Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and theologian with whom Cyril Wismar and I were personally acquainted, died today. Although best known in recent years as a "conservative" Roman Catholic, when I first met him at The General Theological Seminary in New York twenty-seven years ago, he was introduced to me as a "liberal" Lutheran pastor.
As is often the case with true Christian thinkers, he was difficult to put in a secular ideological box. Because of that, too many Christian non-thinkers felt free to express their dislike of him in ways that seemed tangential to Gospel teaching.
Not that it mattered, of course. He knew what he believed and expressed it in a manner that was lucid and elegant. There is little of that in any branch or style of ideology these days and it will not only be missed, but I'm concerned that such lucidity and elegance will never be replaced.
He had written several books, the best-known of which appears in the link below, and was the editor of the last serious periodical dedicated to the nature of the secular and the sacred, First Things. He was only 72 years old.
Here is an example of his work from one of the last pieces he wrote:
"St. Paul writes, 'Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind' (Rom. 12:2). Worrying about the cultural conformity of Christianity is nothing new. Such worries are a staple in the history of Christian thought, from the third-century Tertullian’s defiant question 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' to Kierkegaard’s withering critique of culturally domesticated discipleship, to Karl Barth’s emphatic Nein! thrown in the face of the Kulturprotestantismus that was the form taken by the 'Christ of culture' model in liberal Protestantism.
And, of course, there are today in America forms of principled nonconformity finding expression among both politically left-wing and politically right-wing Christians who would revive, at least in theological and moral rhetoric, a 'Christ against culture' model—meaning, most specifically, Christ against American culture. There is, for instance, the vibrant home-schooling movement, which often goes far beyond education in forming elective communities of families supporting one another in resistance to the more meretricious elements of popular culture. Such communities—whether Catholic, Protestant, or ecumenical—are frequently charismatic in character. On the left, there are groups such as the Catholic Worker movement and Sojourners, focused on what they define as justice for the poor and, in their more diluted practical politics, supportive of the leftward wing of the Democratic Party. The mix of Christ-and-culture models is a many-splendored thing."