I start my 5th-6th grade faith formation class in an unusual way each fall, by presenting an argument to them that the class I’m teaching is a waste of time.

You see, I explain, one of the practices of the great medieval scholastic theologians was to write disputations. The form of a disputation is as follows. First, one poses a question. Here is our question.

Whether it is worthwhile to study the Christian religion beyond the level accessible to a first grader?

Then, one marshals together every good argument one can think of against the position one is ultimately going to take. Since I think religious education is a worthwhile thing at least through middle school–I’m teaching it, after all–this means I’m going to start by making an argument for the opposite side. Then, since this is a classroom activity, I’m going to ask the class to figure out themselves (with hopefully only a little guidance on my part) what’s wrong with this argument. The end result is that I want them to articulate for themselves what they think they should get out of this class.

Here, then, are some arguments against having my class at all. (This is, of couse, a quite a bit more fleshed out than I can do in one hour with the students.)

Objection 1. Christianity is for everyone, not just the learned. In fact, most Christians through history were illiterate peasants. The basic message of the Faith–God’s creation and love for us, His offering of His own Son to redeem us from sin and offer us the hope of heaven–is presumably clear enough that it got through. In fact, it is quite clear to me that education in itself doesn’t make one more virtuous or holier, not even education in academic ethics or religion.

Objection 2. Our Savior Himself said “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it.” (Mk 10:15) So by divine revelation, a sophisticated faith is less efficacious for salvation than a childlike one, so why in the world would one work for the former?

Objection 3. God is inaccessible to human reason anyway. As St. Augustine said “To reach to God in any measure by the mind is a great blessedness; but to comprehend Him is altogether impossible.” and therefore “For if you comprehend, He is not God.” Dionysius the Areopagite says we must “leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the wold of being and nonbeing, that you may arise by unknowing towards the union, so far as is attainable, with it that transcends all being and all knowledge.” Philosophical complexities could then only disguise the fundamental inadequacy of our mental categories; better and more honest not to even make the attempt.

Objection 4. Since our minds can’t grasp God, the attempt is bound to lead to pointless argumentation and dissention among the faithful. In the moral order, given the temptations to which men are prone, much sophistication is likely to be sophistry designed to excuse sin and infidelity. As Kierkegaard wryly observed “Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible.”

Having presented the objections, I will now attempt to complete the disputation on my own. In the next piece, I make a brief appeal to authority for my own position.

On the contrary, It is written “All Scripture, inspired of God is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice.” (2 Timothy 3:16), which shows that study of revelation beyond the bare-bones communicated to a child is profitable to the faithful. Furthermore, the first pope commends us to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), which indicates that we should be not able to state the faith but also to defend and commend it to unbelievers.

Now I explain my position.

I answer that there is a sense in which theological knowledge is not necessary for holiness. The former is not part of the definition of the latter; it is logically possible to have the latter but not the former. However, what is useful or needed in practice to attain an end is context-dependent. Having a warm coat isn’t part of the essence of health, but you still need one to remain healthy in the cold.

Our job as Christians is to become saints and to sanctify our bit of the world. To do this in our given station of life, we need to be able to relate our responsibilities and our understanding of the world to the Faith. As an obvious example, what parts of the natural law one needs to know depends on age and responsibilities. Unlike children, adults have to deal with sex, money, and violence, so they must appreciate the holiness and indissolubility of marriage, the illicitness of birth control and usury, the strictures of a just wage and a just war. Moreover, even apart from education, growing up means accumulating experiences. Adulthood’s responsibilities, doubts, and disappointments, its experience of loss and anticipation of mortality, call forth a distinctively adult spirituality, in which one finds meaning in suffering as a means of unity with Christ, one must learn to let go of worldly attachments before this short life ends, and one learns instead to yearn for union with God for its own sake. There are treasures in the Church’s spiritual tradition that can really only be appreciated given a certain maturity of outlook and accumulation of experience.

Furthermore, those who do continue secular education beyond first grade will have, say, a high school knowledge of science and history and will need to know how to relate what they learn there to the truths of the Faith, and this requires a high school knowledge of the latter as well as the former. For example, they were told in in kindergarten that God made the world, but hear in high school that the solar system was formed by natural processes. If their beliefs are to form a coherent whole either one of these two claims must be wrong or they must both be correct but perhaps in different ways, and students will need help understanding how both can be true, e.g. via the distinction between primary and secondary causality.

If they are not able to reconcile their secular knowledge with their faith, they may lose their faith, which would be a great calamity. There is, however, a greater and more insidious danger, that they will learn to compartmentalize their beliefs, so that one is “the thing we say in science class” and the other is “the thing we say in Church”. The propositions cease to be claims of objective truth about the world, but become matters of social convention, “language games”. This is related to the Modernist Heresy from a century ago, according to which religious dogmas are not statements about reality (not even false statements) but symbolic expressions of the “spriritual” experiences of the ecclesial group. I would actually prefer one become an honest atheist to becoming a Modernist heretic, because the atheist has at least maintained a basic commitment that his words should correspond to reality and so may find his way back to the truth by further reflection, but the Modernist is closed into social thinking and has lost even the hope of an articulable truth that transcends this. He has lost his faith without necessarily even realizing it.

Furthermore, the need to articulate and defend the Faith depends on the consensus beliefs of one’s community. In a society where the truth of Christianity and its moral code are taken for granted, such ability is less needed, and Christians can more safely trust the communal consensus. Ours, however, is an aggressively anti-Christian society, in that the ideology that animates its media/government/corporate power centers contradicts Christian metaphysical and ethical beliefs, and the elite’s historical/political narrative casts traditional Christianity as an evil (“ignorance”/”oppression”/”bigotry”) to be destroyed. The education system is certainly hostile, and it seems extremely foolhardy to expect our children to get only a child’s exposition to the Faith followed by a college-level atheist education and not to come away with the impression that Christianity is childish.

Our society’s ruling ideology is moreover a vigorously proselytizing one–it wants to convert (“liberate”) the world, including most emphatically our children. Thus, if one is going to propagate the Faith, even to one’s own children, one must understand it enough to be able to defend it against critique and care about it enough to be willing to suffer the censure of worldly power and popular opinion rather than renounce it. Even when formulating ones own opinions on various contemporary issues, one must maintain an unusual independence of mind and evaluate high status/expert opinion, not with automatic rejection, but certainly with a certain degree of skepticism. Today, a general attitude of docility to authority will not lead one to be an orthodox Catholic.

Having explained my position, I must now return to the objections and show that they can be overcome.

Reply to Objection 1. Theology and apologetics don’t automatically make one holier than one with a simpler faith, but they are sometimes important to remove intellectual or social-pressure impediments to the grace of faith. As a rule of thumb, one’s degree of sophistication in the faith should match one’s degree of sophistication in secular academic matters, and the maturity of one’s relationship with God should match one’s psychological maturity.

Reply to Objection 2. The childlike faith our Lord commends to us refers to our absolute trust in God, as a child does its parents, not to the mode of its articulation. The latter should, for a child or for an adult, be proportionate to the holder’s mental development and education. Our Lord Himself discussed adult matters (e.g. adultery, Caesar’s authority) with wide audiences and deep theology with His disciples (e.g. the Last Supper discourses in the Gospel of John), who needed it for their mission. The Church should prepare her members, psychologically and intellectually, for the challenges they will face maintaining and passing on the Faith, and adolescent faith formation contributes to this goal.

Reply to Objection 3. A proper education should, indeed, emphasize that God’s essence and the mysteries of faith are beyond the full comprehension of humans and that interpersonal union with God is more important than just understanding some propositions about God. A certain degree of sophistication is helpful in getting these messages across. However, human reason does have a place, in resolving apparent contradictions of dogmas of the Faith with each other or with other well-established human knowledge.

Reply to Objection 4. The depressing history of Christian schisms shows that this is indeed a danger, but in our time the main danger to the Faith and to Christian morality comes from the opposite direction of anti-intellectualism. I refer to the presumption that we should not clearly defend contentious teachings or clearly condemn popular sins (at least, those sins that it is currently high status to approve) because this might make other people feel bad, as if they are so much better off in ignorance and sin that others should be silenced to protect their complacency. We see things differently if we really believe that what the Church teaches is true and that its truths are life-giving, that living the way Jesus teaches allows us to attain our true dignity and freedom as sons and daughters of God. We should treasure these teachings and desire to help those who have not yet come to them.