Solidarity with Everything Modern is Much adoe About Nothing

Yesterday afternoon was spent in the hospital waiting on my daughter to come out of surgery. While waiting, I was reading Principles of Catholic Theology by Ratzinger. It is really an outstanding book that shows the depth and breadth of formal Catholic principles for our world. What we find so much in liberal Protestantism is the desire to give Christianity a new face and public value that disregards the traditional faith as something too anxious about sin created by an antique narrow-minded moral theology that keep men and women in the chains of self denial. So much of this type of progressivism seems to presently be shaping liberal Protestantism and has sadly gripped many in the church around the world and particularly it can be seen in the Anglican Communion. To embrace such a worldview and theological progressivism is really embracing nothing more than the wind. The real call to Christianity is a call to conversion of life if man really wants to be free and liberated. What so much of Anglican praxis seems to want to embrace today is adaptation to the world. So many of the arguments I find for the progressiveness of the church around the communion involves this sort of adaptation. To adapt, this worldview teaches, is an act of liberation, renewal that surrenders the past and any sense of guilt about how one leads his or her life. How does the Anglican Communion or any individual for that matter get rescued from such emptiness? I believe the answer lies in these words.

A Christianity that believes it has no other function than to be completely in tune with the spirit of the times has nothing to say and no meaning to offer. It can abdicate without more ado. Those who live vigilantly in the world today, who recognize its contradictions and its destructive tendencies--from the self-destruction of technology by the destruction of the environment to the self-destruction of society by racial and class struggles--such people do not look to Christianity for approbation but for the prophetic salt that burns, consumes, accuses and changes. Nevertheless, a basic aspect of metanoia comes thereby into view--for it demands that man change if he is to be saved. It is not the ideology of adpatation that will rescue Christianity, although adaptation is still operative wherever, with sycophantic zeal or tardy courage, those institutions are criticized which, in any event, have become the powerless butt of world publicity (and in so doing, incidentally, have entered once again into the apostolic tradition [1 Cor. 4:13]; nothing can rescue it but the prophetic courage to make its voice heard decisively and unmistakably at this very hour.