Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (1985)
By Benedict Ashley. Vatican II demonstrated the remarkable assimilation by Catholic theology of modern historical consciousness regarding bot the Scriptures and dogmatic development. At last a positive answer to the historical objections raised against Christianity by the secular humanist of the Enlightenment could be given. But the Council was not able to provide an equally positive answer to the Enlightenment’s other and more fundamental objections derived from modern natural science. Why more fundamental? Because the historicism of the Enlightenment arose from a romantic reaction within its own ranks to the “value-free” character of the scientific worldview and the technology it made possible. The reaction was provoked by the need to contrast a value-system which would no longer be based on nature but on human creativity, thus supplying what the new value-free, anti-teleological scientific understanding of nature could no longer provide. One of the principal theses in this book is that this unresolved polarization within secular humanism has today resulted in that deflation of the Enlightenment which we call “postmodernism.” Again we have a “Catholic moment” when the Gospel message stifled by the Enlightenment can be heard.
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