If we are so limited by our reason and intellect, why....?

[fisherman_carl]

Aquinas said that because of our limited understanding the only thing we can really know about God for sure in this life is that he exists.
“I am who I am”.

 

[laocmo]

Aquinas said that because of our limited understanding the only thing we can really know about God for sure in this life is that he exists.
“I am who I am”.

If this is true, and I really believe it is, then I wasted at least three semesters in a Catholic university studying Aquinas and all his “human” opinions of what God is and is not.

 

[DCNBILL]

If this is true, and I really believe it is, then I wasted at least three semesters in a Catholic university studying Aquinas and all his “human” opinions of what God is and is not.

But there is the Incarnation, the Church, the Sacraments, the Scriptures, all of these things God has given us and there is much to study about each of these in order to gain an understanding of how God communicates Himself to us.

 

[o_mlly]

If this is true, and I really believe it is, then I wasted at least three semesters in a Catholic university studying Aquinas and all his “human” opinions of what God is and is not.

Be patient: those studies will come in handy, if not now, later.

St. Thomas raised the basic question: What does Christ mean to a world made by God in perfect order and disrupted by original sin? All the *Summa *attempts to answer that question, an answer that had been satisfactory for centuries: Christ has restored the original order of the world. Christian theology described the religion of order, and its doctrines are about a return to original order. Aquinas, a theologian first and philosopher second, acknowledged revelation chronologically first but made reason primary.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . You wanna try again?

“When today we try to reason out things about our faith, like God’s omnipotence, transubstantiation, free will, etc , we are told by various members of this group that we, being human, are profoundly limited by our reason and intellect, and that we greatly overestimate your own knowledge and the accumulated knowledge of humanity. If all this is true, then why are we expected to put any faith at all in the teaching of Aquinas, and the other early Church followers. They were just as human and limited as we are today.”

I am not sure I can. You might get the response you want if you make the question clear and simple.

But, at that point, if you pray, no one will have to; it will answer itself.

Are your questioning the reliability of posters here? the nature of reason? the limits of the intellect? what it means to rely on our thoughts? our understanding of the thoughts of others? the extent to which words can ever express what is Divine? the nature of and location of “accumulated knowledge”? the extent to which we should have faith in our understanding of what others say? what they actually might be referring to? if there actually is a church, or is it illusion? In other words, there are too many assumptions and sub-questions.

I would rephrase it as a statement, that would go something like “I don’t know what to believe any more.”’
Having admitted my own limitations, I would place it in God’s hand to guide me to do His will.
That is all that matters and everything else that is good will flow from that.