"Hard to Understand"

I once read a commentary on a book of Scripture, where the author interpreted a specific verse as saying the exact opposite as to what was written out. The passage said that women are not allowed to be clergy, and the author (while doing some amazing theological gymnastics) said that what it really means is that women are supposed to be clergy. Yeah, umm, no. As in "N" and "O"; no.

How do you deal with theological concepts that are difficult to understand? Some people will just ignore them. Others will water them down until they are easy to accept. No matter how you respond, it cannot be in any sense a denial of the truth. So, imagine you come across a passage of Holy Scripture that seems to say something that you do not think fits with the Church's teaching. However you choose to deal with it, your solution cannot be, in any way whatsoever, to interpret the passage in the exact opposite of what it appears to say. It might make you feel good about things, but it is not faithful to the Word of God.

So, let us consider, for example, the passage of Scripture from yesterday's Mass reading where it says that God "predestined" people to be conformed to Jesus. No, we are not Calvinists, or Jansenists, or fatalists of any kind. We are Catholics and we hold to the Catholic position on everything because God promised to speak through the Church. St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine have done a wonderful job in explaining to us what this means in a faithful Catholic manner; but laying all that theology aside (since few are able to read Aquinas or Augustine all the way through on those subjects) how would you deal with a challenging passage like that?

If you read St. Paul saying (and he says it numerous times) that God "predestined" people, then your interpretation cannot be that God "did not predestine people". We may not fully understand how the action of God's predestination works with the reality of man's free will, but that does not mean that they do not. In some sense (even if it is beyond us) it does work. We might not even know the proper definition of "predestination" so as to figure this out (and that certainly makes a big difference in the whole subject!). St. Paul was not spouting some contradictory idea that no one else noticed until today (and neither were the other biblical authors who wrote about it). What he spoke was truth, and we must accept it, even if we do not fully understand it. Our lack of understanding does not make something cease to be true.

Whether it is this subject or any other (transubstantiation, the Trinity, purgatory, etc.) we have to acknowledge that some truths will be hard to understand, but that does not negate their reality. Even St. Peter once said that St. Paul's letters were "hard to understand" (2 Peter 3:15-16)! He did not discount these truths, nor did he reinterpret them into their opposite. If the first Holy Father of the Church was challenged by some words of Scripture, how can we expect to be any different? There are many mysteries of the faith; let us accept that God knows everything, even though we do not.