Faith is born of a personal encounter
FAITH IS BORN OF A PERSONAL ENCOUNTER PREMIUM
Tradition and experience
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It is an insight which brings to life the familiar words of the council’s decree Gaudium et Spes, which declares that “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.” It is our human experience and our encounter with Jesus Christ that gives the Church its agenda. This is especially relevant to moral teaching. And that is where friction occurs between faith handed down and faith interpreted through the lens of experience.
This friction is well illustrated by the gradual but fundamental shift in Catholic perceptions of homosexuality. It also applies to the vexed issues surrounding the admission of divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion. The faith as handed down, for instance by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, describes homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered”. But ordinary Catholics have come to realise – by experience – that homosexual men and women are normal human beings with the normal human need for intimacy and love. This experience says that to label them “intrinsically disordered” is insulting, demeaning, and not true. There is nothing wrong with them, but something wrong with a theological account that requires Catholics to set aside what their sincere moral intuition and observation of creation tells them.
The traditional distrust of experience sometimes causes Catholics to question the faith “handed down”, as over church teaching on contraception. Better understood, the point of intersection between faith shaped by tradition and faith moulded by experience could remake Catholic teaching on sexuality into something affirmative rather than negative. This is what Pope Francis was aiming to do with his two synods on family life and the resulting papal document Amoris Laetitia, where he warns against “an attitude that would solve everything by applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations”.
As the theologian Richard Gaillardetz writes in this week’s Tablet, the neo-scholastic logic-chopping of the pre-Vatican II era, still favoured by some theologians, provides the basis for the allegation that Pope Francis’s teaching is leading people into heresy. Yet, as he points out, “divine revelation, the Council taught, comes to us not as a set of propositions but as a person, Jesus Christ, and is given to all the people of God. Its discovery is the task of all believers...”
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