The Progressives Have a Theology. It's Wrong, But...

On occasion, we have spoken of The Progressives in American political life.  But those Progressives are hardly confined to our shores; they also had (and have) sisters across the pond.

And they have a theology, which is voiced, these days, by Cdl. Kasper of Germany who is making a lot of waves about the upcoming Synod on the Family.  Kasper makes waves because he would like the Church to...ahh....modify...her position on marriage and perverted sex.

An Austrian theologian, Dr. Thomas H. Starck, wrote a mid-length essay on Kasper's theology.  In it, we find this:

...Teilhard’s eschatology of the Omega point describes a return of world and history to God, as a result of an evolutionary process of development and self-perfection taking place in history. This historical-philosophical pattern corresponds structurally to that of German idealism, especially the Hegelian philosophy of spirit. According to Hegel, history is in fact a process of development in which the absolute spirit comes to itself by synthesizing its “being-in-itself” with its “being-for-itself” into a “being in-and-for-itself,” and at the end returns to itself and grasps itself as the true which is the real. 

From revelation we know, however, that the end of the story is not characterized by the final self-perfection of creation, but by its ultimate apostasy and the concomitant ultimate catastrophe in human history. It has often been pointed out that it is not apparent how the eschatology of Teilhard could be compatible with the Scriptures. 

It thus seems to me not too far-fetched, given the quotations cited, to suspect that the basic problem of the theology of Kasper is its dependence on specific positions of the philosophy of German idealism. Moreover, this assessment is supported by the fact that Kasper sees himself in the tradition of the Tübingen School, which is known to have attempted to re-establish Catholic intellectual life on the foundation of German idealism. 

Kasper’s pneumatology, of which his ecclesiology is a function, has as its object a “spirit” that—as Kasper himself says—is not identical to the third divine person, but is much more reminiscent of Hegel’s absolute spirit, who in a historical process, synthesizing its dialectical opposites in itself, develops into the whole, that is the truth. ...

Reduced to simpler terms:  Teilhard, Hegel, and Walter Kasper believe that Humanity is a 'work in progress', finding its way to perfection, the Omega Point.  We all are aware that The Progressive, following its evolution-based theories,hold the same belief.  

Implicitly (and explicitly), Kasper and those preceding fellow-travelers deny objective reality, or "order" in the world; rather, they find that "order" is in constant change--something which also showed up in a different forum with Freud and Bernays.

The secular/atheist Progressive, when faced with opposition, declares such opposition to be out of bounds and will do whatever it takes to destroy the opponent.  See, e.g., "Justice" Kennedy's nascent attempt to silence opponents of un-natural "marriage" by declaring that voicing such opposition is "hate speech", and his utterly irrational decision in Windsor (which happens to capture the Teilhard/Hegel/Kasper theology very well), or the Oregon bureaucrat who silenced the bakers over his decision to deprive them of all their earthly possessions because they refused to bake for sodomites. 

You may call that "progress."  I don't think you understand the meaning of that word.

(Another look at the situation, very short and clear, can be found here)