A Kuyperian Catholic?

Several years ago I came into contact with the writings of David L. Schindler, editor of the English-language edition of the journal Communio and Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology at the John Paul II Institute. Schindler is a traditional Roman Catholic in the Augustinian (as opposed to the Thomistic) tradition whose life work has been to familiarize Anglo-American Christians with the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.

What I find intriguing about Schindler’s work is that he sounds many of the same notes as Kuyper and Dooyeweerd and their followers. For example, in his magnificent Heart of the World, Center of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, and Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), he affirms that “giving glory to God is a comprehensive task for Christians, occupying not only all of their time but also all of their faculties, their mind as well as their will” (p. 205). We find what Dooyeweerd describes as the biblical groundmotive of creation, fall and redemption clearly stated in its pages. Most inspiring of all, Schindler repeatedly emphasizes that all of life – and not just the so-called donum superadditum of supernatural virtue – is a gift of God’s grace and that human receptivity to this grace is antecedent to any creativity or activity on our part:

All that is, is gift. All that we are and do and make and produce must therefore emerge from a sense of gift: I gratefully receive from God... and this provides both the warrant for and the deepest meaning of my giving to others... (p. 119).

Above all, Schindler’s book is an eloquent and spiritually-discerning critique of liberalism, particularly as championed by such “Catholic whigs” as Michael Novak, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel, whose efforts are in turn rooted in the Americanizing enterprise of the late Fr. John Courtney Murray. Against their efforts to expand economic freedom within a liberal framework Schindler writes:

A freedom whose nature is wrongly understood does not become good simply because it is widely distributed rather than restricted to a few. I am proposing that liberalism of any stripe – including the liberalism of “open” capitalism – remains unacceptable insofar as its freedom remains conceived as primarily creative – or rather, insofar as its creativity is not conceived as anteriorly receptive. Indeed, here we discover the basic definition of a liberalism which, at its deepest level, threatens the integrity of Christianity, because it poisons at its source the meaning of autonomy. In overlooking receptivity in favor of creativity as primary in the basic human act, such a liberalism overlooks the implications of the relation that is constitutive of the human being as creature (pp. 119-121).

Schindler believes that the achievements of liberalism can be salvaged, but only by “discernment of the spirits” (p. 177). This entails a reordering of the foundational understanding of life at its spiritual sources. Someone in the Kuyperian tradition would describe what he’s getting at as a recognition of God’s common grace in the midst of an effort to reorient one’s worldview at a religious root level.

Moreover, we find in Schindler a recognition of the validity of historical development which echoes something found in Albert M. Wolters’ Creation Regained, and which keeps him from being a conservative pure and simple:

[W]e must reject all attempts at “restoration” or “repristination.” Modernity has thematized freedom and subjectivity in a way that has forever changed our experience of the world; and this change represents a significant gain in the human condition. This initially simple acknowledgement, nonetheless, becomes complicated as soon as we attach the crucially important qualifier: there has never been an actual historical moment when modernity’s freedom or subjectivity was empty – which is to say, unencumbered by a definite worldview inclusive... of an ontology, an anthropology, and a theology....

The burden of my criticism, therefore, is not that we should refuse to endorse modern freedom, but only that our endorsement should coincide with an awareness that freedom, even modern freedom, presupposes, willy-nilly, some anthropology (ontology, theology). Any endorsement of modern freedom must therefore coincide with an evaluation of the anthropology which has always-already given that freedom its meaning (pp. 181-182).

This is very different from traditional scholastic dualism. It is perhaps unsurprising that, given Schindler’s approach, he can so readily cite Reformed Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga against Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, long-time former president of the University of Notre Dame. All in all, Schindler’s is an exhilarating book. Some reviewers claimed to find it a tough slog, shall we say. But anyone familiar with Kuyperian/Dooyeweerdian categories will likely have a quite different experience reading it.

As a traditional Catholic, Schindler is careful to demonstrate the conformity of his ideas with church teachings, and especially those of the present Pope. Yet after reading the encyclical Fides et Ratio, which came out two years later (1998), I found myself wondering how credible an enterprise this really could be. Schindler’s loyalty to his church’s magisterium would likely make him uncomfortable with my saying this, but I far prefer his Heart of the World to Fides et Ratio.