Sin against the Word
Why neither liberals nor conservatives will say, in plain words, what they actually believe.
In my experience, when two groups are locked in a seemingly irreconcilable quarrel over some matter, the closer you look the more likely you are to find a sin they share but manifest in two different ways. Each group sees clearly how the error shows up in the other’s thinking and behavior, yet what makes these two groups find each other as adversaries is precisely their shared sensitivity to the kind of sin they have in common:
Nationalists and cosmopolitan globalists are both unhealthily preoccupied with the place of the nation in human affairs. The former takes it to be the central thing; the latter, the central source of evil.
Ecological activists hold the planetary ecosystem to be worth more than any single species, our own included; their opponents treat nature as a temporary resource, to be used and reshaped without sentimentality — whether in order to build a better world now, or while awaiting the world to come.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Germans’ newly found sense of cultural superiority collided with the Jews’ never-relinquished sense of the same.
People divide over a whole spectrum of subjects, from the role of ornament in architecture to the role of government in society; but nowhere, to my mind, is the divide stranger than the one between liberal and conservative Catholics. Here the sin they share is not some particular thing that one camp would abolish and the other promote uncritically. They like to cast their quarrel as a question of whose love is the real love — but its true root, I would argue, lies in their desperation to interpret the doctrine in a way one could authentically live by.
In other words, it comes down to the Word, to the language of faith. As a convert, I was born into neither camp. I was never drawn to either side, though I found many of the arguments, on both, quite compelling. It never quite dawned on me that I was supposed to choose; so instead I began putting my understanding down on paper, in order to discuss it with those who had been believers far longer than I, and to make sure I had grasped the basic content of the faith. This was where my interest in theology was born — if it can be called theology at all, in the sense we now give the word.
That was more than twenty years ago now, and I have never quite given up the search for a solution to this puzzle since. In fact, I consider it the most interesting problem there is for a software engineer like me. In my professional life, finding the right mental model for the customer’s field is what makes or breaks the software — how long it will live, how organically it can absorb new dimensions and levels of detail. The greatest satisfaction comes when you manage to summarize the customer’s domain so succinctly that they agree it captures the point. And the Church, in the end, is just another domain: a field with its own logic to be modeled. Its factions are stakeholders who must each be able to recognize themselves in the result. Describing Catholic teaching in contemporary terms, in a way that both a liberal and a conservative could read and say “yes, this is what I believe” — that, to me, is something like the ultimate task in my field.
It isn’t so simple, though. To get honest answers to one’s questions, one has to work undercover. It’s no longer as it was in the Middle Ages, when people argued about doctrine the way we now argue about climate change, nationalism, or the role of government — with all the heat and stakes that implies. It’s no accident that we still call such conflicts religious wars, or, more recently, culture wars. But these days, discussing one’s understanding of the teaching in plain contemporary terms is something members of neither faction are willing to do. In my experience, both liberals and conservatives are afraid to discuss in detail what they believe. The former have simply given up talking about doctrine, finding it too academic, too complex, too detached. The latter consider it almost irreverent to depart from the traditional formulations; they try to believe the teaching in its official wording, as written in the catechism. As I’ve said, their shared sin comes down to how they treat the Word — and even the term faith has shifted in this same direction. It no longer means the understanding of the world to which I hold faithful throughout my life; it has come to mean the things I believe to be true even though I cannot grasp them with reason.
After years of trying, I managed to find a mental model, a description in contemporary terms, which I later summarized in a book. It seems to work well when I test it on them undercover. But it works only up to the point where it suddenly dawns on them what I’m actually doing. It isn’t one particular point; it varies from person to person. But that point is always where their theological views abruptly grow very complex — too complex for my analytical brain to get around. At first I took this to mean that, not being part of this communion from the cradle, I would always remain somehow outside the circle: I was trying to penetrate something they understood and I, the outsider, could not. In that phase Catholic doctrine did indeed seem to me like an impossibly complex rocket science — one that could never be summarized in any succinct way at all. One that even the Catholic creed fails to capture, one that the Lord Jesus himself is said to have once doubted on the cross. “And now you get it, my friend,” they would say with a nod.
I don’t think so. I’ve had my own children since, and I’m watching them grow up as Christians from the cradle. There was a time when they couldn’t count to a hundred and were nonetheless able to live a genuinely Christian life. I’ve seen others, young and old, with serious mental disabilities do the same. And the words of the Lord Jesus dawned on me: “You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” If faith comes from hearing the word of Christ, then a succinct version of Catholic doctrine must exist for the little ones — and one must exist also for me, their ever-junior fellow in the faith.
How likely is it, I dare to ask, that a succinct explanation of Catholic doctrine for grown-ups like me is truly unachievable — an expert matter that should never leave the closed door of the academic study, lest it put my faith at risk? I find that hard to believe. Far more likely, it seems to me, that I was able to put an effective one down on paper, and that many other versions of the same must be possible to write.
I once read a novel, Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which is based on the records of the tribunal that tried this poor peasant girl who once delivered France from its deathbed. I was amazed at how incredibly articulate an illiterate country girl could be about theology. Of course she was special — one of the little ones. But I think those of us who can read and write, and who have a fairly standard education, should worry that our refusal to speak about our understanding of doctrine in our own words makes our spiritual lives terribly flat, and our witness to the faith terribly implausible to strangers — to potential converts, as I once was, approaching the Church from outside.
If there were ever a poll on what’s driving the Church’s decline in the West, I would cast my vote for this as the number one cause. And it is one fixable without a council, a movement, even anyone’s explicit permission.