Repuesta de Carl E. Braaten (protestante) sobre la ponencia de Hittinger:

Russell Hittinger has told the story of how natural law has been misused, not only how it was "disembedded from moral theology," but how "moral theology was disembedded from the rest of theology." Yet to my mind this is only half the story The other half concerns the inner sanctum of Christian theology the Gospel of salvation on account of Christ alone. Karl Rahner was a dominant influence behind the scenes at Vatican II, and since then a kind of left-wing interpreta­tion of Rahner's logos Christology has spread in the shape of a plural­istic theology of religions. Paul Knitter and other Catholic theologians have joined a parade of liberal Protestant theologians in affirming that Christ is a way of salvation, to be sure, but only for Christians; other religions have their own ways, equally valid and true. This pulls the plug on the universal mission of the Gospel to the nations.

In control of this pluralistic theology is the unbaptized logos of Greek metaphysics, the logos asarkos, which replaces the logos that be­came flesh in Jesus in a unique, definitive, and normative way. The mission of the Church has been radically redefined by the same son of Catholic theology that secularizes natural law, only now it is the "scandal and stumbling block" of the Gospel itself that is demytholo- gized.

The outcome of this idea of a discarnate logos salvifically at work in all the religions is that the missionary aim of the Church is no longer to bring the gentiles something they do not have, a gift of salvation. The Great Commission of Christ to his apostles and to all communi­ties of faith that claim apostolic succession is effectually denied. The purpose of the Christian mission instead is to help Muslims be better Muslims, Hindus better Hindus, humanists better humanists, through dialogue and cross-fertilization of ideas. These pluralists believe it is more interesting and important to communicate their ideas about religion than to preach the Gospel to people of other religions. Preaching the Gospel might bring about conversion; to attempt that would be arrogant, triumphalistic, colonialistic. They call their theory of religions a Copernican revolution. It is no such thing: it is plain old-fashioned heresy popularized by liberal Protestantism.

Russell Hittinger has shared with us an eloquent lamentation about the collapse of natural law in modern Catholic moral theology. Equally sad, at least for me, is to see how Catholic theologians have followed the liberal Protestant theologians, Ernst Troeltsch and company, in reaming out the Christological core of the Christian faith so that there is no Gospel left to tell to the nations. The Pope's encyclical Missio Redemptoris was right on target in taking aim at and hitting this plu­ralistic theology of religions and the new missiology that follows from it.

I believe that the underlying cause of the problem of a secularized natural law, and of the notion of salvation in non-Christian religions apart from Christ, is a theological method that approaches issues from a philosophical concept of the logos outside the framework of a Chris- tocentric, trinitarian monotheism. This is the unbaptized logos of pagan philosophy that the Church Fathers transformed—but perhaps not radically enough—-under the conditions of their belief in the incar­nation of the logos in the concrete person of Jesus of Nazareth , the logos made flesh.

Natural Law and Catholic Moral Theology, pp. 39 y 40