You are on the same page as John Paul II and I agree: he crossed the line. John Paul said so in Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Jesus explicitly affirmed the existence and eternality of hell.
My point is that this article throws “modernist” and heretic around (the “heretic” is in Rahner’s letter, supposedly repeating what Integrists said). It’s one thing to fault vB as one theologian to another, criticizing him on this point, as JPII did. It’s another to label him a modernist, as the ossified Thomists do. They are the target of my ire.
There’s a new crop of Thomists, ones I greatly admire—Reinhard Huetter at Duke, the English version of Novus et Vetera, the Dominicans at Fribourg in Switzerland. They are not stuck in the Thomas-the-Philosopher-solves-all-our-problems paradigm that Leo XIII (unwittingly) set in motion and which is past it’s sell-by date.
And interestingly enough, these Thomists, which disagreeing with De Lubac on the state of pure nature in Thomas Aquinas (and they may well be right in their critique on that point), do not label de Lubac or Ratzinger or Guardnini or JPII heretics. There’s a cross-fertilization going on between Communio-types (Ratzinger, de Lubac, vBalthasar) and the best and brightest of the current generation of Thomists.
But that is lost on the New Oxford Review and other RadTrad circles who label anyone they disagree with a heretic.
There’s plenty of theological error out there coming from Catholic liberals, some of whom are inveterate heretics but most of whom are just plain theologically erroneous and doing tremendous damage with their error without being heretics. Labeling all that theological error heresy and then throwing orthodox theologians like Ratzinger in with them is just wrong, unjust, uncharitable, unChristian and unCatholic.
Agreed.
Also, I would agree that Thomism had ossified, and was controlled by a bunch of people who hardly understood what Thomism is really about.
On the whole, I find myself in agreement with the philosophical positions of Aristotle and St. Thomas. I find a lot to like in Plato, but I don’t think his basic philosophical approach works as well as Aristotle’s. But I would also agree that St. Thomas was a lot more nuanced and complicated than most of the pedantic “Thomist” theologians of that time understood. The pre-Vatican II Church needed a bit of shaking up, although unfortunately a lot of the wrong people got involved and it didn’t work out as well as one might have hoped.
I think that G. K. Chesterton does a pretty good job with his book on Aquinas, which is written for intelligent amateurs but, I think, brilliantly done.