Fullness of Faith: The Public Significance of Theology.

The Himes brothers should be congratulated for actually attempting what many authors have only suggested needs to be done: an articulation of "the social aspects of dogma" that Henri de Lubac urged over fifty years ago in Catholicism. Their book may be read at three levels. It is first an effort to show how the central symbols and doctrines of Catholic faith yield a vision of things that has public significance. Thus the Catholic doctrines of Original Sin, the Trinity, grace, the Incarnation, and the Communion of Saints are briefly discussed in successive chapters and shown to yield the "background theory" that informs classical Catholic social doctrine and suggests certain concrete policy choices. The purpose here, it would seem, is to demonstrate that the church's social ethic is in fact grounded more securely in the central faith than in the natural law or in "right reason." In this respect the brothers Himes are following a trend that has become dominant since Vatican II, in the social documents of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, and in the pastoral letters of the U.S. bishops.

Second, their argument is at almost every point directed against three features of contemporary American public discussion: the privatized status of religion too often assumed by both believers and nonbelievers, the individualism that marks much public discourse, and the dominance of instrumental rationality over values and goals.

But third, the book argues that this task is best accomplished by the construction, not of a public philosophy, a consensus about basic meanings and values that might unite all participants in the public debate, believers and unbelievers alike, but of a public theology, a vision derived from basic religious convictions that is offered as the church's distinctive contribution to public debate. Stated in terms of representative figures, this is a choice of Reinhold Niebuhr's method over John Courtney Murray's. The book thus adds its support to a view of Murray's project that threatens to become a consensus: that Murray's appeal to natural law philosophy in order to generate the public consensus through which religious meanings and values could be publicly mediated was a mistake theologically (the remark was recently made that Murray had thereby "muzzled" his faith), strategically, and effectively.

These three purposes are at work simultaneously throughout the book. While most readers may have no difficulty in agreeing with the necessity of overcoming certain features of what passes for public discourse in contemporary America, some questions may arise with regard to the book's other two aims.

First, certain features of the effort to identify central Catholic doctrines and to explore the moral vision they imply are questionable. In most cases, the description of the doctrine is very rapid, while the unfolding of the moral norms and possible public policy implications takes up three-quarters of the chapters.

Second, in part because it is so rapid, the presentation of the doctrines at times leaves much to be desired. To cite a basic example: on Original Sin the authors contrast to the classic Protestant view of the utter corruption of human nature with the Catholic view that the image of the Trinity is not destroyed. On this they build an argument against the liberal "myth of self-interest" that they think was the secularized anthropology Hobbes and Smith derived from the Protestant view. The next chapter shows how the trinitarian image yields a view of persons as made for communion and a notion of rights that relates people to one another rather than setting them over and against one another. But so great is the reaction to the Protestant view of corrupt human nature that the reality of sin, original or personal, hardly ever appears in the subsequent chapters. One suspects that Niebuhr's gratitude for the choice of his method would not extend to its application here; one would expect to hear from him something about the theologia gloriae. Perhaps he might also wonder at the absence from the book of the doctrine of redemption by the cross and Resurrection.

Another, not unrelated example: from the doctrine of grace the authors derive an argument in support of the consistent ethic of life that Cardinal Joseph Bernardin offered a few years ago. Here the key is the rejection of the two-storied image of nature and grace in favor of the idea that everything is grace. This idea, however, is presented in such a way as to suggest that the very distinction (I do not say "separation") of nature and grace is in danger of being lost (cf. the description of baptism as the celebration of the sacredness of physical life or the startling affirmation that "a person does not require a second religious |rebirth' to be ushered into the world of grace"). Two things are worrisome here: the absence in the book of any serious discussion of the need for conversion, and the abandonment of the notion of nature that was developed in the Catholic tradition in order to measure the sinfulness of sin and the graciousness of grace.

The neglect of this notion of nature is pertinent to the other aim of the book: to provide a properly theological rather than merely philosophical mediation of the faith to public life. The authors make it clear from the beginning that they respect "the legitimate autonomy of other social institutions" that secularization has properly brought about. Their argument is at the level of cultural debate and proceeds by persuasion not coercion. The faith does not yield immediate policy decisions; those have to be argued for on the basis of a mediating social ethic. In fact, as noted above, the larger part of each chapter is devoted to this mediation.

But this very fact leads one to wonder whether the authors' project in the end really differs that much from what Murray attempted. Like Murray, they mediate the public significance of faith through a social ethic. Unlike Murray, they do not spend much time explaining where they found that ethic, despite the fact that it often appears to be at least as important to their arguments as the generating of religious meanings and values. In some cases, as for abortion, the key insight is even said to rest "upon moral reasoning, not appeals to faith." Similarly, the communitarian orientation of Catholic social teaching is articulated through concepts of person and community, of the common good, of human fights, etc., that in fact did not have an exclusively or even primarily religious origin, that can be debated on strictly philosophical grounds, and that need to be argued for rather than simply stated. This is particularly important when other Catholics, engaged in a similar effort to show the public significance of the faith (Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus, for example), think other concepts both more reflective of the faith and truer to experience.

If they were to undertake such an argument the authors might find themselves in the same arena and forced to undertake a project much more similar to Murray's than they seem to imagine. I do not believe that Murray was as ignorant or uncaring about the properly doctrinal bases of his own position as the authors, following several other commentators, suggest. But he was acutely aware of the danger of the Balkanization of the public arena that can follow from appeals to distinctively religious warrants and of the need to achieve a substantive social consensus. Whether such a consensus is possible or even desirable is at the heart of contemporary discussion's; Stuart Hampshire, for example, in his review of John Rawls's Political Liberalism (The New York Review of Books, August 12, 1993), argues that the necessary consensus is not substantive but only procedural. I suspect that the authors op this point are much closer to Murray than to Hampshire and I would be interested to know how they might engage the question effectively.

The enterprise the brothers Himes set themselves can only be welcomed, and I hope that they will be able to see in my substantive and methodological questions an appropriate response to their call for properly theological debate that is at once adequate to the faith and pertinent to our society.