The Problem With Dogma

Faith in the Supernatural Invites Questions. It Should Not Coerce Belief.

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I’m taking a little break from my ongoing “Postcards from Exile” series to talk about something I’ve been thinking about out here on the road.

First, let me give you some context:

I made a somewhat bold statement on X yesterday in response to someone pushing for the pope to declare the so-called “Fifth Marian Dogma”:

Hot take: Catholicism needs less dogma, not more. Stop trying to make your personal theological hobby horses required for belief under pain of grave sin, do more to spread authentic belief while leaving room for questions and doubts

Someone replied and said:

Disagree. The amount of Catholic dogma is fine. The problem is people call a lot of things “dogma” which really aren’t dogmatically defined.

I replied with something that came as more of gut-level reaction than a deeply considered response. But the more I think about it, the more I feel as though it’s mostly correct — though it might be subject to some degree of revision:

I don’t think we need any “dogma” at all. You need teaching, sure. But the Church leaves herself no room to say, “Hey, we got that one pretty wrong which is why we’re changing this” and you wind up with faith-killing doctrinal “developments” that are clear 180s or they sweep the old ugly stuff under the rug.

@Joeinblack is unquestionably correct when he says, “When we talk about God, we get more wrong than we get right.”

That Kruppian axiom is a very good one. It’s bothered me for a long time that we talk with such certainty about supernatural “truths” we cannot prove. I think a humble distancing from absolute certitude is the healthier attitude when attempting to describe the transcendent.

Downthread, I defined what distinction I’m making when I speak about dogma vs teaching (or even doctrine):

I’m defining dogma the way the church does: a revealed truth of faith or morals, taught infallibly by the Church’s Magisterium (teaching authority), rooted in Divine Revelation (Scripture and Tradition), and required for belief by all Catholics as necessary for salvation.

It’s the last part that gets me.

When you require someone to believe something under pain of damnation, what are they supposed to do if they struggle with that thing? What if they can’t simply make themself believe, but they’re doing their best to live a Christian life regardless?

It becomes an obstacle to communion. If you don’t accept a certain teaching, you’re technically a heretic. You can’t go to confession. You can’t receive communion. You’re on the outside looking in.

Maybe you’re trying to get there but your intellect won’t release its objections. But now you’re cut off from sanctifying grace, so you don’t even have that help.

Obviously, the Church needs core teachings. But why is say, believing in papal infallibility or the immaculate conception as important as believing in the Trinity or the Incarnation? It gets hairy in the particulars.

I got a number of replies on this thread, which isn’t surprising. It’s a controversial thing that I’m saying, and I know that. But I think it’s important.

One guy objected to my explanation as follows:

Outsiders already wrestle with the OT, hell, and the problem of evil. The Church should still clarify truth—difficulty isn’t a reason to avoid dogmatizing doctrine.

I replied:

I’m specifically critiquing the “assent required for salvation” aspect of dogma.

I don’t think you can make assent to unfalsifiable supernatural beliefs mandatory on pain of eternal torment.

If someone struggles with papal infallibility, the immaculate conception, or even the hypostatic union, but they believe in Christ’s saving power and do their best to live a virtuous life, are they damned for not handing over their assent?

I have a problem with the compulsory nature of these things. Acceptance of proposed truth shouldn’t come at the barrel of an eschatological gun.

We went back and forth a few more times, and then he said:

Imagine if your argument applied to every ancient vice—rape, infanticide, cannibalism, and so on. Have you read Peace Child? The tribe in that story praised Judas for betraying Jesus because their culture valued betrayal. How would that kind of moral framework work out?

Your argument that doctrine doesn’t need the coercion of eternal torment isn’t rational. Without some form of coercion, there would be no laws. Whether people like, understand, or accept it is irrelevant—the real question is whether the doctrine itself makes sense.

I began to type up a reply, but it sort of took on a life of its own. After a while, I realized it would be better as a post, so here we are.

My response to his argument is as follows:

You’re conflating so many things here I’m struggling to sort them all out.

Do you need coercion to see the beauty of a sunset? Or the innocence of a child? Or to feel the power of the sea?

You’re still thinking in terms of rules and consequences, which is the wrong frame for this.

If God is good, beautiful, and true, you shouldn’t have to put a gun to anyone’s head and demand they say they believe it. He’s like that sunset, that child, that ocean — and a whole bunch of other self-evidently transcendent things besides.

Jesus didn’t come to implement rules and consequences, he came to save us from the consequences after we already broke the rules.

He, too, told people to honor the teaching, but he was a pretty staunch critic of the Pharisees and their over-reliance on rules to the exclusion of love:

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.” (Mt. 23:1-4)

Personally, I’ve long favored the Jeffersonian view:

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

You need core beliefs, but dogmas exist to kill questions. They exist to tell you that questioning things you don’t understand is bad, and if you don’t stop asking, you’re going to be punished.

When he was a teen, my father was driven out of the faith by this exact mindset. He was in a Catholic school, and he questioned some of the things he was taught, and the nuns accused him of impudence. So he logically concluded, “They don’t actually have answers to these questions, that’s why they act like this,” and he left. When he eventually came back, nearly a decade later, it wasn’t because he suddenly saw the sense in the rules. Instead, he had a profound, completely unexpected experience of God’s love and mercy that he describes to this day as miraculous. And just because he experienced a reversion didn’t mean his path to a more authentic, lived faith was instant. It’s been a long, often difficult road for him. For most of my childhood, it still looked more like his Catholicism was a kind of duty. Only when I was much older did it start to look like love.

Rules, Fear and Broken Faith

I spent the first 43 years of my life as a scrupulous slave to the rules, the rubrics, all of it. It was so bad that I developed this need to save others from breaking them. I was trying to protect everyone from God’s wrath because I lived in fear.

It took my life imploding, my “faith” (which was mostly just a system of obligations and intellectual understandings rather than actual, heartfelt belief) being stripped from me, my career being lost, and my marriage being very likely ended before I started being able to be free my mind from this way of thinking. I have sought God for years, but warily, and it has only been very recently that I’ve begun to feel the return of any real openness to what that might entail.

The process of my unceremonious deconstruction has been ongoing for about five years — longer if you count the three or four years of struggle before I let religion go — but the part where I stopped hanging on to the rules and the threats only happened after my wife asked me to leave in September.

As I have gone out on the road, trying to figure out what the hell happened, I have felt too powerless and alone not to increase the intensity of my seeking.

I started learning what love looked like when it came from those who offered it to me, unconditionally, in my time of crisis. They gave it even though I felt unworthy of it. There were no dogmas that governed the working of their hearts. They took me in, and comforted me, and gave me time to nurse my wounds.

And they all showed me things that were unfamiliar to me.

My friend Paul, with his simple approach to faith that keeps him clear of the complications of overwrought theology.

My friend Fr. Joe, with his single diagnostic criteria on whether or not to submit to this or that “heavy burden” laid on someone by an ecclesial bureaucrat: “What does that have to do with Jesus?”

My friend Kale, who would drive me nuts when he would laugh and say about some overbearing teaching, “Yeah, sorry, maybe it makes me a heretic, but I just don’t know if I believe that.”

That laugh was the thing that got to me. It was 100% sincere. It was lighthearted. It was so cavalier. He wasn’t weighed down by the guilt of that thought, which I felt compelled to take so excessively seriously.

And yet he’s a believer and I’m a skeptic. Maybe he is a heretic in certain small ways, but he’s also free and faithful in a way I’ve never been.

I had it in my head that if you’re going to be Catholic, then you have to do it by the book or not at all.

And for at least four years, the fact that I could no longer do it by the book meant not at all.

The truth is, I’ve been more hurt and angry and resentful than I even realized. My whole life, I tried so hard to follow all the rules and worry about the consequences and try to get others to do the same. I dotted all the Is and I crossed all the Ts and I said the prayers and I took my family to the best Masses that I could and when I screwed up I went to confession and tried again and I made sharing and defending the faith (and its rules and consequences) my top priority and EVERYTHING I CARED ABOUT WAS TAKEN FROM ME ANYWAY.

It felt like a knife in the back.

Love, Not Fear

And then, one day, a couple of weeks ago, I sat in Fr. Joe’s little basement podcast studio, and listened to him address a question from a woman who was worried about the soul of her believing but non-practicing Catholic husband who had died unexpectedly. He said something I will never forget:

“A God who will die for you on the cross is not the kind of God who is looking for a loophole to send you to hell on a technicality. He’s going to do everything he can to make sure you’re with him in heaven. He loves you more than you could ever love anything.”

And something in me broke. Not quite perceptibly. I didn’t know it was a milestone in the moment. I did, however, find myself silently wiping away the tears through the rest of his explanation.

But since that day, I haven’t quite been the same.

Because I realized that isn’t the God I ever believed in. I believed in the scary, wrathful God that I was taught to fear growing up, and who so many saints and priests warned about. I remember my mom telling me something along these lines when I was little: “God is always watching you. And if you do something bad, even if I don’t catch you, he sees it. So you’d better tell me if you did it, because it’s worse to be punished by him than by me.”

In fairness to her, she was probably just trying to get me to fess up to something she suspected me of doing. She was very young, and I doubt she considered the damage saying something like that could do. But it stayed with me, and was reinforced over the years, and I came to see God as a wrathful, divine panopticon, always surveilling you so he could punish you when you made a mistake. I was always aware of his eyes on me, and I would try to explain to him why I was doing whatever thing I shouldn’t have been. “When I said damn it,” I once said, when I was about 4, “I meant the river dam, not the bad word.” (I did not, in fact, mean the river dam. But I thought I could fool him!)

The point is, there were way too many credible people in my life and in the Church saying that God is scary and you’d better follow the rules or he’s going to open up a can of whoop-ass on you, and I believed it.

And it made my life miserable.

But on the other hand, the more children I had, the less that idea of God made sense to me. Jesus told us to look at him as our father, but no father worth a damn wants anything but the best for his kids. He corrects frequently, encourages as often as possible, and punishes only when he feels he has no other choice.

And even then, he hates to do it.

Good fathers don’t want to cause their children pain. I’m sure about that part, even though I’ve often screwed it up. Over time, I came to know what kind of dad I wanted to be, but I also knew what kind I had been. My conception of fatherhood was warped. My own dad was so angry and aloof and volatile with me that I was terrified of him. And then, every once in a while, he’d interject moments of love and generosity and humor that just made him totally confusing.

I grew up to be way too much like him. It took me a long time to start to change.

And I could never figure out if God was like that or not, too.

The fact that my faith, my career, and my family had all been taken from me felt like divine punishment. I kept asking what I’d done. It was too much to all just be coincidence. I think the feeling that this wasn’t random, and that God was actively making my life painful, actually kept me in a form of low-level belief, even though I had come to consider myself agnostic.

But Father Joe was right: the kind of God who would do die on a cross for us…it just didn’t make sense that he would torture us. At least not without a damn good reason. I had already concluded some time ago that eternal conscious torment was incompatible with any workable notion of an omnibenevolent God. Not in the sense that there should be no punishment for sin, only that eternal punishment could never be proportionally just as a response to finite crimes.

Sitting there, in that podcast studio, a thought grew in my mind:

What if God really does love me?

In some respects, it feels almost unimaginable. I’m not even sure if I believe in him, or if I do, what I believe about him. But then again, why do I talk to him so much if I don’t? Am I hedging my bets? Are these vestigial habits after four decades of daily prayer? I’m kind of at war with myself over how to make sense out of any of it. It’s all so jumbled up inside.

So when I talk to him, I ask for clarity.

So far, it hasn’t come.

But something else has: a new willingness to be open to what he might be trying to show me, even if the way he’s doing it feels infuriatingly cryptic. Along with it, there is a lessening of my anger, and a softening of my heart. If anything, with all I’m going through right now, I would expect myself to be even more upset with him. I’m certainly not above it.

But I have nothing left. I’m down to just me: fragile, forsaken, lonely, broke, lost, powerless, heartbroken. What will more bitterness add to that? I would rather believe there is a reason for all of this, planned out by someone who has my best interest at heart, than that I’m being broken into my component atoms for no reason at all.

I am not content to believe this is all the product of pure random chance. There is a pattern here, buried beneath all the pain.

But if he leads me back to him, things will never be the same.

I will never be the scrupulous rule-follower I once was. I will never again have the energy to argue about endless minutiae like Christianity somehow depends on it. I enjoy vigorous debates on the path to carving out the most effective route to deeper meaning, or I wouldn’t be talking about this now. But I have lost the ability to believe that human beings, with all their messy brokenness, and different circumstances, and varying formative influences, can all really be corralled into a single, one-size-fits-all solution.

Questioning is an Essential Part of Faith

I’m pretty sure that asking questions and expressing doubts are healthy expressions of a rational mind trying to come to grips with a God who isn’t knowable by conventional, perceptual means. We should ask. We should push back. We should say, “I’m sorry, but that thing just doesn’t make sense.” We should be able, like Kale, to say with a laugh, “I’m not sure I really believe that.”

In his excellent universalist apologetic, That All Shall Be Saved, David Bentley Hart makes an important distinction between questioning God and questioning the stories we tell ourselves about him:

[I]f the traditional Christian philosophical claims about God are true, we are permitted to arrive at all sorts of analogical conclusions regarding how God might act, so long as our frame of reference is correct. If we know what it is for an ethical agent to act in accord with moral goodness, then we have some sense, however limited, of what moral goodness is in itself, in God who is its source and substance.

Now, obviously, this still does not mean…that we have any warrant for trying to pass judgment on what we take to be God’s actions in any particular isolated worldly event, since any such event is one whose causes and consequences and conditions and circumstances all quickly slip beyond our ken, and we can have no sense of how that event fits into the pattern of the whole of things. Any such judgment on our part would be made from an infinitely inadequate perspective.

If, however, we are not confronted just by this or that particular contingent tragic or terrible episode or circumstance, of which we are trying to make sense within the context of all other contingent events and conditions, but are instead presented with a comprehensive story that purports to be nothing less than the total narrative and total rationale of all God’s actions in creation, then we may indeed pass judgment on that story’s plausibility. In fact, it is morally required of us to do so; not to judge is a dereliction of our rational vocation to know and affirm the Good.

And here, recall again, we are not assessing God’s acts against some higher standard of ethical action; we are merely measuring the stories we tell about him against his own supposed revealed nature as the transcendent Good. It is our story that is being judged for its internal coherence, in keeping with our rational grasp of justice and benevolence, not God who is being judged according to some external scale of ethical values.

Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (pp. 59-60). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

When the Church Mistakes Itself for God

For Catholics, this kind of distinction tends to grate, because the Church makes such grandiose claims about her exclusive, divinely-granted authority to define truth. We therefore tend to equate Church teaching with absolute truth, and we consequently fear that when we question church teaching, we are actually questioning God himself.

I don’t think I buy that anymore. But even if I’m wrong, I’m pretty sure he can take it.

Ironically, I think we have to get past that fear if we want any chance of having real, deep faith. If God is who we are told he is, he’s certainly not an idiot. He knows full well what our limitations are, both in reason and perception, and how the lack of dispositive evidence for supernatural things causes the very curious intellects and rambunctiously free wills he gave us to buck and writhe at being told to accept things — even when they don’t make any sense to us — or else.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if God is capable of respecting human beings at all, it seems sensible to conclude that he would do so most, as Jefferson argued, when he sees us exercising the kind of minds he gave us, not being purely obsequious out of blind fear.

The Church loves to push the virtues of docility and obedience, and while they certainly have their place in the virtuous life, they benefit the institution of the Church far more than God. We are no threat to God’s authority or power, but when we fail to bow and scrape before the temporal institution that speaks for him, the men who are in charge can get pretty angry. Just ask Joan of Arc and Galileo.

But Joan of Arc and Galileo both proved that sometimes we get it right when the Church gets it wrong.

Put Down the Gun

You can’t govern an institution like the Catholic Church without rules. You can’t have a religion without non-negotiable beliefs. But you also can’t expect everyone to be in lock step with either, all the time.

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”

This quote is often misattributed to St. Augustine. (Anyone who knows anything about Augustine can tell it doesn’t sound like him at all.) But the axiom is, in a very important sense, correct. While it’s observably the case that truth does not always prevail — people are very good at blinding themselves to truth when it suits their purposes — those who seek truth, who approach with humility, will find it, and know it when they do.

I don’t know how long and winding the path might be from where I am, just beginning to open up again to the quiet voice of God, to where I may be being led. I don’t know what shape it may take when I arrive. But something is happening within me, and as I cautiously look down this road, I know I’ve had enough of a faith that threatens, and uses fear to suppress inquiry and quash doubt. If I am to return to some kind of faith, I want one that is irresistible because it is beautiful and transformative and true, not because it bullies me into quiet acquiescence.

God isn’t here, showing himself to us face to face, doing live Q&A sessions. We have no choice but to take the word of those who claim to know what he communicated to us — not the most reliable sourcing, at least in human terms. So we need room to get things wrong, and correct our understanding along the way. The Church would be much more believable if she had always acknowledged she was going to make mistakes, instead of insisting on infallibility while deploying casuistic concepts of “doctrinal development” that really signify reversals, or taking equally dishonest approach of just no longer teaching the harsh things she used to while still technically holding them as true, in the hopes that people just forget.

My old theology professor, Dr. Regis Martin, often used to quote H.L. Mencken’s assessment that “religion is not a syllogism, but a poem.” But the line comes within a larger context, a fascinating essay called Holy Writ, originally published in 1923. The entire thing feels like a reversal of the experience of both Catholics and Protestants today. Most of it is relevant, so I’ll excerpt a good chunk:

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to the same extent the Church is wise; again, to the same extent it is prosperous.

Its toying with ideas, in the main, has been confined to its clergy, and they have commonly reduced the business to a harmless play of technicalities—the awful concepts of Heaven and Hell brought down to the level of a dispute of doctors in long gowns, eager only to dazzle other doctors. Its greatest theologians remain unknown to ninety-nine per cent of its adherents. Rome, indeed, has not only preserved the original poetry in Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry—for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high Mass must be a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early Church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder, these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope. This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity.

A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the Mass, is a dignified spectacle, even though he may sweat freely; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable saloon-keeper in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

Argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It really is a pity.

By all means, teach the faith. But put the gun away.

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