92 Chapter 7
REGARDING OUR STORY SO FAR
Grace, by definition intelligible without being predictable even in principle, thus becomes fundamentally
incoherent within the intellectual and scientific framework chosen by both New Class and traditional
Catholicism. Creation ex nihilo ("out of nothing") does also. For as Fr. Keefe points out, "out of nothing" also
means out of no necessity. The idea of a thing whose existence is not at least an implication of what is already
here is obviously absurd within an intellectual framework in which the only things that can exist must have
their existence by being at least an implication of what is already here. Within that framework, creation ex
nihilo is automatically excluded.
Grace and creation ex nihilo are of course absolutely central to Catholic teaching, and yet both of them are
absurd within the fundamental intellectual and scientific framework of both New Class and traditional
Catholic thought.
Therefore, Covenantal Theology is able to refute a notion that has begun to have popularity within current
traditional Catholic thought: that everything was sound within Catholic theology, until the Enlightenment
perversion of Right Reason. This is why I call traditional Catholic thought "what holes?" Catholicism: despite
the paucity of its influence not only in the secular but even in the Catholic world, it is simply unable to
recognize its own extremely serious flaws.
Of course, Covenantal Theology refutes this fashionable idea (even traditionalists have fashions) simply
by showing that, by its own unthinking adherence, nearly from its beginnings, to dehistoricized cosmology, as
a matter of historical fact Catholic thought itself conveyed that very paradigm of dehistoricized cosmology to
the Enlightenment -- and thus Catholic thought itself has been the fundamental, if not the proximate, conveyor
of dehistoricized cosmology to modern man.
The difficulties Catholic thought has in the modern world must therefore squarely be laid at Catholic
thought's own doorstep. No sinister outside force causes its troubles. These are the result of Catholic thought's
own inadequate intellectual and scientific commitments. (This of course is not to say that the faith of the
Church is going to become less of a hard saying if Catholic thought becomes more intellectually and
scientifically coherent. Man will ever be free to reject the Good News.)
Once the problem of the existence of 'free will' is set up in terms of the paradigm of dehistoricized
cosmology, 'free will' automatically belongs in Mr. Minsky's middle box. Thus Catholic thought as presently
constituted will never be able to refute free will's placement there, in Mr. Minsky's middle box, because it
accepts the same paradigm of dehistoricized cosmology. Catholic intellectual and scientific respectability will
continue to vanish along with that middle box, for Catholics will continue to be forced to 'refute' a truth which
Ecclesiastes never doubted and which Mr. Minsky and all rational scientific people will more and more
establish: that within `flesh,' which is all the world that Man can ever find in isolation from the New
Covenant, 'free will' does not, and can not, exist.
Therefore, it is almost funny that the evangelization of the modern world, so long sought and so
seemingly impossible, can begin with such a simple step. The first step is simply to accept Mr. Minsky's
conclusions, which, after all, only amount to what all Catholics must accept:
Jesus Christ the Son of God died.
It is only within an acceptance of a dehistoricized cosmology, a time-less explanation for the universe, an
intellectual framework in which Catholic thought must end up assigning not only free will but also
Catholicism itself to Mr. Minsky's middle box, that it is not possible to see this. The very day that Catholic
thought accepted the notion that it could stand in some time-less place to understand the Eucharist, was the
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.