This I Believe: A Faith That Does Justice

The characteristics that made Paul Dinter an exceptional Catholic chaplain on the campus of a large, highly competitive, and secular university 40 years ago are on full display in his 2022 book, This I Believe: A Faith That Does Justice. The keen mind, the love of debate, the gleeful iconoclasm, the wide-ranging intellectual interests, the facility with languages ancient and modern, and yes, the restless, searching, active faith.

And if that’s all this densely distilled little (114 pp.) meditation on the Apostles’ Creed and the roots of Christian faith contained, it would be worth reading.

It’s what has happened to Dinter since he left academia and the priesthood, and how he’s allowed those experiences—marriage, learning to be a stepfather to two girls, becoming a grandfather, and years of visiting and teaching prisoners sentenced at a nearby maximum security facility—to work on him that raises This I Believe above the category of learned, thoughtful analysis of ancient texts and their contemporary implications, and into the realm of a cosmic mysticism firmly grounded in biblical notions of love and justice “on earth as it is in heaven“.

The Apostles’ Creed, Dinter asserts, “tells a story whose universal scope still possesses truth value for our technologically evolved age.” (p. 4) The intellectual construct of “truth value” is one he returns to throughout the book. The truth value of a statement or concept is different from its (rational, scientific) truth. “Today, we no longer base our worldview, our grasp of reality itself, on the cosmology, anthropology, or biology that biblical writers took for granted…. These early, poetic creation tales continue to have truth value about the created world, and even the human condition, quite separate from their unscientific, counterfactual basis. Their value lies in their poetic, not their literal, meaning.” (p. 13)

Basically, if we’re reading Genesis and concluding the Earth and all it contains was created in 168 hours, or if our beliefs about Jesus’ birth and divinity rely on the physical status of a 1st century Judaean teenager’s hymen, we’re doing it wrong. “The virgin birth ‘says’ far more than any gynecological examination of Mary of Nazareth would reveal. Its power lies in its artistry, beauty, and wonder.” The biblical writers used the language and stories and culture they had to try to express what is ultimately inexpressible—the experience of the Divine breaking into our daily lives. (p. 35)

Likewise with The Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in God,
the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
I look for the resurrection of the body,
and the life of the world-to-come.

Amen.

Dinter takes the ancient affirmation line by line and breathes new life into it with bracing and imaginative reflections and insights. Some examples:

“…neither (Paul) nor the Gospels allow us to reduce this ‘rising’ to the resuscitation of a dead corpse that, zombie-like, emerges from the tomb.” (p. 38)

“‘He ascended into heaven’ straddles the paradox that Jesus of Nazareth left this world in death but, as the Christ of God, remains in the world as ‘his body,’ the church, through the life-giving power of God’s Spirit. In mythic terms, a post-resurrection ‘ascension’ unites his earthly mortality with his heavenly origin in a great act of divine/human reconciliation.” (p. 42)

“But let’s be clear that ‘Trinity,’ (or ‘three-ness’) does not primarily function as a noun. It describes actions: life-giving movement, self-giving love, the fulfilling of all desire, and the communion of all things with their Source and End.” (p. 73)

“…the ‘catholic church’ began as a radical effort to gather people from ‘every race and tongue, people, and nation’ and proclaim their mutual solidarity as human creatures in the image and likeness of God.” (p. 74)

“As sacramental, all creatures, from microbes to planets, from quarks to galaxies, ‘tell the glory of God’ even as they participate in the drama of evolutionary death and subsequent life.” (p. 75)

“Far from being an assertion that ‘outside the church there is no salvation,’ the communion of the saints attests to a quintessential human desire to be connected across lifetimes in acts of real communion that unite generations across time as well as join together members of otherwise diverse societies and races.” (p. 86)

“Praying for the coming of the kingdom of God ‘on earth as in heaven’ challenges us to anchor our faith lives and homes in enacting God’s justice in the here and now. Sharing now in the communion of the Holy Spirit, as a ‘pledge/guarantee’ of a new creation, requires that we do justice in every society where the dignity of all creation is denied or taken for granted.” (p. 101)

The doing of justice, flowing inevitably and irrepressibly from the mystical experience of God and God’s presence throughout creation, permeates This I Believe, so much so that Dinter inserts a 20 page reflection/example of “Doing Justice Today” in the middle of the book, offering the reader some contemporary illustrations of what he means by justice.

It’s likely most readers will find something to disagree with in his proposals for how to work toward racial, economic, ecological, restorative, gender, sexual, and reproductive justice in today’s world. Which is fine. Unanimity is not the point. (Dinter prefaces the section by bluntly stating, “My effort is not comprehensive or definitive.“) The necessity of doing justice in concrete and incarnational ways as an inextricable and inescapable element of faith, is. (p. 51)

A seminarian during Vatican II, Dinter was one of that great number whose lives were transformed by the Council and its animating ideas. Among those was the notion of ressourcement—a return to the sources. Originating with French theologians, this was the investigative principle that urged Catholics not to take for granted as “tradition” the practices, ideas, and habits of recent centuries, but to go back, as far as possible, to the original sources and see what they had to say.

Thus, the Mass was recited in Latin, originally, so that people in the western Roman Empire could understand what was being said. Thus, the large number of religious orders (especially women’s communities) whose foundresses were not cloistered and wearing arcane religious habits, but living in their communities and serving the poor, the hungry, the sick, the young, and the old. The reforms that followed at and after the Council unleashed a great revival throughout the Catholic Church, one perhaps best seen today “at the periphery”, in Africa and Asia where the church is thriving.

This I Believe is a work of ressourcement par excellence for the 21st century US church, and can proudly count itself as “one in that number” of reform and revival that are signs of hope in and for the church universal, and for the wider world.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Paul Dinter has more to write, but if This I Believe is his “last testament”, it’s one of which he can be proud, and one that I suspect will find its way to inspire future generations.