Two Latent Heresies in the Church that Do Battle With
Francis
The Two Temptations to Heresy That Have Done Damage to
the Church: Pelagianism and Gnosticism:
Pelagianism is to reach God through one’s own efforts; Gnosticism
is to put primary trust in our way of knowing and reasoning. That is, it is all
about us and our way of knowing and doing. At its root, it has done away with
the God of Jesus Christ Who is the Trinity of Persons. The truth of
Judeo-Christianity is that God comes to us. We do not go to God. The first act
of man is to receive without being a “thing-in-itself” that receives. That way
Robert Barron says this is” “there is nothing substantial and external with
which God enters into relationship but rather that all that is not God is,
essentially, a relationship to God… In
response to the question of whether creation is something in the creature or
perhaps between the creature and God, Thomas makes the Zen-like remark that
that which receives the act of creation is itself a creature [De Potentia, q.
3, art. 3, ad 3]. Operating beyond the categories of substance and accident,
Aquinas says that creation is quae
relation ad creatorem cum novitiate essendi, a kind of relation to the Creator
with freshness of being. The creature does not have a relationship with God;
instead, it is a relationship with God.”[1]
The
first act of the human being is to receive, to listen and obey, not to be a great spiritual figures as Buddha,
Gandi, Lao Tze, etc. Judeo-Christianity
is not a source of great spiritual achievements. Rather, it is receptivity and
obedience. The initiative is all on the side of God Who is the source of all
good in creation.
Joseph
Ratzinger wrote: “The Church does not conceive of the action of becoming a
Christian as a process of instruction or even a wider-ranging pedagogical
process. She conceives of it as being a sacrament. This means that no one
becomes a Christian by his own unaided power. No one can make himself a Christian. It is not within the human
being’s power to shape himself as it were into a great-souled person and
finally into a Christian. On the contrary, the process of becoming a Christian
begins ony when a person sloughs off any illusion of independence and
self-sufficiency when he or she acknowledge that human beings do not create
themselves and cannot bring themselves to fulfillment but must open themselves
and allow themselves to be led, as it were, to their own true selves.
“However, we know that there are many
temptations we must resist. I will present you at least two of them. The first
is that of Pelagianism, which leads the Church not to be humble, selfless and
blessed. … Often it leads us even to assuming a style of control, of hardness,
normativity. Rules give to the Pelagian the security of feeling superior, of
having a precise orientation. In this it finds its strength, not in the soft
breath of the Spirit. Faced with the ills or the problems of the Church, it is
useless to seek solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration
of outdated forms and conduct that have no capacity for meaning, even
culturally. Christian doctrine is not a closed system incapable of generating
questions, doubts and uncertainties, but it is living, it knows how to disturb
and to encourage. Its face is not rigid, it has a body that moves and develops,
it has tender flesh; Christian doctrine is called Jesus Christ”.
“A second temptation is the gnosticism that
leads us to place our trust in logical and clear reasoning that, however, loses
the tenderness of our brother's flesh. … The difference between Christian
transcendence and any other form of gnostic spiritualism resides in the mystery
of the Incarnation. Not putting into practice, not leading the Word to reality,
means building on sand, remaining in the pure idea and degenerating into
intimisms that do not bear fruit, that render its dynamism sterile”.
That failing, mummies of
spiritual worldliness, static status quo returning to the past – clericalism -
in a museum
[1] R.
Barron, “Exploring Catholic Theology,” Baker Academic 2015, 35. Creation and
its consequences goes beyond our sensible and abstractive epistemological
horizon. In this case, God, creating from
nothing (ex nihilo) creates the very receptivity that “receives” being from
Him. There cannot be a pre-existent “being” - substance or essence- that
receives the esse that makes it be. So, everything created must
be constitutively relational to the Creator since it can be nothing-in-itself.
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