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The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America by William M. Shea Oxford Univ. Press, 2004 416 pp., $35 |
In one respect, at least, The Lion and the Lamb is a landmark. It is the first book by a Roman Catholic scholar to find long-term significance in the project called Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), a pie in which I am privileged to have a finger. ECT is the venture of an unofficial conservative group working to build a platform of unequivocal theological consensus, uncompromised and uncompromising, with a view to proper mutual appreciation leading to joint mission tasks. There has never before been anything like it in North America, though Le Groupe des Dombes in France is in some ways similar. Shea sees ECT's togetherness as starting something irreversible and epoch-making, as when cracking ice signals the reality of global warming. Whereas up to now conservative evangelicals and Catholics have on principle (as both communities would say) kept their distance, from now on there must be mutual respect, forward-looking dialogue, and an acknowledgment of common cause as they labor to beat back the secular modernity that seeks to outflank both of them. That American Catholicism will benefit hereby, Shea is sure. He has an agenda of his own, and his cautious cheering for ECT is clearly meant to further it, but before we get to that let it be said that any cheers for ECT are welcome after the clobbering some of us receive for being part of it.
Shea, a laicized priest of Irish descent who now heads the Center for Religion, Ethics, and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross, and who in true Irish fashion becomes whimsical as his way of being serious, makes no secret of being a cross-bench liberal Catholic who believes that Catholics and evangelicals need each other. Catholics need evangelical help to get them beyond clerical autocracy, and evangelicals need Catholic help to get them beyond their sub-ecclesial and sub-sacramentalist individualism. The point of his title is not that one community is lion and the other lamb, but that this is the time for the two supposed incompatibles to start snuggling, so that good things may begin to happen.
There might be a touch of Machiavellianism here, positioning evangelicals to fire what are in fact the author's bullets; certainly, this agenda is put forward in an over simplified way. My Catholic friends in ECT, like other conservative Catholics, are conservative not just theologically but also institutionally (I once stunned one of them by saying that the papacy still seems to me a grotesque institution, for all that John Paul II has been wonderful), and I am pretty sure they will not resonate with Shea's dream of declericalizing the church that John Paul has worked so hard to reclericalize throughout his pontificate. Then again, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches are mentioned (just), but evidently the person closest to Shea's idea of the pure and perfect evangelical would belong to the Campbellite Church of Christ, no member of which is involved in ECT. And one can admire Shea's cheerful frankness in rating the first ECT statement theologically "underdeveloped, unimpressive, and unimportant" and in admitting that he finds evangelical Christianity "quite narrowly biblical (i.e., Pauline), ahistorical, fanciful, and ecclesially irresponsible (as any good Catholic would!)" without jumping to the conclusion that he must really have taken the measure of what he is talking about.
Yet as history of ideas, which is Shea's field of strength, this book is a major achievement. It is centrally an overview of Catholic-Protestant polemic from the sixteenth century in Europe through four centuries of American history to today, seen through the lens of a deep and cogent understanding of human tribalism and the myths that tribes live by. Under the heading, "Paul speaks of Peter," Shea surveys the major attacks made on Catholicism over the years as the half-pagan foe of democracy and personal freedom, and neatly distinguishes en route between "hard" evangelicals, who see the Catholic community as apostate, and so strictly a non-church, and their "soft" counterparts, for whom the Catholic community, while misbelieving and misshapen in specifics, is a church still. Then, under the heading "Peter speaks of Paul," he surveys the dignified and largely successful rejoinders of Catholic leaders to the Protestant charges. And following that, Shea traces the parallel between the Catholic and evangelical volte-faces during the past century and a half. The Catholic story is of defensive anti-modernism capped by Vatican II's new openness to dialogue with the world and with non-Catholic Christianities, a move that left integralists behind. The evangelical story is of anti-liberal fundamentalism trumped by the commitment of the 1942 National Association of Evangelicals to interactive engagement with both secularism and Protestant liberalism, a move that left fundamentalists behind. (Fuller Seminary and Carl Henry are not mentioned, but should be.)
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