There are two kinds of people: open people and closed people. This is not a distinction of temperament or emotional character, but of spiritual stance.
Open people are those who are open to all reality. They are parepared to go beyond themselves. They are open to all questions, including ultimate questions. They reject the obscruantism that would turn away from the beckoning of transcendent truth. They are, therefore, open to the Word of God , to the call to go beyond the comfortable limits of knowledge proportionate to man's own understanding embrace the disconcerting demand to accept mysteries and enter into the darkness of a new, transcendent relation with God.
Closed people are those who refuse to go beyond themselves. They call a halt and stop at somestage in the process that draws them on beyond the familiar. They remain perhaps within the comfortable, tangible world of sense. Or they refuse to step outside what they can prove for themselves. They find even belief in other men difficult and jib at mutual trust and readiness to commit oneself to others it involves. They prefer cynicism and remain distrustful and sceptical wherever they are not the masters. The call to go understand or prove from a God who remains hidden and demands commitment in the darkness of faith strikes them as intellectual suicide. If God wants them to believe, let him come within their world so that they can number, measure and weigh his words by the light of their own mind. "The Rationalist," said Newman, "makes himself his own centre, not his Maker: he does not go to God, but he implies that God must come to him."Thus they remain enclosed within themselves, within the narrow sphere of their own intellects.
Here it is important to notice that a genuine openess to truth cannot be limited to an openess to the transcendent in itself and a readiness to believe in God. On the contrary, we reach out towards the unlimited transcendent and do not rest in and idolatrise our own limited concepts and formulations only if we recognise truth as an absolute and universal value to be sought unconditionally wherever it may be found, even in secondary and everyday matters. Concern for truth is necessarily as universal as truth; otherwise, a supposed reality a concern for something else, such as security or authority. And true belief can exist only in the context of an unconditional belief in the true God from belief in false gods, and faith is corrupted into idolatary and superstition. True believers must be concerned with the truth of their beliefs. Consequently, they must be prepared to disbelieve if ever their belief should be shown to conflict with the truth. As Leslie Dewart puts it: "A genuine and lived concern with truth means a hypothetical willingness to disbelieve should the truth require one to do so."
