orthodox Catholic scholars rightly reject him. 

Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)

This proves that even astute and orthodox scholars such as Mascall don't always get everything correct, for if Mascall had dug somewhat deeper, he would have realized that de Chardin was just as culpable as Robinson, van Buren, and Bultmann in secularizing the Church, and looking at today's Catholic Church, that is self-evident although thankfully not universal.  

When I pick up in the next segment, I will discuss the idea of "demythologizing" as a means of secularizing Christianity, as there have been important implications of that dating back to the Enlightenment.