100 Chapter 8
PLENTY TO DO
8 St. Paul Had Plenty To Do On
Earth, St. Therese Has Plenty To Do
In Heaven
The Catholic faith, the sole object of Catholic theology, consists of
a free Event, and a free response to that Event.
1
It is hard to imagine a
blunter refusal of the view that the Catholic faith is a set of time-less
propositions, to be assented to out of the command of both logic and
obedience. Nor is this declaration support for any contention, however
venerable, that the object of Catholic theology is "Sacred Scripture and
Sacred Tradition." For in that formula, the sacraments themselves --
let alone a free response to them -- are not even mentioned.
This is no mere quibbling. The study of "Sacred Scripture and
Sacred Tradition" from a time-less place is the project of New Class
Catholicism no less than traditional Catholicism. Thus the real
difficulty with the venerable formulation is not merely that it justifies
what so often happened within Catholic theology:
1. "The Catholic faith is a free
intellectual response to a free revelatory
Event; neither the Event nor the
response can be subsumed to any
necessity whatever, whether in God or
in man, nor can we furnish any
antecedent account of the prior
possibility of the Event or of the
response: both are given ex nihilo sui et
subjecti, and in their free unity they
constitute the a priori of all theology."
CT, p. 119.
Here is the Catholic Faith, over here
<- - - and over here is the Catholic
Faith also, the words we say about
it,
words which we can clarify by
making them:
propositions commanded by logic or
(if one is not sufficiently 'logical') by
obedience.
The real difficulty is the assumption so 'obvious' it is rarely even
articulated:
Both the sacraments and "Sacred Scripture and Sacred
Tradition" are over here
< - - - and here we are, standing
some place else, in the 'normal
universe,' looking at them, and
trying to understand them.
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.