Category Archives: Bible

Fulfillment of the Law

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As Moses departed from the people of Israel, he promised that God would send another prophet just like him (Dt 18:15).  This prophet would not only lead them into the True Promised Land, but would give them a new law.  So the Jews were constantly on the lookout for this “new Moses” and the early Church repeatedly preached Jesus as the Mosaic prophet they were looking for (c.f. Acts 3:22, 7:37).  It is no surprise then that Our Lord, just after beginning His public ministry in Matthew’s gospel (addressed to the Jews), climbs a mountain and delivers the Sermon on the Mount.  For just like Moses who had to climb Mount Sinai to bring the law from God down to the people, the new Moses, God Himself, speaks directly from the mountain about the Law.

Chronologically and culturally removed from the Sermon on the Mount, it is often confusing for us when the Bible speaks of “the Law”.  What exactly does that mean and, more specifically, what does it mean when Our Lord tells those gathered that “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Mt 5:17)?

The Old Law

In his treatise on Law in the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas enumerates three kinds of precepts of the Old Law: moral, ceremonial, and judicial.  By placing all of the Old Law within these three broad categories, we are able to better understand both our relationship to the law and the manner in which Christ can say that He did not abolish it but came to fulfill.

When most people think of the “Old Law” the Ten Commandments immediately come to mind.  It serves as the foundation for all the moral precepts contained within the Old Law.  The Decalogue is in a certain sense superimposed upon the Natural Law, making the precepts of the Natural Law specific.  Some of the precepts are easily discernible based on the natural law—“thou shall not kill…thou shall not bear false witness”.  Other precepts require wisdom and reflection such as “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”  Still others, especially those of the first tablet require Divine instruction.  Nevertheless, they do all relate to what can be known from the natural law.

Second, there are the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law.  These pertain to Divine Worship.  This would include things like sacrifices, sacred things such as the tabernacle, Old Testament “sacraments” such as Seder Meals and circumcision, and observances that distinguished them as worshippers of the True God (not eating pork, etc.).

Finally, there is judicial law.  Judicial law is similar to civil law in that it determines the way that a People is governed.  It maintains the sovereignty of the People, it governs relations within the People, and governs how citizens interact with non-citizens.  Much of the book of Leviticus lays out in detail how Israel is to govern itself in these areas.  Israel was to be a “light to the Gentiles” but must remain a distinct People because “salvation comes from the Jews.” 

Fulfillment of the Law

With three types or precepts of the Old Law, there are also three ways in which Christ fulfilled them.  When we speak of “fulfillment” we must first grasp intention.  The moral precepts, reflected in the Ten Commandments, are the direct intention of God with respect to how we are to relate to Him (1st-3rd Commandment) and to each other (4th-10th Commandment).  As St. Thomas says, there can only be dispensation of the law when the letter of the law frustrates the intention of the Lawgiver.  Therefore, there is no abrogation of the moral precepts of the Old Law.

Christ, nevertheless, fulfills the moral precepts in Himself.  He perfectly follows the moral law.  In so doing, He wins graces for His followers such that they are empowered to do the same thing.  It is as if He gives us the power to “re-read” the Decalogue not in terms of rules but as a prophecy.  “in Christ you shall not make false idols…in Christ you shall not covet your neighbor’s goods” etc.   

Christ likewise fulfilled all the ceremonial precepts.  The purpose of the ceremonial precepts was to prefigure and act as a foreshadowing of the mystery of Christ.  All of the sacrifices find their meaning and fulfillment in His sacrifice on the Cross.  He is the true tabernacle.  Baptism becomes the “new” circumcision.  All dietary laws are abrogated because the Bread of Life has become man’s true food.

The judicial precepts had as their purpose setting apart the Jews for the sake of the Messiah.  In Christ there is no distinction between Gentile and Jew so that the judicial precepts are no longer binding (Heb 7:12).  The catholicity of the New Israel means that the theodicy of the Old Israel has ended and the principles of the New Covenant can guide men in civil life, regardless of the form of government they take.  Church and State work together, each within its respective sphere, to bring men to salvation, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s” (Mk 12:17).

 We see then how Christ came not to abolish but to fulfill the Law.  He fulfills the moral, ceremonial, and judicial precepts of the Law, but each in a unique way.  The moral by empowering men to live according to God’s law.  The ceremonial by giving us Himself on the Cross and through the Sacraments.  And the judicial precepts through the Church.    

Faith and the Suspicion of God

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Are you suspicious of God?  This is a rather strange question to open an essay, especially one written by a believer.  It seems to be the question of the skeptic.  If we are honest, we will admit that, yes, on some level, I am suspicious of God. That level of honesty is difficult because it shatters the image each of us has of himself as a Christian.  Nevertheless, it is there.  God has willed it (even if only permissively) as an effect of the Fall.  We have each inherited from Eve a suspicion that God might not totally have our best interest at heart.  Satan placed the question of whether God was holding out on her in her heart and its echoes have been heard in the hearts of her progeny ever since.

There is further proof that suspicion is part of our default condition.  In those children whom He has adopted in Baptism, God has placed the remedy—Faith.  Without it we will eternally go on questioning God’s motives.  With it, suspicion is wiped away.  The point is that Faith is not natural, not something we can obtain or, once we have it, even increase on our own.  It is beyond our natural capacities and is totally supernatural.  Upon hearing of the power of Faith (Lk 17:5, Mt 17:20), the disciples do not say “Lord we will try harder to believe”, but “Increase our Faith.” 

Despite its supernatural origin, it is nevertheless a habit infused into our souls that we have the power to use.  But in order to use it properly, we must become more aware of its mode of operation. 

Natural vs Supernatural Faith

Oftentimes we equate supernatural Faith with human faith and think it simply means trust.  Like supernatural Faith, natural faith is a form of belief based on trust.  We might have faith that a pilot has been properly trained and therefore get on a flight even if we are anxious about flying.  Natural faith is based on reasons—the airline would not want to put inexperienced pilots in the air because it is too great of a liability, we know someone who is a pilot and he went through years of flight school, the FAA unlike most government agencies is effective in monitoring airlines, etc.  Ultimately there is a leap of faith involved, but the leap is based upon solid reasoning.

Supernatural Faith is not quite the same.  Like natural faith it involves first believing someone (trust) before believing in his testimony.  But with Faith there is no leap of faith involved.  God has picked us up and placed us across the chasm of mistrust and doubt.  He has given us a share in the trust that Christ had in the Father.  Now, Christ did not have Faith because He had the Beatific Vision from the moment of His conception, but nevertheless He merited for us the foundation of Faith—trust.  The problem is that we often put the cart before the horse and focus on what is revealed before we address the issue of trust in the Revealer.

There truly is no such thing as an “intellectual conversion”.  You can think all of the doctrines of the Faith are reasonable and still not have Faith.  You simply have right opinion.  That is a good thing, but it is not Faith.  Faith consists first in trusting the Divine Person and then, knowing that He cannot deceive or be deceived, you believe everything that He says. 

There is a great recent example of this in an interview Jordan Peterson gave.  Anyone following him over the last few years will see that he is coming to think like a Christian.  He even admits to seeing Christ as an important historical figure who lived.  But he does not, and never will be able to, convince himself that Christ lives.  He still sees Him as living in the past and only influencing today through some natural progression of His doctrines.  This is natural faith, but, as I have said previously, one does not graduate from natural faith to supernatural Faith.  Pray that he receive the gift of Faith.

Disposing Ourselves to Receive Faith

We can detect our own tendency to naturalize Faith by how we respond to the interaction between Christ and the Apostles when He tells them it was because of little Faith that they could not cast out the demons (Mt 17:20).  Most of us read that as a rebuke.  But how can He rebuke them for something that they don’t naturally have?  Instead He is making them aware both of the power of Faith (it can move a mountain) and their need to ask and ready themselves to receive an increase (Lk 17:5). 

Because Faith is the foundation of the spiritual life and thus the deeper the foundation the taller the edifice that can be built upon it—but we said it was a gift and thus we cannot strictly speaking increase our faith we can ask for more faith and do certain things which dispose us for a reception of stronger Faith.  As St. John Henry Newman says :

“…with good dispositions faith is easy; and that without good dispositions, faith is not easy; and that those who were praised for their faith, were such as had already the good dispositions, and that those who were blamed for their unbelief, were such as were wanting in this respect, and would have believed, or believed sooner, had they possessed the necessary dispositions for believing, or a greater share of the them.”

St. John Henry Newman, Dispositions for Faith, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.

There are two things in particular we can do to dispose ourselves to receive an increase in Faith.  First and most importantly is to ask.  Admit your unbelief and ask for an increase in Faith (Mk 9:24).  Second, exercise the virtue of Faith.  When you exercise the “muscle” of faith through its exercise, you will be ready for the Divine Spotter to add more weight on the bar of Faith.  The three exercises that are particularly helpful are:

  1. Make acts of faith, especially by reciting the Creed.  But also in general by affirming that you believe any particular doctrine you happen to come across in your spiritual reading or discussion.  I find this practice particularly helpful during homilies that otherwise would not move me.
  2. Study the Faith.  When you also understand you are able to make a firmer assent to what is believed.
  3. Teach the Faith or openly profess the Faith in front of others.  This requires first a trust in God that He rewards those who proclaim Him and then a trust that He has spoken truthfully.

Scriptural Bingo

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In Book VIII of his Confessions, St. Augustine details his conversion.  After begging the Lord to finally free him from enslavement to sin, he began to weep with bitter sorrow because he felt powerless to overcome it.  He suddenly hears the voice of a child, almost in a sing-song voice, say “Take and read, take and read.”  He reasoned that the voice had a divine source and immediately opened a book of the Epistles of St. Paul.  Happening upon Romans 13:13-14, “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires”, the saint was immediately converted to Christ with “all the darkness of uncertainty vanishing away” (VIII, 29).

Augustine had learned this approach from St. Antony of the Desert whom he had read about.  Antony entered a church and upon hearing the words of Christ to the Rich Young Man to sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mt 19:21) did exactly as he was told.  We might be tempted to think the men superstitious, playing a form of Scriptural Bingo.  Except, that is, for the fact that we are talking about two saints.  Let us then examine exactly what is going on there.

Faith in Sacred Scripture

In his Encyclical on Sacred Scripture, Providentissimus Deus, warned that “a thirst for novelty and unrestrained freedom” in Scriptural interpretation represented a great threat the belief in Sacred Scripture as the true Word of God.  Scripture itself became victim to the cult of the expert and Scripture Scholars, rather than the Church, became authentic interpreters.  The average Catholic comes to think Scripture above his paygrade so that, confused by the experts, he sets it aside.  Faith in Sacred Scripture as the authentic Word of God, addressed not just to experts but to every man, was toppled.

The saints, including Antony and Augustine, believed in the public revelation contained in Sacred Scripture.  But because it is God Who speaks, they also believed that Scripture was a vehicle of private revelation as well.  This does not make them closet Protestants but fully Catholic.  They believed that God also revealed Himself and His will to them personally through Sacred Scripture.  To grasp this fully, we have to do some theology.  “Doing” theology means that we take something we believe and work out the implications of it so that it becomes a real principle in our lives.  We move from just believing it to real-izing it.

Real-izing Our Belief in Sacred Scripture

Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit is the true author of Sacred Scripture.  To real-ize this we must first set aside the question of how inspiration works.  It is not that this is an unimportant question, but that there is a tendency to over-play the hand that man plays in it.  However it worked, we have to know that the Holy Spirit inspired the Sacred Author to say exactly what He wanted to say and how it was to be said.  In other words, the Holy Spirit is the One Who is speaking, even if He is using a human mouthpiece.  From this we can draw a couple of principles

  • Every single word is both inspired—“all Scripture is inspired by God”  (2Tim 3:16) and true—“He cannot deny Himself”(2Tim 2:13)
  • Because it is God Who is doing the speaking Scripture is “living and active” (Heb 4:13)

This second principle likewise bears some explanation.  Because it is God Who was speaking through St. Paul, He had foreknowledge of the fact that St. Augustine would read Romans 13 on the fateful day.  The words contained within their meaning exactly what Augustine needed to hear to move his heart, opening it up to receive the grace of conversion.  It is as if God Himself in that very moment spoke directly to St. Augustine telling him what to do.

The words therefore are more than a dead letter, they are also active.  This means that like all of God’s words they are performative.  They effect what they command.  Augustine was not just reading something directed to him personally, the words themselves contained the power for him to “make no provision for the flesh.”  It is the words themselves that move Augustine to convert.  Whenever God commands, He also equips. 

Augustine as Everyman

What happened to Augustine is really not unique in that regard.  It is the same thing that is supposed to happen to each one of us every time we open our Bibles.  Each time Christ told the Apostles “have no fear”, He wasn’t just telling them to calm down, but He was also taking away their fear.  But not just their fear, but everyone who ever laid the eyes of faith upon Mark 6:45-52 while in a state of anxiety.

The Apostles knew Christ’s words had power because He had commanded a storm to cease with a single rebuke.  We too must come to believe that same power flows from the same Word found in Sacred Scripture.  This is what I mean by faith in Sacred Scripture.  Once you real-ize that it truly is living—directed to you personally from the seat of Eternity—you can expect it to be active by causing something to change in you. 

The problem is that there are forces at work trying to undermine this by turning Scripture into an academic subject and subjecting it to literary criticism without having faith in it living power.  Ultimately this undermines faith by echoing Satan’s “did God really say?”.  God really is speaking through Sacred Scripture, not just to mankind but to me here and now.  Pray for the grace of an increase in faith in Sacred Scripture!    

The Visible Church

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Sacred Tradition is, and always has been, a great obstacle for Protestants to overcome.  There is an utter incongruity between the Christianity of history and Protestantism that requires much mental gymnastics to avoid.  St. John Henry Newman put it another way: “if ever there were a safe truth, it is this…To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”  The early Protestants, because they were drawn from the ranks of Catholics, knew this so that their theological acrobatics required them to discredit, or at least mitigate the role of the Catholic Church during the first fifteen centuries of Christianity, while still maintaining the revealed truth that the Church could not totally fail.  From this they developed the idea of the “Invisible Church” as the true Church.  This “spiritual” society was to be comprised of all the just men and women.  It would only be made visible to the extent that the various religious communities more or less perfectly realize the ideal proposed by Christ.  All of this leads to the notion that one Church is as good as another and only the “heart” of the individual believer really determines whether they are a part of the true, invisible Church.

We must admit at the outset that this ecclesiastical sleight of hand by the original Protestant revolutionaries was deliberate.  But for Protestants today, it is simply an unquestioned maxim upon which the entire façade of Protestantism rests.  This is why Newman thought, especially from his own personal experience, that studying the Church Fathers would lead one to the conclusion that the Protestant Fathers invented a new Christianity that was, at least in theory, based on the Bible alone.  But prior to this study it is often necessary to raze the foundation upon which the entire building of Protestantism rests—the invisible Church.

That Christ intended to form a single Church is clearly testified to in Sacred Scripture.  The one mustard seed, the one field, the one Bride of Christ and telling it to the Church all put this unity on display.  He prayed to the Father before making His sacrifice that all believers would be one.  Of these facts both Catholics and Protestants can agree.  But in order for this unity to real, there must be certain characteristics among the body of believers.

For any society to exist there must be a true union of minds and wills between members.  This unity in intellect means that the same doctrines are known and professed by each of the members.  Likewise, the union of wills means, not just that they do the same things, but that there is submission to a common authority.  Because man is not just a mind and will however, there must also be a third characteristic.  This third characteristic is a set of external signs that symbolizes this internal unity. 

Unity in Visible Government

In merely human societies, this unity is usually realized imperfectly.  Nevertheless, there are some core set of beliefs, recognition of authority and visible signs that mark members of a society as belonging to that society.  In the supernatural society that is the Church, these are necessarily realized perfectly.  No mere core set of beliefs will do because of the Divine promise of being given “all truth” (Jn 16:13).  There are no “core beliefs” in Christianity because the Truth is one.  This unity of doctrine likewise means a unity of acceptance and a unity of government. 

The Truth must be guarded and protected so as to avoid corruption.  Protestantism bears this aspect out.  Because there is no unity of belief, there can be no unity in government and thus we have thousands of “denominations.”  Protestantism, rather than leading to the unity willed by Christ, has led in the opposite direction.  This government must not only be one, but it must be visible.  The Government of the Church, because of the nature of man and the nature by which men are cooperators, must be something visible and external. 

As Leo XIII said in Satis Cognitum:

The Apostles received a mission to teach by visible and audible signs, and they discharged their mission only by words and acts which certainly appealed to the senses. So that their voices falling upon the ears of those who heard them begot faith in souls-“Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the words of Christ” (Rom. x., 17). And faith itself – that is assent given to the first and supreme truth – though residing essentially in the intellect, must be manifested by outward profession-“For with the heart we believe unto justice, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom. x., 10). In the same way in man, nothing is more internal than heavenly grace which begets sanctity, but the ordinary and chief means of obtaining grace are external: that is to say, the sacraments which are administered by men specially chosen for that purpose, by means of certain ordinances.

SG, 3

Unity in Visible Worship

But this visibility in government is not the only aspect by which the Church must be visible.  Since it is a religious society, there must be a unity in worship.  It is this unity of worship that signals to the world that the Church is one. 

Man, on his own, is incapable of worshipping God in a fitting manner.  For that, God must reveal the form of worship that is pleasing to Him. Throughout salvation history, God always makes a covenant with Israel that includes regulation of a concrete form of worship that God seeks.  The New Covenant is no different in that regard.  The worship that God seeks, the only worship that is pleasing to Him is the Mass.  This is exactly the point that St. Paul makes to the Corinthians.  First, he reminds them that the liturgy is their source of unity: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?   Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf” (1Cor 10:16-17).  Then he tells them that the form of the liturgy, including the manner in which they participate, is regulated by Christ Himself: “In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes” (1Cor 11:25-26).

Practically speaking then there can be no true Christian Unity without unity of Faith, government and worship.  True Ecumenism then must always have as its purpose conversion because until we have unity in the True Faith, governed by the True Church and worshipping with the True Sacrifice, we remain a divided society.

God’s Salt

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In his extended commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, St. Augustine says that Our Lord has laid out for us “the perfect standard of the Christian life.”  Prepared from all eternity, it is the most perfect sermon.  We should be hanging on the Word’s every word.  From beginning to end Our Lord has one goal in mind, to give the blueprint for sainthood.  The outline is made in the Beatitudes and the “how-to” follows.  The first words then of the “how-to” section are vital to understanding what it means to be a Christian and therefore merit our close scrutiny.

After defining Christians as those who find their joy in being persecuted, Our Lord tells His disciples they must be salty; “You are the salt of the earth.  But if salt loses its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?  It is good for nothing anymore but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men” (Mt 5:13).  To modern ears the Saline Commandment might strike us as a bit odd, especially because we only think of salt as a seasoning.  But Our Lord had something deeper in mind making this a most perfect metaphor for the Christian mind, something that we can begin to grasp more clearly if we look at salt itself.

The Master of Metaphor

First, we must admit that Our Lord was a master of metaphor and the reasoning for this is simple.  Our Lord did not need to search for a metaphor to describe the Christian, He simply created the metaphor.  Salt may have plenty of practical uses (all of which could be accomplished another way if Our Lord so decreed), but salt is what it is precisely because Our Lord wanted to use it to reveal the truth to His disciples.  In this case the truth of what it means to be a true disciple.  Catholics used to grasp this intuitively because they had a sacramental vision of reality.  Thanks to an unhealthy scientific excess, we have lost that ability and need to regain it.  That begins by resisting the temptation to simply say salt is “nothing but” Sodium Chloride and to probe deeper into its meaning. 

Salt itself is formed by the evaporation of salt water.  The process of evaporation involves two outside elements—sun and air or wind.  Salt cannot escape the sea water without these two things.  Now in sacramental language, the seas water is associated with chaos.  The Sun is Christ and the Wind is the Holy Spirit.  Putting them all together we find that His disciples cannot escape the chaos of the world without Our Lord and the Holy Spirit.  This is to make sure that the “try-hards” recognize that the Beatitudes are absolutely impossible without the infusion of grace.  Salty Christians then are formed.

The Real Saline Solution

We can glean more of Our Lord’s meaning, especially what He means when He calls them “salt of the earth” by examining how salt was commonly used.  Prior to refrigeration, salt was the primary preservative for food.  By reducing the water molecules in the food through osmosis, bacteria had no medium in which to grow.  What little bacteria did land on the food would die because it attacked their DNA.  In short, salt was used to stop decay.

So too it is with the Christian in the world.  Our Lord is saying that once they become salt, the disciples keep the world from decay.  This role of Christians is one that is easily overlooked but one that is worth examining more closely.

When God saw all of the evil that was going on in Sodom and Gomorrah, He told Abraham that He was going to destroy it.  But it wasn’t just as a punishment for the evil that He threatened to destroy it, but because there was no salt to keep it from decaying.  He could find no righteous men to preserve it.  Sodom and Gomorrah were fully decayed and their destruction was inevitable.  Had their been salt, they would have been preserved.

Christians are “salt of the earth” precisely because they preserve it and enhance its flavor.  All around us we see signs of decay, but true Christians can slow that decay by their very presence.  It is saints that change the world, not primarily by their actions, but by their sanctity.  The solution to our cultural crisis is simple—be a saint.  It is saints who have turned every culture around and it is saints that will turn ours around.  Saints are those who are committed to God’s will no matter what and those are the ones that He uses to season the world. 

Because of its dehydrating qualities salt was often used in war as a means of destroying crops.  So too God will use some of His salt to destroy the crops of the Evil One.  As His salt we must, each and every one of us, be prepared to be poured out on the ground.  Martyrdom is never really that far away for the Christian and we must be prepared for it to come.  But even if it doesn’t God’s salt must continue to keep the bacteria from spreading from within their own sphere of influence.  The thing about salt is that we immediately recognize its presence as well as its absence.  We must be salty then.

Before closing, let us take to heart Jesus’ words regarding losing our savor.  For salt cannot actually lose its savor without ceasing to be salt.  Despite the fact that we no longer use this language, it is important for us to do everything we can to stay in a state of grace.  If we lose our savor, it can be restored by becoming salt again, but we are at a great risk for being trampled underfoot.  All the saints prayed for the gift of perseverance so let us join their litany to stay salty.

The New Eve and the Immaculate Conception

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In a previous post, we mentioned how St. John gives us all we need to make the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady explicit.  But this is not the only dogma that he gives us the foundation for.  He also helps us to ground the other controversial Marian dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

One of the things that makes Christianity unique among all the world religions is that it is grounded in history.  Its central premise is that the eternal and transcendent God took human flesh in a specific time and place and effected our salvation.  The Incarnation is a historic event that, because it occurred in the “fullness of time”, was not some haphazardly chosen moment, but one providentially decreed from the foundation of the world.  The events leading up to the Incarnation were meant to reveal God’s plan and toe prepare the way for it.  This means that these events, especially those detailed in the Old Testament, are charged with prophetic and theological meaning.  From this emerges the principle of typology which reveals the unity of salvation by moving from “type” to fulfillment in the “antitype”.  Because the movement is from prophecy to fulfillment it is always from lesser to greater.

Typology is not a trick biblical scholars apply to the bible but instead is a principle that is applied in the Bible itself.  The New Testament abounds in examples, but one in particular, because of its relationship at hand bears special mention—Christ as the New Adam (c.f. 1 Cor 15:45, Rom 5:12-21).  St. Paul is essentially alluding to the fact that Christ is the new and greater Adam, serving as a counter-image our first father in the flesh.  Although created by the infusion of God’s breath (i.e. the Holy Spirit), the first man failed in his test and brought sin and death into the world.  The Second Adam, who also was made flesh by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit did not fail the test and defeated sin and death. 

The New Eve

In a very real sense this type-antitype relationship is the most fundamental of all because it is the first one used in the Bible.  The first thing that God does after the Fall, is to promise a New Adam, one who would crush the head of the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gn 3:15).  This promise however is not just for a New Adam, but also another “Woman” (Eve’s name given by Adam) who would serve as a New Eve.  The New Adam would be born of this woman’s seed (an allusion to the Virgin Birth since, biblically speaking, the seed always came from the man) and she and the Serpent would have a relationship of enmity.

This New Eve is revealed to us by St. John in his gospel, a theme that he makes rather explicit.  The beginning of John’s gospel would immediately evoke the beginning of Genesis as if what he is about to write about fulfills the Creation account found in Genesis.  Both open with “in the beginning” and both go on to depict days of creation and re-creation.  In John’s account we find the use of “next day” twice and then skips two days and starts again “on the third day”.  If you are counting, that gives us six days—“the beginning” (1), “the next day” (2), “the next day” (3) and “on the third day” (6).  And just like on the sixth day of creation, we are told on the sixth day of re-creation there is a marriage taking place.  We are told nothing about the bride and groom of that wedding, but only that Our Lord and His Mother are there (John 2:1).  We are then told of a conversation between the Mother and her Son in which He addresses her in a rather strange way—as “Woman”.  This address, combined with the parallels to Genesis, would call to mind both Eve and the promise of the New Eve.  This New Eve would, by her words, overturn the damage done by the words of the first Eve and set in motion the work of the New Adam in defeating the Serpent. 

This connection would already be pretty clear, but Our Lord wanted to make sure it was crystal clear when, hanging on the Cross, He once again addresses her as Woman (John 19:42).  This time He makes both the image and the vocation clear.  Just as Eve of old was the mother of all the living according to the flesh, the New Eve was to be the mother of all the living according to the Spirit.

Mary as the New Eve was not something hidden away in the Scriptures or a product of popular piety but something that dates back to the Apostolic age.  We find this as the first title that the Church Fathers gave her.  For example, St. Irenaeus whose favorite theme was re-creation or recapitulation used that title when he made account of the Apostolic preaching saying,

“And just as through a disobedient virgin man was stricken down and fell into death, so through the Virgin who was obedient to the Word of God man was reanimated and received life… For it was necessary that Adam should be recapitulated in Christ, that mortality might be swallowed up and overwhelmed by immortality; and Eve recapitulated in Mary, that a virgin should be a virgin’s intercessor,  and by a virgin’s obedience undo and put away the disobedience of a virgin.” 


Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 33

St. Irenaeus most certainly was qualified to give account of Apostolic preaching for he was a disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of St. John.

Typology and the Immaculate Conception

With the type-antitype relationship firmly established we can make the link to the Immaculate Conception more explicit.  Recall that this relationship implies that the privileges given to Eve must in no way exceed the privileges given to Mary.  Eve was conceived without the stain of Original Sin, that is, she was conceived with the gift of sanctifying grace.  Mary then too must be conceived, at the very least, with the same privilege or else the type-antitype relationship falls apart.  St. John in canonizing Mary as the New Eve also, even if only in an implicit manner, declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Using typology we can even go further when we factor in the revelation that the New Eve will be at enmity with the Serpent.  This term, enmity, means that the hatred will be so deeply seeded that she will never fall into his power.  And just as Eve received grace consonant with her mission to battle the Serpent and make her a “helper suitable” to the first Adam, so too the New Eve would receive a plentitude of grace to make her a suitable helper to the New Adam and His battle against the Serpent by making her immune to his weapon of sin.  The Hebrew term ezer kenegdo that we translate as “helpmate” or “helper suitable to him” implies both a similarity and a complementarity.  And just as God gave to Eve a share in Adam’s humanity, so God gives to the New Eve a share in His divinity, which we call sanctifying grace and a complentarity by which the New Eve gives her seed to His humanity.  She is to be a helpmate suitable to His mission as Redeemer by being like Him in a unique share in His divinity but still subject to His redemptive (or pre-demptive) act.  In short, the New Eve would need to be not only conceived in grace, but also to never have lost it through sin.

We can do no better than to conclude by quoting Saint John Henry Newman’s lucid summary of the connection between Eve and the Immaculate Conception:

“She [Mary] holds, as the Fathers teach us, that office in our restoration which Eve held in our fall:—now, in the first place, what were Eve’s endowments to enable her to enter upon her trial? She could not have stood against the wiles of the devil, though she was innocent and sinless, without the grant of a large grace…Now, taking this for granted, . . . I ask you, have you any intention to deny that Mary was as fully endowed as Eve? …If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had even a greater grace? …And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the first moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference:—well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.”

Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching

The Divine Quadrilemma

Bible, Defending the Faith, Faith and Reason, History, Paganism, Passion of Christ, The Life of Jesus, , , , ,

The greatest heresy in the history of the Church was the Arian heresy.  At one point during the Fifth Century, nearly 3/4 of the world’s bishops were Arian.  Arius posited that Jesus was not truly God but instead the greatest of God’s creatures.  The popularity of this heresy was due to the fact that it would enable Christianity to be palatable to both Pagans and Gnostics alike.  By denying the equality of the Father and the Son, Christianity would take a decidedly Pagan turn.  This is what made this particular heresy such a threat—it made Christianity more palatable to Pagans and could be a source of unity throughout the recently Christianized Roman Empire.  This blending of Christianity was, of course, rejected by the Council of Nicaea with St. Athanasius leading the charge.  It took a long time for the Nicene effect to be felt throughout the Church, but eventually the Arian Heresy was squashed.  Unfortunately, heresies never wholly die, but are reincarnated in different forms such that we have seen a revival of the errors of Arius in our own day.  This time it comes in the form of a religious eclecticism that attempts to blend all religions together.

In our day there are any number of people who say, “there are many paths up the mountain, but the view is the same at the top of the mountain.”  They present the metaphor usually as a defense of blending religions or choosing a religion that best suits them (as opposed to one that is true).  This religious indifferentism is really a substitution of spirituality for religion.  Spirituality is about self-fulfillment whereas religion is about a relationship with God.  But it is problematic for a more fundamental reason, one that is easily uncovered once we drop the metaphor and actually compare religions. 

To insist that they lead up the same mountain while simultaneously contradicting each other makes this hard to believe.  One says Jesus is God, another that He was a prophet, another that He is the brother of Lucifer, another that we are all gods, and another that says everything is God.  While it may be convenient to use the “same mountain” metaphor, the truth is that there is no way that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Pantheism can be reconciled.  Depending on which you believe you will end up with vastly different conclusions.  They are not different paths on the same mountain, but different mountains all together.  

It may be possible to blend some religions together, but Christianity does not lend itself to any blending whatsoever.  This is because Jesus, in His infinite wisdom, has forced us all to take a stand.  Unlike any other religion, He made the claim to be God Incarnate.  That means that you must either accept that claim as true and relate to Him as absolute Lord or you must treat Him as a crazy, lying cult leader and dismiss everything He said.  If it is the latter, then to say that you like His teachings, that is to label Him as merely a human teacher, is not really an option.

The Quadrilemma

Those familiar with CS Lewis’ Christological trilemma will recognize this as a version of it.  Lewis said that you must treat Jesus as either lunatic, liar or Lord.  Those are the only three options.  You cannot treat Him as a merely human teacher however.  You either submit wholly to Him or you run as far away from His teachings as possible, even if some of them are actually helpful.  Lewis’ trilemma however is not impenetrable because, thanks to “biblical scholars” in our own time, there is now a fourth option that many people are choosing.  They claim that Jesus never actually said He was God.  And in this way, we see how the Arian heresy is coming back into play.

When we focus on whether Jesus actually said He was God (as opposed to whether or not that is true) we move from the realm of faith to that of history.  In other words, this is an attack on the historical reliability of the Gospels.  As an internal witness, the Bible is quite clear that Jesus made Divine claims.  But in order to grasp this, we must first take a necessary tangent in order to examine how He might say it.

The Internal Evidence

If the Incarnation were to have happened in our day and age you might expect Him to say (in English) “I am God.”  But if we look at the translations of the gospels we have today, we do not find such a direct statement, nor should we expect to.  We should expect that Jesus would say it the way a first Century Jew might.  Our Lord’s moments of self-revelation always invoke the Old Testament name for God, the same name He gave Moses and that the Jews treated as unutterable (YHWH).

In Greek, the language of the gospels, the Name is translated as egō eimi or “I am”.  This phrase is used in a number of places, but any time it is used in an absolute sense without any predicate, it refers to the Divine name.   The most obvious examples occur within John’s Gospel where we find he uttering things like: “unless you come to believe that I AM, you will surely die in your sins” (Jn 8:24).  Likewise, when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus in the Garden and announce it is Jesus they are seeking, He answers egō eimi.   In the ordinary sense it simply means “I am he” letting them know they have found who they were looking for.  However, those who hear this response fall to the ground suggesting that they are party to a theophany.

John’s Gospel, written later in the first Century, has a distinctive emphasis on the divinity of Christ because it was, according to Irenaeus, meant to counter some of the early Christological heresies that had arisen (Against Heresies, Book 3, Ch11).  But he is most certainly not the only one who uses this Jewish formulation for identifying Jesus as divine.  These references are found throughout the Synoptic Gospels as well.  First, there is the fact that only one reason is given for His crucifixion—blasphemy.  When on trial before the Sanhedrin, the High Priest asked Him:

“Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?”  Then Jesus answered, “I AM”; and “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”  At that the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further need have we of witnesses?  You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as deserving to die.”

(Mk 14:55-64, c.f. Mt 26:59-66, Lk 22:66-71)

Notice that Jesus invokes the Divine Name and equates Himself with God by prophesying that He will sit at God’s right hand.  Likewise, He is also accused of blasphemy for setting Himself equal to God when He forgives sins (c.f. Mk 2:6-7, Mt 9:3).

Perhaps His clearest revelation comes in the form of a question to the Pharisees about whose son the Messiah will be.  They tell Him David, which He does not deny but He shakes their limited understanding by quoting from Psalm 110: “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet’? If David calls him ‘lord,’ how can he be his son?” (Mt 22:44-45, c.f. Mk 12:35–37; Lk 20:41–44)    By referring to the Messiah as both pre-existing David and David’s LORD, He is admitting to being God Incarnate.

The External Evidence

Those who challenge that Jesus said that He was God often overlook the fact that we have external evidence as well.  They try to attack the timing and historical accuracy of the Bible but forget that we have writings of the Apostolic Fathers that confirm what has been said has been received as such.  These writings show that Christ’s divinity was not something added later on but was understood to be true directly out of the hands of the Apostles.  There are numerous quotations that could be shared, but a few should suffice to show that the gospels are historically reliable.  First there is Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of John who was likely ordained by Peter who said, “For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary in accord with God’s plan: of the seed of David, it is true, but also of the Holy Spirit” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 18:2).  There is also the aforementioned St. Irenaeus, the disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of John who said “…He indicates in clear terms that He is God, and that His advent was in Bethlehem…” (AH, Book 3, Chapter 20). Finally we have Pliny the Younger, a Roman Governor, describing Christians as “singing hymns to Christ as to a god” in a letter to the Emperor Trajan.

Given both the internal and external evidence, we must conclude that Jesus did make the claim that He was God.  This, of course, doesn’t prove that He was, but it does render our potential quadrilemma as a trilemma.  Christianity cannot be mixed with other religions because of the unique demands Jesus makes upon His followers.  He is either Lord or Liar, but you must choose one or the other.

On Circumcision

Bible, Bioethics, Judaism, Theology, , , , , ,

In a previous post, it was discussed how Catholics could not participate in Seder Meals.  The reasoning was that for one to participate in a distinctly religious act like a Seder Meal is a form of external worship.  When external worship does not conform to internal belief, then objectively speaking one has sinned against the Seventh Commandment.  In other words, it is a form of lying.  This applies not just to the Passover meal, according to St. Thomas, but to all of the legal ceremonies of the Old Law.  Each of the ceremonies of the Old Law expressed the expectation of the coming Messiah, those of the New Law reflect His having already come.  Regardless of what one actually believes, to participate in one of these ceremonies is to profess that Christ is yet to come.  Once articulated this way, it seems rather straightforward.  But there is another action associated with the Old Law that is performed with far more frequency today than Seder Meals—Circumcision.  Have all those who have been circumcised, or more accurately their parents who chose to have them circumcised, then sinned gravely?

St. Paul is rather straightforward in his condemnation of those who would choose to be circumcised.  In Galatians 5:2-4, the Apostle to the Gentiles says, “if you have yourselves circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you.  Once again, I declare to every man who has himself circumcised that he is bound to observe the entire law.  You are separated from Christ, you who are trying to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.”  St. Paul is reiterating and expounding upon what the Council of Jerusalem declared regarding the practice of Circumcision (c.f. Acts 15).  Baptism became the new circumcision, the means by which both the circumcised and uncircumcised entered the New Covenant (Col 2:11-12).  It was not necessary to first enter the Old in order to enter the New.  So, it seems that, just like the Seder Meal, one should not ever be circumcised.

A Possible Exception?

The problem with this view however is that St. Paul, on the heels of the Church’s declaration, tells the Gentile Timothy to be circumcised in order to be more effective in his ministry to the Jews (c.f. Acts 16:4).  What this “exception” opens up is the possibility that the act of circumcision can be performed for non-religious reasons.  But the fact that St. Paul refuses that Titus be circumcised means that circumcision is OK as long as it is not done for religious reasons (Gal 2:3-5).  And in this way, it is vastly different from the Seder meal in which the religious element cannot be removed.  Whether the only exception is when ministering to the Jews or if there might be others then does not necessarily matter.  What matters is that Circumcision can be viewed as a non-religious action and thus it is not intrinsically wrong for a Catholic to be circumcised.

 During the Middle Ages, the Church spoke authoritatively regarding the practice of circumcision and disallowed it in all cases.  Most prominent among the decrees is that of Pope Eugene IV who, in the Papal Bull Cantate Domino declared that “all who glory in the name of Christian not to practice circumcision either before or after baptism, since whether or not they place their hope in it, it cannot possibly be observed without loss of eternal salvation.”  It is clear from his language that again, it is not the physical act of circumcision per se that is the problem but that it is impossible to separate it from its religious meaning given the current climate.  Only Jews were circumcised during the Middle Ages clearing the way for either irreligion (for those who professed it did something) or scandal.  What this does not say however is that somehow Jews, because they are circumcised before Baptism are somehow lost.  That would obviously go against the testimony of Scripture (c.f. Romans 11:25-29).  Pope Eugene IV makes it crystal clear when he says “Jews and heretics and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart “into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels” [Matt. 25:41], unless before the end of life the same have been added to the flock.”  Jews, despite being circumcised can still be saved through Baptism and remaining within the “bosom and unity of the Church.”

Therapeutic Circumcision

If we advance four hundred years, arguments are being put forward for therapeutic reasons why circumcision may be advisable.  In other words, there may be non-religious reasons for being circumcised, reasons that once it became more commonplace such that its practice would not link a person intrinsically to the Jewish faith.  It was from within this climate that the Church began to change her tone and now begin to look at the morality of circumcision from within the context .  Pope Pius XII, in a discourse from 1952 even explicitly taught that circumcision was morally permissible “if, in accordance with therapeutic principles, it prevents a disease that cannot be countered in any other way.”  Nontherapeutic reasons have yet to receive an endorsement from the Church and so it should be assumed that, although there may be morally licit nontherapeutic reasons (like Timothy), there needs to be further development and understanding what those reasons might be.

It is instructive to delve deeper into the particularities of the therapeutic viewpoint so as to understand more deeply when it is wrong.  Therapeutic modalities are governed by the principle of totality which is meant to protect bodily integrity.  The principle of totality and integrity says that we may not modify the body of a person except in the case of medical necessity or to restore proper functioning.   Summarizing, the Catechism says about bodily integrity, “[E]xcept when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against moral law” (CCC 2297).  

Strictly speaking, circumcision as it is commonly performed within Western medicine is not a mutilation or a sterilization.  Both of these are related to bodily function.  Circumcision does not alter the functioning of the penis.  It is however an amputation and is medically defined as such (posthectomy).  Thus we cannot perform a circumcision for nontherapeutic reasons.

Did God then command something that was wrong in commanding the Jews to be circumcised?   The medical circumcision that we perform today is different from that of the Old Covenant Jews in the time of Jesus.  They did not amputate the entire foreskin but instead made a ceremonial (although probably no less painful) cut of a flap of the foreskin called a Brit Milah.  Obviously, this would not be a full amputation like we currently perform today, called a Brit Peri’ah.  This may also mitigate the “Timothy exception” since his circumcision was not an amputation.  This is mentioned as well because we are likely not dealing with the same thing, even though we call them both “circumcision”.   But even if they are then the permissibility then hinges on whether or not there are therapeutic reasons for doing so.    

This is a question for medical science and not for theology and so the Church as remained relatively silent in recent times about the issue (unfortunately).  Most circumcisions today are performed, at least by parents, under the assumption that there are good therapeutic reasons for doing so.  Medical science is starting to come to a different conclusion, although coming to a consensus has been rather slow.

Given all that has been said and if we are to assume that there are not good therapeutic reasons for being circumcised in most cases, it is natural to ask whether one is culpable for being circumcised.  The obvious answer is no for, even though the parents may consent for the children, the sins of the father do not fall upon the children.  Circumcision is done to you, not something you choose to have done and thus you bear no moral responsibility.  But we did speak about the “sins of the father “suggesting there may be some culpability on the part of the parents.  Most parents have no reason to question convention, especially when medical professionals assume the procedure is to be done.  Thus, they are operating under invincible ignorance and any culpability they do bear is for not considering the question more thoughtfully.  But it is also assumed that the parent-to-be reading this essay will take the time to form themselves now that they know it is a debated issue and overcome their ignorance.

In conclusion we can say that as far as we can discern without further instruction from the Church, all non-therapeutic circumcisions are wrong.  There certainly are therapeutic reasons for performing one, although they may be less serious than the culture at large would have us think.  Although this is a medical question, each person should do their homework and exercise cautious prudence when deciding to have their sons circumcised.

Our Daily Bread

Bible, Church Fathers, Eucharist, Prayer, Sacraments, Spiritual Life, , ,

Pope Francis recently approved a new translation in French and Italian of the Lord’s Prayer that offers a re-translation of the petition “lead us not into temptation.”  The Holy Father has repeatedly expressed his concern that the phrase as it is translated is misleading, making it seem like it is God that actually leads us into temptation.  Whether or not this is theologically correct or even prudent, I will leave to others to argue.  But this new translation business certainly opens up the question whether there are other phrases in the current translation that need to be amended.  In particular, I have in mind the petition “Give us this day, our daily bread…”

Familiarity can create a blind spot, but if we come to the petition afresh, we must admit that it is awkwardly worded.  In particular, it is the repetition of this day and daily that strikes us as odd.  Why don’t we pray simply “this day for our bread” or, more succinctly, “give us our daily bread”?  Either one would seem to be more in line with conventional usage.  But to see why this wouldn’t work and why the current translation doesn’t quite capture its meaning we should return to the original Greek.

A Faulty Translation?

Obviously, Our Lord did not give the Apostles the prayer in Greek, but the Holy Spirit did when He inspired the sacred authors to include it within the gospels.  So, we can assume that any mis-translation would occur from Greek to (in our case) English.  The word that we translate as daily is epioύsios in Greek. This word is utterly unique to Sacred Scripture and is not found anywhere else in the Greek language prior to its appearance in the gospels.  This created a historical difficulty in defining exactly what it means (let alone translating it).  None of the Fathers agreed upon its exact meaning, although a number of them settled upon the in literal meaning— epi meaning super and oύsios meaning substance—from which we would derive with the English term supersubstantial.  This is hardly a word that is found in the English vernacular, but its meaning is “above material substance”. 

The use of the term supersubstantial led the Fathers of the Church to teach that the petition relates “not so much to the material bread which is the support of the body as the Eucharistic bread which ought to be our daily food” (St. Pius X, Sacra Tridentina).  Why then do we say “daily”?  After all supersubstantial hardly has the same connotation as daily.  Until, that is, we put on a Biblical mindset.  There is one place is Sacred Scripture in which God provides “daily bread”.  It is the giving of the manna in the desert.  This same bread was in a very real sense supersubstantial as it just appeared with the dew fall and spoiled as quickly as it came the next day.  But Our Lord said the manna was but a prefigurement of the True Bread come down from heaven, the true “daily bread” that can only be described as supersubstantial—the Eucharist.

When the emphasis is placed upon the Eucharist the context of the petition is thrown into relief.  We pray to Our Father as His adopted children, brought into the family of the Trinity and united as one family on earth.  We pray that He feed us with the family meal because the Eucharist is only for us, it is Our daily bread.  But there is another sense in which we must deal with the current choice of translation as daily.

Receiving Our Daily Bread

Like the manna in the desert, the petition is meant to remind us that the Eucharist is something that is given to the Church daily, a gift that we both express gratitude for and petition God to continue blessing us with.  For there will come a time, at least according to some of the Fathers of the Church like St. Augustine, in which the persecution will be so bad that the celebration of the Eucharist will cease.  Whether it was to cease completely or not, one can still imagine how difficult it would be to receive the Eucharist during that time.  There are plenty of places in the world where it already is.  We risk, especially in times like our own in which belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist is in decline, becoming like the Israelites in the desert, taking the manna for granted and grumbling in disbelief.  “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me” (Mt 26:11).

Over a century ago, Pope St. Pius X made this connection between the manna the Eucharist in a decree that encouraged the “Frequent and Daily Reception of Holy Communion”.  The saintly Pontiff said that given the correct dispositions for worthy reception, all Christians “should be daily nourished by this heavenly banquet and should derive therefrom more abundant fruit for their sanctification.”  He states unequivocally that it is “the desire of Jesus Christ and of the Church that all the faithful should daily approach the sacred banquet.”  He encourages the Faithful to make use of the Sacrament for the purpose that Christ intended—extending the Incarnation in time in order to enable those who touch Him to receive His healing touch.  That is, “the faithful, being united to God by means of the Sacrament, may thence derive strength to resist their sensual passions, to cleanse themselves from the stains of daily faults, and to avoid these graver sins to which human frailty is liable…Hence the Holy Council calls the Eucharist “the antidote whereby we may be freed from daily faults and be preserved from mortal sin.”

St. Pius X also declares that the person “who is in the state of grace, and who approaches the Holy Table with a right and devout intention” should approach the Holy Table often.  This “right intention consists in this: that he who approaches the Holy Table should do so, not out of routine, or vain glory, or human respect, but that he wish to please God, to be more closely united with Him by charity, and to have recourse to this divine remedy for his weakness and defects.”

In short then, the Our Father ought to express a desire that Christ “give us always this bread” (John 6:34).  This of course assumes we understand what we are asking for.  One will be surprised how, once they commit to receiving Our Lord frequently, even daily, and prays as such, daily Mass begins to “work out” and they find their schedule opening up.   This is why a re-translation might lead not only to a re-education, but a re-invigoration of desire for the Eucharist.  This will start with the commitment to personally make this supersubstantial bread our daily bread.  If we nourish our bodies daily, then how much more do we need to nourish our souls? 

Faith in Christ

Bible, Church, Defending the Faith, God's Love, God's Will, Heaven, , , , ,

One of the more controversial teachings of the Second Vatican Council deals with the salvation of non-Christians.  Summarizing the teachings of the Council Fathers, the Catechism says “’Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery.’ [GS 22] Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved” (CCC 1260).  The controversy arises not so much in the letter, but in the spirit that followed.  It was interpreted as a softening of the Church’s traditional stance that salvation comes only through faith in Christ.  Once softened, the way became clear for a belief in universal salvation.  While this clearly goes beyond the text, nevertheless the evangelical aftershocks have left the Church’s missionary zeal in the rubble.  In an age where exceptions, rather than proving the rule, become the rule, a certain amount of clarity surrounding this issue will help to reignite the evangelical fires of the Church.

It must be admitted at the outset that like many of the statements of the Council, the teachings surrounding this issue suffer from a certain ambiguity.  That the ignorant can be saved does not mean that they will be saved nor does it even make it probable.  It simply opens a door, something that only the most hard-hearted fundamentalist would refuse to admit.  For nothing is impossible for God.  It is not salvation, at least according to St. Thomas Aquinas, that is improbable but ignorance.

What is Faith?

A few preliminary points are in order at the outset.  First when we speak of faith, we must make the distinction between the object of faith and the act of faith.  The object of faith is a statement about reality and the act of faith is an assent to the reality that has been opened by the statement.  Belief requires an object of belief—no one just believes, he must believe something.  When we speak of having “faith in Jesus” we can only mean that we believe that “there is no other name under heaven and earth by which man can be saved” (Acts 4:12).  So when St. Paul declares we are justified by faith (c.f. Romans 3:23-25), he means that we believe the reality that was opened to us by the Incarnation of the Son and by our assent conform our lives to it.

The saving power of faith illuminates a second necessary point.  The author of the Letter to the Hebrews says that “without faith it is impossible to please Him for anyone who approaches God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).  St. Thomas is pointing out what he sees as the content for a “minimum” of faith.  He calls these two fundamental dogmas, that God exists and that He rewards those who seek Him, the credibilia because they contain, at least implicitly, all that God has made explicit through revelation and the Church.

Once he has drawn attention to it, he combines it with the belief that God wishes all men to be saved and concludes that the credibilia have been offered in one way or another to all mankind that has lived apart from Judeo Christian revelation via either the ministry of angels or direct illumination (c.f ST II-II, q.2 art 7).  But he doesn’t stop there because he says that implicit faith is not enough.  It is only an explicit faith in Christ that saves.  The Angelic Doctor says that once the person responds to the credibilia through the workings of Providence He leads the new believer to explicit knowledge of Christ.  With the interior assent to the credibilia and the gift of faith, comes the gifts of the Holy Spirit which perfect that faith.  In other words, ignorance is improbable because, as the Thomist Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, “if anybody were to follow the guidance of natural reason in the pursuit of goodness and flight from evil, God would by an interior inspiration reveal not only the prime credibles but also the redemptive power of the Incarnation.”

Salvation and the Man on the Remote Island

St. Thomas rejects the “man on a remote island” narrative because it is too natural of an explanation.  Faith is a supernatural gift by which God, who desires all men to be saved, saves us.  He uses the example of the conversion of Cornelius to demonstrate the principle:

“Granted that everyone is bound to believe something explicitly, no untenable conclusion follows even if someone is brought up in the forest or among wild beasts. For it pertains to divine providence to furnish everyone with what is necessary for salvation, provided that on his part there is no hindrance. Thus, if someone so brought up followed the direction of natural reason in seeking good and avoiding evil, we must most certainly hold that God would either reveal to him through internal inspiration what had to be believed, or would send some preacher of the faith to him as he sent Peter to Cornelius (Acts 10:20).”


De Veritate q.14 a.11 ad 1

In short, if God wills all men to be saved then He would not allow ignorance to get in the way.  Faith comes from hearing, but sometimes it is God Who does the talking.

There is an important corollary to this that, despite not being ecumenically correct should not be overlooked.  Bear with me on this one.  If God moves each and every man from implicit to explicit faith then there are men who, if they remain within certain religions that openly reject Christ as Redeemer, will not be saved.  Push always comes to shove because you cannot both implicitly accept Christ and simultaneously explicitly reject Him.  God’s invitation, for it to be truly accepted, must come with full knowledge and full consent.  Love would have it no other way.  That is why I say this not from a judgment seat but bedside to put to rest the prevailing mentality that non-Christians are “just fine”.  It is time we stoke the embers of the evangelical fires and enter the fray and fight for souls.  We need to stop apologizing for being Christians and start apologizing again for Christ.

Nothing New Under the Sun

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A mega-church pastor in Atlanta named Andy Stanley has written an article in Relevant magazine asking why Christians persist in protecting monuments to the Ten Commandments when, in truth, they no longer apply to us.  Although keeping up with the ramblings of various mega-church pastors could be a full-time job, this particular article merits attention because it is demonstrative of heresies in general and how they seem to persist, especially when believers are cut off from the preservative protection of the Catholic Church.

A native of Sinope in modern day Turkey, Marcion was a shipbuilder who rejected the Old Testament.  He desired to strip Christianity of anything Jewish and any connection to the Old Testament.  In his view, Christ came to undo the work of the Creator.  He even went so far as to produce his own set of Scriptures, removing the Old Testament along with any references to the Old Testament in the New Testament and any suggestions that we would be judged by God.  Within the plan of Divine Providence, Marcion of course moved the Church along by encouraging her to make explicit the role of the Old Testament in the life of the Church.

The Law and Historical Christianity

Pastor Stanley and the second century ship builder are, in a very real sense, kindred spirits.  For truly, there is “nothing new under the sun” when it comes to heresies.  They are simply recycled throughout the ages.  That is why Blessed John Henry Newman’s maxim rings true—“to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”  Pastor Stanley’s error is not just theological but historical.  He claims that “the blended model began as early as the second century when church leaders essentially kidnapped the Jewish Scriptures and claimed them as their own.”  This is simply rehashing what Marcion said and he interprets the Church’s clarification as “kidnapping” the Jewish Scriptures.  In other words, he is saying that Marcion was right. 

Interestingly enough, many German Lutherans became Marcions under the Nazi regime for obvious reasons.  To be clear, Pastor Stanley is not suggesting anything like this (he does in fact condemn it).  But his doctrine necessarily leads to that no matter how unwittingly he proposes it.  This is the nature of heresies, they always lead to a dead, and sometimes even deadly, end.  Given enough time, what is implicit will always be made explicit.

The Law and the New Covenant

That is why it is instructive to cut off his error at its roots, especially because it is a common one.  In essence, his thesis comes at the end of his essay—“While Jesus was foreshadowed in the old covenant, he did not come to extend it. He came to fulfill it, put a bow on it, and establish something entirely new.”  The error really comes in equating the Old Covenant with the Law.  There was not a single “Old Covenant” but instead God made a series of covenants with man, beginning with Adam and ending with David, all of which culminated in the New Covenant that is sealed in Christ’s blood.  Nowhere in Scripture does it suggest that Jesus was “establishing something entirely new.”  The new wine and new wineskins are like the old wine and wineskins, even if they are new. 

The question, and it was one that the early Church had to wrestle with (c.f. Acts 10-20), was what role the Jewish law would play in this New Covenant.  That it was to play a role was clear when Our Lord said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17-18).  For Pastor Stanley and many like him Jesus came precisely to destroy the Law.

St. Augustine in his famous treatise on the Sermon on the Mount said that to “not abolish the law but to fulfill it” can be taken in two ways, both of which are applicable to Christ’s words.  First to fulfill means to add what is lacking.  Augustine says, “he who adds what is lacking does not surely destroy what he finds, but rather confirms it by perfecting it.”  For Pastor Stanley, addition comes by way of subtraction.  You need only one commandment—“love one another as I have love you”— but he would have this commandment demolish the foundation of the Law rather than building on it.  No wonder he calls out Chick-fil-A for closing in observance of the Sabbath.  His one commandment says nothing of loving God, a commandment that surely requires more than keeping the Sabbath sacred but most certainly not its exclusion.

Christ also fulfilled the Law by doing everything that was in it.  He did this not just to show it was possible, but to make it possible for us as well.  In Christ, the impossible becomes possible.  Ethics becomes ethos as the Divine Stonemason moves the law from the stone of Sinai to the stone of our hearts.  The Ten Commandments cease mere laws, but prophesies.  Christians “shall keep the Sabbath” and “shall not kill, lie or steal.”

As further proof that Christ does not want to abolish the law, He devotes much of His Sermon on the Mount to how it will be fulfilled.  He does this by precisely using the Ten Commandments as the model.  “Moses said, but I say to you…”  So clearly He has no intention of abolishing the Ten Commandments.  But what about all the other Old Testament precepts?  Some of them, particularly the ceremonial aspects will find their fulfillment in the rites of the New Covenant.  Other precepts, especially some of the moral ones will remain in place.  Still, if we examine the issue honestly, there is still not enough guidance.  This reveals the larger error that Pastor Stanley makes and, unfortunately, many other Christians with him .

The aforementioned quote of Newman is really an indictment that Protestantism is not the Christianity of history.  Sola Scriptura necessitates that view because they are rejected a historical explication of Christian dogma in favor of one based solely on the Bible.  The problem with this however is that it is a dead Christianity because much of the Bible only makes Revelation implicit.  Which aspects of the Mosaic Law are binding and which are not is never explicitly told to the Biblical reader.  Instead what is implicit in Christ’s words must be made explicit.  This explication must happen under the guidance of the Church, led by the Holy Spirit “who guides us to all truth” through the Church.  Once a Protestant turns to the Church Fathers and sees the unbroken line of belief to what the Apostles taught, errors such as Pastor Stanley’s are never made.  Christ did not make something entirely new, he added the necessary ingredients to Judaism to make it Catholic.  But if you reject the Catholic Church outright then you necessarily will think He must have started something new.

Being closing we would be remiss in neglecting Pastor Stanley’s fundamental question as to why Christians should insist on the presence of monuments of the Ten Commandments instead of the Sermon on the Mount.  Perhaps Pastor Stanley’s suggestion is a little self-serving in that he is looking for a place to actually read and study it.  But in theory there is no particular reason why we could not use the Sermon on the Mount instead, although it is, admittedly, a little long.  But the Ten Commandments, especially in a post-Christian culture can be very effective for the same reason that God gave them first.  The law was given so that the people became aware of their inability to keep it and would cry out to God for redemption.  Sometimes the bad news is just as effective as the good news.

The Idolatry of Marriage

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In a society that finds its foundation, marriage, crumbling, one can’t help but ask why so many marriages fail.  There is no shortage of theories—a search of the internet yields close to 22 million hits and counting.  They usually boil down broadly speaking to a few categories related to economics, communication and emotional availability.  While these may be the reasons listed, they are mere symptoms of the real cause.  Marriages fail when marriage itself becomes an idol.

As Christians, we believe marriage is sacred, not just because it was instituted by God, but because it was instituted to serve as the primordial sacrament.  Marriage, for anyone with even a modicum of Biblical knowledge, is the primary image that God uses to describe His relationship with mankind.  He proposes throughout the Old Testament (c.f. Is 62:5), marries mankind in the Incarnation, consummates it on the Cross (John 19:30) and invites all of creation to the wedding feast (Rev 19:7).  All of this however is prefigured in the opening words of Genesis.

Marriage in the Beginning

When Adam is made, he is given dominion over all the earth.  He has everything at his disposal, and yet He is alone with no one to share it with.  He looks at the animals, and, despite them being bodily creatures like himself, he is unable to find a suitable mate to share those things with.  Then God puts Adam into a deep sleep and from his rib He creates Eve.  When Adam looks upon her he knows he has found that mate because, even though she has a body like the animals, there is something different about her as well.

What is it that is different?  Through her body, he discerns two things.  First that she is a person and no mere animal—a person made in the image and likeness of God.  Second, that because she is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” he is made for communion with her and vice versa.  In seeing the image of God, the image that sets her apart from the animals, and knowing that he is made for communion with her, he knows that he is ultimately knows that his communion is an image of the communion that he is to have with God.  It is considered the “primordial sacrament” because it is a sign of the ultimate communion that is to come—the one flesh communion of God and man in the Incarnation and the communion of saints with the communion of the Trinity. 

This natural desire that Adam experienced, this same natural desire to unite in marriage that we all experience, is meant to serve as a signpost to the infinite desire to be united to God.  But living outside of Eden the sign has faded.  Now two fallen people come together and are mostly just trying to get along.  Getting along even though they came into the nuptial pact expecting that infinite desire, the same desire that drove them to marriage in the first place, to be fulfilled.  This is why Our Lord saw the need to elevate it to the status of a Sacrament and repaint the sign in his Blood.  Now the Sacrament brings about the thing signified, union between the spouses in Christ begets union with Christ.

 

 

But even when it is not received as a Sacrament it is still a sacrament.  And herein lies the problem.  Whenever an image is confused for the real thing, the image becomes an idol.  When marriage is entered into with the expectation that it will lead to ultimate fulfilment it is doomed to fail.  The image/idol disorientation is what has lead many people to give up on marriage completely.  Once it becomes an idol it is emptied of its meaning.  Even those who decide to get married are in a precarious position because in idolizing it they are expecting their spouse to fill the God-sized whole in their heart.  When the emotional newness and excitement wears off, or their spouse turns out to be less than they were expecting (and how could they not have been?) or when someone else stimulates that excitement, they blame their spouse for not fulfilling their needs.  They are expecting their spouse to bear an infinite weight and are ultimately disappointed when they can’t.  The failure to see this is why most people who get divorced once do so multiple times afterwards.    

Raising Expectations

To think everything that has been said so far is simply a summons to lower expectations is to miss the point.  In fact it is the exact opposite.  Again as the primordial sacrament it still points to the thing signified—the union between Christ and the Church.  Instead marriage must be modeled upon that.  What does that mean practically?  First that the spouses must be willing to give of themselves completely to each other.  We only find meaning in life by making a sincere gift of ourselves (Gaudium et Spes, 24).  We only find ourselves by giving ourselves away and marriage is the place where this happens for most of us.  Marriage as an idol is focused merely on what we get out of it and when the ledger goes into the red it is time to move on.  But marriage as a sign means giving.

Marriage is not only giving, it is also taking—as in “do you take X to be your lawfully wedded …?”  Christ not only gives but receives.  Marriage requires not just a gift of self, but a reception of the other person’s gift.  This means seeing the other person as a gift and receiving the gift, brokenness and all.  Christ receives His Bride the Church with all her blemishes so that she might be made holy and spotless (c.f. Eph 5:25-30).  It is this receiving of the other that is usually the most difficult in practice.  And it is only when you see marriage as a sign, a faded and blurry sign at times, and not as an idol, that it is even possible. 

Christians unfortunately have failed to live marriage as a sign to the world.  It began when Luther de-Sacramentalized marriage making it essentially a secular institution.  The Church still recognizes all valid marriages between Baptized Christians as a Sacrament precisely so that the grace of the Sacrament can overcome the secularizing weight.  This secularizing of marriage has even crept into Catholic circles and is really at the heart of the push for giving Communion to those in irregular unions.  Now the sign must become a counter-sign to the world and we must, as Catholics, let the truth of marriage shine forth.

Where We Got the Bible

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In an age marked by an exaggerated ecumenism, there is a tendency to paper over important differences that, once argued and resolved, could readily become a means of true unity.  Take for example the question of “how many books there are in the Bible?”  This question is not really one of personal faith, but historical fact.  Still it tends to be largely ignored because the facts are not really known on either side.  For this reason it is instructive for us to examine the history of the canon of Sacred Scripture.

To properly speak of a “canon” of Scripture, there are some necessary distinctions that need to be made.  First, the word canon is a theological term that was first used in the Fourth Century AD.  Prior to that the term Scriptures was used to distinguish those books that were inspired from those that were not.  This is important because, as Vatican I taught, the Church in recognizing the canon, was not bestowing inspiration upon certain books, but acknowledging that those books contained in the canon were inspired.  So properly speaking the Church did not “decide” the canon but merely recognized that the books contained in it were inspired and was tasked with preserving and protecting them.

Judaism and the “Canon” of the Old Testament

Second, there was no set canon within Judaism at the time of Our Lord.  Judaism was not a monolithic religion and different sects had different beliefs as to which books from the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired.  The Sadducees, for example, believed only that the five books of Moses were inspired (which is why Our Lord reprimands them for not knowing the Scriptures when they denied the resurrection in Mt 19).  The Pharisees on the other hand included other books, but disputed over the status of Ecclesiastes, Esther and the Song of Solomon.  The Essenes, the group from whom the Dead Sea Scrolls have been excavated, accepted even more, including some that are not found in any of the Christian Scriptures.

The point is that there was no accepted central authority within Judaism that could canonize the Scriptures.  This is one of the things that they thought the Messiah would do (c.f. John 4:25).  This dispute over which books were considered Scriptures lasted well into the second century and beyond.  This point is also important to consider because of a popular myth, perpetuated mainly by Protestants (especially Norman Geisler) that there was a Jewish council at Jamnia around the year 100 that closed the Jewish canon.  The end result was a canon of 22 books; the same set found in most Protestant Bibles.

If they did not recognize the Messiah whose role it was to discern the Scriptures, then by what authority could they have declared a fixed canon?  Furthermore, there is absolutely no historical evidence for such a formal council.  It appears that this was made up by H.E. Ryle as a defense of the Protestant subtraction of books from the Christian canon.  More on this in a moment.

What the Jews did begin to do, although in nothing like a formal way, was create a wall around their Scriptures in order to fend off the evangelization efforts of the Christians—Greek speaking and Greek Bible-reading Christians specifically.  So naturally one of the ways they would do this was to de-emphasize or even accept those books written in Greek.  It was for this reason that Christians, starting with St. Athanasius began making distinctions between what he referred to as “canonical” and what he called “other books.”  The “other books” were simply those books, that though considered to be inspired by the Christians, were not useful for evangelizing and argumentation with Jews.

How do we know that these books were considered inspired, even though not listed among Athanasius’ canon?  Because they were all approved to be used within the liturgy.  This is an important point that cannot be overlooked.  Books that were used in the liturgy were considered to be sacred and authentically the Word of God; lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief.  In an age where literacy was low encounters with the Scriptures happened regularly in the liturgy.  Even if they were not able to read, they were still well versed in the Word of God for this reason.

It was the usefulness of the two groups of Scriptures that led St. Jerome to wrongly make the canon-deuterocanon distinction, positing that the latter were not inspired.  This conflating of usefulness with inspiration was an error that persisted even into the Middle Ages.  There are no degrees of inspiration, it either is or it isn’t.  But there are degrees of usefulness.  It is clear that Genesis has greater use than Tobit, but that does not mean the latter is not inspired.  It was in light of this that the Church spoke definitively as to which books were canonical and could be read in the liturgy at the Council of Carthage in 418.  This same list, which included the so-called deuterocanonical books, was reaffirmed throughout the centuries including at the Council of Florence almost 80 years before Luther drove the nail into his 95 theses.  The “Counter Reformational” Council of Trent merely reaffirmed the list and declared it to be a belief that was to be definitively held.  A solemn declaration had become necessary because for the first time since the third Century someone had challenged the contents.

Luther’s Role

Martin Luther did not actually remove books from the Bible as is commonly thought.  To do so would have been far too radical.  What he did do though is revive the canon-deuterocanon distinction.  His German translation reformatted the Bible so that the books in question appeared in the back of the Old Testament texts. Eventually he labeled them Apocrypha, prefacing them with a note that these were“books which are not held equal to the holy Scriptures and yet are profitable and good to read.”  The logical question is why he would have included them in the Bible to begin with unless they were actually in the Bible.  Why not remove them altogether?  Instead he pulled a little bait and switch by a common heretical trick that remains down to our day—gradualism.

This highlights the difficulty with the “Jewish Council” defense or anything like it.  Why would you remove books from the Christian Bible based upon Jewish authority?  Given the choice between 1500 years of Christian practice and dubious Jewish authority, why would you choose the latter?  For Luther and his progeny that was a red herring.  Books, in his view, should be included in the Bible only insofar as they confirm his authority.  He is very clear about that.  At first he quoted the books of Wisdom and Sirach in his own apology against indulgences.  But when those books were shown to reveal other things he didn’t agree with, he did not argue but instead questioned their authority.

Blessed John Henry Newman once quipped that to be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant.  While he meant that once we study the Church Fathers it becomes clear that they were Catholic.  But his dictum can be taken in a deeper sense in that once we study the history of the Bible we come to see that the Protestant position regarding the contents of Scripture is wrong.  For a group of Christians who believe only in the authority of Scripture this is highly problematic to say the least and Catholics in charity owe it to them to set the record straight.

Marriage in Heaven

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Matthew the Evangelist relays a conversation that Jesus once had with the Sadducees in which they tried to trap Jesus into admitting that the resurrection of the dead was absurd.  They present Him with a case study of a woman who was married seven times, each ending in the death of her husband.  They ask Our Lord, “Now at the resurrection, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had been married to her.”  If Our Lord said all of them, then He would be admitting there was polyandry, thus rendering the resurrection of the body a sinful state.  Instead Our Lord utters words that have shocked many Christians throughout history: “because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God.  At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven” (c.f. Mt 22:28-33).  For some of those who are married, newlyweds and those happily married especially, these words cause much angst.  For the rest, relief.  But for all of us they are relevant because they give us a momentary glance at our promised destiny.

This ought to go without saying, but it has been uttered enough that it bears mention.  When Our Lord says that they “are like the angels” He does not mean that they become angels.  “For angels have not bodies” as St. Thomas says.  Therefore, it makes no sense to speak of resurrection, that is the re-unification of body and soul, if there is no body.  Instead Our Lord is describing the qualities of the resurrected life.  They will have the powers of the angels in thought, movement and glorification, but they will still be embodied spirits.  They will also, like the angels, not marry.

Seeing Marriage for What It Is..and Isn’t

Part of the struggle to grasp what Our Lord is saying stems from the fact that we live in an age in which the definition of marriage remains elusive.  That is, we are unclear what marriage is and what it is for and so endeavor to see how, if at all, it could fit into the scheme of eternity.  Marriage is the one flesh union of spouses tending towards the communion of their persons.  This union is of the whole person, physically, emotionally and spiritually, and not just an emotional bond as is commonly thought today.  This unbreakable personal union also is the foundation of the family which is the natural domicile for the procreating and raising of children.

As the instrument for the procreating and raising of children, obviously marriage is unnecessary in the next world.  While it served this purpose here below as the place where man lived out the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” once the harvest comes there will be no need for more fruit.

As a Sacrament marriage too will pass away in the eschaton.  In fact, all the Sacraments will pass away.  As signs, the Thing signified will be unveiled and made fully present.  Gone will be the need to see Our Lord veiled behind the appearances of bread and wine and it will pave the way to see Him face to face.  Likewise Marriage as a sign will no longer be necessary because the reality will be fully present.

Marriage as a Sign

The nature of marriage as a sign that points to a very specific reality is vitally important.  Specifically, marriage, as an earthly reality tending towards the communion of the spouses points to a parallel heavenly reality.  First, in its bond of love and fruitfulness it points to the Communion of Persons which is the Trinity.  But that is not all.

As a complete gift of self, it signifies the mutual gift of self between God and each man and woman.  As proof that this union is real, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  The Incarnation is the definitive marriage of mankind with God.  The Son is forever united to a human nature.  As if further proof were needed, Christ also raised Marriage to a Sacrament by which He bestows sanctifying grace.  This sanctifying grace not only cements the bonds of the spouses, but more importantly it truly unites each of the spouses to God.  In this way it becomes not just a sign, but the thing signified, “the great mystery in reference to [the bond of] Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:32).

There is also a third reality that is signified in marriage and it is this one that ought to bring relief to those who despair no longer being united to their spouse.  It is this reality, says St. John Paul II, that is the reason why we are not simply “laundry listing” what we believe in the Creed but implying an intimate connection between the truths and reality.  More to the point, the Saintly Pontiff says that we link the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints in the Creed.

We are embodied creatures and our bodies too are a sign.  They are a sign that we are made for communion, not just with God, but with one another.  But these signs do not pass away because they bring about the thing signified, that is our bodies are who we are.  In this life we are limited in our capacity of self-giving to the point that we can only give of ourselves fully to one other person.  When time ceases, this limitation will be lifted so that we will be able to give of ourselves fully in all our relationships.  Put more succinctly we will participate fully in the Communion of Saints, a communion of self-giving and receiving of the entire redeemed community.  This is why, by way of anticipation, Our Lady, although only a creature, can have a personal relationship with each of the members of the Church Militant.  It is this redeemed community that is wedded to God, a communion with a communion as John Paul II said.

This is the Good News for spouses.  All in their relationship they have built upon and centered on Christ will endure.  The true intimacy, in Christ, they experienced will not be forgotten but instead will be the foundation of their relationship with each other in the Communion of Saints.  They will experience a level of intimacy beyond anything they could imagine.

And this is ultimately why Our Lord refused the Sadducees trap of treating marriage and the resurrection as some theological theory.  It is also why we shouldn’t treat this as some “pie in the sky” musings.  It ought to inform our relationships here and now.  If only those aspects of our relationship that were built on Christ will last, then we know which ones we should focus on.  If everyone did this in living out the consequence of Marriage as a Sacrament, then there would be peace in many homes.  And that, truly is the Good News.

In Defense of Fanaticism

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It is perfectly OK to be a fan, but not a fanatic—especially a religious fanatic.  Better to be moderate than to be zealous.  At least that is what the spirit of the world tells us.  But if we trace the contours of salvation history, especially in the low spots marked by corruption, it was always the zealots that brought about health and reform.  The Old Testament gives us numerous examples.  Moses, Phinehas, Samuel, David, Elijah, Jael, and Judas Maccabeus are but a few.  Though times changed, these men and woman’s jealousy for God drove them to heroic perseverance in restoring God’s glory among the peoples of the world.  So deep was their hatred of all things opposed to God’s glory being made manifest that they were even willing to take up the sword (or even a tent spike).  They were fanatics in the truest sense of the word.

“Killing in the name of God”—that is exactly the reason why fanaticism is a bad thing.   But that misses the point completely.  These stories were “written for our admonition and our learning” (Romans 15:4) so that we would stir up the same zeal, even if it is to be made manifest differently.  When Peter zealously picked up the sword to defend Our Lord he was rebuked not for the zeal, but for the use of the sword.  Armed with the “sword of the Spirit” it is no longer necessary to wield an actual sword.  The thickness of the Blood of Christ makes the enemies of God nothing more than potential friends. It may be true that “those who live by the sword die by the sword” but this does not absolve us from the duty to become fanatics.

What is Zeal?

St. Thomas defines zeal as an effect of intense love (ST I-II q.28, a.4).  An intense love seeks to remove everything that opposes it.  The more vigorously we love, the more vigorously we oppose resistance to that thing.

We can imagine then that zeal is a most necessary virtue in times of corruption.  When there is much that opposes a good, it takes an intense love of that good to fight against the obstacles to that good being made manifest.  In fact, we could say that it is only men and women of zeal who can lead to true reform.  Church history is marked with fanatics, moved by intense zeal, for God’s glory to shine through His Church.  Our time is no different.  We can look back in time and see figures like St. Athanasius, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Alphonsus Liguori who were consumed with zeal for God.  But for every one of these saints, there were many more who were consumed with a false zeal.  The temptation is ever-present, St. Paul even cautioned the Romans about synthetic zeal, that is, “zeal for God but without discretion” (Romans 10:2).   In order that we not succumb to this counterfeit, it behooves us to make the distinction between true and false zeal.

Drawing on a distinction made by St. Thomas can help us clarify the distinction.  The Angelic Doctor says that zeal comes about according to the type of love we bear.  First there is the love of concupiscence or self-love.  He does not necessarily mean “self-love” as in selfishness but in the sense that we desire our own good.  Zeal manifests itself in two ways: jealousy and envy.  Jealousy is the zeal we experience when something hinders us gaining the object of our love.  We tend to think of jealousy as an exclusively bad thing, but it is not necessarily so.  A husband may jealously protect his wife from other suitors (assuming they are actually trying to take her from him otherwise his jealousy is a bad thing).  Likewise, God is said to be a “jealous God” because there are enemies that are trying to take His beloveds from Him.  The zeal of envy is always bad in that we are moved to envy those who seem to excel and by doing so seem to hinder us from excelling.

Love of friendship on the other hand seeks the friend’s good and zeal in this regard seeks to remove anything that opposes that friend’s good. Aquinas says that, “a man is said to be zealous on God’s behalf, when he endeavors, to the best of his means, to repel whatever is contrary to the honor or will of God.”

True and False Zeal

It is the zeal motivated by the love of God that marks true zeal.  God’s will, put simply, is that His glory be made known.  Anything that acts as an obstacle to this, especially evil and sin, is zealously opposed.  The zealot hates sin first and foremost because it is an offense against God.  Aquinas again: “a man is eaten up with a good zeal, who strives to remedy whatever evil he perceives; and if he cannot, bears with it and laments it.”

Notice that when Aquinas’ man is unable to remedy an evil, he tolerates it, but he also laments  it.  The man of good zeal, in imitation of Christ, takes the sin as if it was his own, grieves over it, and, united with the Passion of Christ, offers the Father penance for it.  He does not attack the other person, but instead wields the sword of the Spirit which penetrates into the evildoer’s heart.  This is a sure test as to whether you have true zeal or false zeal—are you willing to do penance for the person simply because you do not want God to be offended?  False zeal would rather “flame” the person because it is always tainted with self-love.

The true fanatic also knows zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls are two sides of the same coin.  God is never more glorified than in the conversion of sinners.  We usually utter trite sayings like “hate the sin, love the sinner” to remind us of this, but sinners are nearly impossible to love.  Instead it should be “hate the sin, but love God who wants to redeem the sinner.”  This is the discretion that the Israelites lacked and St. Paul warns about.  We must love our neighbor for God’s sake first knowing that even the most unrepentant of sinners is powerless against the flood of the Precious Blood.  It is fanatics that open the floodgates.

The Roots of Feminism

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Whenever we want to understand the cause of human behavior, it is usually instructive to return to the “beginning.”  The divinely inspired words of Genesis 2 gives us a valuable glimpse of human psychology.  In this regard, the roots of modern day feminism are no different.  The reverberations from the Fall were felt not only in relation to God, but man and woman also experienced a rupture in their relationship with one another.  Rather than living in domestic bliss, man and woman are destined for conflict.  With the entrance of fig leaves, complementarity is threatened by competition as man rejects his role of protector and instead is met with the temptation to rule over woman (c.f. Gn 3:16).

Competition and Complementarity

It is important to add that while the Fall left man and woman with relational myopia, it did not doom their relationship.  It is strained, but not irreparably so.  The path to reconciliation, at least according to Our Lord, passes through “the beginning” (c.f. Mt 19:4).  Man and woman were made to live in harmony.  But this harmony was (and still is) contingent upon harmony with God.  In fact, it was meant to be a sign of it.    This helps us to grasp why we say they were cursed.  It was not because hell hath no fury like a God that has been scorned, but because God refuses to give up on mankind.  His cursing of man and woman and their relationship is meant to awaken within them an innate sense that reality is not quite what it seems.

The lie hidden within the serpent’s temptation was that God was withholding something from Adam and Eve.  Up to this point, man’s fundamental stance was one of receptivity.  They saw everything as a gift from the God Who desired nothing more than to father them.  But with satanic sophistry, the woman is tempted to change her stance to one of appropriation rather than receptivity.  Rather than receiving a gift, she is tempted to seize it.

This tension between receptivity and appropriation helps us to understand why it was woman who was tempted by the serpent.  Femininity, properly understand, was meant to be a sign of mankind’s receptivity of the gift.  In fact this receptivity is stamped into her body.  Eve, in seizing the apple, rejects not only God but her femininity.  By attacking the woman Satan is able to distort both man and woman’s signpost for their relationship to God.  Woman is now cursed to experience the consequences of the new paradigm.  She will become an object of appropriation as man no longer views her as a gift but instead as something to be seized and controlled.

With the threat of appropriation always looming over woman, she is keenly aware that something is fundamentally wrong.  She experiences desire for man, yet that desire is often met by a lust for domination.  This experience then also carries with it a temptation for her. The desire and the lust are precisely because of her femininity.  The temptation then is to reject her femininity.  Thus we find the genesis of modern feminism in Genesis.

Grasping Masculinity

This helps to explain why ersatz feminists, rather than embracing all those things associated with authentic femininity, attempt to grasp masculinity.  And because they are grasping they grasp a counterfeit version of it.  They set fake masculinity on a pedestal and then try to imitate it by taking a pill that enables them to indulge all their desire for man (even though the Pill actually robs them of that desire) and lord it over everyone they meet.  They come to loathe their own and other’s femininity and hate any man who portrays authentic masculinity, mostly because they cannot seize it on their own.

The curse may haunt the woman, but it does not have the final say.  The path out is by embracing her femininity.  Eve may have set the tone, but the New Eve gives the escape route.  Mary is the archetype of femininity.  She is totally receptive—“be it done to me according to Thy word” (Lk 1:38).  She is the archetype not just because she is the perfect wife and mother, but because she is the perfect disciple of her Son.   She is the model of receptivity, praising “the Almighty Who has done great things for me.”

The tug of the curse cannot be overcome by trying harder—that too is the appropriated masculinity revealing itself.  Instead the solution is to submit to Christ Who offers the grace to embrace her true femininity.  The true feminist is one who demands of men around them that they be authentically men.  She knows that masculinity is not something she can grasp but must come as a gift from a man who is able to give it.

Adam fell in not guarding Eve’s femininity.  The New Adam, because He “handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish empowers men to guard the femininity of woman” (Eph 5:25-27), restores man’s masculinity and empowers him to guard the femininity of woman.  Rather than seeing her as a threat to his own masculinity, he gifts himself to her.

Many of today’s feminists trace their ideological roots back to the 1960s.  If they were to dig further then they would find they extend back much further.  Failing to see this, they apply false solutions only exacerbating the problem.  Instead they should submit themselves and their femininity to Christ, the only One Who can fulfill their deepest desire.

On Finding Wayward Shepherds

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In the second chapter of his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul details his encounter with the first pope upon his visit to Antioch.  The Apostle to the Gentiles called St. Peter to task for withdrawing from the Gentiles and eating only with the Jews out of fear of offending the latter.  Knowing that their faith was weak, St. Peter did not want to scandalize them and so, out of a misguided sense of charity, he pretended to agree with them.  St. Paul was, of course, right.  St. Peter failed pastorally to shepherd his entire flock.  The truth can never be a source of scandal and it is no act of charity to water down the faith.

This event is favorite for non-Catholic apologists for arguing against the primacy of Peter.  After all, they reason, if Peter is the infallible head of the Church then how could Paul question him and find in him in error?  Therefore, the Apostles were all equals and the Catholic doctrines surrounding the papacy are false.  Of course, they read far beyond what happened.  Nowhere does St. Paul challenge St. Peter’s authority to rule, only his exercise of that authority.

Putting aside its apologetical value, this particular passage serves as a guiding light for Church management, especially in times when error is being propagated by those in authority.  One can see the great wisdom of the Holy Spirit in inspiring St. Paul to recount this event because it serves as an example for both prelates and their subjects.  From the perspective of the prelate, we are given an example of humility so as not to disdain correction from those who are “lower” than them.  From the perspective of the lay faithful it provides an example of both zeal and courage to correct those in the hierarchy.

What is Scandal?

First, a word about scandal.  In English this word tends to be understood as referring to an action that leads to public disgrace.  But in the theological sense the word has a more precise meaning.  The word comes from the Greek skándalon which means “a stumbling block.”  Specifically it refers to some action that creates a moral stumbling block for another person.  St. Thomas defines it as “something less rightly done or said, that occasions another’s spiritual downfall.”  The Angelic Doctor goes on to categorize scandal into two types: active and passive.  Active scandal, that which has as its reward a millstone, is “when a man either intends, by his evil word or deed, to lead another man into sin, or, if he does not so intend, when his deed is of such a nature as to lead another into sin: for instance, when a man publicly commits a sin or does something that has an appearance of sin.”  Passive scandal is when “one man’s word or deed is the accidental cause of another’s sin, when he neither intends to lead him into sin, nor does what is of a nature to lead him into sin, and yet this other one, through being ill-disposed, is led into sin” (ST II-II, q.43, a.1).

In short, scandal always pertains to an act that is in some way public in the sense that many people know about it.  One should never make public what was strictly done in private as the accuser would then be the cause of scandal rather than the perpetrator.  What happens in private should both remain and be corrected in private.  But in either case it is an obligation of charity to issue a correction.

The Obligation to Correct

Why is there an obligation?  By way of analogy, St. Robert Bellarmine, a Doctor of the Church helps to illuminate why this is:

“As it is lawful to resist the Pope, if he assaulted a man’s person, so it is lawful to resist him, if he assaulted souls, or troubled the state, and much more if he strove to destroy the Church.  It is lawful, I say, to resist him, by not doing what he commands, and hindering the execution of his will.”

While the saint mentions the Pope specifically, what he says applies to Bishops, Priests and Deacons.  If you saw a prelate beating a man physically you would stop it and you should do likewise if he is beating him spiritually.  St. Thomas Aquinas goes a step further saying that it is an act of charity not just towards the rest of the sheep but also towards the prelate as well because the scandalous behavior puts the prelate’s soul in great danger.  He, who has been given much, will have to answer for much.

St. Thomas says that “like all virtues, this act of fraternal charity is moderated by due circumstances.”  What he means by this is that we must not only be aware of our obligation, but also the manner in which we exercise that obligation.  While criticizing a prelate does not make you “more Catholic than the Pope” the manner in which you do it should make you just as Catholic as the Pope.  That is we should never forget that the operative word is charity.  This means that there are certain rules that ought to govern our interactions.

The Code of Canon Law (Canon 212) says that the faithful may legitimately criticize their pastors but that it must always be done “with reverence toward their pastors.”  This means that the criticism should first of all be done in private so that the pastor has an opportunity to correct himself.  This maintains the dignity of both their office and their person.

There are times however when the pastor does not correct himself or that meeting with him in private is not possible (not everyone can get a papal audience for example).  It may also be that the act or word poses such a danger to the faithful that a public rebuke is necessary.  In other words, it may be necessary like St. Paul to “withstand him to his face.”  St. Thomas says that if the faith were endangered a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly on account of the eminent danger of scandal (ST II-II q. 43 a. 1 obj.2).  This is why it is important to understand what constitutes scandal and what does not.  In any regard it may be necessary to “correct” the pastor in public out of, not just fraternal charity, but justice because the faithful have a right to the content of the faith in a clear and undiluted manner.  But still it must be done with gentleness and reverence for his office.

Before closing a word about the response of pastors.  Augustine says that Peter “gave an example to superiors, that if at any time they should happen to stray from the straight path, they should not disdain to be reproved by their subjects.”  Very often pastors think themselves above criticism from mere lay persons regardless of how qualified those lay persons are.  They remove the emphasis away from the truth as spoken onto the one speaking the truth.  Unfortunately the fraternal charity is not likewise met with pastoral humility.  It is this spirit that causes many lay people to remain quiet not confident enough that they could defend the Church’s position, especially when they are likely to be met with hostility.

In Loss and Gain, Blessed John Henry Newman’s fictional account of the conversion of a man from Anglicanism to the Roman Catholic Church, the protagonist Redding was drawn to the Church by its consistency.   While he could ask ten Anglican Priests to explain a particular dogma and  get ten different answers, he would get the same answer from ten Catholic pastors.  Those days of consistency are no longer among us, a phenomenon that can only be corrected when the entire Church, lay and clergy, take ownership of the Faith and fear not to correct wayward Shepherds.

The Unforgivable Sin

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If Jesus does not both shock and disturb when He speaks to us through the Scriptures, then we aren’t taking Him seriously enough.  Take as an example this Sunday’s Gospel when Jesus, Mercy Incarnate, returns to Galilee and accuses the scribes of doing the seemingly impossible—committing a sin that will not be forgiven.  “Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mk 3:28-29).  These words ought to shake us, especially in an age of exaggerated mercy.  While Jesus leaves us clues as to the nature of this unpardonable sin, He does not really come out and tell us what it is.  Therefore, there can be great spiritual benefit in investigating this question more deeply.

St Thomas Aquinas found this to be a question of particular importance as well and includes it among the questions dealing with sins against faith.  Standing on the shoulders of his saintly predecessors, the Angelic Doctor says that there are three traditional ways in which this has been interpreted.

The First Two Interpretations

The first is the literal meaning based on the context in which Christ said it.  To utter a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (or God in general) is to ascribe to the devil that which comes by the power of God.  The best historical example of this is the Golden Calf in which an Egyptian god (which St. Augustine says was actually a demon) is said to have led Israel out of Egypt.  So clear was the action of God in rescuing them that the Israelites could not have acted out either weakness or ignorance.  Therefore there is no excuse in receiving punishment and the sin is unpardonable.  Returning to the passage however, Jesus is not condemning the Scribes per se, but instead issuing a warning.  Because Our Lord had yet to reveal His divinity, they acted out of ignorance, an ignorance He reminds the Father of from the Cross (c.f. Lk 23:34).

This is related to the second interpretation that Aquinas mentions.  He says it is a sin against the Holy Spirit specifically because it is a sin of malice.  Because power is appropriated to the Father, to sin against the Father is a sin of weakness.  Likewise, because wisdom is appropriated to the Son Who is the Word, ignorance is a sin against the Son.  And because goodness is appropriated to the Holy Spirit, then a sin against the Holy Spirit is a sin of malice.  With full consent and full knowledge, a sin against the Holy Spirit is a sin of malice, that is in essence saying “evil be my good.”  This particular sin is the eternal sin because it removes all of those things from us that might be a cure.  It creates a hardening of the heart like Pharaoh in which the grace of conversion cannot penetrate.

As a fruitful tangent, the doctrine of appropriation in which we ascribe to specific persons of the Trinity that which in truth is an action of all three is not only a way in which we learn more about the life within the Trinity, but also a way to develop a relationship with each of the Persons individually.  When we need strength we should pray directly to the Father, wisdom to the Son and power over evil the Holy Spirit.  This habit of prayer and personal relationship keeps us falling into the trap of believing the doctrine of the Trinity while not really believing in the Trinity.

A Third Interpretation

The third interpretation that Aquinas mentions is also the most favored today, although often in an overly simplistic way.  Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit can be viewed as final impenitence.  In this interpretation, the blasphemy occurs not necessarily in word, but in thought or deed.  It is against the Holy Spirit because it acts contrary to the forgiveness of sins which is the work of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Jn 20:22).  It is also the favored interpretation of the Great Mercy Pope, St. John Paul II.  In his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem he says that “the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit consists precisely in the radical refusal to accept this forgiveness, of which he is the intimate giver and which presupposes the genuine conversion which he brings about in the conscience” (DV, 46).

Standing on the shoulders of these saintly giants then, why is this most widely accepted answer overly simplistic?  Because there are two ways in which final impenitence can manifest itself.  First there is the obvious stubborn refusal even on one’s death bed, call it an impenitence of the will, to repent.  But there is a second, and for many of us more dangerous way, and that is through what we might call an impenitence of fact.  Although many of us envision our deaths being something we can plan for, the truth is that many of us die suddenly without much warning at all.  That means our temporal impenitence can become final impenitence.

This final impenitence in fact is not necessarily brought about by a hardness of heart, but we become victims to Aquinas’ insight that the sin “unforgivable by its very nature, insofar as it excludes the elements through which the forgiveness of sin takes place.”

In short, we simply a refusal to examine ourselves well and are blocked by presumption.  Fear of the Lord, through which we seek the forgiveness of sins is a certain (healthy) anxiety by which we recognize that in truth we are fugitives from hell and that it is only God’s mercy that saves us.  This is healthy not because we are morbid, but because each time we accuse ourselves of a sin, we are humbled and God is glorified in His mercy.  Each time we stir up sorrow for our sins, God is glorified in His mercy.  And ultimately this is why, no matter how we interpret the passage, we should take Our Lord’s warning to heart: to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is to refuse God the glory of His mercy.

A Truly Virgin Birth

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Sometimes familiarity can be a catalyst for myopia, especially when it comes to the mysteries of the faith.  Christmas is no exception in this regard and offers an excellent opportunity to expand our sights by fixing them on some of the not-so obvious mysteries hidden with of Our Lord’s nativity.

In his customary manner, St. Matthew ends his account of the birth of Our Lord with an Old Testament proof-text to show how the prophets spoke specifically about Jesus.  Quoting Isiah 7:14, the Evangelist says, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’” (Mt 1:24).  It is common for us to use this as Scriptural proof of the virgin birth of the Messiah, but unfortunately very little attention is paid to what this actually means.  More to the point, we often substitute our idea of the virginal birth with the idea of the virginal conception.  Both of course are true, but how is it that a virgin could give birth?

If we come at it from the perspective of the one who gave birth, clarity emerges.  For a belief in Our Lady’s perpetual virginity is really saying three things.  First, that she became pregnant with Our Lord without “knowing a man” (Lk 1:34).  Second, that Our Lady remained in this state after the birth of Our Lord.  These two are obvious, but it is the third that helps bring illumination—Our Lady remained a virgin “even in the act of giving birth to the Son of God made man” (CCC 499).  Or, as the Council of Ephesus puts it: “After giving birth, nature knows not a virgin: but grace enhances her fruitfulness, and effects her motherhood, while in no way does it injure her virginity.”

The Miracle of Christ’s Birth

In order to keep her virginity intact, Our Lord did not leave His Mother’s womb through the birth canal.  He would have been delivered in a miraculous manner, passing directly from her womb into the outside world.  Without getting overly bogged down in the biological details, we can still glean some particularly poignant aspects of the mystery.

As a first consequence of this, Tradition has always taught that Our Lady’s partus was completely devoid of pain.  This is more than an interesting fact, but carries with it a very deep corollary that Our Lord wished to establish from the beginning of His mission.  When Our Lord came into the world, He came to suffer so as to redeem us.  But He was unwilling to be the cause of any other unnecessary suffering.  As St. Thomas says, “But the mother’s pains in childbirth did not concern Christ, who came to atone for our sins. And therefore there was no need for His Mother to suffer in giving birth”(ST III, q. 35, a.6).  Our Lady would suffer because of her role as the New Eve, but only in the amount that was absolutely necessary.  Likewise, all those associated with Him (us) are guaranteed only to suffer when it is necessarily tied to His redemptive mission.  He did, and still does, refuse to “break the bruised reed or quench the smoldering wick” (Is 42:3).

Remaining on the more practical level, we can also see why this miraculous intervention might be necessary.  If Our Lady’s virginity remained physically intact, there can be no doubt as to the truth of the virginal conception.  This is also why it is reasonable to believe that Our Lady remained a virgin throughout her entire life.  While we do not get overly fixated on the biological details, the virginal birth is still a biological fact.

Virginity, properly understood though, is not just a biological fact.  It is a condition of the entire person and does not simply mean someone who has never had sex.  Our Lady is ever-virgin because she is all-pure, both body and soul.  Her body is as a sacrament revealing the state of her soul.  In order to affirm this Our Lord does not destroy the physical sign of her personal virginity.

As a point of clarification, we call it a miracle because it defies the laws of nature for a human body to pass under its own power from its mother’s womb.  This should be seen as distinct from Christ, while operating under the power of His resurrected body, had the power of subtlety, that is, the power to pass through physical objects.

The Miracle as a Sign

But we also refer to it as a miracle because, like all Christ’s miracles, it has great value as a sign.  The same infant that was wrapped in swaddling clothes, that is burial cloths, had just passed from the closed womb pointing to the time when He would pass from the tomb.

His birth also was to serve as a sign revealing the fullness of Our Lord’s person as true God and true man.  As St. Thomas says, “He mingled wondrous with lowly things. Wherefore, to show that His body was real, He was born of a woman. But in order to manifest His Godhead, He was born of a virgin, for ‘such a Birth befits a God,’ as Ambrose says in the Christmas hymn” (ST III, q28, art. 2, ad. 2).

The miracle also serves as a sign of our ultimate redemption.  Living in this post-lapsarian world, it is difficult to view creation as anything other than a closed system of corruption.  By passing through Our Lady’s womb, without leaving behind the natural traces of corruption, Our Lord was pointing ahead to the redemption of creation in the New Heavens and the New Earth where corruption is no longer possible.

Finally, Our Lord wanted to point each of us to the true joy of Christmas.  By taking something that is naturally painful and filling it with gladness, He was forever instituting Christmas as a day of great joy.  Merry Christmas everyone!