A Modern Take on Catholicism

From OpenArt

So this is an argument I hear sometimes. You may find it as thought-provoking as I do.

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”Perhaps you have heard of John Dominic Crossan? He is a bit of a hero of mine. He used to be a monk and a Catholic priest. He fell out with the hierarchy, left the priesthood, got married. He’s a leading researcher in the Historic Jesus programme.

"His position is not mine. He wants to revert to the teaching of the historical Jesus as best we can determine it. But Jesus preached his apocalyptic thesis of the very imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God in very precise historical circumstances: those of a febrile, pre-revolutionary Jewish agrarian society disintegrating under the Roman yoke [see note at end]. His personal, authentic teachings are less directly applicable - in their difficult entirety - for the ongoing civilisations of subsequent eras. I doubt Dr Crossan has a workable programme.

"From one angle I could appear a mere cultural catholic but that is not the case. I'm not invested in ‘theology-as-factual’ at all, of course: no-one of any sophistication could be a Biblical literalist. I have, in fact several takes on Catholicism. 

"Firstly, the existence of the church itself, a significant social force for 2,000 years. Institutionally the church fosters certain ethical stances which, taken in the round, are prosocial (not the reactionary stuff, for sure, which comes from substituting institutional doctrine for the founder’s original message). We'd miss it, or something like it, if it wasn't there - in its vast inertia it is a bulwark against far more profoundly stupid and/or dangerous ideologies.

"Secondly, I would argue that in the purely secular domain the big issues: life, death and points in between, are not addressed well. A culture founded upon individualism has consequences: there are no emotionally-compelling commemorative processes or rites of passage which come close to those offered by the Church.

"Thirdly, the real message of Catholicism is emotional, not rational. The religious experience is at heart an emotional one: God - the concept of God - is mysterious and will not be limited and bracketed by human theorisation. John Henry Newman said, "It is not by logic we believe, but by a multitude of separate converging reasons, by testimony, by habit, by disposition, by growing experience...".

"In our present dominant ideology of secular rationalism (of a very shallow, bounded, biased kind, one should add) the deprecation of collective emotional experience is a felt lack for many people, including myself.

"You will argue that despite all that, the elephant in the room is that the Catholic paradigm is bogus and illusory; I respond thus: it is in the nature of the cultural artefacts humankind has come up with to justify and make sense of existence that they should be equally without a truly compelling foundation. It suffices that they do the job of socialising our young people well and codifying our best ethical morality: Catholicism does a fair job in this.

"In truth Nihilism is the only well-founded philosophy: we're all just atoms and the void; everything is pointless. Period. And in that philosophy the first part is true and the second part is not: as a framework for living it is useless.”

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Note

"The historical Jesus can be retrieved only within the context of first-century Galilean Judaism. The Gospel image must therefore be inserted into the historical canvas of Palestine in the first century CE, with the help of the works of Flavius Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. 

"Against this background, what kind of picture of Jesus emerges from the Gospels? That of a rural holy man, initially a follower of the movement of repentance launched by another holy man, John the Baptist. 

"In the hamlets and villages of Lower Galilee and the lakeside, Jesus set out to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God within the lifetime of his generation and outlined the religious duties his simple listeners were to perform to prepare themselves for the great event."

[From: Vermes, Geza (2010). The Real Jesus: Then and Now. pp. 54–55].