Wednesday, August 20, 2003
(11:08 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Adam Kotsko on the Road, pt. 3
I will be going to New York City for the next four days and will take a break from all internet-related activities, including blogging and e-mail. Robb has assured me that he will man the helm for that period, meaning that there will still be daily updates. As for Mike, he's in an awkward state of transition right now, so let's not put too much pressure on him.
I would like to make one parting comment about that radical orthodoxy article. I'll admit that I had only read half the article when I wrote my response, since I had to go to work eventually. It became clear toward the end that the author didn't like the radical orthodox because they didn't act as adequate apologists for the Roman Catholic Church. The implicit point throughout was that the radical orthodox, coming after the dawn of modernity and working within it, could not recover the Christian tradition adequately. The only way to do it right would be to join up with the institution that has continually preserved the Christian tradition completely unchanged, which is, of course, the Roman Catholic Church.
Modern Catholicism, however, is every bit as much a modern phenomenon as Protestantism or Radical Orthodoxy or whatever -- its main contours are the result of a deliberate choice by a particular pope (Pius IX) of what strain of the diverse Christian tradition would be authoritative. The Second Vatican Council distanced itself from that narrow vision somewhat, through precisely the recovery of certain ancient Christian writers and traditions that the Radical Orthodox theologians performed (though not necessarily the exact same materials were "recovered"). In any case, to hold that the Catholic Church has been an uninterrupted stream of authentic, constant teaching from St. Peter to John Paul II is frankly ridiculous (even if I did convince myself it was true at one time). Even if it weren't exceedingly improbable in theory, the continuity theory does not match up with the facts (see, for example, Jaroslav Pelikan's detailed and wonderful The Christian Tradition or Hans Kung's recent short history of the Catholic Church).
The key here: once modernity hits, there is no return to innocence. From that it doesn't follow that the Catholic Church is not an adequate expression of the gospel or that the way the Radical Orthodox have chosen to go is right or that we should just give up and become bleeding-heart liberals -- we just need to acknowledge the fact that no matter what we feel about Western secular modernity, none of us is immune, not even Pope Pius IX himself.
With that, I leave you, dear readers.
