Catholicism: Liberal, And More Than Liberal

The classical Liberal is, of course, entirely correct to assert that belief in the objective existence of God is fully compatible with philosophical and scientific analysis, and that God operates in and through any scientifically investigable process. But such belief can never be restricted to such analysis, nor can that operation be limited to any one or more such processes. Scientific facts cannot be the objects of faith; one is simply obliged to accept them.

Likewise, it is thoroughly orthodox to assert that some sort of experience of God underlies each of the great (or indeed small) theistic religious traditions in so far as any such tradition approximates to Christianity, as well as to recognise that His Natural Law is the root cause of similarities to Christian morality in other ethical systems.

It is also the case that the full humanity of Jesus Christ must be emphasised most strongly while at the same time asserting that He was the man fully conscious of God in the way that we are all partially capable of being. However, the humanity of Christ must never be allowed to detract from His divinity, any more than vice versa, and a mere “degree Christology” fails to satisfy humanity’s need for a saviour who is at once God and Man.

As with science, so with historicity, and especially with the Historical Jesus. While the heart of the Catholic Faith is indeed God’s incarnational redemption of human life and history from within, the various “Quests for the Historical Jesus” have floundered due to the lack of agreement as to the objective criteria for determining which parts of the Gospels are, and which are not, historical in the post-Enlightenment sense.

It is absurd to assume, apparently a priori, that Saint John’s Gospel, the Infancy Narratives and anything involving miracles are by definition unhistorical. An absolute insistence that miracles do not ever happen is not even compatible with agnosticism, much less with Christianity. On the matter of John, it is very much worthy of note that even Professor Dennis Nineham, in his epilogue to The Myth of God Incarnate, cites B H Streeter’s calculation that, except for the forty days and nights in the wilderness, everything attributed to Jesus in all four Gospels could have happened in a mere three weeks. (This argument is also very useful against those who would deny the authority of the Apostolic Traditions.)

In any case, historical criticism cannot be treated as if it existed apart from the several other means of engagement with the biblical text; they need all to be applied within the context of each other, even if sometimes to demonstrate why some of them are potentially useless, or even dangerous. And after all, both the Historical Jesus and the Historic Christ are here and now in the form of the Church, which is the Body of Christ and “Christ in action”.

The Liberal perceives of life after death in terms of the immortality of the soul, and draws a very radical distinction between the risen “bodies” that will be the vehicles for our personalities in the hereafter and the mortal bodies that fulfil such a function for the time being. If it is consistent (which it usually is), Liberalism thinks of Our Lord’s Resurrection in the same way.

But it is very wrong indeed to suggest that He rose with a merely spiritual “body”. No reading of the Biblical text allows either for such a belief or for its co-requisite: that the progression of the disembodied soul in Christ is the final human state in Him, rather than an intermediate state while we await the General Resurrection at the point when the existing physical world is recreated and restored to perfection, but certainly not destroyed.