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In the old thomist tradition, distinctions were drawn between an essentialist or idealist interpretation and application of Gospel norms and an existentialist or realist interpretation and application of them. This distinction is necessary because we live in a tension where we are undeniably realizing the Kingdom now even as we, as created co-creators, join all of creation in the labor and groaning of the act of giving birth to an ever more full Kingdom realization.

The essentialist understanding seizes upon the efficacies of the Spirit’s help and the Word, itself, proclaimed and lived by faithful witnesses. The existentialist understanding recognizes our human frailty due to our radical finitude and sinfulness and so makes allowances knowing humankind will yet fall short of Gospel ideals. One would not want to say that the essentialist approach is theoretical and the existentialist practical, because one would not want to discourage any courageous persons from living out the Gospel, radically, as prophetic witnesses and lovers of God and all. We can say that the existentialist approach is pastoral, however, looking with compassion and understanding on us in our human condition, helping us to do the best we can.

Concretely, then, for example, this tradition affirms both pacifism and just war principles as legitimate expressions of Gospel ideals. While I am not a pacifist, myself, I am in deep solidarity with and very much supportive of my pacifist sisters and brothers in my denomination and in other traditions. I would not want to live in a world without their voice of prophetic protest and without the witness of their lives. Your sharing of your personal experience with these tensions was depthful and generous.

With respect to the law, the same distinctions apply, I think. Those who eschew any active and coercive legal and political engagements can also serve as authentic voices of prophetic protest and witnesses to the reality of the Kingdom, now among us and yet to come more fully. From a pastoral perspective, consistent with an incarnational outlook, we can also legitimately seek to permeate and improve the temporal order. I am thankful that our US founders integrated religion into the public square, strengthening its influence through nonestablishment and free exercise provisions. This was a healthy response to Enlightenment principles, healthier than the Enlightenment fundamentalism of the Continental experience, where religion was marginalized by secularistic forces.

So, I’m for a robust engagement of religious and metaphysical perspectives in the public square. That’s not what’s wrong per se with the approach of the Manhattan Declaration drafters, in particular, and many on the Religious Right, in general. Where they go wrong, in my view, is two fold: 1) They too often fail to translate their moral stances into a language that would give their moral intuitions a normative impetus for other groups of believers and even unbelievers. 2) They too often give jurisprudential considerations short shrift, emphasizing form over substance, paying too little heed to whether a law will, in actuality, be efficacious and bring about its desired aim, especially in a pluralistic society where demographics reveal a proposed law as not only unenforceable but possibly even counterproductive.

There is a related problem, which is that the failure to successfully translate some religiously-derived moral intuitions results from the fact that certain of those intuitions are philosophically and anthropologically indefensible.

More discussion follows here>>>

At a deeper level, it’s not an ethical divide about moral realities but an epistemic divide regarding humankind’s access to truth, naive realisms manifesting as sola scriptura (e.g. whether Bible or Koran) or solum magisterium (e.g. whether scientism or religious hierarchicalism) versus critical realism.

The more apodictic certainty invested in one’s IS, the more normative impetus given to one’s OUGHT. However, our deontology should be as tentative as our ontology is speculative? It’s an impoverished anthropology that gives rise to either the epistemic hubris of the fundamentalists (Enlightenment scientism as well as religious fideism) or the excessive epistemic humility of the radically deconstructive postmodernists. Where’s Goldilocks when you need her?

At an even deeper level, the problem is thinking that religion has more to do with morality than recognizing & realizing our imago Dei.

Finally, modernISM and postmodernISM dis-enchanted reality and people are desperately seeking re-enchantment vehicles, which leads to traditionalism, absolutism, authoritarianism and other foundationalisms. What’s uncanny is how all of these foundationalists don’t see the sad irony in the fact that they’re all appealing to otherwise incommensurate foundations (Bible, Koran, Authority, Methods elevated to Systems) with no way to successfully adjudicate between each others’ otherwise disparate appeals. The only thing these fundamentalistic foundationalists have in common is the tenacity with which they hold their opinions and their willingness to coerce others’ compliance.

Re-enchantment is ours as dichotomies like natural and supernatural, immanent and transcendent, secular and sacred, material and spiritual dissolve, when we quit locating God in metaphysical gaps and searching for divine causal joints in philosophies of mind and quantum realities. In my view, it’s ALL supernatural. Of course, I might be wrong. But it’s an eminently plausible (equiplausible vis a vis competing interpretations) and existentially actionable, which is to say both extrinsically and intrinsically rewarding. How to make it more compelling? I defer to St. Francis and his ilk.

I do think it’s important for us to look over our shoulders at the nature of our various leaps – however we label them (foundations, presuppositions, fundamentals). For example, we want to distinguish between a theory of truth and a theory of knowledge. It is one thing to affirm the reality of transcendental imperatives like truth, beauty and goodness and quite another to claim unfettered access to same. It is one thing to believe we can reason from an is to an ought and quite another to claim an unproblematical inerrant description of an “is” leading to an indubitably infallible norming of an “ought.”

This is more than a distinction between core and peripheral issues, essentials and accidentals. It is not just a compare and contrast of different approaches to hierarchical tiers of truth.

Humankind, as a community of value-realizers, has moved slowly but inexorably in its advance of knowledge and other value-realizations, pragmatically cashing out the value of its paradigms and conceptualizations. We have recognized that descriptive science, normative philosophy, interpretive religion and evaluative culture are methodologically-autonomous even if otherwise axiologically-integral. Tremendous efficacies have flowed from such autonomy and grave inefficacies have resulted when such methods are conflated.

Indeed, many hot button issues are good indicators. What they most indicate to me is who is more likely to be fideistically encroaching on science classrooms or who is more likely to be scientistically making superficial religious pronouncements, obverse sides of the same epistemically bankrupt coin of methodological conflations. It indicates who is more likely to come into the public square translating one’s metaphysical and religious stances into compelling moral arguments that can be understood apart from special divine revelation and who is otherwise attempting mere theocratic coercion.

It tells me that, sometimes, the failure to successfully translate some religiously-derived moral intuitions results only from the fact that certain of those intuitions are simply indefensible, anthropologically (descriptive science) and morally (normative philosophy). It tells me that some folks are more concerned with the form of the law with no serious consideration for its substance, which is to recognize that questions of jurisprudence often get short shrift with very little concern for whether or not a law will be either enforceable or will effectively bring about its desired aim or possibly be even counterproductive.

The crucible of human experience adjudicates between the perils and the opportunities of one epistemic outlook or another and fundamentalistic theocratic and secularistic urges, while differing in degree from place to place, are inevitably insidious and horribly pernicious.