Welcome to the 13th Century

I was amused to see this news story the other day about the man known as "the American Pope" - Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York. Although Dolan's argument against same-sex marriage and others like it (e.g., Pope Benedict XVI's many comments on the subject) might seem convincing on the surface, the problem is that they're based in a theology that's essentially stuck in the middle ages.

At the time, in the first part of the second millennium, ancient Greek philosophy had just been rediscovered among Christian scholars and they were eager to apply its ideas to their own thought about God and faith. From the Greeks, such as Aristotle, theologians like Thomas Aquinas and others got the idea that all things in creation have "natures" - that is, that they're "ordered" toward certain ends or goals that can be discerned in the way they're structured. From this it followed, for instance, that only males and females should express love sexually since, so to speak, "God made them that way." Both in the realm of sexual ethics and for all sorts of other questions related to human life, the message was that all one had to do was look to nature and find there a code for how things were supposed to be - "natural law," as it was called.

For its time and place in the middle ages this theory worked fine but the problem is that its ideas have long since been discredited by various scientific advances. For example, it is no longer believed that the world was created literally in seven days or that somehow God "wrote" natures into human beings or other creatures. Instead, the theory of evolution and other advances tell us that things are the way they are because they evolved that way after a long, complex process.

Now this doesn't mean that we need to give up our belief in God. On the contrary, our faith can be strengthened and sharpened in light of advances in the various realms of knowledge. But what's harmful is when, as in the case of Archbishop Dolan and others, we cling to outmoded ways of understanding reality and lose sight of more important values in the process. For example, although it's no longer viable to think about things having "natures," what if we thought about God or the divine or the sacred - however you want to label it - as something at harmony with nature but also greater than it? What if we saw God as the love that goes beyond mere biology and that transforms reality through the power of compassion and mercy?

As historian Mark Jordan has remarked (Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, U. of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 174), the reason medieval theology eventually needed updating was that it got stuck in the game of reading a strict sense of order into creation when in reality the order and meaning need to come not externally but internally - that is, not from the supposed "laws" of what we know now to be, at least on the surface, an essentially random system but from the order we ourselves construct together when we discover realities greater than and beyond ourselves and nature - things like love, mercy, compassion and the transformation they can produce. Otherwise, as Jordan writes, Christianity devolves into nothing more than a pagan fertility cult, where the only values are those based on physical reproduction.

From Christ himself, we know that there's more to the story than this. Rather than being wed to arbitrary readings of nature's "laws," Christ teaches us higher, deeper values that set us free to live lives that transform both our own existence and that of creation, too. As the apostle Paul once put it, "Faith, hope, and love remain...but the greatest of these is love."

Peace,
Padre Chuck