Benedict's essay is learned and traces this historical origins and vicissitudes of "Europe." He does not "essentialize" Europe, as he shows its shifting historical nature. Yet he does not want to dismiss its cultural achievements and goods -- nor is he blind to its atrocities. There does seem a bit of Constantinian nostalgia behind his discussion. The essay ultimately asks, "Is there a European identity that has a future and to which we can commit whole heartedly?" (p. 20), a question that I am not very interested in asking. Yet his essay is quite perceptive. He is writing to get Europeans (a cultural, not geographic term) to reflect on their own secularity, to see secularity as a denial of their own historicity.

He thus writes want to embrace a multiculturalism, but does not think that a European society can sustain a true multiculturalism from within secularity: "multiculturalism, which is so passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial, a flight from one's own things. Multiculturalism teaches us to approach the sacred things of others with respect, but we can do this only if we ourselves are not estranged from the sacred, from God. With regard to others, it is our duty to cultivate within ourselves respect for the sacred and to show the face of the revealed God -- the God who has compassion for the poor and the weak, for widows and orphans, for the foreigner; the God wo is so human that he himself became man, a man who suffered, and who by his suffering wtih us gave dignity and hope to our pain" (p. 23). I find wonder if he has been reading some Levinas here, and extends Levinas' looking for the face of God in the other as seen especially clear in the incarnation. This is no right wing reactionary, though some will read him that way. He understands that catholicity brings a harmony to multiculturalism in the city of God that differs deeply from the conflict of interests and the reduction of multiculturalism to power-games within a secular multiculturalism.

Rather than reject multiculturalism to impose a European identity on the world, he wants a truthful multiculturalism, as that seen within the church, that he is convinced can only be sustained in God. He thus is empowered to speak truthfully to Europeans about their smug secularity from the perspective of non-Europeans: "To the other cultures of the world, there is somethign deeply alien about the absolute secularism that is developing in the West. They are convinced that a world without God has no future. Multiculturalism itself thus demands that we return once again to ourselves" (pp. 21-22).

What then is the role of the church? It is interesting that even with hints of his Constantinian nostalgia, he ends up vigorously rejecting it. Benedict wants no return to papal states, nor control of crusading armies: "we must agree with Toynbee, that the fate of society always depends on its creative minorities. Christian believers should look upon themselves as just such a creative minority, helping Europe to reclaim what is best in its heritage and thereby to place itself in the service of all humankind" (p. 22). While this isn't exactly Stanley Hauerwas' argument that the churches main job is to tell the world that its the world, it isn't far from this either. Here is an ecclesiology for believers not to succumb to the secularity of the world around them, not merely to be different, but to use their own creative resources that life as a minority provides for the sake of calling that secularity beyond itself, to the Triune God.

Benedict here converges with the thought of George Lindbeck, emeritus professor of theology from Yale and official observer of Vatican II. Lindbeck in The Church in a Postliberal Age writes,

"I once welcomed the passing of Christendom and found Richard John Neuhaus' demurrers misplace; but now,.. . I am having uncomfortable second thoughts. The waning of cultural Christianity might be good for the churches, but what about society? To my chagrin, I find myself thinking that traditionally Christan lands when stripped of their historic faith are worse than others. They become unworkable or demonic. There is no reason to suppose that what happened in Nazi Germany cannot happen in liberal democracies, though the devils we no doubt be disguised very differently. From this point of view, the Christianization of culture can be in some situations the churches' major contribution to feeding the poor, clothing the hungry, and liberating the imprisoned. So it was in the past and, given the disintegration of modern ideologies, so it may be at times in the future. Talk of 'Christian America' and John Paull II's vision of a 'Christian Europe' make me uncomfortable, but I have seen a number of totally unexpected improbabilities come to pass in my lifetime, such as Roman Catholic transformations and communism's collapse, and cannot rule these out as impossible" (p. 7).

What is Lindbeck's prayer? He wants a "Israel-like view of the Church" "as reconstituting Christian community and unity from, so to speak, the bottom up. It is here that the structuring of the Church in the first centuries is very instructive" (p. 8) Lindbeck recognizes that the church must thus live as a 'creative minority,' especially given the secular drift of the West. He thus states, "This focus on building Christian community will seem outrageous to some in view of the world's needs, but it is a strength for those who see the weakening of communal commitments and loyalties as modernity's fundamental disease. Perhaps no greater contribution to peace, justice, and the environment is possible than that provided by the existence of intercontinental and interconfessional communal networks such as the churches already are to some extent, and can become more fully, if God wills" (p. 9). It is thus that we see the great convergence that God is doing for the world in the reclaiming the unique and particular contributions Christian thought and practice for the sake of the world in the work of people like Lindbeck, Yoder, Hauerwas, and Luigi Giussani of the Communion and Liberation movement.

When I read of Benedict's comments from David Jones at ressourcement.blogspot.com, I immediately thought of Lindbeck, Barth, Hauerwas, and others that helped move me beyond the 'evangelical-liberal' theological impasses (which I've come to see as really two versions of the same theological commitments), and their similarity to Benedict's vision. I planned to write this post as a discovery, as my insight, as an invitation to come along and see if we can be the faithful creative minority that Benedict and Lindbeck see, at MidCity, and then, through friendships here and around the world, with those who share the conviction of Lindbeck that "the crumbling of modernity . . . brings Christians closer to the situation of the first centuries than they've been in more than a millenium and a half. We are not better placed than perhaps ever before to retrieve, critically and repentantly, the heritage of the Hebrew scriptures, apostolic writings and early tradition. This retrieval is also more urgent than ever if the chares are to become the kind of global and ecumenical community that the new age needs" (Lindbeck, p. 9). I doubt that Benedict would disagree with Lindbeck at all about this assessment.

Yet while I still offer it as an invitation to come along, I cannot say that this convergence between Benedict and those formed at Yale is my observation alone. In a wonderfully sympathetic article on Benedict XVI from Francis Schuessler Fiorenza in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin (www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/33-2_fiorenza.html), Fiorenza writes, "one can readily compare Ratzinger's position with the theological appropriate that Hans Frei and George Lindbeck of Yale have made of the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Clifford Geertz in order to understand Christianity as a community with its specific narratives and language." Now I might quibble that Fiorenza interpretation of Frei and Lindbeck as modernist mediators of Christian theology through Wittgenstein and Geertz is misplaced. Yet we see that others too recognize this convergence. To move on now, to see where the Spirit takes us, not only in thought, but in bodily friendship, that is an exciting prospect.