Perspectief 2013-20

57 On George Weigel’s Evangelical Catholicism - recensie by Eduardo Echeverria George Weigel, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a leading authority on the Catholic Church, is the author of many books, but he is probably best known for his internationally acclaimed, two volume biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning . His new book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21 st -Century Church (Basic Books, 2013), is an argument for a new way of being the Catholic Church. “This new form is in essential continuity with Catholicism’s origins and doctrinal developments, for otherwise it would not be a genuinely Catholic ‘form’ of being the Church”. “But”, he adds, “it is also something new”. What is new about this form of Catholicism? The evangelical Catholic is, according to Weigel, evangelical because he affirms the Gospel to be God’s free gift of salvation by faith in the saving passion, death, bodily resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. This gift of salvation is the dynamic behind the essentially missionary nature of the Church: proclaiming the Gospel, calling for a response, for personal conversion by the Spirit’s power to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. The evangelical Catholic also affirms the centrality of the Holy Bible as the authoritative Word of God in the faith and life of a committed Christian. He is an evangelical Catholic because he believes that the gospel is the Good News of Jesus Christ for all men, and hence it is the free gift of God to which he is called to give public witness as the truth. As to the Church’s public witness, evangelical Catholicism is a form of “integral evangelization”. Its evangelization is integral, in the words of John Paul II, because the Church’s mission of evangelization and, indeed, “the purpose of the Gospel”, aims at “transforming humanity from within and to make it new. Like the yeast which leavens the whole measure of dough (cf. Matt. 13:33), the Gospel is meant to permeate all cultures and give them life from within, so that they may express the full truth about the human person and about human life”. But differently, the vision of evangelical Catholicism is informed by a theology of nature and grace in which the whole (fallen) creation is recapitulated in Christ through his redemptive work. God’s redemptive grace in Christ restores or renews and hence transforms fallen nature, which was savagely wounded by the fall into sin, bringing the whole creation from within its own order into conformity with its divinely intended ends. Furthermore, an evangelical Catholic is catholic because he is committed not only to the normative confessions of faith of four ecumenical councils regarding the Christological and Trinitarian dogmas (Nicaea, Ephesus, Constantinople, Chalcedon), but also to the constitutive significance of the Church for the reality and the interpretation of the faith. The Church belongs to the Gospel insofar as the Christian faith and life is bodily, historical, institutional, sacramental and liturgical. Moreover, constitutive of this evangelical vision of the Catholic faith is not only the listening Church ( ecclesia discerns ) - the whole Church is called to take up the stand of hearing the whole Gospel ( auditus fidei ) - but also the teaching Church ( ecclesia docens ). In its teaching office the Church is a servant of the Word of God, having the ministerial authority and responsibility of the office of the pope and episcopacy, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to serve as the primary and authoritative interpreter of Christian truth in its integrity. The Church’s mission is evangelical to the core, without losing its institutional, sacramental, liturgical, and social dimensions. The Christian life, according to evangelical Catholicism,