Category Archives: Scripture

On Dating Christmas

Advent, Apologetics, Christmas, History, Scripture, , , ,

Each Christmas a friend of mine sends me a text wishing me “seasons greetings”.  He casts a wide net capturing the “spirit” of the season wishing me a “Merry Christmas, Merry Natalis Solis Invictus, and Happy Kwanza” and, just in case, throws in a “Happy Festivus” for the rest of us.  Rather than continually engaging him each year, I now simply respond “Merry Christmas…and as for the rest, I have already aired my grievances.”  His point is rather clear—Christmas is just as made up as the rest of them.  It is an indirect attack on the historicity of Christ, but also a direct attack on the dating of Christmas as December 25th.  Having addressed the indirect attack in other posts, it is the direct attack I would like to address in this post.

The Problem of Accuracy

One of the problems we must admit right away is related to the accuracy of the date.  The Church Fathers are not unanimous in the dating of Christmas and very few mention December 25th.  It is not until much later that the Church selected that date to mark the Solemnity of Christmas.  Part of the problem is the abundance of calendars used in the ancient world.  The two most commonly ones that were used Egyptian and the Julian Calendar.  The Jews also used a calendar based on the lunar cycles (354 days) rather than on the solar cycle (365).  These were considered obsolete when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in the 1500s (although the Orthodox still mark Christmas on January 7th which is the equivalent to December 25th on the Julian Calendar).  The point is that our December 25th is not the same day as the December 25th using the Julian Calendar, which was the one in use in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ.  We have to admit that there is a “translation” problem that makes the exacting dating difficult.

This does not mean, however, that the selection of December 25th is arbitrary and meaningless.  But this is to yield to the sentiment that somehow accuracy and meaning are synonymous.  Just because we cannot accurately calculate the date of Christ’s birth doesn’t mean December 25th is arbitrary.  In fact, it is the most fitting date to celebrate the historical reality of Christ’s nativity because it preserves the meaning of Christ’s birth.

There is a principle at play in the discussion that, in our Big Bang/Evolutionary ideal, is often forgotten.  Nothing within Creation is arbitrary.  Even the tiniest activity is charged with meaning, not because of the Butterfly Effect, but because of Christ.  To put it in biblical terms, “in Him were created all things in heaven and on earth…all things were created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:16, emphasis added).  At the center of Creation, at the center of history, is Christ.  All of Creation points to Him and all of Creation finds its meaning in Him.  Christ really is the answer.  He is, to use Aristotelian terms, the Final Cause of each thing in Creation.  This was His reason for creating so many natural images so that He might use them to describe Himself and His Kingdom. 

The Fittingness of December 25th

With this in mind, why is December 25th fitting then?  To grasp this we must go back to “the beginning”.  Many of the Jews and ancient Christians believed that the Sun was created on March 25th.  It is assumed that when God created the Sun to “separate day from night” (Gn 1:14), this separation was equal.  This only occurs on two dates throughout the year—the two equinoxes in the Spring and the Fall.  The date for the Vernal Equinox in the Julian Calendar was March 25th.  God chose the fourth day for the creation of the sun because it was the day in which the “sun of righteousness” (Mal 4:2) was to come into the world.  Its creation is for the sake of God Himself entering Creation.  This entering into Creation occurred when the Holy Spirit overshadowed His Mother at the Annunciation.  It is for this reason To mark Christ’s conception the Church celebrates the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25th .

As an aside, March 25th is also believed by many Church Fathers to be the day Christ died.  “On the third day, He rose again” and man was re-made.  Again, we see the parallel with Creation.  The Sun is created on the 4th day and then “on the third day” (Day 6) man is first made.  This only seems like a stretch when we forget the principle articulated above.  If all things really were made for Christ, then this is exactly what you would expect.

If Christ was conceived on March 25th, then it would be reasonable to celebrate His birth nine months later on December 25th.  This is the reason for the December 25th celebration.  In support of this date we also have the witness of nature itself.  “The true light which has come into the world” (Jn 1:9), comes right after the Winter Solstice, when the amount of light coming into the world from the Sun begins to increase.  December 25th is most certainly fitting.

The three Wise Men knew all of this.  This is why they followed the Star.  They knew nature points to the True King.  The choice of December 25th is a defense of the primacy of Christ, not just over Solis Invictus, but over all of Creation.  We too would be wise to pay attention to this principle.

The Muddled Creationist

Evolution, Faith and Reason, Science, Scripture, , ,

There is perhaps no movement in the Church that has been more destructive to confidence in Sacred Scripture than Theistic Evolution.  Proponents usually defend their position by saying “truth cannot contradict truth” so that the lens of science can be applied to the biblical account of origins confidently.  But the amount of exegetical gymnastics that it requires ultimately destroys faith in the truth and historicity of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  Once faith is shaken in the beginnings of the Bible, it is not long before other books fall victim to the same fate. 

At first glance it seems to be a reasonable position especially with our modern disdain of fundamentalism, no matter what position they actually take.  As Christians, the full evolutionary explanation, one marked by a completely material explanation of the origins of life, is unacceptable.  But rather than rejecting it outright as false, they attempt to tweak it so as to avoid being lumped in the fundamentalist creationist camp.  They insert God into the gaps in evolution by saying that either He guided it or stepped in at certain points.  The evolutionary fence-sitting seems like a compromise but all it ends up doing is compromising the Faith itself.

Avoiding the Evolutionary Creep Deep into Genesis

I mentioned the first eleven chapters of Genesis as being in the crosshairs.  We should not be surprised about this because St. Peter warned us that scoffers in the end times would deny the truth of the Flood.  He even tells us how they will deny it—by saying ‘all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.’ (2 Peter 3:3-7).  This describes what has become known as uniformitarianism.  This “theory” posits that all geological features can be interpreted in terms of slow-and-gradual processes.  Layers of sediment and the natural processes all proceed at exactly the same pace throughout the history of the world enabling us to somewhat accurately measure time based on the fossil record.  If those processes are not uniform then really nothing can be said as far as timing.  If there was, say a world-wide flood, burying the surface of the Earth for 100 days, the receding of the waters would not only profoundly change the face of the earth but also lay down layer upon layer of sediment almost all at once.  This would mess up the “biological clock” and leave evolution without enough time to work itself out.  Combine this with other similar catastrophes that were not as large and any dating of the Earth would certainly be overestimated.

Darwin himself recognized that the Flood must go— “Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure” (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species).

Even if we ignore the fact that fossils only form when something is buried quickly, uniformitarianism has been called into question as a scientific theory.  Many geologists, especially those who don’t have an atheistic axe to grind, agree that  it should retired.  We have many recent examples of catastrophes that have resulted in an “aged” landscape.  A good example that refutes uniformitarianism is near Spirit Lake in Mt. St Helens in Washington state that was created in a mere few hours and has the “appearance of being millions of years old.  Nevertheless, it is nowhere near being as sure a theory as it is often portrayed. 

What is sad is that many theistic evolutionists feel obligated to adjust their interpretation of Noah’s Flood by making it either a mythical event or just a small local flood because it does not fit with evolution.  This is non-sensical unless you are also willing to explain away all the animals on board (why is this necessary?) and God’s promise never to do it again (there are local floods all the time).  Darwin had at least this right—if the Flood really did occur then it is practically impossible that evolution is true. 

Not a Science Textbook

There are those who willingly accept the historical truth of the Flood yet still claim that we should accept evolution because Genesis is not a science book.  This is a bit of a non-sequitur because no one claims that it is.  Science could not explain creation for the simple fact that it is a supernatural event.  The Six Days of Creation describe supernatural actions performed directly by God (Wisdom 9:1).  It definitely explains how  it was done, even if it doesn’t do so using scientific language.  It is a dogma of the Faith that each thing was created out of nothing by God’s Word (“through Him all things were made”) and not through any secondary causes (more on this in a second).  Science could no more explain how God did it than it could explain how Christ turned water into wine or rose from the dead.  Science can only explain natural phenomena.  The fact that it is a supernatural event explains the rather oblique language, but it does not clear the way for an evolutionary interpretation.  The language is meant to add clarity not obscurity.  To say that the “dust of the earth” really means “ a monkey’s body” or that the birds being formed on the fifth day before the reptiles on the sixth day isn’t really meaningful since evolutionary theory has birds evolving from reptiles or the fact that the whales and other sea-going mammals were formed on the fifth day before the land animals on the sixth day from which they supposedly evolved also doesn’t matter is putting the evolutionary cart before the scriptural horse.  It may not be a science textbook, but there is no reason to use oblique language when there is a perfectly understandable explanation.  Truth cannot contradict truth indeed.  Why would we assume that the Scriptural text should be adjusted when it is clear that there is little more than a scientific hypothesis that reptiles evolved into birds?  It is almost as if God anticipated the Theory of Evolution and directly refuted it through the order in which things were created.

As promised, we will return to the dogmatic declaration that all things were created directly by God and find a rather large stumbling block for theistic evolution.  The First Vatican Council declared

“If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God; or holds that God did not create by his will free from all necessity, but as necessarily as he necessarily loves himself; or denies that the world was created for the glory of God: let him be anathema.” (Vatican I, Dei Fillius, Canon 5).

The bold text means that God did not use any secondary agents to create each new kind of living thing.  This Biblical kind is distinct from biological species (a nebulous term anyway), but it does leave the door open for microevolution even broadly speaking (say for a horse to become a zebra for example).  But it closes the door on is macroevolution because it does not permit any belief that one kind (say reptile) became another kind (say bird).  Evolution, even guided, also necessitates on God’s part an adherence during creation to natural laws.  This too draws the Church’s anathema upon the theistic evolutionist.

Ultimately then the theistic evolutionist can only subscribe to a microevolutionary theory of variation with biblical kinds and requires God to regularly intervene in creation whenever a new kind is made.  What they don’t realize is that this ultimately makes them muddled Creationists.  They concede that God created each new thing, but then mix in microevolution to explain all the variation.  I say muddled because they are confusing what St. Thomas describes as the Creation/Providence paradigm.  During the days of Creation God created each thing according to its kind.  On the Seventh Day and beyond, no new kinds of creatures come into being (God rests from creating on the 7th day), but through reproduction and multiplication we might see distinct scientific species arise (think of my horse and zebra hypothetical).  But this really isn’t evolution at all, at least not as Darwinists define it.  Certainly, you could read Genesis literally and there would be no conflict with microevolution at all (this is why I have written about the need to not fall for the evolutionary bait and switch).

It turns out then that Theistic Evolution is nothing more than a Faustian Bargain.  In order to be intellectually honest to the Evolutionary explanation, Faith in Genesis must be replaced with faith in Darwin.  There is no compromise to be made between the two worldviews that does not leave the compromiser compromised.

Scriptural Bingo

Bible, Church Authority, God's Will, Grace, Scripture, , , , ,

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 Battle Over the Origin of Species

Anthropology, Creation, Creed, Evolution, Science, Scripture, , , , , , ,

Writing in his journal in 1873, Charles Darwin said “I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect; real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.”  Using his slow and silent theory of Evolution as his side attack, Darwin decided that he would reimagine the Book of Genesis.  The original Origin of Species speaks of the supernatural beginnings of all of creation and it was to be replaced by a completely naturalistic explanation for the origin of all that is.  Darwin’s Theory of Evolution started a revolution, first by consigning the first three chapters of Genesis to “myth” and then systematically deconstructing each of the tenets of the Creed.  The Church was certainly caught flat-footed when the attack began and the Faithful made compromises with Darwinists that can be labeled as “theistic evolution.”  But this compromise does not just remake the beginnings but removes the supernatural from nearly every element of the Faith.  It is high time then that we reconstruct a theology of Creation which starts with a proper understanding of the opening chapters of Genesis.

Before diving into the specifics, we must first admit that the use of figurative language has as its goal to make the truth clearer.  Those who attempt to reconcile the two Origin of Species accounts often speak as if Genesis is using figurative language to convey the truth that God created all things, but that it is not intended to explain how He did so.  Nevertheless, the account does in fact reveal how He made things.  Genesis speaks very clearly that the animals are made from the clay(Gn 1:24), Adam from the slime of the Earth (Gn 2:7) and Eve from the rib of Adam (Gn 2:23). 

The Figurative Catch-22

It is often contended that the author of Genesis is merely using figurative language thus opening the door to an evolutionary explanation.  The problem with this interpretation is that there is no need to use figurative language; ordinary language will do.  Darwin did it and didn’t need the Holy Spirit’s help.  If Theistic Evolution is true, then the figurative language makes this less clear, not more, and violates the sole purpose of using figurative language to begin with.  No one would read “Let the earth bring forth the living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds” (Gn 1:23), and think this is simply a metaphor for one living species becoming another.  It is quite clear, even if we admit that it is figurative language, that the author is saying that the living animals all came directly from inanimate matter.  Likewise with man who God “breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” If man’s body came from animate being, then “breathing the breath of life” into the man so that he “became a living soul” may be figurative language, but the figure does not actually point to reality.

This also invites the more fundamental question as to why God needs to use figurative language to begin with.  Certainly, there are truths that are beyond human understanding and thus only a metaphor or the like will do.  But when speaking of God’s actions in Creation, the Omnipotent God, can do things in such a way as to make them explainable.  In other words, why would God need a metaphor to describe how He created—couldn’t He just create in a way that enables Him to also describe it in relatively simple terms? Why do we default to thinking that “the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth” isn’t actually how God actually did it?  The only reason why we wouldn’t read that literally is because we a priori remove any supernatural action on God’s part and assume that it is a metaphor for some natural explanation.  Again, why would God then use a metaphor when there is a natural explanation that could be explained using clear language?  The ancient peoples knew of different theories of evolution, so it would have been intelligible to even them.  “Slime” or “dust” (depending on your translation) is not a metaphor for ape, even for the most inarticulate person you could imagine.

That it should be read with a supernatural interpretation is clear from the fact that things are created by God’s Word—“through Him all things were made.”  How can we reconcile God’s “let there be” and evolutionary construction of the universe by natural processes?  The only way is through a Deistic conception of God by which He speaks not directly into creation (i.e. supernatural creation and miracles) but through some Divine blueprint by which the universe reaches its completion without any direct intervention on His part.

The Mind of the Church

It was mentioned above that the Church was caught somewhat flat-footed in its response to Evolution.  That was not the case initially.  A local synod was held in Cologne, Germany in 1860 to specifically address Evolution. They sought to respond to the release of Origin of Species in Germany and nip any attempt to say humans were subject to evolution in the bud.  Although it was a document of a local Church it did receive the unreserved acceptance of Rome because it contained the ordinary Catholic teaching.  Likewise, Vatican I declared that all things were created directly “according to their whole substance” by God.  Pope St. Pius X also commissioned the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC), giving them Magisterial Power to declare the truths about Genesis.  In his 1907 Motu Proprio, Praestantia Scripturae, he declared that “all are bound by duty of conscience to submit to the decisions of the Biblical Pontifical Commission, both those which have thus far been published and those which will hereafter be proclaimed.”

Related to the specific question at hand, the PBC issued the document “Concerning the Historical Character of the First Three Chapters of Genesis” in 1909.  The question that was posed was “[N]otwithstanding the historical character and form of Genesis, the special connection of the first three chapters with one another and with the following chapters, the manifold testimonies of the Scriptures both of the Old and of the New Testaments, the almost unanimous opinion of the holy Fathers and the traditional view which the people of Israel also has handed on and the Church has always held, may it be taught that: the aforesaid three chapters of Genesis contain not accounts of actual events, accounts, that is, which correspond to objective reality and historical truth, but, either fables derived from the mythologies and cosmogonies of ancient peoples and accommodated by the sacred writer to monotheistic doctrine after the expurgation of any polytheistic error; or allegories and symbols without any foundation in objective reality proposed under the form of history to inculcate religious and philosophical truths; or finally legends in part historical and in part fictitious freely composed with a view to instruction and edification?” to which they answered, “In the negative to both parts.”

Genesis, according to the mind of the Church then, contains actual events “which correspond to objective reality and historical truth” and is not “allegories and symbols without any foundation in objective reality proposed under the form of history to inculcate religious and philosophical truths.”  Genesis is true history from “the beginning”.    

If the modern Church that has been steamrolled by the slow and steady onslaught of Darwinian Evolution it is because these teachings have been mostly forgotten.  If we are to reverse the tide, then we must reassert our confidence in the truth and meaning of God’s Word.  We have abandoned it for dubious science and the fallout has been great.  Only by reasserting the Traditional understanding of the Church can we restore a belief in the supernatural action of God.

God’s Salt

Bible, Church, Creation, Grace, Martyrdom, Scripture, Spiritual Life, The Life of Jesus, ,

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 Permanence of Hell

Anthropology, Church Fathers, Communion of Saints, Devils, Heaven, Magisterium, Mercy, Scripture, , , , , , , ,

C.S. Lewis once said that there was no doctrine that, if he had the power, he would more willingly remove from Christianity than hell.  But he also was humble enough to recognize that were he to do so, it would destroy the very reason for Christianity.  The Good News is really only good when we understand the bad.  Unfortunately, there are many in our modern day who, rather than teaching us how to avoid hell, avoid hell itself by explaining it away.  In its place they have offered a universalism in which all men will be saved.  There are different ways in which this universal salvation is brought about, but one of the more popular versions posits that hell is not everlasting and those who had been consigned there will be given the opportunity to repent and join everyone else in heaven.

According to Scripture, Sacred Tradition and human reason, escaping hell after death is an impossibility.  In Hebrews 9:27-28 we are told that just as Christ died once, we too die and receive judgment once.  Likewise, Revelation 20:10 says that the damned “will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”  That “their worm dies not and the fire is not extinguished” (Mk 9:45) is also taught by Sacred Tradition, not only through the unanimity of the Fathers (c.f. St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Irenaeus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Augustine) but also through the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) which declared that the damned “receive a perpetual punishment with the devil”.

The Permanence of Hell and Human Nature

It is when we apply human reason to Revelation about the duration of hell that we begin to understand why it is the way it is.  In our temporal state, our will remains flexible in that it may be changed both before and after a choice is made.  We choose based upon some knowledge and only choose differently based on some new knowledge.  In short, a change in will is dependent upon a change of mind.  Regret only follows upon some new realization.

The ability to change our minds is a uniquely human power, and uniquely temporal at that.  The angels, our spiritual counterparts, are incapable of regret because they can’t change their mind.  Our decisions are plagued by ignorance, their decisions are always fully informed and thus fully consented to.  Their wills remain everlastingly fixed in the decision they have made because they never have a reason to change their mind.  When the soul is separated from the body, we will “become like the angels” in that our wills too will remain fixed in the state they were at separation and we have no reason to change our mind.

As we apply this anthropological truth to the question of the damned, it does not seem obvious at first why they should not desire to change their mind.  Wouldn’t the pains of hell be enough to make them rethink their relationship to God?  The short answer is no and to deny this would begin to tear at the fabric of many Christian beliefs besides the everlasting duration of hell.

A change of mind regarding God in this life requires the action of actual grace.  We are incapable of lifting ourselves out of sin and move towards repentance on our own.  It is actual grace that moves us.  Because it is still my and your repentance however there must be a movement of the will that accompanies the actual grace.  It is possible that the will become so hardened that actual grace no longer penetrates the hardened heart.  Scripture offers us a prime example in Pharaoh.  While Moses pleads with him, his heart remains impenetrable.  The will becomes hardened through its own acts and only a supernatural act of God can undo it.

Why Repentance After Death is Impossible

The soul in hell then is incapable of repentance because there is no actual grace present to move them.  This is not because God withholds it however.  It is so because their will is fixed in a permanent “No!” to God.  There is no actual grace is present because no amount of grace could change their mind.  Why this must be so becomes obvious once we think about it for a second.  This fixity of the will is, in a certain sense, a two-edge sword.  It keeps both the damned in hell and the blessed in heaven.  If a change from evil to good is possible, then it could also be possible that there is a change from good to evil.  In other words, there would be nothing per se that would keep the blessed from crossing over the chasm into hell.  This law of human nature cannot be operative for good only.  As Abbot Vonier puts it, “God has made spiritual natures so perfect that a wrong use of their powers will bring about results as permanent as the right use of them.”

This, by the way, is at the heart of the error that those who believe in “once saved, always saved” commit.  They confuse our temporal state with our permanent state.  The soul is not fixed until death, but they insist that it is fixed once a single choice for Christ is made.

All of this helps us to see damnation as caused strictly by the damned themselves and not as a result of God’s judgment.  It all depends upon the condition of a person’s soul upon death.  Our souls at baptism are reformed into the shape of a cup enabling them to hold sanctifying grace.  This grace, as a participation in the divine nature, is what enables us, upon death, to see God face to face.  It is what makes our souls flame resistant enabling us to stand within the flames of the Consuming Fire.  But our wills, through mortal sin, can also bend our souls so that they are no longer able to hold sanctifying grace.  If our souls are never repaired and we die with them in that shape, then we become permanently incapable of standing before God.  It is the shape of our souls then that determines are everlasting state.

Catholics have grown very fearful of hell, not in the sense that they try to avoid it, but that they avoid speaking of it.  The risk for seeming harsh or intolerant is overwhelming.  The problem is that silence on the bad news makes preaching the Good News very difficult.  Catholics need to rethink their approach if they are to trample down the Gates of Hell and save many people who would otherwise end up there.  This begins by seeing hell for the hell it is and understanding why it must be so.

Taking Down the Firewall

Apologetics, Church Authority, Communion of Saints, End Times, Last Things, Protestantism, Purgatory, Scripture, , , ,

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral, the Augustinian priest ignited a firewall that continues to separate Catholics and Protestants down to this day.  At the heart of his question was the abuse of indulgences, but he ultimately attacked the firewall upon which the doctrine was built—Purgatory—in order to make his point.  Unfortunately, the debate still rages today, not necessarily because of Purgatory itself but because of all of the ancillary issues attached to it: Atonement, Penance, Tradition, Development of Doctrine, and Authority.  In an age of exaggerated ecumenism, we tend to ignore those doctrines like Purgatory that ultimately lead to division.  Ignoring the truth is never a good idea, especially when the truth is a practical one.  Purgatory is perhaps the most practical of doctrines; many of those who don’t believe in it now will experience it first-hand in the not too distant future.  But it also is important to have a ready explanation for it because it is also a “head-pin” doctrine; knock it down and many of the aforementioned obstacles will fall with it.

The most common argument against it is that it is not Scriptural.  We have spoken any number of times in the past about the rule of faith being implicit within Sacred Scripture and the need for Tradition to make it explicit.  In other words, doctrines like Purgatory need not be explicit in Scripture only implicit.  We will not traverse that well-worn path yet again.  It is mentioned because we need not necessarily have this discussion regarding Purgatory.  If we dig a little deeper into Scripture then we will find that Purgatory is a common theme, so much so that we can offer a strictly Scriptural defense of it.

St. Thomas said that, when arguing with an opponent, we should always argue using terms and sources of authority that they agree with.  For example, when discussing some aspect of morality with a non-Christian, we should not cite the Bible but instead Natural Law.  We can certainly show how the Bible agree with that source of authority, but to obstinately stick to the Bible when they think it mythical is foolish.  A similar thing happens with Catholics and the doctrine of Purgatory.  Second Maccabees (2 Maccabees 12:39-46) clearly points to a belief in Purgatory.  The problem is that Protestants don’t accept that book as inspired.  By referencing them it seems to only prove their point that Purgatory is a Catholic fabrication, yet it still remains the go-to texts from the Old Testament.

St. Francis de Sales and the Argument from Scripture

Throughout post-Reformation history, there is perhaps no one better than St. Francis de Sales at converting Protestants.  Some estimate that he was responsible for over 70,000 conversions in his lifetime.  It is therefore instructive to look at how he presented this divisive doctrine.  He did not argue from Tradition or even mention 2Maccabees, but instead gave a strict Biblical defense using Protestant accepted texts.  Given his success rate and the fact that most of these texts are rarely cited, it is educative to review what he said (Catholic Controversy, Appendix II).

It without saying that Catholics and Protestants both agree that Christ’s Blood is the true purgatory.  But the question still remains how and when that purgation is applied.    For the saintly Bishop of Geneva and the thousands he converted there was a simple reasoning process: if there are passages which speak of purgation after death then there must be a place (call it Purgatory since the name is never given us) where this purgation occurs for purgation can happen neither in hell (where “the worm does not die” Mk 9:48) or in heaven (where “nothing unclean may enter it” Rev 21:27). 

St. Francis begins where many of the Fathers of the Church, those who spoke the great Amen to God’s Revelation, began, in Psalm 66.  There the Psalmist speaks of being led out into the spacious place by passing through fire (Ps 66:12).  Likewise, Isaiah 4:4 speaks of being cleansed by a spirit of burning. 

St. Francis also refers to Christ’s teaching on the Sermon of the Mount where he cautions about the punishments attached to anger (Mt 5:22-26).  Our Lord suggests different levels of punishment, with only the latter meriting hell.  For the other two, Jesus speaks of a prison of sorts that one can leave saying, “truly, I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny” (5:26).  Building on this theme, St. Paul refers to a man who is saved “as through fire”  (1 Cor 3:11-15).

Praying for the Dead

All of this points to a time and place of purgation, but, absent a connection to Tradition, one could argue that this purgation occurs in this life.  The problem with that interpretation however is the abundance of Scriptural examples of people praying for the dead.  St. Francis begins by referring to David’s prayer and fasting for Saul and Jonathan after their deaths—”And they mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and for Jonathan his son and for the people of the LORD and for the house of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword” (2 Sam 1:12).  Likewise, we find St. Paul praying for his departed friend Onesiphorous (1 Tim 1:16-18).

He also explains two other often problematic texts by referring to Purgatory.  The Mormons often justify their habit of literally vicariously baptizing the dead by referring to Paul’s text in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians (1 Cor 15:29).  St. Francis says that when Paul speaks of being baptized for the dead he does not mean it in the literal sense, but as an exhortation to offer sufferings for the dead.  He says that St. Paul is using Baptism in the same manner as Christ did when He speaks of His baptism of afflictions and penances undertaken in Luke 12:49-50—I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!  There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!”.  Notice how Our Lord references to a fire in this rather clear passage.

Perhaps his most convincing passage prooftext is the last one he refers to: Philippians 2:10.  St. Paul says that that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth”.   In particular, St. Francis is concerned with a proper interpretation of those “under the earth”.  To assume that refers to those in hell would contradict Scripture— ”For there is no one in death, that is mindful of thee: and who shall confess to thee in hell?” (Ps 6:5, c.f. Isaiah 38:18).  Instead those “under the earth” refers to “holy souls in Purgatory”, that is the Church Suffering.  St. Paul’s hymn is making reference to the Church in all her members in heaven, on the earth and in Purgatory.  Ultimately then, there is no firewall between the Church’s members nor should there be between Catholics and Protestants.

Kindred Spirits?

Defending the Faith, Protestantism, Saints, Scripture, , , , , ,

Summing up why Sacred Scripture matters, St. Jerome once proclaimed that “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”  The famously acerbic Doctor of the Church knew that the Word Made Flesh could be found on every page of the Bible and therefore dedicated his life to studying the Scriptures and producing accurate translations of the books of the Bible.  Living in a time when many of the versions had become corrupt due to poor translation and copyist errors, he learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic just so that he could create the most accurate translation of the ancient books.  So gifted was he in this area that the pope at the time, Pope Damasus, asked him to produce an “official” translation in Latin that became known as the Vulgate.  It is this translation that remains the official translation of the Church to our day.

Like much of what the somewhat contentious Jerome did during his lifetime, his work was not without controversy in his day.  Little did he know that this controversy would be felt a millennium later when a former Augustinian monk stumbled upon some of his early thought and used his arguments to justify his own position.  The bulk of Jerome’s work was done when the Church did not have an official canon—official in the sense that the Church had authoritatively spoken as to which books were part of the Bible and which weren’t.  It was not until 382 that Pope Damasus produced a list of the canon that was later affirmed by the Council of Hippo (393) and the Council of Carthage (397).  Nevertheless, there was still widescale agreement among the Faithful as to which books could be used in the Liturgy (which was the home of Scripture) and which couldn’t.  There was still some question about a few books like the Book of James, Revelation, the Letter of Clement to the Corinthians and the Didache, but most agreed that the former two belonged and the latter did not.  But before officially closing the canon, Pope Damasus sought to produce an accurate translation of the entire canon of Scripture so that the Church could have a single collection of the books to rely on.

It is important to note however that the debated books never included what has become known as the Deuterocanon (or Apocrypha in Protestant circles).  This name, Deuterocanon, was used to distinguish books of the Old Testament that could be used for argumentation and evangelization with Jews from those that couldn’t.  For the Jews, once they realized that their books were being coopted by the Christians, had begun to build a wall around their Scriptures and rejected all those books that were not found in Hebrew.  A list that included the seven books (Baruch, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Sirach, Judith, Wisdom, and Tobit) and parts of two others (Daniel and Esther) of the Catholic canon.  But the Church still viewed both sets of books as inspired and we find those books included among all the early lists of the approved Scriptures by the Church Fathers. 

Jerome’s Line of Reasoning

The agreement in the Early Church regarding the Deuterocanonical books was unanimous except for one man—St. Jerome.  For Jerome made a mistake in his thinking, a mistake of which the aftershocks are still felt today.  As he gathered up the various translations of the books, he found that the copies of the Septuagint, that is, the ancient Greek translation of the books of the Old Testament, were various and not wholly consistent.  Translating them without finding an “official” text proved difficult to say the least.  He also found that the Hebrew texts, what he called the Hebrew Masoretic (HM) texts, had been widely circulated for several centuries and were much cleaner and consistent.  From these two facts, Jerome came to an incorrect conclusion.  He thought that the HM texts were the “correct” ones and not the Septuagint.  He called this the principle of “Hebrew Verity”.  And since the Deuterocanon did not appear in the HM texts he also concluded that they were not inspired.

Flash forward 1100 years and Martin Luther, whose theology, especially on indulgences and praying for the dead, is clearly contradicted by these books, is looking for a reason to throw these books out of the Canon.  He stumbles across Jerome’s reasoning and latches on to it.  The story of how he removed the books has been covered previously, so we won’t rehash that here.  What we will cover however is that Jerome was wrong in his line of thinking and therefore Luther merely resurrected his error and passed on a stunted Canon to his Protestant progeny.

Why Jerome was Wrong

We know that Jerome was wrong for two reasons.  The first is related to the findings in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  This sacred library was discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds and contained the earliest translations of many of the books in the Old Testament.  These translations precede any of the earliest translations we had up to that point by almost 1000 years and precede Jerome’s HM text by almost 500 years in some case.  Why this is significant for the discussion at hand is that among the books that were found were the books of the Deuterocanon.  And not only were they in the library, but there were Hebrew and Aramaic translations.  These translations, as well as the translations of the other books that were found, are closer in substance to the Septuagint and not to the HM texts.  In short, the Dead Sea Scrolls show that Jerome erred in thinking that just because the HM texts were consistent, they were correct.  The problem was that the parts of the Septuagint were actually preserving the original Hebrew better than the currently existing Hebrew and the Dead Sea Scrolls show this.

While Luther might be excused for not knowing this, the second reason should have convinced him.  The reason we know Jerome was wrong is because Jerome said he was wrong.  In a letter Against Rufinus he said,

“What sin have I committed if I followed the judgment of the churches? But he who brings charges against me for relating the objections that the Hebrews are wont to raise against the Story of Susanna, the Song of the Three Children, and the story of Bel and the Dragon, which are not found in the Hebrew volume, proves that he is just a foolish sycophant. For I was not relating my own personal views, but rather the remarks that they [the Jews] are wont to make against us.”

And this ultimately helps us to uncover not just the error Luther made but his motivation.  For he cites St. Jerome as his authority, but then does not do what Jerome did.  For Jerome, even though he had personal reservations against those books being included in the official canon, still translated them, and ultimately deferred to the authority of the Church.  He knew that his personal opinion could err, but the Church could not, especially when it comes to the Canon of Scripture.  He knew that a fallible list of infallible books leads to an absurdity, one that tugs at the seamless garment of the content of faith until it entirely unravels. 

It is not much of a stretch, especially when we read their writings, to see that Jerome and Luther were kindred spirits with one huge exception.  St. Jerome has the humility of a saint and deferred to the authority of the Church.  Luther had the pride of devil and decided to set himself up as his own authority.

Protestantism and the Motives of Credibility

Apologetics, Church, Church Authority, Defending the Faith, Ecumenism, Scripture, , , ,

In investigating how we come to Faith, we discussed how the key step in the journey from natural faith to supernatural faith is to have “reasons to believe” that God has authentically spoken.    These external proofs of Revelation, when combined with the internal light of the Holy Spirit, help to formulate the content of faith.  The Church calls these reasons to believe motives of credibility (CCC 56) and enumerates three of them: prophecy, miracles and growth.  Only the Catholic Church bears all three of these stamps of authenticity, proving that she is the voice of God.  But these motives of credibility can also be applied in the opposite direction; not only are they signs of authenticity, but their lack is a sign that a given religion is false.

St. Francis de Sales, in his book The Catholic Controversy puts these motives of credibility to the test in refuting the authenticity of the Protestant Reformers.  He points out that throughout Salvation History, every ambassador for God carried with him a “letter of recommendation”.  This letter of recommendation comes in two forms, mediate and immediate. 

The mediate minister is the one who is commissioned by an already established authority and sent by one of God’s authentic ministers.  Scripture is replete with examples, but one will suffice to demonstrate the point.  When Elijah, who was God’s anointed, appointed Elisha as his successor, the latter became the authentic prophet and the voice of God among men through the imposition of his mantle (c.f. 1 Kings 19:16-21).  Likewise, Acts of the Apostles shows numerous cases in which the Apostles (or those who have been given authority by them) sending ministers out to speak in the name of the Church, the voice of God among men.

Someone who is sent immediately is one who received direct divine commission.  Again, we find numerous Scriptural examples including the aforementioned Elijah and the Apostles themselves.  In contrast to the mediate ministers, these immediate ministers must always carry with them two marks: prophecy and miracles.  They must be both prophesied and prophecy themselves.  The Apostles once again are the example par excellence through both being prophesied and prophesying themselves.  They also performed miracles making their message believable.  The interior movement of the Holy Spirit was met with external signs directing them to the true voice of God.

Applying the Principle to the Protestant Reformation

Once this principle is established, St. Francis de Sales applies it to the Protestant Reformers to see if they are truly God’s ambassadors.  It is readily apparent that the Reformers were not mediately appointed.  They rejected the authority of the Church and therefore to argue that they were sent by the Church would be nonsensical.  But what is often argued is that the Protestant Revolt was one from below and that it was the rank and file laity that sent them.  This viewpoint is historically debatable given that it was mostly imposed by princes, but even if we concede that it is true, then it is most certainly not Scriptural.

Hebrews 7:7, “unquestionably, a lesser person is blessed by a greater” carries with it a corollary and that is that a lesser person cannot bless a greater person.  What this means practically is that the laity cannot ordain an ambassador for God.  Even if some of them were priests, sharing only in Apostolic Succession through their Bishop, they lacked the proper authority to act directly against those Bishops.  To say that Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were anointed by the people would contradict a fundamental tenet that the Reformers all had in common: sola scriptura.  Therefore, we cannot say that these same Reformers were mediately appointed.

This leaves us with the immediate option, namely, that they were appointed by God directly. These reformers were obviously not the first in the history of the Church to make claims against the Church.  Heretics almost continuous made similar claims and were all rejected in part because they lacked these two signs of credibility.   So then, if the Protestant Reformers were truly on a mission from God, then we should expect both prophecy and miracles.  Unfortunately, we find neither as Luther and company never performed any miracles nor were they either subjects or objects of prophecy.

This certainly deals a blow to their credibility and should have been enough for many people to reject them out of hand.  But they countered that they were not changing anything , but restoring it.  Anyone who has studied the history of the Church knows that this is a rather dubious claim at best.  But what is indubitable is that they did change one thing: the Priesthood.

Changing the Priesthood

We find two Scriptural examples of a change in the Priestly Office.  First, we have the Levitical Priesthood.  Moses instituted the Levitical priesthood through his brother Aaron (c.f. Ex 28) as a replacement for the original priesthood of the firstborn son of every family.  This changing of the Priesthood was accompanied by a changing of the law given on Sinai. The members of the tribe of Levi were set aside to offer sacrifices for the people, despite the fact that the entire people of God was a “kingdom of priests” (Ex 19:6).

Jesus, the new High Priest, instituted a new priesthood.  It was prophesied that there would be a new priesthood.  This new priesthood would cease to be a hereditary Levitical priesthood but would be of the order of Melchizedek.  This priesthood will never be replaced (c.f. Ps. 110).  To make the point clear, the Book of Hebrews explicitly lays out how Jesus’ priesthood was of the order of Melchizedek and was the replacement for the Levitical priesthood (c.f. Hebrews 7:11-28).  Its sacrifice (a priest by definition must have a sacrifice) is bread and wine (c.f. Gn 14:18-20).  Jesus anointed the Apostles as priests and commanded them to continue this sacrifice perpetually at the Last Supper.

Looked at in this light, we can clearly see then that the Protestant Revolutionaries instituted a new priesthood.  Gone was the Melchizedekian priesthood to be replaced by “the priesthood of all believers.”  Yet, unlike Moses and Jesus, they did not carry the divine letters of credit with them.  The Melchizedekian priesthood was to last forever so these “reformers” were not prophesied anywhere within the divine deposit of faith.  Nor did they perform any miracles.  Thus, we must conclude that they were operating under, at best, their own inspiration.   

Lacking the first two motives of credibility would be incriminating enough, but they also lack the third as well.  The reformers sowed disunity rather than unity, leading to over 200 different “churches” or denominations (the number 33,000 has been greatly exaggerated ).  Unity is evidence of God-protected and inspired institution while disunity is evidence of a man-made institution.  That is why the unity or “one-ness” of the Church remains a mark distinguishing it from all other ecclesial communities.

St. Francis de Sales spent much of his life battling the Protestant reformers, even being exiled from his See of Geneva.  But because of his grasp of Scripture, a love for the Church and a love for those who left the Church, he convinced many Protestants that he had the truth on his side.  We could all learn a valuable lesson from him.

Led into All Truth

Apologetics, Defending the Faith, Ecumenism, Protestantism, Scripture, Theology, , , ,

The digital age is nothing if not cacophonic.  We are inundated with words to the point that, in order to be heard over the din, hyperbole becomes the norm.  Our Lord and the Apostles, on the other hand, were neither cacophonic nor hyperbolic.  When He said something, the Word made Flesh was economical and precise in what He said and what He meant.  That is why when He promises the Apostles that the Holy Spirit “guide you to all truth” (John 16:13), he really means all truth.  The Apostles would be given full and perfect knowledge of God’s Revelation so that the Barque of Peter would never be steered off course.

One might be justified if his initial reaction to such a statement, even if true, is to conclude that, in the end, it has no practical bearing.  But as we shall see it is an especially important point that has practical implications.  So important in fact that when St. Irenæus, the second-degree disciple of the Apostle John through St. Polycarp, wrote his treatise Against Heresies, he included a proof of it in order to refute the Gnostics who claimed to have hidden knowledge.  Irenæus tells the would-be heretics that “after our Lord rose from the dead, [the apostles] were invested with power from on high when the Holy Spirit came down [upon them], were filled from all [His gifts], and had perfect knowledge…”(St. Irenæus, Against Heresies, III-I, emphasis added).

The Amen of the Church

We look to early Church Fathers such as Irenæus  because they tell us how Divine Revelation was received.  God speaks and the people, in receiving His message, say “Amen”.  If someone like Irenæus interpreted Jesus’ words during His farewell discourse literally, then we can rest assured that it is the authentic interpretation.  This becomes even more obvious when we consider that it has to be true or else the Deposit of Faith will eventually decay.  And this is why he wrote what and when he did.  The Gnostics professed that the Apostles merely got the ball rolling and that men (especially men like them) would come along and add to it: “For it is unlawful to assert that they preached before they possessed perfect knowledge, as some do even venture to say, boasting themselves as improvers of the apostles” (ibid).  If the Apostles did not have full and perfect knowledge then it necessarily allows for addition to it the deposit of faith, the position that Irenæus found “unlawful”. 

The practical implication that follows from this is the absolute necessity for the development of doctrine and the authoritative Church.  Development is not the same thing as addition, as we have discussed previously, but a result of the Word of God being living and active.  But the distinction between development and addition necessitates the presence of an authoritative Church.  But just because the Apostles had full and complete knowledge, it does not mean that they articulated all of it.  To grasp this we can turn to the Apostle of Development, Blessed John Henry Newman.

Newman on the Full Knowledge of the Apostles

Like Irenæus, Newman also took Our Lord at His word.  But he was more interested in how that could be, than that it could be.  In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (EDCD), Newman concludes that “Thus, the holy Apostles would without words know all the truths concerning the high doctrines of theology, which controversialists after them have piously and charitably reduced to formula, and developed through argument. Thus, St. Justin or St. Irenæus might be without any digested ideas of Purgatory or Original Sin, yet have an intense feeling, which they had not defined or located, both of the fault of our first nature and the responsibilities of our nature regenerate…Thus St. Athanasius himself is more powerful in statement and exposition than in proof; while in Bellarmine we find the whole series of doctrines carefully drawn out, duly adjusted with one another, and exactly analyzed one by one.” (Blessed John Henry Newman, EDCD, Ch.5, Section 4).

The knowledge “without words” meant that the “Apostles had the fullness of revealed knowledge, a fullness which they could as little realize to themselves, as the human mind, as such, can have all its thoughts present before it at once.  They are elicited according to occasion.  A man of genius cannot go about with his genius in his hand: in an Apostle’s mind great part of his knowledge if from the nature of case latent or implicit…”

In essence, the Apostles were infused with all knowledge of divine Revelation.  It was always in their mind.  But the communication of knowledge on a human level is always deficient.  No word necessarily encompasses a complete idea.  Development allows the idea to be looked at from multiple angles so that it can be fully articulated.  Instead then of fully articulating what they knew, they were guided by the Holy Spirit to have all of their knowledge spread implicitly.  It would then unfold over time, under the divine authority bestowed upon the Church.

Newman gives a good example when he asks whether St. Paul would have known about the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.  While he might not have initially grasped what the term Immaculate Conception meant, “if he had been asked whether our Lady had the grace of the Spirit anticipating all sin whatever, including Adam’s imputed sin I think he would have replied in the affirmative.”  The explication may have been foreign but as soon as he knew what you meant he would have found it among the deposit of faith that he was given.

The practical implication then is that either way, the Protestant argument against the Church’s authority fails and ultimately is self-defeating.  If they take a reductive, rather than a literal meaning of Christ’s words, namely that the Apostles did not know all things, then there is no reason why the deposit of faith must be closed or must be included solely in the Bible.  In fact, if this is true then an authoritative Church is absolutely necessary as the guardian of divine revelation.  Likewise, if the Apostles did know all things and did not communicate them explicitly, then there must be an authoritative Church that guides the articulation of that knowledge.  There is a third option, namely that the Apostles were simply bragging about what they were given and were unwilling to hand it on, although that leads to an absurd conclusion.  Either way then, the existence of an authoritative Church is implicit in Christ’s promise that the Apostles would be led to all truth by the Holy Spirit.

St. Justin Martyr and the Divorce of Faith and Reason

Church Fathers, Faith and Reason, Paganism, Scripture, , , ,

The image of an acorn and an oak tree is often invoked to describe the growth of the Church from its humble beginnings to today.  The image is meant to convey the unity of the Church separated by nearly two millennia, but it is also helpful because it transmits a second, often overlooked aspect.  To grow from acorn to oak, the tree needs not only water, but must grow within the soil it is planted by assimilating the various nutrients found in the ground.  Watered by the Spirit, the Church too grew out of the soil of not just the Jewish faith, but also the Hellenic culture in which it was planted.  Not only were the Jewish people chosen to bring us the Messiah, but the Roman Empire was the chosen soil from which the Church would grow.  And it would grow by assimilating the nutrients found within that culture, most especially its reliance on Greek philosophy.

St. Justin Martyr was the first to recognize this.  Born a generation after the destruction of Jerusalem at the turn of the second century, Justin was a pagan living in Samaria.  Despite his beginnings, God had placed a great desire in Justin’s heart for wisdom.  He was the precursor to St. Augustine.  He sought out masters in every school of philosophy in his day—Stoics, Paripatetics (Aristotelians), Pythagoreans, and Platonists—but it was not until he met an old man while walking on the beach one day that he found Truth.  This man taught Justin about “the Word made flesh” and “straightway a flame was kindled in [his] soul; and a love of the prophets, and of those men who are friends of Christ, possessed me; and whilst revolving his words in [his] mind, [he] found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable. Thus, and for this reason, [he was] a philosopher” (Dialogue with Trypho, 8).

The love of wisdom is what made him cling to the “true philosophy” and to open a school of philosophy in Rome.  But it was God’s Providential love for mankind that placed the philosopher saint in an age of philosopher kings.  Rome put the brakes on its decline when two philosopher emperors came to power—Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius.  God hit the accelerator on the spread of the Church by inspiring Justin to write two apologies for the faith, one to each of the emperors.  Far from apologizing for the Faith, St. Justin was showing how sorry the lover of wisdom would be to dismiss the Faith without trying it against reason. 

St. Justin and the Logos

In was in his Second Apology that St. Justin left his most lasting contribution to the Church.  He laid the cornerstone upon which the edifice of Faith and Reason could be constructed.  And that cornerstone was Christ, Logos Incarnate.  He told the Emperor that,

“[o]ur teachings appear to be greater than every human teaching by the entire rational principle having become Jesus Christ who appeared for our salvation, in body, reason (logos), and soul. Whatever things were well spoken by philosophers and legislators, they did so by participating in the Logos either by discovery or theory. But since they did not know the Logos completely who is Christ, they often said contradictory things.”


Second Apology, 10

The Greeks believed that the logos was the principle of reason that governed and ordered the universe.  Christians professed the same thing, but rather than seeing it as some abstract principle, the Logos was God who took flesh in Jesus Christ.  St. Justin was merely echoing what he had heard in the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel.  “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God” (Jn 1:1).  But St. Justin took it a step further and said that all of the truths found outside of direct revelation were merely participations in the Logos.  For truth cannot contradict Truth.  Clement of Alexandria, a generation later, would speak of the prophetic power of philosophy that  “was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring ‘the Hellenic mind,’ as the law, the Hebrews, ‘to Christ.’ Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ” (Stromata, I, V).

When we speak of the edifice of Faith and Reason we immediately fast forward to our own days where the two appear to be in constant conflict.  But we need to linger a little longer in the early days in order to see the contemporary conflict correctly.  In the designs of divine Providence everything always happens right on time.  The time was right for St. Justin because the Church as it moved away from Jerusalem towards Athens would need to be able to explain the Faith in terms readily understood.  The time was right because the Church would need a language to defend the interpretation of Revelation from the coming onslaught of heretics.  Finally, the time was right because philosophy needed to be purified and elevated to assume its proper role as God’s prophet.

We speak so much of faith and reason, but what made what St. Justin said so profound is the fact that he shows faith in reason.  If it is through the Logos that all things are made, then “there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason—nothing which he has not willed should be handled and understood by reason” (Tertullian, On Repentance, 1).  What the Early Church discovered is not only that there is an observable order to the universe, but that human reason, as a participation in the Logos, is a reliable instrument for observing the universe.  Prior to this time either the world was governed by capricious gods or else there was a pantheistic “personalization” of nature that left each thing under its own control.  In either regard, without faith, human reason remained handcuffed. 

Once Christianity corrected Greek metaphysics, then physics could emerge.   It is only within the Christian conception of the Universe and of mankind that anything remotely resembling science and technology can emerge.  That is why it is absurd to attempt to put faith and reason in conflict with each other.  Their marriage is based on a inherent complementarity.  Any attempt to tear asunder what God has joined will end up destroying both.

The Enemies of Faith and Reason

Nevertheless, there are two schools in the modern world that have granted an imprimatur on their bill of divorce—the Enlightenment and Protestantism.

The Enlightenment is rooted in an absolute exaltation of human reason.  Without anything to purify it however faith in reason is lost.  Unable to bear the weight, we speak of Progress without reference to what it is we are progressing towards.  Progress without an endpoint, an endpoint given by Faith, is just aimless wandering.  Reason yields its crown to feeling and a real Dark Ages is sure to emerge.

On the opposite extreme is the fideism that is marked by Protestantism.  Martin Luther hated philosophy, especially Scholastic philosophy.  But because every man has a philosophy whether they know it or not, he was a nominalist.  The world is just a collection of individual things without any real relation to each other.  Creation has nothing to tell us about God and faith and sola scriptura are the only means by which we know God.  Of course, there are no ways to understand, explain or defend the content of faith so that all that really matters is the sincerity of what you believe and not what you actually believe.  You can believe anything as long as it is somewhere in the Bible.  Faith ultimately is destroyed.

It is not a coincidence that both these schools of thought have a common enemy, the Catholic Church.  We should not be surprised then that the Catholic Church is the lone defender of not only the true Faith, the same Faith that St. Justin Martyr earned his moniker defending, but also human reason.  And just as she stubbornly upholds Our Lord’s admonition about divorce between a man and woman, so does she keep Faith and Reason wedded. 

Returning to Our Roots

Church, Church Authority, Creed, Magisterium, Scripture, , ,

One of the recurring themes of the Second Vatican Council was a commitment to return to the sources of the Catholic faith.  Whatever the Council Fathers had in mind by this repeated stressing of the need for ressourcement, the Holy Spirit had His eyes upon the turmoil that was to follow.  Not only would there be a continued proliferation of Protestant sects, there would also be widescale dissent within the bounds of the Catholic Church as well.  Add to that sciences like the Historical-Critical method and the recipe for confusion was complete.  As we approach the 60th year since the calling of the Council, it is time that we take their recommendation to heart and begin to study one of the major fonts of Christian wisdom, the Church Fathers. 

Knowledge of the Church Fathers is woefully lacking among most Catholics and, what little is known, is mainly in the form of apologetical snippets.  Some think it sufficient to  admire the Fathers from afar seeing them as a “great cloud of witnesses”, but not really sure what it is that they witness to.  But, more than just satisfying our nostalgic longings, the Church Fathers, like our human fathers, are vital to our identity as Christians.  A person who has no history, or has forgotten it, is in a very real way less goes through an identity crisis.  Like the amnesiac, they are lost, and, more relevant to the concern here, they are malleable to the suggestions of others who will tell them who they are.  Christians are so easily manipulated into believing falsehoods about the Faith because they do not know their history.  Studying the Church Fathers is the only remedy when Christian identity as a whole is threated.

Revelation as Give and Take

Why is this the case?  Because Revelation is a two-way street.  God is always the Great Initiator, but His communication, to be true communication, must be received.  A message that is neither received nor understood is no message at all.  A second, related principle, is articulated St. Thomas Aquinas, who says that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver.”  With respect to the Church Fathers, we must look at them as the ones who truly received the fullness of God’s Revelation.  It was spoken to them in a manner that they could receive it.  It is meant for us too, but it must, in a sense, pass through their hands.  If we want to receive that same message, a message that was given directly to them, then we should look at the way they understood the message.  Their role, as one author has put it, is to issue the “Church’s great Amen” to Revelation.  They received it and said Amen, which means “I agree” or “I got it.”  By tracing what they believed revelation to be saying, we can then give our own Amen.

Now to be clear, we should not expect our beliefs to be the same as theirs.  Revelation wasn’t given to them as a dead letter.  We should expect it to be made more explicit as it is “received according to the mode of the receivers” in each generation.  As both wisdom based on Christian patrimony and human knowledge grows, we become in a certain sense more receptive to the fullness of God’s revelation.  What they received in seed form, we receive as a sapling or a full-grown tree.  All that we believe explicitly, they believed implicitly.  They give us an unbroken chain to the Apostles enabling us to trace the path from implicit to explicit.  So, rather than trying to go back to what they believed exactly (as some antiquarianizers do), we should make sure we can trace what we believe back to what they believed.

It is the fact that the Church Fathers had the “voices of the Apostles echoing in their ears” (St. Irenaeus) that gives them an authoritative voice in the Church.  They are not infallible like Scripture or the Church, but their authority is more in a constitutive sense.  They tell us what the Apostles meant.  All that we believe today must be traced back through their voices because they link us to the Apostles.  If what is believed today contradicts what they say, then it is most certainly a false doctrine.

An Example

Take for example the Canon of Scripture (for a more detailed explanation of the forming of the Canon read this previous post).  We see as early as 96AD in Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians authoritative quotes from 13 New Testament books along side many Old Testament quotations.  He seems to put them both into the category of inspired Scriptures.  Fast forward 50 years and there is almost universal agreement on which books are to be treated as inspired and used in the liturgy with a few exceptions.  By the fourth century we have an official list of the books of Sacred Scripture that was reaffirmed several times since then.  This example is illustrative because, if we want to know which books the Apostles were handing on and constitute true Revelation, then we should go to the men whose hands were open to receive it and not a former Augustinian monk some 1500 years after the event.

The Church does not maintain an official list of Church Fathers, but if such a list did exist, it would likely contain the names of about 100 men.  She identifies a Father using the criteria that St. Vincent of Lerins, himself a Church Father, articulated in the 5th Century.  He said that the Fathers are “those alone who though in diverse times and places, yet persevering in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church, have been approved teachers.”  They are marked by four qualities: sound doctrine, Church approval, antiquity, and holiness of life.  The latter, holiness of life, can never be overestimated.  Saints not only walk the walk, but also talk the talk.  They live rightly because they believe rightly.  Each Father may have made mistakes because they speculated on questions that had not yet been answered, but when they reliably pass on what was unquestionably believed at the time they wrote.  We know this, not because just one of them wrote it, but because many of them did.  They showed the unanimous consent of the Church in her beliefs.  This is why the First Vatican Council said “it is not permissible from anyone to interpret Holy Scripture in a sense contrary to this, or indeed against the unanimous consent of the Fathers.”

It is with more than a little irony that the prevailing “Spirit of Vatican II” has rejected the Fathers even though the real spirit encouraged revisiting them.  For those who want to defeat that Spirit they would do well to ad fontes!

On Adding to Scripture

Church, Church Authority, Magisterium, Scripture, Theology,

The great 19th Century Catholic convert from Anglicanism, Blessed John Henry Newman, once pronounced that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”  The Beati was describing his own path to the Catholic Church based on historical study.  But his point was not just that once you study the Church Fathers you will necessarily turn to Catholicism, but that there is an “utter incongruity between Protestantism and historical Christianity.”  He thought the “safest truth” in the centuries old debate between Catholic and Protestants is that “the Christianity of history is not Protestantism.”  A “safe truth” because the sola scriptura of Protestantism is, in principle, a rejection of history (which is just another word for Tradition) in favor of the Bible alone.  Protestantism turned Christians into a “people of the Book.”

Of course, Protestants will counter that this is the only way to protect against the corruption of God’s saving words.  Catholics have added to these words, something that is explicitly condemned in Scripture (Rev 22:18).  For Newman and for Catholics as a whole, they would plead guilty as charged.  Otherwise Scripture is doomed to become a dead letter.  But if it is “living and active” then to be living means, according to Newman, “to change, and to change often.”  In other words, Newman is not only defending what Catholics call “the development of doctrine” but is saying it is an absolutely necessary component of Christianity.

To come to this conclusion, Newman looks at the nature of ideas and the human mind.  Ideas when they pass before different human minds are considered under different aspects.  These different minds will draw different truths from these ideas.  So for an idea like “the sky is blue” two different minds may run along the tracks of different trains of thought and come to two different, though equally true, doctrines.  One may turn to the “color” of the sea and conclude that water is merely reflecting the sky.  Another may turn to the composition of the atmosphere and conclude that it filters light such that it turns the black of space into blue.  Living ideas, that is, ideas that are constantly “carried forward into the public throng” will constantly have new lights shed upon it.  Relevant to the point at hand, if Scripture presents ideas, and these ideas are living in the sense that they are consumed by public minds then you should expect that there be development.

A Bridge Too Far?

That last statement might seem like a bridge too far until we observe the behavior of Catholic and Protestant alike.  They argue about interpretation.  Neither side says “the Bible says this” and leaves it at that.  They argue about the meaning of what the Bible says.  The Biblical ideas meet two separate minds and two separate doctrines emerge.  It is inevitable.  In other words, if you even begin to argue about the interpretation of Scripture then you are already admitting the principle of development.  This is why I said that without development Scripture becomes a dead letter.  It simply says something like “Christ was born in Bethlehem” and says only that thing, not allowing us to draw any conclusions.  Scripture becomes collection of “God facts” of which we simply intellectually assent and then summarily ignore. 

Otherwise, once the ideas of Scripture pass before our minds, we will make judgments upon them and thus develop them in our minds.  Or, as Newman says, “it is characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things which come before them. No sooner do we learn that we judge; we allow nothing to stand by itself.”  It is human nature for ideas to have consequences.  Divine ideas, spoken to man, are no different in this regard. 

All of us have had the experience of encountering a certain passage of Scripture and each time that we do realizing completely different things.  That is because no single term can exhaust all the contents of an idea.  This is especially true of God Who has the power to use an economy of words to convey more content than mere human words can.  As St. Justin Martyr said of Christ, “His sayings were short and concise; for He was not rhetorician but His word was the power of God.” 

Moving from Implicit to Explicit

Take for example Hebrews 11:6, what St. Thomas calls the credibilia—”But 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.”  In this one sentence all Christian doctrine is contained implicitly.  Everything we believe, all that is in Scripture and Tradition, is connected to this waiting to be made explicit.

It is this movement from explicit to implicit that is described by the theory of the development of doctrine.  In truth Scripture leaves many important and vital questions unanswered.  In other words, Scripture is not wholly explicit.  There are always further implicit truths contained in every explication.  Newman uses the example of the fact that Baptism is necessary for the forgiveness of sins.  But what happens to those who sin after Baptism?  If that question is to be answered then there must be either additional revelation or development.  Our Lord Himself came to fulfill and not abolish the law and the prophets implying a rate of gradual growth in doctrine.  At what point can we say that growth ceased?  At Pentecost, at the Council of Jerusalem, on Patmos with John the Apostle, at Chalcedon when the Biblical Canon was closed, at Wittenberg, or what?

The development of doctrine itself is a biblical principle.  Christianity is not some esoteric philosophy but instead a historical religion.  The Bible itself reveals a plan of progressive revelation.  As an illustration Newman points to the seemingly unimportant meeting between Abraham and Melchizedek and the importance placed upon the ancient priest and his sacrifice of bread and wine in the Letter to the Hebrews.  Does this development cease in that letter or does it continue to progress down to our own day in the doctrine of the Eucharist? 

Once we establish that development is necessary then there is a strong antecedent argument in favor of an authority checking those developments.  To give Revelation without securing it against corruption is not to really have given it at all.  This is his argument in favor of the authority of the Catholic Church as the guardian and preserver of Revelation.  St. Paul and St. John show that heretics, like ravenous wolves, were active in the Church.  As the ideas of Scripture develop over time we should expect more heresies, not less, than the Apostles did. How can Revelation be protected without further doctrinal development, development that not only condemns but clarifies?  The moment you admit the development of doctrine, you must admit an authoritative Church. 

The question then, is not whether there will be development, but how to decipher between authentic development and corruption.  A living Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, is the only possibility for doing this.  After all, revelation that has been corrupted is not revelation at all.  It is lost to history.  And this is why Newman thought that Protestantism suffered not only from being unhistorical, but also untrue.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Bible, Church, Ecumenism, Magisterium, Redemption, Scripture, , , , ,

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.

Where We Got the Bible

Bible, Church Authority, Scripture, , , , ,

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.

The Roots of Feminism

Anthropology, Bible, Fatherhood, marriage, Mary, Scripture, Theology of the Body, , ,

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.

The Mystery of the Transfiguration

beauty, Creed, Grace, Incarnation, Passion of Christ, Resurrection, Scripture, The Life of Jesus, Theology,

One can hardly begin to imagine the amazing things that the Apostles, especially the inner trio of Peter, John and James, saw during their time with Our Lord.  But if you were to ask which event stood out above the others, the answer might surprise you at first.  You might think for St. Peter it would have been the event of the miraculous catch or walking on water, but instead he mentions only one—the Transfiguration.  Given nearly three decades to reflect upon it, the Vicar of Christ in his second encyclical still finds it to be the most formative event in His life, describing himself as receiving honor and glory from God the Father when he was an eyewitness of the majesty of Christ on the holy mountain (c.f 2Pt 1:16-19).  It is this truly awe-inspiring event on the mount of Transfiguration that the Church invites us to celebrate today.

To set the tone, it is worth mentioning that the Transfiguration is one of the few events in the life of Christ which is found in all three Synoptic Gospels.  The Holy Spirit thought that this episode was not only formative in the life of the Apostles but ought also to be for the Christians that were to follow.  For each of the mysteries of Christ’s life are recorded within Sacred Scripture not only for our knowledge but as invitations for our participation.  The Church reminds us of this invitation by including this feast with the liturgical calendar because, as Pope Pius XII reminds us, although these historical events occurred in the past, “they still influence us because each of the mysteries brings its own special grace for our salvation” (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 165).  It is then the Church’s hope that we will lay hold of the special grace attached to the Transfiguration.

What the Transfiguration Reveals

Grasping what made this experience so monumental for St. Peter will help us to drink more fully of the mystery ourselves.  In this single event we find a compendium of Christology.  The Transfiguration reveals the fullness of the Person of Christ—true God and true man.

When asked, most Christians would say that Ss. Peter, John and James witnessed His divinity.  This is true to a certain extent, but what they saw was the glory of His sacred humanity.  A moment’s reflection on the accounts will make this clear.  First, their reaction betrays this belief.  They are clearly awed by the fact that “His face shone like the sun and His garments became white as light” (Mt 17:2), but they are not at any pains to look away.  Instead when the Divine presence is manifested in the cloud, they “fell on their faces” because they know that “man shall not see me and live” (Ex 33:20).  It is the word spoken by the Father that reveals Christ’s divinity to them—“This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased.  Listen to Him” (Mt 17:6).

His divinity, according to St. Thomas, was also made known to the Apostles in His power over the living and the dead.  Elijah was(and still is) among the living.  He has never died and lives within some heavenly realm until his return to defeat the Antichrist as one of the two witnesses (c.f. Rev 11:3-12).  Christ had power to summon him.  Christ also was the Lord of the dead, able to bring forth Moses from the realm of Abraham’s bosom.  It was to preach to them of His Exodus, that is His Passion, Death and Resurrection, that He brought them forth.

One suspects that the profundity of the Transfiguration for Peter was not just because it revealed Christ’s divinity to Him, but because it also put flesh around the divinity.  It is the foundation for what has since been explained as the Hypostatic Union.  Although it would take the fullness of Christ’s mission and the gift of the Holy Spirit to realize it, the Apostles now knew that this was a man, but no mere man, that was walking around with them.

The Second Person of the Trinity, the “Beloved Son” is God.  In the fullness of time, He took to Himself a human nature without setting aside His divine personality.  He remained and remains a divine Person that used a human nature (not a human person) as His instrument for our salvation.  In the natural course of events, when a body and soul are fused together in conception, a person is formed.  But in Christ, the body and soul united to the Second Person of the Trinity so that He supplied the personality.  This is why we can accurately say that God became man and not that a man became God.

This uniting of the human nature with the Eternal Word is called the Hypostatic Union.  This union means that the body and soul of Christ enjoy special privileges.  One of those privileges was the Beatific Vision.  This is the direct vision of God that all the blessed in heaven possess; each being able to see all things in their divine relationship.  It is a source of constant joy and glory so that this beatitude overflows from the soul into the body, making it shine like the sun.  This effect, one of the four qualities of a glorified body, is called Clarity.

It is a miracle that is, a suspension of what naturally happens that the effects of the Beatific Vision did not flow into all the regions and powers of Christ’s soul allowing Him to suffer and sorrow.  Otherwise He could not be the “Man of Sorrows.”  Likewise it is a miracle that His Glory did not overflow into His body.

The Transfiguration is a result of God “suspending” this miracle so that the natural clarity of Christ’s body shines forth.  He suspends this miracle to reveal the other three qualities of the glorified humanity at other points in His public ministry.  He shows His natural agility by walking on water, His natural subtlety by passing from Mary’s womb, leaving her virginity intact and His impassibility when He was unharmed by the Jews attempts to stone Him.  But because clarity is perceptible to the human eye, the Transfiguration becomes a testimony to the full humanity of Christ.  It is the testimony of the fullness of divinity and humanity in this single event that leaves the indelible mark on St. Peter’s mind.

The Transfiguration and Us

The Hypostatic Union plays into this in a second way as well.  In Mystici Corporis Christi, Pope Pius XII says “[F]or hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love.” (75).   It was the Beatific Vision that made each one of us present at the Transfiguration.  He performed this miracle then not just for the Apostles, but for each one of us individually.  He simply awaits our active participation in this mystery so that He can give to us the graces He has already won.

Like all of His mysteries, there are personal graces to be found for each one of us; graces we discover through personal meditation upon the mystery itself.  There are also the more “generic” graces attached to the mystery of the Transfiguration as well.  Blessed Columba Marmion articulates a three-fold grace that Christ wants to give us when we ascend the summit of Tabor.  The first is the grace of increased faith.  We can re-echo the Father’s declaration by proclaiming, “Yes Father that is Your Beloved Son.  I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  Secondly, there is the grace of hope.  The Transfiguration reveals to us our destiny.  By sharing the Sonship of Christ, we come to share in His blessed reward.  Finally, there is the grace of charity won by doing whatever He tells us.  The commands of God are always supplemented by the power to fulfill them.  And in this regard, the Transfiguration becomes a great source of salvation here and now.

Who’s Afraid of a Little Sin?

Mary, Passion of Christ, Prayer, Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saints, Scripture, Sin, , ,

With the smoke still rising from the second great war, Pope Pius XII surveyed the moral landscape and declared that “the greatest sin today is that men have lost the sense of sin.” This theme, a loss of the sense of sin, has been a recurring one highlighted by each of the subsequent six pontificates.  In many ways it represents one of the greatest challenges to the Christian in the modern world.  Most of us still believe in sin, but living in the midst of a culture that laughs at any mention in it, we fail to see the ugliness of even the “smallest” sin.  The thought of achieving our freedom and conquering sin is nice, but not something we truly desire.  And so we simply live a stagnant life by merely avoiding the big sins, or at least that is how we reason.  After all, how could we grasp the gravity of sin when it is all around us?  Does a fish know that it is wet?  So how could we even hope to avoid the little sins and climb the heights of holiness?

When we examine the question more deeply we realize that the problem is hardly unique, even if it is more acute in our age.  Preaching a Lenten homily 175 years ago, Blessed John Henry Newman asked pretty much the same question:

“As time goes on, and Easter draws nearer, we are called upon not only to mourn over our sins, but especially over the various sufferings which Christ our Lord and Savior underwent on account of them. Why is it, my brethren, that we have so little feeling on the matter as we commonly have? Why is it that we are used to let the season come and go just like any other season, not thinking more of Christ than at other times, or, at least, not feeling more? Am I not right in saying that this is the case? and if so, have I not cause for asking why it is the case? We are not moved when we hear of the bitter passion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for us. We neither bewail our sins which caused it, nor have any sympathy with it.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 6, Sermon 4).

The Blessed convert hints at the reason in the framing of the question.  We do not recognize the seriousness of our sins because the Passion of Christ, not just the entire event, but the whipping, the scourging, the being dragged in chains, the carrying of the cross, the falling , the crown of thorns, the nails, and the suffocation, leaves no lasting impression on us.  We might as well be watching a movie.  Disturbing perhaps to think about, but quickly left aside as we move on with life.  It is not that we are uncaring, it is just way too abstract.  And why is this?  Newman again responds saying “For this one reason, my brethren, if I must express my meaning in one word, because you so little meditate. You do not meditate, and therefore you are not impressed” (ibid.).

Why Meditation on the Passion Saves Us

Newman is really reiterating something that all the saints have said.  Meditation upon the passion of Christ is necessary for both our salvation and our perseverance in the quest for it.  Echoing s similar theme, a contemporary of Newman’s, Blessed Columba Marmion said that he was “convinced that outside the Sacraments and liturgical acts, there is no practice more useful to our souls than the Way of the Cross made with devotion.  It is sovereign supernatural efficacy” (Christ and His Mysteries, p.309).

Why would Blessed Marmion make such a profound statement?  Because he realized that the Passion and Death of Christ is an eternal event and that it has lost none of its power to heal and transform us. In his words, “When we contemplate the sufferings of Jesus He grants us, according to the measure of our faith, the grace to practice the virtues He revealed during those sacred hours…When Christ lived on earth there emanated from His divine Person an all-powerful strength…Something analogous happens when we put ourselves into contact with Jesus by faith.  Christ surely bestowed special graces on those who with love, followed Him on the road to Golgotha or were present at His immolation.  He still maintains that power now.”

Faith enables us to participate in the Passion of Christ simply by bringing it before us in meditation.  It gives us the opportunity to draw directly from its specific, and very personal fruits.  At the root of discipleship is Christ’s command, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me”().  And only by meditating on His Passion can we know what that cross looks like or to have the power to pick it up.  “Follow me” is meant literally by walking right behind Him during His own Passion, something that can only be done by putting ourselves there.

Two Examples

Scripture offers us two contrasting visions of disciples who did and did not meditate upon the Passion of Christ that serve as a caution and a model respectively.

The three-fold denial of St. Peter is well known.  His disavowal of Christ is one of the things that make him very relatable to all of us.  Because we can easily relate to him, we can also fall prey to his blind spot.  Why, exactly, did St. Peter abandon Our Lord?  In short it was an unwillingness to meditate upon the Passion.

Throughout Our Lord’s public ministry the theme of His Passion and Death was always looming in the background, even if it was shrouded in mystery.  He announced it to the Apostles three times (no coincidence) and each time it was denied by Peter.  We should not be surprised that his unwillingness to sit with the mystery of the cross then led to his fall.  It was his willingness to relive the Passion in his mind and his own share in it that gave St. Peter the grace of final perseverance (c.f. Jn 21).

Our Lady on the other hand is the ultimate model of meditation upon the Passion.  Each of the three times it was presented to her in Sacred Scripture, rather than denying it or allowing it to become abstract, “she kept these words in her heart.”  This habit of sitting with the mystery of Christ’s Passion enabled her to assimilate that same spirit and to walk with Jesus on the road to Calvary.  It was this habit, in other words, that won for her the grace of perseverance.  It is for this reason that she can serve as both a model and a guide in our own personal meditation of the Passion of Christ.  It is also one of the ways in which she intercedes for us to obtain the grace of final perseverance.

After one of her many encounters with Mercy Incarnate, St. Faustina reflected that Jesus was pleased “best by [her] meditating on His sorrowful Passion and by such meditation much light falls upon my soul. He who wants to learn true humility should reflect upon the Passion of Jesus. I get a clear under-standing of many things that I could not comprehend before” (Diary, 267).  The habitual meditation upon Our Lord’s Passion is a constant among all the saints and will become a source of unlimited spiritual growth for the rest of us as well.  When we intimately come to know the sufferings our sins cause we will no longer find them desirable, transforming not only ourselves but everyone around us relegating the “loss of a sense of sin” to the past.

Take and Read

Holy Spirit, Saints, Scripture, , , , ,

As a Bible-believing Christian I will confess to finding red-letter Bibles to be a paradox.  Paradoxical, not in their application—words that are written as coming directly from the mouth of Jesus have red text—but in their principle.  The implication being that these words and their red lettering should give us pause as we read them because these are really the word of God, spoken directly from the mouth of the Word of God made man.  Do the words of Jesus according to Matthew, Mark, Luke or John carry a heavier weight than the words of God contained in the letters of Paul or Peter?  The red letters might lead us to believe this to be true, but the truth is that both are equally acts of condescension by God to speak to us in a language we can understand.  It is the Word of God using the voice of man.  It is not just the red letters, but “all scripture [that] is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17).  Perhaps the publishers of those Bibles can be forgiven for succumbing to a marketing ploy of sorts, but it also betrays a pitfall that many of us fall into in our use of Sacred Scripture.  Notice that I said use and not just read.  Why I used the former rather than the latter will become evident momentarily.

If we were to parse some of that red lettering, then something will become rather obvious to us.  When the Word of God speaks, things happen.  When He commands demons to depart, they leave.  When He commands storms to cease, everything is calm.  When He commands a crippled man to walk, he grows strong and walks.  He even commands the Apostles to “not be afraid” and fear exits.  To these we could multiply other examples throughout Scripture starting with God speaking creation into being in Genesis and ending with the creation of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation.  The Word of God is performative and while this power is earth shattering in the literal sense, it is hardly so in the figurative sense.  We already know this—after all this is what makes God, well, God.

What’s In it for You and Me?

Until, however, we go a step further and ask what difference this makes for you and for me.  For this, we have to call to mind two very important Scripture passages about Scripture itself.  First there is a passage from the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah in which the Sacred Author, operating under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says that:

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And do not return there without watering the earth And making it bear and sprout, And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater; So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth; It will not return to Me empty, Without accomplishing what I desire, And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it” (Is 55:10-12).

This is God reminding us of the power of His speech.  But when exactly did He send forth these words of Scripture?  Was it back in the 6th Century BC when these words were likely written, or was it yesterday when we heard it as the first reading at Mass?  God is speaking from the eternal now so that His words speak to all times and places.  When you read these words and I read these words they are spoken to you and to me right here and right now.  In inspiring the author of Isaiah to put these words to sheepskin, God in His Providence knew exactly when and how you and I would encounter them.  He addressed them to you and me directly, not just in a generically but in a deeply personal sense.  Inspiration did not stop in the author but extends to each of the readers.  It is the Holy Spirit speaking directly to us.  This helps explain why we might read the same Scripture passage many times and “get something different out of it” each time.  Those words were spoken not just way back when, but here and now.  It is also why Scripture scholars usually struggle praying with the Scriptures—they read it only as a theology textbook and assume they have exhausted its meaning without plummeting the depths of its personal message.  They may read the Scriptures but fail to use them as God’s preferential means of communicating with us individually.

There is a concomitant passage to Isaiah in the New Testament that helps further illuminate the point.  In the Letter to the Hebrews the sacred author says that “the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.  No creature is concealed from him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account” (Hebrews 4:12-13).  Sacred Scripture needs no red letter, nor is it a dead letter, but it is also much more than a read letter too.  Recall that when God speaks, things happen—even if that word is spoken to you and me in the Sacred Scripture.  When we read and meditate on these Scriptures we are changed, not just because we make great resolutions, but because God’s word changes us simply by being heard.  We can easily overlook this but we should expect it to happen.  As the Catechism puts it, “Still, the Christian faith is not a ‘religion of the book.’ Christianity is the religion of the ‘Word’ of God, a word which is ‘not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living.’  If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, ‘open [our] minds to understand the Scriptures’” (CCC 108).

The Witness of the Saints

History is full of examples of saints who were changed simply by an encounter with God through the Scriptures.  The most famous example is St. Augustine.  He was a man who, after a long intellectual battle, found the Christian explanation of reality to be true.  Nevertheless he struggled with the moral demands, famously praying “Lord make me chaste, just not yet.”  One day Augustine was in a garden praying and he heard a voice telling him “Tolle Lege,” that is “Take and read.”  He understood it to mean the epistles of St. Paul that he had left in the house.  When he grasped the book and opened to a (seemingly) random page, his eyes fell upon Romans 13:12-14—“Let us then throw off the works of darkness [and] put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy.  But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.”  In that moment the saint found the moral strength to fully convert and live totally for the Lord.  God spoke, and Augustine was changed.

Augustine himself was moved by the example of another Scriptural convert, St. Anthony of the desert who one day heard the Gospel of the Rich Young Man and knew that it was addressed to him.  He sold everything, went into the desert, and was instrumental in preserving the Christian faith during the Diocletian persecution.  We could multiply the examples but the point is that these men saw the Scriptures as a medium of communication between God and themselves.  They ardently believed that the Scriptures held the power of God’s direct speech.  With such a cloud of witnesses, shouldn’t we do the same?

Our Jealous God

Evangelization, Faith and Reason, God's Love, Scripture, Sin, ,

Public revelation was officially closed with the death of John the Apostle.  This does not preclude, from time to time, God raising up prophets, fashioned in the mold of the Jeremiah, Isaiah and Elijah, to help the People of God apply the contents of that revelation to their current times.  History is rife with them—St. Athanasius, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena and St. Faustina to name a few.  The Spirit of Prophecy is a key component in the Mystical Body of Christ even in our own day.  Unfortunately, like the days of Israel of old, the spirit of false prophecy is always lurking at the door.  There will always be those who claim to speak on behalf of God and yet are lending their voices to the enemies of humanity.  It is to one of those groups that I address this post today—the self-styled prophets who claim “God does not care if…”

This spirit of false prophecy is ubiquitous, especially in our “YOLO” culture.  Who among us has not met one of these prophets?   They are quick to tell us, “God does not care if we go to Mass.” Or, “God does not care if we call Him the right name.”  They proclaim, “God does not care how we worship Him.”  And even remind us that “God does not care if you eat meat on Fridays.”  And “God does not care if you smoke weed.”  These are but a few of their prophetic utterances, but you get the point.  These Bizarro John the Baptists repeatedly reassure us that God loves us as long as we are good people and enable us all to relax a little bit, if for no other reason that we have found out that God has sanctioned our drug habit.  They are great prophets of, well, not exactly peace, but at least of “chilling out.”

God’s New Name

Just as Jonah was stopped in his tracks when his message was received, these luminous prophets are often thrown off when they are asked “how do you know God doesn’t care?’  Probing, you find that what they really mean is that if they were God, then they wouldn’t care.  God is really their prophet.  But it is not the audacity of their message that is the most distressing element, but instead the image of God that emerges if we are to worship “I CARE NOT” rather than “I AM WHO AM”.

All of us tend to chill out in our old age, and “I CARE NOT” is no different.  Given all the time of dealing with humanity, He has chilled.  At least that is what our prophets would have us believe.  But the image this God invokes is actually just as scary as the so-called “fire and brimstone” God they are trying to extinguish.  Their God may be laid back, but He is still merely a Divine Auditor concerned only with tallying up our actions.  He may not put as many things in the left-hand side of the ledger, but he still has his ledger.  Presenting him as mellow does nothing to remove this image.  It is a scarier image because we have no way, other than by listening to these prophets, to actually know which belongs in which column.  If “God doesn’t care” does that mean these are good actions then?  Or do we now have an indifferent column?  If he is mostly indifferent about what I do, then how do I even know he cares about me?  Most people will take the God who hates over the God who is indifferent—at least the former also loves.  Indifference and love, bumper stickers to the contrary, cannot coexist.  In trying to avoid sterile moralism, the Prophet of Indifference manages to castrate God Himself.

Why God Cares

These prophets can still challenge us however, even if it is by way of an end around.  They force us to ask the question why God even cares what we do.  As we probe we find that St. Thomas Aquinas asked the same question, framing it in terms of sin as an offense against God.  In Book 3 of the Summa Contra Gentiles, the Angelic Doctor says that “God is offended by us only because we act contrary to our own good.”  In other words, God cares so deeply about each one of us that He takes offense only when we do something that ultimately harms us.  And what are those things?  We call them sins, but they are essentially things that move us off the path that our nature and our supernatural calling has put us on.  There are some things that help us to advance towards this goal (we call these good), some things that stop us (venial sins) and some things that knock us off the path entirely so that we need His help to get back on the path (mortal sins).  In short, God not only cares what we do and don’t do, He says that He does so as a jealous lover.  He knows that giving ourselves to any other lover than Him ultimately ends in frustration that could be eternal.  But choosing Him as our love, we can love all those other things in Him.  “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Mt 6:33).  This is not to trivialize just how bad sin is—it is still an offense against Almighty God—but to place it within the context of a filial relationship rather than as Judge and defendant.  God, in all eternity, is Father but only with respect to creation is He judge.  It is of His nature to be Father and not to be Judge.  See, He does care what we call Him.

In his sermon entitled “Jewish Zeal, A Pattern to Christians,” Blessed John Henry Newman reminds us of the best weapon with which to combat these false prophets.  He says that Christians should not be taking up the sword in the manner of Elijah when he encountered the false prophets of his day, but instead to capture the spirit of mind that animated his actions.  Zeal, Newman says,

“consists in a strict attention to His commands—a scrupulousness, vigilance, heartiness, and punctuality, which bears with no reasoning or questioning about them—an intense thirst for the advancement of His glory—a shrinking from the pollution of sin and sinners—an indignation, nay impatience, at witnessing His honour insulted—a quickness of feeling when His name is mentioned, and a jealousy how it is mentioned—a fullness of purpose, an heroic determination to yield Him service at whatever sacrifice of personal feeling—an energetic resolve to push through all difficulties, were they as mountains, when His eye or hand but gives the sign—a carelessness of obloquy, or reproach, or persecution, a forgetfulness of friend and relative, nay, a hatred (so to say) of all that is naturally dear to us, when He says, ‘Follow me.’”

Let us go forth in this same spirit.