dennisknapp:
Certainly this is the goal, but does being the Faithful mean more than this? What about faithfulness in regards to belief?
No, I think that those two sum up everything. Of course, with a sufficiently loose definition, they could encompass everything.
As far as belief, I think you have to believe in certain basics such as the Jesus came and died and rose for us. Unlike many apologists, I don’t place a whole lot of value on having all the correct intellectual answers.
I have always been a very technical person, and have placed a lot of value on knowing, intellectually, what the right answers are. I have a MS in electrical engineering and worked doing research and other work for Bell Labs. I worked at Boeing building things that send the computer and electrical signals to drop bombs out of airplanes.
There are scores of factory workers that crank out product everyday and who know their job inside and out. They did not know mine. They had wonderful suggestions for how I did my job, though, because they had lots of experience building things that engineers hand them to build.
Just because these people did not know the technical design and operation of a unit, doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary and valuable toward the production of the product. Not only did I not look down on them but I revered their hands-on experience and their insight in helping me design the equipment so that it is produceable and maintainable the first time around.
Without engineering, their equipment would not have worked. Without production, our engineering would never turn into product.
Every person has his own part. I think it is unnecessary for anybody but apologists and other church leaders to actually know all the details of all this stuff. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, as it were, to know the basic concept of loving v unloving.
I can’t see Christ going around giving His followers a checklist of dogma that they must intellectually assent to in order to be effective followers. He did say to do whatever the Pharisees tell you, so there might be a point to be made there.
I think a church that would insist not only that you follow Christ’s great commandments, but that you must know and abide by a huge set of rules and regulations as well in order to be in good graces, is misguided. Many Catholics literally do not have the brain power to comprehend some of these subtle distinctions, and others honestly try but find their conflicts never get adequately resolved. They can still be great stewards, and do much of the work of the Church.
I like the song “they will know we are Christians by our love,” but I don’t expect to hear a song any time soon that goes, “they will know we are Christians by our theological knowledge.”
Face it, when teaching College Algebra, I often wondered why art majors, who would never take another math class, had to learn the asymptotes of an ellipse. It was my job to teach them that and test them on it, but I could never see any value to their having that information or even to have once gone through it. Luckily last time I taught it, that section was no longer required. Nothing against asymptotes of a hyperbola, and personally I find them fascinating and I wish everybody thought so. They don’t, though.
Here’s another one; synthetic division. I never used synthetic division from the time I had it in high school math until my senior year of college where we were designing radio filters and other networks, at which time we had to be retaught because we had forgotten it. At least when I taught synthetic division (along with long division of polynomials) I knew they mattered to somebody, somewhere, even if not to anybody in this class.
In much the same way, I think there are very few people who actually need to know all the Church teachings on esoteric details such as the details of the Assumption of Mary, papal infallibility, scores of guidelines on culpability for sins and all that. Arguing about this stuff makes it seem like Catholicism is an intellectual exercise. To apologists, maybe it is.
Which reminds me. Real Algebra Teachers like to try to convince their students that they have to learn all this because it applies to the real world. Balderdash. Mathematics applies to so much more than the “real world” that this is not even capturing a glimpse of its beauty. What those teachers really think, but never occurs to them to say, is that they personally love this stuff and that’s why they got good at it.
Not everybody feels that way, though, and that’s what many Real Algebra Teachers just can’t get. A person who doesn’t just naturally thrill at learning all the complex roots of a polynomial equation looks to them like a child who does not want an ice cream cone. It just doesn’t compute. So it seems with apologists, except now I’m in the class instead of at the head of it, looking from the other direction.
Alan
