Mental Moratorium (review of The Common Catechism: A Book of Christian Faith)

One of the surest and most pathetic signs of that bleak event called dying and death is the spastic thrashing of limbs you note in headless chickens, chopped snakes, and landed fish, and in the pointless automatism of still growing hair and nails in a corpse. Real life has fled. But the thrust to reproduce past activity goes on—for a while. For some years now, ecumenism seems to have consentiently accepted its failure to provide anything but a pleasant feeling. (It did make churchmen civil to each other.) It could have been a training ground for some vital development. Now, with the publication of The Common Catechism, you know that, while all life has left ecumenism, we are still going to be bothered by that distressful thrashing and those disturbing growths of a dead thing.

The Catechism has as much relation to the life of the Church of Jesus in the mid-Seventies as a treatise on leeches has to modern hematology. It is actually a 690-page celebration by Catholic and Protestant theologians, together with their editors, of their nice intellectual agreements based partly on the mental hairsplitting of an outmoded German theological liberalism, partly on a “gentlemanly” retreat from mutually unacceptable positions (so useful once upon a time on croquet lawns), and steeped in the impossible conviction that no one is wrong, no one is right, agreement is truth, vagueness of statement is breadth of judgment, and faith comes from theologians in dialogue with each other. You need not be a believer in order to read this book. If you are a believer, do not read it.

MM

About the Author

Malachi B. Martin

One of the surest and most pathetic signs of that bleak event called dying and death is the spastic thrashing of limbs you note in headless chickens, chopped snakes, and landed fish, and in the pointless automatism of still growing hair and nails in a corpse. Real life has fled. But the thrust to reproduce past activity goes on—for a while. For some years now, ecumenism seems to have consentiently accepted its failure to provide anything but a pleasant feeling. (It did make churchmen civil to each other.) It could have been a training ground for some vital development. Now, with the publication of The Common Catechism, you know that, while all life has left ecumenism, we are still going to be bothered by that distressful thrashing and those disturbing growths of a dead thing.

The Catechism has as much relation to the life of the Church of Jesus in the mid-Seventies as a treatise on leeches has to modern hematology. It is actually a 690-page celebration by Catholic and Protestant theologians, together with their editors, of their nice intellectual agreements based partly on the mental hairsplitting of an outmoded German theological liberalism, partly on a “gentlemanly” retreat from mutually unacceptable positions (so useful once upon a time on croquet lawns), and steeped in the impossible conviction that no one is wrong, no one is right, agreement is truth, vagueness of statement is breadth of judgment, and faith comes from theologians in dialogue with each other. You need not be a believer in order to read this book. If you are a believer, do not read it.