Intellectus quaerens fidem*
Becoming an Adult Christian: a Personal Memoir
* "Understanding (or the mind) seeking faith", adapted from St. Anselm's title Fides quaerens
intellectum
As my parents were not especially religious,
what I came to believe as a teenager was less what they had passed on to
me than the result of my own reading and reflecting over several years,
roughly from the age of fifteen to eighteen. However this process has
never stopped, because truth of course is never seized at a particular
moment, and just as for the church, also for each individual
understanding of the truth is always evolving and deepening.
Strangeness of the Gospel
When I was fifteen years old, living in Vancouver, I began to read the
New Testament for the first time. My initial impression was one of
bewilderment, for two reasons. First, beginning as I did with the
Gospel of Matthew, it all seemed very strange, with the references to so
many things I didn't understand (Scribes, Pharisees, Son of Man, etc.).
It didn't take me long to do a bit of elementary reading, such as an
Encylopaedia Britannica article, and to find out that Jesus'
central message about the Kingdom of God or Heaven had nothing to do
with dying and going to heaven, as I had always supposed. That initial
impression of strangeness left me with the conviction that Biblicism, or
the protestant principle of "sola scriptura" (that the Bible is clear in
its meaning and the only source of religious understanding and faith)
was wanting, for the simple reason that the meaning of the words of the
Bible is by no means self-evident, and reading the Bible requires both
an understanding of the very different culture from which it comes and a
consideration of how the text of the Bible has interacted with questions
of men and women in the Christian community throughout history (i.e.,
"tradition"). So I was oriented towards a sympathy for Catholicism, the
historic faith of the Irish side of my family, from
the time of my first encounter with the Bible.
The Gospel and the establishment
The second source of my bewilderment was that I had come to the New
Testament, at the age of fifteen, with the false preconception that it
would be a kind of charter for the established order, with all the rules
on what we were supposed to do and not do to please those in authority.
I was therefore astonished to find Jesus constantly challenging the
establishment (like the Scribes and the Pharisees), condemning the rich
and powerful ("Woe to you that are rich"), rejecting those who exercise
power over others ("You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it
over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall
not be so among you"); overturning the bankers' tables in the Temple,
and so on, and then finally being executed as a threat to both the
established religion and the state.
I was surprised as well to find, both in the teaching of Jesus and in
the letters of Paul, encouragement to live by a radical ethic of love
rather than by a set of predetermined rules ("The sabbath was made for
man, and not man for the sabbath"; "On these two commandments [of love]
depend all the law and the prophets"; as well as the whole Pauline idea
that we are not justified by works of the law and that love is more
important than even faith: "Faith, hope, love abide; but the greatest of
these is love," etc.). I thus understood that in such matters
as respecting the rights of homosexuals, Christians must give absolute
priority to love over any preconceived dogmatic considerations.
Biblical and theological readings
A few years later, when I was now at university, my understanding of the
teaching of Jesus and his significance for a believer became clearer
after a friend recommended to me New Testament scholar Norman Perrin's
book Rediscovering
the Teaching of Jesus. Using the most rigorous norms of
historical research, Perrin's book dispelled for me some of the
strangeness I had experienced on first reading the gospels, and
elucidated for me the meaning of Jesus' Kingdom of God as the
activity of God as king, and how this was manifested especially
in Jesus' breaking down of social class in the table fellowship at the
very centre of his ministry.
At the time I began my studies in languages and history at the
University of British Columbia, I also started to read some of the
well-known theologians of the twentieth century, both Catholic and
Protestant. At the time they were often discussed in the student
Christian groups I associated with, such as the (Catholic) Newman Club
and the Student Christian Movement: for example, the Lutherans Paul
Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann and the Catholics Karl Rahner and Hans
Küng. The first three had engaged a Christian dialogue with German
existentialist philosophy, especially that of Martin Heidegger. I
attended a weekly study group at the home of the Anglican chaplain,
Father Alan Jackson, where we shared a potluck supper and over the
course of a year discussed the Systematic Theology of Paul
Tillich. I found that Tillich had articulated much better than I
could the view of the relationship between the Bible and its readers
which had informed my own initial reactions. On the first page of his
three-volume work, he wrote: "in its biblistic-evangelical form [Tillich
is referring here to the 'Biblicism' I mentioned above], the theological
truth of yesterday is defended as an unchangeable message against the
theological truth of today and tomorrow ... It elevates something finite
and transitory to infinite and eternal validity."
I saw Tillich's notion of God as the "ground of being", and his
insistence that it is a serious misunderstanding to see God as a
being existing alongside other beings, to be consistent with the
classical Catholic doctrine of God articulated in the thirteenth
century by St. Thomas Aquinas, the doctrine of God not as a
being, but as esse ipsum, as being itself. The ancient
tradition of Christian mystical theology, for example in the fifth
century Greek mystic Dionysius the Areopagite, had observed that if, in
our human language, we must say that God "exists", we must equally say
that God "does not exist". God is thus conceived as that which gives
being, the reason why there is anything and not nothing, rather than
simply a form of infinitely superior intelligence. This concept of God
puts to rest any claims that biological evolution, or any other
scientific fact, has any relevance whatsoever to the question of the
existence of God.
The New Testament and Mythology
Around the same time I came across Rudolph Bultmann's essay "New
Testament and Mythology (or "The mythological element in the New
Testament"). Bultmann was known as the most prominent New Testament
scholar of the century, an expert on the source analysis of the gospels
and author of the exhaustive, two-volume Theology of the New
Testament. On first reading I found his essay "New Testament and
Mythology" unsettling, even if it was written by a scholar who was a
believer and who knew the New Testament inside out. Superficially,
Bultmann seemed to be dismissing Christian doctrines that I had come to
believe as untenable myths. But I soon realized that for Bultmann the
terms "myth" and "mythology" were not negative and dismissive, but
neutral and descriptive.
I had at this time some undergraduate student friends who were studying
philosophy, and who would challenge me to articulate exactly what I
meant when I would refer to these doctrines. In discussion with
them I came to realize that religious language was of a different order
than the language of science, and that, for example, no neuroscientist
would be able to examine someone's brain and determine that the person
was "divine". So I came to understand that religious statements were
statements of value, rather than empirical observations of the
type a scientist would make, and that these statements of value were
expressed in a symbolic language that naturally varied from culture to
culture. I found the analogy of a flag instructive. Physically a flag
is simply a piece of cloth, but in the symbolic order it is endowed with
a value, which is no less real than an empirical or scientific
reality, and which transcends the physical composition of the flag.
This realization made Bultmann's analysis much less threatening. He
argued convincingly that the "three-storied" world of the New Testament,
with its heaven in the sky, its miracles, its spirits wandering around
earth, and other such features that are no part of our experience, was
simply the conceptual framework in which the authors of the New
Testament had to express themselves, and is in no way the essence of the
Christian message. "Can Christian preaching", Bultmann asked, "expect
modern man to accept the mythical view of the world as true? To do so
would be both senseless and impossible. It would be senseless, because
there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the
world as such [and] impossible, because no man can adopt a view of the
world by his own volition -- it is already determined for him by his
place in history." Rather, for Bultmann, the Christian message should
be understood in terms of our concrete existence in the world
("existentially"), of which he gives a number of examples in this and
other essays.
French literature and tolerance
In my first year of university I studied French literature and made the
acquaintance of Renaissance (16th century), Classical (17th century) and
Enlightenment (18th century) Catholic writers like Montaigne, Descartes,
and Montesquieu, who had come to understand the cultural relativity of
the symbolic language which expressed religious truth. Even as a child
I had realized that if I had been brought up in a different culture I
would have different ideas, and especially different symbolic points of
reference. These writers impressed upon me the importance of not
assuming that religious symbols are the best just because they are
mine, and that the complement of my own faith had to be respect
for that of others.
For example, reading Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), the
imaginary correspondence of Iranians visiting Paris and observing the
"strange" customs and religion of the French (this is written by a
Catholic Frenchman!), I found the character Uzbek describing different religious practices
(Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu) and concluding that whatever
religion one accepts, it teaches that God loves all human beings, and
that what pleases God, irrespective of our religious practices and
symbols, is for us also to love all human beings "en exerçant envers
eux tous les devoirs de la charité et de l'humanité."
The Church as the human race
Encountering the writings of the Jesuit Karl Rahner, generally
recognized as the most important Catholic theologian of the twentieth century,
also helped me to refine my ideas during my years at the University
of British Columbia. My thought was particularly influenced by his
essay "The
Future Reality of Christian Life" (1967), where Rahner envisaged a
future Western society that will not be a Christian society, but rather
one where the "future Christian will be living as a member of the little
flock in an immeasurably vast world of non-Christians." Asking "How in
such circumstances is he to think of his Church?", Rahner replies: "He
will be able to do it only if he views the Church as the
sacrament of the salvation of the world."
The Church, then, is not comprised of those who boast that "we
are saved," but rather proclaims to humanity (in taking up St. Paul's
theme that salvation is not for a particular people, but for all):
"you are saved." Rahner's ideas were later reflected in the
wording of the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which,
quoting the Second Vatican Council of the nineteen sixties, affirms that
"To the Church, in different ways belong ... the Catholic faithful,
others who believe in Christ, and finally all mankind" (paragraph
836).
So the different pieces in my understanding of what it meant to be a
Catholic Christian were coming together during my first years of
university study.
During these years, the long and horrible war in Vietnam was still going on, and I found unbearable news of
the daily atrocities where American aircraft bombed poor farming villages and dropped napalm on their
inhabitants. More recently, the war in Iraq, with its many tens of thousands of civilian victims and the
razing of entire cities like Fallujah, and the offensive war of occupation in Afghanistan, where NATO
forces have knowingly killed thousands of innocent civilians with their bombing and shelling, as well as
the big-power "proxy wars" in Syria and Yemen, have caused me the same anxiety.
The Gospel of the Prince of Peace
Already in high school, when I was first reading the Gospel, I grasped
that Christ's commandment "Love one another" could not possibly mean
"Bomb one another to a pulp," and that it was not just to Peter that
Christ had said: "Put your sword back into its place, for all who take
the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52). In my well-worn
copy of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, I had underlined
the sentences where the bishops of the Church proclaimed that the modern
development of "scientific weapons" required "an evaluation of war
with an entirely new attitude," and specifically that warfare which
results in "the destruction of extensive areas along with their
population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits
unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation." I came to believe that this
era is no time for compromise with evil power, and that Christians
should return to the practice of the first three centuries of the
Church, when they simply refused military service.
My reflection on Christian freedom confirmed this conclusion. I
realized that the moral freedom of a Christian was totally
obliterated if he or she surrendered to some other person (or to the
state) the right to determine if they must lie, steal, torture, or
kill.
My attraction to the Catholic Church was fortified by the courageous
resistance against war by a number of American priests, nuns, and monks
(like Thomas Merton), especially the Jesuit Daniel
Berrigan and his brother Philip.
The different gifts of the Spirit
So there is the story of how I came to develop my formative
understanding of what I believe as a Catholic Christian, but, as I said
at the beginning, my beliefs are by no means some kind of closed system,
and I am always learning. When I was a little older, Pope John Paul
II's 1981 encyclical letter on human work and against market capitalist
(or Soviet-style state capitalist) "economism," Laborem exercens, and his 1998 encyclical on
faith and reason, Fides et ratio, for example, both had for me
many helpful insights.
More recently, Pope Francis' remarkable 2015 encyclical Laudato si: On Care for our Common Home is in my view an enlightening synthesis
of the environmental emergency, its links to capitalism, and Christian responsibility in dealing with the
crisis.
Christian faith, however important it is for the inner spirit and personal relations, has always for me
meant as well an engagement with life in society and the real world. I have stated in a public talk at the university that
right
now the real world is facing three major crises: the environmental crisis, the permanent state
of war, and devastating worldwide poverty. My personal faith engagement thus means -- even if,
remembering what I read in Karl Rahner years ago, I do not necessarily announce my faith motivation -- at
least partly, responding to these human crises.
St. Paul has emphasized the many different gifts and contributions of
Christians, and I do not of course believe that the kind of engagement I
am speaking of here is necessary for every Christian, just as I would
never say that my particular understanding of the Gospel message is more
complete or more important than those of others. I am speaking only of
my own path. On the contrary, the engagement of many others seems much
more important than my own.
James MacLean
Other essays by James MacLean