Speak the Truth in Love

Blog Break

2012-02-21T16:20:00.003-07:00

Lent is here again. I shall return at Easter. Got to keep the main thing the main thing. Pray for me and I shall pray for you.

Sola/Solo Revisited

2012-02-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

A while back there was a series of articles at Called to Communion responding to a book by Ken Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura. There was a bunch of back and forth. Eventually Mathison responded. He even responded on this blog once. But his main reply was in two parts. One was to note the bias of the authors. That is they all seemed to come from a Catholic point of view. The second was to make a more generic argument against the Catholic church.

Neal Judisch wrote a reply to that reply. There were a number of other replies but I want to reflect on Neal's which I don't think was ever really responded to. His response was basically to point out that the responses were not logical critiques of the logical argument presented. They were claims of bias but they don't matter when you are not making an argument from authority. If the trustworthiness of someone's judgement is not a premise of the argument then pointing out bias does not refute anything.

So that is where it was dropped as far as I can tell. With Neal challenging Mathison to refute the argument in logical terms. That is to state precisely which premise he rejected or why he didn't feel the conclusion followed from the premises. That was about a year ago. Nothing. Sure there were many comments on all of these posts but nothing I can remember as coming close to meeting this challenge.

So what does that mean? If you reject Catholic arguments because they are Catholic and not because they are logically unsound? What that ends up doing is pitting faith against reason. Reject this conclusion on faith despite the apparent rational basis for it. It is dangerous territory. It essentially says there are some truths that cannot be properly scrutinized by reason.

Protestantism is supposed to be based on scripture and plain reason. There is huge subjectivity in what counts as plain reason. But if defending it requires you to reject logical arguments without explaining what is unsound about them then you have taken that subjectivity to a new level. You end up undermining every logical argument you ever make. If you can simply ignore logical problems then why can't some else?

Examining John Piper

2012-02-17T11:04:00.000-07:00

Christian Piatt writes an article result reacting to what Piper said about Christianity and gender.

I really want to give John Piper the benefit of the doubt. Given that he’s a minister in the Baptist tradition, it doesn’t surprise me when he only refers to God as “he” or when he talks about the man’s role as spiritual head of the household. I grew up Baptist, so I’ve heard it all before.

But he goes too far with it. Way too far. And given the breadth of his influence, his message serves to normalize the marginalization of half (slightly more than, in fact) the world’s population. While I expect he believes he is fulfilling a divine call in sharing his message, I believe I’m serving a similar call in holding him to account.

It is interesting that he starts with some comments about authority. He knows Piper has clout. That many evangelical pastors choose to give him teaching authority. He knows Piper feels called to speak for God but he feels the same call. So what has happened here? God is being taken out of the picture. We have a debate where both sides claim a divine call. But one of them must be wrong.

Piatt states this and moves on. He knows that if he can get people to see the divine authority question as a draw then he can win. He has the culture on his side on this. People living in modern society will find his ideas about the roles of men and women easier to accept that Piper's ideas. So it is a good debate tactic. Get the question of divine authority off the table.

But if divine authority can be finessed then what chance do we have at arriving at truth? All we have is human opinion. Fallible leaders that have been immersed in our culture, immersed in sin, and immersed in human tradition. One of these leaders may have been given the grace to see God's truth clearly but how do we know which one? We don't.

We will come to agree with one and disagree with the other. Guess what? The vast majority of the time we will agree with the side that matches what we would have said anyway. Person A is telling us we are right. Person B is telling us we are wrong. It is human nature to be more sympathetic to person A because we like to be told we are right. So the process that was supposed to be us hear God's word and obeying it now becomes us convincing ourselves that God must agree with our opinion.

Can the Holy Spirit intervene and make someone realize that he is wrong and person B is really speaking for God? Sure. Does it happen often? No. Most of the time people's thinking goes along predictable paths. We think we are above it. That our mind can set aside the influences of sin, society, and human tradition. It is spiritual pride. We don't really grasp the significance of our own fallibility.

It reminds me of the typical atheist argument. If God exists He would make His presence obvious and would make obedience easy. Here we have a similar assumption. God exists so He will make His will obvious and not let me embrace serious error unknowingly. The trouble is you are telling God how things should work. He has chosen to be hidden in plain sight so He is obvious to some and invisible to others. It gives us a choice whether to believe and obey or deny there is anything there. But if He gives us the bible and allows us to choose whether to believe it or not then why would He not give us leadership with divine authority and let us choose whether to believe it or not?

As a protestant I could see the atheist was pursuing his own version of good and blaming any God that might exist for not making the right thing clear enough. I didn't see that I was pursuing my own version of good as well. Sure it was formed by scripture. Still the pressure was on God to make things clear to me. I was not going to go out and find a more complete source of His word. Something that could guide me on issues like the role of women in the church that seem to have no strong consensus of what is biblical. Just like I would tell the atheist that if you honestly looked for God you would find Him in the person of Jesus. I can now tell protestants that if you honestly look for an answer to the divine authority stalemate you will find God working powerfully through the Catholic Church.

Anyway, this is getting long so I won't comment on the rest of the article.

Sucked In By Religion

2012-02-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

One big fear people have when it comes to religion is being sucked in. Why not? There are many false religions. There are many smart people in those religions. So it happens. But smart people get trapped in bad sexual relationships. They get taken in by greed. They get addicted to alcohol and drugs. Yet people don't respond by avoiding sex, money, parties, etc. They realize there are dangers but you have to live your life. So you exercise due caution and proceed. With religion it is different. People think the most reasonable course is to avoid it altogether.

Of course you can't. Religion is just about answering the big questions in life. GK Chesterton talked about philosophy as thinking that is thought all the way through. It is a pain to do this but the alternative is to not think things through. With religion you can do that. You can refuse to think about the really big questions in life. It is cowardly and irrational but you can do it.

The trouble is those questions do force their way onto the stage at some point. Often you are not ready for them because it happens at the moment of great crisis. A loved one has just died. You have just seen your life's dream crash. Whatever it is. That is when you notice your world and life view is missing in action. That is precisely when you are most likely to get sucked into bad religion. You are emotionally needy and you are not going to be able to think straight. It is really not the best time to be making big life choices but that is often when they get made.

The good news is that most people who make religious commitments under such circumstances end up in a pretty good religion. Some end up in cults or radical groups but most are picked up by an aggressively-evangelizing protestant church. Theology won't be their strong suit but they likely get a lot of things right.

What happens next? Not a lot. They typically either stay where they are at and embrace the tradition that brought them to the faith or they stop going to church entirely. Very few of them do any serious reading and try and find which Christian church has doctrine that makes more sense than the others. Even if they are in a church that makes up a very small fraction of Christendom.

Suppose you are sick and look for a doctor. But the first doctor you run into is a Sioux Indian medicine man. Would it make sense to judge all medicine by this one medicine man and other medicine men he introduces you to? That would be nuts. You need to go to a mainstream doctor. Even if the medicine man tells you main steam doctors are no good. But this is what people do with Christianity. They judge Christianity based on one particular tradition. They either embrace that tradition or reject all of Christendom. Even when that tradition might be just a few decades old and amount to a trivial fraction of all Christians.

For someone to reject Christianity without seriously investigating Catholicism should be quite strange. Like writing off all smart phones without investigating the iPhone. One could do it but you would not expect many to do it. Somehow it is common for protestant Christians. As a protestant I didn't know anyone who ever read anything serious by a Catholic on why he is Catholic. It is just never seriously addressed.

The bottom line is if people took a more rational approach to religion there would be more Catholics. We could avoid this scenario that starts with fear and later is driven by despair. Instead one could read the best representatives of all the major religious schools of thought. It is not really obvious who that would be but to make a serious attempt at it is not that hard. You can start by asking a member of that faith who you respect for something that describes his religion well. It is exceedingly rare. Most people only consider religious arguments they happen to stumble into.

I wish I could say I had been more rational in my faith journey. I really wasn't. That is why I didn't become Catholic until I was 40. For a long time I just accepted the reformed tradition I was raised with. I thought I was being perfectly rational. I wasn't. I trusted the people I knew because I knew them. Even after I discovered other Christian traditions had impressive Christians in them as well it still took a long time for me to really question whether the reformed tradition was even close to the truth.

Political Sloth

2012-02-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

Sloth is an indifference or lack of energy in matters of faith. For example, when people don't attend mass. They can't work up enough energy to go every Sunday. People who are slothful tend to be double-minded. They will affirm their faith but not in a really strong and definitive way. Sometimes the lack of faith comes from the lack of energy. Sometimes it is the other way around. If someone believes the Eucharist is the source and summit of the faith and that regularly partaking of it is essential to their spiritual health and personal happiness then why don't they go? Faith leads to action so if you are unwilling to act you must manufacture doubt.

But it is not only individuals that have trouble with sloth. Societies do as well. We seem to have all sorts of truth issues when it comes to pornography, torture, abortion, etc. Are they really truth issues or are they political sloth? We don't want to do the right thing so we convince ourselves that these moral questions are so hard we could not possible get agreement on them. We blame politicians for trying to run away from the issue. But running away is what society wants. Abraham Lincoln talked about doing right as God gives us grace to see what is right. Today's politicians are much happier being blind and the public does not want them any other way.

So what is the solution? At a personal level the solution to sloth is joy. If our Christian walk is a source of joy to us then we won't lack any energy or enthusiasm in pursuing it. If it isn't then sloth will be a constant struggle. The same goes for countries. If a nation does not see joy in respecting life then it is going to be very hard to get people to change their votes based on issues like torture and abortion. If they don't see joy in building a culture where chastity is supported and not ridiculed then those initiatives are going to have very limited success. It is not enough for people to feel they should do this or that. For them to get active enough in large enough numbers they are going to have to see how this will change their neighborhoods for the better.

So how do we get there? That is harder. It is easy to point out when rules are broken. It is a lot harder to point out why breaking that rule is a bad thing. Why it will interfere with your joy. You can do it with philosophical reasoning but many people don't find that very compelling. You can try it with art. That has some real potential but art about sex or violence is tricky. We have experienced so much art that handles sex and violence so badly that it is hard to imagine it being done well and being received well.

But that is what is needed. To try and get someone to imagine a modern society where life is respected and sex is respected and how each person's dignity would be affirmed. How people would flourish and become the beautiful men and women God intended. How these strong, healthy people would benefit their friends and family rather than taking advantage of them. That would make the net effect on society much greater than the sum of the parts.

If you think about the Christian takeover of Rome. They didn't just imagine it. They built it. As Roman society became more and more dysfunctional Christians stepped in and picked up the pieces. Sexual perversions went from being widely accepted everywhere to being recognized as gravely evil. They had seen where the Christian way led and where the pagan way led. But we have trouble even telling that story. When we do we end up making the pagan way of life looking pretty appealing.

Racism

2012-02-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

Thinking about growth of secularism, I wrote a bit about the role of abortion yesterday. Really the sexual revolution was huge. But I think racism also played a role. Not that one side or the other was racist but the issue of racism and the way it has been discussed in the culture has made people more secular. It is an inflammatory issue. The topic of race is almost never discussed rationally. People have strong opinions and they don't want to have them questioned. It is one of the few true evils in society. Racists are given no respect and they are offered no forgiveness. Oddly enough even a small incidence of racism is enough to trigger this. You must be pure of all stain of racism.

Despite the fact that race is still such a sore spot with so many people it is still seen as an area where modern man has made some great strides forward. Slavery has been ended. Segregation in many forms is a thing of the past. The thought of excluding a person based on race just seems crazy to us now. So there has been great progress made. How did we make it? What was the process by which we arrived at the consensus that discriminating based on race is wrong? In particular, what role did religion play?

On the positive side the role of religion was more behind the scenes. Many of the major players were Christians and their opposition to racism flowed from their Christian world and life view. But there was no explicit doctrine that this idea was connected with. In fact, there were a lot of intellectuals involved who were not very religious at all. Some black leaders were Muslim. In Africa and India you had a wide variety of religions on side. So it is very hard to draw a clear line between one religion and the emerging consensus that racial discrimination is a morally wrong.

On the negative side you can see religion much more clearly. The white southerners who defended racism were all religious. Many used religious arguments. They found scriptures to back up their point of view like protestants tend to do. I grew up in a Dutch Reformed church. I remember being embarrassed by our sister churches in South Africa. Those churches were some of the most racist institutions in that society and they remained so for a very long time.

So the net effect of religion in the area of racism seemed quite negative. It seemed like man reasoned his way to moral progress rather than praying his way to moral progress. The underpinnings of that reasoning were often Christian but it was man that was largely credited with making the steps forward. Religious people were seen as in the way. They were obstacles to progress. Even when that progress was moral in nature.

So if you talk with a secularist today it won't take long before they compare gay marriage or abortion to racism. The implication is clear. Christian thinking is not infallible. You got the racism question wrong and eventually admitted that liberal intellectuals were right. That pattern is likely to happen with other moral questions as well.

Again the Catholics have a good answer and the protestants don't. Catholics believe in a very precisely defined doctrine of infallibility. So it is very easy to see that racism is old but it isn't magisterial. That is, it does not have the authority of popes, ecumenical councils and saints behind it. So we can label that as sinful because sin is old too. But our teachings on abortion, gay marriage, contraception, divorce, etc. are magisterial. That means Christians have not just believed them but God has led His church to teach them with her full authority. Christians can err. God cannot.

Protestants just don't believe in this distinction. Protestants believe in Sola Scriptura. The trouble is he cannot really say Sola Scriptura could not lead him into error. So how can he say his biblical source of truth is more reliable than secular sources? Even if the secularist accepts that the bible is trustworthy when interpreted right the protestant has to admit it is often not interpreted right. So why should we not believe those that say religious people are standing in the way of progress again?

Blasphemy

2012-02-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

Peter Berger writes and interesting piece on blasphemy.

Barring an onset of collective amnesia in the Supreme Court, there is no chance of overt anti-blasphemy legislation. But it is important to point out that the concept of so-called “hate speech” offers a usable substitute, and it has achieved considerable judicial approval both in this country and in Europe. Here the insult is not deemed to be against God, but against the presumably tender “sentiments” of some believers. As far as I know, this concept has not played itself out in the federal courts.

I have written before on how secularism is becoming the state religion in the west. It is not seen as a religion so it escapes the non-establishment clause in the constitution. But it functions very much like a state religion. Hate speech laws are very similar to the "blaspheming the prophet" laws that we criticize in Islamic counties. There is some inflammatory speech that seems reasonable to get rid of. But where is the line? One person's unreasonable inflammatory speech is another person's honest attempt to embrace the truth. That is precisely why the American civil rights movement took as its basic principle that all religions were to be respected by the state.

It is interesting that we are seeing how hard it is to establish democracy in places where this freedom is not respected. When political movements can label their opponents blasphemers and justify the use of violence against them then true political debate ceases and democracy fails. Precisely at the time when we are trying to teach others how to do democracy we are forgetting how to do it ourselves. With all the influence the US had in Iraq and Afghanistan they never suggested simply allowing blasphemy as part of free speech. They were too afraid they would offend the Muslims. Then they wondered why democracy failed.

On the home front we have political correctness trumping freedom of religion in more and more court cases. There are certain dogmas of secularism that you cannot contradict. They are taught in public schools. They are assumed by the news media and the entertainment industry. Increasingly they are enforced by law.

If you think about it, Roe v Wade made the concept of an American Christian impossible. To be a good American you have to believe in the rights and freedoms of the constitution. Roe v Wade said that included abortion rights. So it says anyone who thinks abortion is intrinsically wrong is against the constitution and the bill of rights. That really defines the country in a way that rejects Christianity. Chesterton talked about America as a country founded on a creed. When you change the creed you change the country.

Once you enshrine one tenant of secularism into the constitution you are not going to stop there. The dogmas just keep coming. Eventually Christians get pushed to the fringes of society and the more extreme secularists are able to gain more power. People who believe on faith that all faith-based beliefs are wrong. Who think it is immoral to declare something immoral. Who are radically intolerant of intolerance. Who bully people by calling them bullies. Anyone can believe anything as long as it has no real content but those who believe in an offensive gospel are going to have a tough time.

Why Children?

2012-02-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

When people pursue marriage today they often don't think much about children. Often people are dating saying they don't want to have kids. They just want a spouse. They want to storybook romance but family is often not part of that dream anymore. So when they hear the Catholic church say that the unitive and procreative purposes of sex are inseparable they don't understand. Part of the reason they don't understand is the theological language. The unitive purpose of sex is just the ability of sex to bring a man and a woman close together not just physically but emotionally and spiritually. (My spell checker keeps wanting to change "unitive" to "punitive," not sure what to make of that.) Anyway, the procreative purpose of sex is the conception of children. So these are unfamiliar words for familiar concepts.

But the concept that is radical to modern ears is the inseparable part. The notion that sex cannot fulfill the purpose of bringing a couple close together when there is no openness to having children. That seems insane to modern culture. We love the idea of falling in love. Our culture is constantly telling stories about lovers. All cultures tell love stories. Our culture tells them in a more explicitly sexual way and they rarely involve children. But then the church tells us that openness to life and true romantic love can't be separated. One has to involve the other. Why is that?

Think about what children are. They are people like their mother and father. So if you love someone, why would you not want to create more people like that someone? Often it is because we don't really love them. We love the idea of being in a sexual relationship with them but we don't really love them. They are very different things. Being in a relationship where you can use them for your pleasure and tolerate their closeness is not love. You would not want to spend time, money, and energy to raise a child who is going to be like that person. You only want to make that kind of effort to raise a child if you believe strongly they are going to be a huge blessing to the world. That means you need to believe that your partner is a huge blessing to the world. But if you don't believe that then do you really love him or her?

Many people today approach marriage from a selfish point of view. I can see myself being happy with this person because they are good looking and they have a good sense of humor or good manners or whatever. It boils down to what I get. Can I take the good and tolerate the bad? Are there more pleasures than pains? This is what John Paul II called the opposite of love. That is a self-centered relationship where a person uses the other. That is contrary to the nature of sex. Sex calls you to a complete gift of self but as long as you are in a using type of relationship it will be destructive to you and your partner.

But does every relationship that is closed to children have to be a using relationship? That is the claim. It is not that you must have children. It is that the desire must be part of your relationship. You might have practical reasons why having children is not going to work but the desire should be strong. It should be as natural as living together. There might be reasons not to live with your spouse but they need to be serious reasons like you have jobs in different cities. If a couple lives apart without serious reasons that is a very bad sign. The same goes with children. If you avoid having children without serious reasons there is something very wrong with the relationship.

Many people will say their relationship is wonderful and they have chosen to never have children. People say a lot of things. Some say committing adultery made their marriage better. You don't want to call people liars but that can't stop you from identifying the essence of marriage. Society is very lost and there are many good-hearted people who have strayed far from it. That does not make it unimportant or optional.

What about those who are not drawn to have children? There is the option of the celibate life. People dismiss that too quickly. Marriage is hard. Celibacy is not easy either but it is a very different road. If a man wants to spend his life on something that takes too much time and provides too little income to allow for a family then the celibate life can free him up to do that. The priesthood is the obvious example but there are others. With women it is more common. Motherhood is more demanding so women tend to choose celibacy in greater numbers. This is all good. Marriage and children need to be top priority. If you feel God is calling you to make something else top priority then marriage is not for you.

The Decline of Man

2012-02-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

Pope Benedict's phrase "the decline of man" came to mind when reading this article. It takes a long view of it and goes back to William of Ockham and St Thomas Aquinas.

St. Thomas, in line with patristic Christianity and Greek philosophy, gave primacy to the natural reason as formative in our free choices. The human will, he taught, was inclined to the good, to happiness, to being, to truth, and beauty, and the intellect was ordered toward knowing where these are found. These transcendentals are positive, spiritual realities that attract the will and the intellect. This attraction precedes the free will choices we make. Our freedom derives from the use of reason ordered to truth, and the will ordered to the good, the two uniting to make a choice.

The point is that the will being ordered towards the good has been degrading over many centuries now. We are at a point where many don't know what good is or even if it exists. Reason ordered towards truth has taken a beating as well. We have advanced in our understanding of scientific truth but have declined in our ability to grasp deeper truths. We know the mechanism of things but not the meaning.

You see it in politics. When I was young there were still politicians who were trying to do good. Now we are just looking for someone who will refrain from gravely immoral acts. The chances of even that happening are slim and none. Then there is religion. Decade after decade we see a drop in faith and a rise in all sorts or immoral behavior. There is just a lot of bad news.

So where does it go? Is this general decline we have seen since the 13th century going to just continue? I was thinking that the seed of the church is the blood of the martyrs. So once it gets to a point where Christians start getting killed simply for being Christian then the world will see that something has gone amiss. In many parts of the world they are already doing that. The West does not seem that far off.

But look at WWII. The west had to face the reality of evil then. What happened? They went back to church for a while. But the next generation, the baby boomers, they picked up the same ideas as before the war and ran with them. The WWII generation didn't look very deep. They didn't ask what truth were they missing or what evil were they tolerating that allowed WWII to happen. It was more that they were scared. They almost lost their freedom. Many almost lost their lives. So they went back to their old faith. But they didn't go forward to a closer union with God.

The fact that it was WWII should have been a clue. Responding the same way people did to WWI had already proven inadequate. Embracing the faith of your fathers or even your grandfathers is not going to do it. The seeds of the decline of humanity were already in that faith. It was like trimming the weeds rather than pulling the weeds. It was only a matter of time before evil returned.

I do think we will see a revival like that.That is a returning to God as people currently understand Him which is still a degraded understanding based on false philosophical assumptions. That kind of revival happens every once in a while. They are part of the longer story of the decline of man. But will the errors in Christian thinking that this article traces ever become less dominant? That might take longer.

I do think that evil is growing stronger. Man is more capable of violating human dignity and less capable of seeing why we shouldn't. We might be creating an environment where lesser faiths have trouble surviving. Catholicism will always survive. It can take anything the devil can throw at it. Other faiths have survived a long time. Islam is almost 1400 years old. Protestantism is almost 500. But they require an absolute belief in a book without really addressing questions about where that book comes from and why we should believe it is true. With modern technology it is getting harder and harder to avoid scrutiny. Young people will find websites that ask all the hard questions and ridicule their family's faith.

The good news is that God is real. The Catholic church has been growing in it's understanding. As people's questions get more sophisticated the church's answers have gotten deeper and more beautiful. That is the grace of God that has been poured out despite the fact that many have rebelled. God has kept a people for Himself in every generation. So the answer is there when people want it.

The biggest issue is people's desire for good. They have set the bar low. When will they see that? When they encounter a saint. When they see someone living a truly holy life they realize what they are pursuing is junk by comparison. Then they won't need to be arm twisted into joining a religion. They will want it.

Moses and the Pope

2012-01-30T13:10:00.002-07:00

Pope John Paul II at Mt Nebo where Moses viewed the promised land

Our deacon opened this week's homily with this old joke:

This is the transcript of the ACTUAL radio conversation of a U.S.naval ship with the Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland October 1995.

Radio conversation released by the Chief of Naval Operations 10-10-95.

Canadians: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoida collision.

Americans: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the North.

Canadians: Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to
the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divertYOUR course.

Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.

Americans: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS LINCOLN. THE SECOND
LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIEDBY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS, AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH, I SAY AGAIN,THAT'S ONE FIVE DEGREES NORTH, OR COUNTERMEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKENTO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP.

Canadians: We are a lighthouse. Your call.

This is a made up story despite the word "actual" being in all caps. In the deacon's version the American was a high ranking official and the Canadian was a lowly seaman. His point was that truth was more important than office in determining authority. My guess is our deacon pulled this from a protestant source and didn't realize that Catholic theology is a bit deeper on this point.

Truth is more important than office if the truth is known with certainty like it is in this case. But in many cases we don't really know the truth. We might have a strong opinion. We mistake it for knowing the truth. Everyone who disagrees with church leadership thinks they have truth on their side. They know that contraception is OK or they know that Mary was not sinless or they know the new mass translation is stupid. Then truth trumps office, right? That makes it OK to rebel against your bishop? Of course not.

But we love the story, don't we? We love when the lowly person is right and the proud ruler is humiliated. Especially when we happen to be the lowly person. So we are quick to assume that this is the case. Is it ever the case? Sometimes you do know facts that church leads don't know. Cases of sexual abuse come to mind. A person might have first hand knowledge that the bishop does not have. But this is rare.

Normally we have become certain because of who we chose to listen to. We listen to the secular culture or we listen to a particular protestant tradition or we listen to one particular wing of the Catholic church. We can read some good arguments and become very convinced. The human mind can arrive at psychological certainty when there is nothing approaching absolute certainty. That means we can become sure we are right and still be wrong. This is not rare.

In fact, we are more often like the commander of the larger ship. We are the ones loudly proclaiming our truth only to suddenly see that our truth was not true at all. We like to put the bishop or the pope in that role. Another old joke is that the good news is there is a God. The bad news is you are not Him. Think of yesterday's first reading:

Moses spoke to all the people, saying:
"A prophet like me will the LORD, your God, raise up for you
from among your own kin;
to him you shall listen.
This is exactly what you requested of the LORD, your God, at Horeb
on the day of the assembly, when you said,
'Let us not again hear the voice of the LORD, our God,
nor see this great fire any more, lest we die.'
And the LORD said to me, 'This was well said.
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kin,
and will put my words into his mouth;
he shall tell them all that I command him.
Whoever will not listen to my words which he speaks in my name,
I myself will make him answer for it.
But if a prophet presumes to speak in my name
an oracle that I have not commanded him to speak,
or speaks in the name of other gods, he shall die.'"

It is interesting that Israel decided they didn't like the cloud of fire and the powerful voice of God. Sometimes people wonder why God does not make Himself more obvious. The answer is because man was totally uncomfortable with that. The good news is there is a prophet. The ultimate fulfillment of that is Jesus. But popes and bishops are examples of this too as well as the Old Testament prophets. So the good news is that somebody does speak with the authority of God. The bad news is it is not you. This is good news too. Remember we didn't want to hear from God directly. We want a pope and a bishop to do that for us. But then we want him to agree with us.

More Shots At Santorum

2012-01-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

Rick Santorum's candidacy may have a few problems on issues related to war and torture but he sure is touching some nerves with his social policy agenda. It seems he is not as easy to ignore as a few hundred thousand Walk For Life marchers. Kate Harding is the latest to take notice and respond to Santorum's comments about abortion.

As a lapsed Catholic turned atheist, a staunch feminist and someone who has a strong general aversion to sleazy, disingenuous men, I was shocked yesterday to find myself feeling something like respect for Rick Santorum, Pope Benedict XVI and Piers Morgan all in the space of three minutes.

Good to know where she is coming from.

The three minutes in question are a clip from Morgan's interview with Santorum on the former's CNN talk show. In it, Santorum declares that even if his own daughter were raped – a hypothetical scenario both men manage to discuss with remarkable calm – the Roman Catholic presidential candidate would maintain his adamantly pro-life position regarding abortion.

I do think that candidates should just refuse to discuss hypothetical questions like that. It has become normal but it quite silly. Candidates should discuss matters of public policy. Nobody really knows what they would do when faced with a huge trauma like a family member being raped. This is sentimentalism in action. We want to put your moral code to some kind of emotional acid test. But the right thing to do can be hard in some scenarios. Often it is not as hard as we imagine it will be. A woman can love her child even if it is the product of rape.

I sincerely feel a tiny, grudging mote of respect for that degree of consistency. As anti-choice zealots go, those who will take the "baby killer" argument to its extreme appeal to me slightly more than those who can say with a straight face that abortion is murder, except when the woman didn't want to have sex.

This is good. Consistency is critical. It is either a baby or it isn't. The rape exception is mostly crafted to take the very rare scenario off the table. Focus on the most common abortions. Once we agree that those are wrong we can talk about the hard cases.

Of course, that's the beginning and the end of my respect for Santorum, who had the gall to tell Morgan that his opposition to legal abortion is "not a matter of religious values". He insists that it's founded on his interpretation of the US constitution, as opposed to his interpretation of the teachings of Jesus Christ: "[L]ife begins at conception and persons are covered by the constitution, and because human life is the same as a person, to me it was a pretty simple deduction to make that that's what the constitution clearly intended to protect."

It is not even the constitution. The notion that life begins at conception is a scientific one. It has biblical support but previously many Christians believed that life began at quickening. That is the time when a woman can first feel the baby in her womb. Nobody believes that anymore because the science has shown it to be incoherent. The fetus is a living thing from the moment of conception. It's species is human.

Once you grasp that then you can take a lot of different roads to arrive at the position that it is immoral to kill it. Moral thinking varies a lot from person to person but most people accept that an innocent human life deserves the protection of the law. Christianity says it. The US Constitution says it. Kantian morality says it. There are lots of ways to get there. If fact, you would have to wonder about any moral system that does not say innocent human life deserves protection under the law. That is the big letter E on the top of the moral eye chart. Everyone gets this one right.

Hang on, I need a moment. Reading those words just gave me a bad flashback to tutoring hopeless freshman composition students in a university writing lab.
We're to believe that Santorum's desire to overturn Roe v Wade is "not a matter of religious values", yet, when discussing a hypothetical pregnancy by rape just moments later, he says: "I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you." ("In the sense of rape." Deep breaths, Kate.) "Gift from God," "person under the law" – why quibble about semantic differences? The point is: Life! Glorious life! Santorum will defend it!

OK, so you do think life is worth protecting. Then why are you pro-abortion? It boggles the mind that that never needs explaining. It is like the default position. I might get kicked out of the feminist club if I was pro-life.

And here's where my blip of respect for Morgan comes along. "I know that your position is – correct me if I'm wrong – that you believe in the sanctity and the innocence of life. How do you equate that with supporting the death penalty?" he asks. Boo-yah! I dearly wish more American reporters would put that question to self-styled "pro-life" candidates who evince little interest in the sanctity of human life ex utero.
That brings us to my smidgen of respect for Pope Benedict XVI – and for that matter, John Paul II before him – for making it clear that Catholic doctrine, in a moment of convergence with common sense, holds that a pro-life position contraindicates revenge-killing born people. "It cannot be overemphasised that the right to life must be recognised in all its fullness," Pope Benedict said in 2009, praising the abolition of the death penalty in Mexico. So at least in that one respect, Santorum can truthfully say that his political intentions are not based on his professed religious values.

This is not exactly a "Boo-yah!" moment. There is a distinction between killing an innocent human being and killing someone who has committed a serious crime. Every Catholic should have serious reservations about the state taking any life precisely for the reason Pope Benedict gives. But there is a balancing concern. How to properly address what this person has done. One can reasonably say the right to life still trumps everything but one can also reasonable say there are cases where it does not.

Still, if you can't even speak for a whole minute on a political issue without invoking "God's will" as a supporting argument, you have no business running for president of a country whose constitution actually – no weasel words or tortured logic necessary to make this case – enshrines freedom of religion. That alone should be enough to make any American who truly loves liberty and the vision of the "founding fathers" lose all respect for Rick Santorum as a politician.

That would be the same constitution that says "all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights?" How is that different from talking about "God's will?" Santorum does not invoke God's will when talking about taxes or foreign policy. Just when talking about issues of life and marriage. Where should he get his ideas about the value of human life and the importance of marriage? From Kate Harding?

But if you're not persuaded by that, just try remembering that he said becoming pregnant by a rapist is a gift from God. Out loud. With a camera on him. And he wants to be president of a country that has women in it.
What does this man have to do to get drummed out of the race?

That is what it means to say every person is a gift from God. Not just when mom and dad are in love and planning to conceive. Everyone, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. If not, then when does that human life become valuable? Would it be OK to kill that child as an infant or a toddler? He or she remains the product of a rape. You worry about consistency. Where is the consistency in valuing the lives of those who are born but not those very same lives prior to birth?

Mark Driscoll on Sex

2012-01-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

Mark Driscoll is a pastor of a Mars Hill Church in Seattle. He wrote a book on sex and Christian marriage that has drawn a lot of reaction. He recently wrote a response to that reaction. Not surprisingly, he thinks everyone is very confused except him. There is something deeper there. Evangelicals are unsure about how to handle issues of sexual morality. He identifies the two extremes and the ideal in the middle. We can be too permissive, we can be too legalistic, or we can be just right. But just because one can describe these categories does not mean one can correctly put everything related to sex in the correct category.

This book and a few others have generated reaction more from the way they talk about sex than what they actually say. They are quite explicit in their style. They say those who react badly to that have bought into the mistaken idea that sex is gross. That might be true for some of his critics. He does not give examples so there is no way to know. But there is also the idea that sex is sacred. Sacred things are often veiled. That is why we wear cloths to veil the sacred sexuality of our bodies. But language has it's own form of veiling. By using less graphic and more poetic language around sex we respect the sacred nature of it. Modern man does not like that. We see sex as a biological function and tend to think more clinical language should be used. But we have trouble doing it. Something inside us wants to move to the higher language of love or the lower language of the barnyard. We know what we are doing and it isn't clinical. It is either love or lust. Our talk tends to reflect that.

Christians should not fight this. We should not tell couples to use more graphic language in their marriage. We should develop our own love language. Just because some people think of Christians as prudish is no reason to make ourselves talk dirty to our spouse. Just have good marriages with large families and people will figure out that their is a healthy sexuality. That is what the bible does. It talks about men being blessed with a beautiful wife and many children. We are left to fill in the blanks.

Speaking of large families. The other huge problem with this book and many protestant books is it does not see the link between sex and procreation. It is a huge blind spot. He rightly starts by asking what is the purpose of sex. But then he gets the answer wrong. Partly because he is in a bible-only mindset. He can't see that the biological connection between sex and procreation might imply a spiritual connection as well. He can't see it because it is not stated in the bible in explicit, clinical language.

Gen 4:1 says, "Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain." There are quite a few similar verses. Are they just giving us biological information or is there a deeper truth they are trying to communicate? Why are those verses not cited when looking for the biblical purpose of sex? Because protestants choose to ignore them. They have already embraced a contraceptive mentality before examining the scriptures. That is precisely what Driscoll says everyone else does wrong -bringing their existing bias to their biblical interpretation. This is a problem but he is not immune from it either.

So everything he says about sexual morality is off. He is right that sex is a gift from God. That it is given for a purpose. We honor the Giver if we use it the way it was intended. But he gets the intent wrong. By missing procreation he has reduced sex to just binding two people together. Any two people for any reason? You can see how this would make his whole argument come off the rails.

As with many theological discussions, the inadequacy of the Sola Scriptura method has once again become clear. The bible is a wonderful book but it is not a sex manual. That is a good thing. But that does not mean there should be no authority in matters of sexual morals. But if you accept Sola Scriptura then it does mean that. So you have the typical scenario of everyone speaks for God so nobody does. Guys like Mark Driscoll thrive in that system because absent real authority people will look for someone who is personally compelling. Driscoll is that. Unfortunately that does not correlate at all with being theologically correct. If anything, the devil will have the better presentation.

Pro-life Atheists

2012-01-20T10:46:00.001-07:00

Can atheists be pro-life? There are a few. Nathan Hentoff is the classic example. But the fact that there is one classic example means it is pretty rare. I wonder about that. Atheists are very rational, counter-cultural thinkers. Why would they not be pro-life? Thinking about what Paula Kirby wrote about original sin made it more clear. Being pro-life means having to face the reality of grave evil. When innocent children are being killed by the millions and it is being defended by people who are otherwise find upstanding citizens that is big time evil. You can't contemplate that much evil sanctioned by that many people without believing in sin. I mean really believing in sin. Not just saying "nobody's perfect" but accepting that there is something deeply wrong with the human person. That we have a great capacity for denying evil or pretending we just don't see it.

Atheism just does not have an answer to that kind of evil. The kind of evil that can take the mind of an intelligent person and twist it so he can't see what is right. Atheism is essentially salvation by human reason. So it cannot deal with facts that show evil winning out over human reason. Intelligent people who do stupid things because they were overcome by pride or anger or lust or greed. They are all over the place. Atheists need to see that as the exception and not the rule. They must believe that the power of human reason can remain intact. That society won't just come off the rails and embrace evil. That is why they can't contemplate the Nazi holocaust. For the same reason they can't process the modern holocaust of abortion.

You hear this from people who are doing crisis pregnancy ministry. The women involved are not typically atheists but they are often very secular in their thinking. The ministry does not try and evangelize. They try and make the mother see her child is already human and deserves to live. But the two are tied together. When a mother chooses life she often also chooses faith. They typically go back to church and make many positive changes. If you accept sin then you have to accept grace. Otherwise you end up in despair.

Some will make a choice for life and still deny that it was a moral choice. They will just say they personally could not do it but they don't think it is wrong for anyone else. They almost treat their inability to have an abortion as a mental defect. Sort of like an irrational fear of flying in an airplane except this is a phobia about killing your child. In truth it is an irrational fear of transcendent moral principles. That happens but it is not the argument crisis pregnancy people make. They say it is wrong for everyone despite the fact that millions have done it. You can't really process that if you don't believe in grace. Grace for those who have had abortions or pushed other to have them and must account for their actions some day. Also grace for those who choose life and have to face all the challenges that come down that road.

The cross of Jesus is really the only answer to sin that makes sense. But if you don't really, seriously believe in sin it will never make sense. Then taking up your cross and following Jesus won't make sense either.

Atheists And The Meaning Of Life

2012-01-18T16:39:00.001-07:00

Apparently the most popular post I have ever done was a reply to an article by Paula Kirby. Not sure why but I ran into another one of her articles. See what happens:

The correspondent was blunt: “Why don’t you atheists just go out and kill yourselves right now?”
True, most Christians phrase it rather more delicately, but atheists are regularly informed by a certain kind of believer that our lives can have no value if we do not believe in their God. What is the point, they ask, of being kind or loving, caring about suffering or doing anything at all, if one day we just die?

The problem is not just that we die. Sartre said, "Nothing finite has any meaning without an infinite reference point." It is not that we die. It is that everything dies. The human species will one day be extinct. On that day will it matter if you have been nice or cruel? Will it matter if you have helped advanced human society or been a self-centered jerk? As long as that society continues it will matter at least a little. But however long that is will be small in comparison with eternity. So why should I give up some short term pleasure for something that will vanish in significance?

It is true that in the absence of a divine plan our lives have no externally determined purpose: an individual is not born for the purpose of becoming a physician or creating a spectacular work of art or digging a well in an arid corner of Africa. But are the sick less cured, the pleasure to the art-lover less intense, or the thirst of parched villagers less slaked, simply because a man sought his own purpose rather than following a diktat from on high? Do we really need a deity to tell us that a life spent curing cancer is more worthwhile than one spent drinking in the gutter?

Augustine weighed this very question before his conversion. Could he be happy as a drunk? We think the question is rhetorical because we make assumptions that flow from centuries of Christian influence. How should a man seek his own purpose? Why should he suppose he has one? Why should he suppose following that purpose would lead to joy?

Why should we not find satisfaction in alleviating suffering or injustice, just because we’re all going to die one day? The very fact that this life is all we have makes it even more important to do everything possible to reduce the suffering caused by poverty, disease, injustice and ignorance. To describe such attempts as meaningless is to say that avoidable suffering does not matter, hardly a moral stance.

It is not to say it does not matter. It is to ask why it matters. To look at that moral imperative you feel in your spirit and ask where it comes from. It could be just a feeling. The way the human brain has evolved. It could also be a sign pointing to a bigger reality. But if it is just in my head then it's meaning cannot be bigger then my head. The meaning is either an illusion or it is real. It cannot be both.

Many Christians claim we have no reason to care about others if there is no God. But this is itself a religious claim, arising from the theological concept of Original Sin, which declares humankind fallen and corrupt. We can safely ignore it, for in reality we do not need childish stories of eternal reward or damnation to coerce us into being good: research shows that the least religious societies have the lowest incidence of social ills, including crime and violence. Healthy humans have empathy built in, and the explanations for this lie in psychology and evolutionary biology: no gods required.

Christians don't say that the moment people stop going to church they become serial killers. People have natural empathy for family and other people similar to themselves. They continue to follow many Christian morals on autopilot for a while. In some cases a long while. But there will always be undesirables. People groups that the leadership does not like.We were shocked at how harshly the Nazi's and the communists dealt with these groups. We thought human empathy would have prevented such crimes against humanity. It didn't. You can say you don't believe in original sin but there is ample evidence that people are capable of great evil. Modern man has not made himself immune to this.

Socialist societies do tend to be less religious and also have less crime. But where does their concern for the poor come from? It flowed from the enlightenment but also from the Christian idea of the dignity of human life. Except for abortion and euthanasia the left has mostly kept this idea intact. How long will that last? I don't know. In principle there is nothing to prevent it from changing. Remember that social ills are what the government tells you they are.

Life cannot be meaningless so long as we have the capacity to affect the well-being of ourselves and others. For true meaninglessness, we would need heaven.
In the state of permanent, perfect bliss that is the very definition of heaven, ‘making a difference’ is ruled out. If the difference made an improvement, the previous state could not have been perfect. If it made things worse, the result would not be perfect. In heaven, neither is possible. Even being reunited with loved ones could not add one jot to their bliss or yours, for heaven would be, by definition, a state that could not be improved on.
Just consider for a moment the hellish pointlessness of heaven. At least in our real existence our actions have an effect, for better or worse, and it is therefore worth trying to get them right. In an eternal life where we can have no effect whatsoever, we might as well be dead.

This is interesting. It is also wrong. God is a trinity. A love relationship. More of a dance than a static thing. Heaven will be us joining that love relationship. To be in communion with each other and with God. A marriage between Christ and His Church. God is compelling enough to keep us fulfilled for all eternity. I know those who have always been bored by holy things can't understand that. Don't worry. God won't force heaven on anyone who has not shown the desire to be with Him on earth. If you want to trust yourself to the idea that sin is just a theological concept that can be safely ignored then God will let you do that. That is why He allows hell to exist.

If you have ever claimed that your life would have no meaning if it weren’t for your faith in God, do you really believe your family and friends have no worth in their own right? Can you really not see the point in striving to protect and nurture your children, even if there is no eternal life? Really?
If you do, then it is you, not atheists, who debase humanity, and it is Christianity, not atheism, that diminishes the real value and meaning of life. We atheists find purpose in the world as it is, and in our real lives; we see living beings as valuable in their own right, deserving of our concern and compassion simply because they share our capacity for pain and pleasure. It is hard to imagine a position less moral, less conducive to empathy, than this inherently warped and uncharitable view of humanity proposed by Christianity.

This is just a false choice. That you care for someone because they are children of God or because you feel empathy for them. It can't be both. That is just silly. The issue is that some days we won't feel empathy for some people. Then what? Can we use them and abuse them? We will be tempted. We will be able to rationalize it. We are not above that. Is that is an "inherently warped and uncharitable view of humanity?" I would accept warped. I would not accept uncharitable. I think the honest truth is we are warped. We are sinners in need of God's grace. To deny it would be uncharitable.

This is a perverse view of reality. After all, if the only valuable thing about existence is that God gave it to us, then that must mean the gift is not worth having in its own right. God’s creation would be the equivalent of a shapeless, baggy sweater of dubious color that you would never willingly wear but which you nevertheless can’t bring yourself to throw away because it was a gift from Granny. This approach in effect says you’re grateful for God’s gift, but you don’t actually like it very much; that, were it not for your belief that there’ll be an eternity in heaven to compensate you for having had to endure it, you can see no reason why you’d ever want it.

The trouble with this notion is that the Christian life is a life of joy. It might not seem so when analyzed from a pain and pleasure point of view but there is a much deeper peace and satisfaction that only those living the life understand. So you do wear the sweater. It turns out to be perfect. It suits you like nothing you have ever picked out for yourself. God knows you that well. Heaven is just a bonus. We pursue God on earth because He is worth more than anything this world has to offer. Heaven is going to be the same God and His sweater.

Theistic religion reduces life to something that has no value other than as the creation of an imagined deity. It decrees that purpose and meaning can only be found in being that deity’s puppet, having no purpose but its purpose and no value other than as its handiwork. Theistic religion looks on all that is best and most noble in human impulse and endeavour and dismisses it as meaningless and worthless --or worse: corrupt --unless done in the name of God. It is time to abandon this baseless worldview. It is time to reject theistic religion and start viewing ourselves and others with real dignity, as beings with value in our own right and not just as the distorted shadows of a fictional creator.

It is still not clear why human beings have value in their own right. If they are products of evolution and evolution has no particular goal then why does human life matter? It seems that she is doing precisely what she accused theists of doing. That is just asserting something for the purpose of manufacturing meaning. Instead of asserting God exists she is asserting humans have value. But she gives no reason why that assertion is likely to be true. If it is true, and I think it is, then the reason it is true would be very important. She just says, "There must be a reason. I don't know what it is but I am sure it isn't God."

If you know the meaning of life then you have to reorder your life around that truth. So the trick is to say there is meaning but to not be precise about what that meaning is. Then you don't have to live up to the morals that fall out of that. I am reminded of John Paul II saying, "Don't be afraid of the truth about yourself." Face that truth with all its implications and live life to the full.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2012-01-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

Every year this week comes up and is marked the same way. Christians from different denominations worship together. They pray together. They make some sappy speeches about love and respect. What unites us is greater than what divides us. Then they go back to their regular lives and ignore each other or, quite often, compete with each other. This is a step forward from where we were 100 years ago. Where Christians did not respect each other. Some Christians still need to make this step but I think they are getting fewer and fewer. Those that have resisted these symbolic gestures despite all the cultural pressure towards tolerance and celebrating diversity are not likely to change their mind anytime soon.

So these events used to be significant steps forward but they really aren't anymore. We can't keep celebrating the same piece of progress forever. We need to take the next step. What is that? Asking why we can't all be part of one big church? What are the issues that divide us? What are the possible resolutions? That last question is particularly hard for protestants. Protestants can see that simply arguing their particular interpretation of scripture is right will not lead to resolution. But it is the only method of resolving truth claims that Sola Scriptura allows. So there are very few choices:

God does not want all Christians to come to unity confessing one faith
All these people in other denominations are not Christians
Sola Scriptura is not what God intended

Given the fact that 3 is unthinkable for a protestant he is left with some combination of 1 and 2. But once you fellowship with other Christians and talk charitably about your areas of disagreement both those become untenable. Unity is God's heart and there simply has to be a way to get there. God would not leave us snookered.

You can see why most events praying for Christian unity do not want to go there. It is very uncomfortable. I was there for a long time. I wanted unity. I didn't dream it could require me to change my thinking so much. Nobody does. Nobody thinks they are far from the truth. Logically some people will need to seriously rethink some important doctrines. You just always think it is the other guys that are in need of the rethinking.

As Catholics, what are we to do? It seems pretty hypocritical to say everyone else must submit to our church. Even though we have good logical, biblical, and historical reasons for saying that it will always seem to protestants like we get a free ride on the unity issue especially for cradle Catholics. I am not sure we do. I am reminded of something a nun told me long before I considered joining the church. She said, "If you become a Catholic become a good one. We have enough bad ones!" The biggest thing preventing people from becoming Catholic is bad Catholics. The biggest thing causing people to become Catholic is good Catholics. From whom much is given much is required. We have been given much and we can't bury it in the ground.

First, we need to do a good job of submitting to the church but remaining a good critical thinker. When protestants look at the church they see dissenters and they see Catholics who avoid the topic of religion at all cost. Since they can't see themselves becoming either of those kinds of Catholics they think Catholicism is not for them. They need to interact with people who are completely Catholic and undeniably Christian. Many protestants don't believe that is possible. It is easier for them to believe that. Then they can write off the Catholic church. It is the job of every Catholic to be the counter example to that thinking. To make protestants think the church really might have something they are missing. In short, we are to be saints.

Santorum and Drug Dealers

2012-01-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

A CNN columnist, LZ Granderson, writes on why he does not hate Rick Santorum.

When I was a youth pastor at a small, evangelical church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I used to accompany my pastor and other members of our congregation into some of the city's neighborhoods where gang activity and gun violence were most prevalent.
We would stand on the corner next to the drug dealers and talk to them about why it was important to turn their lives around.

We start with an attempt to build credibility. Liberal Christians have to do this because you can't tell from their thinking they are Christian. So they have to tell you.

Some would listen.
Others would walk away.
All gave us respect, even if they didn't agree with what we had to say. And I believe they did so because we respected them. We didn't call them names or discount how they felt. We met them where they were -- literally and figuratively.

Not clear what this means. You want to meet people where they are at. Do you have another choice? But you don't want to affirm everything about where they are at. Look for positives but don't pretend negatives are really positives. Which does he mean here?

In a lot of ways, hearing Rick Santorum talk about social issues, particularly gay rights, reminds me of those days. Like those drug dealers, I'm sure he can't see how he destroys his community. Like those drug dealers, Santorum is probably doing what he thinks he needs to do. And like those drug dealers, what Santorum is pushing is addictive, poisonous and a trigger to violence we see all around us.

Just no moral difference between opposing same-sex marriage and dealing drugs. No qualifiers. No explanations. Isn't it just obvious. Drugs destroy communities. Marriage between a man and a woman? Does he have any statistics to show how drug use and traditional marriage are equivalent in their community destroying property? Somehow I doubt it. We just have to take his word for it.

His anti-gay rhetoric justifies, for some people, the bullying in school, the senseless beatings of people perceived to be gay and the under-reported murders of transgender people. The truth is that the disrespectful tone in which Santorum talks about GLBT people, in the name of religion, gives permission for our lives to be equally disrespected. Disregarded.

Can we get a quote from Santorum that justified violence against gays? I guess we will have to take his word for that to. But I have one more question? What happens if someone reads Mr Granderson's stuff and goes out and beats up a member of the Christian right? All it takes is "some people" reading what you write and becoming violent. Granderson can't control that. Neither can Santorum. So why bring it up?

Sometimes, the impulse is to return the fire, matching name-calling with name-calling. I, too, have found myself so ticked off by Santorum's words that I've called him everything but a child of God. That's when I come to my senses and try to remember the one thing he seems to forget. We're all God's children. We're all brothers and sisters.

You just accused him of destroying communities and of inciting violence. Unfairly. So how is that different from name-calling? If you are going to throw mud that is your right but at least admit you are throwing mud. Treating someone as a child of God involves more than just saying you love Santorum like a brother. It involves doing it. That would start with actually interacting with his ideas and not simply making baseless inflammatory accusations.

And like brothers and sisters, we won't always agree. Sometimes we will fight. But we can't get so caught up in our disagreements that we forget that what bonds us is far more important than what divides us. Being respectful doesn't mean you have to give up your religion.

Still, as much as it pains me to admit, Rick Santorum is my brother. I don't support the way he sows seeds of discord for political gain, but I can't allow him to drag me down so far that I hate him. Just as I didn't hate the drug dealers and gang bangers who were poisoning the Kalamazoo neighborhoods.

Not sure he has a clue what being respectful means. If he can't see that comparing Senator Santorum to gang bangers and drug dealers might be disrespectful then there is not much hope. He seems to feel respect is about patting yourself on the back for being respectful and that is it.

Instead we all must go to the figurative street corner and find a way to respectfully engage. After all, Santorum's views are not just his. More than 30,000 Iowans last week said they wanted to see him in the White House. This week thousands in New Hampshire might say the same. Calling social conservatives names might help blow off steam, but it's not going to change their hearts. And you cannot change a person's mind without first changing his or her heart.
Some will listen.
Some will walk away.
But neither group is going anywhere without at least getting to the place of respect.

It think he is confused between respecting an idea and respecting a person. People always deserve respect. Ideas might or might not. Some ideas are just evil. If someone holds them deeply you interact with them for the sake of the person. No for the sake of the idea. He is nowhere close to respecting Santorum as a person. If he did he would be quoting him and explaining why he disagrees.

Now I'm sure some are surprised to learn that I was heavily involved in the evangelical church. Others are shocked to read I lived in a small town called Kalamazoo. But we are all more than we appear to be.
Santorum is more than his homophobic rhetoric.
I am more than a gay guy who opposes it.
And if we were to sit across from each other with a cup of coffee, I'm sure we would find the labels we assign to constituent groups and such wouldn't do any of us justice.
Sound touchy feely?
It is.
But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

It does not mean it is true either. Who cares if you both cheer for the same baseball team or both like to fish? What we need to know is what is true about marriage. Let's talk about that. This is just sentimentalism. Never mind about the moral fiber of society. We are nice guys. So we want a gay marriage here, some pornography there, and an abortions every few seconds. Let's just be friends and forget about that.

Rick Santorum's significance has nothing to do with the election -- it's that he gives voice and seeming legitimacy to a lot of people who think it's OK to fire someone for being gay. Getting upset by such a notion is natural. Slapping them with a name like bigot is understandable. But then what? Santorum's campaign presents us with the uncomfortable but necessary task of dealing with that question.

Sure the issue is bigger than the election but to say it has nothing to do with the election is a little strange. It has nothing to do with bigotry. It may be natural for him to call everyone he disagrees with a bigot. Good thing he is above name-calling. But he is right. There is a question to deal with. It is uncomfortable. We need to ask whether society is giving marriage an environment where it can flourish? The numbers seem to indicate No. It matters because children matter. That is what will be uncomfortable. Looking past out short term pleasure long enough to think about the nation's children.

Santorum said he would love his son just the same if his son were to tell him he was gay. Whether that's true is debatable, but what isn't debatable is the importance for fair minded people to push for a country where, if Santorum's son were gay, he wouldn't feel society hates him for it.

You wonder if people like him actually buy this. That they can't imagine a society where marriage is between a man and a woman and yet society would not hate someone who declares himself or herself to be gay. Is it really that hard to imagine? Probably the advocates are the worst people to ask about this. My guess is most people want to keep their sex lives private. Guys like Granderson have chosen not just to make it public but seek a public image built around their sexual preference. Their profession is being a public gay person. So if one says society should not celebrate gayness then they are likely to take it personally. It costs them money. It costs them celebrity status. So they might feel loved or hated by society based on whether people feel the need to trot out a token homosexual every once in a while and say nice things about them.

Part of this has to do with the notion or moral relativism. That society can somehow control the rightness or wrongness of an act such as gay sex. That if gays win the political battle then the tortured consciences will go away. They won't. Moral relativism is false. Gay sex will remain immoral regardless of how widely it gets accepted in contemporary society. But I think many have that hope. Salvation through politics.

Are Protestants Still Protesting?

2012-01-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

Are Protestants Still Protesting? If you had asked me that 20 years ago I would have said No. My experience growing up reformed was embracing the reformed traditions and Calvinist theology. We didn't see them as a rebellion against Catholicism or anything else. We were pursuing truth and holiness and that was that.

But things have changed. This discussion over I Like Jesus But Not Religion is typical of what you hear from protestants a lot lately. They distinguish themselves from traditional Christianity. They don't say Catholicism partly because it would be offensive and partly because there are more Christian groups they would include as traditional. But the aim is clear. They want to paint themselves as different from what people think of as Christian. People are not interested in traditional Christianity. We want to show them Jesus without that. That starts by affirming that they were right to reject the traditional worship Christians have always engaged in. This is even done within the same denomination. The reformed, liturgical worship I grew up with is often mocked by modern reformed pastors. It is seen as a great evil. Something that caused a lot of young people to leave the faith.

But when you protest previous generations of Christians what are you protesting? What protestants would call the church. They would not think of this but what is their definition of the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church? They say it is the collection of all the saved both living and dead. How is that different from what they are attacking when they rail against those churches with empty ritual and judgmental sermons? Are they saying none of those people in those traditions were saved? They seem to come close to saying it. It just isn't sustainable. Those traditions represented almost all protestants up until around 1950. You start to think of names like CS Lewis and Corrie Ten Boom. Very few protestants would start to argue they were unsaved.

You can see what is happening. They are not protesting the Catholic church by itself. They are including a bunch of protestants that are lumped in with the Catholics. They are getting the same issues. All that is happening is the line between "good modern Christian" and "bad historical Christian" is being drawn differently. But they are still rejecting what scripture calls the Bride of Christ or the body of Christ or the family of God. They don't want to be identified with historical Christianity. They want to emphasize all the ways they are different. That they have somehow fixed this broken thing called Christianity.

Ultimately it is not an emphasis on Jesus but on the pastors. They try and emphasize Jesus. They really do. But you say previous generations were wrong and you are right. Was Jesus there in previous generations? Sure. So what has changed? What fixed this big problem? New human leadership. So Jesus without the hip new pastor is bad? How do you get away from that?

Feeling God

2012-01-10T15:44:00.002-07:00

I was reading about a Barna study about young people and church.

One category that was monitored was connecting with God, which the study described as the most important outcome to churches.
According to the study, 66 percent of churchgoers said they have had a personal connection with God during church service, while one-third of churchgoers never felt a connection God during church.
The report says that 44 percent of people who attend church weekly feel God's presence every week and 18 percent feel God on a monthly basis.

What struck me was the emphasis on feelings. What the churches described as important was "connecting with God." That is a great thing for a church to desire for it's members on Sunday morning. But then the responses from the members added that extra dimension. Feelings. Do I feel connection with God? That is a huge leap.

As a Catholic I go to mass to connect with God. Jesus is objectively present in the Eucharist. That means He is there whether I feel that connection or not. I want to feel His presence but reality is more important than my feelings. I need to believe on faith that the connection happened whether I feel it or not.

This is a huge distinction. If you approach Sunday mornings from a perspective of how can I manufacture a feeling of God then you are liable to go very far afield. What if you feel God more when you go fishing then when you go to church? Should you go fishing on Sunday morning? What if the church that makes you feel God's presence also teaches heresy? I had that issue as a protestant. I was Reformed in my theology but felt more inspired by Pentecostal services.

What I need is a way of worshiping God that does not depend on my feelings because they change like the wind. That is what the mass gives me. I was actually Catholic for a while before I realized I needed this. I was actually happy with my feeling-driven Sunday morning experience.

Then there is talk about "gained new spiritual insight" or it "affected their life greatly" or "they experienced transformation." You do expect these things from a church but you would also expect these things if you were "tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming" (Eph 4:14). If we continue to embrace the same faith more and more deeply then the change should be more organic. Like a tree grows over the years but you don't think of it as experiencing transformation. Your new insights might be new fashions rather than real growth.

Christians and Persecution

2012-01-09T09:10:00.000-07:00

Timothy Dalrymple discusses whether Christians have a persecution complex. It turns out to be about the "War on Christmas." That is something I have not noticed this year. What I have noticed is persecution of Christians around the world. Violently in many places in the world and more politically in the west but increasing at an alarming rate all over.

Tim's post does a good job of addressing the fact that Christians have not really claimed the Christmas issues were persecution but I wonder if we should have. It is becoming clearer and clearer that western society is drifting towards persecution of Christians. The Christmas issue has gone away mostly because other issues have cropped up that are worse. We are now talking about Christians being excluded from government programs unless they agree to support abortion. Christians being fired from their jobs for disagreeing with gay marriage. Christian adoption agencies being shut down for believing children need a mother and a father. These are not possibilities. These are things that have already happened.

The future is looking even worse. The government is setting a very dangerous precedent by making conscience exceptions much narrower than they have ever been. These are clauses in laws that mean government can't force religious institutions to act against their faith. So if a head of a Christian ministry is caught in a sex scandal he can be dismissed on religious grounds and the government can't force the ministry to rehire him because it meets their definition of an unfair dismissal. These protections have covered a lot of church and para-church organizations in the past. The plan seems to be to change that. It is right now focused on contraception and health insurance but the principle is broad. It has the potential to attack any pro-life or pro-marriage organization.

It is the tyranny of sentimentalism. All you have to do is imagine someone who will be hurt if you don't do that. The person does not need to exist. It is not like there were millions of people in agony from being wished Merry Christmas. You just act as if there are. How many gay couples were really hurt because they could not use a Catholic adoption agency? It does not matter if there are none. There are going to be some activists who will claim offense. You can't prove they are lying. So that is enough. Sentimentalism is not about others being hurt. It is about making us feel hurt vicariously. Reality does not matter. If we can imagine a gay couple would feel devastated and not just go to another agency then we are there. Sentimentalism is really self-centered. It is our feelings that matter. We only pretend to care about another person.

I wonder if God is not sending us persecution because we don't care enough for our persecuted brothers. Studies show that Christians are by far the most persecuted religion word-wide. But over 80% of Christians live in countries where Christianity is the majority religion. So we tend not to care about the 200 million or so Christians living under persecution. Christian countries have done little to protest these incidents. So maybe if God gives us persecution here we will start to care. So next time you see a story of some Christian person getting fired or some Christian organization losing funding because of their faith, pray for them, but also pray for the Christians dealing with violence in Egypt, India, Nigeria and many other places.

Saint and Lions

2012-01-06T13:45:00.001-07:00

Saints usually win. They win over kings and emperors. They win over philosophers and armies. They even win over popes. But there is an exception. Lions beat saints. St Ignatius is the most famous example but there were many saints who were fed to lions. I did find one, St Blandina, who was miraculously not eaten by the Lions but even then the Lions did not get eaten. St Blandina was still martyred. So it seems that when Saint and Lions meet that the Lions do pretty well.

For those of you who don't follow the NFL this is important because there the Detroit Lions plan the New Orleans Saints tomorrow.Go Lions!!!

Politics and Justice

2012-01-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

School of Athens by Raphael

I find US elections hard. I like politics. I just don't like watching Christians engage in politics. The accuse each other of all sorts of things. They also tend to twist their theology inside out to fit their politics. It is not pleasant to watch. But the election seems to dominate all the talk these days. It is hard to avoid.

I don't think we should avoid it. As Christians we should look to transform politics and make it more Christ-like. The opposite is more the rule. Politics transforms Christianity and makes it more political. What we are to work on as Christians needs to be bigger than one political race or even a political party. We should all read Pope Benedict's' address to the German parliament where he talks about how politics and religion should interact.

Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, as this is what opens up for him the possibility of effective political action. Yet success is subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of justice. “Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?”, as Saint Augustine once said . We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.

I could not really find a quote that does it justice. You kind of need to read the whole thing. But he did not talk about one party or one issue. He talked about what is the core motivation. First of all, it must be about justice rather than winning. But then he goes on to ask where your sense of justice comes from. How we need to merge our morality and our reason to get there? Can we bring Athens and Jerusalem together?

Then he did something that reminded me of a CS Lewis quote that can be found in something Mark Shea just linked.

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all values are rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.

What the pope sees is that if he can sell Germans on one value he will have sold them on the whole concept of morality. What value did he choose? Environmentalism. Something Germans have embraced big time. That is one way that people have seen "that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives." If we can see what is natural ought to be preserved ecologically then we have moved from "is" to "ought." That can lead to the same kind of "ought" in preserving what is natural socially. Like the sanctity of life and the integrity of marriage.

The point is that we need to think rationally about what ought to be. We should pick politicians that do that well. Sure you expect them to avoid certain wrong answers. But how do they avoid them? Do they make a political calculation? That is do they decide based on winning rather than justice? If so, then they are worse than those who decide based on a warped view of justice.

I must say the choices all look pretty poor when evaluated on this basis. I don't see any candidates that consistently make choices based on justice rather than winning. I guess that is because they don't win. Santorum seems to do so on social issues but not on issues of national security. There he seems to follow the polls. Paul seems interesting but I don't know enough about him. He seems a little unbalanced but I can't point out exactly why.

People elect the same old type of politician again and again but they always seem to want someone different. It is like we know these guys are not what we need but we don't demand better. Justice gets hard. Politicians mostly fold when anything gets hard. That is the problem with guys who are focused on winning. That is all they will accomplish is winning. But that problem is not just with the candidate. Many of the supporters have the "just win" mentality. They are not concerned with leaving behind a better society. At least not concerned enough to risk their political life for it. It is rare to find candidates like that. Santorum and Paul seem like the only guys out there who believe something strong enough to stick by it no matter the cost. Guys with that kind of courage can do great good or great harm. That is why we need to understand where they get their ideas about right and wrong.

Are Good People Boring?

2012-01-04T10:44:00.001-07:00

We got season 5 of the show House for Christmas. One plot line has Dr House finding out embarrassing details of the various character's lives by hiring a private detective. There is one character, Foreman, he can't find any dirt on. House dismisses him as boring. Then they have a follow-up conversation reenforcing that comment that this Foreman character, who is the only moral character on the show, is boring.

Now in thinking about this post I am reminded of some debates about World Cup Soccer. I have pointed out that if you have to argue something is not boring then you are already in a lot of trouble. So I don't want to go there. I do think we often find good people less superficially attractive. There are a bunch of reasons for it. One is because we like to sin vicariously. We don't want to do drugs but we like to hear about any excitement generated by them in someone else's life. We don't cheat on our spouse but we want all the details when someone else does. It is an affection for sin. It can rob us of our spiritual joy. That can make us boring people.

The other problem is we are scared to look too close at good people. Certainly fiction will dig endlessly into the depths of evil. We love Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet because of their tragic flaws. Hollywood has endless attempts to plumb the depths of drug addiction and sex addiction and whatever else. But what about what makes a good person tick? When you explore goodness humans feel pressured to respond. They feel like you are preaching at them. When you show the source of a character's goodness you issue an implicit demand that everyone pursue that source too. That is the nature of goodness. If we fail to pursue it we are failing as human beings.

I was at a hockey banquet last night. There were a couple of inspirational speakers there. I found they suffered from this as well. They had their lives changed by coming into contact with something good. But they refused to explore that good thing in any depth. Why not? Because when you do you are talking about religion. When you do that it demands a response. Often these stories are Christian stories with the God talk removed. Someone suffered terribly and through their faith in Jesus they were able to move from being an angry person to being a joyful person. People hear that and think it it is an incredible story of the human spirit. That the God stuff is just an aside. But it is not off to the side. It is the foundation. Why was this person OK with a life that was very different and in some ways much less than the one he had dreamed of? Because he believes God meant him to be what he is and not what he dreamed. Once he gets that the envy and anger can melt away he can be truly joyful. But if he believed it was just bad luck that took away his dreams then why should he not be angry at life and envious of those who get to live the life he dreamed of?

So how could the House writers make Foreman more interesting? Give him a compelling reason to be good. Don't just take away the sin and replace it with nothing. Certainly don't take away the difficulties in life. Good people have challenges. Most of the suffering on the show is self-inflicted so Foreman has none. That is not real. You still suffer. Your suffering just does good. Love does amazing good but it opens us up to suffering. It is not boring.

Thinking about it makes me wonder how much contraception has played a role here. Certainly contraception makes marriage boring. The protestant endorsement of contraception is really a big embrace of boredom. God wants to make you fruitful but you can be safe instead. You can have a sterile Christianity where you don't do anything good or bad. God wants our cup to run over and we just want to turn it off. Half full is fine ... and water please because wine is to dangerous!

A Pope Benedict Quote

2012-01-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

From Pope Benedict's book Jesus of Nazareth II (p241-2):

The Christian faith stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead.

If this were taken away it would still be possible to piece together from Christian tradition a series of interesting ideas about God and men, about man's being and his obligations, a kind of religious world view; but the Christian faith itself would be dead. Jesus would be a failed religious leader who despite his failure remains great and can cause us to reflect. But he would then remain purely human, and his authority would extend only so far as his message is of interest to us. He would not longer be a criterion; the only criterion left would be our own judgement in selecting from his heritage what strikes us as helpful. In other words we would be alone. Our own judgement would be the highest instance.

This is written about the resurrection. It strikes me how similar it is to the problem with Sola Scriptura. That the resurrection makes Jesus the ultimate criterion. He is the one true mediator between man and God. But the moment that mediator leaves this earth we have the same problem again. We are left with merely human authority that is only going to extend as far as it interests us. Unless we aren't. Unless there is an authority on earth that is more than human.

This is the insidious thing. Protestants claim their authority gets the important things right. So what is the big deal? The problem is that reduces Christianity to something human. You and the thinkers that interest you decide what is important and what are the right answers on those issues. That is the end of the public part of Christianity. The private part of Christianity is still there where we pray and reflect and try and follow Christ. But "what strikes us as helpful" is even more central in our private discernment than it is in our public confession. For me and many protestants I knew that sense is assumed to be God's voice. It can be God's voice. It can also be our own pious imagination. How do we know? We don't. Not unless we have some discernment that we trust more than out own.

Mary is a good example of something that does not interest protestants. There is an assumption that because I don't have a desire to meditate on her role in salvation that it must be unimportant. We read the bible, we pray, we just don't feel led to think about Mary. Is that God telling us she does not matter? Not at all. It is your human tradition becoming an echo chamber and drowning out God. Unless there is an authority that can demand we go beyond what interests us then there is no way out. Then Jesus is not really alive to you. You are still in an entirely human situation.

It sounds harsh. If you reason in good faith and try to follow God why should that not work? But that is why we needed Jesus. People reasoning in good faith was not adequate. He came to give us something better. A new covenant. But we also need a new covenant community. We need to encounter the true Jesus and not just ideas about Him. Even very pious and sincere ideas are not good enough. We need the way, the truth, and the life. Not just from one of the many who claim to have Jesus figured out. From the mystical body of Christ itself.

This is what Bryan Cross was saying with his now-famous Ecclesial Deism article. That Sola Scriptura turns Jesus into "a failed religious leader." Still a very interesting figure but not a criterion. At least not a knowable criterion. No matter how many good things grow from that foundation they are ultimately human things. For we are alone with our judgement. God is not with us.

Evangelicals and Sex

2011-12-22T14:11:00.002-07:00

I have read a few articles about the high rate of sexual activity among Evangelical singles. I hesitate to post on it because it seems like someone else's dirty laundry. It is not like the studies show Catholics are chaste. But I think it is a serious trend and I think it will have seriously bad consequences for Christianity in the US and to a lesser extent in Canada. The other reason is I think Catholicism offers some real hope. There is a new reality with the modern availability of pornography and contraception. But where sin increases, grace increases all the more (Rom 5:20). The trouble is we need to cooperate with that grace. I believe that that grace is flowing primarily though the Catholic church. So we need to speak the truth in love.

What is happening is that evangelical churches are focusing a lot of their chastity teaching on teens. This is very popular. Parents love it. The teens are leery of jumping into sexual activity so they are happy to get good arguments for chastity. Many teens do remain pure. This is good.

When you look at the next age group the story changes a lot. Evangelicals aged 18-29. They tend to wait for marriage just as much as secular people do. Most of them don't wait with sex as well. Their parents are less of a factor. They question the church they have been raised in. The culture continues to wear at them with the constant assumption that everyone their age is sexually active. At the end of the day the rate of sexual activity among single, evangelical, young adults is about 80%. For non-evangelicals it is about 88%. So the gap that is large among teens becomes a lot smaller when those teens move to adulthood.

So what is going wrong? The first issue is contraception. When marriage is not about children then young adults don't see much difference between the serious relationships they have and what a married couple has. We are not married but we are in love so what is the big deal? If marriage is about procreation that question answers itself. You are not ready for children so you are not ready for sex. Or it is time to reorder your lives so you are ready for children. When the contraceptive mentality permeates their thinking then it is hard to see the sense behind a requirement to marry before having sex.

Related to this is the effect of Sola Scriptura on sexual morality. What verse tells you that premarital sex is wrong? What about one that shows pornography is wrong? Then you get into the more perverse questions and the proof texts just are not there. Where are the boundaries? Where do I go to get a definitive answer? What about all the people arguing from the bible that this and that is OK? There simply is no coherent sexual morality in the protestant world. You have to bring in tradition. You have to bring in the sacramental nature of marriage and sex. Some do it by the back door and don't admit it. The arguments just don't hold up under scrutiny.

Then you have Sola Fide. From one of the articles:

Brittany, a 24-year-old veterinary technician, is an example of the newly disaffected. In high school, she attended a conservative Episcopal church in northern Virginia. She enrolled in college thinking of herself as a conservative and not wanting to have sex until she was married. Her views changed when she met her boyfriend. She began to question the theology of her home church on a number of social issues."I know I'm a Christian and believe in God, but the church hasn't helped me in my struggles," she says. "It really doesn't affect anything in life right now."
The result? "I don't go to any church."

She knows she is a Christian. Why? Sola Fide tells her she does not need to go to church and does not need to live a chaste life. There is no such thing as mortal sin, right? How can anyone tell her that her faith is inadequate without bringing works into it? Church is not needed. It is something that might help with your struggles and if it does not then don't go. Sacraments? Obedience? I believe in God so what is your issue?

Then there is the theology of the body. A great grace God have given through the church in at an time of need. It gives us a sexual ethic that is not only coherent but beautiful. Rules no longer seem arbitrary. They are there because the dignity of the human person and the nature of sex demands they be there. You would not want to change either of those things. It shows how we can't improve our sex lives by making some exceptions for ourselves. Trying to remove the sacrifice ends up removing the love.

Then there is the lack of celibate witness, that is priests and religious. Having people around who have sacrificed sex for a greater good. They blow all the cultural thinking out of the water. Who says you can't resist sexual temptation? Who says you can't be fulfilled unless you are in a relationship? It is one thing to teach that sexual pleasure is way less important than fellowship with God. It is another to live it.

Then there is the heavy artillery. When we deal with serious temptations we need serious weapons. Eucharist, confession, penance, fasting, the intercession of Mary and the Saints, adoration, relics, the rosary, etc. Most of these protestants don't have. They say they don't need any of those things because they have Jesus. But when you need extra grace to fight some serious battles with lust these gifts can make all the difference.

The short answer is the evangelical house is built on sand. The storm of the sexual revolution is hitting it hard and it looks like it is going to fall. The answer is to build your house on the rock. The Catholic church can weather this storm but only if the members actually live the faith. Too many are living like protestants or living like atheists. The atheists will wait a lot longer before they admit their system has failed. Evangelicals will see the decline in sexual morals and know there is something very wrong. Will they accept a solution so radical as becoming Catholic? That remains to be seen.

Real Christianity

2011-12-21T15:58:00.001-07:00

Most people are confused about Christianity. Both people who think they are Christians and those that don't can be profoundly confused about what are they accepting or rejecting. Is it about going to heaven and avoiding hell? Is it about being a good person? Is it about knowing why we are here? There are so many reasons why Christianity is accepted or rejected that only touch on a small fraction of what it is about. This is why Christmas matters. It brings us back to the beginning. God became man. The Logos became flesh. The light entered the darkness. So much talk about religion is so small compared to such a huge truth. The Being that holds the universe in existence entered the womb of a woman. Understanding Jesus as someone who wants you to be nice or wants to take you to heaven is such a small shadow of that.

This is why so many describe Christianity as wishful thinking. For many Christians it is. They imagine the God they want. Nothing more. But real Christianity is not wishful thinking. We could not possibly wish for something we cannot even comprehend. It is too big an idea to be made up. Truth is stranger than fiction. Christianity only ceases to amaze us when we water it down. When we reduce the faith to family values or social action or the sinners prayer or whatever. Christianity is about meeting God.

This is why the early church was much more focused on who Jesus is than it was on what Jesus taught. Look at the creeds. God from God. Light from Light. True God from True God. Consubstantial with the Father. It does not talk about loving your enemies or helping the poor. They are not unimportant but they are not central. The central matter is exactly who it is that came to the world on Christmas morning.

Modern scientific humanism can be quite open to Christianity. They are OK with saying Jesus is someone who advanced human moral thinking. They are OK with saying Christianity is one of the great positive influences in history. But to say Jesus is God is quite another matter. If Jesus is God then He is not just one of the great goods this world has to offer. If He is God then He is the Good by which all other goods are measured. Modern man wants to decide for himself what he will call good. Like pagans who were always willing to make room for another god in their worship. But the one God that demanded to be in the ultimate place of worship was too much. Modern man is like that. We will give Jesus faint praise along with everyone else's favorite good. But putting Him over everything is too much.

Christians are not that much better. We confess Jesus is God but often we don't really deal with the fullness of what that means. We don't enter into a love relationship with Him. We can fall into using God for our own ends. It is wrong to use people as a means rather than as an end. It is more wrong to use God that way. This is why getting theology right is important but only the beginning. We need to get liturgy right. We need to get prayer right. We need a whole spirituality that is focused on loving the true eternal God as opposed to our pious imagination of what He might be like. That is why I see the church as such a gift. It gives us a fighting chance at getting this right.

Understanding the World

2011-12-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

I stole this image from Marc Barnes' blog. I wanted to go a different direction with it than he does. Dawkins is unintentionally insightful here. He describes well what he wants and what we all want in a world and life view. What he has that many religious people he knows seem to be missing. The trouble is he assumes that his hunger to understand the world comes from his atheist creed and other people's perceived satisfaction with a lack of understanding comes from their religious creed. Quite the opposite is the case. Why does an atheist want to understand the world? I would suggest that the reason does not flow from atheism. It is borrowed from Christianity. You know why Christians want to understand the world. Understanding creation means understanding the creator. That brings us into fellowship with God which is the ultimate goal of man.

But why does an atheist want to understand the world? If he dies with a head full of knowledge he still dies. Why put in the effort? Isn't power or pleasure more important than knowledge? If you can shout down your opponents then why does it matter if they have a true understanding of the world and you don't? Dawkins does not see himself this way. He thinks he has the truth. Many have said he does a lot more shouting than he does reasoning. But he does value reasoning and likes to think of himself as a pursuing actual truth. But why do that?

Think of Martin Luther. He opposed the pope as a way of pursuing truth. He believed he had the real truth about God and the church was teaching error. Then Henry VIII embraced Luther's rebellion against the pope but he didn't care so much about truth. He likely convinced himself he was right but it was basically a power grab. He convinced the English bishops to support him by executing St Thomas More and St John Fischer. He didn't need to make a theological argument. Why should the next atheist that comes along care about science? Why not just use force to shut up the scientists? There is nothing in atheism that makes that inconsistent.

Even more simply, an atheist could just decide science is hard work. He might have the ability to be a good scientist or engineer or doctor or whatever. Why put in the time? Why not pursue wine, woman, and song instead? If we are not going to be held accountable for our choices then what is the upside to all that learning? You could impress more people by learning trivia. There are easier ways to make money. Why shouldn't I be satisfied with not understanding the world to the degree I could?

Then there is the deeper question of whether there is even an actual truth to be understood. Dawkins thinks there is. He would accept that either God exists or He does not. That one should use reason to discern which of those possibilities is actually true. Many people disagree with that. They would say objective truth either does not exists or is unknowable. To me that seems like being satisfied with not understanding the world. If you say truth exists and is knowable, which religious people do, then you will try and separate truths from falsehoods.

The issue Dawkins has is the Christian does not limit his reason and his data to science. He looks at divine revelation. He looks at philosophy and art. He tries to put it all together into one big worldview. Now that is a very different way of thinking of the world. It is hard to see why he would interpret that as being OK with not understanding the world. He might be referring to some Christians denying evolution. Not sure what other example he could give. Generally religious people do not deny scientific truth.

Science and Religion

2011-12-15T16:28:00.001-07:00

The English seem to be ahead of the Americans in matters of science and religion. That does not mean they know more. It means they know less. Society has been moving in the direction of forgetting truth it once understood. This comes from a series called Heathen's Progress by Julian Baggini. It does not mean "progress" in the sense of learning and developing deeper understandings. Here it means progressively asking more questions and admitting fewer answers.

One of the most tedious recurring questions in the public debate about faith has been "is religion compatible with science?" Why won't it just go away?
I'm convinced that one reason is that the standard affirmative answer is sophisticated enough to persuade those willing to be persuaded, but fishy enough for those less sure to keep sniffing away at it. That defense is that religion and science are compatible because they are not talking about the same things. Religion does not make empirical claims about how the universe works, and to treat it as though it did is to make a category mistake of the worst kind. So we should just leave science and religion to get on with their different jobs free from mutual molestation.

Why it won't go away is because you have the wrong answer. Religion is more concerned with spiritual matters but it can say things about the physical world. Christianity has the doctrine of the incarnation. It has the doctrine of creation. Certainly the bible has many stories which have archeological evidence that seems to be related.

So religion and science are answering different questions but it is not like they will never run into each other. They will. The assumption is that they will always contradict. They won't. There is one truth out there. We want to know it as well as we can. Science can only address the physical world but religion can address both the physical and the spiritual. If they contradict then your science or your religion is wrong. You can't finesse the law of non-contradiction by labeling some truths scientific and some truths religious.

Critically, however, scientific "why" questions do not imply any agency – deliberate action – and hence no intention. We can ask why the dinosaurs died out, why smoking causes cancer and so on without implying any intentions. In the theistic context, however, "why" is usually what I call "agency-why": it's an explanation involving causation with intention.

I don't like his term "agency" because science is interested in certain kinds of agents. If the dinosaurs does out because a meteor hit the earth then that meteor is the agent of their demise. That is still in the realm of science. I would prefer he say "teleological" because that is what he means.

He does not touch on the most common error. That is the assumption that the silence of science on teleological questions means they are unimportant or they do not exist. Most of the time when people assert that science and religion are not compatible they are confused about that. They note that science has determined the proximate cause of many things and even those things who's proximate cause we don't know we have good reason to believe that science will figure that out as well. Then they make the leap that somehow religion and even philosophy is not needed. I guess since this guy is a philosopher he does not want to go there. Still I think society's silence on teleological questions has caused the most confusion on the relationship between religion and science. It is ironic that Biggini, as a philosopher, is silent about these questions as well.

Consider, for example, anthropic fine-tuning, which the religious physicist, Paul Davies, calls "The Goldilocks Enigma": the conditions in the universe are just right for life to have evolved, and had a few things been just slightly different at the Big Bang, none of us would be here. At the moment, there is no generally accepted scientific explanation for why or how this is so. Taking off his physicist's coat and donning his theologian's hat, Polkinghorne answers the "why" question by saying that the life-enabling laws of physics are "graciously provided by the creator". Not only does this introduce agency-why where we'd normally just look for scientific-why, it is also a claim about how the universe came to be this way, namely, by divine fiat. It trespasses onto the "how" territory of science, but since it cannot explain the mechanism by which God intervened, nor test the hypothesis that he did so, it is no substitute for a proper scientific answer.

This is an interesting theory. It is really a "God of the gaps" argument. It points out a pretty huge gap in science. Can that gap be filled? It is hard to imagine but not impossible. It is somehow easier for us to see the fingerprints of God on something we don't understand scientifically. To the extent that is true then noting the huge number of things in the universe that seem to have been put in place so we could exist will tend to strengthen our faith. But he is not suggesting that this is instead of trying to answer the why question in a scientific way. All the phenomenon he describes are still the subject scientific research and I don't think Davies is calling for that to stop. He is just noting that the universe not only looks big and beautiful but it also look's like it is ordered towards life. How precisely it was ordered towards life is still an interesting question we should try and answer. But it right now it might also give us an important clue as to the ultimate cause of why the universe exists. It has something to do with life.

The comment about divine fiat is instructive. It comes from Genesis 1. God spoke things into being. But that is not an anti-science speaking. God is a God of power but also a God of order. One does not cancel out the other. If they did then the conflict between science and religion would make sense. To say God brings rain on the righteous and the unrighteous would be to deny that rain is scientifically explainable. But we don't deny it. We hold that both explanations are valid and true.

The religious believer could bite the bullet, accept that religion does make some empirical claims, and then defend their compatibility with science one by one. But the fact that two beliefs are compatible with each other is the most minimal test of their reasonableness imaginable. All sorts of outlandish beliefs – that the Apollo moon landings never happened, for instance – are compatible with science, but that hardly makes them credible. What really counts, what should really make the difference between assent and rejection of an empirical claim, is not whether it is compatible with science, but whether an evidence-led, rational examination of a view supports it better than competing alternatives.
So the fact that science is compatible with religion turns out to be a comforting red herring.

This is absolutely true. He is implying that religion is irrational and therefore should be rejected. I don't agree with his premise and he does not try and defend it. I do agree that is it were true that religion is irrational then it should not be believed. In today's world you can just state that religion is irrational and people will accept it. That is because secular people are ignorant not because religious people are irrational. Religion is very rational. It takes the data from prophets or whatever and scrutinizes it. It determines what is believable and tries to put it into some system of theology. This is really the only kind of religion I have been exposed to so when people just assume all religions are irrational I wonder how much they get out.

The less comfortable wet fish slapped around the face is that how easily science and religion can rub on together depends very much on what kind of religion we're talking about. If it is a kind that seeks to explain the hows of the universe, or ends up doing so by stealth, then it is competing with science. In such contests science always wins, hands down, and the only way out is to claim a priority for faith over evidence, or the Bible over the lab. If it is of a kind that doesn't attempt to explain the hows of the universe, then it has to be very careful not to make any claims that end up doing just that. Only then can the science v religion debate move on, free from the illusion that it rests on one question with one answer.

This explains a lot. Religions can be grouped loosely into two categories. Fundamentalists and liberals. Either doctrine trumps secular reasoning or doctrine changes to accommodate secular reasoning. The trouble is Catholicism does not fit into either category. It is always open to new ideas but it can firmly reject new ideas as well. The answer is not a firm and unthinking No like the fundamentalists give. It is also not an initial No that inevitably changes to a Yes like the liberals give. It is an open mind that will eventually close on either a No or a Yes. It does not compete with science. It accepts scientific results for what they are. Then it determines the doctrinal implications.

That kind of religion seems foreign to him. The kind that can accept evolution and reject contraception. That cannot be fit into the simple categories he offers. That takes both faith and reason very seriously.That does not pit progress against tradition. In other words he has not considered the Catholic faith very well when he wrote off religion.

Albert Molher and the Virgin Birth

2011-12-15T10:07:00.003-07:00

Albert Molher has an article on the Virgin Birth. He defends it. This is a good thing because the doctrine is true. But he goes further. He says one must beleive it to be a Christian.

Now, even some revisionist evangelicals claim that belief in the Virgin Birth is unnecessary. The meaning of the miracle is enduring, they argue, but the historical truth of the doctrine is not really important.
Must one believe in the Virgin Birth to be a Christian? This is not a hard question to answer. It is conceivable that someone might come to Christ and trust Christ as Savior without yet learning that the Bible teaches that Jesus was born of a virgin. A new believer is not yet aware of the full structure of Christian truth. The real question is this: Can a Christian, once aware of the Bible’s teaching, reject the Virgin Birth? The answer must be no.

The problem is that Albert Molher does not have the authority to define who is Christian and who is to. He is responding to Nicholas Kristof writing in the New York Times who says the very opposite. Some people think he has a lot of authority as well. In the protestant world everyone has authority and if everyone does then nobody does.

The doctrine is sometimes called the Priesthood of All Believers. Really it amounts to the Papacy of All Believers. Everyone has the authority to define the Christian faith for themselves. But the bible says in Ephesians 4:5 that Christians all have one faith. How can we have one faith unless we have some way of defining that faith that we share? We can't. Molher sees this. He says:

What are we to do with the Virgin Birth? The doctrine was among the first to be questioned and then rejected after the rise of historical criticism and the undermining of biblical authority that inevitably followed.

So the question is bigger than the Virgin Birth. If Christianity cannot say definitively that this doctrine is part of the faith then the same can be true of any other doctrine. Molher gets that. But he cannot offer any more than his own opinion against the opinion of Kristof. They both make arguments. How can anyone be sure who is right? How can we say the Christian position is Mohler's position and not Kristof's?

Mohler does his best to appeal to tradition. He identifies Kristof with liberal theology and secularism. This is code for Evangelicals. He is basically saying these guys are not part of the Evangelical magisterium and I am so listen to me. An indirect appeal to authority. It is indirect because Molher does not believe in appeals to authority. As a protestant he rejects the doctrine. But without it Christianity is unworkable. So they kick it out the front door and slip it into the back door. They try to have it both ways. All Christians are equal but some are more equal then others.

Moral Pills

2011-12-13T15:44:00.000-07:00

I was reading some thoughts about a morality pill. I guess in a culture that has a pill for every ill why not take one for immorality? But immorality is not like a disease. It is a lack of virtue. The 4 cardinal virtues are justice, wisdom, courage, and self control. Can a pill give you those? Then you have the 3 theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. They can only be a gift of God. So good luck putting that in a pill.

The trouble is people think about morality as a series of "thou shalt not" commands. Those are important. They are like land mines. We need to know where they are because they can hurt us. But the goal of a soldier is not just to avoid land mines. His goal is to win the battle. That means initiating action and not just avoiding something. Morality is like that. We need to be initiators. They say the greatest sins we commit are the sins of omission. The pill model completely breaks down on those.

In fact, a pill gives you what atheists claim is wrong with religion. That is it turns you into a unthinking robot that just does whatever he is told. That is not my experience of religion but you hear that a lot. Atheists call themselves free thinkers. So why take a pill to control your thoughts? What we need is access to the goodness that is higher than us but still complete freedom to choose good. We don't want good forced upon us. That would be beneath our dignity as human persons. This is precisely what Jesus gives you. He gives you the grace to do good and avoid evil but leaves your mind free and your actions free. You have to choose it every day. Either the road that leads to the cross and to the resurrection and to glory or the wide road that pursues the pleasures of the flesh and leads to destruction. But we have to choose. No pills. Just the truth of the gospel to help you decide.

The other assumption I felt coming from this analysis was that morality is something you want for others but not really for yourself. You are willing to be moral because if you were not then others would not be moral back. So it is a back scratching thing. Again, that is not what Christian morality is about. If it is then Jesus did it wrong. He ended up crucified. He did good not because He could benefit from some societal goodness He had contributed to. He did good because goodness is an end in itself. God is the ground of all goodness so to pursue good is to pursue God.

Ultimate goodness is relationship with God. Again, not something you find in a pill. The Eucharist might be thought of as such a pill but even that does not fit. Jesus is present in the Eucharist but we are still free. We need to partake while free from mortal sin. We need to cooperate with that grace every step of the way.

That is the problem for everyone trying offer humanity some form of salvation. How do you preserve free choice? Communism is a good example. Their planned society could tackle any question except the question of whether or not a planned society was a good idea. It had to impose itself on people in order to work. But people resist. No matter how good an idea it seems to be there will be some who don't like it. The pill would have this issue. What do you do with the anti-pill people? Do you force them?

The Contraception Error

2011-12-08T08:38:00.001-07:00

Did Christians give away marriage? That is the provocative title of a column by Anthony Bradley. He actually dares raise the contraception issue. He does it by quoting others rather than owning the notion that breaking the link between sex and children has basically conceded the central point of the debate over marriage. It is a hard truth to contemplate. That evangelical Christianity made a bad call when it accepted contraception. That led to increases in divorce and premarital sex. That leads to "the reduction of marriage to a mere contract between consenting adults has stripped marriage of its sanctity and its family-forming utility."

Why is this such a hard truth to contemplate? If it is a mistake it is a huge mistake. How much spiritual damage has been caused by the sexual revolution? Christians were fighting it but were they fighting it with the fullness of truth? If they were not teaching God's plan and living God's plan for marriage and sex then Christians have to look at themselves as being responsible for the excesses of the sexual revolution.They were poor witness to the world.

A mistake that large and that damaging to society has to make you look at how you made that mistake. Protestant leaders got caught up in the culture of the day and embraced what they thought would be a morally permissible technological advance. There was debate for a while but they pretty much all ended up in the same spot. That does not happen often to protestants but it did this time. But why? Why did everyone abandon a moral teaching with so much Christian tradition behind it? Basically there were 3 reasons:

Christians wanted it. The idea of having more sex and less self control within marriage appealed to Christians as much as it did to anyone else.
The biblical data was not all that clear. You have the sin of Onan and a few words from Paul that might be referring to contraceptives but there is no strong proof-text.
New technology. People were able to convince themselves that the moral questions around birth control were somehow different in modern times then they had been for the rest of Christian history when every Christian tradition condemned it.

Of the 3 main reasons I would say #1 was most important. If you think about abortion, which many protestants continue to say is immoral, it is easy to see that #2 and #3 apply to the issue of abortion. Just read what liberal theologians say on the subject. But most Christians gain no personal benefit from abortion. The leaders who make the doctrinal decisions are almost all married men. They are faithful to their wives. So #1 does not apply for abortion.

So what does this say? That protestants can make huge errors that are not from willful disobedience but from more subtle causes. Causes so subtle that almost nobody in any of the major protestants traditions pointed out the error for decades. Even now, with the consequences moving from bad to catastrophic there are only a few protestants willing to even talk about contraception as something that might need to be re-examined.

What it means is we have a system failure. Everybody followed Sola Scriptura in good faith. Yet we didn't end up in controversy and stalemate like we normally do. We ended up in false teaching. So even when Sola Scriptura does give you a definitive answer it can be definitively wrong. So the stakes are high. Saying contraception is immoral makes it very hard to stay with bible-only Christianity.

The good news is that God is real. Even when Christians have embraced false teaching and society has seriously come off the rails as a result God is still there and He can still fix it. How? What church has not broken from the historical Christian teaching on contraception? That is a hint. More than 95% of Catholic couples have not lived the teaching. So what? That just makes it all the more amazing that the teaching has remained firm.

It is the opposite of what happened in the protestant world. In the Catholic church you did not have people doing everything right. They don't read scripture. They don't seem to live their faith. Most of them anyway. So how did they get it right? Their system works. Even when there are many bad Catholics. Bad Catholics succeed where good protestants fail. How does that make sense? It is called grace. It is not about our goodness but God's goodness to us.

William Lane Craig and God-Commanded Violence

2011-12-07T14:16:00.001-07:00

William Lane Craig had a debate with Christopher Hitchens that seems to have scared the bejebeers out of atheists. Edward Feser has a funny post on Dawkins ducking any Craig debate. This is all good. But one of the issues atheist have raised as an excuse to not debate Craig is his refusal to exclude the possibility that God might command some Christian or group of Christians to commit mass murder at some point in the future.

At issue is a few of the atheist's favorite passages where God commands Israel to go to war and to kill every man, woman, and child of the enemy people group. Christians don't really focus on these passages much. Mostly they are used to underscore how the new covenant is superior to the old. But as a bible-only Christian Craig has to defend the entire bible as understandable without an authoritative interpreter. These passages make that hard. You can find good explanations for why you don't expect God to give orders for you to exterminate some group of people but can you completely exclude something from happening when there is a biblical precedent? Craig says No. He says Christians should obey a direct command of God even if it involves what would otherwise be gravely immoral.

For atheists this puts Craig in the same category as Muslim terrorists. In some sense they are right. Holding that God can command immoral acts is one of the big problems with Islam. It makes God irrational. It means anyone can claim that God is on their side. There are still important differences. Mohammad was way more violent than Jesus. The Koran is way easier to interpret as a call to violence than the bible is. Muslim history has way more religious violence than Christian history. So we should not accept the notion that Craig has put the two religions in the same category as far as violence goes. But leaving the door open to God giving such a command today is a problem.

It underscores how protestants cannot really believe in development of doctrine. They sneak it in and that is a good thing because it is true. But if you believe that the bible is it then as long as the bible does not change you cannot expect any deeper or fuller revelation of God's word. You have to argue from scripture and plain reason. Any exegetical principle you want to make normative would be an addition to scripture and is not allowed. Remember you are dealing with difficult opponents who will call you on any inconsistencies. So I am not surprised Craig has gone where he has gone.

It is so sad because Christian tradition has gone in completely the other direction. Pope Benedict has recently spoken out against religious violence and atheistic violence. That has been the way the Holy Spirit has been leading the faith for many centuries now. If Craig didn't have his bible-only dogma he could point out lots of authoritative statements that would make this scenario impossible. He could go on the offensive and point out the atheist history of violence as Pope Benedict did. But Sola Scriptura puts him in a theological straight jacket.

False Morality

2011-12-06T11:53:00.001-07:00

Humans are wired to strive for good. We can get confused about what is good. We can strive for lesser goods like physical pleasure or money. But we can't just not feel any moral impulses at all. So when atheists try to tell us there is no God they don't tell us there is no right and wrong. What they tell us is religion is evil and they are good. Modern man has the desire to be free from moral constraints but he also has a burning desire to do good and fight evil. Mark Shea linked 2 articles that talk about this. One is a reflection on Pope Benedict

Moral obligation is not man’s prison, from which he must liberate himself in order finally be able to do what he wants. It is moral obligation that constitutes his dignity, and he does not become more free if he discards it: on the contrary, he takes a step backward, to the level of a machine, of a mere thing.
A Turning Point for Europe?, 36

He suggests that if we rebel against a high moral calling we don't get freedom. We just get a lower morality that will be just as difficult and give us less dignity. What could be worse is that running away from true morality can lead us to false morality. So the good we fight for might not be just too small but it might actually be evil. Fr Denis talks about how one common lesser good is consequentialism. That is rejecting the revelation of God about what is good and simply trying to figure out which actions will have good consequences. The trouble is our assessment is limited by how well we understand human dignity and how well we can predict future consequences. So the moral argument is simply, "I don't see what is so wrong with it." But the fact that you don't see means you need moral guidance. Consequentialism says not seeing means you can ignore moral concerns.

The other article Mark links is by Mike Flynn on hypocrisy. It is another way to run from morality and replace it with moral outrage.The trick here is to assume everyone who says they are trying to do good is a hypocrite. Then you can do evil and claim to be better than everyone else because you admit you are doing evil. Now this works better if there is some doubt whether the act in question is actually gravely evil. You can trade on that. We know hypocrisy is wrong so you can trade moral certainty for moral gravity.

Is it better to admit you indulge in porn rather than do it secretly? It depends what you mean. If you mean is it better to confess your failings, they it is true. But if you mean it is better to act like indulging in porn is not morally wrong, then it is false. It is better to try and stay pure and fail than it is to fail without even making an effort. So you have people self-righteously claiming, "My porn might be wrong but at least I am honest about it." That is not better. They say hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. To feel contrition enough to want to keep your actions secret is better than to proudly and publicly act. The best is to be honest and contrite but we should not be fooled into thinking honesty with no contrition is a step in the right direction.

Again, the reason this works is people see pornography as a minor sin. They see the lying as a bigger issue. It isn't. Pornography is gravely immoral. It is also a choice. Modern society sees it as inevitable. The idea that nobody is pure. Everyone does it. It is just a matter of who admits it. Nonsense. People can be holy. That is the goal. If we switch the goal for just being honest about our vices then we have lowered ourselves.

The really honest sinners not only admit they sin but admit they are powerless over sin. Like step 1 of the 12-step program. Saying you need help rather than saying you commit this sin and everyone should just accept that.That is real honesty. The happy drunk or the happy fornicator or whatever is really not that honest. At some level they know they are doing evil and they are not at peace with themselves.

This is why many of Mike Flynn's examples come from fiction. Fictional characters can flaunt moral standards without the slightest crisis of conscience. Real people have trouble with that. Fiction also allows all the moral characters to be confirmed hypocrites. We imagine a world devoid of saints so our hero becomes the one-eyed man in the world of blind men. But in the real world it is possible, with God's grace, to be good. When you encounter someone who shows you virtue then you just can't be happy with your vice.

As Silly As Superman

2011-12-01T16:18:00.001-07:00

Alvin Plantinga was once the most celebrated professor at my alma mater, Calvin College. He didn't become Catholic but he did move to the somewhat Catholic University of Notre Dame. Anyway, he wrote an article about a debate he had with Daniel Dennett on Science and Religion. He makes a bunch of interesting points but I just want to react to one point Dr Dennett made.

Dennett agreed with my first claim: that in fact there is no conflict between evolution and theistic belief. He went on to say, however, that many very silly claims are compatible with science-for example, Supermanism, according to which that redoubtable comic book character is real. (But the way Superman flies around without the benefit of wings or aircraft? The way he can leap over tall buildings in a single bound? Is that really compatible with current science?)

My first reaction is that calling something silly does not really belong in a philosophy forum. Silly things can be true. I can say atheism is silly. It does not prove anything. What I think he means to say is that we need evidence to believe in superman. If he existed, at least on this planet, we would expect to have some significant, documented, physical evidence. Since we don't have that we can say there is no reason to believe he exists. If he didn't exist we would not expect the world to be any different than it is now. So it is more rational to believe he does not exist.

So can't you make the same argument about God? Not at all. God is not an entity existing within the physical world. St Thomas Aquinas thinks of God as the essence of being itself. Like Merton said in Seven Story Mountain:

And the one big concept which I got out of its pages was something that was to revolutionize my whole life.” That concept was aseitas, a word “which can be applied to God alone, and which expresses His most characteristic attribute…” Merton learned from Gilson that God does not require any justification for existence, for his very nature is existence... Merton realized that God is not one being among many, but ipsum esse subsistens—the sheer act of being itself. He had never imagined that people could speak of God in such an intellectually satisfying way, but Gilson showed him otherwise.

So God is fundamentally different from superman so the evidence we would expect to find is going to be very different. If you can imagine Hamlet trying to prove Shakespeare existed. The fact that he searched his castle and didn't find him would not prove that he didn't exist. He isn't in the play. He is the author. Hamlet could reason that because he is a character in a play there must be an author. We can do that. We can reason that way about God. That is not called science. It is called metaphysics. Science isn't going to find Him. To expect science to find God like we would expect it to find superman is just to misunderstand what Christians believe about God.

The other side of it is the incarnation. God would not be findable with our senses and analyzing the physical world except for Christmas. God became man. So He is one being among the many beings in this world. So He does give science a fighting chance. In fact, there are enough miracles that any scientist that wants to can find some very strong evidence for a miracle. That is not evidence we would expect to find if God existed. It only evidence we would find if God existed and wanted to be found. If He wanted to intervene in human history and have a relationship with us.

Does this evidence prove God exists? No. The existence of Jesus and the existence of miracles does not preclude any other explanations. Often we can conclude that with our existing understanding of the world we cannot find another explanation. That does not mean there isn't one. God always seems to leave that door open at least a crack.

That is really at the heart of Dennett's objection. God could give us evidence that is massive and undeniable. What he is saying is that the expected evidence is not the same as it would be for superman but it should be larger not smaller. Why does God not make his existence physically obvious? That is a fair question. God asks us to walk by faith and not by sight. Why does He do that? He asks us to accept Him without the kind of scientific evidence we want. That is a hard thing to do.

Still this should not be confused with a logical objection. It is not impossible that God exists and always makes belief and unbelief logically plausible options. Just like it is not impossible that God exists and asks us to live through extreme suffering. It is a hard reality to accept but it is not something we can exclude based on evidence and reason.

In fact, the evidence is quite strong that man cannot settle in either camp. One of the big arguments against theism is that people have such a strong tendency to doubt God's existence. But the same is true for atheism. People don't settle there either. Many have tried. Certainly in our day many have tried. But for most if not all the transcendent has a way of creeping back in over and over. You would think a God who does not exist would leave people alone. So if you don't want to walk by faith you are just out of luck. Whether you believe in God or not it is going to take faith.

From Christ To Christianity

2011-11-30T12:33:00.001-07:00

Just reading a story about Frank Turek and a talk he gave at Saddleback Church on the historicity of the resurrection. He makes some good points. Essentially arguing that the gospels do not make sense as a made up story. Just one example:

“They make no effort to give Jesus a proper burial. Who buried Jesus? Joseph of Arimethea. Who is Joseph? He is a member of the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin actually sent Jesus to die.”
“So, they are saying they ran away and had Joseph bury Jesus in a Jewish tomb.” Turek then asked, “Now, why would they make that up? They look bad, he looks good, they put him in a Jewish tomb. That’s the last place they would put him in if they were making up this story.”

There are many arguments along this line and they make sense. If you are going to say the apostles or anyone else made up the resurrection story then you have to find answers to these questions. Very few atheists actually even address them. So these are good arguments for every Christian to know. It shows how the Christian position actually is better thought out than the atheist position.

But then he makes a leap:

Turek concluded his lecture from the pulpit by saying there is proof that the New Testament is historically reliable and fact not fiction, therefore the entire Bible is true. He added that there should not be a reason for young people who grow up in a Christian home to fall away from the church when they go off to college.

“The bottom line here is that Jesus rose from the dead and if He rose from the dead then Christianity is true and you can trust it,” he concluded. “There is evidence that you can show beyond a reasonable doubt that Christianity is true and we don’t have to watch another generation walk away from the church.”

The trouble is that this does not logically follow. If the New Testament is historically reliable then the entire bible is true? Why is that? Because Jesus rose from the dead the book of Ephesians is inerrant? Is that supposed to be obvious? The next conclusion that "Christianity is true" is even more problematic. It is not even clear what that means. Lots of different ideas have been associated with Christianity over the centuries. Which of these are obviously true because of the resurrection? He has given a strong reasoned defense of one Christian teaching but he blows it with a completely unreasoned leap from Easter morning to Saddleback Church. So much for a well thought out belief system.

But how else can we get there? The logic has to proceed step by step. The impulse of "Christianity is true" is a good one. But we need to define that. That is where the church comes in. You can trust a visible church. You cannot trust something as vague as Christianity. But as a protestant he can't get away from the vagueness. What he means is the broad strokes of Christian doctrine are true -creation, sin, the atonement, the bible, etc. But what is on that list and what is not? Do we need a separate argument for each thing we want to put on the list? If you have one main source of divine revelation then you just need to prove that is trustworthy and you are done. But the Catholic Church is really the only candidate and he does not want to go there.

But it is worse than that. Not only do you not have a church that can make precise this vague argument of the main doctrines of Christianity being solid. You have to undermine the whole process by denying many of the doctrines early Christians held. So your argument is not just imprecise but it is also inconsistent. For example, as Bl. John Henry Newman points out, evidence for the book of Philemon being part of the New Testament is very similar to the evidence for the prayers for the dead being part of the deposit of faith.

For instance; the first Father who expressly mentions Commemorations for the Dead in Christ ... is Tertullian, about a hundred years after St. John's death. This, it is said, is not authority early enough to prove that that Ordinance is Apostolical, though succeeding Fathers, Origen, St. Cyprian, Eusebius, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, etc., bear witness to it ever so strongly. "Errors might have crept in by that time; mistakes might have been made; Tertullian is but one man, and confessedly not sound in many of his opinions; we ought to have clearer and more decisive evidence." Well, supposing it: suppose Tertullian, a hundred years after St. John, is the first that mentions it, yet Tertullian is also the first who refers to St. Paul's Epistle to Philemon, and even he without quoting or naming it.

There is no solid reason to accept Philemon as trustworthy and not accept prayers for the dead. But protestants are forced into this kind of inconsistency over and over again.

The point is you go from a very well reasoned defense of the resurrection to a very poorly reasoned defense of Christianity. You can show that Jesus is legit but you can't show how that implies Christianity as you know it today is legit. You can say if Jesus is God then He would not let His message be lost. But the protestant historical narrative involves the gospel being lost for many centuries. Any argument you make just does not survive scrutiny.

Junk Praise

2011-11-28T15:26:00.001-07:00

I heard a speaker talk about the book The Self Esteem Trap this weekend. It is actually written by a Buddhist but it seems to have some insights. It talks about the emphasis placed on building up children and making them feel special. She argues that it does not produce better or happier adults.

Today's children and young adults are suffering from a number of symptoms, including obsessive self-focus, restless dissatisfaction, pressures to be exceptional, unreadiness to accept responsibilities and feelings of either superiority or inferiority. According to the author, instead of contentment and positive self-regard, kids raised to believe they are extraordinary or special are more likely to be unhappy and disappointed.

This really resonated with me. People of our generation are not willing face their sin or admit their failure. Often they blame their parents for much of it because they were punished for this or for that. They think they can raise kids so much better by just being positive. It does not work. Kids are too smart. They figure out when they are getting junk praise. That is adults who would never say their effort was poor even when it obviously was poor. They handle it in different ways. None of them very good.

It goes hand in hand with religious movements of the same time. Guilt was declared to be the biggest evil. That had to be avoided even at the cost of making what the person did wrong unclear. The reality is guilt and failure are some of our strongest motivators. They need to be properly formed but they should not be removed entirely. When we try we do people a great disservice. The good news is we can't really get rid of guilt. We can raise kids to have no language to express guilt and failure but we can't raise them not to feel those things. Those are just part of being human. We can tell people they did nothing wrong and not to feel guilty but they still feel that way and then they feel additional guilt for feeling guilty. They need to learn to distinguish legitimate guilt for real sin from a phoney guilt trip someone else tries to impose on you. Then when the guilt is real they need to learn how to turn that into positive change.

However, the choice offered by this author is a false one. She says we have to choose between telling our kids they are extraordinary or telling them they are ordinary. She argues for the ordinary option. I do think Christianity gives you a way to do both. Each child is extraordinary but not in comparison with other children. They are extraordinary because they are loved by God and have access to the grace of God. Therefore they can do amazing things. They are ordinary because they sin. They struggle with the same pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust that we all do. There is nothing special about our sin. There is something special about how God made us. Again, taking nothing away from how special God made the next kid. God has enough amazing stuff to gift us all.

So we should not give up on telling our kids they are special. But we should give up on the junk praise. The stuff we come out with just to give their self esteem a boost that really isn't accurate. Speak the truth in love. Even when it comes to the hard failures we should not protect our kids. They say you learn to ride a horse in seven falls. We need to let them take their falls and be there to bandage their knees. If we keep them from falling it will just mean a bigger and more painful fall later in life. Then who knows where they will go for comfort? They won't go to you if they think you think they are perfect.

Calvinism and Moral Evolution

2011-11-25T09:54:00.001-07:00

David Lahti has an article on Calvinism and evolution. I understand he has a PhD in moral philosophy but works as a professor of biology. I guess not many people hire philosophers these days.

When I told my father I was going to Cambridge to give a talk on the question of whether humans were good or bad, he looked at me sternly over his glasses. "You know what the answer is, don't you?" Total depravity and filthy rags he was hoping I would say of our nature – the first is a primary tenet of Calvinist doctrine, and the second is a phrase from Isaiah. I was about to say that we are at our root neither good nor bad, but pulled in contrary directions with the ability to make a decision. So I knew we were in for … a discussion.

I don't think Calvinism is that simple. As a Calvinist I did believe in common grace. That means that even the unsaved are capable of good though the grace of God. Still evil is emphasized as the deepest truth about ourselves. The creation story is actually different. We were created good, even very good. Then we chose evil. The corruption of evil is deep and profound but the good in us is even deeper. That is our essence. That is who we are.

He does what many do. He judges all of Christianity by the particular form of it he was raised with. This is why it is important to identify heretics. Then people know when a guy is not considered a true Christian.

From an evolutionary perspective, considering other social species on this earth, it is remarkable that a bunch of unrelated adult males can sit on a plane together for seven hours in the presence of fertile females, with everyone arriving alive and unharmed at the end of it. We could be a lot worse than we are, according to our common notions of right and wrong. We have certainly come a long way towards becoming a co-operative, sympathetic, even loving species.

This is a good point. People know there is something sacred about sex and about life. If evolution told the whole truth about us we would engage in rape and murder all the time. Scientists have frequently speculated that cave men married by means of kidnapping and rape. There is no historical evidence this ever happened. But if you follow the logic of the science that is what we should do. The fact that we don't means that science is missing an important part of the picture. They understand man only as an animal but that does not explain all the data.

Granted, this depends on your perspective: if you're a biologist, as I am, you might notice how far we've come. If you're a theologian, perhaps the more salient realisation is how far we haven't. The meeting place between these perspectives is that we are full of conflicting tendencies and inconsistencies in our attitudes and behaviour. So we would do well to ask why this conflict exists, in addition to arguing whether we've done well or poorly in it.
I don't know that there is a conflict. We compare ourselves to animals and look pretty good. We compare ourselves to God and look pathetic. What is inconsistent about that? The question is how do we get better? Understanding our animal self has helped us get better physically. It has allowed us to do medicine and nutrition and that has been a great benefit. But is there any benefit to contemplating our spiritual side? Can science tell us much about that or do we need to turn elsewhere?

At several points in our evolutionary history, sources of conflict have arisen, leading to moral tension and ambivalence. Perhaps the oldest and most significant is the fact that we as individuals have gained by looking out for ourselves in competition with others, but that we also have depended on our social groups and so gained by supporting and contributing to the stability of those groups. From this ancient situation eventually arose the tug of war between selfishness and altruism that is a common aspect of our moral experience.

He needs to be careful here. The evolutionary evidence of any moral development in man is very thin. Almost to the point of being invisible. Can we look at the last few thousand years of human history and see moral improvement? You could argue there is but you could also argue the opposite. We now have the United Nations but we also have suicide bombers. Europe has avoided a major war for the past 65 years but the 30 years before that saw the worst 2 was ever. The point is people start with the theory of evolution and read tends of moral development into history because the theory says they should be there. One could just as easily argue that man is just as prone to evil as he has ever been. If you consider that Gandhi and Hitler were contemporaries you have to think it is not as simple as to say man is progressively becoming more moral.

We should realise, however, that these often contrary tendencies both evolved in our nature through natural selection based on individual advantage. Even more importantly, though, we should realise that an evolutionary mechanism does not necessarily trickle down into our intentions and motives – caring for each other may have evolved by natural selection, but this does not rule out the possibility of genuine love and kindness.

That is an important distinction. Science cannot rule out genuine love but if it exists it is not something that can evolve based on survival advantage. If it is just the advantage to self from social groups then that is a different beast from the virtue of love. Love is self-sacrificing. If it is even indirectly selfish it is not love. So science does not rule out love but if you assume evolution is the whole answer to where we came from then you have to rule out love. It must be an illusion. All love must be an attempt to give so we can get. Jesus' idea of laying down you life for your friend would be a distortion of the essence of evolutionary love. Sure he might have discerned some transcendent moral truth. But if that is the case then evolution does not tell the whole story about morality. We need to contemplate those transcendent moral truths.

Furthermore, we can extend our moral consideration far beyond what was beneficial to our ancestors – to humanity as a whole, even to the natural world. This leads to another important source of angst in our moral life: the difference between attitudes and behaviours that would have been advantageous for our ancestors, and those we wish to embrace and promote today. We need not wait for evolutionary adaptation to catch up with our vision of goodness, if ever it would. We can do this on our own, but it requires that familiar battle between what we feel like doing and what we know we ought to do. The former very often comes from our past, our evolutionary heritage, whereas the latter comes from whatever is most important to us.

This is getting into what I would call morality. What he has been calling morality is really too self-serving to deserve the term. He glosses over the question of how we determine what we ought to do. He seem to say it is subjective rather than objective. What we feel versus what we think is important. So we are still self-serving. Does he think someone who says sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll are most important to him is just as moral as someone who says world peace is most important? He seems to frame things in terms of a conflict between the desires of the flesh and the desires of the spirit. But he cannot seem to say anything concrete about the spirit. He agrees that it is "most important" but he does not dare give it content. Just a vague notion that there is something we want to strive for.

Many of the evolutionarily savvy among us have chosen one of two roads with regard to describing our moral nature. One is the comforting notion that we are generally prosocial nice folks except for those odd meanies who must be explained as having some strange allele or bad childhood environment. The other common option is a descent into moral scepticism or nihilism where nothing matters anyway because it's all just a product of our evolution. These alternatives together look remarkably like a sour grapes attitude: either we are fundamentally good, or else forget it there's no such thing as good and bad. The main reason for Isaiah's admonition to remember how we fall short, as for most Jewish and Christian moral admonitions come to think of it, is to counteract our tendency to look at ourselves with rose-coloured glasses and become complacent. It looks like we could use a dose of my father's old time religion after all.

I don't know what he means by "evolutionarily savvy." Perhaps he means atheists. He seems to mean those who push the theory of evolution way past what the evidence supports. Having pro-social feelings is good. Whether we got them from evolution or something else does not matter much. What is more important is what is our goal. How do we define progress? We will discard our pro-social feelings for a greater good. That is wonderful if we correctly discern what the greater good is. Communism thought it understood the greater good. Even Hitler thought he was doing something good for Germany. How can we be sure we won't make a huge mistake? That is why we need Isaiah's admonition. So we don't assume nice folks like us are not capable of that kind of evil. But we also need to heed Isaiah's solution also from chapter 64:

⁸ Yet you, LORD, are our Father.
   We are the clay, you are the potter;
   we are all the work of your hand.
⁹ Do not be angry beyond measure, LORD;
   do not remember our sins forever.
Oh, look on us, we pray,
   for we are all your people.

That is that God is real and He cares for us and will lead us if we let Him. Dr Lahti seems to have gotten some less than impressive advise from his evolutionary father. He needs to go to his heavenly father to get his morality properly centered. He seems to have thought through a lot of the peripheral questions. It is the part in the center he is missing. What is this thing called moral goodness anyway? Until he tackled that question his moral reasoning will be incoherent.

Filtered Christianity

2011-11-23T09:44:00.001-07:00

I was having a dialogue with Nathan at Called to Communion. He is a Lutheran arguing that we don't need to obey church leaders if they are bad. He does not really argue that. He mostly documents their badness and thinks that it becomes obvious that Jesus does not require us to obey them. I argue there that in Mat 23 explicitly commands His followers to obey bad leaders.

The problem is we appoint ourselves as the judge of badness. What it does is it puts a filter on our pipeline with God. When God tries to tell us something through His leaders we allow ourselves to label the leaders bad instead of obeying. It does not seem like a big deal at first. But like all sin it gets worse and worse over time until it leads to death.

What happens is we limit God by our own imagination. God's wisdom is foolish to men. So when it comes to us we need to put aside our human assumptions and accept that His thinking is higher than ours. That is just not compatible with the idea that we can judge the messenger to be wrong. What we end up with is something human. Something that tries to make sense of all the data but it is a human attempt to do so. The first real attempt at this was by John Calvin. It was pretty impressive but it was still human. There were certain truths about God that were foolish to Calvin and so he rejected them and tried to create a system of theology that worked without them.

There have been many more attempts to make this filtered Christianity work. They all have different things they find foolish in God's revelation. They often embrace the errors of the previous generation. You end up with a man-made theology or a bunch of man-made theologies.

The big question facing us today is, "Did man invent God or did God invent man?" Is the idea of God something man created to give himself a meaning and purpose, to give himself a basis for morality, to give himself comfort when facing death or for whatever other reason? It is a fair question. They look at Christianity and see this collection of man-made theologies. What conclusion are they going to arrive at?

Many have said the bible contains a story so incredible man could not have made it up. That is true but people are so familiar with the basic story that it stops being amazing. When you get past the basic story you lose that sense of wonder if you are examining a protestant faith or, worse yet, a number of protestant faiths.

When you begin to dig into Catholicism in a charitable way. That is you are able to see it's beauty and not just look for it's faults. What becomes clear is that man could not have invented the Catholic church. The wonder does not disappear after you get past the basic story. It just gets more amazing. It is unfiltered Christianity. What happens when you let God tell you things you know are foolish.

Follow Your Heart

2011-11-21T10:44:00.001-07:00

The doctrine of invincible ignorance says that a sin is not a mortal sin if a person is ignorant of the sinfulness of the act through no fault of their own. There are two ways people run with this. One is the charitable way. We are to refrain declaring people to be in hell or on the road to hell because they have committed an act that is gravely immoral. This doctrine says we cannot know that unless we know the person's conscience and are qualified to judge it. Well we don't and we aren't. So we should stick to teaching the truth about gravely immoral acts and let the individual judge for themselves whether they are guilty of such sin and on the road to hell. Only their judgement of their own soul leads to repentance anyway.

But we don't just have the danger of judging someone guilty. We also have the danger of judging someone innocent. That can be a bigger danger in our tolerant and affirming culture. What happens is we assure people that although the church says what they are doing is wrong and it involves grave matter that they won't go to hell if their heart is in the right place. That might be technically true but it a very dangerous thing to teach. How can somebody know if their heart is in the right place?

We have many examples in scripture where somebody was telling themselves they were doing right and God judges them to be sinning gravely. One that comes to my mind now is from 1 Sam 15. Saul says explicitly, "I have carried out the LORD’s instructions" with respect to the Amalekites. Even after Samuel points out the fact that sheep that he was supposed to kill are still alive he repeats, "But I did obey the LORD." So he was telling himself he was being obedient. If you told him to not worry as long as his heart was in the right place he would have been reassured by that. But it would have been a false assurance. Samuel gives him the true word of God and it is not pleasant.

So the "follow your heart" gospel is not true. We are expected to obey God's word even when our heart finds it difficult. That is what it means to surrender your heart to God. It is precisely what the road to heaven is all about. So we can't present the gospel in such a way that these hard issues seem like optional extras. They are not. That is why the church says they are grave matter. They can cost a person their eternal soul. People have a right to be told that.

Two places where this comes up a lot is dealing with protestants and dealing with gays. They are both times where we run into people that seem to be good Christians except for one thing. But that one thing is a serious sin and seems quite unlikely to change. You don't know their heart. You don't know whether they are ignorant of God's true will for their lives or if they know and are just rationalizing their disobedience. But we tend to make assumptions. I tend to be quick to assume the protestant is invincibly ignorant. Not so much for the gay person. That comes from my own experience. I have no trouble imagining somebody wanting to serve God and not thinking even for one second that God wants him to become Catholic. I went to mass with my wife every week for years before that thought crossed my mind. So I know how slow that truth can be to penetrate. A gay person? I have trouble getting my mind around the idea that someone might not know that is wrong. I know people say it. I just have trouble believing it.

The biggest problem is this doctrine gets used by liberal teachers to finesse around unpopular church teachings. Yes, it says that in the catechism but if your conscience is clear you are OK. Just follow your heart. But you need to judge your heart against God's word. Don't avoid the parts of God's word that you are afraid will convict you of sin. Seek them out. Even if they tear your apart inside. Follow God's heart.

Why Mark Galli Isn't Converting (Yet!)

2011-11-18T08:36:00.001-07:00

Mark Galli wrote an interesting article on CT about whether evangelicals should become Catholic:

On a recent trip to Durham, North Carolina, I was asked, "What do you make of all the evangelicals converting to Roman Catholicism?" What immediately came to mind was two recent and well-known conversions of evangelical scholars: Christian Smith, sociologist at Notre Dame, and Francis Beckwith, who at one time was president of the Evangelical Theological Society. Other well-known conversions to Catholicism in my generation—by men whose writings have been important in my intellectual growth—include the late Richard John Neuhaus and Robert Wilken (not from evangelicalism as such, but from Lutheranism).

These are not minds to trifle with! We're talking about men who were and are at the top of their intellectual games, in sociology, theology, and church history. And none of their motives are to be questioned. When it comes to momentous conversions, we usually don't know our own deepest motives. These are often discovered only long after the fact, or maybe never (at least not until we find ourselves in the presence of our Lord—Ah, so that's what I was doing!).

What I can comment on is the tug of Catholicism on the evangelical heart. Because it is a tug that I must admit has pulled at me and many close friends. But there are tugs and there are tugs. Some tugs come from the Holy Spirit, and these naturally are not to be criticized! But other tugs deserve a little scrutiny.

I find this so refreshing. So many times you see protestants psycho-analyzing Catholic converts. Saying they were not real protestants. Questioning their honesty and/or intelligence. He does not go there. He can only comment on his own heart. That is all he tries to do.

On the other hand he leaves the reasons these men have given for their conversion behind as well. You don't want to question the man but you want to respond to the argument. He does neither. He just gives his own reasons for not becoming Catholic.

The Holy Spirit set the pattern for what church would be like at the day of Pentecost. And it looked like this: Massive confusion. So much confusion that when onlookers tried to describe it, they called it a drunken party (Acts 2:13).

He starts his defense with a very strange reading of the Pentecost account. There is a leap he makes that if the Holy Spirit is in all men and women that somehow a magisterium is not needed. I don't think that is stated and I don't think that is obvious. In fact, the opposite is implied. Peter stands up and calms the crowd and exercises his teaching office. So confusion is OK but not only confusion. There is a time for clarity.

Reading through Acts and the New Testament letters, we see a radical leveling in the early church; all manner of people were speaking in the name of God. We find arguments about whose baptism counted, what Jewish laws needed to be obeyed, whether the Second Coming was still coming, whether to participate in civil religion, and so on. Paul and Peter and John used their authority as apostles to try to settle disputes, though they mostly argued from Scripture or the teachings of Jesus. But even after they spoke or wrote, the church had to go through a period of discernment to determine what the Holy Spirit was, in fact, teaching the church.

This is just nonsense. There is no radical leveling of the church. The apostles are in charge. When they are challenged that is seen as a challenge to God. Did they argue from scripture? Sure. But not just as one opinion among many. What about the "teachings of Jesus?" That is called tradition. Sacred Tradition is just the teachings of Jesus given to the church and protected by the Holy Spirit. Protestants tend to think that if it comes from Jesus it does not count as tradition. It does not count as a tradition of men. But Sacred Tradition is the opposite. It only counts if it comes from Jesus. That is the very definition of it.

Many matters took decades, if not generations, to settle out—including the matter of which writings were to be included in the canon to help settle these matters! In other words, there was no magisterium in the early church, but only Christians who lived and argued together at the prodding of the Holy Spirit. Yes, there were bishops and councils who attempted to settle disputes that arose, but many of those bishops were simply wrong on key points, and many of the councils had to be reversed by another council. The full sweep of church history suggests that the Holy Spirit has, in fact, led us into all truth through no other way than men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile wrestling with one another about whatever issue is at hand until, in the Spirit's good time, a consensus emerges.

There was no magisterium but there were bishops and councils? Who called those councils? The Bishop of Rome. Was he just another Christian with a bible to be argued with? How did they arrive at answers? Yes there were a lot of arguments but when they got to a place of unity and put an issue behind them how did they do that? What was the thing that worked? It was the councils and the pope. Without their authority issues like the trinity and the cannon of scripture simply would never have been settled. He says "in the Spirit's good time, a consensus emerges" but it never emerges in a way that would be possible within protestantism.

He says "many of the councils had to be reversed by another council." I am not sure what he means. There are councils and then there are ecumenical councils. If he means smaller councils and individual bishops needed to be corrected by ecumenical councils and the pope then he is right. But that does not describe chaos. That describes hierarchy. No ecumenical council recognized by the pope has ever been reversed. If he is claiming that is not true he should give an example.

We mustn't forget that for a couple of hundred years, most Christians were not Trinitarians in the way we understand the Trinity today, but the Holy Spirit slowly led the church into a fully Trinitarian faith. At one time, Arianism was the majority option in the church, and yet the Holy Spirit led the church to reject that heresy and reaffirm the full divinity of Christ.

Again I have to ask how? How did we get from a place where most Christians were not Trinitarians to a fully Trinitarian faith? The Holy Spirit? Sure. What means did the Holy Spirit use? Sometimes you can say wait for the Holy Spirit but the Holy Spirit might be waiting for you to stop sinning. In this case it is the sin of schism.

At another time, huge segments of the church were bound to the chains of works righteousness before the Holy Spirit ignited the Reformation. And on it goes.

The Holy Spirit wanted a reformation but that is not what happened. The so-called reformers actually left the church rather than reforming it. The church was reformed a bit later. It was needed. But the reformation removed protestants from some of the basic tools the Holy Spirit uses to lead and purify and unify the church. The sacraments and the magisterium.

When we're in the middle of one of these intractable issues, the church will seem like it is going to collapse under the weight of confusion and disagreement. But it hasn't so far, and we're assured it never will. The common critique of evangelicalism is that "the center will not hold." Bah. Humbug. Of course the center will hold, because at the center is not a doctrine, nor some human authority figure, nor a complete and inerrant statement of faith. There is only the Center, Jesus Christ. We don't need a magisterium. We already have a Lord, who told us that not even the gates of Hades (whose landlord loves to sows confusion in the church!) will prevail against the church.

The truth is the center will not hold. The center is not Jesus. That is just arrogant to say Jesus must be at the center of my faith community because it is mine.I am saying that as someone who held exactly that arrogant position for a long time. Jesus says I will build My church and the gates of hell will not prevail. You can't just build any church and apply the same promises to it. It is Jesus' church that the promises apply to. This strange beast known as the American evangelical movement is not it. Can it withstand the onslaught of modernism? I don't think so. The storm is coming and only the house built on the rock will stand.

We need to realize that it is not the Holy Spirit or the magisterium. It is both. Jesus said the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth but He made that promise to the disciples not to the crowds. Those disciples became apostles and those apostles ordained bishops but the promise is still there.The Holy Spirit frequently works through the magisterium to make truth clear. He can't teach us definitive truth unless we can know objectively one voice that is His. The hard part for me was accepting that such a voice might not be evangelical at all.

Heretics Helping the Poor

2011-11-16T08:57:00.001-07:00

Catholic charities have often struggled with the question of how much of the Catholic faith does one have to believe in order to be active in ministry. Should the answer be different for teaching and sacramental ministries than it is for caring and sharing ministries? Does it matter if you are pro-choice if you are delivering food hampers to poor families for St Vincent de Paul? There is a chance they will grow in their faith and become more orthodox as they see the faith in action. That is one theory. In many places it works the opposite way. The caring and sharing ministries become bastions of liberal theology. Pope Benedict has said this is a problem. We need to bring the fullness of truth to the poor and not just material help. Only that can affirm their human dignity in a deep enough way to produce a real change of heart.

What we are seeing now is the inverse if this. Secularists are demanding doctrinal purity of anyone involved in secular ministry. That is why Catholic charities are being denied the right to do adoptions or to get government money to help the poor. We don't subscribe to the secular doctrine of being pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. It turns out that they are more zealous about being secular than we are about being Catholic. So if you are not a member of the secularist faith then you cannot be involved in implementing any government programs.

That would be fair except for two things. One is they don't say pro-life and pro-traditional marriage people are immoral. If Obama would get on national TV and declare ex cathedra that the 54% of Americans that identify as pro-life are immoral people and therefore unfit for government service then that would make sense. We could debate and vote on such a notion. But they don't do that. It is easy to see why. Here is some of what he said about abortion at Notre Dame:

Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health-care policies are grounded not only in sound science but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women.

If you demand doctrinal purity among government agents you need to be able to say clearly what you are doing and why. Otherwise you might end up saying one thing and doing another.

The second issue I have is that it is not limited to government programs. Especially in health care it seems to include everyone regardless of whether they are taking government money or not. That amounts to the establishment of a state religion. I know they deny secularism is a religion but if it pushes out other religions that contradict it then what is the difference. Could the US become officially atheist and say it is OK under the non-establishment clause because atheism isn't a religion? How is secularism different? In many ways it is just repackaged atheism. So saying you have to be a secularist to run a hospital or to offer health insurance or to practice obstetrics that is state-sponsored religion.

In the short term many of these things will benefit the church. Catholic institutions will need to ask whether they really care about their Catholicism. Many are already saying No. For example the Catholic adoption agency in Illinois re-created itself as a secular adoption agency and solved the problem. I think that is good for the church. Agencies that are bastions of liberal theology should probably just admit they don't believe in anything close to Catholicism. Some will go the other way and re-affirm their Catholic identity and rediscover what that means. I see that all as positive.

The other positive is that many Catholics will wake up and discover where secularism is going. It is out to destroy Christianity. Many Christians don't grasp that. The Catholic bishops understand that a lot better now than they did just a few years ago. As we go down this road the conflict will become harder and harder to ignore. This is good. The spiritual danger is not in fighting and losing. It is in not fighting.

Two Questions About Certainty

2011-11-14T08:17:00.001-07:00

The one thing that always impresses me about protestants and atheists is how sure they are of themselves. They might not provide a good argument but they sure leave the impression that there is a convincing one lurking somewhere. Sometimes that is called the phantom argument fallacy. That is acting like there is an iron clad proof for something but never actually giving it. You run into this a lot in religious discussions. People don't want to take the time to wade through all the evidence. Still they don't want to say they are unsure or that they accepted a position based on a few superficial arguments.

The reality is that is what happens. Nobody will admit it but it is true. I know I would never have admitted it as a protestant. That I never really gave all the non-Calvinist forms of Christianity a fair hearing. I had my proof texts and I was confident. I knew the truth. I was not rude like some protestants but it took me a long time to even start to doubt that it was true. Even when I could see the philosophical foundations were weak. Even when I could not find a principled difference between my position and those I considered obviously wrong. Still I was sure Calvinism was very close to the truth.

So I asked myself two questions. The first was, how does that happen? How do you get people so sure without actually giving them solid reasons for being sure? Is it something about biblical exegesis? That trying to get truth from the bible without sacred tradition is going to produce many contradictory doctrines but it is also going to produce camps with rock solid certainty about the truth of each of those doctrines. Is it the nature of human reason and religion? That we need certainty and therefore our minds manufacture it. So we declare controversies to be settled. We pretend it is a matter of faith but the object of our faith is not God or even the scriptures. It is ourselves. It is the discernment of our faith community. This is why you can have this phenomenon among atheists. They can have faith in themselves and in their fellow atheists just as much as Calvinists can.

The second question I asked was, is it a good thing? Should I wish Catholics could be as sure of themselves as protestants and atheists. Sure some Catholics have a lot of confidence but I don't see the phantom argument thing happening. Most of them are converts and they have sweated the details. That is a different kind of confidence. But should we have faith in ourselves and our fellow Catholics? Sort of. The Church is a proper object of our faith. So if our faith is in the Church and not some fringe element within the Church then it is healthy. Faith in the church is ultimately faith in God and the promises He has made regarding the Church.

Somehow our legitimate faith in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church often pales in comparison to a Protestant's or atheist's faith in his community of human tradition. Why is that? When the church teaches something we have very good reason to believe there is a solid argument backing it up even if we don't know that argument very well. Yet most Catholics don't act like they expect the Church's explanation to make sense. They are afraid. They think the atheists and the protestants probably have better arguments. They often don't want to convert but they have lost their faith anyway. By not believing the Catholic doctrine is logical and defensible they are essentially doubting it's truth. You even hear talk about religion being true in a different way. That is nonsense. There is only one kind of true. The kind that stands up to any questioning and not only survives but shines. Do you believe the Catholic church has that or do you not? If you do then act like it. Assure people answers are there. Learn how to find them when you need to find them. Do not be ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for our salvation.

Why Did You Become Catholic?

2011-11-08T13:05:00.001-07:00

Converts get asked that a lot. The answer is very hard. Some people try and write 50 reasons why I became Catholic. Some people have blogs where all they write on is the question of why they became Catholic. I can understand that. I wonder about people who can give one reason they became Catholic. It could be complex reason that takes a long time to explain. Like "Because it is true" or "To get closer to Jesus". If it is a simple reason it is probably not a great reason.

The reality is people join protestant churches for a lot of simple reasons. They like the pastor. One particular doctrine appeals to them. They have a great youth program for their kids. Their worship experience is awesome. Traditional denominational ties have grown weaker and many protestants go church shopping. They look for a spiritual home much the same way they would look for a physical home. They take it seriously but they balance different considerations. You can't have everything. You need to choose something so you do.

So when a protestants asks why you became Catholic your first task is to respectfully communicate that this choice was not like that. That is was simple and yet very complex. That it involved none of those things yet it involved all of them. The simple explanations often sound insulting to protestants. Because I want true doctrine and true sacraments. Because I want to stop committing the sin of schism. The point is the reasons are very serious and a corollary of that is that your choice not to be Catholic is also a very serious one. It is a little bit like when someone asks "How are you?" Do they really want to know? Most of the time they don't.

Mat 6:33 says, "But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." I think that principle makes this question harder as well. By seeking God's kingdom we get everything we wanted in a church when we were protestant:

The right pastor? We have pastor with real authority from God to teach, given, and perform sacraments in His name.
Powerful worship? The mass is the highest for of worship. Offering the sacrifice of Jesus' body and blood for our sins.
A shared story. Protestants are often bonded by similar history. I grew up with a church full of dutch Calvinists who's family immigrated after the WWII. But Catholics have the whole story of salvation history to share.
A solid foundation for our children. Where else can you find a church that you know will be teaching the true gospel in a generation or two or three?
Strong social action. Not every church is actively caring for the poor. Often protestants that have a heart for the poor find a church that focuses on that. The Catholic church has that as a big part of her identity.
Strong on life and marriage issues.
Vibrant spiritual community. This seems to be absent at first. We tend to judge people who have different spiritual gifts and devotions quite harshly until we get to know them. But difference is where the blessing is.
Biblical. No church that I know of reads as much scripture together as the catholic church does. Especially if you go to daily mass.
Spiritual gifts. When I was protestant that was big for a lot of Christians. Are miracles occurring? Is the gift of prophecy active? But none of those churches could touch the Catholic Church for the sheer number of miraculous stories that were attested by solid evidence.

The list could go on and on. If you get beyond the superficial things then the Catholic church becomes the best from almost any perspective you can think of. That is what you would expect. A supernatural church will be different from a natural church. It will ignore some things that consume natural churches. But in the ways that are really important it will be better.

So why did I become Catholic? Because the Catholic Church has everything. Because the Catholic Church has the one thing that is needed. The only thing it might be missing is you!

Christian Fanatics

2011-11-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

Dan Delzell has an article on The Christian Post called How Christians Can Avoid Tangents and Fanaticism .

Think of it this way. Every Christian has opinions on many secondary areas of doctrine and practice. I am talking about things that are not essential for salvation. This is the level I call "Convictions." Picture it being the center circle of several concentric circles. At this level, Christians differ from one another on a multitude of perspectives and practices. It doesn't change the fact that every believer, regardless of his other convictions, is saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. We are one in Christ through the blood that He shed to make us His own. We are family forever.

This sounds reasonable but he does not give any examples. Why not? One reason is that there is not agreement on what is a secondary doctrine and what is "essential for salvation." For example, some Christians get excited about speaking in tongues. I was there once. Most would see this as a good example of an issue Christians can become fanatical about. But there are also many Christians and some fairly large churches that teach that speaking in tongues is essential for salvation. So if you make that your example your whole point will get sidetracked by a discussion about whether that teaching is true or not. Guess what? Almost any example you give presents the same problem. End times prophecy, political activism on the left or the right, anti-Catholicism, no matter what you chose you will get somebody saying it is not a secondary doctrine.

So he is assuming people can clearly discern whether something is primary or secondary when that is precisely what Christian fanatics cannot do. They need help. Is their church going to help them? Often the church is part of the problem. They have hooked up with a strange pastor who seems quite holy but has a pet issue he talks about way too much.

Pastor Delzell analyzes this in terms of everything's relationship to the center. He imagines concentric circles and later defines tangents from those. But the assumption is everybody knows where the center is. They don't. Most think they know. But they can also be convinced they have missed some central truth of Christianity. How often do books make a claim that they have discovered some key principle of Christianity that has been missed up until now? Even this very article has a hint of it:

Brother in Christ. Sister in Christ. Please sit down when you have some time and prayerfully meditate upon Romans 14. It will change your life. It will change our churches. It will lead to renewal in our fellowship with others. If you and I as Christians think that somehow we are above or beyond this sinful tendency toward tangents and fanaticism, we are living in denial and we have only deceived ourselves. There is a beautiful saying that goes like this: "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity."

Romans 14 talks about giving other Christians freedom in one non-essential area, the eating of meat sacrificed to idols. The point is Paul has the authority required to declare this matter to be non-essential. In 1 Cor 5 he gives some very different instructions about a matter of sexual immorality. Again he has the authority to decide that this matter is much more serious. The question is who has that authority today? If it is yourself or someone of your own choosing then you are assuming you are "above or beyond this sinful tendency toward tangents and fanaticism." It needs to be someone ordained to speak for God the same way Paul was ordained. The amazing thing is God provides us those leaders today.

If you want an example of how this should work look at what Cardinal O'Connor said

Indeed, on this current occasion I haverepeated publicly what I have said before and mean, with every fiber of mybeing: "If anyone has an urge to kill an abortionist, kill meinstead." That's not a grandstand play. I am prepared to die if my deathcan save the life of another.

The killers of abortionists are often cited as a typical example of a Christian fanatic. If they accepted leadership from men like Cardinal O'Connor then that fanaticism would not happen.

Where Does Gayness Come From? Why Do We Care?

2011-11-04T14:04:00.000-06:00

There was a controversy about a column written by Daniel Avila about the ultimate source of same-sex desires. It was taken down from the Boston diocese paper's website but it was reproduced in full on the blog in the link with some commentary from a gay blogger. The USCCB didn't stand behind Mr Avila at all. He apologized and when that was determined to be insufficient he resigned from his USCCB post. So what did he say?

So what causes the inclination to same-sex attraction if it appears early and involuntarily and "who," if anyone, is responsible? In determining the answer to the "what" question, the most widely accepted scientific hypothesis points to random imbalances in maternal hormone levels and identifies their disruptive prenatal effects on fetal development as the likely and major cause.

The most recent and most comprehensive discussion of this research is found in a book published earlier this year by a scientist who also happens to be a gay-rights advocate. Even though it discounts other environmental factors that other scientists believe also may play a role, Simon LeVay's publication, "Gay, Straight and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Attraction" is worth the read.

This is dangerous territory. Not because the science is not interesting. It is because the scientific answer to the question of causation does not change the moral answer. So picking one scientific theory among many and using it to justify the church's position makes it seem that the church's moral teaching depends on Simon LeVay's theory being right. It does not.

LeVay is not interested in the "who" question and describes same-sex attraction as just a variation among other human inclinations. Catholics do not have the luxury of being materialists. We look for ultimate explanations that transcend the strictly physical world and that stretch beyond our limited ability to mold and reshape reality as we know it. Disruptive imbalances in nature that thwart encoded processes point to supernatural actors who, unlike God, do not have the good of persons at heart.

This is true but it is also dangerous. Looking at creation and figuring out why God made things the way He did and why God gave the commands He did is interesting but error prone. The biggest error we make is finding a partial answer and assuming it is the whole answer. We do believe we can learn from creation. We just need to be very careful. If the bible is hard to interpret we can expect creation to be quite a bit less clear.

In other words, the scientific evidence of how same-sex attraction most likely may be created provides a credible basis for a spiritual explanation that indicts the devil. Any time natural disasters occur, we as people of faith look back to Scripture's account of those angels who rebelled and fell from grace. In their anger against God, these malcontents prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. They continue to do all they can to mar, distort and destroy God's handiwork.

This is the paragraph that got him into trouble. He seems to refer to same-sex attraction as a "natural disaster." I don't think he intends that. His point is valid. Just because something comes from nature does not mean it is good and beautiful and right. Earthquakes come from nature. They are part of the brokenness of the world and not part of the goodness of creation. How can science tell us which is which? It can't. He is suggesting that same-sex attraction comes from what scientifically can be described as"disruptive imbalances in nature that thwart encoded processes." It is easier to associate those kinds of things with the devil then with God. But is it impossible for God to work good ends through such genetic anomalies? No. We might discover an example down the road. It would not shock me.

Therefore, whenever natural causes disturb otherwise typical biological development, leading to the personally unchosen beginnings of same-sex attraction, the ultimate responsibility, on a theological level, is and should be imputed to the evil one, not God. Applying this aspect of Catholic belief to interpret the scientific data makes more sense because it does not place God in the awkward position of blessing two mutually incompatible realities -- sexual difference and same-sex attraction.

The language of a broken world I think is less offensive than the language of the devil. Saying the devil is in your DNA is hard to process. It brings up images of the Damien movies. We need to understand that this is a big misunderstanding with a lot of same-sex attracted people. They are told that the Catholic church teaches that they are just evil and cannot be saved. That is a lie but it is a lie many people have believed. So we need to be extra careful when addressing the fact that same-sex attraction is disordered. It does not mean the person is evil. Just like we don't say a diabetic is evil but we do say diabetes is disordered. So saying diabetes comes from the devil would be unwise. Some people speak of the devil in a very broad framework and from that point of view it would not be inaccurate to say diabetes is from the devil.

If in fact this analysis of causation and culpability is correct, then it opens new perspectives on the Church's teaching in this area. Being born with an inclination which originates in a manner outside of one's control is not sufficient proof that the condition is caused by God or that its satisfaction meets God's purpose. Furthermore, a proper understanding of who is really at fault should deepen our compassion towards those who experience same-sex attraction and inform our response to the question of loneliness. Ultimately, an accurate attribution of responsibility for same-sex attraction frees us to consider more fully the urgent question of why sexual difference matters so much to God. These matters will be addressed in my next column.

I think you could just remove the first line here. Causation is irrelevant. If you knew you same-sex attraction came from being sexually abused as a child. Certainly not God's will. You will still ask God where He expects you to go from here. You let me get here. I now have these desires. Why can't I act on them? It really changes nothing.

What changes things is the knowledge that celibacy can be a blessing. That is something this world cannot seem to understand. They see a life without sex as unthinkable. You need to know that however you got to that place God is going to either heal you of same-sex attraction or grant you the grace to have a fruitful celibacy. Both options seems impossible to many same-sex attracted people. It requires such a deep change of heart they can't imagine it. But God can heal anything if you let Him. Do you want to be healed? Do you want God more then you want your sin? These are the questions every person faces.

The whole incident shows me how rational discussion has been shut down on this issue. It is true of many issues. This article is not perfect but it is reasonable. It is not just name calling. It is insensitive but it is not malicious. It certainly does not deserve to get anybody fired. That can only have a chilling effect on freedom of expression on this issue.

Tim Tebow Not Offended

2011-11-03T11:01:00.000-06:00

I am a Detroit Lion fan so I was pleased to see my Lions kill the Denver Broncos. I do like Tim Tebow though. Not so much as a football player but as a Christian. His is happy to let his faith be central to his public persona as well as his private one. He is real. He is not playing PR games when he prays or when he shares his walk with Jesus. This is why I found it very amusing that people were outraged when Lion players poked fun at Tebow's much-publicized prayer pose. The picture shows Lion LB Tulloch striking the pose after sacking Tebow. I cannot imagine a Christian getting offended by that. He is not poking fun at God but rather the media frenzy around one moment of prayer. It's OK for the media to go crazy. They do that. It is also OK for people to joke about it.

What is interesting to me is society's inability to figure out what is offensive. There is an assumption that non-Christian people interacting with the faith are going to offend. It is quite the opposite. The most offensive thing one can do is ignore a Christian's faith. If you tell him he seems like a regular guy and his faith does not make any difference. That is offensive. It may be true and if it is you should still say it but a Christian should take feedback like that to mean he has completely missed the boat.

When you tell a Christian you find his faith strange and even crazy that is to be expected. We are claiming to be transformed by the supernatural love of God. So if you analyze us using purely natural thinking we should not make sense. So people should laugh. They should get confused. They should see something that is condemning in the sense that it makes their sin seem really bad. Yet that same thing is still attractive. Like they are meant to be like that. In short, they should see God.

We love it when people want to interact with that in any way. If they have fun with it. If they argue against it. If they ask questions about it. Somehow we have this idea that if you don't affirm someone's faith you should just ignore their faith. That means the affirmations are going to be pretty shallow. So most people just avoid the whole topic. But this is often just imagined offense. What it flows from is the idea that religion should not be rational. That is not a Christian idea but our society has gone there in the face of many differing theologies. So it is considered unfair to hold up someone else's faith to logical scrutiny. So to ask if you give God the credit when you score a game winning TD what happens when you get sacked? Is that God's fault? It is a fair question even if it is asked in a mocking sort of way. Lots of mocking goes on on the football field. How else are you going to express yourself in an atmosphere of such intense aggression?

So what is offensive? Really just deliberate attempts to desecrate what is holy. If somebody tries to find something offensive to do to the Eucharist precisely because they know Catholics believe it is sacred. That is offensive. It can hardly be done in ignorance. We might not be able to explain why something is sacred but if we know it is then we can treat it in a blasphemous way. Sex is a prime example. People know sex is sacred. They might hold to a materialist world and life view that cannot make sense of the sacredness of sex. But they still know. So crude talk or behavior is uncharitable. Again society always gets this wrong. The offended party is labeled intolerant and the offender is given a free pass.

The Moderate And The Radical

2011-10-31T16:32:00.001-06:00

I went to a pro-life conference this weekend. There were some interesting speakers there. Two in particular made me think. One was a full time pro-life activist from CCBR. The other was a former publisher of Calgary's major daily newspaper. A guy named Peter Menzies. Menzies traced back the way the pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage won the media and eventually the public to their side. His point was they did it a little at a time. The changes they asked for were always incremental. He said the media love moderates. They don't like radicals. That is even more true in Canada than the US. Canadians are much more polite and not wanting to offend or even listen to someone who might be offensive to someone else.

His point was the social liberals have done a much better job of making their position seems moderate every step of the way even while the sum total of the change they have effected is quite radical. One example of how radical the change has been was the firing of Damian Goddard for tweeting that he supported traditional marriage. So his point was this step by step ever moderate approach has been working for the other side in this fight. We have not used it very well and have lost in large measure because we have been seen as the radicals.

His suggestion was to aim at some moderate gains. Gendercide is one battle we can win. Most people oppose aborting a child because it is a boy or because it is a girl. So we can sound moderate there. Making it a crime to coerce a woman into an abortion is another moderate gain we could aim for. How can a feminist oppose that? It is just protecting a woman's right to choose. These are battles we can win and we can move the ball forward. If we keep doing that and keep winning we can eventually move society a long way.

The other speaker, the pro-life activist, he does not care at all who thinks of him as a radical. He loves to show gory pictures of abortion fetuses. He wants to make people uncomfortable. He want to hit them over the head with the truth. He uses strong words like genocide and holocaust. His point is that it is not him who has taken the radical position. It is our culture that is radical.

So I ended up thinking these two guys should have had a debate. What one sees as counterproductive the other sees as the only way to make real progress. Both characterize the pro-life strategy to date as the opposite of what they are suggesting. The radical would say we have been too polite. The moderate would say we have been too offensive. The pro-life movement is large and diverse so examples can be found of each. But where should our efforts be concentrated?

One thought I had was that the pro-abortion and more recently the pro-gay movement did lie about their ultimate goals. OK, they may have been ignorant of where their own movement was going. I am a bit skeptical of that. Nevertheless, for pro-life people, they would definitely need to deal with pro-aborts saying this is a ploy to try and eventually make all abortion illegal. How would we respond? Would we lie? I have trouble seeing how you get around that. Satan can use deceit as a tactic. We can't. Even when we see deceit has worked well for him.

Thinking about the saints. How many saints were considered radicals and how many were considered moderate? I can't think of many moderate ones. Some were moderate on many issues and picked their spots about what position to take. But I can't think of any that consistently avoided taking radical positions.

For myself, I value logical consistency. Taking a moderate position on abortion might be an easier sell but it is fundamentally an incoherent position. Saying abortions based on gender should be illegal and not saying all abortions should be illegal is really ducking the central question. That is the question of whether the unborn child is a human person or not. The pro-life position appeals to me because it deals with the question and is not afraid of the logical implications of the answer. These more moderate ideas jsut don't have that property at all.

I wonder of God intentionally gives us radical truths that are hard to moderate without creating an incoherent position. The divinity of Jesus is one example. How do you construct a moderate version of that? I have thought that maybe if I encourage a person to go to mass more often then maybe they will drift into stronger Catholicism. But eventually a more radical choice will need to be faced. There is just no way around it.

The same is true of the church. How can you create intermediate steps between protestantism and Catholicism? It does not really work. Liturgically you can find a middle ground but in terms of doctrine and authority there really is no middle ground. Either you are your own pope or you let someone else do the job.

Two Kinds of Violence

2011-10-28T15:39:00.002-06:00

Pope Benedict made a very interesting speech at Assisi. He talked about two sources of violence. The violence of religion and the violence of atheism. It is quite interesting. We can attack somebody because we believe they are evil. That is something all religions need to deal with. Of course all religions were represented at Assisi so it was a good time to bring that up. It is kind of against inter-religious etiquette to bring up topics like religious violence but there would have been little gained from a polite photo op. So he was quite bunt. We, as Christians, have engaged in violence and we need to deal with it. Violent Christianity has always been a perversion of the true Christian faith or at least an undeveloped version of the Christian faith. Still it has happened. To some extent it still happens. We need to do what we can to end it.

Of course many of the other religions represented there have a much worse track record for violence than Christianity. He especially focused on the 25 years since the last interfaith conference at Assisi. A time when religious terrorism really began to become a problem in may parts of the world. The idea that people "consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others."

I think this is awesome. One of the myths about atheism is that not believing in God makes you better able to speak out against religious violence. It just isn't true. I can't imagine any atheist being as effective as the pope was here. He has credibility precisely because he is a man of faith and not a wishy-washy faith.

He also warned that as much as religion has an issue with violence atheism has a bigger one. He mentioned concentration camps but he also mentioned drug abuse. What he calls the "decline of man." We might not embrace full blown atheism at the state level but secularism is causing us to drift morally. It is the absence of God in a different way than the communists and the Nazis imposed it but it leads to violence none the less. The number of people killed by the US government in the war on terror has been skyrocketing. The body count from the war on drugs is huge. Then you have abortion. The numbers for that are insane. This is all violence that we accept as a society. We have lost our moral center. Even when we protest we don't know why. We occupy Wall Street and all we can do is babble about 1% and 99%. We can't articulate a moral principle.

I think the "decline of man" should be one of those phrases that forms a shorthand for what Catholics believe is wrong with the world. Like the "culture of death" was for John Paul II. The evil has grown to effect much more than our view of the sacredness of human life. It has effected politics big time. The financial sector is in serious trouble because of moral failings. It is all over the academic world especially in philosophy. The Decline of Man seems like an insightful phrase. He just needs to keep using it.

Religious Life

2011-10-27T16:17:00.000-06:00

When discerning a vocation the first step is to understand the beauty of each choice. If you look at either marriage or the religious life and see nothing attractive about it then there is something wrong with you. That is not an insult. That is information. We know that about marriage. If someone says there is nothing about marriage that is appealing you would wonder about them. Those that do say that mean they could not bring themselves to commit to one partner for the rest of their life. But most don't say that. Most people love the idea of falling in love and having it last forever. Having children. People might not be willing to make the sacrifices required to get there but they understand that it is a good place to be.

It is much less common with religious life. Many people react with complete aversion to the idea of becoming a nun or a priest. They see nothing at all appealing about it. That is honest. But they need to understand that shows a lack of spiritual maturity. It is not that they are not called to religious life. It is that they have not taken their faith seriously enough to even ask themselves the question. Do you believe God alone is enough to full satisfy all your desires for as long as you live? The theological answer to that is easy. Of course He is. He is God. But do you believe that in your heart? Is there something in the vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience that is just too much? That you cannot imagine God would satisfy that desire and bring you to a place of joy.

That is not a matter of calling. It is a matter of faith. When faith gets practical you find out how real it is. It is hard. It is something we need to grow into. But the exercise has benefits that go way beyond any potential religious vocation you might have. What happens is your desires are reordered as desires for God that might involve an intermediate goal. You might want a career. But why do you want a career? Is it so you can feel significant? Is it so you can earn money and do some good for yourself and for others? These are not bad things to want but why do you want them? You keep digging and you either get to God or you get to self. Ultimately those are the two real ends we pursue. The part that is ordered towards God can be sacrificed at God's command. The part that is ordered towards self needs to be repented of. We need to give ourselves fully and unconditionally to God.

If you go there then you can see marriage and religious life as two great goods. It will be sad that you can only do one. That is a good space to be in. Often someone will take a long time to surrender to the religious life and when he finally does God surprises him with a wife. I see something good about stories like that. Entering marriage in a place of total surrender to God. The point is not to make everyone religious. Most people should marry. But everyone needs to leave the choice up to God.

One of the big problems with marriage is many don't enter it in that place of surrender. There is a mentality of contraception and divorce in our culture that we can drift into all to easily. Often the reason why marriage appeals to us more than religious life is because we think we are required to give less in marriage. In some ways that is true but we should not marry out of an aversion to self-donation. If we are still in that space when we marry that is a very bad sign.

Preference for the Poor

2011-10-27T08:30:00.002-06:00

The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace came out with a document. I though John Allen had a good take on it. He talked about how the majority of the Catholics in Africa, Asia and Latin America have some very different thinking about economic justice than Catholic in Europe and North America. This document was written by an African, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. It reflects African thinking. This is one of the great things about being Catholic. You benefit from the wisdom of Christians of other times and other cultures. We tend to get trapped in the modern western mindset. Not only the secular western culture that influences us but the Christian western culture that is better but still very narrow in it's perspective. Catholic tradition breaks us out of that to some extent. It works for issues that have been around for a long time. But what about the more recent issues like globalization. Tradition has less to say. But we still benefit from the fact that the church is Catholic and it is one. We share the church with men like Cardinal Turkson and about 750 million other Catholics who are not part of the western culture. We can benefit from them. We also benefit from the fact that the church is holy and apostolic. That is the magisterium has special gifts to be able to discern God's wisdom. That does not just apply to infallible documents. We need to learn to think with the church.

So how has the Catholic community been doing? I don't see a lot of attempts to learn from this document. It has fallen into the left/right political divide. The conservatives have been most disappointing because they normally take the church quite seriously. They know the church has wisdom but cannot bring themselves to consider the possibility that some conservative orthodoxy might need to be questioned. They point out that it is not infallible. they have pointed that out again and again and again. OK. Got that. But it is still a document written by one of the church's foremost African thinkers. Someone Pope Benedict trusts on matters of justice and peace. It represents a very common viewpoint inside the church at all levels. One the pope is endorsing. Not a powerful endorsement but a thumbs up nevertheless.

I believe the proper Catholic response to such a document is constructive engagement. We can debate. We can disagree. But we should not write off Cardinal Turkson as a liberal. Trying to fit him into the American political picture is just nonsense. We should expect him to transcend those categories. We need thinking like that because both Republican and Democrats have managed to run us into a mess. How much constructive engagement have their been? Mostly it has been a defensive, dismissal.

One big point of difference is the view of the United Nations. Nobody knows better the the Catholic church how the United Nations has been used to make abortion and contraception more available. But Catholic thinkers have not been willing to call the entire institution a bad thing. Pope Benedict took his name from the WWI Pope Benedict XV. That Pope Benedict put forward some of the ideas that President Woodrow Wilson adopted and later grew into the League of Nations and then the United Nations. Pope Benedict XVI is actually a big fan of Pope Benedict XV. So it is no surprise he thinks the idea of international authority has some potential. WWI showed how one war could engulf the whole of Europe so conflict resolution really was everyone's business. The recent crisis shows how one nation's financial policy can cause major problems worldwide. Why should preventing such crises in the future not be done on an international level?

Yes, there is a national element here. As John Allen points out, many are "wary about the global influence of the United States." I can see that Americans might have a different view of this. Giving up sovereignty to international bodies is something they rarely do. Economically they are still powerful but not quite the superpower they once were. The times are changing. The church is not afraid of new ideas.
We should not be under the illusion that we can get to utopia through human effort but we can and should try to make things better.

When God Seems To Change

2011-10-24T12:43:00.000-06:00

Called To Communion has responded to an article arguing that Catholicism has changed its doctrine on salvation outside the church. This is a common claim. Atheists often make a parallel criticism that the God portrayed in the Old Testament is bloodthirsty, vengeful, and mean. There are some documents from church history that don't seem to fit with modern Catholic teaching and there are some passages from the Old Testament that don't seem to fit with our image of God shaped by the New Testament.

I think atheists and Catholics are right to point out that this is a real problem. God never changes. When something claiming to be a revelation from God changes over time we need to wonder. It could possibly be evidence that their claim is false. That this is just man trying to know God but it does not have the reliability of God but rather the reliability of the people involved. When we examine the claims of Muslims, Mormons, or Jehovah's Witnesses to speak for God we find inconsistent statements they have made over time and they become Exhibit A in our case against these false prophets. So can a similar case be made against the bible? Or against the church?

The answer is that God did not reveal everything about Himself and His plan to save man all at once. We see it being revealed slowly over many centuries. God chose to take man on a journey. Man needed to know the seriousness of sin. So we have the event of the flood. Every child knows the story because their are lots of animals involved. But the story is really about the fact that sin was everywhere. God is a powerful and when we sin we are just daring Him to destroy us. This is not smart. God is gracious and does save eight people but only eight. Was that the whole picture of God? No. But it is truth about God. The same God we serve today.

This pattern continues. God focuses His efforts on the Israelites. Why just them? Why not everyone? God wanted to show a contrast. Here is My chosen people and here is everyone else. Did God abandon everyone else? No. But the focus was on the special graces being given to the nation of Israel. God did use His power to carve out a space in a heathen world for His people. He decreed that some nations be exterminated to make room for the Israelites. A pretty extreme measure to be sure. Is God guilty of mass murder? God is the giver of life so He has the right to take life away. Murder involves us taking that prerogative from God. So murder does not make sense as a charge. But God was showing a contrast. His people could not just fit in with all the other nations. In fact, they needed to be protected from their influence. Extreme measures were needed.

The point is salvation history is not just about Good Friday and Easter. It is very long and complex for a reason. We start to have problems when we simplify it. It is a natural thing to do but we must never lose track of the fact that the big picture is very big. We end up with a very truncated spirituality. We end up in serious doubt when people point out parts of the bible we have been ignoring.

The same is true of early church history. There was an emphasis on the importance of the church for a long time. That is not something that went out with Vatican II. It was not part of Catholic confusion. It is a real truth about how God is working in the world. To leave the church and try and maintain your relationship with God was and is spiritual suicide. That is the truth God chose to drill into us first. It is possible that a person might have such a dysfunctional view of the church and the sacraments that not much would be lost. That case was not really address until more recent times. The reasons should not be hard to see. People today have used that teaching as an excuse to stop evangelizing and start dissenting. We are very good at ignoring subtle distinctions when it suits our own agenda. If that that had been revealed at the Council of Florence people would have misunderstood it much worse. God wanted to show us anther millennium and a half of what He could do with the church before he made us aware that He has always been working outside it as well. He knows we are slow to grasp certain concepts like obedience.

So at the end of the day both the bible and the church pass the scrutiny. Atheists can fail the bible and protestants can fail the church but that is their choice. We are not logically forced to reject them because the two stories are not incompatible. One is a deeper telling of the other. It forces us to remember some truths about God that may not be fashionable to talk about today but that is a good thing.

Fertility and Pornography

2011-10-14T15:25:00.000-06:00

Marc Barnes says a lot of interesting things. One of them has got me thinking quit a bit recently. It comes in point #6 in his post called 10 Reasons The Pill S@#%$. He points out a study that found when you give female chimpanzees contraceptives the males in the community showed an increase in confusion, violence, masturbation and homosexual behavior.

Increase in confusion, violence, masturbation and homosexual behavior? All well and fine, a cute experiment, right? It’s what your average, American, teenage boy is growing up with! The truth is we don’t know exactly what it’s doing to the modern man, but it certainly isn’t something we can conveniently gloss over. We would never look at a chemical that causes cancer in monkeys and say, “Oh, but this couldn’t happen to us! We like this chemical!” And yet no-one seems to be worrying about The Pill’s affect on men. I am willing to bet my life that the rise in pornography-use/masturbation in adult men does not mirror the rise in hormonal contraceptive use by some strange and coincidental accident.

What attracts men to women? There are many factors. A lot only get turned on while a woman is fertile. Fertile women smell different. They talk different. Their eyeballs look different. These are subtle cues that cause men to become aroused much more quickly and effectively by a fertile woman. Women are also more interested in men while they are fertile. It should not surprise us. The church teaches us the God intended sex for procreation. Science is just confirming that.

But what happens when you put a man into a community where almost all the young women are using the pill? Most of what should be attracting him to women isn't there. First of all, both men and women will have a lot less pleasure from the sexual energy of their interactions. Secondly, what remains in woman to attract men will be over-emphasized. What is that? Mostly it is the body shape of a woman. That is still there. So men get overly interested in breasts and buttocks. That leads to immodest dress and pornography. But that is not the way God made men and women. The shape of a woman's body is taking a role that is out or proportion to what God has intended.

What happens when you have a Christian community of young people? There you have men and women committed to chastity. Obviously the woman won't be taking the pill. Women dress modestly. What happens? Do men ignore the modest women and find someone who is wearing less clothes? No. They find the modest women very attractive. Why? Maybe it is because they are allowing their bodies to be what God made them to be. Attractive to men in more ways then we can imagine. Not a constant attraction but in a monthly cycle. It is an interesting dynamic to contemplate. Who does she want to spend time with when she is more attractive? Who wants to spend time with her when she is less attractive?

As a protestant I thought a lot about how premarital sex was messing up the dating and courtship process. This is another way the start of good marriages and strong families has been disrupted by societies decision to embrace sin. The damage is always so much deeper and more widespread than we foresee.

Poster Boy For Hate

2011-10-13T09:05:00.001-06:00

Rev. Robert Jeffress has been making a lot of waves because he makes blunt statements and he has ties to Rick Perry. Bill Donahue of the Catholic League made this comment:

Where did they find this guy? When theological differences are demonized by the faithful of any religion—never mind by a clergyman—it makes a mockery of their own religion. Rev. Jeffress is a poster boy for hatred, not Christianity.

So what has this guy said? I have not gone into a lot of depth but the quotes I have see are that Mormonism is a cult. Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are false religions. He also said, “Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion. Isn’t that the genius of Satan?”

OK, those are not sounding very charitable but they are likely phrases picked out of longer talks. The point is he is just plainly stating what he believes. I agree with him on some of it but not all of it. But should we call him the "poster boy for hate" because he says this? That is a very short-sighted and dangerous comment.

The one thing that Christians and especially Catholics are accused of frequently is hate speech. I think it will get a lot worse. Many people will lose their jobs or go to jail because they voice their Christian faith and society labels it hate speech. It is already happening. Mostly to people on the fringes of Christianity that make more shocking statements. Rev. Jeffress seems to be one of those. But if we start to deny people's freedom to speak that way then it won't be long before all serious religious discourse is banned.

Think about it. All evangelism takes the risk of offending someone. When we say something that might convict someone of their sin and produce repentance it might also produce another reaction. It might cause them to convict us of hate and get angry. That is why so many evangelists were martyred.

So when we see talk in society of hate speech we should be concerned. We should not be encouraging it and we should certainly not be engaging in it. So I was very disappointed to see Bill Donahue using that kind of language. He has gotten into the media frequently as a defender of the Catholic faith. Not sure how that happened but it is reality. So he needs to be careful what he says. Calling Rev. Jeffress the poster by for hatred is a very bad way to react to the statements in question. Sure he says Catholicism is wrong. The way to deal with that is to start a dialogue and try and correct some of the false statements he made.

I know most media and most people don't have the patience for that. They love to hear someone shout out a clever insult. But we can't go there. We need to be about reason and love. Calling someone hateful is not love. Putting the truth out there for anyone who cares to listen is harder but it is needed.

Then there are the true statement he made. He is not far off when he talks about Mormonism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Sometimes we need to say negative things about other religions and we need to say them quite clearly. We even need to say negative things about Evangelicals. To say a religion is false is not to hate the people who adhere to that religion. To equate the two is a big mistake. It suggests dialogue with other religions can be meaningful or it can be charitable but it can't be both. But it must be both. We must love those in other faiths but that love must motivate us to point out the very serious problems with their religion.

Think about smoking. If someone is a smoker and I am not what is the loving thing to do? To avoid the topic of smoking? To not say one negative thing about it? But there are really solid reasons I don't smoke and really bad consequences for smoking. Should I not bring those up?

Schism and Heresy

2011-10-12T16:30:00.000-06:00

Brian Cross has a post responding to Michael Horton's thoughts which he thinks reduce schism to heresy. He is right as he usually is. But he focuses on the fact that the church fathers saw heresy as distinct from schism and modern protestants don't. Now if a protestant is going to start being bothered by discrepancies with the early church fathers I don't think this is the one that is going to be the hardest to ignore. So I wonder how convincing this particular line of reasoning will be.

For me, I found it more convincing the idea that schism was my issue and heresy was not my issue. You can see this in the biblical language. Eph 4:3 says, "Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace." There is no verse that tells us to make every effort to keep doctrinal purity. We are not told to do that. Why not? Because it is Jesus' job. He says, "I will build my church." We can't so it because we will mess it up.

Think about it this way. When did Arius fall into sin. When he taught that Jesus was no God? No. He was teaching what he thought was truth. It was not yet condemned by the church so he was not putting himself into schism by teaching that. Over time that changed. Eventually the council of Nicaea decided the matter and condemned Arianism. That is when he committed the sin of schism. The body of Christ had chosen one path and he refused to follow.

As a protestant I thought of heresy as teaching a theological opinion that I strongly disagreed with. If that is the definition of heresy then it is not a sin. People have all sorts of opinions. Most of the time they have them in good faith. How are they supposed to know their opinion is wrong? That is the key. Should they know? In the Catholic world that question can be answered objectively. Do they explicitly reject some infallible teaching of the church? If so, they have separated themselves from the church by doing that. It is really a form of schism. So theological error that has grown into schism is really the problem.

Perhaps we might not have a full blown schism but just some form of discord with the magisterium. In that case we cannot be sure who is right. The smart money is on the magisterium but infallibility is not in play yet so it is at least possible the opinionated individual might be right. That is when the individual in question needs to worry more about keeping the unity of the church and not at all about the possibility that the church has it wrong on this issue. There are two things that can go wrong. The church can split or the church can teach false doctrine. The first problem is ours to prevent. The second problem is God's to prevent.

Thinking about that was big for me. I had this notion that I had to fight for the truth. That in this world of theological confusion we were supposed to embrace the true doctrine. That meant not just giving in to the Catholic church. When I realized that God might not want me to do that it was quite a break-though. Why does God need to me to show people the truth? I can't be sure I even have the truth.

But what about schism? I had a heart for church unity but could I really say I was not just embracing a schismatic culture? My desire to fight for truth was keeping me from being united with the Catholic church. I was letting truth trump unity when I was supposed to let unity trump truth. Not that truth was unimportant. Just that I could not get it by pursuing it. Unity I could get. Truth would come.

If you think about it schism has always been a much harder problem to solve. When bad theology is taught the church can institute reforms and correct the issue. Maybe they hold a council. Maybe God raises up a saint. There are lots of examples of theological errors being fixed. But schisms are another matter. How often are schisms healed? Even when the reasons for the schism are long forgotten they tend to be very hard to fix. So how did we get so focused on heresy to the point where we completely ignore schism?

Kings and Kingdoms

2011-10-06T13:31:00.000-06:00

Scott McKnight has an article about how misused the word "kingdom" is in modern Christianity. He has a point.

One of my college students told me her sister was not working in the Church but was doing “Kingdom” work and “justice” work at a social service. Another student explained to me she was joining hands with a local inter-faith group to further peace. She called it “Kingdom” work and added, “It has nothing to do with the Church.” There’s a common theme here: the “Kingdom” is bigger and better than the “Church.”

So people talk about kingdom work because they want to avoid talking about church. You can see why. The protestants concept of church is a mess. People want to unite with other Christians to serve God but they no longer see any church as a good vehicle for doing that.

The word “kingdom” comes from Jesus, and so to Him and His Jewish world we must go. It was impossible in Jesus’ world to say “kingdom” and not think “king.” Either the word “king” referred to Caesar, the empire-building, worship-me-or-die emperor of Rome, or it referred to Israel’s hoped-for King, the Messiah. When Jesus said Kingdom, He meant the Messiah is the one true King and Caesar is not.

This is important. The concept of kingdom has lost some meaning today. Certainly Israel would think of Caesar and they would think of the ultimate King promised by God someday. But there would be others. King Herod was there. King David was big in their thinking. So the Messiah as the one true King would be seen in the light of those kings. A wise and kind ruler that could keep order and foster prosperity. A brave warrior who could lead them into battle when enemies attacked. Someone who would not abuse the power of taxation and arrest.

Furthermore, a first-century Jew couldn’t say “Kingdom” or “King” without also thinking of “Kingdom people” (or citizen-followers of the Messiah). The most unusual of people were Jesus’ Kingdom people—sinners, tax collectors, fishermen, hookers, demonized women and ordinary, poor Galileans.

I don't think this is true at all. A king was not someone who asked you if you wanted to be part of his kingdom. Everyone has to be part of it. There was no concept of kingdom people and non-kingdom people. If you opposed the king you were a traitor and would be executed. But there was a matter of who has the king's ear. Who would he listen to and often what favors has to be done to get the king to do what you want. Jesus was different because He was not at all self interested. Kings of that day were always interested in those who had money or influence. Jesus wanted broken spirits and contrite hearts.

There’s a third element about what Kingdom means for Jesus. Kingdoms only work well when they have a constitution. The Jews of Jesus’ day called it “Torah.” Jesus swallowed up Israel’s Torah into His Kingdom vision—and it broke loose one day when He was teaching His disciples. We call it the Sermon on the Mount. This is the Torah for followers of King Jesus.

Again this seems strange to me. The Torah was not associated with the king. It was associated with the priests and the teachers of the law. Sure a kingdom needs rule and it needs structure. But the sermon on the mount was about personal morality and not about community action. The king's role was more about appointing magistrates than it was about writing law. There might be some laws a king would proclaim but most laws were already there. It was a matter of it being applied fairly.

A kingdom without a magisterial structure was just unthinkable. It still is. Every government has one. Every church has one. Every company has one. To say that Jesus established a kingdom but did not establish a hierarchy for governing that kingdom is to really confuse matters. In fact, that is the root cause of all the misuse of the word "kingdom" among Christians today. It is all over the gospels. Jesus mentions it more often than any other concept. But in protestant thinking Jesus never left us anything remotely resembling a kingdom. So of course the word is misused because using it properly would make Jesus' statements into nonsense. Or they would be Catholic. Either they refer to nothing at all or they refer to the Catholic church as one visible organization that is charged with governing all Christians.

Who in Jesus' day would say they were loyal subject of Caesar and yet openly disobey Pilate? It would make no sense. Being loyal to Caesar was the same thing as being subject to his local magistrates. It did not mean you only had to listen to Caesar if he got on a boat and personally came down from Rome and gave you an order. That is not the way kingdom's worked. So why should the kingdom of Jesus work any different? Why should my acceptance of Jesus as king not imply I obey the local officials of His kingdom? How else is the kingdom supposed to work?

The biggest problem with the Church for many is that the people they know who go there don’t follow Jesus. Which is the exact reason why so many today want to disconnect Kingdom from Church: Too often a church looks like anything but the Kingdom because too many so-called Kingdom people don’t follow Jesus!

But the kingdom of God is supposed to have wheat and tares. It will always have people who don't follow Jesus or follow Him so differently that I don't recognize them as followers. That is not a problem with the church. It is a feature. We can't fix it. God won't fix it. So church has to work anyway.

Christians need to sit down with the gospels, read them and compare the themes of Jesus’ Kingdom vision with the themes of many local churches.

This is a nice thing to do. It won't fix the problem. Never has. Personal renewal does not fix a church. It is a good thing but it is actually more likely to make the differences greater and more intense. It will also make it more important that you get Jesus' kingdom vision right. I think Scott McKnight has gotten it quite wrong. I think many people will get it quite wrong from just sitting down with the gospels. More is required.

I wish we would all dig in all over again and construct new foundations for a Kingdom vision of the Church. A church embodies themes like love, justice, peace and wisdom. The Kingdom church will not only talk about such themes, but will be a society marked by a Gospel justice, a Gospel peace and a Gospel wisdom. It will be a people who eat together, love one another and who see the needs in the world around them and do something about those needs. According to Jesus, a local church is designed to be a local fellowship of Kingdom people who love and follow King Jesus.

What makes him think we can construct new foundations that are better than the foundation laid by Christ?(1 Cor 3:11) He keeps coming back to eating together. As a Catholic I immediately think of the Eucharist. Maybe going to a church with a valid Eucharist would be a good place to start.

I wonder what text he is thinking of for the last sentence. Jesus only used the word "church" twice in the gospels. Mat 16:18 and Mat 18:17. Don't see it there.

Instead of choosing either the Church or the Kingdom, Christians are called to see church as a living manifestation of the Kingdom.

This is so true. Making the Kingdom invisible and subjective really robs it of it's power. But the same is true of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. It needs to be visible and objective. As a protestant I pretended that my denomination was the living manifestation of that. I knew it wasn't but my I needed to pretend it was for my faith to work. As a Catholic I could stop pretending.

How Did We Get Here?

2011-10-04T16:36:00.001-06:00

We saw that secular society sees all religions as basically the same. That the differences are superficial. It is really quite a silly notion. So why do so many people accept it? A lot of it flows from doctrinal indifference within Christianity. When you ask a Christian about his church what does he say? Typically they talk about the superficial stuff. The preaching, the music, the kids programs, the fellowship. People almost never focus on doctrine. If they go to a non-denominational church they might not even know much about the doctrines the pastors believe. Often churches try and steer clear of anything that might cause controversy. Just focus on Jesus and never mind the details. But what do they mean by that? They typically don't mean just focus on the cross. They typically mean a warm fuzzy loving Jesus.

But if you go there then it does not matter if you are Reformed or Pentecostal or Anglican or Catholic. It is all basically the same mush underneath. Even atheists are capable of the same mushiness. People say it is because we are all approaching the same God. That is not really it. We are all going nowhere. If you don't go deep into your faith then the content of you faith does not matter. All traditions end up in the same spot but it is not God. It is self. We start out with human impulses to love and to worship and we never get beyond that.

But why do we avoid depth and opt for mere Christianity? Because we lack truth and we lack unity. You can try and contemplate the depths of God's truth but the deeper you go the fewer people you will have with you and the less certain you will be about whether you have made a serious error or not. The exception to this is Catholicism but protestants and even many Catholics don't embrace the Church as the source of truth and unity. So many Christians end up with basically a man-made religion that secularists can dismiss because it really is pretty superficial.

There are exceptions. Some people are undeterred by the lack of certainty and end up getting many things right. But they remain exceptions precisely because they lack the unity that would make them something else. Only the Catholic church is united enough around a faith with enough content to not fit into the secularist model. Even then the secular person will not see it because there are so many weak Catholics. It makes it easy to dismiss them all rather than deal with the orthodox core.

So Christians have created this secular beast by running away from their faith. They have created a mass of contradictory faiths that make it easy to dismiss all the differences. It seems like the smart thing to do. It even seems fair because you are treating all the faiths equally. You are not picking one right one. So freedom of religion means disrespecting all religion equally. Even those who still practice their faith can be seen to disrespect their own religion because they buy into this fairness idea. Who knows what is really true? Even Catholics talk that way.

The good news is God has given us the grace to be able to unite around one truth. The hard part is we all have to abandon our pet doctrines and unite around God's truth. It is easier to just shrug and say "Who knows?" But it is better that there is a truth in this world worth living for and worth dying for. We just need to discard all the forms of Christianity that come from the works of man and embrace the one that comes from the grace of God.

What Is Religion?

2011-10-03T15:32:00.001-06:00

It seems people are confused about freedom of religion. They get that we need to allow people to worship in different ways and have different teachings about God. They will follow different leaders and have different holidays. But these things are the religious facade. Behind them there are very deep ways of thinking that are very different. But many don't seem to get that. They seem to assume that once you get past all the traditions and mumbo-jumbo then all religions boil down to the same thing. Except they don't. The assumption that they do is actually part of a secular world and life view. We can never know what people really believe in their most secret thoughts so the secularist just injects himself into that and assumes everyone must think pretty much like he does.

This thinking becomes more extreme when we get to sexual morality. Secularists are sure that religious people are always breaking their moral code when it comes to sex. That no matter what their faith teaches about sex that behind closed doors everyone is really a secularist. Well, maybe not everyone but most of them are. Secularists believe that sexual self control is just not possible. People will always cheat. To an extent they are right but they tend to assume sexual sin is much more serious and much more widespread than is warranted. You see that when you look at historical fiction. No matter what time period the story is set in and no matter what the religious or cultural reality existed the story will always involve characters jumping in and out of bed with each other freely and frequently. Like they can't take seriously the possibility that people might have lived chaste lives.

So now we get to the HHS mandates. Why don't they see an issue of religious freedom? First of all because people are being allowed to worship any way they want. Catholics can have their smells and bells. Evangelicals can have their mega-church bands. What is the problem? You don't want to deal with unplanned pregnancy and STD's because you expect people to live chaste lives? We all know that people don't REALLY do that now don't we? Can't we put aside that illusion when we are dealing with people's health?

The sad part is that for many Christians they are right. Many are really living like secularists when it comes to matters of sex. They have bought the lie that self control is impossible. We know the church will always be full of wheat and tares. But the Christian wants to treat everyone like wheat to maximize the fruit they bear while the secularist wants to treat everyone like weeds because the weeds are more like him.

So at the end of the day the secularist thinks he understands perfectly what is going on in the minds and the bedrooms of religious people. They are just secularists who do a few funny things on Sunday morning. Their leaders think they are living out their faith but we know better. They are really just like us. What it boils down to is a state religion. You can have different religious customs and festivals but to have a truly different religion is not allowed. We don't allow it because we take it as an article of faith that religions are not truly different. They just claim to be different. We know this is true based on the state religion that must be believed regardless of which visible religion you mix it with. It is a bit like the old emperor worship laws. Believe what you want except you must accept Caesar as divine. Only the Jews found that unacceptable.

Church Welfare Bums

2011-10-01T08:27:00.000-06:00

From the recent trip to Germany the pope's talk to the German parliament is getting the most attention, and rightly so, a really clear analysis of why we don't want too much or too little religion in politics. But what the German clergy is really worried about is what he said about the church taxes levied by the state and given to the church. He didn't bluntly call for them to end but he certainly opened the debate by saying the church needs to deal with it's problem of worldliness and becoming poorer is likely to make this happen. Here is a story of prominent German Catholics trying to deny he could possibly be talking about getting poorer by giving up the church's $6.3 billion a year government check.

Freiburg, Germany - A call from Pope Benedict XVI for the Catholic Church to massively change by getting rid of its worldly wealth has shaken German clergy, who say this is not the reform they had in mind.
Even a long-time critic of the German-born pope, theologian Hans Kueng, was incredulous a day after the call, contending that it was just a dodge by Benedict, 84, who dropped the bombshell on Sunday, the last day of a four-day trip to Germany.
In a first response, the head of the Catholic Church in Germany, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, later insisted the pope was not criticizing the German church's revenue streams, which include levies on registered Catholics, administered by government tax authorities.
But the church establishment may have difficulty pushing this genie back into the bottle after Benedict's statement.

The German church has essentially become a welfare bum. They just sit around and get fat while waiting for the government money to arrive. Not all of them but way too many. What is worse is the institution has taken on a political character and has lost it's focus on God. They are Martha's and not Mary's. They have forgotten the one thing that is essential. All of German society really has but it is most striking in the church.

The pope's answer? Get poor. That is how to get worldliness out of your system. It is the money that is corrupting you. Get rid of it. Go cold turkey. That will force you to turn to God for help.

Kueng, 83, contended the pope was like a 'doddery old doctor handing out spiritual fruit juice' instead of the proper medical treatment.

I see some irony in that last statement of the article. Kueng's spiritual fruit juice is married priests, female priests, contraception, etc. Pope Benedict is actually suggesting taking out a tumor that has sapped the life our of the German church for a long time. Other churches have tried the path Kueng suggests. They have not been revitalized. Quite the opposite. Pope Benedict's idea is scary. If God is not real it will kill the church. The church needs to die. Then it needs to rise again. But how can a leadership that has lost it's faith choose that path?

1000 years

2011-09-30T15:40:00.000-06:00

As a protestant you do a lot of thinking about the millennium. The period of 1000 years that is mentioned in Rev 20. There are many theories. What occurs to me in looking at church history is there is a 1000 year period where Satan did seem somewhat bound. That is roughly from the year 300 to the year 1300. Around 300 we have Christianity becoming legal and a long period of persecution ending. We see Christianity spread. We see many great thinkers deepen our understanding of the faith. Sure there are heresies that need to be dealt with but that is simply a symptom of serious theological reflection. Sure development is slow and many things go wrong but the church is basically on the rise. From Pope Leo the Great to Pope Gregory the Great to Charlemagne to Thomas Aquinas we can see good things happening. The kingdom of God is slowly unfolding.

Then we hit the 14th century. Why think Satan has suddenly become unleashed? For one thing you have the black death. Just the name sounds a little like Satan doesn't it? So many people dying. This included the best of the priests and bishops. The ones that were in close contract with the poor and sick were the ones to die. That left the church in the hands of those clergy who didn't really respond to the suffering of the people. In other words those who were not very Christ-like.

Then you have the attacks on the papacy. We have a series of weak popes who get involved in political games and lose. They lose in very publicly humiliating ways. You have the whole Avignon fiasco where the bishop of Rome moves out of Rome to try and please a secular king. You have the suppressing of the Templar order. The pope refusing to defend the falsely accused and instead punishing the innocent again because the french king wants it. It is especially difficult for English and German Catholics because the french king is their enemy. So how are they supposed to react to the spectacle of a pope humiliating himself to curry favor with their enemy? Still about 2 centuries before the reformation but seeds are being sown.

It gets worse. We see the college of cardinals meet behind the pope's back and elect an anti-pope. We had anti-popes before but never one that had the support of so many high ranking churchman. Then you have corruption. Sexual scandal and financial scandal. Intellectually you have William of Ockham, John Huss and John Wycliffe were sowing seed for the reformation in other ways. You get the feeling that the church is being attacked like never before.

The point is that after 1000 years we have a huge attack on the church on many fronts. It was like God was sheltering her until she grew strong enough to survive this kind of intense evil. Since then one could view most of history as sin becoming full grown. Attacking the church grows into leaving the church. Leaving the church allows a slow decay of the faith. Eventually you look around and discover you don't believe at all anymore.

But where sin abounds so grace abounds all the more. We see revivals. But the last 700 years does seem like a constant uphill battle. Certainly in my lifetime the church has been seen as losing ground. Somehow it never really gets lost though. Still from the Borgia popes to the reformation to the enlightenment to the sexual revolution the church always feels like she is under attack. For 1000 years you didn't need much faith to believe the gates of hell would not prevail. The church just looked so strong. For the last 700 it has more challenging. Rather than saying the church must be of God because it is so strong we end up arguing that the church must be of God because she seems so weak and yet never dies.

Gay Bullying Suicides?

2011-09-26T10:14:00.001-06:00

Now I have to be careful here. I want to be clear that nobody should be bullied or mocked. When Christians interact with gay people or same sex attracted people they need to be very careful to be charitable. It does not always happen. People treat gays bad. Sometimes they even do it in the name of God. We need to condemn that in the strongest possible terms.

But having said that I wonder how much of the problem is bullying and how much of the problem is guilt. Gays have a higher suicide rate even when they don't come out of the closet. They feel guilty and sometimes that guilt can lead to suicide. That does not mean the guilt is wrong. Think of Judas committing suicide. He was feeling guilty and the disciples might have even said some uncharitable things to him after he betrayed Jesus. But the root cause of his suicide was the wrongness of the act itself.

So now we are seeing all this media about gay teens committing suicide. It all jumps to conclusion that the suicide was the result of bullying and not the result of guilt flowing from the wrongness of the acts in question. How can we know that? Did these kids have to deal with some jerks. Sure. Maybe even more than the average kid. I was a geek in school so I know kids can be mean to straight kids. But these kids did not seem to be without support. They seemed to have support both in their school and in the online communities.

People claim that if only society embraced homosexuality then gay people would not feel guilt for what they do. The reality is society already does embrace it. Hollywood has to put a gay character on every show. Everything in the media is pro-gay. Schools are tripping over themselves to celebrate the greatness of homosexuality. Politicians line up to attend gay pride events. People say society is hostile to gays. I wonder where they live.

The other dynamic that can happen is that charitable people who are maintaining the immorality of homosexual acts can be wrongly labeled as bullying. That is often what happens when we sin. Those who make us feel the guilt of our sin more intensely make us get angry. Sometimes they say nothing directly about our sin but just the fact that we are reminded of the presence of holy people makes us feel condemned. But it is we who are judging ourselves. That is more likely to happen when we are trying to convince ourselves our sin is not actually sin. We feel guilty anyway and we look around for someone who must have made us feel guilty. It has to be someone else's fault because we assume there can be nothing intrinsically wrong with our actions.

So the Christians get the blame for gay people committing suicide. Why not? Jesus gets the blame for our sin. Why should the body of Christ not take the blame for the sins of the world? It is by the cross He redeems the world. Will innocent Christians be martyred over the gay bullying charge? Don't be surprised. But also don't be surprised if such a turn of events results in many same-sex attracted people coming to Christ.

But who wants to teach such unfashionable truth? Catholics have the advantage because they have access to the fullness of truth. We can teach the precise truth with confidence. Not getting wishy-washy about maybe it is wrong and maybe it isn't. Also not going to the other extreme and saying all same-sex attraction is evil. If Catholics boldly proclaim their faith and accept that society is going to get enraged with them then we will experience a cross and a resurrection. But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (Jn 12:32).

Because That IsThe Way God Made You

2011-09-24T08:50:00.000-06:00

I said in an earlier post:

What makes humans special is not their bodies. Human anatomy is not very different from other mammals.

Brent Stubbs disagreed with that statement. It surprised me. I thought it was obvious that humans are special because they are bodes and spirit together. But I guess the hman body is special in some ways. The first way I thought is the brain. We have better brains than most animals. There is something to be learned from that. We are to be thinkers. God did not give us such good minds so He can do our thinking for us.

There is more. We have actually been given a greater sex drive than most animals. By some measures we are the most sexual animal on the planet. I think about dogs. Female dogs come into season every 6 or 8 months. The rest of the time they are not interested in sex. Males dogs are also not interested when the female is not in heat. Humans are interested all the time. Men don't even care if a young woman is ovulating.

So why is that. It is easy to see why God gives us big brains. But why does God give us big sex drives? One reason might be that the wonders of science and philosophy and human imagination can be so compelling that we might lose interest in procreating if our sex drive was not strong. In fact that is what is happening. The break between sex and procreation has caused us to become unbalanced. We focus to much on our reason and not enough on the self sacrificial love that family life demands. We are becoming less human.

One of the other biological realities is that our children are helpless. That makes us humble knowing that we were once babies. It also makes procreation take decades. I know it is not a purely biological thing but we are wired to want to stay together as couples and we are wired to want to nurture and teach our children. Some animals have that but it is more extreme in humans.

Again it is easy to see where God is going. He loves family. He introduces Himself as Father. He allows most of to start life off in a community of unconditional love.

So I guess there is a lot about our bodies that tells us who God wants us to be. I did not really mean to deny that. But it is interesting to think about. Our bodies are designed to remind us that there is more to life.

Abortion and Atheism

2011-09-19T10:24:00.000-06:00

I talked about how atheists can be prolife and one can and often should frame prolife arguments in a way atheists and secular people can accept. But what about the other direction. Can being prochoice lead you to atheism? I can see that happening. Either a human person is created by God for a purpose or not. If you are making a choice or supporting a choice to end that life based on the common things abortion decisions are based on then you really have accepted that this child was not created by God and is not loved by God. It would make no sense. If you are worried about money or worried about how you friends and family will react or how it will effect you relationship with the child's father or any of the common reasons why women can't see themselves carrying a pregnancy to term then what are you saying? You are implicitly dismissing the suggestion that some bigger question is at play here. That God has created a human person with amazing potential and immense dignity. That God can make this person beautiful even from a less than ideal situation. So the fact that the money is tight right now and nobody is popping any champagne corks when they heard about the pregnancy is nothing compared to the fact that God has a long term plan for this child.

So if you want to have the abortion you are almost forced into a materialist world and life view. That is that what has happened is purely a series of biological processes and nothing more. There is no greater reality to consider. But if one human person is merely a bio-chemical phenomenon then we all are. If a mother's love for a child does not point to something deeper than brain chemistry then what does? The only logical place to go is to believe all of that is in our mind. That is atheism. That meaning and goodness and virtue are all just things we make up as humans and not things we sense of a deeper reality that is God.

I think the Catholic understanding of mortal sin makes a lot of sense here. Most of the time it is not that atheism is so appealing as a philosophical position. What is appealing is sin. Whether is it abortion or sexual sin or whatever sin you must embrace. Sin when it is fully grown leads to death. When you try and address the big questions of life and you have one serious sin you are not willing to let go of then that will make Christianity impossible. So holy living flows from faith but sin does not really flow from lack of faith. It mostly goes the other way. Sin comes first and destroys our faith.

This is why rational discussion about faith can become difficult. If someone is in the power of a mortal sin they will not be able to see the logic of the faith. So a simple prolife argument becomes impossible for them to accept. Logic is not enough. They need God's grace to break the power that the sin has over them.

Courage and Islam

2011-09-16T13:15:00.000-06:00

Reading a bit about the life of Muhammad. It strikes me how few people know even the most surprising facts about him. That he married a 6 year old. That he was a leader of a gang of robbers. Attacking dessert caravans and stealing, murdering and raping. Then there was what happened to the Jews of Qurayza:

Then they surrendered, and the apostle confined them in Medina. . . . Then the apostle went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches. . . . There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900. Every male who had reached puberty was killed. Muhammad divided the women, children, and property among his men (taking a fifth of the spoils for himself).

You wonder why Christians and secular society does not make these facts known. We believe in truth don't we? We don't want people making big life decisions like becoming a Muslim without knowing the relevant facts. So why don't we do our best to make sure these things are known? The short answer is we are cowards. We have gotten very good in the west at steering clear of those pesky doctrinal issues that can lead to arguments. So we have developed an etiquette around religion that you don't want to be negative about what someone else believes. There was a real problem. Many people were getting into very heated arguments and even wars over fairly minor doctrinal questions. There was a time in the west when all the major religions were Christian and all Christian groups were much more orthodox in terms of doctrine and morals. So it hardly seemed worth the trouble to risk hurt feelings over such matters.

There are many things wrong with such thinking but one problem is knowing where to draw the line. When does a problem with a world and life view become serious enough to point out? Once you accept little lies they tend to grow into big lies. You just start processing things different. Speaking the truth in love is no longer the focus. Avoiding conflict becomes the game. But you don't end up avoiding all fights. You just end up fighting over lesser things.

What strikes me about Muhammad is that he had this virtue of courage that our society is lacking. He believed some wrong things but he never backed down from them. It was not easy. People responded to someone who believed what he believed so strongly he was able to accept personal risk and sacrifice. That kind of moral courage impresses people, especially young men. Even today we wonder why young men are attracted to Islam. Sure they lack self control but at least they have some passion that needs controlling. Dead people have excellent self control but nobody wants to be dead. People who avoid talking about religion except in church are spiritually dead. Why would anyone be attracted by that?

So Islam is a threat as well as a hint. Give people something to believe in and they will respond. We could even have the courage to put Muhammad and Jesus side by side. Which is greater, the courage to kill or the courage to die? Muhammad fought for what he believed was good but he used the weapons of Satan. Jesus fought with total self-sacrificing love. Something Muhammad was unable to accept. Jesus always respected each person's right to choose for Him or against Him. Muhammad? No so much. Why don't you hear sermons like that? Because we might offend someone? That fear is far more offensive than a charitably presented truth could ever be.

Disregard for Truth

2011-09-13T09:00:00.000-06:00

Interesting talk from the archbishop in Ghana.

Archbishop Nketsiah noted that people tended to care more for, and be concerned with their ethnic affiliation, political party affiliation and their social status more than they cared for the truth. He said people would go at length to tell lies to defend their political parties and ethnic groups.

He said the increasing disregard for the truth posed great danger to churches, communities and the nation as a whole.

The Archbishop said if the truth was sacrificed, then nothing would stand

I think this is very useful to point out. In politics, in business, and even in religious discussion we see more games played with the truth all the time. People have come to expect it. They hardly bother pointing out when a politician is lying or when an advertisement is misleading. News organizations used to be terrified of printing a false story. Now they accept it as the cost of keeping up with instant news media. Even the outrage people feel when the other side lies about them is assumed to be feigned outrage. Really nobody is surprised.

Christians are supposed to stand out as signs of contradiction in this kind of mess. Do they? I can say that about some of them but not that many. Often they are politically at least as partisan as the average American. You don't hear them calling out their own party when lies are told. Often they want the most aggressive, negative, twist the truth campaigns. They work. People respond. So if we want to win that is what we have to do.

But what do you win? If you join in the rat-race even when you win you look in the mirror and notice you are a rat. You no longer have the power to change the world for Christ because you have left Christ. What is worse is society judges Jesus by you just because you are in the public eye.

Look at what George Bush did. He was an evangelical yet he ran against John McCain by spreading a rumor that McCain had father black children out of wedlock. How many Christians called him out for that and many other less than charitable and less than truthful tactics? I know the Republican elites would have been furious with Christians if they had gone public with concerns like that. It is hard to respect the truth. The reality is that it is not clear many Christians even had private concerns. They wanted to win as bad as anyone.

So when George Bush won was it a victory for Christ? Did abortion and gay marriage go into decline? Quite the opposite. Bush proceeded to associate Christianity with war, with lack of reason, and with hypocrisy. These associations existed before but having a poster child for all 3 sit in the white house for 8 years made things a lot worse.

I have to say I think Catholic bishops have done far better than most Christians in sticking to all of the truth regardless of whether their favorite political party is on the right side of that issue or not. They can defend the unborn one day and the immigrant worker the next. They can love what is natural when discussing environmental policy and also love what is natural when discussing marriage. They can win or lose a political race but they will not lose their integrity. I can't say that is true about all Catholic bishops and not true about protestant leaders but I have noticed a real difference.

So now we get to have another election. Will Christians win or lose? As corny as it sounds it is really true. It is not whether we win or lose. It is how we play the game. If we are willing to sacrifice short term political advantage for the sake of being true to our faith then we can change society. If we don't then society has changed us.

Peace and Truth

2011-09-06T16:39:00.001-06:00

Michael Hannon writes about Peace and Truth at First Things.

“Peace if possible, truth at all costs!” Thus heralded Martin Luther half a millennium ago, and let no man accuse him of failing to practice what he preached. Of course, whether or not a Christian agrees with Luther’s particular interpretation of truth will determine whether he is a Catholic or a Protestant. But less obviously and perhaps more interestingly, whether or not a modern American agrees with Luther’s principle—that despite the very real goodness of peace, truth trumps it each and every time—will in large part determine whether he is a conservative or a liberal.

The difference he sees is who values peace more and who values truth more. It is interesting but not quite accurate. Both liberals and conservatives value truth. That is just the way humans are wired. They cannot embrace something they believe is false or wrong. They can hold their nose and ignore things but they can't really fight for it. So everybody would agree with Luther's idea of truth at all costs. But the author himself qualifies it. Luther didn't fight for truth but for his "particular interpretation of truth." Hannon is looking for common ground between conservative Catholics and conservative protestants. He is suggesting the common ground is their love of truth. That is not it. The common ground is their certainty about truth. Conservative Catholics and conservative protestants are sure abortions, gay marriage, pornography, etc. are wrong.

Liberals are not so sure. In fact, liberals understand Martin Luther better. They get that he fought for "[my interpretation of] truth at all costs." They understand that everyone has an impulse to fight for what they think is right. They just are not sure who is right. They tend to believe the culture before they believe Christian tradition but they emphasize that nobody really knows. Conservatives think they know but they believe that is just because they don't get out much.

The truth is conservatives Catholics know that they know. Conservative protestants don't understand that Luther was a liberal. That they are defending a liberalism from another time that has passed into conservatism now. To understand that would raise the question of why liberalism was good then and it is not good now. The answer is it was never good. But to say that is to reject Luther and every protestant after him. It is easier to just not look at your own history so closely. It is easier but not very credible. Liberals point out how arbitrary conservatives are in saying this or that truth is solid and unchanging when they accept a lot of innovations from contraception in the 20th century back to divorce in the 16th century.

So the deeper link between conservative protestants and conservative Catholics is the belief that God gave us some bedrock truths that we must not question but simply obey. Liberals would be more inclined to say nothing is certain and everything is ultimately opinion. The question they ask is why this or that truth is bedrock. Protestants have trouble. They explicitly deny infallibility. That is what they are being asked. Is the immorality of abortion dogma? Should the consciences of all Christians be bound by that truth? Should those who deny it be considered to have left the faith? If you can't say that about abortion or any other controversial Christian doctrine then what do you say to a modern day Luther who's interpretation of the truth is different? All you can say is I think I am right and he is wrong and this is why. But you can debate until you are blue in the face and you will only end up proving the liberal's point that we don't really know for sure who is right.

Catholics confess that their faith includes infallible revelation from God. That those who disagree with the central tenants are forced to admit they can't affirm the dogmas of the faith. That means they reject the revelation Jesus Christ gave to the world. That is a revelation that has not changed. So we can argue that God's truth is objectively knowable. People can accept or reject Catholicism but they cannot say it is arbitrary or inconsistent. It flows from the acceptance of Jesus as the Word of God made flesh.

So the difference between protestants and Catholics does not come from "whether or not a Christian agrees with Luther’s particular interpretation" but rather it comes from whether one agrees that Luther had a right to a particular interpretation. What binds conservatives together is their belief in dogma. A consistent position for Catholics. An inconsistent belief for protestants. What binds liberals together is the denial of dogma. This time the protestants are being consistent and the Catholics are being inconsistent.

Adam and Eve

2011-09-01T13:02:00.000-06:00

John Ferrell writes about the problems that the belief in one couple, an Adam and Eve, as the ancestor of all humans creates in terms of genetic science. He particularly says Catholics are in a lot of trouble.

The Catholic Church indeed of all the Christian churches faces a particular quandary. The Council of Trent is quite explicit on the topic. Catholics are required to believe not only that Adam is the single father of the human race, but that Original Sin is passed on by physical generation from him to the entire human race. It’s not something symbolic or allegorical (although it is regarded as ultimately mysterious). The First Vatican Council reiterated the doctrine, as did Pope Pius XII in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis.

The claim is that this cannot be reconciled with what we know from genetics. He links an article

Unfortunately, the scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible. Genetic data show no evidence of any human bottleneck as small as two people: there are simply too many different kinds of genes around for that to be true. There may have been a couple of “bottlenecks” (reduced population sizes) in the history of our species, but the smallest one not involving recent colonization is a bottleneck of roughly 10,000-15,000 individuals that occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That’s as small a population as our ancestors had, and—note—it’s not two individuals.

I am not a scientist but this does not make sense to me. When we are talking about the origin of the human species how can we talk about the origin as 10,000 individuals? The theory is that we went from zero humans to 10,000 all at once? That seems a little problematic. Maybe science has not arrived at a final answer.

Now the idea that there are too many kinds of genes around makes sense. If that is the scientific problem then we as Catholics need to believe God did some sort of miracle to increase the genetic diversity of humanity. I have no problem believing that. I have often thought that God must have done something to avoid the problems that go with inbreeding because lots of inbreeding goes on in Genesis.

So it requires us to believe that the origin of man is a supernatural event. That God must have acted in ways outside if what we see in genetics today. But Catholics already believe in many miracles. Is this harder to accept then the virgin birth or the resurrection? I don't see it. Doing a natural analysis of a supernatural event has limited value. You can never prove a miracle impossible. Miracles are impossible or close to it. That is why we call them miracles.

What makes humans special is not their bodies. Human anatomy is not very different from other mammals. So God could have used an existing primate and breathed a soul into him. That could have been His clay that is referenced in Gen 2. Could He have breathed a soul into the offspring of Adam and Eve even when they conceived with a non-human primate? I don't see that speculation as being outside Catholic orthodoxy. God does a miracle every time a new human life is conceived. An eternal soul is created. A human person that has been stained by the original sin of Adam.

The big advantage the Catholic church has here is that it does not need to guard the integrity of scripture. The notion that not taking one part of the bible literally will open the doors to interpreting every miracle as figurative. The church can define what interpretations are legitimate. So when Tim Keller says something like :

[Paul] most definitely wanted to teach us that Adam and Eve were real historical figures. When you refuse to take a biblical author literally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved away from the traditional understanding of the biblical authority.

Catholicism does not have that problem. We don't think the bible is an authority. It is a revelation. We have a living authority. So it creates a problem for the protestant understanding of the biblical authority.

Justification

2011-08-31T16:32:00.002-06:00

I was reading this post on justification at Gospel Coalition. I thought as a Catholic there would be something to debate. The post zeros in on the protestant understanding on Rom 3:28

Having been convicted of our personal sin, the second fundamental thing Lloyd-Jones argues must be understood “is God’s way of salvation in Christ.” The gospel. At the heart of the gospel, according to Romans 3, is the imputation of Jesus’ righteousness to the sinner by faith in Jesus’ work on the cross and resurrection. We stand righteous before God through an alien righteousness credited to our account. We are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, apart from any works of our own. Understanding this, Lloyd-Jones contends, unlocks the key to spiritual joy and increasing victory over spiritual depression. Without this basic understanding, spiritual depression will continue to reign in the lives of those who are nominally Christian and unconvinced of their sin.

The funny thing is that this is all right. As a Catholic I don't agree with the language. It can be misleading but the point is valid and Catholic. We must understand the depth of our sin and our powerlessness to do anything about it without the grace of God. If we don't get that then we tend to think of God as a coach or a teacher. Someone who helps us improve ourselves. Gives us a hand. We tend to divide life up. I am OK in this area but I need help over here. Why does that lead to depression? Because we are not OK anywhere. Everything we have that is worth anything is by grace.

People who have been raised in a Christian faith have a tougher time with this. Partly because often they have not sinned as badly as some others and they want to hold onto that as something in their favor. God should be pleased with me because I have been a good person. But why were you good? Isn't it just because God has granted you more grace growing up? Given what you have received should you not be a lot holier than you are? This is the point the Jews in Rome were missing. The Roman gentiles were into some pretty serious sexual sins and the Jews mostly stayed away from them. But the Jews sinned in different ways and Paul shows from the Old Testament that God is not impressed with their lives either.

The truth about sin is so humiliating that people being raised in the church stop hearing it. Even when it is preached over and over they never really contemplate it on a personal level. I know I didn't for long periods of my growing up. It is much more pleasant to believe you are just a bit holier than most people. Sure you need grace but not as much as some people you know.

The fact is that nothing here contradicts the fact that salvation by grace needs to produce works. That the imputed righteousness is also infused and your heart and mind are transformed by that grace to the extent you cooperate with it. In fact, it seems like many of the problems he describes would be less serious for Catholics. We would still have them but the Catholic distinctives seem like they would help rather than make them worse.

First you have mortal sins. The teaching that certain sins break your relationship with God. Often people look at their life and compare it to other people. The distinction between mortal and venial sins gives us a standard that does not depend on the people around us. When we fail we can't minimize it. We are a serious sinner. We need confession. We need to tell a priest what we did. It is humiliating. We get the same treatment as a murderer would get. We are entirely dependent on God's mercy.

Secondly there is the increased focus on Jesus' suffering. When we look at a crucifix we start to understand how great our sin is and how great God's love is. Same with the sorrowful mysteries or the stations of the cross. Even the mass, when we experience it as a sacrifice, it humbles us. I need to have this perfect sacrifice offered to God for me because I have sinned.

The idea of justification as a one time thing seems like it would make this problem worse. We become aware of our sin more and more over time. We need constant conversion. We need to keep going back to God and desiring more grace and greater graces. If you think salvation was somehow done somewhere in your past then you might not be as quick to go back to square one.

Still the remarkable thing about reading this was how little disagreement there is. They say the two main issues are Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura. The more I think about Sola Fide the more I understand it to be a minor issue. Most of the differences are misunderstandings and much of what the reformers thew out has been reconstructed in some other form.

I see the opposite with Sola Scriptura. The more I think about it the more I see how deep and how serious the problem is. How many doctrines are effected. How much the cause of Christ has been damaged by it. How much it makes people self-centered when they are trying to be Christ-centered. They might be the two pillars of protestantism but they are not equal.

Theology and Reality and Divorce

2011-08-25T14:16:00.001-06:00

I saw the title, When Theology and Reality Don't Meet, and thought it would be about sentimentalism. That is human emotions being taken as a more reliable indicator of right and wrong then divine revelation. I was right.

The phone rang. My dad tearfully explained that he and mom had separated and would be getting divorced. I was devastated, shocked and overwhelmed. My parents’ 34-year marriage was ending.
As a seminary student I’ve been in several classes that explored divorce. Up till now it’s been a topic I’ve been able to discuss from a purely ethical, theological or pastoral standpoint.

So she has two sources of information here. Her feelings and her seminary. Now it makes sense to allow your life experience to shape your theology. Emotions are a part of that. But you can't just dismiss what is taught in seminary. There is a lot of life experience behind that as well. What you really can't lose sight of is God as the author of marriage. What He says about marriage and divorce has to be central. Normally young men and women cannot make promises that will last a lifetime. It is a God thing. So going to our own emotions for wisdom about it is going to be limited.

The neat theology formed in the safety of my seminary classrooms is clashing with the reality of my life. I’m no longer a safe distance from this issue; I’m living it. For the first time, my theology and reality are not matching up. The paradigm on which I have based huge portions of my life and faith has been yanked out from under me, and I am lost.

You wonder why she bothers with theology at all. If she allows it to be yanked from under her when life gets hard then what good is it? Faith is only useful when it shows us a deeper reality than we would otherwise see. If we can't accept a deeper truth than our strongest emotions present to us then we really have not surrendered to God. So she is right to describe herself as lost.

Jesus speaks on divorce multiple times and says that it is only okay in cases of adultery. So is that the answer? I’m not a literalist but how do you argue something that seems so clear?

Actually it is unclear what Jesus means by "adultery." He does not use the normal word for it. It is very possible that He meant couples that were never married and just cohabiting. God had not put them together so they are in a different situation. What is clear is that sacramental marriage is forever.

If we can interpret Jesus’ words in a different way, how do we go about applying these interpretations?

This is a good question. Particularly when we have a society that thinks serial monogamy is just fine. Commitment for a few years or even a few months is seen as more realistic. But it radically changes marriage from complete a gift of self to a relationship where I will abandon you as soon as you cease to be useful to me. One version of this is to actually marry each partner and then divorce them when you want to move on. So how can you accept divorce and not accept that kind of abuse of the marriage bond? You are either serious about your marriage vows or you are not.

If we take Jesus’ words literally, are we then requiring people to stay in abusive marriages? What about marriages completely devoid of commitment or love? Would Jesus have really wanted those unions to continue?

Staying in a marriage does not mean you have to live with the person. If that person is abusive then move out.But you are still married. You don't marry someone else. You don't date. You live as a married person who's family life has sadly broken down.

A lot can be done to fix bad marriages. If a marriage is devoid of commitment or love today it need not be that way forever. God gives us a ton of grace to change our hearts if we let Him. It is when everything seems hopeless that God does His best work. Sometimes God asks us to suffer for a while. Unite your suffering with that of Christ and pray.

Adultery didn’t end my parents’ marriage, other mistakes did. Does that make their divorce more sinful?

Only God can judge the mitigating circumstances in a person's heart. Divorce is objectively immoral. It is a choice. It is not something that happens to a couple. One partner or the other must file for divorce. When they do they are committing a sin.

How am I supposed to deal with this? How do I form a new theology when I didn’t know the old one was broken? How much of my theology needs fixing?

That is a big question. When you accept sentimentalism you are essentially rejecting Christianity. The consequences are far reaching. You look at any of the modern controversies and you see sentimental arguments. Gay marriage, abortion, women's ordination, they all have people behind them with very sad stories. Do we change our theology every time?

The real issue behind this is Sola Scriptura. Where does this concept of "my theology" come from? Why does she think she has the right to formulate a theology of her own? Sola Scriptura tells her she can. The reality is that when we are emotionally involved in a situation we need the church all the more because our capacity for sound theological reason is much less. When the only authority you have is scripture and plain reason then anything that compromises your ability to reason distorts your picture of God. This often happens when you need Him most.

How Lost Was Old Testament Israel?

2011-08-24T13:09:00.001-06:00

Can God's covenant community fall into serious error? Protestants say Yes. They point to the nation of Israel. It fell into major sin for long periods of time. But is that the same thing? There are different levels of error one can fall into. There is disobedience. That is a constant reality in the church. The people can know the truth and simply ignore it. Neither Israel in the Old Testament nor the Catholic Church in the New Testament is protected from that. Even very serious disobedience that rightly shocks us because we don't expect God's covenant community to ever behave that badly. Both those communities have behaved very badly and did not lose their status as God's chosen community because of it.

Then there is another level of error. Where the truth is ignored. The community stops teaching the truth. Other teachings start to fill the void. But they know these other teachings are not the truth of Jehovah. They know it is something they have borrowed from some other religion. This can go on for generations and there might only be a vague awareness of the fact that there is a truth about God that has been lost. That is really a more extreme case of disobedience. Not only do they not respect God's truth enough to obey it but they don't respect it enough to even understand it and pass it on to their children. So the practice of the faith goes from inconsistent to non-existent. Still when somebody calls them back to God they know what that is. Not in detail but they know it is not what they are doing.

Then there is another level of error. That is an error when they do something they think is holy and right in the eyes of Jehovah and it just isn't. That is a more serious error because when you have an obedient heart that is the time when you benefit from knowing God's truth. If you are not disposed to obey God then knowing what He wants of you is not going to help you. But if you want to do good but end up doing evil because of an honest mistake that is sad. You would expect that over the long term God would correct your mistake. At least when the entire covenant community is embracing the same error. God should have some method of correcting the error rather than having it persist for a long time and become firmly embedded in their spiritual life.

This is the level of error protestants say existed in the early church. The Eucharist, the papacy, saints, relics, penance, etc. If they are errors they are not small errors. They persisted for a long time. Many people during that time were very impressive believers. They were very smart. They were willing to sacrifice. There were many miracles and martyrs. People saw visions and dreamed dreams. Yet all these errors continued to be embraced without controversy. The Holy Spirit seemed to be working powerfully in some ways and yet not leading them into truth as Jesus promised He would.

The question is whether there is a parallel of that in Old Testament Israel. I don't know that there is. People engaged in temple prostitution and child sacrifices but they didn't think Moses and Elijah would have been fine with it. They knew they were following other faiths and other gods. When Ezra found the book of the law they read it eagerly. They knew they needed to hear it. Nobody thought they were already understanding and obeying God. They knew they were ignorant. Much of that ignorance was by choice. The book was always there. They just had not looked before. But that goes back to the first type of error. The error of disobedience rather than an error of invincible ignorance.

I don't see anything in the Old Testament that indicates a strong embrace of some false doctrine as if it were the truth of Jehovah God. Kings led Israel into sin. Even then some remained faithful. They did the best they could with the lights they had. Then as now people were not always blessed with strong spiritual leadership. But you didn't have strong spiritual leaders that were phonies and pushed a bunch of false teachings that fooled everyone. They got false teachings from false gods. It is not at all analogous to what protestants think happened in the early church.

John Allen Nails It

2011-08-23T15:08:00.000-06:00

He reflects on World Youth Day and talks about evangelical Catholicism.

Historically speaking, Evangelical Catholicism isn’t really “conservative,” because there’s precious little cultural Catholicism these days left to conserve. For the same reason, it’s not traditionalist, even though it places a premium upon tradition. If liberals want to dialogue with post-modernity, Evangelicals want to convert it – but neither seeks a return to a status quo ante. Many Evangelical Catholics actually welcome secularization, because it forces religion to be a conscious choice rather than a passive inheritance. As the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, the dictionary definition of an Evangelical Catholic, once put it, “We’re really at the dawn of Christianity.”

Paradoxically, this eagerness to pitch orthodox Catholicism as the most satisfying entrée on the post-modern spiritual smorgasbord, using the tools and tactics of a media-saturated global village, makes Evangelical Catholicism both traditional and contemporary all at once.

This is exactly my experience and my hope for the catholic church. Catholics who have made a conscious choice to embrace the doctrines and traditions of the church. Many liberal Catholics have more of the unconscious cultural Catholic tradition. Everything they love about being Catholic is pretty much exactly the stuff I could not care less about. But inside that huge community there is a growing minority who have seen the beauty and truth of the faith and have been changed forever. Many of them, like myself, used to be evangelical protestants. I had not heard the term evangelical Catholic before but it works for me.

Whatever you call it it is interesting to see a guy like Allen notice is coming. He sees it as something that is coming from Pope Benedict down but also something that is growing at the grass roots level. It is a move of the Holy Spirit to bring the church back from the dead. I know in North America it was never really dead but in Europe it really was. See such huge numbers of young people in Madrid is a sign that renewal is coming. Abuse scandals didn't matter. A pope who lacks charisma didn't matter. Society's growing intolerance of church teaching didn't matter. People come because they believe it is true. The Eucharist is really Jesus' body. The pope is really the vicar of Christ. Confession really is a sacramental encounter with Jesus. Young people around Europe are coming to believe this in greater and greater numbers.

This is a movement that is so old it is new. Post-Christian society can't understand the Catholic faith anymore. So believing what the church has always taught becomes a strange new idea. I mean really believing it. Trying to order your life around it rather than just going through the motions. Even saying you want to be a saint makes people look at you funny. As if being Catholic and not wanting to be a saint made any sense at all.

Two Kinds of Faith

2011-08-22T16:32:00.001-06:00

This week's gospel is Mat 16:13-20:

¹³ When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
¹⁴ They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
¹⁵ “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
¹⁶ Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ,the Son of the living God.”
¹⁷ Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. ¹⁸And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. ¹⁹ I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” ²⁰ Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.

Here Jesus contrasts a faith based on human opinion with a faith based on revelation. This is a distinction being made a lot in discussions at Called to Communion and other places. But I was surprised to see how clear Jesus makes that in this passage. Where can we get information about Jesus? We can just see what people are saying. We will get answers. Actually pretty good ones. Jesus is a prophet. So comparing Him to Elijah or Jeremiah is not way off base. But it is too small. It is not the fullness of truth about Jesus.

In verse 15 Jesus asks "What about you?" As modern individualists we tend to think Jesus is making it personal. Asking what my faith is like. But He is asking the disciples. Those that have been chosen by Jesus to have a special role in the Kingdom. Jesus is suggesting the opinion of the disciples is going to be more accurate. That opinion is expressed by Peter. Jesus blessed Peter. Not just saying Peter got an answer right. He is saying the rightness is not just a coincidence. That the process of Peter speaking for the disciples was mysteriously transformed into God speaking through Peter.

Now if Jesus was just referring to an unrepeatable event that God revealed to Peter the 10 words he said in verse 16 then it is quite unremarkable. Why validate the way Peter arrived at this answer rather than just validating the answer itself? It only makes sense if this process can be used for other questions. So even before we get to verse 18 and 19 and the images of the rock and the keys we already have the suggestion that Jesus is teaching us how to get past human opinion and arrive at divine revelation.

The fact that Peter was to get the keys of the kingdom of heaven would have been expected. The disciples knew they were to reign with Christ. It was obvious Peter was the leader of the disciples. Why would Peter not be made leader of the church? The modern idea that Jesus' kingdom might not have any officers or magistrates or administrators would not have occurred to anyone. The notion that one person would serve as a chief administrator under the king was well known then and is well known now. Every president will appoint a chief of staff. Peter was the obvious choice.

It would also be obvious that obedience to Jesus would imply obedience to Peter. You could not call yourself a follower of a king and disobey his officials. To rebel against the official was to rebel against the king. Why should the kingdom of heaven be any different?

Then you have the rock. Peter is the foundation of the church. This makes no sense to many people. How can a person, even a person with successors, be the foundation of the church? You see leaders being called the head or the summit or the top. Who calls them the foundation? Foundations are important but they are invisible. Popes are not invisible. They are to be servant leaders.

I do see the papacy as being thing that makes the Catholic church resist cultural pressure when other churches have caved in badly. The pope is not answerable to anyone but God. He has huge power in the church and is basically immune to public pressure. When a new pope is chosen it is by and from a college of cardinals that the old pope picked. So there is very little chance for the waves of human opinion to get in and toss the church around. Sure there is the Holy Spirit protecting the church but it does seem like in terms of human structure the papacy is designed to resist change rather than reflect the will of the membership.

Abortion and Religion

2011-08-19T15:34:00.000-06:00

One of Canada's national newspapers ran an article on abortion today. I have been thinking I have not discussed abortion enough so I thought I would respond.

Much is made about the influence of religion in determining one’s opinion about this issue. Indeed, Christian beliefs are cited as a principal motivation for many prominent opponents of legalized abortions, including Linda Gibbons, whose June 25 speech to the Toronto Pro-Life Forum included several references to her religion. However, the faithful do not hold a monopoly on objection to the euthanizing of unborn children, as I consider myself to be a committed, though lonely opponent of both abortion and religion.

Christianity is a rational religion. I know opponents of religion don't really grasp this. Most Christians oppose abortion both because of their faith and because it is the morally reasonable position to take. It is not either/or. Christians often make arguments that don't involve religion. Peter Kreeft makes one here. Scott Klusendorf makes more here. The fact that they sometimes include references to religion in their speeches does not mean they only make religious arguments. I don't know of any pro-life person that is not happy to say there are pro-life atheists.

I am convinced that the pro-life position is not dependent upon any references to Christianity and that religious arguments about the sanctity of life and the protection of unborn children are actually very powerful secular arguments in disguise. Nevertheless, both sides of the debate continue to promulgate the notion that religion, or lack thereof, is the linchpin of both pro- and anti-abortion perspectives.

We are conflating two things here. Is the argument religious? That is does it require an explicitly religious premise like "The bible is the Word of God?" No. We can stick to purely secular premises. But that does not mean one's attitude towards Christianity is irrelevant. Most people have a strong emotional reaction to traditional Christianity. Either they love it or they hate it. Very few have no reaction at all. This will impact what people make of the various arguments. It is not a purely logical exercise.

It is impossible not to notice the way in which this debate has been unnecessarily complicated by religious differences. With few exceptions, both hardline supporters and opponents of abortion have set up hermetically-sealed universes for themselves, in which they write and speak of their convictions before pre-approved audiences and then smear each other’s positions outrightly as hedonistic or theocratic. The consequence is a stalemate, in which positively no progress is made on the debate.

I would say this about pro-life politicians. We don't have such beasts in Canada but the ones in the US tend to only beat the pro-life drum in front of solidly pro-life audiences. Once they know many pro-choice people are in the crowd they tone down the rhetoric. Pro-life activists are the opposite. They try and talk to anyone who will listen. That is not that many. Most people who have not made up their mind are quite hesitant to get into a discussion.

I do think the pro-choice side is much less logical. I don't think they seek out pre-approved audiences either. They typically use their access to the mass media and get their message to everyone. But the message is more of a smear than an argument. People are imposing their morality on me. People want to turn back the clock. Even the name pro-choice is more of a smear. Like abortion is just a random choice people want to remove because they somehow don't like choices.

In order free ourselves from this deadlock, both sides need to take responsibility for these false perceptions. On one hand, opponents of abortion need to have more faith in their own arguments, ironic as that may sound, and resist the urge to mire their dialogue with religious rhetoric. While using this sort of language may be mutually satisfying among fellow believers, it quite effectively alienates adherents of other faiths and non-believers who may be sympathetic to the pro-life persuasion. Making this adjustment would not only serve to gain non-Christian support for the cause, but would also shake the pro-life position from its stereotype as an entirely religious opinion.

Absolutely. I just would add that many pro-life people are doing this. Often people are tone deaf. They hear a religious argument because they expect to hear one. Even when the speaker explicitly states that his argument won't be religious and it isn't.

By contrast, the pro-abortion camp should recognize that there is a secular debate to be had about the issue. (I could barely believe my eyes when, in response to this claim, a liberal and fellow secularist wrote to me: “I suspect [that] religious dogmatism is so deeply entrenched, you cannot see how ingrained it is. What viable reason is there against abortion? I say none. Any reason given would probably have its roots in religious dogma.”) Most reasonable people, on either side of the political divide, should be able to recognize that the abortion issue amounts to a conflict of rights between an expectant mother and her unborn child, and that prioritizing these competing freedoms is the role for rigorous public discourse.

Interesting comment. Under this analysis the pro-choice position that is law in Canada and the US has to be considered a complete failure. There is no prioritizing of competing freedoms. The unborn child is given no rights. Zero. None at all. Never. So if that is the goal society could hardly fail worse than we are now failing. In Canada I would also say there is no rigorous public discourse. It is almost never discussed and when it is the pro-life position is not allowed to be defended. So, yes, recognize there is secular debate on the issue and that many pro-life activists are willing to engage in that debate without referencing to God or the bible. They may be Christian but they are capable of secular arguments.

Furthermore, apologists for abortion should be cautious about characterizing pro-life advocates as misogynists. This is not only hopelessly demagogic, but is also false in almost all cases, including religious opposition to abortion.

So saying this is uncharitable and it is untrue so therefore you should be "cautious" when you say it?

Finally, supporters of legal abortion should recognize that the privilege of comprehensive and secular dialogue is an end in itself, and not simply a means of achieving liberal aims.
It is certain that the religious angle to the abortion debate provides both sides with ammunition in prosecuting their cases; however, it has also led to a protracted gridlock, in which all parties refuse to further engage. Only by recognizing the self-evident ethical dilemma posed by abortion, without being obstructed by religious differences, can we hope to make progress toward ending the practice.

I am not sure the ethical dilemma is evident to everyone. Once you understand the dilemma the answer is obvious. Some characterize the dilemma as "Should I bring a child into the world?" But that isn't it. The child is already in the world. It has a beating heart, fingernails, etc. The question is not can I bring it into the world. The question is can I kill it. When that ethical dilemma becomes evident then the answer becomes obvious. But the whole pro-choice game is to prevent the question from being seen in that light. So why dialogue? Why break a gridlock that preserves a status quo which they like?

Trouble At My Alma Mater

2011-08-16T12:45:00.000-06:00

Calvin College has a flare up over views on creation/evolution. A professor of biology has left and another one is under a cloud for writing about evolution and Christianity. The college has a statement saying all professors must affirm the Bible is the authoritative, Spirit-breathed Word of God, and fully reliable. But many people think that implies you reject evolution and many think it does not. These professors are in the ladder camp but many Calvin Alumni are in the former. So who is right? No way to know.

This is a good example of how my thinking has changed so much since becoming Catholic. As a protestant I would have one of two reactions to this. One would be to declare it unimportant. The other would be to pick a side. So I would end up disrespecting something. Either disrespecting the doctrinal question or disrespecting the people on one side of the argument. I might have said what one of the professors involved said:

Harlow, who like Schneider has tenure and considers himself a committed Christian, said that the backlash reflects the views of fundamentalists within the Reformed denomination, not what most people think. "I work in the mainstream of Biblical scholarship, and we believe that the early chapters of Genesis are divinely inspired stories which imagine the human condition and creation of the world. Their intent is to make theological statements. They weren't written to provide geological or biological information," Harlow said. "My college freshmen seem to be able to handle this, but fundamentalists get all bent out of shape over this."

Notice how the fundamentalist group is being disrespected. It is not a good dynamic. But he is reacting to people who want him fired from his job and have already gotten his colleague to resign. So you can understand the frustration. Another faculty member takes a shot at colleges that have affirmed the more fundamentalist position.

This faculty member said he is not sure what the future holds for colleges like Calvin. While it may be more difficult to reconcile science and faith, he said that he sees some Christian colleges that "are thriving by ignoring the scientific evidence."

But this goes to the heart of the problem. Why is it so difficult to reconcile science and faith? It comes from Sole Scriptura. When do you change your biblical interpretation to account for scientific discoveries? Sola Scriptura not only does not provide an answer but it rules out any potential answer. Why? Because under Sola Scriptura any bible-based argument is infallible. The college can't overrule it. The synod of the church can't. Nobody can even set out what questions are to be addressed by the church and what questions are properly addressed by science. The fundamentalist has his proof texts and that settles it in his mind. It just does not matter who tells them what.

In the Catholic world there is at least a chance of charity. The church makes clear what the faith is. We are not allowed to ignore dogma but we are not allowed to create dogma either. We might think everyone should believe in a literal six-day creation but we don't have the authority to impose that on anyone. We can save our angry letter writing campaigns for when someone explicitly denies church teaching. But in those cases the professors should know they are doing that and they have excluded themselves as reliable teachers of the faith. So even then there need not be a lack of charity. You are not saying they are lousy or dishonest bible interpreters. The church's teaching's on these matters are clear.

Now that is how is should work. Often it does not. Sadly many Catholic schools have drifted into liberalism. Why? Because many people didn't trust dogma. Just as Catholicism gives you the chance to be charitable it gives you the chance to respect truth. It does not guarantee either. This is a case of Catholicism not being tried and found wanting but being found difficult and left untried.

So at the end of the day I have to admit Calvin College has done better than many schools in avoiding the twin pitfalls of liberalism and fundamentalism. They have chosen a middle ground and have been right on many issues. But they are relying on human discernment to find that middle ground. What is more everyone recognizes that as fallible so they feel free to attack it. So as human effort goes I think they have done pretty well. It is just that human effort is not enough. We need grace and the particular grace needed is only available through the Catholic church. So their effort is ultimately going to fail. It has already failed on issues like contraception and divorce. They unknowingly embraced error on those issue. That will keep happening. But they do better than most and remarkably well given the lights they have.

This is why I am grateful for the few orthodox Catholic schools we have. They seem to be growing but they are still quite a small blip on the overall Catholic higher education scene. Protestants need to see how Catholics can reconcile science and religion quite beautifully and naturally. They can avoid fundamentalism and liberalism. It is not going to happen unless Catholic schools as a whole get a lot more Catholic.

How Much Do Bad Sexual Choices Affect You?

2011-08-12T08:56:00.001-06:00

Fr Barron said a few things about the hook up culture and John Paul II. One thing I found interesting is he quoted Dr. Leonard Sax and his book Why Gender Matters. That is a book I had read and was impressed by but I didn't think many others had read it. So it was pretty cool to see Fr Barron talk about it. The other thing I found interesting was a point he made on the forming of an ethical person.

Karol Wojtyla taught that in making an ethical decision, a moral agent does not only give rise to a particular act, but he also contributes to the person he is becoming. Every time I perform a moral act, I am building up my character, and every time I perform an unethical act, I am compromising my character. A sufficient number of virtuous acts, in time, shapes me in such a way that I can predictably and reliably perform virtuously in the future, and a sufficient number of vicious acts can misshape me in such a way that I am typically incapable of choosing rightly in the future.

This is not judgmentalism. It is a kind of spiritual/moral physics, an articulation of a basic law.

This is something he applies directly to engaging in acts of casual sex. That is that they compromise your moral character. This is something you don't hear very much about. That sexual immorality will produce other forms of immorality. Conversely that being sexually pure will make you better morally in other areas of life.

This is something many people assume is false. When Bill Clinton does something sexually immoral nobody says that that makes all his moral judgements suspect. People assume that is just one area of life that won't affect his job, even such a multifaceted job as president of the US. They talk about Kennedy who committed adultery a number of times. He is considered a saint by American civil religion so he can't be questioned.

Even in today's paper there was a headline that struck me. A person on trial for child pornography was charged with murder in an "unrelated" case. That seemed like a loaded word to put in a headline. How do you know the moral problems he has in the area of sex are unrelated to moral problems in other areas of life? I do remember reading about some study that showed exactly the opposite. That people who indulge in porn do commit more crime. That is violent crime, not just sexual crimes.

I find that even many Christian resources don't make this argument. They say your sexual choices impact your relationship with God. That might in turn effect your moral life generally. But the idea that even for non-Christians and even for people that don't believe something is immoral. Just the fact that what they are doing is against the moral order will cause their character to degrade.

So even if you honestly think there is nothing wrong with hook ups or pornography or artificial contraception just the fact that it is wrong means your entire moral life will suffer if you engage in it. The "acts can misshape me in such a way that I am typically incapable of choosing rightly in the future." Certainly if you know they are wrong and do them anyway the effects will be worse. But simply getting rid of all teaching on the wrongness of such things does not solve the problem. The wrongness is inherent in the act. Our conscience will tell us that on some level at least for a while.

Those of us whom God has entrusted with the knowledge of that wrongness should say something as well. After all, evil won't stop when it infects the whole person. It will infect the whole of society. Unless people start saying they don't want to live in that kind of society. But so many of those people have been misshaped by what was considered casual sex 30 years ago. Not as bad as the hook up culture today but a long way from a truly moral sexuality. Back then 3 sexual partners a year was considered casual. Now it is more like 30. So we are getting worse. Most of today's parents have not had a solid moral formation so they can't provide one. Really a return to the church is our only hope.

Love and Science

2011-08-11T14:48:00.000-06:00

People love to separate the spiritual from the physical. The old heresy was gnosticism. That said the spiritual was good and the physical was bad. Very few people defend gnosticism explicitly. Yet you still see it as the underlying assumption behind much modern thinking. It is tempting because the physical can get so messy and painful.

Today a lot of people are going the other direction. They separate the physical and the spiritual but prefer the physical. The physical world can be examined by science. That is where the real truth is. The spiritual is nice but just not as important. Spiritual truth is kind of fuzzy. There might be contradictions that could not happen in science. It just does not matter except at a very subjective emotional level. Some people say it matters a lot after you die. You might believe your spirit lives on if in a good place or a bad place based on this or that but who knows who is right about these matters? The really serious minds focus on the physical world. That is the path to progress.

Still most people would say that love is the highest human value. But this kind of thinking says love is not part of what is real. Is it physical? If it is physical then it is just a state of a set of neurons in a person's brain. Apart from the lover's brain there is no such thing as love. But saying a neurological phenomenon is the highest human value does not make a lot of sense. It is like saying having good teeth is the highest human good. Sure neurons are more complicated than teeth but it is still an arrangement of body parts. Love must be more than that.

If it is more than that then it is not physical. That means truth about love is second class. It is in the category of fuzzy non-scientific truth. But how can what is most valuable not correspond to what is most real? So either way love is diminished. It is either a neurological phenomenon or it is something deeper. If it is deeper then it must take a back seat to solid, scientific truths.

Getting Answers From God

2011-08-10T13:01:00.000-06:00

As Christians we all want to obey God but we don't always know what God wants. So you have vocation stories. Someone explains exactly how they figured out God was calling them to religious life. You have them for the married vocation to but those are normally called romances. But it is similar. Typically at a young age people are discerning how God wants them to spend the rest of their lives. How do they know this? God does not often give an external command. He could appear to a young person and say "marry so and so" or perhaps "become a monk." He does do that but only in a small minority of cases. He could do it more. Somehow God wants us to discover who we are rather than Him just telling us. We tend to rebel against things that are imposed on us. When it is our own idea we are much more likely to embrace it.

We also have an amazing capacity for questioning the most obvious signs. If we did have a vision or a dream and God spoke to us and told us exactly what His will for our life was then what would happen? We would proceed with great confidence at first. But as we went along and we encountered struggles and the vision faded in our memory we might start to wonder. Did I really hear from God? Did I imagine it? Could my mind have been playing tricks on me? We imagine that God could resolve all our doubts with one obvious sign but God knows there are deeper doubts there that will resurface even after something like that. So he puts us through a much slower process that deals with those deeper doubts. Letting your faith that this is God's will for you grow over time. So you might not be able to describe how or why you became certain this was His will. But you do get a peace about it.

So we can spend much time searching and praying for our mission and God can be quite slow to answer. Often He is giving hints. Pointing us in the right direction. Why does it take long? One reason is we are not willing to contemplate that God might be telling us what he is telling us. GK Chesterton said the big step in his Catholic conversion is when he simply decided to be fair to the church. Once he took that wall of prejudice down the conversion process proceeded slowly but surely. That is pretty common in conversion stories and vocation stories. There is something that is preventing the person from seriously considering going there. Once that has been removed it is a matter of due diligence. You still need time to pray and get questions answered. If it is truly God's will that should strengthen your resolve.

Another reason it can take a long time is because the answer can be way bigger than we imagined. I know when I prayed for a wife in my early 20's God seemed not to answer for a long time. In hindsight I can see that He had to clean up a lot of issues in my life before I was ready for the kind of marriage He wanted for me. That took time. But back then I didn't see those connections. I thought God was just slow.

Something similar often happens when people ask God for something and the answer is to discard protestantism and become Catholic. They often don't know how big a thing they have asked God for. They might just want to know what God's truth is on one doctrinal question that has been bugging them. But the answer is going to imply that many doctrines they are quite confident about are actually wrong. So people get confused as to why God can't just show them whether women can be ordained or not. But their understanding of ordination is way off base so what seems like a simple question isn't simple at all.

Asking God questions is not safe. The answers can mess with our lives big time. But we need to do it and we need to be willing to consider any answer. We need to persist. We need to use all the means of grace available. Read the bible and pray for sure but don't stop there. Fast, make sacrifices, do Eucharistic adoration, have a mass said for your intention, say a rosary, ask saints to intercede, ask family and friends and clergy to pray and give advice. There are so many ways God gives us to pray.

The Centrality of Love

2011-08-05T16:00:00.000-06:00

Thinking more about spiritual formation and how someone might appear to be well formed but internally they have been pushed into compliance and don't really believe what they are living and saying is true. So what is the answer? How can you be sure your formation program works deep down. The only way is to love them. If people are loved then they will be honest with you about their most politically incorrect thoughts. If people are loved they won't tow the line out of fear of the consequences. They will know whatever consequences happen are designed for their own good. This is why this blog is called Speak the Truth in Love. Because truth spoken without love can become a weapon that can drive people away. I never want to do that.

It seems that the Catholic church and the larger, entrenched protestant churches didn't have a good combination of truth and love. Certainly in the Catholic church before Vatican II we had truth and little love. After Vatican II we had love and very little truth. Neither really worked. Part of it has to do with size. When you need to teach a lot of youth with a few staff you can either drill it into them and allow no talk back or you can just discuss what they think the truth might be and have them feel good but learn nothing. Given the choice I would prefer the former. At least you learn facts. They might come alive for you later. If you just leave with a warm fuzzy feeling that is not likely to help you later.

But why choose? Why can't we have both? Develop some real relationships with youth and teach them the faith. OK, so you won't be able to process thousands of kids with a small group of volunteers. But if you make the ministry rewarding for both teachers and pupils then it will grow. Pray hard and God will send you enough teachers and enough kids.

The key is to go deep. The temptation is to keep it simple and fun. I have done youth ministry as in protestant and Catholic settings and that is the common theme. Too much focus on experience and too little on content. Many kids are very bright and they need to be pushed. Society tells them religion is for the weak minds. Real thinkers don't talk about faith much. Churches play right into that by dumbing down the faith. Not just intellectually but often spiritually too. Often the part about taking up your cross gets short shrift. There is an assumption that if we challenge people they will head for the door. Some will. But some will take up the challenge. Do we dare offend some to convert those who are willing. Often the big bureaucratic churches won't go there. They want fewer complaints instead of more saints.

Preacher's Kids and Catholic Societies

2011-08-04T11:39:00.000-06:00

Carl Olson has a post about preachers kids (or PK's as they are called in the protestant world) and strongly Catholic cultures like Ireland, Quebec, Portugal, etc. that lost their religion as a culture. These are both interesting topics to me because I am a PK and because, as a Catholic convert, I have often struggled to understand how places that were almost completely Catholic became secularized so quickly. Olson has a theory.

On a much smaller, more intimate level, I liken this process in some ways to what I witnessed with many "preacher's kids" ("PKs", they were often called) from my Fundamentalist youth: they were so tightly controlled and directed in every facet of life—even into their late teens—that they struggled to think critically and properly engage with the larger culture. They were often given pat answers that weren't, in many cases, necessarily wrong, but which weren't so much taught as foisted upon them. There was, in other words, an approach to life that was quite reactionary and fearful, rather than confident and open to questions and debate

There are some parallels here. You would think that if a world and life view is strong then those who are closest to it and are deeply immersed in it from birth should see its strength and not be attracted to counterfeits. But it does not always work that way. PK's can rebel against the faith. They tend to be really good or really bad. But one would expect that having a strong spiritual father they would do better than they do.

Catholic societies have been generally weak. There are exceptions, Poland, the Philippines, until recently Ireland was one too. But Catholic societies like Spain, France and Italy have really not resisted liberal Christianity very well. Protestant countries like Sweden, Germany and England have not done much better but you would expect some spiritual benefit from true sacraments and a legitimate teaching authority. It is hard to see it.

So why does this happen? Olson's theory is that power can cause pastors to take shortcuts. That is they push their theology but they don't teach their theology. They arm twist people into the faith rather than presenting the full beauty of the faith and letting it attract people. So they look converted but they are not really converted. They have not made the free choice to embrace Catholicism. So it can become somewhat forced. God can seem oppressive. Intuitively they know He is not so they put the stuff they were forced to accept in a different category. It is not like being forced to accept truth about math or geography. It is personal so nagging doubts continue to bother you. But you might not be able to ask those questions out loud. You just don't feel people would respond well.

As a PK I can understand some of that. In school kids could ask offensive questions but I could not. If the preacher's son asks, "What is wrong with looking at pictures of naked women anyway?" there will be a different reaction than if a random teenage boy asks that. So you learn not to ask anything that might embarrass your father. For me that was not a big deal because I was not the kind of kid to ask stuff like that anyway. But I can see how some people might feel they had questions that there was no forum in which they could ask them.

So the thinking is that when religion becomes entrenched in society the fear of questioning can be widespread. Especially when it becomes associated with political movements or ethnic communities. Rejecting Catholicism becomes unthinkable on grounds that have nothing to do with religion. So even seriously questioning it is out of bounds. So nobody struggles with the hard questions in a good way. That leaves an invisible weakness in people's faith. As soon as the non-religious reason for being Catholic is removed then that weakness expresses itself.

I have posted previously on Belloc's explanation for the rise of liberal Catholicism. His focuses on intellectuals. Olson's theory, borrowing from Wiegel, really applies to all Catholics. He emphasizes the importance of clericalism in associating the church with something other than the faith. Belloc talks about anti-clericalism as a big factor. It seems like a contradiction but perhaps not. People tend to go from one extreme to another when they see a problem and overreact.

Is Sweden Atheist?

2011-08-03T14:41:00.000-06:00

Jerry Coyne has an article in USA today called You Can Be Good Without God. Most of it seems quite confused about the relationship between evolution and theism. He assumes the two are mutually exclusive. He must not get out much. He seems to make the error Ed Feser talks about.

The elimination of purpose and meaning from the modern conception of the material universe was not and is not a ‘result’ or ‘discovery’ of modern science, but rather a philosophical interpretation of the results of modern science which owes more to early modern secularist philosophers like Hobbes and Hume…than it does to the great scientists of the last few centuries

That is to say that as a biologist he things biological theories like evolution have obvious philosophical implications. The trouble is real philosophers see those implications as anything but obvious. So when Coyne says:

As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."

This is a straw man. I don't know anybody who argues this. But notice the opposites here. We have evolved morality and God-instilled morality. Why can't it be both? These are no only not opposites. They are not even in the same category. Asking whether something is from evolution is a scientific question. Asking whether something is from God is a religious question. So the thinking is quite muddled.

Then he addresses the question we have been discussing a bit on this blog.

Should we be afraid that a morality based on our genes and our brains is somehow inferior to one handed down from above? Not at all. In fact, it's far better, because secular morality has a flexibility and responsiveness to social change that no God-given morality could ever have. Secular morality is what pushes religion to improve its own dogma on issues such as slavery and the treatment of women. Secular morality is what prevents ethically irrelevant matters — what we eat, read or wear, when we work, or whom we have sex with — from being grouped with matters of genuine moral concern, like rape and child abuse. And really, isn't it better to be moral because you've worked out for yourself — in conjunction with your group — the right thing to do, rather than because you want to propitiate a god or avoid punishment in the hereafter?

So what does he think the purpose of morality is? Is it is just to be responsive to what we want to do? Then why have it? An immoral person does what he wants. Is that is the goal of morality? To do exactly what an immoral person would do? Secular morality was very responsive to the communists and the Nazis. It was able to "improve" it's dogmas against genocide.

Nor should we worry that a society based on secular morality will degenerate into lawlessness. That experiment has already been done — in countries such as Sweden and Denmark that are largely filled with non-believers and atheists. I can vouch from experience that secular European nations are full of well-behaved and well-meaning citizens, not criminals and sociopaths running amok. In fact, you can make a good case that those countries, with their liberal social views and extensive aid for the sick, old and disadvantaged, are even more moral than America.

About 70% of Sweden's population are members of a church. It is less Christian than the US but hardly an atheist state. Still he begs the question when he asserts Sweden is moral. Sure they have "well-behaved and well-meaning citizens, not criminals and sociopaths." But you could say that about Nazi and Communist countries as well. He seems to feel qualified to judge the morality of Sweden. Based on what?

The problem with secular morality is that whatever the ruling class thinks is moral can be declared to be moral.Western societies are not there yet. There is still a Christian moral sense deep in these populations. But how long will it last? It has given ground on abortion, euthanasia, etc. What is next? Where will it end? In principle all that is required is time and a continued decline in religion and anything can be accepted. Does that mean they will go out and do a bunch of evil things? They will do what is right in their own eyes. Just like Hitler did. Just like Stalin did.

Hope And Hell

2011-08-02T10:59:00.000-06:00

I noticed Bryan Cross weighed in on the Is Hell Empty issue. Glad to see it. I have a lot of respect for Brian. As normal he makes the point better than I did. I did want to reflect on one related question. Suppose we are hoping hell is empty. What are we hoping for? What would a world in which this hope was realized look like? People don't get this. That they are not hoping that God lowers the admission price of heaven. That when Rev 21:27 says, "Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful" that God will reconsider that and say why don't we just let everyone in? That might be what some universalists suggest but it is not what von Balthazar is discussing. What he is hoping for is that God changes hearts. That is a good thing to hope for.

Suppose it happened. Suppose God transformed every heart on the planet so that they were all in a state of grace. What would the world be like if that were the case? It would look like heaven. We would have on earth exactly those who would go to heaven. What would be the difference? Ignorance and freedom. People might do gravely evil things if they were invincibly ignorant of the fact that they were evil or if they were somehow unable to avoid the evil. Where would ignorance come from? Where would the lack of freedom come from? It would come from false teaching and the abuse of power. But even these false teachers can't be culpable for their evil so they must themselves be ignorant or under some sort of compulsion. It becomes like a Nazi chain of command where everyone is following orders and nobody is responsible. But somewhere it seems ignorance and/or compulsion must have a source.

But more than a source, ignorance must also have a purpose. Having a world where people can exercise free will and make clear whether or not their heart is inclined towards the things of God makes sense. Having a world where people do evil simply because they lack the information even in their conscience to know what is good or evil makes less sense. If the heart of man is not the problem but simply ignorance of what is truly good then it becomes very confusing why God does not just fix that problem. He has given us the bible and the church and a conscience but if ignorance is still so deep that good people continue to do gravely evil things all the time then it seems God has not given us enough. We simply don't have enough information to allow our conduct to reflect our character.

It seems that the only way to process the idea that hell is empty is to get rid of the notion that certain common acts are gravely evil. That is where non-Catholic universalists go. They say not attending mass or using contraception or indulging in pornography and masturbation etc. that these things are not really that bad and that you don't need to suppose any deep ignorance on the part of people who do these things. But trying to fit universalism within Catholic orthodoxy you have to assert widespread and deep and long term ignorance of even basic morality. What is does is create a world where nobody is culpable for anything. It does not stand up to scrutiny.