Customer Reviews

Priority of Christ, The: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism

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I found Barron's approach extremely refreshing. Having waded through modern philosophy and much contemporary theology, I found Barron's ideas penetrating and profound. Instead of attempting a false "neutrality," he stands clearly in the faith perspective of the Church and tackles the modern dilemma that "modernity" has handed the modern-day believer. He shows how a correct understanding of Aquinas and Scripture lend themselves to what he terms a "post-modern" Catholic view of reality. The book develops many of the insights of modern hermeneutics and avoids returning to the over-emphasis on rationalistic foundationalism found in theology during the enlightenment and post-enlightenment periods. He is not afraid to find agreement in modern thinkers, and is nuanced in his disagreement. He diagnoses the problems, show how Christ offers a solution, and then deals with the implications of the perspective offered through the lens of Thomistic thought. While some may attempt to dismiss this perspective as old (chronological snobbery) in their worship of modernity, the points Barron discusses at least deserve a careful reading and debate. He breathes fresh life into the discussion.

I would suggest this book for those who have at least a little background in theology. Recommended for Catholics, but would be interesting for all Christians, (especially his critique of modernity and discussion of the roles of Christ).

It is not an easy thing to get a handle on the reactionary Catholic mindset these days when it comes to anything historically past the age of Aquinas. It can be a slightly brain-fog inducing experience to try to understand the diverse approaches. What is good about this guy is that at least he takes Kant seriously, and has some realistic sense of the debt of modern religionists to the great thinker, even if he's got predictable criticisms. (For this alone he gets 2 stars!) This is at least more honest than the many crazed reactionaries, like Kreeft, who have made Kant into some sort of unrecognizable villain. However, the story gets poorer in Baron's account of the inception of modern thought more generally. I blinked in disbelief as I realized that he actually was seriously trying to portay the birth of modern thought as a sort of children's playground dodge-ball war between "Heraclitean" modern impulses and those more traditional "Parmenidean" traditional ones of the medieval world. For the mean time let's leave aside the utter misprision of the terms used. Beyond that, two things should stand out to anyone with even a basic honest sense of intellectual history. And these should call into question the entire premise of this effort here. First, the modern era was at least as much, if not more, concerned with revivals of stable ancient wisdoms as anything else. In this it was in fact often more reverential for the recovery of the stable past than, say, scholasticism was. Second, therefore, to see it merely as a reaction to the medieval world is ultimately simply a cryptic form of propaganda for a medieval view. A mere sop in that direction, not accurate history of ideas. Or one suspects in this author's case, a neo-medieval view he would like to propound. But whatever the case, the idea that the modern era can described as a reaction between these pre-Socratic tendencies, even if meant poetically, is just tendentiously misleading. One suspects it is done with the underlying desire to portray all modern though as evanescent and in "flux". When in fact the modern era has brought vastly more stability in terms of understanding of human rights based on modern conceptions. Thus, as is so often the case with these reactionary Catholic intellectuals, there seems to be a hidden purpose. One wishes they would stop beating around the bush and just come out and say. They want to find a way of making it acceptable that the conceptions of a late medieval Dominican friar should be the basis of contemporary conceptions of society. Good luck with that.