When it came out last week, I had intended to write a lengthy rebuttal of Peter Leithart's First Things piece "The End of Protestantism." But if you know much about church history, reading it for yourself makes that unnecessary. For what Leithart is advocating, which he calls "reformational Catholicism," has been around since the 16th century. It's called "Anglicanism"--or more precisely, what used to be called "broad-church Anglicanism." C.S. Lewis would have been quite comfortable with it. Leithart's brand doesn't require England, but it's just the sort of via media of which traditional Anglicans are so uniquely proud.Read more >>
Friday, November 15, 2013
"The End of Protestantism" turns out to be ... Protestant
Michael Liccione, "'The End of Protestantism' turns out to be ... Protestant" (Sacramentum Vitae), November 14, 2013):
The end of Protestantism is Nietzsche: heresy breeding nihilism and ultimately insanity- the anti-Christ, as he perhaps not inaptly called himself. As a young man I came under the spell of his writing, lead astray by my Jewish 'mentor.' (Be very careful in choosing your child's college.) I enthusiastically read and re-read everything he ever wrote, culminating in my Master's thesis 'Nietzsche on Becoming.' Looking back on the experience following my conversion, I saw that his entire attack upon Christianity was directed against the bastardized version of it he'd inherited from his Lutheran forefathers- nary a sentence touches anything in the Magesterium. In his name it has since become fashionable to rail against the HMC as the source of all evil in the world; but if you carefully study him you will soon realize it is worldly Protestantism he mostly abhors. (Today's homosexualists are his intellectual heirs.) To be sure, there are to be found in his polemics scattered denunciations of otherworldliness in general; but one also has the sense that had he known true Christianity he would have had a very different appraisal of the life to come. I've read the he and the Little Flower spent a night under the same roof, during her trip to Rome. What a pity someone like her never managed to touch his
ReplyDeletehardened heart.