New World
book

on the
same path
Two theology experts met in New York to discuss the underlying history and the future ahead of Luigi Giussani’s American Protestant Theology, just published in the U.S. This ecumenical conversation gave witness to the openness necessary for walking together.

by Maura Kate Costello

In recent months, Pope Francis has provided the world a great witness in dialoguing with those whose beliefs are different from his own. The present moment is thus an incredibly appropriate historical context for the release of the English translation of Luigi Giussani’s American Protestant Theology: A Historical Sketch. In Pope Francis, we witness a desire for dialogue without conditions: a natural ecumenism that springs forth from the gratitude of the encounter with Christ, and the deep certainty that the human heart is equipped to recognize and follow the truth.  The insight of Giussani’s work on American theology models this genuine ecumenism, in the best sense, and promises to deepen the conversation, friendship, and unity between Catholics and Protestants. Here, Giussani traces the historical development of American Protestantism and offers insights into how it shaped American culture and spiritual life. He uses the lens of his experience in the Catholic tradition without reducing the American Protestant experience and without compromising or confusing his own. Within the same week the book was released, Crossroads Cultural Center of New York invited two speakers to pioneer a discussion about it: Dr. Archie Spencer, Associate Professor of Theology at the Northwest Baptist Theological Seminary, and Dr. Margaret Harper McCarthy, Assistant Professor of Theological Anthropology at the John Paul II Institute.

A book thrown on the desk. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this event was Dr. Spencer’s sharing the story of his personal encounter. Giussani came into his life with a “thud” when  a colleague literally threw The Religious Sense on his desk in a desperate search to get someone to write a book review. What started as a work obligation quickly became a profound dialogue and the beginning of a friendship with the book’s author. Spencer, a committed Protestant theologian and church pastor, said that the impact of reading Giussani was akin to that of reading some of the greatest thinkers of Western thought. As years passed, and the English versions of the other two books in the trilogy (At the Origin of the Christian Claim and Why the Church?) were published, Spencer reviewed both. His reviews, in turn, caught the attention of John Zucchi, a professor at McGill University who belongs to Communion and Liberation. In 2003, Zucchi invited Spencer to give a paper on Giussani, and, as Spencer put it, “the rest is history.” It was at this conference that Spencer met people from the Rimini Meeting and, later that year, he met Fr. Giussani in person.           
Spencer’s thoughtful, well-considered recollection of his meeting with Giussani did much to convey its impact on him. “He was a singularly great man,” Spencer said. He had introduced himself to Giussani as a poor Protestant sinner, to which Giussani responded, “I’m just a small Catholic priest who is an even bigger sinner and happy to receive you.” We are reminded of Pope Francis’ similar description of himself in his recent interview with Spadaro–such humility is at the heart of all ecumenism. Through Giussani, Spencer learned to “think laterally in developing the Christian faith, not just gaining numbers for your church.” The seeds of this idea seem to be planted, as is evidenced in the incredible influence Giussani has had on other contemporary Protestant thinkers like John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwaas, and others. Spencer also situated Giussani’s work within a larger community of ecumenical Catholic thinkers, like Cardinal Avery Dulles and Richard John Neuhaus, for example. He noted that Giussani’s voice “has the capacity to alter reality. It’s why I think Protestants need to listen to him.”
Spencer outlined the salient points of the trilogy that he thinks are most useful and influential in Giussani’s reading of the American Protestant experience. Spencer recalls that in The Religious Sense, Giussani “orients the understanding of our religious nature not within humanity itself but in our God-given nature to perceive the divine. He argues very powerfully, from the point of view of human need and history, that our religious nature emerges regardless of our attempts to deny it.” He goes on to explain how, for Giussani–and this can be found in At the Origin–our religious nature, our needs that push us to perceive the divine, is essential in the path to certainty about Christ not just for us but for the disciples as well. This, he points out, is the dynamic that makes the path to Christian faith reasonable. Finally, in Why the Church?, Giussani understands the Church as the consciousness of the Christian fact in history and the entity through which this fact is reincarnated. This fundamental religious ontology “is what drew me into the beautiful abyss–in the sense Gregory of Nyssa or Dionysius the Areopagite would use the term–into which we fall that we call the ‘knowledge of God.’ That’s Giussani as I encountered him and this is all part of an ongoing discussion for me,” one that he is grateful to be able to continue.

As a fellow soldier. In addressing Giussani’s latest book, he identifies two bookend Protestant categories: those that stress the freedom of God (Puritan and Calvinistic) and those that stress the freedom of humanity (Methodist); others fall between these two.
Spencer observes that Protestantism was born in the spirit of protest and separation because “there was a deep-seated sense in us of a need to order our life in relationship to the transcendental. This is the need Giussani identified in The Religious Sense. All of us move into relationship with reality because of that need.” He explains that the emphasis on the personal encounter and relationship with Christ, the individualistic nature of the Protestant religious expression, is rooted in the European Reformation and Luther’s confession–when there was a strong desire among Protestants to believe and interpret for themselves. It was born from a deeper desire of wanting to overcome all obstacles that compromise the realization of the faith. The mediation of priests, the Mass, and the saints were judged to be such obstacles.
Giussani observes that that same individualism, in modern America, became “a fierce individualism that made community impossible.” This is where Spencer sees one of the greatest possibilities for a contribution from Giussani: “He can teach us once again what it means to be an individual, to hold faith in community, and to have community hone and shape that individual faith.” In addition, he sees Giussani as a fellow soldier in the fight to keep Christianity Christ-centered. He explained that for Catholics, the Mass keeps the faith Christ-centered and for Protestants, the Gospel used to do the same, but now, “our social pressures require us to accommodate our message for a culture that does not like particularity when it pertains to Jesus Christ.”
In Spencer’s view, Giussani is “ideally placed to be a strong contributor to the ecumenical conversation” in our shifting times. The kind of openness we see in Giussani is what is needed on both sides to make real steps toward one another.
Margaret McCarthy also offered her insights into Giussani’s new publication from her experience as a convert from Calvinism to Catholicism. She spoke reverently and enthusiastically about her upbringing in a Calvinist home and the intensity of the faith with which she was raised, one that instilled in her a commitment to a religious identity that was not based on moral concerns as much as on a desire to follow the truth. This same desire, McCarthy points out, is shared by Giussani and was cultivated in his days of formation with his fellow seminarians at Venegono. Much like McCarthy’s own upbringing, Venegono was a place of faith and community, but with an even greater openness. At Venegono, Giussani’s education was a full and vital experience of the faith: art, music, literature, science–nothing was outside the scope of the Christian experience. Although the American Protestant religious reality was apparently “outside” the realm of an Italian Catholic priest, in truth, it was not. His education at Venegono made it clear to him that no reality could fall outside his interest or concern.
Indeed, Giussani’s experience inspired his conviction that he was living in a particular historical moment, with a dramatic chance for unity among Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox–the entire Christian world. Perhaps this came so naturally because of his certainty that he was already connected to these other communities of faith by their very belonging to Christ and living in relationship with Him.
After describing these interconnections, McCarthy reviewed some of the primary features of what Giussani most valued in Protestantism: the awareness of sin and human limit, the focus on a covenant of grace, awareness of a Something else and its supernatural origin, and, finally, “the ease of saying Jesus’ name,” re-centering Christianity in Christ. At the same time, she noted Giussani’s observations on the limits of the American Protestant experience, particularly its pessimism about human nature, which tends to limit the power of salvation and man’s participation in it. The natural tendency to iconoclasm in American Protestantism puts a clear abyss between human nature and the divine, and does not leave much space for the Incarnation. Further, in the case of liberal Protestant theology, “God is identified with the world” (Giussani) to the point of dissolving into secularism, harboring a problematic notion that “God buried Himself in the tomb of the world so the world no longer has to look up to Him.” McCarthy sees these observations from the Catholic perspective as particularly illuminating in the inter-faith dialogue.

A great potential. This first presentation and discussion of Giussani’s new release certainly carries historical weight and holds within it the seeds of great potential for further discussion. The presenters, both of Protestant origin, have clearly been deeply taken by the work of Giussani, enriched by his thought and charism in the practice of their own faiths, and are enthusiastic about the contributions he can make to the Protestant world. In Pope Francis’ letter to Eugenio Scalfari, he extends an invitation to the atheist journalist, “sincere and full of hope... to walk this path together.” Spencer and McCarthy witness to us what becomes of those who walk this path, in their affection and reverence for Giussani and his work, as well as the personal growth and blossoming friendships that can be attributed to it. Their experience demonstrates that the unity we desire is really possible.