Another look at liberalism in the Church

Newman defined liberalism by laying out 18 propositions that liberals hold. (Newman’s 18 propositions and my comments here.)

There is another way to define liberalism which may be more to the purpose in the Church today. That is as a habit of mind.

Liberalism is the habit of mind that does not look to the actually existing Church (either present or historical) to learn what the Faith is. Instead it gets an idea of what the Faith is from some other source and, seeing that the Church does not teach this, decides that the Church ought to change to conform to this image.

In a way it is Newman’s tenet 5 of liberalism—“it is immoral in a man to believe more than he can spontaneously receive as being congenial to his moral and mental nature”—but instead of being held and defended as a proposition, it is acted out as a habit of mind. It is the twentieth-century fruit of that nineteenth-century seed. As so often happens, what in one century is the abstract argument of professors becomes in the next century the unconscious assumption of the middle class.

Without a doubt this habit of only listening to what is congenial to our moral and mental nature is active to some extent in all of us and distorts our reception of the faith. In fact there is probably a name for it as a cognitive bias.

The key test which makes a cognitive bias into the habit of liberalism is whether an appeal to the history of the Church has any weight at all. Take the case of the ordination of women. One could imagine a poorly-informed Catholic advocating the ordination of women because he believes there was a time when the Church did ordain women. Then a historian shows him that the evidence uniformly shows that the Church has only ever ordained men, and he reconsiders his position. That man, when he was advocating women’s ordination, was defending a liberal cause. But our man is not a true liberal, because he still cares what the Church has actually done and said. Clearly, his training was deficient.

A true liberal is not be swayed at all by an appeal to history like that. Even the authoritative decrees of ecumenical councils or popes hold no weight. They listen to another authority. It doesn’t have to be left-wing, either—it could be conservative or reactionary. The point is that the Church is not the teacher, the Church is the pupil.

By this definition I would call Dr. Charlton a theological liberal. He will not correct his theological speculations with reference to the actual practice or teaching of the Church, at any time or place in history.

This is why with liberals anything goes. There is no limit to how the Faith could potentially be defined, because the Faith does not have to conform to anything that has actually been said or done about it.

In a word, a Christian ought to have a habit of receptivity to the Church; liberalism is the habit of criticism of the Church. It can be right-wing and reactionary criticism as much as left-wing and modern.

The Christian faith is historical, not philosophical. It cannot be worked out by intelligent speculation or even prayerful meditation. It has to be received as a deposit. This is what’s wrong with the liberal habit of mind—it prevents you from receiving the Faith.

The Faith is reality. And the oft-lamented, much-rued nature of reality is that you have to take it as a given. It is no good criticizing it—what’s the use of criticizing water for freezing at 0^o C? You cannot substitute a better reality for it. You’d better get on with conforming yourself to it.