I wouldn’t normally post a comment here since there is already a link, but I couldn’t left our readers miss this. This was in response to the post below about RCIA problems. RC – whoever you are, thanks very much for your thoughtful and true comment!
Let me riff on one of your points.
“You can’t put God into a box” is not just a cliche’, it’s anti-Incarnational. God already has put Himself into a “limited”, “contained” physical nature when He became a man; He continues to be present in the world in some very specific and concrete ways: the seven Sacraments and the living Church, which is the presence of Christ in the world today. He protects that Church from error when she gives voice to truths about God in the specific and particular words of the Creed.
We are talking about the “scandal of particularity” — the seeming strangeness that the immaterial and transcendent God would work in particular people, places, acts, and things. It is an understandable human reaction to the claims of a revealed religion. It is, let us recognize, a doubt. Christ, our Incarnate and Crucified God, confronts that doubt; He meets it and answers it head-on when he came and gave his life and rose for us. To believe that those particular events — Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection — are the supreme revelation of God is precisely what we accept when we accept the Gospel. They are what Jesus calls us and all mankind to accept.
The Body of Christ — His earthly human body, His Eucharistic body, His mystical Body — is the “box” in which God offers Himself to us as a gift. Giving people a flesh-and-blood Jesus, a tangible Communion, a Church that lets its Yes be Yes and its No be No — this is not imposing our personal idea on the Church; it is simply letting Jesus speak.