NT Wright's How God Became King. Book Review by Frederick Blonigen

The final Sunday of each liturgical year is the great feast of Christ the King. This universal solemnity of the Church was instituted by Pope Pius XI on December 11, 1925, in his encyclical Quas Primas. The date of this papal document is significant. It was a time of growing materialism and secularism. Soviets had decimated their orthodox clergy and Mexico was killing its priests. The Spanish republicans would join the bloodletting in a decade. A time of ideological fervor and the rise of Communist and Nazi dictatorships in Europe. A time when many were losing hope for humanity as Christianity was bypassed in the exercise of public authority. Pope Pius XI saw the need to reaffirm the absolute sovereignty of God over the affairs of men. Christ and His Church, the pope declared, is the one and only source of salvation. Christ alone is King and Ruler. “It is Christ whom the Father ‘hath appointed as heir of all things: for he must reign until at the end of the world he hath put all his enemies under the feet of God and the Father.’ “It is most fitting and necessary, continues the pope, for the Church to salute the Lord as King of Kings and to remind mankind at the end of the liturgical year that when Christ returns at the Parousia, the Second Coming, He will come in triumph and glory as King of the universe and Judge of all nations.

The role of Christ as King and Ruler is not simply a liturgical celebration commemorated once a year. It is at the very heart of the New Testament. It is the central, and forgotten, message of the four gospels. This is the thesis of N.T.Wright’s fascinating book, How God Became King : The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. Wright, an Anglican bishop, a prolific writer and one of the foremost New Testament scholars in the world, argues there has been a deep seated and persistent misunderstanding. In the opening paragraph of How God Became King, the author explains: “It has been slowly dawning on me over many years that there is a fundamental problem deep at the heart of the Christian faith and practice as I have known them. This problem can be summarized quite easily: we have all forgotten what the four gospels are about. Yes, they are about Jesus, but what exactly are they saying about Jesus? Yes, they are about God, but what precisely are they saying about God? Yes, they are about the beginnings about what later became known as Christianity, but what are they saying about that strange movement, and how do they resource it for its life and work.” Despite centuries of intense and extensive study of the gospels most of the Western Christian tradition, both Catholic and Protestant, has simply missed the main message the four books were trying to convey. The story the four evangelists are telling is the story of how God became king on earth as in heaven.
The problem N.T. Wright is attempting to address in this book is captured memorably in a personal story he tells about an incident that occurred almost fifty years before when the author was still in high school. At the time Wright belonged to a Christian studies group and the members decided to do a series of reports on some aspect of Christ, each report beginning with “Why”. For example, Why was Jesus born , Why did Jesus live? Why did Jesus die? Why did Jesus rise from the dead? For some reason the author ended up with the task of having to do a report on the middle topic: Why did Jesus live? And even at that young age he realized he had been given the most difficult topic to research.
What about that question in the middle—his question? Why did Jesus live ? Did anything worth knowing take place between Jesus’ birth in a stable and His death on Calvary? Why did the four evangelists provide all that information about Christ’s three year long public life? What difference does it make that while we know precious little about Christ‘s first thirty years of life, we know a great deal about His last three? What truths can we learn from Our Lord’s public life? Since Christ was the man who came to earth to die for us and redeem us and atone for our sins what is the point of spending thirty three years on earth, the first thirty in obscurity and the last three living an intensely active public life?
Over a lifetime of studying and teaching the New Testament, N. T. Wright was surprised to discover that these very questions about “Why Christ lived” are seldom raised by many Christians who read the gospels. “Adapting a phrase from a well-known book on management, The Empty Raincoat , such readers experience the four gospels as an empty cloak. The outer wrapping is there—Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. But who is inside the cloak? What did Jesus do in between? Is there anybody there? Does it matter?” According to Wright, when most Protestants refer to the “gospel” they are not referring to the four gospels but to the gospel message: the good news that Jesus Christ has died for mankind’s sins ( atonement) and all we have to do is believe ( justification by faith alone). This gospel message isn’t even found in the gospels but in the letters of St.Paul, especially in Romans and Galatians.

This peculiar relationship between the “gospel” and the gospels is also found in the relationship between the “gospel” and the great Christian creeds. The great creeds when they refer to Jesus go from His virgin birth to His suffering and death. The gospels, on the other hand, tell us a great deal about what Jesus did between His birth and His death, especially what might be called His “kingdom-inaugurating” works: “the deeds and words that declared that God’s kingdom was coming then and there, in some sense or other, on earth as in heaven. They tell us a great deal about that; but the great creeds don’t.”
The creeds do not mention anything that occurs in the life of Jesus between His birth and death. To quote Wright: “ What I see is a great gulf opening up between the canon and the creeds. The canonical gospels give us a Jesus whose public career radically mattered as part of his overall accomplishment, which had to do with the kingdom of God. The creeds give us a Jesus whose miraculous birth and saving death, resurrection, and ascension are all we need to know....We have assumed some sort of creedal framework, and the gospels don’t fit it. Have we , then, all misunderstood the gospels? Is there an emptiness at the heart of the great cloak of the creedal gospel? I fear the answer has to be yes....The  gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God. It would be truly remarkable if one great truth of early Christian faith and life were actually to displace another, to displace it indeed so thoroughly that people forgot it even existed. But that’s what I think has happened. This book is written in the hope of correcting that distortion.”
If the focus of the Christian creeds gives us, to use Wright’s metaphor, a cloak without a body ,the opposite problem, all body and no cloak, has been a persistent issue ever since the eighteenth century when Biblical rationalists have come to the gospels with the historical question: Did it really happen? And many of the skeptical scholars answered in the following manner. Yes, Jesus really did exist but all that stuff about His miraculous birth, His miracles, and His death and resurrection: in short, anything supernatural about Jesus never actually happened. But when we take away the creedal framework—the body without the cloak, as it were—the story of the gospels we have left is very different than the one told by the Church. The “liberal” picture of Jesus, says Wright, reduces Our Lord to one of three things. He is either a Jewish revolutionary seeking the violent overthrow of the Roman state. Or He is a fanatical visionary predicting the end of the world. Or He is a mild mannered teacher preaching the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Or He is some combination of all of the above. Many Christians have grown up with this liberal, reductionistic view of Jesus. The idea that Jesus came to teach a new ethic of being “nice” to other people without any dogmatic or supernatural claims is deeply embedded in Western culture. That Jesus actually is God, that He was born to die for mankind’s sins and make it possible for us to be saved and that He established a Church to carry on His salvific work seems just too fantastic to believe. Instead of leaving out the middle of the gospels in order to focus on the creeds, the liberal reductionist does just the opposite : he focuses on the middle material in the gospels and ignores or even denies the supernatural claims about Jesus found in the creeds.
The truly orthodox response to this misreading of the gospels is to see them from the perspective of God’s kingdom. “ What I miss, right across the Western tradition “, {says Wright}, “at least the way it has come through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is the devastating and challenging message I find in the four gospels: God really has become king—in and through Jesus. A new state of affairs has been brought into existence. A door has been opened that nobody can shut. Jesus is now the world’s rightful Lord, and all other lords are to fall at his feet. This is an eschatological message, not in the trivial sense that it heralds the ‘end of the world’ (whatever that might mean), but in the sense that it is about something that was suppose to happen when Israel’s hopes were fulfilled; and Israel’s hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God’s glory. It is , however, an inaugurated eschatological message, claiming that this ‘something’ has indeed happened in and through Jesus and does not yet look what people might have imagined. That is the story the gospels are telling.”
The argument N.T. Wright makes throughout How God Became King is that the four canonical gospels tell us that the story of Jesus is the story of how Israel’s God became king. That Jesus of Nazareth, the God of Israel, has become the king of the world: this is the forgotten story of the gospels. And in missing this central message we have misread the gospels.

Having established the problem of how the gospels have been misread, Wright then sets out to debunk various inadequate answers to the question of how the reader should understand what happens in the gospels between the birth and death of Jesus, or as he puts it, what’s the purpose of the “body” inside the “cloak”? What is the point of Christ’s healings, the conflicts with the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Sermon on the Mount, the calming of the storm, and all the other rich material found in the “middle “ of the gospels? The first inadequate answer, according to Wright, and the most serious misreading of the gospels, is that Jesus came to teach people how to go to heaven. Wright is not in any way denying that the whole New Testament assumes that God has a wonderful reward prepared for those who do His will in this world, a plan that includes the resurrection from the dead and a new heaven and earth. But, Wright insists, this is not the point of the four gospels. Rather the kingdom of heaven or God’s kingdom is not about people going to heaven but about heaven coming to earth. When St. Mathew has Jesus talking about “the kingdom of heaven” he means that heaven, in other words God’s kingdom and His sovereign rule is being established not just in heaven but also on earth.
A second major misreading of the story in the middle of the gospels, according to Wright, is to reduce Jesus to a teacher of a new ethical theory. In this understanding, Jesus is primarily concerned that people behave well and that His moral teachings, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, are a guide to living a morally upright life. Jesus was , of course , announcing a whole new world and He was “teaching “ His followers how to live good lives within this new world. But Jesus’ teaching must be understood within a larger picture of what He was doing. Without this larger picture, Jesus can easily be reduced to just another great religious teacher, like Buddha or Confucius, who provides His followers with a collection of teachings to live by.
Wright discusses several other false readings of the gospels, concluding with the standard argument that the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote their respective gospels to prove the divinity of Christ and also His humanity. Most readers of the gospels in fact assume that the purpose of the gospels is to demonstrate that Jesus is fully God and fully human. After all, did not the early Church spend a lot of effort in its first few centuries dealing with various heresies, like Arianism and Docetism, heresies that challenged the true identity of Jesus?
The point is not that the four evangelists do not think Jesus is divine but that is not the primary thing they are trying to convey. They presuppose Christ’s divinity. The issue for the evangelists is not whether Jesus is God but what God is doing in and through Jesus. In other words, for the evangelists Jesus is indeed the Messiah. In this man,  and in him alone, we see how God is establishing his kingdom in this world. And if Jesus is the Messiah then his public life is how Israel’s God is establishing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. If Jesus is the Messiah, then it is through this greatest anointed king of Israel that God himself is revealing who he is.
For N.T.Wright the misreading of the New Testament, and specifically the gospels, begins with the Old Testament. Unless we understand correctly the story of Israel we can make no sense of the gospels. The problem is that too often we have read the gospels as simply God’s answer to the fallen state of humanity. The back story of the gospels is not the story of Abraham, Moses, and David but Adam and Eve (representing all mankind) sinning and in need of a Redeemer. For many modern readers of the Bible the story of the Chosen People seems to be a kind of side show. But that is not the way Matthew, Mark, Luke and John see it. They believe that it is critically important to retell the history of Israel and to show how the story of Jesus is the story in which the long and painful history of Israel reaches its climax. The Old Testament story of the Israelites is the story of the people God had chosen from all eternity to be the means through which he would create his kingdom on earth. To again quote the beautiful words of Wright, “The call of Abraham is the answer to the sin of Adam. Israel’s story is thus the microcosm and the beating heart of the world’s story, but also its ultimate saving energy. What God does for Israel is what God is doing in relation to the whole world. That is what it meant to be Israel, to be the people who, for better and worse, carried the destiny of the world on their shoulders. Grasp that and you have a pathway into the heart of the New Testament.”
It is Wright’s argument that unless we read the gospels and the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of the story of Israel, we will miss their central message. Especially since the skepticism of the 18th century Enlightenment, Western Christians have reacted by reading the gospels as a story of Jesus the God Incarnate but have not listened carefully to what the evangelists are saying regarding which God they are talking about and what exactly this God is doing. For too long Christians have seen the story of Jesus as primarily hooked up to human sin in Genesis and not with the story of Israel. On that reading, after the Israelites failed to keep their covenant with God and rejected his Son as the Messiah, God had a second plan through which Jesus would be born, suffer, die and rise from the dead and all those who would believe in him would be saved. But the story of Jesus is the story of Israel’s God , the Creator and the Savior, who has come to earth to dwell among his people and to establish his kingdom. The fulfillment of Israel’s story is the story of Jesus and the founding of God’s renewed people. In establishing his Church, Jesus does not so much replace the Chosen People as renew and fulfill them. The Church then is the launching of God ‘s renewed people.
The entire story of Israel , on one level, is how Israel’s God takes on and defeats the arrogant tyrants of the world and destroys their pagan idols. At Babel God confused the tongues of those who in their pride were attempting to build a kingdom without God. The call of Abraham is God’s response to the arrogance of man. God allows the Israelites to be enslaved in Egypt but he sends Moses to rescue them and lead them to freedom. Through David’s defeat of Goliath, God again rescues his people from the Philistines . Over and over the God of Israel defeats Israel’s enemies, the kingdoms of the world are no match for the kingdom of God. It’s the same story throughout the Old Testament and it is the same story the gospels writers are telling in the story of Jesus himself.
The early Christian writers believed that they were setting forth an eschatology that had been inaugurated but not fulfilled. They believed that they were living between the accomplishment of God’s reign on earth in Jesus and its full implementation in the future. But the eschatology they believed and preached was not just personal or spiritual; it was social, political, cultural, even cosmic in its dimensions. For the New Testament writers the new creation has already begun and will be completed. Jesus is even now ruling over the new creation in and through his Church. The ruler of this world has been defeated and God is king on earth as he is in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are so eager to tell.
The difficulty understanding this reading of the gospels is in large part the result of separating the kingdom from the cross. The story Matthew, Mark, Luke , and John tell is how God became king in and through Jesus both in his public life and in his death. To again quote Wright,” ‘To suffer and then come into his glory’—in other words, cross and kingdom. The very word ‘Messiah’ already implies kingdom; now it is clear how that kingdom is attained. This is how the story of Israel comes to its climax. The suffering of Israel’s representative has drawn the sting of the world’s evil; Luke made it clear that Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, and death were the point where at which the powers of darkness were doing their worst (22:53). Now the original vision of Israel can at last get back on track. The other three evangelists have their own way of getting at the same point, but we have every reason to believe that they would have agreed. The first reason we can be sure that kingdom and cross belong tightly together in mutual interpretation is that this is the way gospel writers saw the story of Israel reaching its climax in the story of Jesus.”
God‘s worldwide sovereignty on earth as in heaven: the central goal of Jesus’ mission and the reason for his life, death and resurrection. How can we understand this? God called Israel to be the means to rescue the world specifically in the person of Jesus the Messiah. The purpose of the gospels is to tell the story of how God‘s kingdom is established through the obedient suffering of Jesus. This task can only be accomplished by God himself. This is not only the heart of the gospels, but of the entire Bible.
The gospel story of Jesus inaugurating a new people of God, the Church, includes the amazing transformation of the apostles after they became witnesses to the Risen Christ and after they are enlightened by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. For the early disciples the kingdom and the cross were not mere theological abstractions but the consistent pattern of their lives. Therefore, we should not be surprised to learn that for the early Christians being a follower of Jesus necessarily included their own suffering and often death. It was not just that as followers of a misunderstood Jesus the early Christians could also expect to be misunderstood and persecuted. But that in God’s providence, like the suffering of Jesus, their own suffering would be the means God would use to fulfill his divine purpose.
The suffering and death of Jesus ’people, in other words, is not simply the negative side of following someone whose person and message were rejected with great hostility and hatred. But it has the positive effect of advancing the redemptive work of Jesus not by adding to it but by sharing in it. Jesus called his followers to inaugurate his kingdom; that is the point of sending out the Twelve during his lifetime and after His death and resurrection. But if his disciples are to bring His kingdom to the world according to the Master’s way, they will be people who share in His suffering. That is the mysterious and paradoxical way, the divine way, the kingdom of God will be fulfilled.
This is the correct way to understand the entire New Testament vision of the Church. The renewed people of God are sent on the great mission of suffering kingdom-bringers.

This inseparable relationship between the cross and the kingdom, for Christ and his followers, is captured beautifully in the book of Revelation:
Glory to the one who loved us, and freed us from
our sins by his blood, and made us a kingdom, priests to his
God and father. ( 1:5-6)
You are worthy to take the scroll;
You are worthy to open its seals;
For you were slaughtered and with your own blood
You purchased a people for God, From every tribe and tongue, From every people and nation,
And made them a kingdom and priests to our God
And they will reign on the earth ( 5: 9-10)
This vision of a people rescued by the cross of Christ and transformed into kingdom-bringers is the story the four evangelists are telling: it is the message of the gospels that so many have missed. “The implicit ecclesiology of all four gospels is a picture of a community sharing the complex vocation of Jesus himself: to be kingdom-bringers, yes, but to do this first because of Jesus’ own suffering and second by means of their own. The slaughtered and enthroned lamb of Revelation 5 is not only the shepherd of his people; he is also their template. Sharing his suffering is the way in which they are to extend his kingdom in the world.”
In the Old Testament, the Temple in Jerusalem is the most sacred place on earth for it is where God is uniquely present to his people. In the New Testament, Jesus is now the living Temple of God, he is now the person in whom earth and heaven meet. The event which accomplishes this meeting is His crucifixion on Calvary. The cross is Christ ‘s victory over sin, Satan, death itself. The cross is the victory of God ‘s kingdom over all the world’s kingdoms . The cross is the victory of God himself over all the powers and evil, both human and demonic, of this world. True theocracy or the rule of God can now be established because the false rulers of this world have been defeated.
Without the cross, the rule of Satan remains in this world. That is why for all the evangelists the cross is the final and ultimate task of theMessiah. His death on the cross is the defeat of the Evil One. Sin  has been conquered. The great Accuser has lost his kingdom. And now the Creator and Redeemer of the world can launch his new creation. The crucifixion of Jesus was the long prophesized way in which the Messiah would come to be king of all the world. The purpose of Jesus’ dying on the cross –the gospels are telling us—is to establish God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. In all four gospels the message is clear: the coming of God’s kingdom, the sovereign rule of Israel’s God, has arrived in the person of Jesus, David’s true heir and royal son. The kingdom comes in a way unexpected and deeply mysterious. When Jesus stretches out His arms on the cross to embrace all mankind and to suffer the most ignominious death for all the sin and evil in the world, it was God ‘s definitive statement that divine love is stronger than evil and death. Christ’s suffering and death on the cross was his glorification, his enthronement.

To quote the magnificent words of Wright, “We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more. It is the moment when the story of Israel reaches its climax; the moment when at last the watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls see their God coming in his kingdom; the moment when the people of God are renewed so as to be, at last, the royal priesthood who take the world over not with the love of power but with the power of love; the moment when the kingdom of God overcomes the kingdoms of the world. It is a moment when a great door, locked and barred since our first disobedience, swings open suddenly to reveal not just the garden, opened once more to our delight, but the coming city, the garden city that God had always planned and is now inviting us to go through the door and build with him.”
It is Wright’s argument throughout this book that the tragedy of modern Christianity is that while the “orthodox” have preferred the creed to the kingdom and the “unorthodox” have tried to have a kingdom without a creed, it is time to unite what never should have been separated. The gospels tell the story of how in Jesus the living God has become the king of the whole world. Reading, praying, and living these gospels is  how Christians build God’s kingdom in our world, a world whose meaning and purpose can only be found in the humble and loving worship of Christ the King.
The thesis that N.T.Wright so convincingly sets forth in How God Became King, is not without its flaws, especially for a Catholic reader. There is no Eucharist, no Apostolic priesthood and thus no  living structural Ecclesiology. For all the talk of kingship there is no harrowing of hell and Apostolic thrust to baptize the nations.  From a Catholic perspective, since we see the Eucharist as the source and summit of the faith, this is a major flaw, indeed. For the Eucharist not only draws us into the suffering of the cross but reconstitutes humanity as the Risen Body. Without the Eucharist there is no Church; there is no Mystical Body of Christ; there is no judgement of the nations; there is no kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. But still this is a  riveting book.
One way of showing how Wright’s thesis could be strengthened and completed is to look at the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, mysteries added to the Rosary by St. Pope John Paul II in his beautiful and moving 2002 Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae (On the Most Holy Rosary). It seems Pope John Paul II like Wright saw the mysteries of the rosary(like the Creed) recounting the childhood of Christ(the Fifth Joyful Mystery ends with the Finding in the Temple ) and  resumes on the night before He died (First Sorrowful Mystery -The Agony in Garden). Maybe John Paul saw what Wright saw.  The Gospels in between seem missing.

As Pope John Paul explains in his letter, if the Rosary is to be prayed as a true “compendium of the gospel” then key events in Christ’s public life need to meditated upon as well. When we move from Our Lord’s infancy and hidden life in Nazareth, our contemplation then should bring us to those mysteries which in a special way can be called “luminous” or “mysteries of light”. Of course, the whole mystery of Christ is a mystery of light for he is the “Light of the world”. But this truth becomes especially clear during Christ’s public life when he proclaims the Gospel of the Kingdom. The five mysteries of light John Paul gives to the Church for its meditation are : 1.The Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan 2.His self manifestation at the wedding of Cana 3.His proclamation of God’s kingdom and call to conversion 4. His Transfiguration and 5. His institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. Each of these mysteries is a revelation of God’s kingdom in the very person of Jesus.
The Eucharist, however, is the sacrament of sacraments for it not only gives us grace, it gives us the author of grace, God himself. From the perpetuation of the sacrifice of the cross and her communion with the body and blood of Christ the Church in her members is renewed and given the spiritual strength to carry out her divine mission in the world: the communion of all mankind with Christ and in him with the Father and the Spirit. The Eucharist builds the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist. One reality makes no sense without the other.

                                                             

N.T. Wright’s thesis in How God Became King is persuasive and compelling. Let his Catholic elder brother St.John Paul II complete his argument.  In 2003 in what was to be his last encyclical letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia ( On the Eucharist in its Relationship to the Church) , John Paul said, “Every commitment to holiness, every activity aimed at carrying out the Church’s mission, every work of pastoral planning, must draw the strength it needs from the Eucharistic mystery and in turn be directed to that mystery as its culmination. In the Eucharist we have Jesus, we have his redemptive sacrifice, we have his resurrection, we have the gift of the Holy Spirit, we have adoration, obedience and love of the Father.” And, yes, we have the Son who was born to be the King of the Jews, the Savior of mankind, the Head of His Mystical Body, the King of Kings and the ruler of all nations and the Universe.

Friday Book Review: Hitler's Religion by Richard Weikart

Was vegetarian Hitler a Christian anti Semite or a rationalist atheist? Or did he believe religion is believed by the poor, ridiculed by the educated, and useful to the demagogues. Here is a good review of Hitler's Religion by Richard Weikart.  Here is an AOA analysis of the biological Hitler-an armed Darwin. The writer who best describes the racial understanding of Hitler is Timothy Snyder in his Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.
 Weikart correctly understands Hitler as no atheist. Hitler  believed there was a great order in Nature and the leader of a great race must align himself within that order. Nature rewards the strongest group with the most durable survival. Hitler's God was Nature and Darwin was her prophet.

Light of Christ by Thomas White OP and Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man by Henri de Lubac SJ. A Comparative Review by Frederick Blonigen

If Satan is the great divider then one indispensable weapon for battling him is a clear and comprehensive understanding of the whole. Two priests from two different eras have given us such wide canvas presentations of Catholicism.

Fr. Thomas White’s In the Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (2017) and Fr. Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (1947) are two comprehensive expositions of the narrative, the dogma, the characters, and the practices of the Catholic religion.

Archbishop Charles Chaput compared  Fr.White’s new book to Fr. Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity of fifty years ago: “(White) combines scholarly depth with an engaging style to present the what and why of Catholic belief with exceptional clarity and grace.” Bishop Robert Barron called Fr. White “one of the brightest and most articulate theologians writing today”.  His new work is “an intelligent and spiritually alert introduction to the principal themes of Catholic theology. Both beginners and serious academics will find much to savor in its pages.” Philosopher and Catholic convert, Edward Feser says “Fr. Thomas Joseph White articulates the Catholic faith in a way that lays bare its harmony with reason. He is a superb teacher. Skeptics and believers, academics and laymen alike, will learn much from this fine book.”
                                                                       

Fr. White, a Dominican friar and an associate professor of systematic theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington , D.C., has authored several other important Thomistic works, especially his 2009 book, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity. Fr. White’s new book has all the qualities of a Catholic classic. It can be favorably compared to such venerated expositions of the Catholic faith as Frank Sheed’s Theology and Sanity, Fr. Ronald Knox’s The Belief of Catholics, Fr. Karl Adam’s The Spirit of Catholicism, and Msgr. A.N. Gilbey’s We Believe. 

In the Light of Christ has eight main chapters : 1. Revelation and Reason 2. God and Trinity 3. Creation and the Human Person 4. Incarnation and Atonement 5. The Church 6. Social Doctrine 7. The Last Things and 8. Epilogue: On Prayer.

In his introduction, Fr. White argues that human beings are innately conditioned to raise basic metaphysical questions.  “The spiritual quest of the human person for truth, goodness, and beauty can be deferred and even denied for a time. It can be stunted and stymied by lack of education, corrupt social influences, and subservience to the idols of money, status and other forms of worldly success. But it cannot be eradicated. Our souls will not be satisfied with mere information, as if our hunger for knowledge could be quelled by uploading data. Google provides endless facts, available in an instant. But we want understanding, insight, and wisdom. We want to know why and what for. We wish to perceive all in the unending light of what is and cannot not be. Our hearts are restless with the desire to know the truth.”

Fr. White then articulates the major purpose of In the Light of Christ : “My goal is to make explicit in a few broad strokes the shape of Catholicism. I hope to outline its inherent intelligibility or form as a mystery that is at once visible and invisible, ancient and contemporary, mystical and reasonable. Throughout I do not seek primarily to present my own individual ideas, but to represent the wisdom of the Catholic Church. For she has been for us what Christ himself promised she would be: the trustworthy teacher of truths both human and divine.”

In the first chapter of his book, Fr. White discusses the critical interplay between Revelation and reason. The starting point of Christianity is based on an appeal to the truth of God “uncovering” or “unveiling” Himself to mankind. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth (Jn. 1:14).” The foundational principle of Christianity is not a philosophical idea or an intellectual abstraction. It is the reality of a Personal God showing Himself to mankind in and through a Chosen People, the Israelites, and most fully manifesting Himself in the Divine Person of Jesus Christ. God takes the initiative revealing Himself as the Creator of all that exists Who out of love designed human beings for a life of love in this world and in the next. Faith is the supernatural gift from God, a theological virtue, by which a human being responds to Divine Revelation. Or as the new Catechism says, “Faith is a personal act—the free response of the human person to the initiative of God who reveals himself ” (CCC 166). God can be known through reason and faith. Even without Divine Revelation all men, by nature, can know something about God but because God is infinite and human beings are finite, human reason alone is radically insufficient when it comes to knowing God. However, God has revealed knowledge of Himself in a way that far exceeds anything unaided human reason could know. Faith is not a leap in the dark, a substitute for knowing. Faith is a deeper way of knowing a reality more profound than that clasped in the grasp of reason. The Unveiling of God took place in three “Trinitarian” steps: 1. God revealed Himself to Israel, the Chosen People. 2. God revealed Himself through the Incarnation of His Eternal Son, Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, and the fullness of Revelation. 3. God revealed Himself through the Holy Spirit and Christ’s Body, the Church, to carry on His work until the end of the world.

In his discussion of ways of knowing God, Fr. White emphasizes the harmony between faith and reason. Right reason never opposes or contradicts faith. They are allies not enemies. And, of course, no philosopher or theologian ever demonstrated this harmonious relationship between faith and reason more persuasively than St. Thomas Aquinas, the master of Scholasticism. In a penetrating passage, Fr. White writes as a true disciple of Aquinas:

“The real opposition, then is not between faith and reason, but between a skeptical reason that is reductive and a magnanimous, studious reason that engages in faith. Expansive desire for the truth breaks away from conventions, and awakens human beings to our true nobility, against temptations to self-diminishment. The Christian vocation of ‘faith seeking understanding’ is both dynamic and restful. It gives us something greater than ourselves to ponder, and takes us out of ourselves toward God as our teacher. But it also allows us to know ourselves as rational beings, able to truly ask and even answer the deeper religious questions. Faith therefore creates a learning community. The Church is a place where human beings have the conviction to patiently seek the truth together, in shared life of charity, one that is both cosmopolitan and personal, both reasonable and religious, both philosophical and theological. This communion in the truth is made possible, however, only because people have first accepted to be apprenticed to revelation through a common effort of learning the truth from Another (i.e., God), who is the author of truth, and from one another.”

In the second chapter of The Light of Christ, Fr. White writes magnificently about the greatest of all mysteries of the faith: the Trinity. The lucidity and sheer beauty of his prose reminds one of Frank Sheed’s exposition of the Trinity in his greatest apologetic work, Theology and Sanity. According to Fr. White there are two ways we can think about the Trinity: First, we can start with a personal, affective relationship with God Whom we know in faith, through a prayerful encounter, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He calls this an “intuitive” knowledge of the triune God. Second, we can acquire a speculative understanding of God as we analyze the mystery of three Persons in one God. “The great works of reflection on the Trinity in the early Church—those of Irenaeus, Gregory of Nazianzus , Augustine, and others—are living meditations that spring from the inner life of faith, and from reflection on Scripture and Church doctrine. They are profound intellectual works, but they are also grounded in a deeper mystical life and spiritual aspiration.” For the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the study of the deepest of all mysteries, the Trinity, was not a mere academic exercise; it was an attempt to understand with a prayerful heart the Trinitarian God whom we worship and adore. It is what the renowned theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar calls “a kneeling theology.” It begins every classroom lesson and every writing session with the Sign of the Cross.

As Fr. White explains, the Trinity is a communion of divine persons, co-equal and co-eternal. “That is to say, each person is a subsistent relation. The Son is utterly relational by being from the Father by virtue of his eternal generation. But the Son is also the subsistent being of God. He is God from God, Who has in Himself all that is in the Father and the Spirit. The Father likewise is entirely relational, as the paternal origin of the Son and the Spirit, and has in Himself the plenitude of the deity, and thus possesses all that is in the Son and the Spirit. The Spirit is entirely relative to the Father and the Son from whom He proceeds as love, but He has in Himself the plentitude of the divine essence, and thus all that is in the Father and the Son.”

This Trinitarian doctrine is the central mystery of the faith, the source and summit of everything we believe as Christians. It is the theological vantage point from which we interpret all of reality. And our decision to believe this greatest of all revealed truths is determined by how we understand the person of Jesus. If Jesus Christ truly is the Son of God, if He truly rose from the dead, if He truly founded His Church on the apostles, then the mystery of the Trinity is real. We cannot believe in the Trinity without believing in Christ and we cannot believe in Christ unless we believe in the Trinity. St. Teresa of Avila, the great 16th Carmelite mystic, always emphasized the importance of going to God the Father through the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ. As Fr. White explains,” The study of the Trinity is meant to help us understand more deeply the mystery of the life of Jesus itself, to see his unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, in his actions of healing, forgiving sins, and bearing witness to the truth, but also in the mystery of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Christ. The paschal mystery of Jesus reveals to us the identity of Christ as the Son of God, but also as the wisdom and power of the Father, who raised Jesus from the dead, and the gift of love that is the Holy Spirit, poured out upon the Church from the Cross.”
                                                                           

Chapter Three, entitled “Creation and the Human Person”, is one the most insightful sections of Fr. White’s book. The author argues that Genesis provides us with six major teachings regarding the nature of reality: 1. All that exists receives its being from God and creation itself has a temporal beginning. 2. God not only created all that exists but He is the universal governor of the hierarchial order of the universe. 3.The human being because he is made in God ‘s image and likeness is the pinnacle of all visible creatures. Man is one being composed of a material body and an immaterial soul. 4. The human being was created in original justice, in the grace and friendship of God. 5. The human being fell from God’s grace through a personal sin that took place at the beginning of human history. 6. The human beings who sinned in the beginning transmitted to all their descendents original sin - human life deprived of God’s grace and friendship. The state of sin is not a stain but a separation. While all of these teachings about creation and the human person are not meant to be “scientific”, they are in no way in conflict with what science has been able to tell us about the universe and man’s place in it. True science and true theology never contradict each other. In an exquisite passage, Fr. White explains beautifully how the Catholic Church’s understanding of the Trinity and its vision of creation present us with a profound view of reality and the human person’s role in the cosmic scheme of things:

“We said that God in his inmost identity is a mystery of relational persons, the communion of love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus the ultimate foundation of all of reality is both personal and interrelational. If this is the primary truth behind all other truths, then it casts a theological light upon all else that exists. We can see in the light of the Holy Trinity that the physical cosmos ultimately exists for spiritual persons and relational love. The human community is a community of persons, of personal, spiritual animals, who can choose to live in the truth, and to love one another authentically, or to live in falsehood and selfishness. This ‘calling to truth and love’ that is proper to the human person is inscribed in our very being as spiritual persons. It is also meant to be lived out or enacted in our bodies, as the bodies of persons. Here then we can see a fundamental truth of the cosmos: there is a relational character to the hierarchy of being....The human being is the ‘bridge’ between the spiritual and the physical world in a twofold way. In the ascendant direction, the physical world mounts up toward God, or ‘returns’ to God through human actions of knowledge and love. This is especially true in corporate worship, or liturgy, in which the human visible world is made wholly relative and turned toward God in adoration. In the descending direction, man is the ‘place’ that the spiritual world is made visible or manifest in the cosmos. The human community is a kind of icon of spiritual life manifesting itself in bodily, visible form. When human beings are turned toward the truth of God, this icon can become a sign of the transcendent mystery of God, a visible church. But when the human being turns in on itself in pride and rejection of God, it can also become a spiritually empty image covered over by spiritual melancholy, lust, violent frustration, and self–destruction. Ultimately, then, the human being is meant to be a special ‘location’ of grace in the cosmos, where the spiritual gifts of God descend through human freedom into the preservation and construction of a beautiful physical world: a human common life based upon truth, moral goodness, and beauty. The human body can serve the spirit of man so as to acknowledge God in and through human actions. In the bodily life of the human being the physical cosmos can glorify God.”

Fr. White’s eloquence and insight regarding the relational nature and dignity of the human person continues in Chapter Four where the author writes about the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. In the ancient Church there were two answers to the question “why did God become human?” One answer came from St. Athansius and the other came from St. Anselm of Canterbury. St. Athanasius, the great defender of Christ’s divinity, argued that Christ became man so that man might “become God”, that is, that man might become more and more Godlike through a grace-filled union with God. This view of the Incarnation is technically known as “divinization,” or among Eastern Christians as “theosis”. St. Anselm offers a different but complementary view of the Incarnation. Because of the Fall and the reality of man’s sinfulness and man’s consequent alienation from God, a chasm opened up between God and man that only God Himself could bridge. The great St. Catherine of Siena, in fact, in her famous work The Dialogue refers to Christ as the Bridge between heaven and earth. To quote the words of Fr. White, “Christ atones for human sin by being himself humanly loving, and obedient in our stead, as our sinless representative before God. Because Christ is God, his self-offering on our behalf is one of infinite holiness, reconciling us with God’s absolute righteousness. His atonement acts as a compensation for human sin that is more than sufficient for all the sins of the human race. Consequently, even in the face of our own sinfulness we should not live in alienation from God, but in confidence and friendship with God by faith.”

Through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection Christ has redeemed mankind, atoned for man’s sins, and reopened the gates of heaven. The Church He established upon the apostles is, in fact, a continuation of the Incarnate Christ and His saving work in space and time. As the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church has received the divine mandate to preach the Gospel to every corner of the world. “The mission of the Holy Spirit is to accompany the work of the visible, apostolic Church, acting in the preaching and sacramental life of her members, sanctifying them by works of love, and leading them into the fullness of truths.”

In the remaining chapters, Fr. White deepens and develops his reflections by interweaving enlightening discussions of the Church, Mary, the seven sacraments, the social doctrine of the Church, the last things, and prayer. It is difficult to do justice to Fr. White's book even in a long review. He presents the Catholic faith in all of its truth, goodness and beauty. His exposition of Catholicism is a work of great erudition. Just as obvious, it is a work of great faith and love. Fr. White concludes In the Light of Christ: “ It is this mysterious love of Christ for humanity that sustains the Catholic Church in being down through the ages, and that inspires her saints. His love reaches out from the Cross to all of creation, and remains hidden at the center of the world as its living heart. The grace of Christ crucified is the source of the Church’s life, her devotion to the truth and her freedom to love. Therein lies the essence of Catholicism: at the heart of the Church is the life of Christ. It is this life that God invites us to, and that He wants to give us, if we open our minds and hearts to Him in prayer.”
A Nov, 2017 interview with Fr White on his book.

In the Light of Christ has all the qualities of a book destined to a Catholic classic. Fr. Henri de Lubac’s masterpiece Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man is already there. De Lubac’s book was published shortly after World War II in 1947. After a controversial initial reception, it is now recognized by theologians and scholars as one of the most important expositions of Catholicism of the 20th century. Pope Benedict XVI has said of de Lubac ‘s Catholicism , “For me, the encounter with this book{in 1949} became an essential milestone on my theological journey. For in it de Lubac does not treat merely isolated questions. He makes visible to us in a new way the fundamental intuition of Christian faith so that from this inner core all the particular elements appear in a new light. He shows how the idea of community and universality rooted in the Trinitarian concept of God, permeates and shapes all the individual elements of Faith’s content. The idea of the Catholic, the all-embracing, the inner unity of I and Thou and We does not constitute one chapter of theology among others. It is the key that opens the door to the proper understanding of the whole.”

This “deLubacian sensibility of the interpersonal whole” is likewise a major theme of Pope Francis.
Henri Cardinal de Lubac, born into the French nobility, joined the Jesuits while still in his teens. He served with distinction in the First World War and suffered a severe head injury that would result in health problems for the rest of his life. Despite his ill health, de Lubac was determined to finish his Jesuit formation and in 1927 was ordained to the priesthood. In the inter-war years, de Lubac taught fundamental theology at the Catholic University in Lyon. During the Second World War, he was a member of the French Resistance. But de Lubac is chiefly remembered as a major figure in what was called the “new theology," an effort by some of the brightest theological minds in Europe to renew Catholic theology by returning to the sources: Scripture and the Church Fathers. De Lubac’s theological works were to have a significant impact on Vatican II, especially his contribution to three of the sixteen documents of the Council, the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation (“Dei Verbum”) , the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (“Lumen Gentium”), and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World ("Gaudium et Spes"). During Vatican II, de Lubac would forge an important friendship with the young archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla. He would write an introduction to the French edition of Wojtyla’s book Love and Responsibility, a work that would have a great influence on St. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. 

Vatican II made it clear that there was not a monolithic theological approach within the Catholic Church. The two major poles toward which theologians gravitated centered on two theological journals: Concilium and Communio. Before the Council, theologians of both journals were often lumped together as "the new theology". They were friends and certainly read each other's work with appreciation. After the Council, though, fundamental differences appeared. The former journal stood for those theologians who promoted the “spirit of Vatican II” and what Joseph Ratzinger would call “the hermeneutic of rupture”: namely the idea that Vatican II represented a decisive break from the pre-Vatican II Church. The principal theologians of the Concilium camp included Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, and Edward Schillebeeckx. The theologians who began Communio in 1972 represented what Ratzinger would call the “the hermeneutic of continuity.” They believed Vatican II was, indeed, a council of needed reform in the Church: but it was most definitely not a council whose ultimate goal was to revolutionize the Church and change settled dogmatic teaching.  Theologians of the Communio camp included Henri de Lubac and his two former students Jean Danielou and Hans Urs von Balthasar, as well as Joseph Ratzinger. Australian theologian, Tracey Rowland, has explained this best in her  Catholic Theology(2017). She calls her book "a guide for a young Catholic theology student through the Catholic academic zoo."  She distinguishes the Communio and Concilium theologians, “The typical Communio scholar wants to read the Second Vatican Council as an event that emphasized the importance of Christocentrism and therefore the renewal of theological anthropology and Trinitarian theology. The typical Concilium scholar wants to read the Second Vatican Council as an event that exhorted Catholics to be aware of the signs of the times and to enter into dialogue with the world on the world’s terms.”

While Henri de Lubac was not opposed to dialogue with the modern world, he was very aware of the danger to the faith when that dialogue took place on the world’s terms. De Lubac spent his entire life understanding and then fighting the modern ideologies that the Concilium theologians were too eager to find common ground with: liberalism, relativism, Marxism, and secularism. The mission of the Catholic Church, as de Lubac understood, is to convert the world to Christ and not to have Christians converted to the world. He believed that the best way to present the saving Gospel of Christ to an ever more secular world was not through syllogisms and hair-splitting logic and an impersonal theology but through the beauty and spiritual richness of Scripture, Patristic writings, and theological personalism. De Lubac became one of the most prominent members of what is called the “resourcement “ school of theology: those theologians who returned to the ancient sources of Catholic theology. Hans von Balthasar, his former student , once referred to his teacher, De Lubac, as a young David doing battle against “the Goliath of modern rationalization and the reduction of the Christian mystery to logic.”
                                                                     

Henri de Lubac, during his long and fruitful academic career, authored many influential books including The Splendor of the Church, The Christian Faith ,The Discovery of God, and The Drama of Atheistic Humanism. He appreciated the audacious sweep of secular ideologies. In Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man he answered those noble tales with the magnus opus of the Catholic narrative. This was the work that set him apart as a Catholic theologian who wanted the Church to present Christ in the richer grammar of biblical personalism and Patristic narrative.
In the introduction to Catholicism, de Lubac captures the central thesis of his book: “Fundamentally the Gospel is obsessed with the idea of the unity of human society. This shows the full extent of the misunderstanding. We are accused of being individualists even in spite of ourselves, by the logic of our faith, whereas in reality Catholicism is essentially social. It is social in the deepest sense of the word: not merely in its applications in the field of natural institutions but first and foremost in itself, in the heart of its mystery, in the essence of its dogma. It is social in the sense that should have made ‘social Catholicism’ pleonastic.”

De Lubac divides Catholicism into three major sections: the first part demonstrates how the Catholic religion in its creed, its ecclesiology, its sacraments, and its eschatological hope has an eminently social character; the second part discusses Christianity and history, the question of Scripture and its spiritual interpretation, the salvation of humanity through the Church, the predestination of the Church, and the spirit of Catholicism manifested through the missions; and in the third and shortest part of de Lubac’s book the author writes about the present situation for the Church, the person and society, and transcendence.

In the first chapter of Catholicism entitled “Dogma” de Lubac opens:

“The supernatural dignity of one who has been baptized rests, we know, on the natural dignity of man, though it surpasses it in an infinite measure....Thus the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, a supernatural unity, supposes a previous natural unity, the unity of the human race. So the Fathers of the Church in their treatment of grace and salvation, kept constantly before them this Body of Christ, and in dealing with the creation were not content to only mention the formation of individuals, the first man and the first woman, but delighted to contemplate God creating humanity as a whole.” For the Fathers of the Church including Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa , Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus, Hilary and others “the lost sheep of the Gospel that the Good Shepherd brings back to the fold is no other than the whole of human nature; its sorry state so moves the Word of God He leaves the great flock of the angels, as it were to their own devices, in order to go to its help.”

De Lubac, a scholar who has immersed himself in the study of Patristics, argues persuasively that the Fathers of the Church, in their understanding of human nature, see the fundamental principle of humanity’s unity as Genesis makes so clear. In all human persons the divine image is the same. “The same mysterious participation in God which causes the soul to exist effects at one and the same time the unity of spirits among themselves. Whence comes the notion, so beloved of Augustinianism, of one spiritual family intended to form the one city of God.” For the Fathers of the Church to believe in the God of Revelation was to believe in a common Father of all. The prayer taught by Jesus, the Our Father, makes clear that the Fatherhood of God implies the brotherhood of all men.

Into this original unity of mankind enters sin, the great disrupter of man’s primal oneness. Beginning with original sin, division and separation become a persistent reality for the human race. Even though sin cannot completely destroy the original unity of mankind, there abides a great wound. The Father sends His Son as mankind’s Redeemer to restore and, indeed, to elevate the supernatural unity of God with man and the unity of men among themselves.

 St. Augustine saw the whole as well.

"Divine Mercy gathered up the fragments from every side, forged them in the fire of love, and welded into one what had been broken....He who remade was himself the Maker, and who refashioned was himself the Fashioner.” The Incarnate Christ from the first moment of his existence bears all of humanity within Himself. “For the Word did not merely take a human body.... He incorporated himself in our humanity, and incorporated it in himself....In making a human nature, it is human nature that he united to himself, that he enclosed in himself, and it is the latter, whole and entire that in some sort he uses as a body....Whole and entire he will bear it then to Calvary, whole and entire he will raise it from the dead, whole and entire he will save it. Christ the Redeemer does not offer salvation merely to each one; he effects it, he himself is the salvation of the whole, and for each one salvation consists in a personal ratification of his original ‘belonging ‘ to Christ, so that he be not cast out, cut off from this Whole.”

For the Church Fathers, as de Lubac emphasizes, the work of redemption is both vertical and horizontal. Christ through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection reunites man to God the Father but He also reunites men to one another as a sacred species. Christ came to bring peace and unity. He is in Himself the Peace of God. “Raised up on the Cross, his arms outstretched, he is to gather together the disunited portions of creation....It is by his blood that ‘those who for some time were afar off are made nigh’.... Through his one sacrifice he will make but one kingdom out of all nations.”

In many ways de Lubac’s Catholicism is primarily a work of ecclesiology as a synthesis of God’s original design, Christ’s identity, and mankind’s destiny. The book returns again and again to the nature and purpose of the Church as established by Christ for humanity.  “The Church which is ‘Jesus Christ spread abroad and communicated’ completes—so far as it can be completed here below—the work of spiritual reunion{of God and mankind} which was made necessary by sin; that work that was begun at the Incarnation and was carried on up to Calvary. In one sense the Church is herself this reunion, for that is what is meant by the name Catholic... for fundamentally Catholicity has nothing to do with geography or statistics. If is true that it should be displayed over all the earth and be manifest to all, yet its nature is not material but spiritual. Like sanctity, Catholicity is primarily an intrinsic feature of the Church.” Humanity is one by virtue of its divinely created nature; it is the mission of the Catholic Church, in a fallen world redeemed by Christ, to help restore and complete this unity.
On June 29, 1943, Pope Pius XII promulgated his monumental encyclical “Mystici Corporis Christi" , arguably the most important papal document on the Church in the modern era. Four years later, De Lubac published his ecclesiological masterpiece Catholicism. His work can be understood as a book length commentary on Pope Pius XII’s magnificent encyclical. De Lubac provides these powerful words on the true nature of the Catholic Church:

“{The} Church, the only real Church, the Church which is the Body of Christ, is not merely that strongly hierarchical and disciplined society whose divine origin has to be maintained, whose organization has to be upheld against all denial and revolt. This is an incomplete notion and but a partial cure for the separatist, individualist tendency to the notion to which it is opposed: a partial cure because it works only from without by way of authority, instead of effective union. If Christ is the sacrament of God, the Church is for us the sacrament of Christ; she represents him, in the full and ancient meaning of the term; she really makes him present. She not only carries on his work, she is his very continuation, in a sense far more real than that in which it can be said that any human institution is its founder’s continuation.”

Above all it is the sacramental character of the Church which allows this Christic representation. Because the sacraments are the principal means of grace, they are as well the principal instrument of unity in the Church. And the sacrament of sacraments and the greatest source of grace and unity is the Eucharist: Christ Himself, Really Present under the appearances of bread and wine. De Lubac is keenly aware, as the Fathers of the Church were, that the Eucharist is the heart of the Church. In fact, without the Eucharist there is no Church. De Lubac is also aware that true Eucharistic piety is not simply a devout individualism. Rather devotion to the Eucharist embraces the whole world: all of creation and humanity is gathered together at the altar of sacrifice to be offered with Christ to God the Father in the sacramental representation of Calvary. At the center of this greatest prayer to God the Father is the Holy Spirit through whose power and presence the miracle of transubstantiation takes place. At the epiclesis of the Mass, the priest calls upon the Holy Spirit to come down upon the altar and transform bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood. It is this same Holy Spirit, fifty days after Easter, Who came down upon the Apostles in tongues of fire and transformed these once cowardly men into courageous earthly leaders of the Church Militant. As de Lubac so aptly says,” Our churches are the ‘ upper room’ where not only is the Last Supper renewed but Pentecost also.”
                                                                           

Like Fr. White’s In the Light of Christ, Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism is a book whose theological depth, Christocentric anthropology, and Patristic learning seems inexhaustible. For de Lubac Catholicism is not just one of many world religions. “Catholicism is religion itself. It is the form that humanity must put on in order finally to be itself.” God’s progressive Revelation in the Old Testament and His covenant with the Israelites finds its fulfillment in Christ Who shows us the face of the Father. In a central theme at Vatican Council II, a theme clearly influenced by de Lubac, the Council Fathers will remind the Church and the world that not only does Jesus fully reveal to man Who the Trinitarian God is but He likewise reveals to every one of us what it truly means to be a human being. De Lubac exposed the delusion of modern atheism that only a rejection of God could lead to human flourishing. In Catholicism he  showed the only true humanism is Christocentric humanism. Only in Christ could man discover he is created and destined for eternal communion with the triune God. But there is no cheap grace. The original unity of God and humanity is only restored through the mystery of Christ's Cross and Resurrection. DeLubac agreed with the Apostolic Father, Irenaeus, “By the wood of the Cross the work of the Word of God was made manifest to all: his hands are stretched out to gather all men together. Two hands outstretched, for there are two peoples scattered over the whole earth. One sole head in the midst, for there is but one God over all, among all and in all.”

Two books a half century apart by two faithful sons of the Church  counter diabolos who is forever separating and scattering. Enter into these beautiful "works of the whole".  Be not confused!

Book Review: The Construction of Nationhood - Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism by Adrian Hastings

The following 6000 word essay by A. Joseph Lynch is long. The book is complex but Hastings’ historical knowledge and insights are indispensable in understanding nationalism. Many will not read a book that grows out of an African scholar reflecting on European history, thus we have chosen a long review to be an intermediary to his work.

Henry Kissinger noted in his book On China that while Western Europeans fled the nation state after World War II, the Asian nations embraced the form. Western Europe developed an anti-national ideology, blaming their century of war on nationalism. Eastern Europeans spent a half century as captive nations and when they were set free they relished their identities as positive goods, not the source of their troubles. Nations as nations are a lot like men as men. They have had a lot of bad press lately, and yet their historical maturation is the story of Christian civilization. This story has been largely lost due to the wide acceptance of a revisionist history that has replaced Christian civilization with “Western” civilization.

The grand narrative of Western civilization is very different from that of Christian civilization. Its worldview is rooted in the radical autonomy of the individual rights bearer, not the communal covenants that have bound men together for centuries into nations and religion. It celebrates the Reason of the Enlightenment expelling tradition more than the Light of Christ illuminating the darkness. It celebrates the Greek philosophers and “Judaic-Christian values” over the Theology of a Living God creating nature and entering history through the Christian church and the Jewish nation. The history of the West culminates in political Darwinism, atheist Marxism, and the sexual revolution. Rather than taking responsibility for the suicidal destructiveness its ideology has spawned, its defenders insidiously blamed religion and the nations for the world’s historic woes. Anti-national Western modernist and especially Marxist commentators have thus criticized the nation as an “imagined community” that developed out of Enlightenment thinking very late in man’s history. According to this view, the nation and nationalism were created by powerful rulers as inspiration for its people to fight, conquer, and enrich the wealthy and the powerful. The nations, they argue, led man into both world wars and near nuclear annihilation. In a new era of global governance, the short-lived era of the nation is coming to a much-deserved end.

This anemic and cynical view of the nation remained dominant for many years with few scholars offering a defense of the nation against the globalist and Marxist worldview. Adrian Hastings’ (d. 2001) The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism, however, offers just such a defense by exploring the process through which a people develops from an ethnic group into a nation-state. Born of British parents in Kuala Lumpur, raised in England, and ordained a Catholic priest in Uganda, Fr. Adrian Hastings formed his arguments by encountering an array of peoples organized by tribe, ethnicity, nation, and nation states. As an African missionary, he witnessed the impact that biblical and liturgical translation had on national development. As a theologian and historian with deep English roots, he saw what today’s globalist, anti-national scholars miss: that Christianity from the time of the middle ages not only brought whole ethnic groups into the universal corporate body of Christ, but it also encouraged the transformation of those peoples into the territorial civic form of nationhood based on the prototype nation - biblical Israel.

Hastings' work is a monumental contribution to the recovery of Christian civilization, its history, and its impact on man’s political life. We hope the reader recognizes in the following summary the important threads that contribute to the re-emergence of Christian civilization and the potential for peaceful fraternity among nation-states under God.

The nations of the world. Hastings helps explain their rise and why so many of them have a significant Christian population (pink) or a Christian majority (purple)

From Ethnicity to Nationhood

As the title of the book suggests, ethnicity plays an important role in Hastings’ understanding of national development. This fact may lead the hasty critic to assume that he proposes an ethno-nationalist worldview – which, according to the critic, would be tantamount to racism. While it is true that many American ethno-nationalists hold a race-based form of nationalism, Hastings’ emphasis on ethnicity has little to do with race or skin color. Rather, he defines the ethnic group as a group of people with a shared cultural identity and spoken language: “By ethnicity, I mean the common culture whereby a group of people share the basics of life… how roles are divided between men and women… the rituals of birth, marriage, and death, the customs of courtship… history and myths… All this as shared through a spoken language.” An ethnic group could of course be comprised of members from one race, but race itself does not act as an ethnicity’s primary differentiating characteristic. Africa provides a good example of this. The peoples of Africa may share the same skin color, but ethnic groups vary greatly in language with dozens of linguistically distinct ethnic groups living within close proximity of each other.

Although Hastings defines ethnic groups primarily by their culture and shared language, he also emphasizes the role of language in dividing one ethnic group from another. Man is a creature of the spoken word and his unity is largely dependent on a common language. Language itself comes in three forms: oral, written, and universal languages. Oral languages – spoken only aloud and not in writing – are the languages of ethnic groups. These languages are highly fluid, subject to rapid changes which lead to new dialects and eventually new languages. Written language plays a vital role of fixing an oral language in a permanent form, thus reducing its inherent fluidity and its tendency to spawn new oral languages. He contrasts England with the written English bible and France with a language employed in international diplomacy but absent in large parts of the French countryside.

Universal languages, on the other hand, are employed across a vast territory so they can act as the language of international diplomacy (e.g. French) or religion (e.g. Latin). They are less likely to unify a local people within fixed national boundaries. Hastings argues that only written languages foster national development. He further observed that this particular form of written language fosters multi-ethnic nations precisely because it diminishes the bonds between language and ethnicity. It does this by gradually displacing other oral languages as the primary vehicle of communicating truth, especially religious truth. To return to the African example, the selection of a particular oral language for use of a biblical translation in turn led to the adoption of that language among neighboring ethnic groups who were evangelized with that translation. Here religion and the written word helped relieve the barriers that oral languages placed between the ethnic groups, giving multiple ethnic groups a new common identity open to an eventual national identity. As Hastings describes it:

“…ethnicities naturally turn into nations or integral elements within nations at the point when their specific vernacular moves from an oral to written usage to the extent that it is being regularly employed for the production of literature, and particularly for the translation of the Bible. Once an ethnicity’s vernacular becomes a language with an extensive living literature of its own, the Rubicon on the road to nationhood appears to have been crossed. If it fails to pass that point – and most spoken vernaculars do fail that hurdle – then transformation to nationhood is almost certain never to take place.”

Despite this important step in the construction of nationhood, the development and wide use of a written vernacular alone is not enough to forge a nation. A deeper civic identity is needed. This identity can be fostered slowly through the development of a people’s shared history, nurtured through a common faith, narrated by a common language, and defended by a shared military organization. It can be developed by a shared memory of communal humiliation answered by a communal assertion. (“France was humiliated by England and Germany by the French.”)  It can also develop rapidly as the result of an external threat. Hastings emphasizes the “deep horizontal comradeship” felt not merely between subjects of a sovereign, but between citizens of all social classes within a common nation standing above the state and to which the state is answerable. This experience of conscious national citizenship is the deeply unifying bond without which a nation cannot exist. In Hastings words: “A nation exists when a range of its representatives hold it to exist – clergy, farmers, lawyers, merchants, writers, as well as members of a court or cabinet. The more people of a variety of class and occupation share in such consciousness, the more it exists.” Hastings also recognizes the natural corollary to this: the less such civic consciousness exists, the less the nation itself exists. The dangers of narrowing our conception of citizenship to self-interested rights bearers should be apparent.

The broad experience of “deep horizontal comradeship” among citizens naturally leads to patriotism, the generation of social capital, and – most importantly – nationalism. A King can foster nationalism if his rule engenders common sensibilities and loves. Absolutism and a lack of territorial limits by the king are characteristics of despots that retard the development of national identity. Nationalism is essential to the final step in the construction of nationhood: the establishment of a nation-state. Hastings defines nationalism as a communal movement that a nation should have its own state (i.e. a government able to act with authority on behalf of its citizens within a fixed territory). Consider the Kurds of the Mideast. The Kurdish people are certainly ethnically distinct from neighboring Arabs, Turks, and Persians. They are religiously distinct from the nearby Shiites of Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They have a storied history that includes the great Kurdish warrior, Saladin. Their population is geographically contiguous, stretching from northwest Iran, through northern Iraq, across eastern Syria, and into southeast Turkey. Despite this, the Kurdish nation does not have its own nation-state. The eventual fate of the Kurds is difficult to predict. One might think that as Kurdish nationalism continues to strengthen, the emergence of a Kurdish nation-state becomes more likely. Yet a nation-state cannot exist without both territory and borders – and it is highly unlikely that the Kurds alone would be able to defeat its region’s powers to win independence. It is much more likely that pressure will be put on a nation’s Kurds to identify with the larger nation to which that group of Kurds belong (i.e. the policy of Iran and Iraq) or face stricter penalties for failure to integrate (i.e. the policy of Turkey).

The path from ethnicity to nationhood is narrow, arduous, and often-times futile. While every ethnicity has the potential for nationhood, most will never achieve this status. Many of those that do – as demonstrated by the Kurds– will be unable to mount the kind of strength needed to transform their nationality into a self-governing nation-state. Yet even the few nations that are able to become nation-states are not guaranteed survival. Nation-states like Poland have disappeared from the map more than once while nations whose citizens no longer experience a “deep horizontal comradeship” are just as sure to fail.


The Nation is not a Modern Phenomena

Hastings accuses the modernists of being “weak on hard history.” His work, on the other hand, is laced with the particular interplays of ethnicity, language, military threats, and religion which forge national identities and then nation-states. His historical narrative begins with biblical Israel, takes shape during the middle ages, and culminates with the nation on a global level by the twentieth century. His powerful, learned medieval narrative of several nations starkly rebuts today’s globalist and Marxist theoriticians who claim the nation is of modern origin.

By locating the prototypical nation in biblical Israel – as does Jewish scholar Yoram Hazony (author of The Virtue of Nationalism) – the reality of the nation is rooted in ancient history and deeply tied to religion. Such a view also places the nation, with its territorial and cultural limits, in contrast with man’s tendency to form universalizing empires. The sheer number and scale of ancient empires is such that it is impossible to overstate the uniqueness of Israel’s national experience. From Israel’s formation out of twelve tribes, through its exodus from Egypt, to its conquest of the promised land, to its destruction and dispersal, and now in the reemergence of its religious-political organization, one cannot help but recognize divine providence at work. Even God’s hand was evident in the loss of Israel’s statehood. Israel failed to keep the covenant it made with the God and lost the territorial expression of its corporate existence. What is perhaps more miraculous is the fact that even as it lost its state, a remnant of Israel kept faith in God. This allowed it to survive, not as a mere ethnic group, but as a religious nation which lacked a state. 

As an oral language becomes a written language, its fluidity is limited and its vocabulary becomes fixed. Widespread vernacular literature, used particularly for religious and legal texts, diffuses the written language to a much wider, yet still limited, territory. Religion, law, and custom shape the culture of a people, helping to forge them into a nation.

Even in exile, Israel was a light to the nations as their national experience was recounted to the myriad of peoples to whom the Bible was proclaimed by Christian missionaries. What shape would the history of humanity have taken without the ecclesial body inaugurated in the New Testament proclaiming the narrative of the national body described in the Old? The nations of the world would have been swallowed by the warring empires – as happened to biblical Israel in its nadir. As providence would have it, the Christianizing peoples of western Europe needed to re-build civilization following the collapse of the western Roman Empire. They imitated the national model they had internalized while absorbing the drama of the Jewish people in the Old Testament. They found in biblical Israel a free unity of people, language, religion, territory, and government. Israel as a chosen nation, called and set apart by God, made it, in Hastings’ words, “an all too obvious exemplar for Bible readers of what every nation too might be.”

Given the fall of Christian north Africa to Islam and eastern Europe’s dominance by the Byzantine Empire, it is unsurprising that Hastings begins his national narrative with the far-flung nation of England. Physically separated from the continent in space yet linked to it by its Christian faith, England – and its medieval historical experience – was ideal for national development. Here Hastings begins by examining the English language and traces some etymological history of the word nation. The English word nation comes from the Latin word natio from which is also derived the English words nativity and natal. A nation in the Roman sense was thus a group of people born together. For the Roman, “nation” was a term best applied to tribal peoples – a family writ large – while words like “populus” and “civitas” were more appropriate for civilized peoples. As natio became nacion and nacioun in early English translations of the Bible dated to the 1300s, the conception of the nation was transformed with it. By the year 1140, an English bishop described the nation to the pope, not as the family writ large, but as a “people distinct by language, laws, habits, modes of judgement and customs.” Reference to “government” was added to the definition by 1755 as nation-states began to emerge, each with their own form of government asserting political authority throughout the nation’s territory.

The English nation emerged from the convergence of several ethnic groups – Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans – who met, fought, and converted in the old Romano-Celtic lands of southern Britain. Hasting’s narrative begins with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written for one of England’s small kingdoms yet encompassing the history of all peoples in what would become England. The distinct kingdoms of early medieval England brought political division, yet the unity of the Christian faith transcended political borders and established the nucleus of a national English identity. Hastings sees the emergence of an English nation state as the result of the Viking conquest of all but one kingdom and the rise of Alfred the Great (d 899A.D.). Defending against the threat of Viking conquest rapidly enhanced the felt horizontal loyalty among the English, Alfred’s codification of law, support of the Church, use of the political-military Witan, and expansion of coinage and commerce played a vital role in creating the institutions of the English state. By the early eleventh century, the horizontalist bonds were deepened by local political organizations – shires and boroughs – which could hold courts and establish local militia forces called fyrds. Insofar as the shires and boroughs were neither tribal (based on families) nor feudal (based on lord-vassal relationships), both were able to cultivate a civic sense of unity among unrelated citizens of every class. These territorial bonds became the developmental basis for parliament. The sense of citizenship within a territorial people rather than subjects to a common Lord lead to the spirt of the Magna Carta in which the authority of the English monarchy is limited by the laws and customs of the nation.

The story of the English nations begins with the migration and conversion of Germanic tribes (left) and their subsequent union under King Alfred the Great during Viking invasion. Depicted in the center is a picture of Alfred the peacemaker acting as godfather during the baptism of a vanquished Viking foe. The eleventh century Norman Conquest infused England with an aggressive form of nationalism and gave England its nationalizing weapon: the Longbow (right).

Crisis anew came with the Norman Conquest of 1066 – yet the Norman conquerors were themselves assimilated into the English nation. They gave the English their nationalizing weapon: the longbow. Through use of the longbow, common men with their king become a “band of brothers” who defeated noble armies of armored Knights on the continent during the Hundred Years War. The Normans also infused a new form of aggressive nationalism into the English nation. This late- or second-stage form of nationalism differs from the early- or first-form of nationalism (i.e. one that seeks to establish of a state for a nation or defend a nation state from threat) in that it seeks the expansion of the nation state and risks re-establishing the nation on an imperial basis. This second form of nationalism is open to conquest and destruction. It is often the stage of nationalism the critics of nationalism find so reprehensible. While it should be resisted, it often arises from the realization of one’s nation as chosen by God, set apart, and given a special purpose. Here religion plays a vital role in setting the nation’s course in keeping with divine providence. In the spirit of this second form of nationalism England’s formation of the Royal Navy overcame its natural territorial limits and forged the British Empire. Christianity spread through empire – but what really spread was the account of biblical Israel and the seeds of future nations.

While the story of England demonstrates how a group of ethnicities can be forged together into one nation, its narrative is incomplete without some reference to the Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Americans. The Welsh – whose name meant something like “the Compatriots” (a very horizontalist name if ever there was one) – were treated very differently by the English than were the Cornish of southwestern England. Where the imposition of the English language on the Cornish led to the eventual assimilation of the Cornish ethnicity into the English, the Welsh were allowed to maintain their own language in a written vernacular, govern with their own legal code, and pass on the memory of having been descended of the old Romano-Celts of the Roman Empire. Integrated into Great Britain, Wales would become a nation without having its own fully independent state. The early days of Scotland, on the other hand, witnessed a barely functioning state ruling over a people not yet identifying as a nation. Comprised of Gaelic-speaking Scots and Picts in the north and English-speaking British and Angles in the south, it took centuries for Scotland to forge itself into a nation state. Scotland’s war with England, while at the same time adopting many of its political institutions (like the borough), combined with the conversion to Calvinism, was pivotal to the construction of Scottish nationhood. The covenant of the new reformed churches without bishops here emerged as the civic covenant of citizens in a nation.

The story of Ireland is a religious ethnic tale as well. Although much more ethnically homogenous than Scotland, the Irish were more an ethnic group than a nation until external pressures from England began steadily forging Irish nationality. To Hastings account we may add the limits placed on nation formation due to the general lack of Irish urban life and the extensive use of Latin over Gaelic in both scripture and liturgy. Pope Hadrian IV (r. 1154-1159), the Church’s only English pope, gave rule of Ireland to the English – and with that rule came English settlers to Ireland. By the time of the Reformation, these bi-lingual English settlers had become too Irish for the English and still too English for the Irish. As post-Reformation “New English” came to Ireland to impose Protestantism, the “Old English” – who had remained Catholic – increasingly identified with the Irish. As the persecution continued, the “Old English” began to merge with the Irish, injecting the Irish with the spirit of nationalism they once held for England. Most importantly, the full integration of the “Old English” with the Irish forged a new national identity which Hastings calls the “New Irish.” Through its extensive use by Catholic priests, English soon replaced Gaelic as both the spoken and written word. Thus the pressures of English-Protestant persecution, combined with incorporating the “Old English” into the “New Irish” led to the forging of an Irish national identity and an eventual Irish nation-state.

Across the Atlantic, English settlers established the colonies that would become the United States. Hastings believes these proud English colonists viewed themselves as the “elect of the elect” who were set apart by God and called for a special purpose. They also thought of themselves as more English than the English, speaking the language better than those back home, reading from a common Bible found throughout the colonies, and educating themselves by use of the same dictionary. They certainly believed they were more Englishmen than the Welsh. That is why they were so angry that the Welsh were represented in Parliament while they were not. Hastings also notes the degree to which the Quebec Act – which granted religious tolerance to Catholics in the recently conquered French-Canada – alienated the staunchly Protestant and anti-Catholic colonists. Living far from England, with a more bellicose view of both Indian tribes across the Appalachian mountains and the Catholics of Quebec, a new set of loyalties and group consciousness arose among the Americans. It was only a matter of time before the Americans went their separate way.

The story of the nations then turns to the European continent. England’s success had proved “the superiority of a national over a dynastic state,” and France found itself by 1750 longing to become the final model of what a nation could become: the Grand Nation. Hastings finds the root of French nationalism in the French middle ages, where the French viewed themselves as a special and chosen people during the days of the Carolingian Empire. Language, however, hampered national development as neither Latin, the universal liturgical language, nor French, the international diplomatic language, fostered a common tongue among the masses. Hastings notes that French, even as late as the nineteenth century, was still not universally used as the national language. Ruled by an increasingly absolutist king and a knightly class open only to wealthy land owners, France also lacked the local political and military system of England. Nevertheless, Hastings notes that French identity was strong enough during the late middle ages for a peasant girl to rally Frenchmen to the nation’s defense. Like the Scots and the Irish, conflict with England – particularly after the loss of Quebec and India – helped fan the flames of nationalist France.

The national stories of both Germany and Italy were stunted by the Holy Roman Empire, which at times included all of what is today Germany and the northern part of Italy. Despite holding a German identity and speaking the German language, Hastings believed the Empire left Germany “trying to be more than a nation.” Sometimes if a nation is governed by too big a state, its own territorial development as a nation-state is stunted. Having no historic capital and nebulous borders, Germany turned increasingly to ethnic and language-based nationalism over territorial nationalism. German ethnic nationalism incorporated a strong racial component. Yiddish was a Germanic language and Lutheran Germany would make no sovereign covenant with the Jews. Racial purity became essential for excluding the Jews from the emerging nation unifying German speakers. Italy on the other hand was linguistically divided by a multiplicity of Italian dialects, and physical divided by an urban north, agrarian south, and a central core ruled by the Pope in Rome.

The Swiss and the Dutch owe much of their nationhood to the pike and the dike respectively. Isolated by the Alps, staunch adherents of Calvinism over Lutheranism, organized politically in local communities, and united as one man through the use of pike-phalanxes, the Swiss were the only German-speakers to opt out of the fledgling German nation. They had a territorial military identity that kept them free of the pan Germanic proposal. Like the Swiss, the Dutch Calvinists found themselves sandwiched between Catholic France and Lutheran Germany with a hostile ocean to their north. Beginning in the middle ages, Dutchmen began the labor-intensive yet horizontalizing efforts of building dikes to safeguard their lands from dangerous floodwaters. The adoption of Protestantism, combined with the publication of the Dutch New Testament in 1522, bolstered Holland into the ranks of nation status.

The Swiss pike (left) English longbow (right) and the were weapons that had a deeply horizontalizing effect, helping to create a common bond among a "band of brothers". 

Also included in The Construction of Nationhood is the troubling story of Yugoslavia and the South Slavs. Although much attention has been placed on the religious divisions impacting the region, Hastings sees the fighting more in terms of national identity. The peoples comprising the region are known as the South Slavs, a loose collection of varying ethnicities that entered the area around the same time. They spoke different languages and were what Hastings calls the “ethnographic raw material out of which nationalities could grow.” Had national unification occurred in the thirteenth century, it is possible the South Slavs could have become one nation in a way similar to what took place among the Angles, Saxons, Danes, and Jutes of England. At just this time, however civilizational fault lines between Catholicism and Orthodoxy brought the Croats into the Catholic fold while the Serbs became Orthodox. The arrival of Islam added a third religious layer to the divisions. Yet amidst the religious divisions an increasing sense of Slavic national identity developed. By 1920, as Yugoslavia was being created by Versailles, it was too late to form one nation from the emerging nations of the South Slavs. Bosnia, caught between Croatia and Serbia, suffered from the fracturing problem of the Christian schism. Its Christians worshipped either as Croats (if Catholic) or Serbs (if Orthodox). The future fate of Bosnia, according to Hastings, depends on forging a stronger Bosnian identity that transcends religious divides. 

Hastings concludes his case studies with a several different stories on the African continent. Ethiopia whose story is “un-African” was a minority tribe—the Amharic—converted to Christianity. They adopted a vernacular liturgy and a robust story of origins. Ethiopia was never conquered as a nation. The ethnic tribe and their cultivation of the King kept them unified though stratified through centuries of threats from more technologically advanced peoples. The Buganda kingdom in Uganda was a large subkingdom that developed a language of liturgy and religion but has remained a subkingdom (often oppressed). It has not formed the nucleus of the Ugandan political entity. Finally, the Yoruba of Nigeria are mostly Muslim but were heavily influenced by Christian native clergymen who translated the Bible into a common Yoruba language. This unified many ethnic towns in a common identity under that shared written language.  In Africa, says Hastings, the Muslims are always a universalizing force with Arabic an official shared liturgical prayer language becoming the shared public tongue to make larger groups. Paradoxically the Christian tendency to produce written texts for almost every ethnic group detracts from the ability of the written word to forge a larger entity. There is no Yoruba nation-sate. One exception is the most interesting story of Tanzania and the role of Swahili among both Muslims and Christians (who codified Swahili rather than ethnic dialects in the liturgy and their translated bible) as the binding element in the nation. That story includes too brief a profile of Julius Nyere the Catholic, Tanzanian “King Alfred for Africa”. Hastings leaves these case studies with a recitation that almost all state formation in post-colonial Africa was built on borders not defined by a dominant ethnic group. Thus organic national identities are still to be developed and the potential for larger states rests more with Muslims (and their emphasis on Arabic) than Christians. There could have been a serious conversation about the unifying possibilities of French and English but that was not his emphasis. In some ways thinking clearly about African ethnicities, languages, and mostly failed nations allowed Hastings to think most clearly about the European, Slavic and British nations. By observing the nascent stages of national development in Africa, he had the language and categories to more fruitfully describe the nations of Europe.

Christianity and the Construction of Nationhood

As if defending the nation and nationalism was not controversial enough, Hastings devoted an entire chapter to the positive role that religion, particularly Christianity, played in the construction of nationhood. Hastings proposes seven ways in which Christianity shaped nation formation. What’s more, he offers a contrast between the nation-building nature of Christianity with the flattening, anti-national tendencies of Islam and atheist globalism. Hastings insists: “The nation and nationalism are both, I wish to claim, characteristically Christian things which, in so far as they have appeared elsewhere, have done so [in] imitation of the Christian world…”  He adds “…the easy assumption that every religion is likely to have the same sort of political effect… is not so.” Hastings sees in Christianity seven ways the faith uniquely impacts the emergence of nation-states.

The first impact of Christianity on nation formation is Christianity’s sanctification of a nation’s origin. Be it the baptism and sanctification of a king, the role of a particular saint in a nation’s conversion, or the emergence of a nation as the result of religious warfare, Christianity bonds men in faith, communal memory  and civic fraternity. In commemoration of the baptism of St. Vladimir, Vladimir Putin spoke to the leading clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church in July 2018, speaking not merely of St. Vladimir’s baptism, but of the baptism of Russia itself: “Baptism was the starting point for the development of Russian statehood, the true spiritual birth of our ancestors, the definition of their identity, the heyday of national culture…” Words such as these demonstrate the continued power of Christianity's sanctification of a nation’s origins. (Chesterton said men did not make the original social contract to defend each other as individuals but they forged the original political compacts to defend some common place as sacred).   

The baptism of Clovis, St. Vladimir's conversion of the Kievan Rus, and the battle against invading Islam are examples of Christianity sanctifying the origins of France, Russia, and Serbia respectively.

A second impact of Christianity is the mythologizing and commemoration of great threats to national identity. Here we see remembered moments of national strife, where external or internal dangers threatened the nation’s existence. Hastings offers examples such as the Gunpowder Plot that threatened Protestant England, the threat of English armies that inspired St. Joan of Arc in medieval France, and the malevolent forces of Islam marching on Serbia at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Such national threats often involved a traitor, an existential danger, and an “us versus them” dichotomy that leads to strengthened fraternal and civic ties. Such remembrances – akin to the anamnesis of the liturgy – recall the past trauma, enhance patriotic fervor, and advance the spirit of nationalism. 

The socializing impact of clergy is a third Christian construct.  In segregating the discussion of clergy from their examination of political life, scholars, he argues, have often failed to recognize the deep impact the clergy had on bridging the divides between peasant and noble: “What a clergy with some education and status did in most medieval and early modern societies was to mediate identity between rulers and ruled.” While it is true the bishops of Church, tied to their brother bishops across national borders, tended towards promoting a universal social vision, we must recognize the work of the lower clergy at the local level. Hastings continues: “Linking the classes as the clergy did… they had an inevitable role, through their shared existence as well as through their ministry, in ensuring something of a collective consciousness between rich and poor, literate and illiterate, nobles and peasants. They were not in a narrow way simply teachers of religion, but also of history and much else… Village priests ensured that the articulation of a nation was shared by every class… the clergy simply by doing their job enhanced national consciousness through the widespread diffusion of vernacular literature…”

Christianity, fourthly, positively impacted the emergence of the nation by producing an extensive vernacular literature. Despite the Catholic Church’s long insistence on Latin, Christianity has never had a single sacred language. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, translated into the Greek Septuagint of the early Church, and later into the Latin Vulgate. The New Testament, written in Greek, was also translated into Latin. Yet the Bible has been translated into countless languages ever since. The early medieval pope, Nicholas the Great, supporter of the Slavic liturgy, decried the “Pilatist” notion that only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were to be considered “sacred languages” useful for liturgy and scripture translation. The communication of the faith to people in their own languages, increasingly done via liturgical and scriptural translation, played a pivotal role in the emergence of national identity from one or more ethnicity.

Rejecting the "Pilatists" who limited the Church's sacred languages to Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, Pope Nicholas the Great blessed and affirmed the 9th century mission of brothers Sts. Cyril and Methodius and their Slavic liturgy. Hastings reminds us that in doing so, the Church not only promoted inculturation, but also nationalism.

The fifth impact, alluded to above, was the power of biblical Israel as a model of the nation-state that so fruitfully inspired the imaginations of a nation’s citizenry. To the extent that nations are “imagined communities” they are imagined on a biblical template—bordered territory, a written law, an established leadership, and a mutual widespread covenant of male blood shedding. The more nations accepted that template the more other peoples whose civilization were apart from the biblical tradition adopted the biblical form as their own. (Even China is no longer the Middle Kingdom with subjects but the Republic of China.) 

A sixth impact is the frequent emergence of a national autocephalous church. This was more characteristic of Christian nations in Protestant and Orthodox cultures than Catholic. It is deeply tied to the notion of a citizenry feeling they belong not only to a chosen civic people but also a chosen religious people. Ecclesial independence thus mirrored national liberty. 

A final impact of Christianity on the nation is the act of discovering a larger transcendental national purpose or destiny. In realizing itself as a chosen people, the nation discovers it has a role to play in the unfolding of divine providence and thus a reason for its being and a motive for all its activities, both at home and abroad. Tied closely to the Christian vision of divine economy and eschatology, the vocation of a Christian nation opens it to the plan of God and to fraternity with brother nations in peace or at war with evildoers. 

Religion Further Considered—Comparative Tendencies 

Hastings concludes his work with comparisons about nation building within the different forms of Christianity and Islam. He contrasts Christianity’s nation-building character with the anti-national tendencies of Islam and globalism. He sees Catholicism as particularly adept at maintaining the universal while fostering the national. He credits Protestants with not letting the national be swallowed in the larger forms. Thus Romans and Catholics bequeath the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Hapsburg era, and the European Union. Protestant state churches like Anglicanism and Lutheranism tend to set the particular nation state against the others. Calvinism and Protestant territorial covenants established the Dutch Republic, Cromwellian England, Knox’s Scotland, and the United States. 

Yoram Hazony notes that man tends much more readily to the establishing of universal empire than to the limited political bodies of nation-states. Failing to see and celebrate the various cultural expressions of the nations, man is too eager to impose upon his neighbors a political order he has arrived at on the local level. To be limited to the nation state is truly a gift and command from G-d. 

Hastings sees a perennial universalizing danger in Islam. In the case of Islam we find a religion based on a sacred language: Arabic. Yet the imposition of Arabic on the broader Muslim world is an implicit Arabicization of all Islamic peoples, regardless of their national backgrounds. Such moves have led to the revolts of pious Muslims, be they Persians, Turks, or others, against Arab elites. This is not to say that Islam cannot abide the nations, but that Islam itself does not tend towards nation creation. Indeed, the Salafism propagated by Saudi Arabia proposes the destruction of the nations and the return of the universal Islamic caliphate. Hastings does not deal with the interaction of nations with the other major ideology of our time—Western Globalism and secular atheism. Western critics of the nation-state come from this camp, “imagining” with John Lennon a world with no nations and no religions. For such moderns there is only the universal and the individual. The communal loyalties in between detracts from the universal and places unchosen obligations and restrictions on the individual. Hastings concludes his final reflections with Shakespeare’s wish that “a Roman and British ensign might wave friendly together”.  He thought there could be no “better conclusion to a study on nationalism” than that poetic desire for a mixing of the universal and national. 

Rather than "imagine" a world without nations or allow jihadists to re-establish the caliphate, let us celebrate the nation as the gift handed to us by biblical Israel and baptized by Christ. 

Continuing the Work of Adrian Hastings

This careful and complex work of a lifetime gives us a deeper understanding of the sinews that constitute nations. It teaches us to prepare for the emergence in Africa of functioning nation states—maybe many…  maybe not so many. We can best repay our debt to this great scholar by thinking more clearly about the interplay of ethnicity, language, war, and religion in the present identities and interplay of the nations. The capitalist-communist debate is exhausted. Let men seek the guidance of each nation’s guardian angel as we try to coordinate fraternity in a common destiny and reject the Darwinian lie that human beings are meant for perpetual war with one another. Living together as nations will leave us both blessed as peacemakers and worthy of being called the sons of God. Engaging this difficult and insightful book is one guide on our way.