THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
63
Also be warned: what Fr. Keefe might say to Mr. Minsky, if they
ever met, is very probably also not what you yourself might secretly
hope Fr. Keefe would say. You will probably not like Chapter 5 at
first, because it almost certainly will not tell you what you wish to
hear.
The kind of Man -- the kind of universe -- that Man can discover
on his own is a Man and a universe in serious trouble, and there's no
way out. Further, what Man discovers is in fact The Real World. There
simply isn't a 'better' world 'out there' which makes that Real World
untroubling. There really is no way out.
Although that brute reality is plainly re-presented to us at every
Mass, Catholic theology as an intellectual system with fundamentally
pagan intellectual commitments has been intellectually unable to face
it for a long time. On the other hand, the saints, all along and every
day, have lovingly and whole-heartedly embraced that same brute
reality with their very lives -- if not always with their intellectual
theological categories. It's time to make our theological words
correspond better both to their lives, and to the Eucharist.
So, Chapters 5 and 6 may be hard to read, especially if it's your ox
being gored in one of them. Don't say you weren't warned. Covenantal
Theology makes a fundamental critique of current Catholic theology in
all its variants. You almost certainly don't yet understand just how
fundamental its critique is. Like it or not, reading Chapters 5 and 6 will
'help' you understand just that (if 'help' is the right word for better
understanding ideas you may decide you want no part of).
BRIEF DIGRESSION
Mr. Minsky's version of dehistoricized cosmology looks like this:
[CAUSE]
[FREE WILL]
[CHANCE]
Here's a progressive visual transformation of his picture, so you
can see that his picture really is the same as the others. First, we
visually separate out the 'FREE WILL' box:
[FREE WILL]
[CAUSE] [CHANCE]
Second, we rotate the whole picture to the left, and get:
[Here is 'FREE WILL' over here] < - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[CAUSE]
[CHANCE] both over here
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.