We Travel Together Still

This month marks the fifth
anniversary of the death of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009), the founding
editor of
First
Things and co-founder with the late
Charles W. Colson of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. This tribute was
first published in
Christianity Today
under the title “The Radical Conservative.” It is offered here, with some minor
changes, in loving memory of a person whose vibrant vision of God and whose
love for Jesus Christ and his church were an inspiration to me and inspire me
still.

If ideas have
consequences, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus will long be remembered as the most
serious Christian thinker and the most consequential public theologian in
America since Reinhold Niebuhr. As the editor-in-chief of
First
Things, a journal he founded in 1990, and as director of the Institute for
Religion and Public Life, an influential think-tank that addresses issues of moral
and social concern, Neuhaus placed his considerable gifts as writer, thinker,
and networker in the service of reasoned discourse and the common good.

T. S. Eliot described
the art of writing as a “raid on the inarticulate.” Neuhaus was a
brilliant raider, and he never wrote a boring sentence. His many books and
essays, like those of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, will be studied for
generations to come. His death in 2009 at age seventy marked the end of an
era in American religion and public life.

But none of this was
evident as “little Dickie Neuhaus,” as he referred to his younger self, grew up
in the Ottawa Valley of Ontario, Canada. His father was a Missouri Synod
Lutheran pastor, and he was duly baptized and catechized in that Reformation tradition. Though
his life would take many turns and twists, he never lost the ecclesial identity
he received as a young boy. Many years later, when he returned home to
tell his mother about his decision to convert to Catholicism, she replied, “That’s
alright, but do you have to leave ‘the’ church?”

In his mid-teens
Neuhaus was sent to a church-related school in Nebraska, where he got into all
kinds of trouble organizing beer parties and leading panty raids. After he
was confined to his room for several weeks, one of his teachers stopped by to
check on his spiritual well-being. The teacher said to him: “God is very
disappointed with what you did, for he thinks so highly of you. But,
because he loves you so much, he forgives you and will help you to be better.” Neuhaus
repented with tears and gave his life to Christ in what he would later describe
as a “born-again experience.”

Actually, this was
only one of several conversions Neuhaus would undergo in what Anne Sexton
called “the awful rowing toward God.” Despite further shenanigans, through
sheer bravura and brilliance, he made it through college and ended up at
Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Here he came under the influence of a
remarkable teacher, Arthur Carl Piepkorn, who taught his students to value the
evangelical catholic heritage of Lutheranism. Piepkorn remained a Lutheran,
but some of his most able students—Robert Wilken and Jaroslav Pelikan as well
as Neuhaus—would eventually find their way to Rome or the East.

Fresh out of
seminary, Neuhaus moved to New York, where he soon became the pastor of a
robust, largely African American congregation in Brooklyn. From his base
at St. John the Evangelist Church, which he jokingly called “St. John the
Mundane” as opposed to St. John the Divine, the Episcopal cathedral in
Morningside Heights, Neuhaus became deeply involved in the life of the city and
the issues of the day.

While not giving up
his churchly concerns, Neuhaus became a leader in the movements for social
reform and political change that convulsed America during the
sixties. Deeply committed to civil rights, he marched in Selma with his
friend Martin Luther King Jr. A peace activist, he co-founded Clergy and
Laity Concern about Vietnam with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Fr. Daniel
Berrigan. As a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic National
Convention, he was arrested in the tumult of that event.

How did the radical
Neuhaus of the 1960s become the conservative icon of the 1990s and
beyond? While there were important breaks along the way, Neuhaus never
conceded any major upheaval in his own thinking. Rather, he argued, the
rise of a militant secularism among cultured elites and the evacuation of
religious belief from public life and civil debate had conspired to create a
“naked public square,” the title of his 1984 bestseller.

While never accepting
the premise of a “Christian America,” Neuhaus argued that the constitutional
separation of church and state was meant to enhance, not prohibit, the “free
exercise” of religion in public life as well as private practice. The
gravest moral and legal issues in American history, he maintained, from slavery
to abortion, required the kind of conscientious engagement sanctioned by the
church’s understanding of itself as a community of witness. Moreover, our
most cherished political principles, including the irreducible value of
persons, free speech and religious liberty, resistance to tyranny and respect
for the rule of law—are all grounded in religiously informed beliefs. He came
to see that the “moratorium on God” pushed by the secular left would undermine,
and eventually destroy, the American experiment in democracy. At the same
time, Neuhaus believed in a public church, not a partisan church. As
Abraham Lincoln often said, the question is not whether God is on our side but
whether we are on his.

In 2005
Time magazine
included Neuhaus in its list of America’s twenty-five most influential
evangelicals. By that time, Neuhaus had become a confidant and advisor to
President George W. Bush, and he was widely recognized as one of the most
respected conservative voices in the country. This year, 2014, marks the thirtieth
anniversary of
Naked Public Square. Though it has become a classic,
it still remains a kind of manifesto for evangelical engagement in the
culture. Without Neuhaus and the movement that coalesced around him, it
would be difficult to explain the activism of Chuck Colson and Rick Warren, the
journalism of Michael Gerson, the networking of Michael Cromartie, the advocacy
of James Dobson, or the social ethics of Richard Mouw (whose connection with
Neuhaus goes back to “the Hartford Appeal” of 1975).

Neuhaus’ “turn to the
right” was accelerated by the Supreme Court’s
Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, a watershed in the gathering culture
of death that was coming to dominate aspects of modern life in Western Europe
and North America. He became a major strategist for the pro-life movement
and suggested its goal ought to be “every child welcomed to life and protected
by law.” But he always considered his advocacy for the unborn as part and
parcel of the same ethic of human respect that had led him to work with King in
the sixties. The common thread through all of his ups and downs was this:
a profound respect for the dignity and worth of the person, every person made
in the image of God.

I first came to know
Neuhaus in the early 1990s when he and Colson gathered a team of theologians to
form the project known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Just as
Neuhaus never considered his transition from radicalism to conservatism to be
anything more than the outworking of basic principles of human rights, civil
liberty, and moral concern, so too he did not consider his embrace of
Catholicism a major leap in his journey of faith. He once wrote an essay
titled “
How I Became the Catholic I Was.”

Though Richard would
not like my putting it this way, he could just as well have written an essay
with the title “How I Remain the Lutheran I Used to Be.” I do not mean to
question his devotion to the Catholic Church and the pope, which was
unbounded. If he ever had second thoughts about becoming a Catholic, he
hid them very well. But only a thinker so well grounded in the Reformation
traditions could be an honest broker in bringing faithful evangelicals and
believing Catholics to recognize the common source of their life together in
Jesus Christ, the Holy Scriptures, and the Great Tradition of living faith
through the centuries.

Through many hours of
discussion, debate, Bible study, and prayer, we were able to forge together
common statements on some of the most controvertible issues that still divide
Christians today. This was not an easygoing ecumenism that papered over
serious differences, but the earnest seeking of a new beginning, a new
reformation of unity in truth. The two things Neuhaus most wanted to be
continued after his death were
First Things and
ECT. Those of us who labored with him in these endeavors have vowed that,
with God’s help, we will march forward “with a faith disposed toward the future
that we call hope,” as Richard put it.

On one of my last visits
to New York before he died, Richard invited me to stay with him and the
ecumenical Community of Christ in the City, with whom he lived. When our
work was finished for that day, we joined with others in the community for
vespers followed by a common meal. Richard regaled us late into the evening
with stories and laughter as well as serious reflections on birth and death and
the mystery in between that we call life. The next morning I got up at the
crack of dawn, and we walked together to the Church of the Immaculate
Conception, a multi-ethnic, inner-city parish where Richard often preached and
led in mass. Though he was a savant and interlocutor without peer, I
remember him best at prayer.

Back in the nineties,
Richard had a serious bout with cancer and nearly died. Out of this
experience, he wrote what may be his most enduring book,
As I Lay Dying, a little masterpiece of great
spiritual power. “We are born to die,” he wrote. “Not that death is
the purpose of our being born, but we are born towards death, and in each of
our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well
is, in largest part, the work of living well.” Richard John Neuhaus lived
well, and toward eternity, and he was laid to rest in the sure and certain hope
of the resurrection.

In this book, he
tells a story from his early ministry in Brooklyn. He had been called to
visit a man named Albert who was at the point of death.

That hot summer morning I had prayed
with him and read the Twenty-third Psalm. Toward evening, I went up again
to the death ward—or so everybody called it—to see him again. Clearly the
end was near. Although he had been given a sedative, he was entirely
lucid. I put my arm around his shoulder and together, face almost touching
face, we prayed the Our Father. Then Albert’s eyes opened wider, as though
he had seen something in my expression. “Oh,” he said, “oh, don’t be
afraid.” His body sagged back and he was dead. Stunned, I realized
that, while I thought I was ministering to him, his last moment of life was
expended in ministering to me.

If Richard could
speak to us now from that land of light where he dwells in the Father’s
presence, I think he would say exactly what Albert said to him that hot summer
day: “Don’t be afraid. Jesus is victor. We travel together still.”

Timothy
George is the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and
chairman of the board of Colson Center for Christian Worldview. You may contact
him at
[email protected].

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