Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
1 Jesus, Justice, and God's Reign 1
Before Jesus Became the Christ 1
From Nazareth to Jerusalem 3
The Sadducees 5
The Pharisees 8
The Essenes 10
Jesus Becomes the Christ 13
Jesus, Paul and after Paul 20
Can We Square the Circle? 29
2 The Slow March to an Imperial Church 31
Beating the Odds: The Emergence of Christianity 31
Differentiation and Separation: The First Challenge 32
From Accommodation to Rejection: Cognitive Dissonance in the Early Church 34
The Hellenization of Early Christian Thought 38
Shifting Tides and Seeming Triumph 46
A Tentative Synopsis 53
3 Augustine and the Complexities of Genius 56
Where Augustine Started: Life in a Backwater 57
The Personal and the Political 63
Augustine the Hearer 65
Augustine the Neo-Platonist 67
Augustine the Believer 72
The Philosopher Priest 74
Hippo 76
Sin in Hippo 79
Sin, the World, and History 82
4 Different Lights: Thomas and Francis as Medieval Icons 87
The Great Luminaries 87
Thomas: The Angelic Doctor 89
Thomas's Political Thought 93
Thomas in the Twenty-First Century 98
Francis of Assisi: A Different Light 100
Matching Bookends 113
5 Reforms and Revitalizations 116
Storm Clouds 116
Early Reformations 121
Religious Change and Social Conflict 123
Trent and the Beginning of Tridentine Catholicism 126
Ignatius of Loyola: Trent's Great Warrior 133
Murdering the Common Good 140
Trent: Truth in a Straitjacket? 143
6 The Ambiguity and Challenge of Modernity 145
The Foundations Shift 145
The Great Collision: Catholicism and Modernity 148
The First Crisis: The Thirty Years' War 149
The Train Wreck of 1789 152
The Dangers of Nostalgia 158
False Starts and Painful Reactions: The Church Responds to Modernity 161
Three Who Failed 162
Pius IX: The Definitive No 166
A Tentative Yes 173
Beyond the Train Wreck 178
7 Reassessment and Regeneration: The Second Vatican Council 181
Church and Context: Between a Nightmare and a Dream 181
The Crisis of Modernity: From Certainty to Fear 185
Between a Rock and a Hard Place 187
Nightmares 189
Light in the Darkness 192
Seismic Events 195
The Documents: Consequences Inside and Out 198
Phase One: Reform from the Inside 199
Phase Two: Reform on the Outside 201
Gaudium et Spes: The Mission of the Church in the World 202
The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy 205
The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions and the Declaration on Religious Freedom 207
Vatican II: A Brief Assessment 218
8 Dialectical Engagement: The Church and Society after Vatican II 223
Contextualization and Restructuring 223
The Dialectics of Sin and Hope 227
Society's Original Sin: Ideology 229
Utopia as Faith-Filled and Hope-Full Antithesis 231
Liberation and Contextualization: Jesus and the Church in a World of Injustice 234
Contextual Christology 234
Contextual Ecclesiology 236
Why Small Is Better Than Big 239
Reactions: From Secular Hostility to Ecclesiastical Wariness 241
The Magisterium and the Modem Social Order 245
John Paul II 246
Benedict XVI 252
A Frantic Conclusion 260
Works Cited 263
Index 267
