Regarding the Foundations of My Catholic Universalism
“It continues to surprise (shock?) me when people level the ‘human reason’ or ‘inventions of philosophy’ accusation. In reality it is those arguing for an unending damnation that have to rely on modern notions of libertarian freedom (i.e. a freedom undetermined by a telos) or else shroud God when it suits them in the darkness of an impenetrable mystery.”
Mysterian appeals regarding God’s moral character do seem especially misplaced. And the charge that our universalist stances have only ever been grounded in some theologically unmoored rationalism & a priori deductivistic philosophy totally divorced from concrete evidence is indeed just plain shocking.
This all gives rise to my own personal beef with those of my co-religionists who level the charge of my succumbing to some insidious subjectivistic individualism as a magisterium of one.
When it comes to my exercising the primacy of my conscience, just how my conscience was formed & how it is that I aspire & strive to develop a truly upright & mature conscience, I’ve been wanting to get the following off my chest for some time. Thanks to Robert’s observations, today’s the day.
As neither a philosopher nor theologian, my universalist impulse was not elicited by my cognitive mapmaking or by others’ propositional, cumulative case inferences as have been gathered from historical, liturgical, exegetical, patristic, conciliar & hagiographic evidence and placed in the premises of inductive & deductive argumentation.
Like most of us anawim, I suspect, my spirituality was instead formed, first, by right belonging, which spontaneously birthed right desiring, which then freely instilled right behaving. Those were the fruits of being evangelized by my being received into a loving community, where I first encountered Christ in our people gathered, in the Word proclaimed, in the Sacraments celebrated, in living as we prayed & praying as we lived.
Those fruits informed my participatory imagination & shaped the evaluative dispositions of my parental & social instincts, aesthetic sensibilities, moral intuitions & quotidian common sense.
Right believing would surely follow as a fruit of – not only being catechized, but – a truth which came flying in on the wings of all of that beauty & goodness.
Finally, right becoming would come from waking to the reality of the Truth being a Person, Whom I wanted to see more clearly, love more dearly & follow more nearly.
So, yes, my universalist impulse indeed came from philosophy, which, where I’m from, refers foremost to a life well lived.
So, yes, my universalist impulse is integral to and in no way divorced from my being evangelized & catechized as a Roman Catholic. My pneumatological imagination was developed as a teen in the Charismatic Renewal 55 years ago.
As Hans Küng wrote to Karl Rahner in 1973:
“I like to practice theology, Catholic theology, not by ‘playing with ideas in my own subjectivity,’ but in the midst of the great community of believers, in a catholicity of space and time.”
I’m not in the least dismissive of the catechetical, magisterial and propositional. And I hunger for the historical, liturgical, exegetical, patristic, conciliar & hagiographic evidence that might bolster my (hopefully connatural) instincts, sensibilities & intuitions.
I thirst after the latest theopoetic idioms & theologies of nature that can lend ever more systematic coherence to my inchoate propositional stances as I consider them to be indispensable for and integral to my communally formed evaluative dispositions.
Only thing is – I’ve necessarily relied on Robert, Tom Belt, Fr Kimel, DBH, JDW and others (yes, some even coreligionists!) to feed that hunger & slake those thirsts. I am deeply grateful for all of their contributions, academic insights & cogent argumentation, which helps make up for my own lack of academic training.
At the same time, I feel that nonacademic folks in the pews like me have an important role to play as universalist apologists.
We can rely on informal abductive & retortive arguments and appeal to the quotidian common sense, parental instincts, aesthetic sensibilities & moral intuitions that we know in our hearts are shared by, because they were formed in the same way as, so many others!
We can ask others to look within and ask whether they really & truly don’t find the majority eschatological stance to be parentally abhorrent, aesthetically repugnant, morally unintelligible & performatively contradictory? And then we can turn to make a defensible authoritarian appeal to that evidence & argumentation on offer by so many competent theologians — evidence & argumentation that can extrinsically bolster the already legitimate intrinsic authority of our well formed consciences.
Are some of us not entitled to ask, as Küng did Rahner:
“Has it not become clear that I do not want to have anything to do with ‘subjectivistic individualism,’ ‘downright relativism,’ ‘indifferent scepticism’? And has it not become clear at the same time that the attitude of the ‘average Catholic’ toward the Church’s dogmas is by no means always based simply on ‘fundamental error’?”