I was very uncomfortable with your article in the Easter bulletin about disagreeing with church teaching. If what you propose is valid theology, doesn’t that make truth relative?
No, but it does recognize that we don’t know ALL of the truth quite yet. As one of my old Loyola professors used to say, we always need to approach the divine mystery with a healthy sense of epistemological humility, which simply means we are able to say with a great sense of surrender and awe before our great God “we don’t know it all.” Which, truly, if we DID ‘know it all’, then God would not be God, right?
Our scriptures say, Jesus “grew in wisdom and maturity” and he was the ultimate model and example of a human being, so why would we not need to grow too? It would be our hope that each generation moves a little bit closer to God, and grows in truth, yes? Perhaps the disagreement that we experience in our pursuit of truth and our understanding of God’s revelation is often a result of growing pains within the Body of Christ. But, if in the face of this conflict we resist the urge to “take our toys and go home” we can learn much from what Pope Francis calls “constructive dialogue.” Disagreeing? Perhaps, but listening….always listening with an openness to where God may be inviting us to expand our thinking. Listening for God’s presence and revelation in one another and consenting to the call to “grow up.”
Author, priest and theologian Diarmuid O’Murchu says, “Tradition is not about HANGING on to the truth, but HANDING it on!” Each generation needs to do the hard work of meaningfully updating our core beliefs, through mature reflection on all our new experiences and knowledge gained, so we can effectively hand on the faith to our children. That is why the theology of our grandparents no longer cuts the mustard! It shouldn’t! Because we have grown, it does not connect with our experience. It is not relevant to our lives.
St. Paul said “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I gave up childish ways.” (1 Cor 13:11). And Galileo said “I do not feel obliged to believe that the God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use!” This is not to say our grandparents were “childish” or dim-witted in their faith. They were no doubt prayerful, pious, smart people in touch with God and their theology was exactly where it was expected and meant to be for their time. The question is: can we say the same about ourselves?
“When we are confronted by evidence that the faith in which we were brought up no longer provides an adequate explanation for the nature, meaning and purpose of our lives, we have three choices:
1. We can refuse to accept the evidence and continue as before (but this is rather intellectually dishonest. Putting on blinders has never served anyone well in the pursuit of truth).
2. We can abandon the faith we grew up with because it has proved to be inadequate (this is intellectual laziness, an unwillingness to wrestle and update the faith for our children).
3. Or, third, we can accept all our new knowledge and experience and use it creatively to develop a more mature understanding of what lies at the CORE of our beliefs. This third choice is a stance of critical acceptance, leading to a reinterpretation of our core concepts. It recognizes that every advance in understanding invites us to a deeper faith. (John Feehan).
So, in short, growing in truth does not make truth “relative” it makes it “relevant!”
Send your "Crazy Catholic Questions" to dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at: http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment