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INTRODUCTION

cations he draws out even more fully than Habermas by insisting on the ‘‘de facto
nonuniversality of both major cultures of the West—the culture of Christian faith as well
as that of secular rationality’’ and by critical appraisal of Hans Ku ̈ng’s appeal for a ‘‘world
ethos’’ as being a mere ‘‘abstraction.’’ The reason for this assessment is simple enough:
‘‘there is no rational or ethical or religious universal formula about which everyone could
agree and which could then support everyone,’’ a claim that is hardly an affirmation of
ontological pluralism, since it is immediately followed by the statement: ‘‘In any case,
such a formula is presently beyond our reach’’ (p. 267). Pluralism, then, as a concept and
practice, has a political and theological use that is at once essential and limited.^129 As if
echoing Habermas’s well-known metaphor of the unity of reason amid the plurality of its
voices, Benedict XVI claims that, both socially and ecclesially, genuine pluralism is based
upon a ‘‘symphonia,’’ premised upon the prevalence of a whole, since it is:

the fundamental form of the expression of truth in the Church, resting as this truth

does on a complexensemble, rich in tensions. The voice of the faith is not heard as

mono-phony, but as symphony; not as a monophonic chant but as a composition in

polyphony, with many notes which seem dissonant.... To lay aside one of the

themes of this symphony is to impoverish the whole. The Fathers called this attitude

‘‘heresy’’: that is, a simplificatory choice, for only in the totality with its tensions is

the truth to be found.^130

Or again: ‘‘Only that pluralism is great which is directed toward unity.’’ Such ‘‘fruitful
pluralism’’ or ‘‘true catholicity’’ should be distinguished from ‘‘ruinous pluralism,’’ which
Benedict XVI defines as the ‘‘lost... ability to re-unite the great tensions internal to the
totality of the faith.’’ To forgo ‘‘unity’’ and ‘‘totality’’ amounts to reducing the subjective
and ecclesial elements of faith to mere ‘‘contradictory and disordered linguistic frag-
ments,’’ substituting for its ‘‘symphony’’ the ‘‘dislocated pluralism of a home-made
Christianity.’’^131
Pope Benedict XVI’s position differs in many ways from the at times ‘‘sophisticated
theology of history’’ of the administration of George W. Bush, analyzed rhetorically by
Bruce Lincoln on the eve of the November 2004 American presidential contest. In Lin-
coln’s subtle reading, Bush’s theology reveals itself to be a composite and multiply coded
doctrine that strategically blends ‘‘an evangelical theology of ‘born again’ conversion’’ and
a ‘‘Calvinist theology of vocation’’ with a ‘‘theology of American exceptionalism’’ and ‘‘a
Manichaean dualism of good and evil’’ (p. 275).
Speaking in California in April 2006, Bush claimed that he bases ‘‘a lot of foreign
policy decisions on things that I think are true. One, I believe there’s an almighty....
Secondly, I believe that one of great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody’s soul

... to be free.’’^132 These words and the difference between the sensibility they reflect
and that of most European and of American policy makers prompted one American

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