Category Archives: Blogging

Religious Blogging, Brexit, Trump, and Two Kingdoms

22 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Blogging, Church/State, Lutheranism, Politics

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My dear friend Kathleen and I had a short discussion the other night on her blog, Catholicism Pure & Simple. It was as such things are both productive and friendly. One of the things we touched on was whether it is appropriate for a specifically Catholic or even a Christian blog to touch on things like Brexit and President Trump.

It becomes almost impossible to shirk the debate when our governments intrude on religious beliefs and practices, such as marriage, abortion, freedom of worship and practice.

And so while CP&S has touched on these matters, I seem lately to write of little else, my self imposed remit is political with an American, and Lutheran foundation. That is part of why I’m rarely writing here lately, while congruent if feels just a bit unseemly, and a fair number of you read my blog as well. And there is no point in dragging my friends into the line of fire to no purpose, and that is pretty easy, as our friend Caroline Farrow‘s current problems with the British legal system indicate.

In any case, imagine my surprise as I’m looking around this morning to seeing Dr. Gene Veith of the Cranach blog working on exactly what Kathleen and I were discussing. He excerpted an article by British author Will Jones entitled: Progressives vs conservatives: This is why we can’t just all get along. British, American, British, American, British, Catholic, Lutheran, who says our problems are different. In any case here’s Gene, with Dr. Veith in bold:

. . .The divide [is] between those who believe the world has a given order that ought to be respected because it makes things go best in the long run, and those who do not believe this and think invoking such order is little more than a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful against those they exploit.

The social order, says Jones, expresses itself in institutions such as the family and the nation-state, along with the ideas and practices that support them, such as sexual morality and the rule of law.  Conservatives support them–with religious conservatives seeing them as facets of God’s creation–while progressives find them oppressive.

This conservative respect for natural and social order contrasts sharply with the progressive outlook which is typically hostile to claims of inherent order in nature and society. Progressives tend to follow Marx in regarding such ideas as devices created by the powerful (in Marx’s case, the owners of capital, these days, more likely straight white men) to perpetuate inequalities and restrict people’s freedom of action.

Progressives and conservatives both say they want people to be happy, but they understand very differently what this involves. Whereas conservatives see happiness as emerging from respect for the natural and social order, for progressives almost the opposite is the case: the individual’s pursuit of happiness must as far as possible be achieved by not conforming to the social order. This is because to do so is to become complicit in oppression and to succumb to the ‘false consciousness’ of being happy when enslaved. . . .

Conservatives and progressives differ also in their visions of freedom. Conservatives seek the freedom that comes from respecting the boundaries inherent in the created order. Progressives, on the other hand, aim for freedom from the created order – from biology, from the family, from the nation, from God. As a consequence, progressive freedom has a strong authoritarian bent. This might seem paradoxical, but in fact it follows directly from the progressives’ need to oppose by force the outworking of the order of nature, and to silence those who attempt to point out the problems with this.

So how does Christianity fit with this?

Yes, Christians do believe that God has ordained the family.  The “nation-state” is a relatively modern invention, unknown in the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and tribal societies, but the “state” as some sort of social organization with earthly authorities that restrain evil and protect the good is indeed one of the God-given “estates” for human flourishing (Romans 13; 1 Peter 2:13-14).  Also, Christians believe that moral truths are part of a reality built into creation and human nature (Romans 1-2).  So by these definitions, Christians will tend to be conservative.

No one will be surprised that I heartily concur with them both, and with Kathleen as well. Here is part of one of my comments to her, which sums up my view pretty well.

As a Lutheran, I would point out that the Kingdom of the Left Hand (secular government) is also of God, although not as directly as the Kingdom of the Right hand. And so our governments on earth are also of concern to us. But while I straddle that fence, you, here, are more focussed. And, in truth, I don’t write much on the other blog for that reason as well, since I find my well pretty dry lately on church topics.

And Dr. Veith ends with this, which is certainly appropriate for us to discuss as well.

[…] The Christian’s hope is fixed not so much on this world, which will soon pass away, but on the world to come–on Christ who has atoned for the sins of the world and who will reign as King over the New Heaven and the New Earth.

Is this right?  Am I missing something?  How does this accord with Two Kingdoms theology?

I do think Jones’s analysis explains a lot, from our current political polarization to the behavior of people that we know.  But does it follow that such extreme polarization is inevitable, that there can be no common basis for consensus and social unity?  Is it impossible, in these terms, to have a “center”?  How did we as a nation function in years past?  Were there different ideologies at work?  If so, might we bring some of those back?

 

Men in and of the Church

14 Saturday Apr 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Faith, Uncategorized

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This follows on from yesterday’s points on men in the church.

The Rev Karl Hess noticed something from Mundabor’s blog (well, we are in the same business, after all)

[…]Comment Sissy showed up (nickname: “anonymous”; you never know which “anonymous” is “anonymous”) and said the critics of the Novus Ordo were uncharitable, un-this, and un-that. There had been no vitriolic comments, merely a very mild sarcasm.

A good soul, nickname “Templar” (nice one, by the way) intervened with the following words:

I grew up in New York, the Priests from my parish lived exactly 7 doors down from me and our interaction with them was daily and very personal. They were mostly Irish and Italian, most cussed like sailors (refraining only from taking the Lord’s name), used acerbic wit to cut down many a sinner, and wouldn’t back down from a fight if it came to it.

Good Bye good men.

Now we have anonymous posters who wring their hands over bruised feelings, and perceived slights. What you sow is what you reap. We have raised up milquetoast Catholics. Where is the Church Militant? Where are the Warriors? Islam is burying the world through birth rate and butchery, and us Catholics are afraid of some rough language.

The poster hits the bull’s eye in a very pithy way.

We live in times of such unmanliness that by every exchange of opinion that reaches the level of more than mild disapprobation someone – the Comment Sissy; they are everywhere – feels the need to intervene and say how “disparaging” and insensitive other people are.

In former times, such people would have been invited to go play with their dolls; nowadays, the Comment Sissy is socially accepted, and thinks he has firmly taken the moral high ground; it is like a pervert game of political correctness, in which the first one crying “disparaging” has won.

Rev Hess said it reminded him of another Catholic priest about 500 years ago.

I  have  indeed  inveighed  sharply  against  impious  doctrines,  and  I  have  not  been  slack  to  censure  my  adversaries  on  account,  not  of  their  bad  morals,  but  of  their  impiety.  And  for  this  I  am  so  far  from  being  sorry,  that  I  have  brought  my  mind  to  despise  the  judgments  of  men,  and  to  persevere  in  this  vehement  zeal,  according  to  the  example  of  Christ,  who,  in  his  zeal,  calls  his  adversaries  a  generation  of  vipers, blind,  hypocrites,  and  children  of  the  devil.  Paul  too  charges  the  sorcerer  with  being  a  child  of  the  devil,  full  of  all  subtlety  and  all  malice;  and  defames  certain  persons  as  evil  workers,  dogs,  and  deceivers.  In  the  opinion  of  those  delicate-­‐eared  persons,  nothing  could  be  more  bitter  or  intemperate  than  Paul’s language.  What  can  be  more  bitter  than  the  words  of  the  prophets?  The  ears  of  our  generation  have been  made  so  delicate  by  the  senseless  multitude  of  flatterers,  that,  so  soon  as  we  perceive  that  anything  of  ours  is  not  approved  of,  we  cry  out  that  we  are  being  bitterly  assailed;  and  when  we  can  repel  the  truth  by  no  other  pretence,  we  escape  by  attributing  bitterness,  impatience,  intemperance,  to  our  adversaries.  What  would  be  the  use  of  salt,  if  it  were  not  pungent?  or  of  the  edge  of  the  sword,  if  it  did  not  slay?  Accursed  is  the  man,  who  does  the  work  of  the  Lord  deceitfully.

From The freedom of a Christian (PDF)

I think we can all sympathize, we’ve all met the commenters, that have no facts, but are so very easily offended, and so make personal attacks. Indeed, we’ve had a few here, over the years, they rarely last long, though.

With No Free Will; An Incorruptible God Must Be The Agent of Corruption.

15 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Catholic Tradition, Faith

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One aspect of folks that I value is the ability to allow free dialogue, even if it doesn’t seem important, may hinder one’s argument, or a point that tends to lead in a different direction. Of course, I value this because I value the exploring of ideas to reveal truth.

Perfect Chaos is a blog run by Steven Colborne, who believes in God, maybe even the Christian God, but doesn’t believe in Free Will basically because God is in charge of everything existence. Steven posted again today about The Free Will Problem. Naturally, there are analogies that can be given to show when one is in charge they can allow free will etc. However, as I’ve continued to exhibit through Catholic thought, there is ample philosophical evidence within Catholicism that indicates a lack of free will is more or less rubbish.

In this particular blog of Steven’s I gave Augustine’s answer to Steven’s assertions that Free Will doesn’t exist, please refer to his post as well as his essay that he gives a link to in the post. I answered that in accordance with Catholic tradition that Steven fails to properly refute Augustinian Theodicy. More or less Steven doesn’t even address it, which of course the comment is a critique that Steven could use to finely tune his own thoughts on the matter–even for his own side of the argument. Unfortunately, Steven deleted my comment, so I present it here to you, reconstructed. 

Augustine’s point is rested in the Confessions Book 7:

Augustine explains his view of Free Will: ” I was absolutely certain when I willed a thing or refused to will it that it was I alone who willed or refused to will. Already I was beginning to see that therein lay the cause of my sin. I saw that what I did against my will was something done to me, rather than something I actually did. I concluded that it was not my fault, but my punishment.”

Augustine explains earlier in Book 7 how this relates to God in a fashion the resembles Anselm’s ontological argument: ”

There has never has been, nor will there be, a soul able to conceive anything better than you, who are the supreme and best good. But since it is of the utmost truth and certainty that the incorruptible is preferable to the corruptible, even as I already preferred it to be, I could now attain in thought to a being better than yourself, my God, if you were not incorruptible. Therefore, where I perceived that the incorruptible must be preferred to the corruptible, there ought I to seek you. There too, ought I to observe where itself is, that is, whence comes that corruption, by which your substance can in no way be violated. For absolutely no corruption defiles our God.”

The glaring problem in a Christian argument against Free Will, or for that matter the argument for God is that for God to be God, He must be a perfect being. Naturally, this fits into Aquinas’ model in the Summa Theologica:

“Now God is the first principle, not material, but in the order of efficient cause, which must be most perfect. For just as matter, as such, is merely potential, an agent, as such, is in the state of actuality. Hence, the first active principle must needs be most actual, and therefore most perfect; for a thing is perfect in proportion to its state of actuality, because we call that perfect which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection.”

So, as I challenged Steven, for God to be perfect, He must be without corruption or He simply wouldn’t be God. If there is no Free Will, then God would have to be responsible for evil, one would have to assert and defend those evils such as theft, rape, death, any violence, natural disasters would need to be part of God’s perfection and not corruptions in the world to argue that Free Will doesn’t exist because God would be responsible for all of these actions and they could not take away from His perfection.

Sadly, again, Steven deleted my comment which was simply a good nature criticism that I had seen lacking in his essay. As my second response was also deleted after I noticed he deleted my initial comment, I decided to bring my critique to the general readership of the blogosphere.

A Short Reflection: Confessional Lutheran Understanding of the Incarnation.

08 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Faith

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Many know here that my wife is a Confessional Lutheran, so, naturally, I am acquainted with some of the theology of Confessional Lutheranism. What has always impressed me with several conversations with Confessional Lutheran pastors is their rich theology of the Incarnation; the importance on St. Athanasius work on the topic, and Christ’s role, as the new Adam, means for all of humanity–especially men. A topic, I think, lacks in many Catholic circles.

A good book written by a Lutheran Pastor named Jeffery Hemmer on this particular topic is “Man Up.” Pastor Hemmer addresses every man’s call to live by the virtue of Christian masculinity exemplified by Jesus Christ. It is in Christ we see the perfect man by the offering of ourselves in service to our communities either by charity, clarity, or sacrificially we embody what God meant for men to be men. Men need structure and order; Men need to pray; Men need to sacrificially love; and men need to be bold against sin.

All of this Pastor Hemmer tackles in his book. An interesting point Pastor Hemmer makes in his book in regards to the Genesis story is the failure of Adam’s role as protector of Eve within the marriage. So, to flesh this out a bit, I’ll take a look at another part of scripture from Ephesians 5:25-33. It’s a shame with modernity’s worship of feminism, we often lose the true focus of St. Paul’s words in Ephesians 5. Our society will object, “How dare you subjugate women with your backward religion.”  Of course, those same voices never make objections to the next part of the chapter:

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, 27 so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, 30 because we are members of his body.[b] 31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. 33 Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.

The husband’s love is a sacrificial love in which is a love that calls for the obedience of the wife in respect of the Church’s obedience to Christ’s sacrificial love on the cross. A husband must love his wife more than his own flesh, he must love her to his own death to sanctify her. Of course, this what Adam gets wrong in the garden. Pastor Hemmer explains that we often suppose that Adam is somewhere else in the garden when the serpent tempts Eve, but how the narrative follows is that Adam is present with Eve; and he does nothing to protect her from sin! Furthermore, when God comes and questions Adam, the protector, Adam does not protect Eve but places blame on both her and God for being tricked.

As such, we’re reminded of the role of the Incarnation; and the proper role of man, displayed by Jesus Christ in this Sunday’s Gospel reading:

Jesus said to Nicodemus:
“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
And this is the verdict,
that the light came into the world,
but people preferred darkness to light,
because their works were evil.
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light
and does not come toward the light,
so that his works might not be exposed.
But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,
so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.

Jn. 3: 14-21

Relatively speaking

16 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Faith, Pope

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New pope greets crowds in Vatican City

Catholicism poses a fundamental challenge to the contemporary belief that everything is relative (except, of course, the truth that there is no such thing as truth). Truth is the person of Christ, and what flows from that belief. It is precisely for this reason that there is concern when any occupant of the See of St Peter seems not to be giving a clear statement of Catholic belief; if the trumpet gives an uncertain sound … and all that. As an academic I am always happy to stir up thinking by questioning the assumptions my students have about their subject, but what is appropriate in one arena is not in another. I happen to believe that the University where I work is a force for good in the world, and even if I had doubts about some of the things it does (I don’t), I would not raise the issue in public. It remains a mystery to me why Pope Francis cannot follow that simple rule.

One lesson he, and the rest of us, can learn from the postmodernists is that it is not the authorial voice which is authoritative; it is what is heard, as much as what was meant by the author, which counts. If people keep getting a certain impression about what the Pope is saying, that does not mean they are right, but it does mean that those who advise him might point out that greater clarity would be useful.

Of course, there will always be those whose perspective is such that they will misread what is said. One of the things which has concerned me from the start of this Papacy is that from the moment Francis stepped out onto the balcony, there were those who were criticising him. They might want to tell us that everything that has happened since justifies their doubts, even as those who oppose them would tell us that such a reaction os simple self-confirmation bias. From there we descend into the world of ‘fake news’. As with President Trump, those who have no time for him will read everything he does and says as confirmation that they are right. Those on the Right who take the view that such a reaction simply proves the Left will never give Trump a break, might, if they are critical of Pope Francis, like to ponder the irony that in the eyes of the Pope’s supporters, they are doing what liberals do to Trump. As so it goes on.

In all of this, what of the faithful? As with much of our political discourse, it may be a sobering reminder that most people do not follow what obsesses parts of the blogosphere.

The Pope is infallible only in certain matters and on certain issues. If the impression has gained ground over the last thirty years that almost everything the Pope says is to be taken as Gospel, then that certainly would not be the fault of those who spent so much time criticising St Pope John Paul II. The irony of those people now shifting their position to the one they used to criticise is not lost on some of us; nor is the irony of their opponents changing places with them.

Contrary to what is sometimes implied, the Catholic Church has always had a lively intellectual life. How could it be otherwise in a living Church? In a world with 24/7 media this allows more of us access to that process, but we should remember that just as we would object to anyone impugning our good faith in taking up a position, so others will object if we do the same. Tone influences what is heard. From His Holiness down, all who engage in such discussions would do well to remember that.

A return to arms

09 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Faith, Lent, Politics

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newman_john_everett_millaisThere has been much else to occupy my time this last eighteen months, and, as explained in my last posting here, the press of business in my new vocation has been such that it would have been unfair to my university to have offered it less than 100% of my time. But evenings and week-ends still exist, and as we approach Lent, I want to use some of that time to return to the themes of this blog.

At its best it has offered a voice not heard elsewhere. It has been too reactionary for the liberals, and not reactionary enough for the reactionaries. I don’t take that as a sign that the positions taken here are, therefore, in some way ‘right’, but simply that they are a voice worth the speaking.

There is much to be gloomy about. I do not suffer from what has been called ‘Trump derangement syndrome”, which is common in the circles in which I usually move. I am a fan neither of the man, nor his style, nor, in so far as he has them and I understand them (both great caveats) of his policies; but nor do I see him as a species of anti-Christ for those who need one. If he is anything, he is a symptom of a political system where the insiders had long given the impression that they regarded the mass of the population as ‘deplorable’; Mrs Clinton simply said what had, until then, been unsaid. I take rather a similar view on Brexit. Give the electorate the impression you regard them as uneducated idiots and then give them the chance to vote in a way that allows them to give you a kicking, and then express surprise. It could only happen in a democracy where the ties that bind are already loosening.

That is my main worry. Whatever it is fashionable to believe, the basic values on which Western Civilization were founded we Christian ones; explicitly so. We believe in the value of each individual not because of some abstract theory of “rights” – that came later – but because each individual is a child of God; it is that sense, and that sense alone in which we are “equal”. It is that sense alone which matters. It matters because it means we never can, nor should, instrumentalise the human person. Whether it is turning people into cogs in a machine in work-setting, or killing the unborn or the elderly for being “useless”, Christianity rightly rejects such an approach to the human person. The princes of this world, under any system of government or economic system, have a tendency to do this, and one of the great gifts of Christianity is to have rebuked them for it. It is unclear who will do this in the absence of a Christian presence.

There is a deep irony in a leading Catholic Churchman appearing to tell us that China is an exemplar of Catholic Social teaching. One of my colleagues has said all that needs to be said on this egregious nonsense here.  To use his words:

Catholic social teaching demands freedom of conscience, freedom of association and the protection of life from conception until natural death. These are not optional extras and nor are they part of the moral teaching of the Church outside its social teaching. These aspects of the Church’s social teaching are fundamental because they have an impact on education, healthcare and the whole structure of political and civil society as well as on economic and social relationships.

That is true of Christian social teaching; there is nothing in that with which Archbishop William Temple and Anglicans of his hue would have disagreed.

We live in a world where on all sides these freedoms are being questioned in the name of identity politics. The idea, once risible, that one should be able to call for another to be silenced because they offended you, is now commonplace. For some of us, this was where we feared that laws prohibiting certain types of speech might lead. There is no satisfaction in having been proven right.

In a Society where people have been schooled to think that truth is relative, it is only natural that individual feeling should have become elevated into the standard by which to judge others. There is not truth, except that all truth is relative, says modern man and (naturally) woman. But for the Christian that cannot be true. There is a Truth, and it is a person, not a concept. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Light, and we cannot (though we often do) relativise that.

We are all sinners. We are all children of God. We are all fallen. In Him all can rise. The old Adam (and if you must, Eve) is rampant in us all. We all of  us do not what we will, but what we often do not will. For this there is but one remedy: Christ Jesus. He reaches out to each of us where we are. each of us comes to Him as we have the Grace so to do.

As the clouds lower over us, amidst th’encircling gloom, as the Blessed John Henry put it, we have but on Kindly Light. Let us pray that He illuminates our hearts, mind and spirit, in the Lent that approaches.

Dagon fish hats revisited

02 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Blogging, Faith

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As we come to the end of this short series on anti-Catholic polemic, coincidentally, a Twitter follower retweeted this post from 2014 on Dagon fish hats and other nonsense.

It reminded me of the enduring power of sensationalist writing, as well as of the enduring influence of anything which reinforces peoples’ prejudices. The original piece dated to January 2014, and despite reading it then, Bosco continues to tell us that ‘dagon fish hats’ are proof that the Catholic Church is really some sort of pagan Babylonizn cult. When challenged on his sources, Bosco says he’s never read Hislop and gets it all from archaeology. He cannot, of course, cite on reputable archaeological source, which is not surprising because there is not one. Hislop had a vivid imagination, and a detestation of the Catholic Church, not, of course, that he had any knowledge of it in real life. One example of the depth of his ignorance will do. He wrote that:

 “In the Litany of the Mass, the worshippers are taught thus to pray:God Hidden, and my Saviour, have mercy upon us.” Whence can this invocation of the “God Hidden” have come, but from the ancient worship of Saturn, the “Hidden God”? 

In the first place, no such words form part of any Mass. But, and here is how this whole thing works, Hislop had read (just like Bosco has read) the work of one William M’Gavin, another Scotsman with an anti-Papist bent who produced a series of tracts which had wide circulation in the virulently anti-Catholic atmosphere of early nineteenth century Scotland. Hislop, like Bosco and others, had read something somewhere which confirmed his prejudice; why sully the purity of pure ignorance by accessing some real facts.

The anti-Catholic has an implicit and firm faith in his prejudice. Generations of anti-Catholic propaganda have left a deep sediment of rubbish in which otherwise intelligent people can genuinely argue heatedly that fellow Christians are really worshipping ‘Semiramis’ and bowing to ‘idols’ as an act of worship. As with McGavin’s nonsense about the Mass, a few moments study could show them the error of their ways, but they do not want to be shown the error of their ways, theor prejudice comforts them, it stops them having to think about the reasons why some of us joined the Catholic Church; it stops them, dread horror, from having a real explanation as to why they do not join it.

Fulton Sheen was right when he commented that: ‘There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.’ Many, such as Bosco, do not even know where they got their prejudice from. They sometimes say they have it from ex-Catholics, not for a moment stopping to consider whether they would, for example, trust an ex-Republican to offer an accurate assessment of the Republican Party/ The modern dealer in this mind-rotting nonsense is Jack Chick, whose tracts are simple enough to be taken at one sitting by the simple-minded, and the credulous. He simple repeddles the bigotry of M’Gavin and Hislop. The whole thing is a circular operation.

Whose purpose does this serve? Lies are always at the service of the Father of Lies, who loves nothing better than to sow hatred and dissent among Christians. He has been doing it from the moment there were Christians, and he will continue to exploit our weakness until the Good Lord comes again. Heaven knows there are plenty of things to be said against the conduct of the Catholic Church down the years, as there are against any organisation run by members of a fallen race, without the need to resort to obvious twaddle. But if it is perfection we seek in a Church, then we shall have to await the Second Coming. We are sinners all, and that we do as well as we do is only because with God’s help we can fight the good fight and spread the good news.

It genuinely saddens me to see Christian men and women spreading lies that can so easily be seen to be lies by those lacking the need for confirmation bias. It is a sign that the Father of Lies can penetrate even the best defences. For those who continue to peddle this stuff, I pray; but I also ask them to do some serious thinking and praying of their own, because they are in a trap and suffering from a delusion.

 

Primitivism: a common error?

01 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Bible, Blogging, Catholic Tradition, Faith

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There is a persistent strain in Christianity and Islam which emphasises that the nearer to the source, the purer the water; in both faiths we have seen, and we see, a search for ancient practices and belief. But the assumption behind this belief needs questioning, resting, as it does, on questionable assumptions.

The first of these is the notion that we can, in fact, extract a clear idea of ancient practice and belief from the surviving sources. Those scholars who have questioned whether there was in fact any concept of orthodoxy in the ancient church have emphasised a plurality of practice and implied something similar about belief; I am not entirely in agreement with them, but they have a point. We can construct only from what survives, and what survives will not give us a picture of everything, and even if it did, it would include much that is not orthodox. We could, of course, relive old arguments about Arianism, but on the whole I would advise against it (not least since there are  ways in which we often rehearse them).

The second assumption to be questioned is the idea that what is older is purer in some way. Any history of heresy will tell you that heretical ideas go back to the beginning – we can see St Paul criticising them, and SS Peter, John and Jude all warn about those teaching incorrectly; from the beginning understanding and misunderstanding are mixed.

The third assumption is the one that implies that later is somehow more corrupt. This depends on a further assumption, which is that the Apostles understood the fullness of the relevation of Christ; there seems little evidence that this was the case. The assumption seems to be that at Pentecost the Apostles received not only the inspiration of the Spirit to speak in tongues and to go out as missionaries, but that they had a ful understanding of the nature of God as Trinity, and of Jesus as wholly-human and wholly-divine. If that were so, it was forgotten at once, as otherwise, when various heretics advanced what turned out to be misunderstandings of these things, the early Church would have cited Apostolic testimony to disprove them; this did not happen. Instead, the church did the hard work of trying to reach agreement on verses from Scripture which could be, were, and still are, read in different ways. Would it really be such a good idea to abandon these advances in understanding? On what ground, given the questioning of the various assumptions embedded in the argument that older is purer?

We are the inheritors of a rich and varied tradition of Christian practice and belief.  No doubt we inherit some bad things and some good, but we should take care not to discard what is old simply because it is not new.  To trespass on Catholic grief, it seems to me that this was one of the problems with the way Vatican II was interpreted; those who wanted to make all things new because they disliked the old, used it as an excuse to do something they already wanted to do.  There was a similar development in Anglicanism in this country which I regret hugely – the abandoning of the Book of Common Prayer.

What is old and still works is sanctified by the use of our ancestors; we should not lightly abandon their heritage in pursuit of a mythical past.

Misreading the Bible: Jesus’ brothers and sisters

27 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Bible, Blogging, Catholic Tradition

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Yesterday I dealt with the common Evangelical misreading of what the Bible has to say about worship and idols. Today’s target is the misreading of the NT passages about the family of Our Lord. Truly there are no new errors under the sun. There are, however, repetitions of errors by those unversed in history.

In the fourth century a man called Heldvius wrote a book arguing that Mary was not a perpetual virgin and that the brothers and sisters of Jesus recorded in the Gospels were uterine siblings. This ran counter to what Christians had always believed, and St Jerome responded with a book called  The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary  in which he suggested that they were either cousins on Mary’s side, or children of a previous marriage of St Joseph.

The word used by the Evangelist is adelfos/adelphos. For monoglots who insist that the word brother must mean uterine brother, here is Strong’s defintion:

 Definition
  1. a brother, whether born of the same two parents or only of the same father or mother
  2. having the same national ancestor, belonging to the same people, or countryman
  3. any fellow or man
  4. a fellow believer, united to another by the bond of affection
  5. an associate in employment or office
  6. brethren in Christ
    1. his brothers by blood
    2. all men
    3. apostles
    4. Christians, as those who are exalted to the same heavenly place

This, of course, presents no problem for the Infallibilists among us, who proclaim on the basis of their own unaided reading of the KJV that that it has to mean uterine brother. Such a reading defies both the dictionary and most of Christian tradition. It also runs counter to usage elsewhere in the Bible and is, were another one needed, it is an example of the way in which such people tend to make it up as they go along (you won’t find Anglicans or Lutherans indulging in this).

For example, in Genesis 13:8 and 14:16, the word adelphos was used to describe the relationship between Abraham and Lot; however, these two men did not share a brother relationship, but one of uncle and nephew; so does it mean Anbraham and Lot were brothers? Of course not.  Similarly, Jacob is called the “brother” of his uncle Laban (Gen. 29:15). Kish and Eleazar were the sons of Mahli. Kish had sons of his own, but Eleazar had no sons, only daughters, who married their “brethren,” the sons of Kish. These “brethren” were really their cousins (1 Chr. 23:21–22). So, if we are going to insist on a single meaning for ‘adelfos’ then we are going to find ourselves with a pile of egg on our face.

There is an excellent post on this and links to other other explorations of the problem. You will note that like all true apologists, this one deals with care and in detail with the evidence; not once does he state that it must be as he says because the word in English is ‘brothers’ – as though it has only one meaning in English.  When I refer to fellow Christians as brothers in Christ, I am not implying that my late father and mother had lots more children.  When my Trades Union colleague refers to his ‘brothers’ in the Union, he is not implying that he is related to them by birth.

When the Holy Family go into exile in Egypt, there are three of them; when they go to present the child in the Temple, there are three of them; when they go to take the young Jesus to the Temple when he is 12, there are three of them. At the crucifixion Jesus does not commend His mother to Her other sons, he commends her to St John, His cousin. Of course, it could be that all those sons were hiding, or, as Bosco maintains, that they were not Christians, or that they just happened to have the same names as the sons of Mary and Clopas. Of course, it could also be that the Church and most Christians for most of history have it right. The Lutherans are wrong, the Catholics and the Orthodox are wrong, the Anglicans are wrong, but a few monoglot Englishmen with access to a dictionary know better than the people who spoke kione Greek. We see, once more, the effects of Original Sin at work. Mankind fell because it sought to be as wise as God. Some of those ‘born again’ claim such wisdom, and neglect, alas, to take advantage of the accumulated wisdom of Christians down the ages.

Two Babylons?

25 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Blogging, Faith

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Our friend Bosco is fond of writing about Catholicism as the ‘religion of Nimrod’ and calling Catholics worshippers of Semiramis. He seems not to know that such stuff, which nowadays tends to be spread by Jack Chick and his devotees, derives from an early nineteenth century Scottish clergyman, Alexander Hislop, who wrote an anti-Catholic book called ‘The Two Babylons’. Whilst seldom recommending Wikipedia as a source to my students, I did ask Bosco to look it up, as it contains helpful comments and links which, essentially, show that the book is based on out-dated ‘scholarship’ that was not strong when it was written, and which has been comprehensively debunked since. To take one example, key to Bosco’s views:

Lester L. Grabbe  [an expert of Judaisim and ancient history] has highlighted the fact that Hislop’s entire argument, particularly his association of Ninus with Nimrod, is based on a misunderstanding of historical Babylon and its religion.[1] Grabbe also criticizes Hislop for portraying the mythological queen Semiramis as Nimrod’s consort, despite the fact that she is never even mentioned in a single text associated with him,[1] and for portraying her as the “mother of harlots”, even though this is not how she is depicted in any of the texts where she is mentioned.[1]

In 2011 a critical edition was published.[13] Although Hislop’s work is extensively footnoted, some commentators (in particular Ralph Woodrow) have stated that the document contains numerous misconceptions, fabrications, logical fallacies, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and grave factual errors.[14]

Woodrow is an interesting case, as his Christianity occupies the same end of the spectrum as Bosco’s, and he published a book based on Hislop. He, however, had the grace and the guts to (at some cost to himself as the book sold well) to withdraw the book when he realised how baseless its claims were. I wonder if Bosco has the same intelligence, humility and honesty? After 5 years of experiencing him, I am, sadly, betting that he will simply ignore all of this and then repeat the same of script. He has no argument left, just an immovable prejudice against the Catholic Church, which only a miracle can shift; but miracles happen.

As Wiki puts it in relation to the nonsense about Nimrod and Semiramis:

Much of Hislop’s work centers on his association of the legendary Ninus and his semi-historical wife Semiramis with the Biblical Nimrod. Hellenistic histories of the Ancient Near East tended to conflate their faint recollections of the deeds of ancient kings into legendary figures who exerted far more power than any ancient king ever did. In Assyria, they invented an eponymous founder of Nineveh named Ninus, who supposedly ruled 52 years over an empire comparable to the Persian Empire at its greatest extent. Ninus’s wife Semiramis was in turn a corruption of the historical figure Shammuramat, regent of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 811 BC.[7] Hislop takes Ninus as a historical figure, and associates him with the Biblical figure Nimrod, though he was not the first to do so. The Clementine literature made the association in the 4th Century AD. An influential belief throughout the Middle Ages was that Ninus was the inventor of Idolatry,[8] a concept that Hislop clearly drew upon. However, Hislop wrote before the historical records of the ancient near east had been thoroughly decoded and studied, and it became apparent in the decades after he wrote that there never was any such figure as Ninus, and that the Greek authors whom he quotes were without credibility on the subject.[9]

And yet it is on such stuff Bosco relies. Why, you might ask, waste time on such poor stuff? The answer is simple. If you look on Amazon, which is still selling the book, you will see hordes of people praising it to the skies. some even saying that if it were not true, why has the Catholic Church not responded to it? That is a bit like saying why has it not responded to David Icke’s claims that the world is ruled by reptiles? Incidentally, and coincidentally, Wiki adds this:

Author and conspiracy theorist David Icke incorporates Hislop’s claims about Semiramis into his book The Biggest Secret, claiming that Semiramis played a key role in the establishment of a global conspiracy run by Reptilian aliens, whom he asserts is secretly controlling humanity.[18]

There is something heartbreaking about the thought of human beings so adrift from the real message of Christ’s Gospel, and the truth about His Church, that they find refuge and a truth they can believe in such sources. St Paul’s verdict applies:

22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

The good news, for Bosco and for all who are misled by such toxins, is that the Church is there, opening its arms, which are the arms of God, and has the power of Christ to forgive all our sins and to help guide us on the road to Heaven.