The World's Christians. Douglas Jacobsen

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СКАЧАТЬ that decriminalize or encourage behavior deemed immoral by the Catholic Church. In recent years, some Catholics have taken public stands against abortion and LGBTQ rights and other Catholics have been involved in antiwar protests and rallies for peace and justice. Whatever their particular cause, many of these participants are motivated by a spirituality that is deeply rooted in Catholicism’s assumption that human beings are morally interconnected.

      Intellectual rigor

      Perhaps more than any other Christian tradition, Catholicism affirms the importance of bringing faith and reason together. The Benedictine monk Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) coined the phrase “faith seeking understanding,” and those words have been a Catholic touchstone ever since. A hundred years later Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), one of the most influential theologian in all Catholic history, wrote that the goal of the Christian intellect is to use reason and intelligent reflection to turn mere belief into genuine knowledge. The foundational affirmation of the Catholic intellectual tradition is that Catholic faith properly understood and human learning at its best will never truly conflict, but will instead be mutually enlightening.

Faith has not always been properly understood and human learning has not always been at its best, so apparent conflicts arise frequently. History is full of examples, including the church’s unfortunate condemnation of Galileo in the year 1616 for his sun‐centered, rather than earth‐centered, view of the universe. But 1616 is a long time ago, and the notion that faith and reason, or science and religion, exist in a state of perpetual warfare is a fundamental misrepresentation of the Catholic tradition. Most Catholic intellectuals believe that, over time, further reflection and better information will lead to coherence between faith and learning. No one made this case more strongly than the British Catholic theologian John Henry Newman (see Voices of World Christianity 2.1).

      Seasoned by a relatively high assessment of human intellect, the Catholic tradition has developed a style of theology that differs significantly from Orthodoxy. The Orthodox tradition, as explained in the previous chapter, has been apophatic in its theological orientation, often choosing to remain silent rather than to speak and take the risk of misrepresenting God or Christian truth. The Catholic tradition has taken almost the opposite approach. Though acknowledging that care must be exercised when using earthly images or ideas to describe God, the Catholic tradition says that using images and ideas is a necessary part of any robust articulation of Christian faith. Rather than remaining silent, Catholic theology is more likely to pile images and ideas on top of each other in its attempt to explore the depth of God’s being and relationship to the world.

The Catholic tradition insists, however, that these earthly images and ideas must be understood analogically when applied to God. An analogy describes one thing as being similar to something else, but always in a limited way. Thus, for example, Catholics say that God created the world in something like the way an artist creates a work of art, but of course there are differences. God does not have literal hands like an artist, and Catholics believe that God made the world ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), which is something no artist can do. Every other analogy has similar limitations, but these limitations are not necessarily defects; they allow room for intellectual advance. For example, the Catholic Church ultimately came to accept the theory of evolution by pointing out the limitations in the analogy of God as creator. To affirm that the world has an origin and purpose outside itself – that it was created rather than simply existing – does not necessarily imply that Catholics can claim any special knowledge about the details of how the world scientifically came to be. This kind of analogical thinking has allowed the Catholic tradition to develop and affirm many diverse insights regarding both God and the world.

Voices of World Christianity 2.1 John Henry Newman on the Pursuit of Truth

       John Henry Newman (1801–90) was an Anglican priest who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845. After many years of service to the Catholic Church, and especially to Catholic higher education, he was given the honorific title of cardinal in 1879. In 2019, Newman was declared a Catholic saint. While many religious converts demonize their past, telling stories about moving from falsehood and confusion to new and absolute truth, Newman was different. For him, life was an unpredictable journey. He believed that human beings typically move toward truth slowly, haltingly, and indirectly. When Newman was asked to help establish a new Catholic University in Ireland, this concept of slowly unfolding truth was central to his vision of Catholic higher education.

      Excerpt from The Idea of a University (1852):

      I still say that a scientific speculator or inquirer is not bound, in conducting research, to every moment be adjusting [that research] by the maxims of … popular traditions … being confident, from the impulse of generous faith, that, however [one’s] line of investigation may swerve now and then, and vary to and fro in its course, or threaten momentary collision or embarrassment with any other department of knowledge, theological or not, yet, if [we] let it alone, it will be sure to come home, because truth never can really be contrary to truth … There are no short cuts to knowledge, nor does the road to it always lie in the direction in which it terminates, nor are we able to see the end on starting. It may often seem to be diverging from a goal into which it will soon run without effort, if we are but patient … Moreover, it is not often the fortune of anyone to live through an investigation; the process is one of not only many stages, but of many minds. What one begins another finishes … This being the case, we are obliged … to bear for a while with what we feel to be error, in consideration of the truth in which it is eventually to issue.

      John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 229–30.

Salvation

Salvation in the Catholic tradition is set within a grand narrative of God’s eternal love for the world. God made the world out of nothing, out of an overflowing abundance of divine love (see Voices of World Christianity 2.2). And God created people as beings who have the capacity to experience that love and reflect it back to God. Catholics believe that this original relationship of love between God and humanity has been disrupted by humanity’s sin, but despite that disruption God’s love for humankind continues. God is constantly trying to woo people back into the loving relationship for which they were created. This explains why Christ said that the greatest of all the commandments is to love God with all one’s heart, mind, soul, and strength. The love of God is “commanded” not because it is a duty that humanity owes to God, but because people can only truly and fully be themselves when they exist in a mutually loving relationship with God.

For individuals, the day‐to‐day experience of salvation has a somewhat different focus: the forgiveness and elimination of sin. Sin is an attitude or action that transgresses God’s law or that directs humans away from the life‐affirming goals and purposes for which they were created. Sin often takes the form of wrongful attachments to crass desires, the dogged pursuit of material comforts which makes people less than they were meant to be and which undermines the bonds of human care, affection, and solidarity. The Catholic tradition makes a distinction between original sin and subsequent sins. Original sin, which humanity inherited from the first human beings (Adam and Eve) who also committed the first sin, consists of a lack of trust in and love for God. The various specific sins which people commit, ranging in gravity from mortal sins such as murder and adultery to venial sins such as telling a “white lie” or being intentionally rude or disrespectful to a neighbor, all flow from this underlying defect in human nature.

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