But one of the most important aspects of the theology of the second Vaticanum was a renewal of Christian anthropology. In place of an often strained and artificial neo-scholastic account of how grace and nature were related in the constitution of human beings, the Council built on the greatest insights of a theology that had returned to earlier and richer sources \u201d\u201c the theology of spiritual geniuses like Henri de Lubac, who reminded us of what it meant for early and mediaeval Christianity to speak of humanity as made in God\u2019s image and of grace as perfecting and transfiguring that image so long overlaid by our habitual \u201d\u02dcinhumanity\u2019. In such a light, to proclaim the Gospel is to proclaim that it is at last possible to be properly human: the Catholic and Christian faith is a \u201d\u02dctrue humanism\u2019, to borrow a phrase from another genius of the last century, Jacques Maritain.<\/p>\n
Yet de Lubac is clear what this does not mean. We do not replace the evangelistic task by a campaign of \u201d\u02dchumanization\u2019. \u201d\u02dcHumanize before Christianizing?\u2019 he asks \u201d\u201c \u201d\u02dcIf the enterprise succeeds, Christianity will come too late: its place will be taken. And who thinks that Christianity has no humanizing value?\u2019 So de Lubac writes in his wonderful collection of aphorisms, Paradoxes of Faith. It is the faith itself that shapes the work of humanizing and the humanizing enterprise will be empty without the definition of humanity given in the Second Adam. Evangelization, old or new, must be rooted in a profound confidence that we have a distinctive human destiny to show and share with the world.<\/p>\n