I've been meaning to transcribe a few excerpts from a provocative talk given by Msgr. Lane heard via a CD. He begins by talking about Benedict's pontificate in light of the thought of German sociologist/economist Max Weber:
Max Weber wrote:"Modernity has been deserted by the gods, man has chased them away and has rationalized and made calculable and predictable what in an earlier age had seemed governed by chance, but also by feeling and passion and commitment by personal appeal and personal fealty, by grace, and by the ethics of charismatic heroes."Weber looks at modernity at the beginning of the 20th century in a way that is shockingly similar to the commentaries on modernity from Benedict XVI at the beginning of the 21st century.
And one (Weber) looks at it from the point of view of how did religion create this emptiness, and the other (Benedict) acknowledges the emptiness but says how does religion respond now to that emptiness?
Weber said that what created this empty world was Calvin's notion of predestination. If as a matter of fact God has already decided everything that is going to happen in the world, then what's the use? The thing that you really then have to do, Weber said, is to figure out whether you're in or out, whether you are the saved or the damned. You can't do anything about it, Calvin said, and because you can contribute nothing to your salvation, it's already fixed - and as one of the elect you therefore have the obligation in charity to perform your civic duties well. Calvin said the greatest and highest vocation that a person can have is to be conscientious and a good civil magistrate. So that if you have a call to any kind of occupation then you do it well because if you do your pre-determined task well then obviously you are among the elect. And if you are one of the elect then you can rest, as the old Protestant hymn goes, with blessed assurance that you will enter into the kingdom of glory of God. But don't think you have anything to do with it. It's already determined.
Weber calls this inhumane and says it drives man eventually into an incredible loneliness, for they are on their own in the universe and the only security they have is the fulfillment of their vocation, their call, their determined spot in the world and they throw themselves into it, he said, in order to console and give themselves a sense of security that they are saved. What he says this does is it begins to drive the economic machine of Western society. Because if your salvation depends upon you doing what you do to the best of your ability, then if that's how you know you're saved, then the whole notion of the earning of money begins to change. And Weber says in his book Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the whole notion of the economic structure changed. There was always capitalism but in the Catholic world you earned money for two reasons. One was because of what you could buy with it, and enjoy, and the other was what you could do with it, as a good work, to give it away. And so the whole capitalistic machine of the Middle Ages was for pleasure and charity. But now there is a new seriousness of purpose after the Reformation, according to Weber. Now the acquisition of wealth for the sake of acquiring more wealth becomes the hallmark of modern capitalism. And that it is done not so much to enjoy, because certainly the Puritans were not encouraged to enjoy their wealth, but simply to demonstrate the seriousness with which they pursued their work and therefore to assure thenselves that they were saved.
I kind of think, as I reflect upon all of this, that we in our American society are still culturally Predestinarians. If we were to reflect upon the question of salvation, how many within our church communities, how many within our society, would be concerned about their eternal destiny? Don't we kind of in a sense presume that well, our God is a good God, our God is a merciful God, how can we talk about a God who would not save his people? And so we live with this kind of presumption of universal salvation. That may or may not be true, who knows? That's the whole point - nobody knows. The issue then becomes if we are all predestined to glory then what is our relationship to our future? What is our relationship to eternity? It doesn't depend on us anymore. It's already kind of taken care of. The good, the merciful God will take care of it all. The sense in the Medieval church of striving for salvation, of being a participant in an ongoing relationship with Jesus Christ that binds us to Him so closely that our destiny becomes identified with His, but in a kind of freedom where we can break that relationship when we want to - that we don't deal with, or that we must be close and intimate companions with the Lord in order that we might - through our relationship with him - identify with him as person, and enter with him into the destiny of those who are incorporated into the body of Christ. That's not part of the Catholic thought much anymore. The presumption of salvation has undercut that notion tremendously. And the interesting thing is that the great battle and great struggle within our Protestant culture (and this something else Weber says, Protestantism got us there but where we are doesn't need Protestantism anymore; that once you have created the machine we don't need the motivation, the machine takes care of itself), is such that if we look at secular society I think we find the same dynamic in the essence of the political process. The saved and the damned. How do you know if you are on the Left that you are of the elect? This is the source of political correctness. You think the right way, you use the right words. We emphasize that our disposition is crucially important, and so we have hate crimes and hate speech and give adjectives to human sinfulness. But we also have an elect of the right, we absolutize our politics in such a way that we determine a person's righteousness, chosenness, in the political arena. So politics has replaced religion as the determining factor of who is predestined or who has not.
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