Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…But, as you know, there’s a tendency within Catholicism to try to use Hegelian arguments to push a very liberal version of Catholicism. “Well, this thing is going to keep on evolving, there’s no end to the process” — so we can get away from your idea of Catholicism as spanning the generations — as something continuous and unified. Are you worried you’ll become too Hegelian, or are you not yet Hegelian enough? I think the Hegelian insight can be true in the development of political forms and responses to problems that social changes create, problems that basic technological changes create, and you can hold that view while also holding the view that the Hegelian dialectic can’t be usefully applied to certain ideas and certain truths, and you can take extreme examples and say there isn’t a synthesis to be had with — to violate Godwin’s law early in our conversation — there isn’t a synthesis to be had with Nazi Germany. There are certain ideas about racial hierarchies and so on that are not part of some synthesis that you need to work through and grasp. And then to be a Catholic, I think, is to believe that there is a larger body of revealed truths that have to remain as a grounding for civilization, Christian civilization, and so on, even as you grow forward towards programmatic, practical solutions and sociological solutions to new problems that emerge. We all know the Marcionite heresy: the view, from early Christianity, that the Old Testament should be abandoned. At times, even Paul seems to subscribe to what later was called the Marcionite heresy. Why is it a heresy? Why is it wrong?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.