THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
165
The New Class man
recognizes that he is fully capable of choosing the time-less on his own,
assumes that time-less 'Reason' and not the New Covenant gives the ground of the Church's teachings,
understands the Church to be using 'divine authority' as a code word for Man's subjection,
takes it for granted that, since Man's subjection is inevitable, his ability to choose his own form of
subjection (and to reject the Church's form of it) is all the 'freedom' he has,
and hears no words about his ability to create something really new, unpredictable, and yet good.
Given all this, why shouldn't the New Class man find Catholicism repulsive, or at least, irrelevant?
In a way, New Class Catholicism defines itself by its acceptance of the 'reality' of the New Class victory
over 'Faith.' For New Class Catholicism, the intellectual 'war' is over. The New Class won. 'Reason' is in the
end always prior to, and subsumes, 'Faith.' This leaves traditional Catholic thought, also intellectually trapped
within dehistoricized cosmology, to 'defend' the only other intellectually conceivable side, to insist that the
'war' has not yet been 'won' by the New Class, that it is still going on, and that its eventual outcome will
necessarily be the ultimate triumph of 'Faith' over the New Class.
Of course, each day that the New Class somehow manages not to
topple under the sheer weight of its manifest ungodliness is yet another
day that has to be 'explained' by traditional Catholic thought,
committed as it is to the view that the New Class will -- eventually --
falter of necessity.
1
Considering the number of times the grandmother of some
traditional Catholic in the United States is cured of her disease by New
Class medicine, or the believer himself uses a computer or an ATM
machine, talks to his wife on his cell phone, watches television, or flies
in an airplane, traditional Catholic theology has a massive daily task, if
it is intellectually committed to showing that the New Class is
fundamentally flawed, and will inevitably fail, in order that 'Faith' can
triumph.
Thus, there is something to the New Class Catholic charge that
traditional Catholic thought is 'fundamentalist' -- inherently
unsophisticated, naïve, or hypocritical. Deep down, both sides
completely accept, even take for granted, a dehistoricized cosmology
of some kind. That means, at bottom, however politely either side
disguises this, that `Catholicism' has to be subsumed into the New
Class, or the New Class has to be subsumed into `Catholicism.' The
problem is, if there's a war going on just below the polite surface, it's a
war that the New Class appears to be winning. Intellectually,
traditional Catholic thought can not coherently explain the abundant
fruit produced by the secular New Class -- although traditional
Catholics also use every ounce of that fruit, up to the very moment that
doing so seems to be inconvenient to 'belief.'
This difficulty with the obvious, manifest, and abundant fruit
1. Of course the New Class will die. This
leaves unanswered the only real question,
whether it will die in Christ. Unable to
imagine covenantal relation, some
traditionalist rhetoric, more blunt about the
'war' it sees between Faith and Reason, can
stoop pretty low. A) Things are 'actually'
awful now -- despite appearances, the New
Class has already failed. One 'proof': the
'unusual' savagery and 'extraordinary'
violence of modern wars. This despite
overwhelming evidence that pre-industrial
societies were, and are, far more homicidal
than industrial or post-industrial ones.
(Across pre-industrial societies almost one
in three young men are killed during
competitions for status and resources, and
men who have killed often do receive
additional status and resources, and have
more children. Daly M, Wilson M (1988).
Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.).
B) The opposite extreme: we're deadened
spiritually and weakened morally by how
nice it is now. This rhetorical tack can verge
appallingly close to rooting for the New
Class to fail, so that 'the Faith' -- presumably
unable to prosper amidst all this New Class
good fortune -- can rise again.
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.