THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
57
teachings. Acceptance of some dehistoricized cosmology was simply
taken to be equivalent to the use of Reason itself.
However, within all dehistoricized cosmologies, no real freedom,
therefore no real moral choice, and therefore no real responsibility, can
exist, since their possibility is eliminated in advance by the very
framework within which arguments are posed and developed.
It is therefore crucially important to return not only Catholic
theology as a whole, but also, Catholic moral theology, to its only real
foundation, which can never be any dehistoricized cosmology, but only
the sacraments themselves, particularly the Eucharist.
And so it is particularly important to note that,
while the Eucharist is free, anti-necessary, it is also not
arbitrary or incoherent, but rather, it is completely
intelligible.
Indeed, its intelligibility is literally inexhaustible, because it is a
free Event in history, not bound by anything, not conditioned by
anything -- not by the time-less, nor by time. We can understand it, and
we will never get to the end of understanding it.
Thus the Eucharist is also the free gift of Catholic theology: the
human science that can and does really understand the Eucharist
intellectually (for there are other forms of understanding), though
always provisionally, in the form of questions of higher and higher
quality.
Through the Eucharist, Catholic theology then understands the
entire sacramental order of reality -- notably including the moral order
-- and will never get to the end of its understanding of it -- there will
always be questions of ever higher quality to ask.
Because the Eucharist is, in part, the free gift of theological science
to man, it is also the free gift of all of science to him as well, revealed
in the worship of the Church by Christ himself to be the quest to
understand and understand and understand, by means of questions of
higher and higher quality, the utter and inexhaustible surprise given in
the Creation that is good and very good.
As is probably obvious at this point, the thoughts in Covenantal
Theology are not easy to grasp. Covenantal Theology really is a book
for children -- the more you 'know,' the more you possess that will
probably get in the way of understanding it. There is a lot we grown-
ups have to give up in order to understand this very grown-up book.
However, you probably have already absorbed more than you
realize. The next chapter is written in part to demonstrate that. For the
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.