Faith After Deconstruction (Part 2)

How We Can Test the Claims We Make About God

Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

In the first essay in this series, I argued that faith is best understood, not as assent to a set of theological propositions, but as presence: a stance of trustful openness to God, to others, and to the world. Our propositions or truth-claims about God are our best attempts as a community of believers to name, in words, the reality we already know intimately by trustful participation. The propositions still matter deeply, and they can reflect the divine reality more or less truthfully (a phenomenon I have called “contact without capture”), but they are not so much the foundation as the fruit of our faith.

If we take this expanded definition of faith as our starting point, it raises a practical question: How do we know if our claims about God are true? What criteria can we use to discern whether our doctrines and moral teachings really align with the inexhaustible divine reality? How can we distinguish between those propositions that help us live more truthfully, that lead to greater human flourishing, and those that distort reality or diminish our humanity?

That is the work I want to begin in this essay. What follows is a proposal for twelve “guardrails”—criteria drawn from Scripture, tradition, philosophy, and lived experience—that can help us evaluate our theological truth-claims about God, the world, ourselves, and one another. These are not rigid formulas capable of yielding theological certainty, but practices of discernment that can indicate where our beliefs may be inadequate, in need of refinement or revision.

My hope is that these guardrails can serve both as a check against error and as a guide for faithful development of doctrine, so that the faith we hold, individually and as a Catholic community, might become increasingly lively and truthful, aligned with reality, and worthy of the God it seeks to name.