52 Chapter 4
THE EUCHARISTIC NATURE OF REALITY
Nonetheless, these basic intellectual categories, says Fr. Keefe, will
have to be seriously re-converted to Catholicism if they are not simply
to be junked. There really is no other option available to Catholic
theology, if it wants to be what it says it wants to be, the asking of
intellectual questions of higher and higher quality regarding the faith
of the Church.
For of course, the Eucharist itself, the very heart of the Church,
being grace, is also logically unnecessary, and also must logically
disappear, in all dehistoricized cosmologies:
[Insert the Eucharist here]
< - - - - - - - - - -
and please place all rationality,
everything that is implied or caused
by something else, over here.
Covenantal Theology does more than show, intellectually, how
impossible it has become for Catholic theologians to ask serious
intellectual questions regarding the faith of the Church,
as long as they continue to stand
'outside' the Eucharist, within the 'truth'
of some time-less necessity that rules
out the meaningfulness of the Eucharist
from before the outset.
Very importantly, Fr. Keefe further argues that his is not merely an
'intellectual' argument -- which therefore could be wrong or right. He
shows that the Church has consistently proclaimed in its worship, since
the very day blood and water flowed out of Christ's side, an absolute
rejection of dehistoricized cosmology.
The Eucharist itself, being grace itself, is gratuitous.
Gratuitous not only in the sense of being unearned, but also in the
sense of being totally unwarranted, and therefore the Eucharist is an
absolute rejection of truth that is true because, by some prior
intellectual structure or cosmology, it is found to be necessary,
inevitable.
A little while ago, I said that Catholic theologians have found
Covenantal Theology to be unreadable, because it asks them to re-
convert their basic intellectual categories. That is only one reason Fr.
Keefe's work is unreadable. The other is that Fr. Keefe asks Catholic
theologians to re-convert their basic intellectual categories, not to
change them.
He doesn't ask them to give up their present intellectual categories
for another set of intellectual categories, even his own. He does not ask
them to alter their intellectual categories to fit an idea of the Eucharist,
one that's better. You see, this is simply to repeat the mistake that
orthodox theologians made with Berengarius, nearly a thousand years
ago.
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.