by Peter Topolewski
When a certain earthly ruler, soaked in irony, recently lectured Pope Leo XIV about theology, one of the pope’s many charges, Monsignor Arthur Holquin, came to his defense, noting among other things that “Catholic Social Teaching from Rerum Novarum onward has always insisted that the Gospel is not a private spiritual comfort but a public moral claim.”
In other words, the Catholic Church isn’t the place you go to assemble an inner peace that jibes with the way you want to live your life. The Church makes claims on how you manifest your faith in society. You go into the Catholic Church as a guest to enjoy the full meal, not a buffet, and if you don’t want to eat every course, go pound sand.
We can assume a sizable crowd of Catholics would love to see this particular vice president fade from their ranks, or at least the spotlight. Whatever the nature of his call to the Church—even with the benefit of converting as an adult rather than being committed as a child—he’s bastardized that gift by hammering it into another tool of his ambition. Were he a regular Joe, hardly a person would notice his warped commitment to self. By the nature of his position, he’s granted exorbitant attention, making the parade of his faith especially abusive to other believers.
Should he walk away or not, his challenge to the pope leaves the rest of the flock to deal with an ongoing dilemma: How do you deal with the parts of your faith you don’t buy? Doubt is a real and necessary part of faith. For those who struggle, might we take another route forward to make our religion a private comfort so that we might better enact its moral claim?
Over Easter this year, countless Catholic priests around the world gave homilies—that is, offered their congregations an informed explanation and application of the Bible verses read at Mass. One priest in particular assured his listeners that the Biblical account of Jesus rising from the dead was not a myth. A myth being a story that encodes truth too large for literal language. No, not a myth or a metaphor, a literal truth. And he had proof. This claim set at least one parishioner to the edge of his seat. “It cannot be a myth,” the priest said, “because several people witnessed the risen Christ!”
How do we know that?
“It says so right in the Bible!”
To put it mildly, this was not the groundbreaking revelation he’d seemed to promise.
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Non-Catholics might be surprised to learn the resurrection of Jesus is not the most outlandish, radical, confounding, and distracting tenet of the faith. Church doctrine also includes the Immaculate Conception of Mary and the Real Presence of Jesus’ body and blood in the Eucharist. So no, the resurrection is not the biggest ask, it does not require of the faithful the biggest suspension of disbelief. But the resurrection is the most consequential claim of all Christian faith. St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:14 “if Christ be not risen, then our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain.” If the actual Jesus did not rise from the dead, and if you don’t believe that he did, then there’s no point. The priest on Easter Sunday made sure to spell this out.
We can debate many aspects of Christian theology, including the nature of the Creator and the meaning of Biblical passages. Some interpretations are evidently wrong, but it’s not true that there is only one correct interpretation. Scholars agree that many parts of the Bible—including those letters from Paul—are fictionalized, written by committee, backdated, and politically motivated. The theologian David Bentley Hart puts it thus: “The notion that the Bible is a document that’s in full uniform agreement with itself throughout is just prima facie nonsense. It contradicts itself again and again. It’s a human document. It’s not something that dropped out of heaven like a golden tablet inscribed with oracles directly from the lips of God.”
In Matthew 10:28, Jesus says, “Do not be afraid of those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell.” Was he “clearly indicating that our soul [sic]—our thoughts, emotions, and unique personality—are not killed nor [sic] do not die when the body dies its earthly death.”
Really?
The concepts of soul and life after death are open to our interpretation, which changes over time and by situation. Not surprising given that the Bible, in Hart’s view, “is not a revealed text, it is a text that allows for revelation.” Soul, life after death—these concepts are also difficult if not impossible to comprehend in a concrete way. Same goes for eternity. We’ve all waited for a drink at a bar or stood in an airport check-in line that felt like eternity, but how long is that really?
Arguments and wars have raged over these details from the beginning, but from a Catholic perspective there’s no debate about whether Christ rose or not. The religion is premised on this part of Jesus’ story. From the Catholic Church’s perspective, you can doubt and you can debate, but you can’t reinterpret doctrine based on personal preference and you can’t present your personal interpretations as superior to the Church’s.
Does that mean the road ahead is closed off to doubters, to those who can’t wrap their head around the resurrection, those for whom the story does not resonate, those who’ve not been graced with faith?
Loads of Christians bend Biblical texts to their will, often to the detriment of their fellow men and women. There’s no shortage, meanwhile, of Catholics shoehorning scientific findings into their preconceived ideas about creation, Creator, and the rewards that await the righteous. Too many of these commentators like to say well if you don’t buy our story, what’s your alternative? It’s an argument reminiscent of American politics: if you hate a Republican stance, you must love everything about the Democrats. Can’t it be enough to admit to the unknown, to struggle toward your own outlook, free of labels?
The writer Gregg Easterbrook says, “The moral teachings of Jesus are confirmed and fully realized. If there had never been any Christian denomination, but society followed Christ’s morality, most of the world’s problems would wither away.”
Isn’t that enough to venture forward, doing good? Could we use this as a starting point to move well through the world? What might that look like?
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One way to find out is to dig into bits of what David French, a Christian evangelist, recently wrote about attending an evangelical version of the Catholic Service of Light. As the darkness in the church gave way to the light of candles, French says, “there was something about that roomful of candles that touched my heart. It elevated the dignity and worth of every person in that room. When you interact with a friend, with a neighbor, even an enemy, you are meeting a person who possesses an eternal soul.”
If you don’t believe in a soul, or you can’t wrap your head around what that might be, what does that change about the experience French describes? Do you automatically not see your fellow humans with dignity? There are no grounds for that. We have at our disposal all the tools and instructions to recognize the immensity and profundity of existence—and our awareness of it—where there could instead be nothing. This existence, in fact, is probably the lone miracle in all recorded time, for the creation of this multidimensional universe and the life within it still defies the known laws of nature. Every instance of creation deserves awe and reverence. Doesn’t every person put forth in this mystery thus come here with the same dignity? How can one person on the plateaus of Darfur or the steppes of Mongolia, the pharaoh buried in a pyramid or any of those who died building it, possess less dignity—be any less mysterious and miraculous and deserving of respect and awe—than an apostle or a saint or a king or your child?
In Matthew 25:40, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Isn’t that, truly, about treating every person with equal dignity?
“It’s the light (of the candles),” French continues, “that symbolically declares that this is not all there is and that our eternal existence will outshine our present grief and pain.” It’s a theme, it seems, of Christian faith that this world stinks. A place of pain and suffering, one that we should always look beyond toward something better. Why?
Of course, there’s no shortage of grief and pain in the world. But to overlook the miracle of what is and to focus so intently on what is imagined is to miss the beauty of creation. The reality of this world, and how it operates, far outshines in its detail and intricacy and evolution any picture religion has painted of heaven and an afterlife. Whether you believe this life is your one shot, your one experience of all time, or you believe another life or phase is coming after death, what could be wrong with focusing more on the here and now?
“Christians,” French writes, “make a startling assertion, that God himself defeated death—that he entered into history, lived on this earth, was crucified and then returned to life. He demonstrated his mastery over death.”
OK, many take comfort in the idea that there is something beyond the unknown of death. But in a universe that spans time and space beyond our imagination—that to the best of our knowledge is almost entirely hostile to life—aren’t we here on Earth constantly seeing life overcome death? We see it in the many miracles of nature. And increasingly we see it in human discoveries that prolong life. Perhaps not a mastery over death but certainly a phenomenon deserving of reverence and gratitude.
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If the resurrection of Jesus is true, French writes, “it changes everything. If we truly are created in the image of God, then his life becomes our life. We are not gods, of course, but we are eternal beings.”
We can all be sons and daughters of God, whether “He” is an intelligent designer or a cosmological evolutionary engine or something in between. Is there any way to say the “god” who made you is different from the one who made my grandma, Genghis Khan, or Pope Leo XIV? Whether we believe or not, whether Jesus rose or not, we’re all made in the same image.
If we’re eternal , we’ll only know when our day has come. And it’s true, none of us are the God, but we are, in a way, gods. Humans wrote the Bible. We concocted the notion of “gods”. We have pressed back the darkness of ignorance to measure the unmeasurable, to detect items beyond our senses. We have collectively found ways to preserve and pass along and build upon that knowledge, and we’ve used it to design and assemble “miraculous” devices that fly hundreds of us together through the air, that allow us to breath underwater for hours, to fly to the moon, to communicate across the globe, to soar down mountains of snow, to move organs from one body to another. We have restlessly explored the largest and the smallest, and in between we have crafted art from words and sounds and pigments while pursuing the questions we cannot answer with numbers and microscopes and equations.
Yes, our history to this very moment is filled with fear and hatred and horrific deeds. These are a consequence, often, of our freedom to make decisions, a freedom we do not fully understand, one many of us do not agree upon, a freedom whose source remains hidden from us. We suffer under its weight and make horrible mistakes. This can make times and places here literally hell on Earth.
But that does not diminish the value of our freedom to choose. In that freedom we have the opportunity to do better. We have in Jesus—and in many others, including his followers—a guide on how to do better. Treat each other equally, as though priceless. Give up your greed. Love life. Do not judge. Live with integrity and fidelity to truth, even when it costs you. Have mercy.
If more of us did this, wouldn’t most of our problems go away, as Easterbrook suggested? Wouldn’t we be living in a world where the salvation and eternity promised to Christians is emerging in the present?
The Catholic Church doesn’t care for this view. Fair enough, the Church has its rules and if you can’t follow them create your own religion. But that’s the beauty of our freedom. We can choose obeisance to rules and doctrine or not. We decide what makes more difference to the one thing we’re certain of, our lives: adherence to Church law or living to make heaven on Earth regardless of how you struggle with the resurrection and the soul and the Immaculate Conception.
When it ends for each of us, who will be the one to say it’s all been in vain?
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