tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329600504016968888.post825523340420617798..comments2024-03-27T15:47:46.091-05:00Comments on Pastoral Meanderings: Pastor Petershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10653554256101480140noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329600504016968888.post-55735456980227904422011-10-06T09:20:36.206-05:002011-10-06T09:20:36.206-05:00Non-Roman Catholics who read this will not gain as...Non-Roman Catholics who read this will not gain as much as those who share von Hiildebrand's church, because, what he said is torn from the context of developments and controversies specific to that church.<br /><br />We Lutherans may well note his opposition to the redefinition of Jesus in which Jesus emerges supporting what he had previously been held to oppose.<br /><br />What we may not note, and which many Catholics themselves do not note or simply ignore, is that von Hildebrand is himself part of the school that produced these redefinitions, which school is based in phenomenology.<br /><br />Von Hildebrand was a doctoral candidate under phenomenology's founder, Edmund Husserl, and was closely associated with Max Scheler, who took phenomenology further and whose own conversion to Catholicism deeply influenced his own.<br /><br />A young doctoral candidate, a priest named Karol Wojtyla, wrote his dissertation on constructing Christian Ethics on Scheler's phenomenology.<br /><br />Such efforts were part of a broad movement, not confined to doctrine or to liturgy, to bring both Christian thinking and worship out of the framework of Scholasticism in which it had existed for centuries during the Holy Roman Empire, whose remnants had just passed beneath the waved with WWI.<br /><br />Phenomenology was key to this effort, to re-express both thought and practice in a modern way, not beholden to the patterns of Scholastic thought whose roots in turn were in ancient Rome and Greece.<br /><br />His opposition to the "Christ Who Would Have" then is not the opposition of tradition to modern reinvention, but the opposition of a conservative modern reinvention to more liberal ones that take the reinvention farther. While this opposition has similarities to the opposition from tradition, it is not the same and is fundamentally misunderstood when invoked as if it were the same.<br /><br />DvH for example despised the novus ordo, per se, not just "abuses", and thought the devil himself could not have better messed liturgy up. The "spirit of Vatican II" is not a distinct spirit, but the same spirit carried farther than its conservative proponents want it carried.<br /><br />It makes no sense for us Lutherans to invoke him as a defence of traditional Christian thought yet include along with its traditional liturgy our own version of the new order, rites, calendar, lectionary and all, that proceeds from exactly the same thought. Like some sort of Lutheran version of the "reform of the reform" in which conservative non-traditional, ie postconciliar, Catholics try to reign in the more liberal ones. "Reform" is not at issue, just its extent, staying short of the entertainment orientation and pleasure seeking for a Jesus Would Have who would have kept the smells and bells of dressing up and playing church.Terry Maherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17122266461403246084noreply@blogger.com