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WHY IT WAS WORTHWHILE
modern world and thus also 'improve.' Of course, the 'borrowing' and management that New Class
Catholicism has to engage in to carry out this project amounts to putting both New Class Catholic thought and
Catholicism itself into Mr. Minsky's middle box, as Chapter 6 showed.
If we take as established the idea that both New Class and traditional Catholic thought, whatever their
differences, have the same underlying intellectual commitment to dehistoricized cosmology, then traditional
Catholic theology's relation to the New Class also becomes clear.
Even the possibility of 'time-full,' free, responsible, historical, covenantal relation can not even be
imagined within any dehistoricized cosmology, as this book has shown repeatedly. Therefore, traditional
Catholic theology also can not imagine a covenantal relation to the New Class.
As has been illustrated in this book, one of the two major 'resolutions' of the insoluble conundrum posed
by dehistoricized cosmology is the swallowing of one thing by another. For example, in the end, Faith
subsumes Reason, or, alternatively, Reason subsumes Faith. New Class Catholic thought, as Chapter 6
showed, amounts to the swallowing of Catholicism by the New Class. Traditional Catholic theology takes the
eventual, inevitable swallowing to be in the other direction: the subsumption of the New Class into 'Faith.'
This doesn't mean that Catholicism requires either subsumption, of course, but it is to say that Catholic
theology in all its variants must require one of the two alternative subsumptions, as long as Catholic
theology's basic intellectual commitment is to dehistoricized cosmology.
So, deep underneath, the 'problem' of the evangelization of the 'modern world,' the world of the New
Class, gets set up within all variants of present day Catholic thought (and to be fair, within secular New Class
thought, too), as a war. In the end, only one thing is real: 'Faith,' or 'Reason,' and one of those things is
ultimately going to be subsumed into the other.
Consider just the sheer public relations difficulties this sets up for Catholic theology's attempts to
evangelize the New Class. Why in the world would the New Class wish to be subsumed?
The New Class may not be very interested in hearing that it is 'free' because it is bound, "whether it likes it
or not." Yet, according to the fundamental intellectual commitments of traditional Catholic thought, the time-
less 'natural law,' the fundamental nature of reality, binds the New Class, just as it binds everyone else, and
dictates the rules under which the New Class may play its games.
Since traditional Catholic theology can't even find much for St. Therese to do in Heaven, it should be
unsurprising if, at best, its intellectual vocabulary allows only a condescending pat on the head for the New
Class, if it happened to play its fundamentally irrelevant games within the rules, like a good boy. We should
recall that "Pray as if everything depended on God; Work as if everything depended on you" is the kind of
nostrum that is virtually forced, given the fundamentally incoherent stance toward work given within all
dehistoricized cosmology. Nobody's work is actually meaningful within any time-less framework, except by
being subsumed into that time-less framework. Why should the New Class receive different treatment?
Of course, 'liberal' Catholicism is just as vulnerable to this criticism. To the New Class, it could scarcely
matter if its required subsumption is into the Deus Unus or into 'liberation.' After all, all by himself, the New
Class Man can -- and does -- think of plenty of time-less frameworks into which he can enslave himself. The
New Class Man is thus like any other man in that regard: to perform the task of enslaving himself into the
time-less, he scarcely requires the assistance of Catholic theologians, whether 'conservative' or 'liberal.'
Absent words of 'time-full' covenantal relation, the New Class is intellectually correct to conclude that
Christ is at very least irrelevant to it, since the New Class knows itself to be quite capable of constructing
time-less frameworks on its own.
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.