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The high quality of Shea's narrative is maintained in its coda, which shows from the literature that Catholic scholars since Vatican II have not taken very seriously either the theology or the integrity of evangelicals, and implies that it is high time they did. Here a veteran Catholic shoots at Catholics the bullets evangelicals wanted to fire! Lovingly (I hope) my heart says "aha" as I read.
The effect of this weighty, warm-hearted volume will surely be to clear the decks for quality theological action. Hard evangelicals of fundamentalist type, and Catholic integralists of Tridentine type, will undoubtedly continue to press their view of the other party, so that the analysis of Catholicism as paganized apostasy and the plea that for Protestants there is no good home but Rome will still be heard, stridently as before, coming from the sidelines. But the ball is evidently at the feet of the soft evangelicals and Vatican II-brand Catholics, and ECT is already marking out the field of play. Still under discussion, however, are the rules for engagement.
Shea here brings in a point made by fellow-liberal David Tracy. The Catholic imagination is essentially analogical; it "skips through nature and history and even through Judaism and paganism, finding by analogy traces of God here and there," and so Catholic theology has an assimilative cast. By contrast the authentic Protestant (Puritan, evangelical) imagination is dialectical, giving evangelical theology an antithetical cast, for example on God and man, sin and grace, faith and works, sacred and profane, church and world. No doubt there is truth in this, but the point is more about intellectual style and personal spirituality than about the given substance of faith, unless—unless!—we eliminate the distinction between the God-given substance of faith (i.e., revelation in biblical facts and teaching) and the church's imaginative apprehension of it, equating the latter with the former. But this is what liberal Christianity characteristically does. Molded and impregnated by secular culture, the liberal Christian imagination revamps its heritage of belief and behavior to make it fit in with the concerns and prejudices of that culture. This happens within Catholicism as well as within Protestantism, and calls for a little more discussion.
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