"Teaching the Faith in a Postmodern World"

Together, Eucharist (altruistic self-donation) and evolution are the internal and external dynamics of the cosmic, transformational Soul/ Body. Faith and reason together authenticate the intentional roles humans play and qualify the successes of altruism and evolution.

Faith and reason are the underpinnings of religious belief and social governance; religion and civility authenticate each other even as faith and reason authenticate each other. We cannot live life fully except we engage reason intentionally and in the lived expression of collective wisdom (public faith expression).

It needs to be made clear that faith understanding in evolutionary consciousness, the consciousness of Postmodernity, is larger and less ideological than faith understandings of Modernity and Premodernity.

In Modernity and Premodernity, faith like religion is understood in highly ideological terms, that is, as qualified by the authoritarian fideism of patriarchal politics and dominion theology. In Postmodernity, faith is understood as the ground-state of consciousness resourced ever more profoundly in the disciplines of intelligence and universal discourse.

While faith is the certitude upon which knowledge is secured, it is not fixated in one context of cultural experience or in the experience of a single specific time reference. Faith, like knowledge and experience, evolves to accommodate the changing realities of time/ place/ energy/ matter, that is, all the dimensions of quantum relativity.

New knowledge feeds reason even as reason feeds faith. As science expands knowledge, so the insights of reason expand faith. It is clear that neither faith nor reason is closed in its conscious expression; both remain open to the changing dynamics of personal/ social experience. This is a problem for cultures whose faith premises are fixated in closed absolutes, that is, in authoritarian religion and patriarchal politics.

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, SJ, of Milan, Italy, well states the problem: “…we are not all living in the same historical age. Some are still living in the time of the Council of Trent, others of the First Vatican Council. Certain people have digested the Second Vatican Council well or poorly; others are well advanced into the third millennium. We are not contemporaries, and this has always been a great burden for the church and requires plenty of patience and discernment.” (“Teaching the Faith in a Postmodern World”, AMERICA, May 12, 2008)

Eucharistic and evolutionary consciousness is stymied by religious/ political dominion fixated in authoritarian belief. Changing experiences, changing consciousness and changing faith happen in individual lives, and only gradually, come to be accommodated in religious/ political culture — what maturity and intelligence are about.

When institutional fixations stymie personal/ social authenticity, only the people can bring to bear the pressures necessary to jar institutions out of their cultured fixations. A Herculean straining is now being exerted by the people to bring religious and political institutions up to date.