In college, I wasn’t aware for some time that various dogmas of the academic world were steering me. Wanting mostly to party and pass classes, I was easily walked into the secular dogma, to the point that I was converted to the progressive worldview. I recall English and History classes being full of new interpretations that turned nearly every literary or historical person into either an oppressed or oppressor class, (or queer/not queer). Groupings of people were very, very important, which flew in the face of my childhood clubbing of the idea that stereotyping by group was evil. Now it was good to group people.

Of course, these were the correct interpretations, at long last! One professor insisted that Abraham Lincoln, King David, Jesus, Billy Budd, and Queequeg the harpooner were all gay. We spent considerable time on that topic, despite it having little or nothing to do with the class I thought I had signed up for. How did we know their sexual preference? Well, the evidence was right there in the text: these folks all had close friendships with other men, therefore, gay. Friendship between men, I learned, always implies sodomy is happening. This was the secret knowledge, the Gnostic gospel, of a professor. We just weren’t mining what was being told between the lines, but with her magic reading goggles, we would be set free from the shackles of the Western Canon and sexual oppression. This professor, and other professors, gently nudged me toward ideas that undermined the worldview I thought I held. Critical Theory and Queer Theory were the latest things, so those worldviews were being evangelized to us students with nearly the same vigor as St. Paul telling about Christ in Ephesus.

As a paying student, I provided a captive audience to the message.

As I was receiving this instruction and the evidence was presented for these interpretations, I recalled that quote from Nietzsche, where he mocked Christian apologists and theologians for using the approach of “when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” He mocked Christians who found any stick of wood or twig in the Old Testament as a reference to the Cross. I know what Nietzsche meant, as the typology of linking Old Testament to New Testament does sometimes feel like a reach. But Christians are not alone in doing this. My professor obsessed with sexual preference was doing the same thing. From Sigmund Freud onwards, an obsession of finding sexual references in every possible shape, led to our modern priesthood of professors to seeing everything like a ten year old boy who had just discovered a Playboy magazine. Then there was Nietzsche himself, constantly finding his own thought as evidence for his own genius (his last published book was titled, Why I am So Wise).

While I was taking these classes and receiving the transmissions of modern secular dogma, I began to realize that the close readings of texts were as strange and stretched as anything a Christian interpreter ever came up with. Actually, they are more than stretched, they are now completely broken.

If Christians were finding the Cross in every stick of wood of the Old Testament, then the modern theorists were doing the same for sex and oppression. The problem is that there definitely are signals and references that exist regarding the Cross, but taken to the extreme they fall into a level of absurdity. But for my instructor that was looking for disordered sex in literature, any friendship, any handshake, any nod, squeeze of the hand, or look, or glance, any wink became undeniable evidence of a character’s sexual intentions.

The idea of friendship disappeared.

There was only one type of love and that was the kind where people must sleep with one another. There was not a separation of types of love, which anyone in the real world understands. There is physical love (eros). There is friendship (philos). And there is the highest kind of love, which is sacrificial, unconditional love (agape). But in modern lit crit circles, there appears to be only the erotic. These interpretations are a one-trick pony and after a while, the trick gets to be routine and dull. A never-ending obsession with sex as our identity becomes as pathetic as the pursuit of crystal meth, because it’s just one small part of life. In fact, the way we understand sex as an identity makes our bodies and lives so cheap, that it reminds me of the great quote from C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory.

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Mud pies in the alley are fun as a child. But they lose their appeal, when the totality of life is so wonderful and awe-inspiring that to focus on one small aspect of existence is to miss the forest for a tree.

The obsession with sex and oppression came off like a brain fever for two of my professors, because they could not speak for long without beginning to sound just like the overreaching Christian who grasped to link any wood object in the Old Testament to the Cross. The further the obsession became clear, the more thin the argument became. The linkages began to look like a crazy person’s conspiracy wall, where every bit of art, literature, and history was connected by red yarn, to prove that Western Civilization was just a grand scheme to oppress and to stop people from the false heaven of “sexual freedom”.

Instead, what I became convinced of is that the modern dogma is all one huge, ongoing protest to deny that sexual sin exists at all. The professors were doing exactly what every individual or group has done who doesn’t like the existing rules against sin; they break the rule and form a new group that allows and argues for the sin. People really, really think they hate the Catholic church because it consistently sticks to a well-defined list of sins, and doesn’t budge. But that is it’s job, to preach and defend the faith and morals set forth by Christ, and carried forward by the Apostles, and by the Bishops ever after. Thus, they see the church as just a set of rules that is hateful. But the church doesn’t hate anyone - they just won’t affirm your sins. If you see the Church as a list of rules, you don’t understand your sin. If you don’t know your sin, you are still in darkness, because you don’t know why you need a savior. And if you don’t know your weakness and need for a savior, you will never know Christ. Period. When Jesus asks the apostles after washing their feet, “Do you understand what I have done for you?”, he is talking to you and I. To each of us, God asks, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” If you do, then you’re life will radically change. Until you understand what the Creator has done for you, by coming here incarnate as a man - to forgive our sins, to transform our suffering, to defeat the devil, to regenerate our lives in water and spirit, and to raise us to eternal life - you won’t understand who he is or what he has done for you.

The main job of the Catholic Church is actually pretty simple: to speak truth, and speaking truth in love means saying no to sin. But even more so, it’s job is to ask you, “Do you understand what Jesus has done for you?” And if you understand what he has done, your sin and need for a savior will be blindingly clear.

Remember, Jesus wasn’t killed for affirming the sins of others, he was killed for calling out their sins. Anyone who considers their sin to be a virtue, is on the wrong side of history, because God is outside of time and space - all of this time that we live in has happened for God. It’s all done already. Thus, rejecting God and denying sin are the same thing. History is already done for God, and we have this glorious opportunity to cooperate or reject his grace right now. Accepting his grace doesn’t just mean you go straight to euphoria, if means you recognize what he has done for you, and then you begin to see your flaws. You must go through the purgative way before you get to the illuminative and unitive way. Today, people want to jump straight to the unitive, but there is no pill or magic spell or transporter to skip the journey, as Dante showed us so well in the Divine Comedy.

Five hundred years ago, protests against the rules formed new denominations, where our brothers in faith splintered into many groups that tweaked the rules to fit their desires for control and to allow some sins to be vindicated. But today, academics go to great lengths to go deeper to find that sin itself does not exist, that what we call sin is actually a feature of our DNA. Today, we don’t go by “faith alone” but much of our non-spiritual direction uses “reason alone,” and reason alone in the wrong hands is a slippery as faith alone.

A tendency toward alcoholism and same-sex attraction or gambling addiction are seen as genetic outcomes. But even if that’s true (and it’s very likely not true) the choice to drink to drunkenness or to have sex outside of marriage or gamble away the mortgage is still a choice. These are still actions beyond the temptation. “Lead us not into temptation,” is a prayer to ask for help in battling our concupiscence, also known as our urges to choose poorly. We all have our cross to bear. What we are tempted by does not require follow through in performance.

We really want to deny something is a sin because we like the sin, and we go to great lengths to find cheerleaders that will confirm our desire. Interestingly, the sins that we want to deny, those related to alcohol or sex, we can pin to DNA, but no one does this for racism, which is also a sin. There is a sense that we can deny sin that “doesn’t harm anyone but myself” but that’s the problem. Sin always harms other people, even if the action happens alone or with another consenting person. There is no other result of sin but harm to oneself and to others, which is why Jesus and all of sacred scripture prohibits these actions. For fans of the show Breaking Bad, Walter White lives by “reason alone” and he always has reasons that make perfect sense to him and he portrays his actions externally as “doing it for the family,” while he destroys lives around him like a human volcano throwing lava everywhere.

Chapter 7 of Mark shows a nice, short list that will save a lot of time, since people like to argue over what Jesus accepted and what he prohibited. He lists 13 things. It’s not like he hid this list. It’s right there.

“From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” (Mk 7:18-23)

Drunkenness (licentiousness and folly), sex outside marriage between a man and a woman (adultery and unchastity), and racism (evil thoughts and malice and deceit and arrogance) are all covered here. It’s all very simple really. Jesus says, “Here’s the list: don’t do these.”

In fact, evil thoughts and unchastity are the very first two things he mentions, which apply directly to racism and sex outside of a valid marriage between a man and a woman. So cheer up, there’s a little something in Mark 7 for both of our American political parties and foes to soak up. Every human being is guilty of one or more of these thirteen things. The only person who is not guilty is Jesus. The greatest sin of all is to forget this. As always, pride is the gateway to sin, since it infects the heart, and the heart is where all the rest of these thirteen things take root.

But I have not come this far to merely complain about professors or excessive allegory in Christian thought. I get what is happening today. We don’t want to admit our sin any more than Adam or Cain wanted to. We want to divert the blame.

We are all arguing for our favored worldview and trying to recruit others to our side. We want to win. We want to feel righteous. No one wants to be wrong. This is all expected. This is what we like to do. This is not new.

My point is not to mock German philosophers or Critical theorists or Christian interpreters. The whole game of the tree of knowledge is “reason alone.” It is to argue your case against the will of God.

Sports team plan strategy and tactics to win games. So do intellectuals with arguments. This is also why so much ink is spilled in making the case for each side. We require reason to make arguments, and ideally the argument aligns with our experience and feelings, but this doesn’t always happen. This is why people switch sides as the phases of life unfold. Given enough time and grace, the rebellious teenager becomes a gentle grandparent. Even in our own lives, the lion lays down with the lamb, but it may take about eighty years to find a comfortable place to settle. Life experience and age carry great weight in determining what we believe is true, and in each phase of life we consider our experience to be the right one, the truth, the accurate assessment. Based on our experiences, we can use reason to determine what is true and good.

But there is a problem in relying solely on pure reason. The problem is that pure reason ignores that a spiritual side exists at all. As soon as we do this, we can reason sin right out of the picture, as if it was White-Out. But just like using White-Out, it doesn’t remove the ink or pencil mark beneath it, it’s only covered up. It’s still there. We know it’s still there, and the paper is sullied beyond repair, unless some supernatural favor can clean it up. Reason can argue and twist anything into what we want it to be. For Luther, he recognized that sin was still there, and like the White-Out metaphor, he said that Jesus’ redemption made us like a “dung hill covered in snow.” So he reasoned that we were still a piece of crap, but had some White-Out on us. He also pretty much tossed out free-will, and whatever he didn’t toss out, Calvin heaved out the window shortly thereafter. Both of these men were trained as lawyers and you can see how their “faith alone” argument stemmed very much from an underlying line of reasoning that laid the pavement for the truck of unbelief and bad interpretations of scripture to ram its way through Christendom for the past 500 years. Today, we have everyone arguing for “reason alone,” but this devolves quickly into a pursuit of power, because unless you are using reason like Socrates, subjective bias creeps in quickly. Thus, in my university classes, the “reasoned arguments” of my Critical Theory evangelist professor was unmoored from objectivity entirely so that every character with a friend in every book could be sniffed out and spoken of solely in terms of sexual identity. With reason alone, or faith alone, when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is the problem with ideology, and Catholicism is the antidote and counter-culture that cures this hammer/nail problem. Reason alone assumes certainty can be had in everything, while living with “faith and reason” allows for the mystery and nuance, which is exactly what makes life with this body and soul interesting.

If we only use argument to test our world, we cannot have a full game of life, because there is more to our body and soul than reason alone. There is a spiritual life. It’s like playing tennis against a wall instead of against a real person. Eventually it becomes boring, because there are no surprises. The ball volleys back at the exact angle you expect. It’s a game of Pong…forever. There is no spirit or life in the game. Also, you can never beat the wall, because it cannot fail to return the ball. You can never finish and shake hands with your opponent. When the spirit enters your life, then you can play a full game. Like Jacob: you can wrestle with God, but you can’t wrestle with him unless you first admit he’s there. Wrestling with yourself is even worse than playing tennis against a wall.

In the end, to my surprise, the root problem that I was trying to solve wasn’t an intellectual problem at all. There was a larger problem to solve. The problem I was trying to solve was spiritual, not material. It was not a mind problem, it was a soul problem.

The soul surpasses the mind. For non-believers, soul and mind may seem like the same thing, but the soul transcends the mind. Collapsing the mind and soul into one thing kills the spiritual life. If you think of mind and soul as one and the same, then you have walled body away from soul. You have placed the mind solely on the body, in the material world. But the mind doesn’t belong only with the body, nor does the soul disappear just because you built a wall. Souls can pass through walls.

If you must wall off the concept of mind, better to place it with the soul rather than the body, since the mind is where prayer happens. If the mind can only serve the body, then your thoughts can never leave the ground, and you will be stuck with the pursuits that end in the Big Empty - wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. If there is only Mother Earth, then nature with all it’s beauty is also the same nature that is red in tooth and claw. There is only competition.

Better yet, tear down the wall, admit the soul, and embrace the mind as the intermediary. The mind and heart link body into soul. The denial of an immortal soul puts a limit on life, and a soulless mind makes the body a robot. The connection to God is in the soul. A mind that doubts the soul must invent meaning. Then come the strange gods, because they must. The gaping hole where the soul sits invites the odd gods to move in and take up space. They makes themselves at home and eventually will evict you if you don’t evict them first.

We can pretend the soul isn’t in the room, but the elephant is still there. No matter how many blankets or tarps we use in trying to cover the elephant, it remains. Also, the elephant is too large to remove from the room, so it’s there to stay. You may evict the unwanted housemates, but not the soul.

The mind requires arguments as food for thought, but argument does not give life. Argument brings strife, not peace. To have peace, the mind needs certainty. To have life, the mind needs joy. This certainty and joy must come through the spirit, not from argument. The spirit is what animates and gives our body life.

We think we need all the answers, but accepting that there is mystery beyond our knowledge can settle the unsettled mind. In the end, it wasn’t an argument that won me over, just like it wasn’t an argument that convinced the illiterate masses of people who followed Jesus before the Gospels were even written. Yes, the story of Jesus provides an argument, but it is more than merely an argument. As any doubting middle-school child knows, there are flaws in the argument. The resurrection stories alone sow doubt with the inconsistencies and contradictions, so clearly the argument of Jesus’ story alone is not the only force in play.

Something beyond argument changed the early Christians. Something beyond explanation changes people today. There was no book or argument that clinched the deal for the converted. There were no books at all to begin with. There was the story that people heard, of the victory of Jesus over death, but even that alone was not enough. We know that the story alone is not enough, because scholars who study for a lifetime struggle to reconcile the story of Jesus with the evidence. Doubt over the resurrection and his life in general makes writers and preachers talk about Jesus as much now as they did in the first century.

Yet a person who cannot read at all can completely understand. People make radical life changes, as they are impacted so profoundly that it was clearly more than an argument that reached them. A poor person or a rich person can be equally affected. People from different nations and backgrounds can kneel beside one another as brothers and sisters, in complete unity on the basic facts laid out in the Apostles’ Creed. The contradictions in the resurrection stories do not bother them one bit, to the great irritation of unbelievers. How is this possible?

A touch of the spirit goes beyond reason. Something reaches down and turns the heart, sets it on fire. This cannot be explained except by the supernatural. I realize this sounds like UFO conspiracy theorists who seem to say, “When in doubt, it must be aliens.” This is bigger than aliens. The truth is that aliens would also be creatures of this universe, meaning they were created. This is bigger than any created creature and more strange as well.

The difference between unbelievers and believers is where reason is placed in the order of things. For many people today, reason exceeds faith. If reason is the highest good, the world of spirits dies. Reason alone cannot tolerate mysteries.

But for those who place faith higher than reason, there are mysteries and they are glorious mysteries. The odd thing about placing faith higher than reason is this: when we live purely in reason, we want certainty and no hocus pocus. But when we live in faith, we get certainty but can also keep reason. The Christian biologist can believe in the certainty of the resurrection while exploring the depths of the physical world. The Christian astronomer can believe in an immortal soul while studying the pillars of creation in the night sky. The atheist biologist or astronomer must find all the answers in the cells, atoms, and universe. For the believer, reason is still maintained, but it submits to faith.

Something strange happened when I came to understand this hierarchy. I realized that there are different types of “knowing.” Those who have little worldly wisdom or factual knowledge can hear the name Jesus Christ and come to understand that he is God, while the wisest and wealthiest people cannot understand. Where the light of Christ shines, the problem is solved. This awakening changes lives, to the point that all prior experience becomes illuminated in a new way. All the problems are solved through the mystery of the Cross and the Resurrection. This world of chaos and order, of suffering, of pain, of joy, of peace, all suddenly make sense. The puzzle is solved.

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