Public Theology in America: Some Questions for Catholicism after John Courtney Murray

John Coleman's recent contribution to this journal, "Vision and Praxis in American Theology: Orestes Brownson, John A. Ryan, and John Courtney Murray," suggests that the legacy of these three thinkers stands as an invaluable resource for a Christian response to America's present social and cultural crisis. Coleman identifies Murray, along with Brownson and Ryan, as one of the few American Catholic "public theologians" of the past who are worth studying today. These men were theologians because their intellectual work drew consciously from the wellsprings of Christian theological tradition. They were "public" theologians because their concerns emerged from the life of the polis—civil liberty, economic justice, Church-state relationships, etc. They are of continuing interest today, Coleman suggests, because they developed carefully-wrought "mediating concepts" which reveal the relationships between Christian belief and public events in a nuanced and intellectually rigorous way. They were not content to say that the relation between Church and world or between Christian belief and human experience is a dialectical one in which Church and world, faith and experience, help interpret each other. In a distinctive way, each of the three made the attempt to describe the concrete shape of this dialectic of interaction and interpretation. They provided their times with a public theology which, especially in the cases of Ryan and Murray, directly affected the public life of many Catholic Christians. Their public theologies also helped to shape the general discussion in society of some of the most important moral and political issues of their day. Coleman's conclusion from his study of the three thinkers is that appropriation of their insights and of their commitment to the concrete, action-oriented mediation of Church to civil society and civil society to Church is an indispensable component in the effort to develop a public theology for the very different America and the very different Catholic Church of today. Brownson's fundamental theology, with its emphasis on the integral relation between nature and grace, and on the providential direction of political life toward the fulness of human communion, Ryan's economic ethics, with its carefully specified canons of distributive