“Can you be Queer and Spiritual? Trans or non-binary and religious? Straight, hooking up, and Catholic? Can you combine pleasure and piety? Of course you can.”
The above is an excerpt from a current theology class description at Boston College, and the Church’s 2,000 year old answer is “no, you can’t.” When a person has sex outside of marriage it is fornication, a grave sin. This teaching is found in the Bible, long settled, and will not change. This raises the question: is it okay to teach heresy in a Catholic theology department?
At first, the case for teaching heresy in the theology department seems strong. Sexuality and gender identity are pressing issues in our society and on campus. People want to know if their self-expression can find a home in the Catholic Church. Shouldn’t this be a question for the theology department? Furthermore, Boston College is a Tier One research university. We have a duty to bring in top experts on all sides of key issues. Imagine the uproar if the history department mandated that only Neo-Marxists could teach history. If theology is to be taken seriously, surely some heresy needs to be tolerated and encouraged. Don’t we make progress by questioning old assumptions and subjecting everything to doubt?
Or so the argument goes. However, it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what theology is as a field and how it makes progress.
Theology, as opposed to religious studies, is the field which takes God’s existence as a real fact about the world. It reasons from the position that the Bible is inspired and that Jesus is the Word made flesh. In short, it asks: given that Christianity is true, what else can we find out?
Catholic theology, as a field, claims the Church has made many such discoveries. The Trinity exists, the Eucharist is the Real Presence, fornication is wrong always and everywhere etc. Thus, taking theology seriously as a field must mean taking certain claims as true and then reasoning from there. Theology cannot survive going back and questioning its fundamental axioms.
What field best models this approach? Not history, where practically any theory can be molded to fit the data. Not modern science, where new data can go back and undermine old assumptions and cause a paradigm shift. No, theology is best approximated by mathematics.
Like mathematics, theology works from premises to derive new conclusions about eternal truths. Once a proof is determined valid, it is used in other proofs to find new truth. The question of whether the Pythagorean Theorem is valid is not eternally open to new challenges. Rather, math progresses when it uses old theories in new proofs. Imagine if BC professors stopped teaching the Pythagorean Theorem and instead spent class debunking it because the math is “still open.” Such an approach would stifle mathematics. Math grows upwards and outwards from its axioms but it never goes backward.
Theology progresses in the same way. Once we’ve discovered the reality that fornication is wrong, we move on to discover why it’s wrong. We don’t go back to question its morality all over again. Not everything can be open to doubt and still be called theology. To be sure, some mathematicians have challenged old axioms, but what they create are called new fields of mathematics. The world where the Pythagorean Theorem is false is “non-Euclidean Geometry.” The world where fornication is virtuous is “non-Christian theology.” If the axioms of Catholic theology are going to be challenged then it is no longer a Catholic theology, and has no place at a Catholic university.
So, why should BC stop offering heretical classes in the theology department? Because the word theology implies certain axioms and certain doctrines that must be treated as true within the field. Theology only progresses when it reasons up from its axioms to find new eternal truths. Far from helping research, allowing heresy only muddies the water and makes theology progress backwards. Both morally and practically, BC should stick to teaching what it knows to be the eternal truths of the Christian faith.
Featured Image of St. Ignatius of Loyola stomping on Heresy, courtesy of Elizabeth Harper
Nick Letts is a former “radical atheist” who converted to Protestantism as a senior in High School, and then converted to Catholicism as a Junior in college. He studies philosophy in the Morrissey College, and loves nothing more than to curl up with a good book. He is engaged to his lovely fiancée Katherine Brown.
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