THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
77
Aquinas or St. Augustine to have made any really fundamental
theological mistakes.
In either view, the fundamental intellectual structure of traditional
Catholic thought is fine, just the way it is. New Class Catholicism,
therefore, becomes simply one more anti-Catholic perversion of
genuine clear Catholic thinking -- probably straight out of that foul
anti-Catholic nest, the Enlightenment -- requiring only the perennial
solution, Right Reason, or, if necessary, Obedience to Proper
Authority, to be eliminated.
This solution to the current difficulties within the Church could
actually work. It has in the past. But it may not work this time.
Secondly, if there really is something deeply wrong -- not with the
faith, but with the intellectual structure of Catholic thought about that
faith -- then the problem will not go away, even if New Class Catholics
finally "obey," or are "defeated."
The following needs to be stated plainly. If it is impossible for
saints to make theological mistakes, even terrible theological mistakes,
then theology is not a science, it is a sacrament. So, every Catholic
needs to keep in mind that, since even the Summa theologiae is not one
of the seven sacraments of the Catholic church, then theology is not a
sacrament of the Catholic Church, but the science that studies the
sacraments of the Catholic church. That means that St. Thomas's
theological theories, or even the basic intellectual framework within
which he states his theories, does not have, has never had, and will
never have any sacramental status. If another theological scientist
eventually finds some flaws in them, we should be happy, not sad.
The discovery of a flaw in a great scientist's thinking does not alter
his greatness in the slightest -- since the even higher-quality mistakes
of future science are only possible by standing on the shoulders of his
own, extremely high-quality, mistakes. Secondly, mistakes in thinking
are always bad for us, they are usually extremely difficult to uncover,
and we should therefore always be happy when a theological scientist
finds one, and especially happy if he has a 'solution' to the mistake -- a
'solution' in science meaning an idea that enables us to make higher-
quality mistakes than we had been doing.
The problem posed by New Class Catholicism, then, is a
completely logical -- not an illogical -- extension of intellectual
assumptions that the greatest saints, the greatest traditional Catholic
theologians, made also. At some point, the inherent logic of the
intellectual framework thus assumed leads to seemingly irresolvable
conflicts between
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.