Brigid,
I agree with your post 21. When all else has passed away, all that remains is faith, hope, and love. The greatest gift of all is love.
Our intelligence is to accepted as the gift that it is. It informs our faith.
The point you and I were making with our preceding posts was how this special gift can lead to
scholarly questioning to the point of being an obstacle to faith.
This is true in my family - all very intelligent people with lots of education; the ones with the most education are the ones most averse to the Catholic Church. The “enlightenment” has caught them and their intellectual pride won’t allow them to submit to anyone else. It’s sad (at least, for now
).
This questioning is not always a bad thing as it helps us respond to the questions of skeptics. I recently found an anti-Catholic evangelistic flyer. An uneducated faith could easily be swayed by the superficial arguments used. For example, the term “pope” will not be found in scripture. However, when the Apostles are listed, Peter is named first. He is also the spokesman for the entire apostolic college when the early Church was being persecuted. Acts says the early believers submitted to the teachings to the Apostles, God’s covenant is irrevocable, a point with which all Christians believe. Therefore, the Holy Spirit would never abandon the Church established upon Peter, the rock.
When I listen to criticisms of mainline churches, I see where these criticisms come from congregations that have not gone through the persecutions that tested the Church by fire.
Having converted from a mainline protestant denomination, that’s a very interesting statement that sounds right. I’ll have to think on it more.
Our scholarly intelligence leads us to research questions to which we do not have the answers. A person of simple faith, lacking our educational background, may simply say “I know what I saw” and leave it at that. He/she may list how God has worked his his/her life while giving thanks for everything received. They are not swayed by arguments and refuse to be drawn in.
My spiritual experiences do not allow for any deviation, it’s true. People will come up with numerous arguments to my beliefs (and certainly have) and it doesn’t sway me - however it is true that I’ve needed to do a lot of learning both originally for my own skepticism and to give an answer to those same people eg. evangelize.
With the faith of a child we accept the gift of faith. Children have a natural curiosity and desire to learn. As we grow and develop in our faith, we use what we have learned to answer the skeptics, researching the questions that develop, and using the answers we find in our response to nonbelievers.
A freeing statement from the orientation to the Theology class I never took dealt with finding answers in the Bible. “When reading scripture, look for the questions not the answres.” It is in looking for the questions that I have found answers. A scholar seeks through research to answer questions for which their may be no answers. **Research can lead to arguments that silence the skeptics. Of course, we never want to overlook that word of knowledge directly received from God that silences our inner skeptic.
**
.
). Before I converted I read the entire CCC, listened every afternoon to CA on the radio for an entire summer and read anything about the true teaching of the Church I could lay my hands on. I know that as much as I read/learn about the Church, there is always something that I don’t understand and that in order to understand those things I need to first believe and be obedient - then the understanding comes. Actually, I’d been praying the Dominican rosary for 5 years before conversion (and I have no idea as to why I started it
- Mary:thumbsup
and looking back now I can see practically a beeline toward the Church during that time. I credit my conversion to praying the Rosary daily and the learning was a mere tool.
