Coming to Grips with Modernism

While I'm not as big a fan of the current Pope as the last one, Pope Benedict does have some redeeming qualities. As Paul Smith points out in his review of the Pope's latest book, his take of Christ is a whole lot better than many modern theologians:

One thing that really struck, especially at the end of the book is how much of an effort Benedict is making to "recapture" the real Jesus from modern "scholars" who seek to redefine Christ in modernist terms. He frequently points out how some exegetes go beyond what the Gospel writers actually record to try to figure out what Jesus really meant, or which sayings attributed to him He "actually" said. Some go so far as to attribute sayings attributed to Christ as having their origins in works written centuries after the Gospels rather than believe the Apostles wrote down what Jesus actually said and that he meant what he said. They, like Thomas Jefferson, prefer to make God in their own image and ignore the parts of the Bible they see as not fitting that mold.

Good for the Pope for hammering on this. It seems to me that much of Modern theology has been an attempt reconcile the irreconcilable. A large part of it doesn't seem to be "theo"-logy because it strips so much of God and the supernatural from the text.

The main issue is that you cannot take a fundamentally Naturalist philosophy and marry it to religion. The fundamental concepts of the two are in direct opposition with Naturalism decrying the spiritual and religion accepting and fundamentally building upon it. When you take a religious work like the Bible and then strip the supernatural (and largely God himself) out of it, all you have done is gutted the text. And they have to replace those parts of the narrative with something, otherwise they'll just have a gaping hole. The question then becomes, what will the supernatural be replaced with? Looking at the results, it seems to be replaced with whatever the scholar's pet theories seem to be.

Someday soon people will point to the collected works of these theologians and say "Look there's what confounding the wisdom of the wise looks like!" That is if they're not already doing it.