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Murray on Loving Ones Enemies Leon Hooper, S.J. As those of you who have some familiarity with John Courtney Murray can recognize, the title of my paper, “Murray on Loving One’s Enemies,” comes close to being an oxymoron. Murray and the beatitudes – whether Luke’s list with the included woes or even Matthew’s interiorized version – aren’t an easy fit. As best I know, Murray never wrote a gospel-inspired word on loving one’s enemies. And, after hearing many stories about him from those who did not like him, but even from loving relatives, and friends, I find it hard to imagine him ever homilizing on “turning the other cheek” in any but the most clumsy interpersonal and distantly allegorized terms. Which is not to say that he was always especially unkind or, maybe better, uncivil toward present and past enemies. As I will mention, for much of his life he couldn’t think of any principled grounds upon which to talk with atheists about much of anything, certainly not about God. Yet talking with non-believers often enough he did, civilly. After the war between the Axis and Allied powers, he came to Germany as part of a reconstruction team that was helping you develop a new constitution. He kindly made sure that your wall separating church and state was not as precipitous as our own. And the experience of you back then set him on an affectionate course toward most things German, even though your translating and publishing one of his strongest assertions against the principled intolerance of Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani was instrumental in getting him silenced for eight or so years on the issue of religious freedom. Actually Murray did once mention the beatitudes in a discussion of the political. At the
beginning of a talk that eventually became Chapter 12, “The Doctrine is Dead,” of We Hold
These Truths, he related a conversion he had with an unnamed philosopher/correspondent
(probably Walter Lippmann) where the correspondent questioned Murray’s and the Church’s
ability, much less right, to say anything about the war in Korea, with the challenge “What ... has
the Sermon on the Mount got to do with foreign policy? ”
And, again, there is the Murray of the Second Vatican Council, trying to fight off French attempts to reduce the argument for religious freedom to a personal (read: individualistic) obligation to search out the truth, linked vaguely to Johannine biblical imperatives to do so. The third and fourth drafts of what eventually became Dignitatis humanae personae, the drafts that Murray almost exclusively composed, were solidly anchored in the social and the historical. But not for long. As is not often recognized, when Murray was sidelined for a time between the third and fourth conciliar sessions by a collapsed lung, the French gained control over the fifth draft, re-situating the argument for religious freedom in the interpersonal and vaguely biblical. Later, Murray’s social emergence argument, but also the conservative tolerance as lesser-of-two-evils argument, were at nearly the last minute both patched into the essentially French a-historical and a-social text. No wonder that after the Council during the couple years that remained to Murray, Murray repeatedly insisted that DH’s argument was weak, that that which is doctrinal about it is the affirmation of the institution of civic religious freedom and not argument for it, that new arguments needed to be developed. Loving one’s enemies is further from his own argument than even the (individual) obligation to search out the truth that should make us free. He staked his own claims, as I will discuss further, on the idea that something new has been revealed that is beyond the biblical record. We miss it if we stay solely within the biblical record. We miss the essentially common good argument that arose in the practical stuff of historical living. Again, by way of introduction, I can mention the ongoing debate on Murray’s so-called legacy. In my country it is a debate that has simply expanded the gap between revealed and natural sources that Murray exploited to get some wiggle room into an unbreachable chasm that fits easily our current politics by invective. We at Woodstock did not get much beyond the gap in the mid-1990s when, with $100,000 from Lilly Endowments, we made the attempt. Our American neo-conservatives appeal to Murray for his in-your-face Catholicism that challenges Protestants for not being rational and challenges atheists for simply being. What is not often highlighted is that, by staying within simply Murray’s natural law discourse, one has at best some obligation to make sure that others are politically free – even while they starve to death physically, culturally or emotionally. Our scriptures have very little to say about democratic political organizing, while they do have a whole lot to say about caring for the poor, and they even insist that political structures be brought to bear against agencies that deepen poverty. For neo-conservatives it is best to avoid biblical materials, especially Luke’s version of non-interiorized and non-allegorized beatitudes and woes. For those who do care about those on the economic and cultural margins of our world economy, of course, a liberal theologian who claimed, as did Murray, that modern developments of the market have in principle eliminated the problem of hunger and poverty, for those who care, such a theologian and his natural law arguments are worthy of gospel anathemas and woes. Obviously our liberal, vaunted democratic markets continue to grind people into its sandy foundations. Before these sandy foundations bring us all down, governments must counter the egoism, materialism and hedonism that is at the heart of especially Western, but also now Eastern, political economies. And most of these “caring” people do not especially care what force must be brought to bear against what individualistic rights claims. They themselves can seamlessly appeal comfortably to our Scriptures – again Scriptures where we find little on democratic structures and much on care for the other, the alien, the poor. So, the debates in my country that do appeal to, or against, Murray, mostly all take for granted that he had no interest in, nor relevance for, those post-liberal political and cultural concerns that now preoccupy us, certainly no interest in bringing our Scriptures to bear on our contemporary social concerns. These are some of problems that has forced me recently in my own work to identify very explicitly Roman Catholic links between Murray and Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, that is, between our prime American defender of the Anglo-American political tradition and our most visible liver of the beatitudes. I could this day talk about both Murray and Day and their Catholic commonality. But especially I think it would be good to say something about what I at least have found most interesting and helpful about Murray, but also about Lonergan and Rahner as well. Murray, as did Lonergan and Rahner, developed many nifty stances towards divine and human realities that we can still admire. But what I most admire about Murray and Lonergan – the two that I know the best – is the way they moved through their traditions, how they transcended and then transformed those traditions, in their own bodies, minds and spirits, as well as in their teaching and writing. It is Murray on the move through time into God’s future that I want to discuss now, in hope that it might help us move into God’s future for us. I. A Murrayan Introduction to History and Newness In what follows I will be dealing with two distinct issues, both of which concern God’s revelation of God’s self and of God’s will/hope for us. The first issue takes up the question of whether there is ultimately one source of moral and religious revelation in this vale of tears, or whether God’s revelation has emerged from multiple sources. The second issue deals with the problem of the historicity of divine revelation – whether revelation has been closed down in a single or multiples sources, or whether salvific revelation is ongoing. But I should first let Murray himself outline these two issues. And fortunately I can let his own voice do the outlining. In the summer of 1964 at Georgetown University, many conciliar heavies gathered at Georgetown University to discuss what had been and still was to be accomplished by the Council. Rahner was there. He began to read an English version of his talk, quickly handed it to someone else to finish, sat himself down, pulled out his rosary, and promptly fell asleep. Murray did not fall asleep. At that month and day Murray was the most bullish about the council than he had ever been before or would be after. Six months earlier he had completed his, the fourth, draft on religious freedom, one that almost made it to floor discussion, but was temporarily driven back by Ottaviani, on what the pro-freedom contingent called a Day of Wrath. Happily, though, as Murray began his own talk, his draft was slated for discussion and a vote in the up-coming fourth conciliar session. Its future looked good. Murray was confident. Of course a few days later he would suffer a collapsed lung, and temporarily be removed from the drafting committee. The French would rewrite the document in their own image and likeness. And Murray would spend the rest of his life trying to advance a more satisfactory argument for the conciliar endorsement. But here Murray is confident. He begins by outlining the struggle to get the original discussion away from Ottaviani’s Secretariat to Bea’s Ecumenical Secretariat. Then he discussed the politics and arguments that fortunately shot down the first draft, the draft that only grudgingly endorsed religious freedom as eternally the lesser of two evils. Then he outlined his own two drafts, especially his argument that a new insight into the political dimensions of human dignity arose outside the church. Finally he got to the notion of historicity, the historical embeddedness of all divine and human teaching. In his words:
religious freedom today is not based on – or certainly not necessarily based on – any irreligious ideology, as was the case in the nineteenth century. And that introduces an historical question. Oh, this historical question! I wrote it five different times and it’s still no good. It was criticized and quite rightly criticized because it’s too narrow. It undertakes to make just one point, namely, you have the fact that Pius IX, exactly a hundred years before Pacem in terris, said exactly the opposite to what John XXIII said. Pius IX, quoting Gregory XVI, said that religious freedom is a nightmare, a deliramentum, such a fantasy as might overcome a man in the middle of the night. An illusion. John XXIII exactly a hundred years later says that religious freedom is a natural right of man. A man has a right to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. Well this presents a nice little problem in the development of doctrine. How do you get two pope who say exactly the opposite things to be really saying the same thing. Well this is what we have theologians for. So, ironically put, this is Murray facing up to history, and moving toward a Lonergan type notion of “historical consciousness” to which he explicitly appeals. And this insight that had emerged outside the church, to which the church, in Murray’s terms, was just now “catching up,” was quite new. It deals with the right, obligation and power of the people to judge, correct and direct governmental power, elsewhere described by Murray as a “great act of faith in the American People” to morally understand and correct themselves. But, as Murray goes on to describe, the problem becomes one of convincing Rome that this was a truth which it ought to encourage and endorsed as true, and truly good. In continuing to trace through the argument of the fourth draft, Murray comes to what he calls the jurisprudential principle of the principle of a free society: And then the principle of the free society is established here, namely, as much freedom as possible; as much restraint as necessary. You see, this is just the inverse of the maxim of our friends who plead for tolerance. They say as much tolerance as necessary; as much restraint as possible. I had a little trouble getting this in here and keeping this in here. And the only way it could be kept in there was to show that this was simply a transposition of, a translation, a paraphrase of the fifteenth among the Regulae iuris canonici, the fifteenth of Rules of Canon law, odia restringi et favores convenit ampliari, which is itself in substance a piece of Roman civil law. And when they heard that, they said: Oh, well, yes, of course. If that’s what you mean, we’re all for it. Nothing like hiding behind canon law, in favor of something else. Again, Murray held that there exist multiple possible sources of insight and moral will, which especially in our own times American von Balthazarians write off as an unacceptable religious dualism. How did Murray get there? While Murray never wrote much on loving one’s enemies, he did have a clearly identifiable enemies list. Many of these he adopted from his tradition, some he developed on his own or at least gave them his own spin. In what follows I mention four of his enemies, and then I try to spell out how Murray used and abused, rejected and developed his tradition, and thereby gave a new, social nuance to the meaning of Love for enemies. These enemies are, first, America itself. Second, Roman Catholics and the Catholic University of America, and elsewhere. Third, Protestants universally. And fourth, though not by any means last , atheists of any and all strips. Again, I will discuss Murray’s “big hate” toward each, and where his own tradition that often encouraged those hates also encouraged him to something that looks, painfully even , like bearing a cross and loving one’s enemies. II. The First Enemy: Americanism So, to the first enemy which, early on, was America, or at least Americanism – all those New World attitudes that were condemned by Leo XIII in his 1899 Testem benevolentiae. After returning to Woodstock College from the 1939 completion of his Gregorian STD, Murray could, in the face even of the rise of fascism and the outbreak of war in Europe, he could claim that It would appear that our American culture, as it exists, is actually the quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian world. It would seem to be erected on the triple denial that has corrupted Western culture at its roots, the denial of metaphysical reality, of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, of the social over the individual. And in the same talk he could write sympathetically of European fascism, of the desire of the European people to escape the individualism and isolation that characterized much of especially Anglo-American culture. Fascism was offering a “communitarian” alternative to our own decadence, even though he admitted that fascism was an inadequate form of communitarianism. Behind all these American targets of Murray’s scorn lay the entire Anglo-American
tradition. As mentioned earlier, Murray eventually would explore more deeply that Anglo-American political tradition and find there traces of God’s intentions for even Catholicism. But
he had early on, before such a historical turn, one solid ground for at least qualifying this early
and recurring bellicose stance toward that tradition. That counter position showed up first in his
own dissertation. For his dissertation Murray closely studied the work of the German theologian,
Matthias Joseph Scheeben. Scheeben had tried to carve out a Thomistic-based theology for the
laity. Murray most appreciated Scheeben’s attempt to understand all human cognitional and
emotive operations as capable of being taken up by the very cognitional and emotive powers of
God incarnate. In an intricate faculty psychological dissecting of knowing and valuing, Murray
developed a basis for a laity-in-the-world closeness to God that veers toward the hypostatic, build
as it is on the metaphor of the beatific vision defined as a participation in Christ’s view of his
Father, in which we even now participate. To do so, though, Murray had to confront two
elements that stood in the way of lay social action, namely the fundamental paternalism of
Scheeben’s understanding of the divine/human relationship and the reduction of all human action
to simple blind if loving obedience. To correct for what Murray called Scheeben’s “big hate
toward Liberalism” and generally toward anything Gallic or Anglo, Murray suggested that the
primary governing metaphor for lay action in the world must be other than that supplied by
Scheeben. Murray counters—with the help of Newman—that one might more adequately
understand the sacrifice of intellect (which all agreed is required by faith) as more akin to moving
into uncharted territory, than to blind obedience to a clear demand. "Obedience of faith is not
precisely that of Moses receiving the Law on Sinai, but rather that of Abraham going out from
country and hearth and kin, into the land that God would show him, but of which he had as yet
no vision."
So, Murray eventually came to the notion that the God of Nature had revealed a new truth about human dignity outside the church’s visible boundaries. How Roman Catholic antagonism toward his various arguments, and how his own disdain shaped those arguments, is important for understanding where and how he expected God to speak out. Murray began his search for an active God with a distinction between theory and action, initially in addressing the question of who among Catholics should participate in post-WW II reconstruction, and how they should so participate. He insisted that the task of reconstruction was so vast that Catholics were obliged to work directly with Protestants and other believers (I’ll return to non-believers in the next section). The argument, mostly with the faculty at Catholic University of America, focused on the choice between, on the one hand, parallel centers of action, segregated from each other by faith, joined only perhaps at the level of the leadership of each, and, on the other hand, interfaith communities mixed from top to bottom. Murray endorsed the latter, full integration top to bottom. His justification these mixed organizations where the faith of Catholics could be challenged rested on three premises: First, again, that only through such mixed groups could the work get done. A pragmatic argument. The common good required it. Second, that the work would be primarily in the realm of the temporal, not the eternal. And third, that it would be “work”, that is, it would be at the level of action, not at the level of theory and theology. He appealed to Pius XI’s claimed insistence concerning Catholic Action that the clergy stay out of the realm proper to the laity. In this cognitional division of labor, priest/theologians should work away at redeeming human theoretical intelligence, while the laity worked at redeeming the temporal order through the semi-autonomous functioning of practical reasoning. Granted that such a sharp distinction made the social construction that the laity were to perform look suspiciously like the technical reasoning that Europeans condemned in Americanism, and granted that bishops were still supposed to judge the moral qualities of lay action (and therefore could interfere as bishops, not as priests, in the lay sphere. Nonetheless this action/theory distinction worked fairly well for Murray. He could in principle allow lay autonomy in social reconstruction, while keeping them theologically safe. That is, it worked fairly well until he tried to use it to establish a coherent argument to support a Catholic affirmation of civic religious liberty. In his first attempt to clear out Protestant suspicions of Catholic eagerness to coercively suppress heretical voices, Murray tried to run an argument that distinguished between natural and revealed knowledge as theory, on the one hand, and, on the other as action (practical applications based twinly on natural and theological theory). The argument was so full of holes that Murray abandoned the promised last two articles in support of religious freedom, and turned to an area that he had first spurned, namely, the realm of temporal, the on-the-ground historical action between church and state. That which he eventually had to admit was that a new theoretical understanding of human social nature emerged outside the church. That is, in his vocabulary of the time, that natural law theory could, and empirically did, develop in its own right, independently of the Roman Catholic church. One principle of that earliest argument for religious freedom, however, did make it into his later arguments, namely, the assertion that that which is true in the natural order will not be reversed by revelation. That is, the God of nature is still accessible through nature, even with the Fall of Adam. And the God of nature cannot be in contradiction with the God of revelation. We should note the strong lexical relationship here, even in Murray’s pre-historical arguments. Nature has its own autonomy that can make claims against that which is claimed in the name of revelation. Further, once Murray cast his natural law argument into the historical flow, with the possibility that new insights and will emerge, the challenge to Roman Catholic self-understanding and understanding of its unique role within the order of grace was firmly in place. Of course Murray could counter-claim that all he was talking about was the temporal order, not the world of eternal life, so the church should not be alarmed that its own claims to the fullness of redeeming truth are being challenged. And he did so counter-claim, genuinely or disingenuously. But those in Rome and at Catholic University who opposed him were smart enough to know that a rose by any other name is still a rose and can smell as sweet. Especially given the lexical relationship Murray continued to accord now to emerging natural and supernatural truths, Murray was in fact granting at the least two independent sources of divine revelation that could not easily be subordinated in either direction over time. In principle natural truth could legitimately challenge and transform religiously based claims, just as in principle religiously based claims could transform natural (temporal) claims. Genuinely, in the vocabulary of Galasius II, “Two there are, oh Emperor.” Two sources of moral authority in this world. At the end of the decade in which Catholic U helped silence him, Murray would scan over the entire Catholic American scene and almost cry out: “Faith supposes reason as grace supposes nature. If the genuine powers of reason are destroyed or undermined, the true notion of Christian faith suffer the same fate.” And again “not even religion will supply the lack, if reason fails in its functions; for religion cannot form a civilization,” if it forgo public reasoning. He had discovered that Catholics could damage their own mission and their own faith by the reasoning they practiced in either or both the ecclesial and secular orders. Argument in both orders can encourage moral participation or destroy the possibility of participation, following much the same rules of discourse. IV. The Third Enemy: Protestants at Large I mentioned earlier in a discussion of Americanism Murray inherited a strong dislike of America’s materialism, hedonism, individualism. In that same 1940 address, he went on to ask: who can we blame for our being the “quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian world”? And he did have a sure answer. Surprisingly it was not social atheism, either of the Dewey pragmatic variety or of the Soviet Marxist variety (or even fascism in its various 1940 forms). He continued his address: In terms of three qualities of the Puritan soul, its anti-intellectualism and anti-humanism, its this-worldly morality, its intense individualism, you will, I think, find a major ... explanation of the transformation of early American ideals of democracy. They were dehumanized, deintellectualized, moralized, clothed with fierce emotion and [justified the] unregulated activity of the individual in the field that absorbed him—business, economic life. Thus American culture became doubly material: material in its body, its economic order, and material in its soul, emotional individualism. Now, while this 1940 address is both naive and quite early in Murray’s academic life, it does reflect the tradition out of which he was formed in Rome and at Woodstock, highly influence probably by Christopher Dawson in its attitudes toward Calvinism and by the early Maritain in its understanding of Americanism. It was in line with a paper he wrote as a student in 1933 in which he claimed, as he would through 1962, that no theological conversation with heretics was possible, that the best we can do is natural law and natural theism. Some of Murray’s funniest, if harshest, public writing and speaking took aim at Protestants. In an American Mercury series of exchanges with Protestant Russell Bowie, Murray suggested that “hostility to the Catholic Church is profoundly lodged in the Protestant collective unconscious, in consequence perhaps of some natal trauma.” Repeatedly Murray claimed that any misunderstanding between Catholics and Protestants was based on the Protestant reality as solely a religion of protest, for being solely defensive (quoting Tillich), as knowing only what it is against, not what it is or should be for. After the Council, on the other hand, a very confident Murray did claim that we were now entering an age in which theological reflection must begin and end in ecumenism. We new theologians must talk to theologians across the faith spectrum if we are to learn anything new about our God, or they anything about their God. In 1965 he mercilessly brought Lonergan Coals to a Lutheran New Castle. One can feel his uncomfortableness with it, with speaking theologically with Lutherans. And he obviously desired to share that uncomfortableness with his new Lutheran colleagues. But talk he did. So, once again Murray moved from the tradition he inherited, with the help of that tradition but also with the help of something outside the tradition, to something quite new. V. The Fourth Enemy: The Atheist of Any Strip As previously mentioned, Murray did judge fairly early on that Catholics and other believers must and could collaborate, as long as they stayed within natural law and nature’s God. At no point prior to the council, however, could he find any principled grounds on which a Catholic could collaborate with an atheist. In his early Catholic Action arguments, he insisted that it was clear to whom Pius XII’s call to post-war reconstruction was directed. Namely, to all who believe in God, and directed only to them. By 1959 Murray could admit that America’s public arguments had to be open to four groups, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and secularists. However, he offered only pragmatic, lesser of two evils, defenses of secularistic or atheistic participation. In Murray’s discussion of the East’s Communist threat to the Christian West, he described Cold War strategies solely in term of sheer power. The East operated under the norm of “maximum security; minimum risk.” The West should counter with “maximum risk” and “minimum security.” Their own survival is the only value that the East can understand, and the only way we will get their attention. In all else they stand counter to all that the West stands for, not least the rule of law. At the 1962 suggestion that John XXIII was opening a dialog with Marxists, Murray countered that John must only be talking about 19th century secularists, that he could not have meant Marxists, and that, generally, what John in Pacem in terris has to say about East/West relations is of little help. By 1965 Murray participated in Christian/Marxist dialogues, albeit painfully and reluctantly. As reported in the National Catholic Reporter, Murray left the meetings talking about how much Christians and Marxists do not understand each other, and despairingly suggesting that fruitful conversations are far in the future. Yet, despite his own reluctance, what brought Murray into those dialogs? Beyond simply the spirit of the times, Murray finally moved into a principled dialog on the basis of what he had claimed from the beginning of his life was a special concern to the Catholic faith, namely the integral functioning of human reasoning. It was human reasoning in the secular order, as eventually understood in Lonergan’s terms of historical consciousness, that had allowed Murray to talk theologically with Protestants. So it was also another understanding of the structures of human consciousness that allowed him, in his 1964 The Problem of God, to enter into a dialectical argument with atheists of both the existentialist and Marxist varieties. To ground that conversation, he suggests that all human knowing, but especially the human knowing of God, is grounded in two human cognitional drives, namely the drive toward knowing (gnosis) and the drive toward the transcendent (agnosis). He then suggests that Marxists have locked on human knowing (gnosis), claiming to fully understand), while existentialists claim the fundamental unintelligibility of human existence (agnosis). Then, he asks, is not human existence more humane when humans remain dialectically moving between affirmation and negation. To this day I don’t know where Murray picked up the permanent internal dialect within human consciousness, this gnosis and agnosis (I suspect from Schillebeeckx). In these days we have rhetorical analyses that describe Mystical discourse functioning very similarly to the dialectic that Murray advanced. But I do know that what he now had gave him the principled grounding he needed to admit the right of atheists to public voice, that such voices are not simply the lesser of two evils. By noticing that atheists could claim more than they knew, or claim less than that to which they are open, Murray could and did then talk about his own Church claiming more than it knew, or being closed to that to which it ought to be open. At this point in his life, all the languages of the cross and of grace began entering his many discussions. He could with Anglicans talk about the sinfulness of his own Church, Luther’s simul justic et peccator predicated of the church as an institution, not just of individual Catholics here and there. He could also talk about the unbelief of Christians, that unbelief that allows non-believers to give up on the very notion of God, non-believers who are themselves demonstrably more open to God’s future than are self-proclaimed believers. So, over his lifetime Murray moved from an antagonism to most things American to an affirmation that, at least in one significant sense, God was working to redeem humanity through American agency. He got there by expanding his Catholic notion that God has taken up all human reality and was bring it to completion, not negation. Further, he moved from a notion that the Roman Church lived the fullness of God’s hopes for humanity to a much more nuanced understanding of how Catholics, other believers and even non-believers all stand, individually and institutionally, as limited, as sinful, as under the call of the same God. Again, he moved from an insistence that Protestants and Catholics could only work together in the realm of nature and nature’s God to an insistence that future knowledge of God would have to be ecumenically generated. He got here mostly by experience of the Council but also with the help of emerging intelligibility. And he moved from only lesser of two evils arguments for not suppressing atheistic voices to an insistence that both Catholicism and atheists existed, and collapsed under, and transcended their own limits by a permanent dialectic at the heart of each. And each of these moves were a social cross that he had had to bear. Each tore at a Catholic tribalism that place a priori limits on God’s action. Each demanded that he grow, and grow he did. His fate, and grace, was a rugged type of loving that echos much of our contemporary, non-juridical discussion of the cross of the Christ. Certainly most of us humans do recognize that we are not god. But we also hide within institutions that often become our god and thereby spare us the pain of loving our enemies, or spare us of the need to turn over to them our second, much less our first, cloaks. Murray learned from his times, a time of the Cold War that nearly destroyed us. Now, in this age of easy terrorist destruction, perhaps we are poised to again learn something new of God’s wishes for us. Perhaps we can ask a Murrayesque type question: can we any longer afford claims to the fullness of truth that do not allow to others a similar fullness, or can we within most notions of following the Christ claim the full possession of God while granting to others only a partial presence of fully saving grace? Murray struggled toward an ecumenism, very much within the Ignatian ideal of working with God as God works to transform our world. We now struggle toward interfaith discussions, hopefully under the notion of working with our God as God again is suggesting, even in the violence and terrorist brutality we experience, that the limits we ourselves place the good and the godly must be negated, allowing good to be seen wherever it can emerge. To not follow those leads is an ego and tribal soothing luxury that we can no longer afford. Perhaps that is what God is saying. Perhaps it is this kind of movement into God’s future where Murray can be most helpful. Finally, yesterday I claimed that the French, truth-seeking justification for religious freedom was judged by Murray to be individualistic, a-historical, and a bit too self-congratulatory. Perhaps now you can see why he would make that claim. That the truth of moral agency emerged outside the church was essential to his argument, to its integrity, to its faith in an active God. Leon Hooper, S.J. Mainz - February 26, 2005 |
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