by John M. Grondelski.

In a recent essay, I defended Pope St. John Paul II's emphasis on Jesus Christ as the revelation of man to himself. If the human person wants to know what he is supposed to be, he needs to look to Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, who reveal what humanity without sin should look like.

John Paul's pontificate focused on Christian humanism because he rightly recognized that the problem of man was the problem of our times. No Archbishop whose archdiocese was under Soviet occupation (his included Auschwitz-Birkenau) could deny that.

I fear, however, that there's a certain pushback in some traditionalist Catholic circles that this humanistic focus is somehow inimical to "true" religion. Yes, there is always the danger of excessive anthropocentrism in religion but, as Wojtyła insisted, the degree to which man lives as God wills and the degree to which he lives an authentically human life proceed inseparably in tandem. God and man are not in "either/or" relationship. Arguably, one can maintain that removing either from the equation distorts theology.

Recently discussing the centennial of the famous Scopes ("monkey") trial, I asked whether the real question at stake was not one of "science v. religion" but an anthropological one: Who is man?

For the fundamentalists, man seemed to be the creature God placed into a rapidly constructed but essentially finished Paradise. In other words, the idea of man as "co-creator" is missing. For the evolutionists, man seemed to be just another species, an advanced monkey with nothing exceptional about him.

Neither side recognized man as co-creator, given dominion by God by virtue of his being made in the divine image and likeness, charged with advancing the world to the glory of God through his procreation and his work.

As good Protestants, the fundamentalists seemed to be boxed into a ready-made and finished universe, not just because that's how they read Genesis but because of their theological assumptions: an unfinished world in which man advances Creation challenges the classical Protestant antinomy of God's grace never desiring (and perhaps even tainted by) human works.

Creation, then, seen almost exclusively as a finished divine product, seems a possible way of paving the path to Deism: does Deism, with its narrowed notion of the Deity, not only take God essentially out of the picture, but man, too? It seems human co-creatorship is rendered superfluous by the superbly designed cosmic clock that never needs winding, adjusts itself, and keeps on ticking. In that sense, did Protestantism's negation of human acts pave the way to the divinely absent watchmaker?

In short, it seems that cutting either side out of the picture - God or man - adversely affects our understanding of both. With God absent from His Creation, one loses awareness of the dynamism of Creation: that God not only makes but constantly sustains Creation and remains active in it. Creation instead becomes a static event that happened, not one that continues to happen.

That leads, of course, to the error Joseph Ratzinger points out in The Divine Project: the idea that Creation is separable from salvation, as if Creation has no role to play in salvation history.

With creation "back then" and the cancellation of Providence as a result, it seems we are on a straight path to morally therapeutic deism - a "god" who offers nice ethical teachings designed to make us feel good but who otherwise can be kept to the side, like a fire extinguisher in a box, "break glass when needed." You end up with Dostoyevsky's warning that without God everything is permitted.

The same might be said of the nominalism that Protestantism perpetuated. Nominalism rendered morality an act of God's omnipotent will. It's not that God called X "good" or Y "evil" because they were; they were "good" or "evil" because God said so. Is morality prior even to God's declaration (Catholic), or does God's declaration define the morality (Protestant)?

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