Creation is Good

Christians should realize that creation is good.  We mistakenly think that because our sufferings are sometimes manifested physically, the body is a bad thing.  Remember even our bodies are redeemed on the last day.  Therefore, Christians should embrace creation and make use of the created order for salvation (through the Sacraments). 

The book The Analogical Imagination explains Catholicism as analogical, meaning that the divine is seen by Catholics as being actually present in the material. This means that God is present concretely, as in the sacraments. Creation, therefore, is good, “revelatory of the Holy.” The Church being “the body of Christ” means that community is key to salvation in the Catholic world view. Catholics have a “fundamental trust in the goodness of persons and institutions.”

The Protestant is dialectical. Luther, Kierkegaard, Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich—all Protestant thinkers—“insist on the radical difference separating” God and me. This implies that we humans are estranged from God, and must be individually saved. For our salvation, we depend not on a Church but on our individual reading of the Word, the Book, the Scriptures.

Catholicism, then, is communitarian; Protestantism individualistic.

The failure of the Church's sin through scandal arose because Catholics have a tendency to “collapse” the analogy between God and man. We Catholics are too quick to assume that the Church not only represents the Kingdom of God, but is the Kingdom of God.

“The best Catholic theologians always warned that the similarities that define the divine presence in the material forms evaporate if the tension between divine and material realities is collapsed into one: the Kingdom is not just the church; Jesus is not just the Bread; being born again is not just being baptized; repentance is not just going to confession. Loyalty to the church and its institutional needs is not always, in every case, loyalty to Christ and the Gospel.”

A final chapter, “The Last Acceptable Prejudice?,” answers its question with the title of a work by medieval theologian Peter Abelard, Sic et non, or Yes and No. It is essential that while the Catholic faith maintain its validly analogical nature, we Catholics not forget the critical importance always of being dialectical at the same time, of saying yes and no. Obedience to the Church? Yes. Blind obedience to the Church? No.

Read here