Wisdom of God

The mass readings kept going with 1 Cor 1 this week.

 Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
 Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.  Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

It struck me that we have two concepts that might seem to contradict.

1. God's truth is consistent with human reason
2. God's truth is foolish to men

How can something be logically, internally consistent and still be seen as foolish. It might be seen as a school of thought you disagree with but one would think that smart people should be able to see that there is no logical inconsistency and therefore there should be no shame in accepting it as true. But it does not work that way. Christianity will always be logical and it will always be scorned by the intellectual elites as foolishness. The same is true of Catholicism. The Catholic faith will always be the only logical consistent form of Christianity yet it will always be the one that is held up to the most ridicule by the brightest and best protestants.

Why is that? The answer lies in a flaw in human wisdom. Our reason can be warped at key moments by our will. We don't even realize it. No matter how good you are at logical analysis and no matter how unemotional you are in your approach you just can't follow the logic of God without the grace of God allowing you to do so. Something in you spirit will cause you to see a foolish argument where there is actually a rational argument. Call it sin. Call it Satan. The cross of Christ is never going to make sense to someone living in the flesh.Not because it is illogical Because it is too much love. The human heart is not capable of understanding that kind of  love. That is the essence of original sin. It is an inability to understand love rather than an inability to follow commandments.

A lot of people seem to feel that modern secular scholarship can pick up what the Christian tradition has created and we can continue to progress as society. That intellectuals, without using explicitly Christian language, can nonetheless improve on what Christians have done and do more good than harm. But it ignore the fact that secular people will see brilliant Christian insights as foolish. They won't look for ways to improve upon them. They will sneer at them and discard them.

So Christians intellectuals have a choice. To have our intelligence respected by society or to embrace the wisdom of God. If we try and do both we will get neither. If we pursue God we will often be mocked by some in the short term but in many cases the wisdom of such people is eventually recognized. Most are now trying to have it both ways and embarrassing themselves and embarrassing Jesus.

Protestants have the same problem. They think they can start with scripture and take it the rest of the way with human reason alone. But it is precisely when you look at the cross that human reason fails. We cannot follow the logic of supernatural love. This is why protestants never seem to accept the Catholic idea of how the grace of the cross is applied to our lives. Not that it is illogical. Still we need help to get there.

Pain and Evil

Another distinction St Thomas Aquinas makes that is quite relevant to our time is the difference between pain and evil. When we talk about objections to the existence of God we talk about the Problem of Pain and the Problem of Evil as two ways of stating the same objection. According to a Christian mindset they are. But many people don't think that way. The answer to the Problem of Evil comes from the fact that God has given us free will. But the problem of pain is different. Evil is one source of pain. There are others. Love is a source of pain. If we love to play football we will suffer the pain of practicing. Pain itself is not evil. The pain that flows directly from our evil choices is a blessing. It allows us to see graphic evidence that what we have done is evil. We may choose to ignore that evidence but at least it is there. If punching you in the nose is evil then the pain that you feel after I hit you will help me understand that ... or not.

Really all the consequences of evil are good. The only true evil is when humans are given the freedom to choose good or evil and choose evil. Everything else is good. Think about sickness and death. They are punishments for our sinful nature and not always for sinful acts. They remind us that we live in a fallen world. Everything in our spirit says these things are wrong. They should not be. They don't prove God does not exists but they do show God has made us for a better place. If such intense suffer really is meaningless then it would be hard to understand how God allows it. But it is an invitation to stop focusing on the things of this world and start storing up for yourself treasure in heaven. We may choose to ignore the invitation but the invitation itself is good.

When people voice objections like, "If there is a God why do so many bad things happen?" they are not typically thinking of the problem of evil even though Christians often answer like they are. They don't normally wonder why God does not prevent them from committing some sin or other. Sometimes addicts who have tried and failed to quit might ask this but that is not typical. What they want to know is why this world seems so broken. Why do innocents sometimes suffer more than those who are guilty? Why have I experienced so much pain in my life?

I find the more personal the question gets the less likely people are to jump to the conclusion that there is no God. The new atheists who work up moral outrage at this or that injustice to show there must not be a God are not often personally experiencing that pain. People who are in real pain have trouble believing God loves them but they also have trouble accepting a world where there is no path to peace. The problem with the ladder position is much more real to them than it is with the person just using the existence of suffering to make an intellectual point.

But there is always that jump. That suffering is always wrong. It reminds me of the quote from Spe Salvi at the top of this blog, "without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality." So they have begged the question. They have assumed there is no deeper truth than the sentimentality they appeal to. It could be an honest mistake. Many people teach something they call Christianity that actually does reduce to sentimentality.That is why Pope Benedict saw the need to write that encyclical.

Good and Evil

I have been reading some St Thomas Aquinas lately. It is his feast day today so I thought I might reflect on some of it. One thing was the idea that good exists and evil does not. Evil is just the absence of good or the corruption of good. It got me thinking. Do we talk too much about evil and not enough about good? In theory understanding good should come first if it exists. Only then can we properly understand what absence of good or corruption of good might be. I think of sexual morality. We seem to have it backwards. People talk about doing evil. That is committing gravely immoral sex acts. Often good is understood as the absence of such evil. When framing the discussion in that way good does not seem very appealing. St Thomas would have us focus on the good of sex. Concepts like purity and virginity and faithfulness. That is hard to do. Often even those terms are thought of in a negative way. Faithfulness means you have not committed adultery. Virginity means you have never had sex. But that focuses on how you didn't corrupt the good. Do we know how to talk about the good itself? Taylor Marshall asks this question about virginity.

I find it relates to revelation. The idea that whether something is morally permissible should be determined by whether it is explicitly condemned in scripture. That immediately brings the focus to the "thou shalt not" aspect of Christianity. That is one reason I appreciate John Paul's Theology of the Body. He attempts to paint a picture of the greatness of sex, fruitfulness, married and celibate vocations, etc. He sees the marital act as an icon of the inner life of the trinity. But protestants don't want revelation by icons. They want chapter and verse. So they are not going to make those arguments even if they can be found in scripture in places like Song of Songs or even the book of Revelation.

Catholic thinkers have been trying to digest Humanae Vitae. It has flummoxed most Catholics. They don't want to defend it. They don't want to attack it. So they try and avoid the subject as much as they can. Russell Shaw writes about that here. It is, of course, right. But so many can't imagine themselves publicly defending that. Some feel the church just got this one wrong. But you can't declare God' revelation to be in error without profoundly changing your relationship with Him. Then there are those who imagine a huge backlash if they teach it. I say imagine because when it is explained well the reaction is not bad. But it takes courage and quite frankly most Catholic leaders lack courage.

What is more, for many of these questions we not only have to present the good from a personal point of view but also from society's point of view. It is not enough to show the great good that makes you say No to personal sexual temptations. We need to show how the good of the nation is served by protecting the dignity of human sexuality, the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage, etc. But again these words cannot be simply short forms for opposing pornography, abortion, and gay marriage. We need to paint real positive pictures of what good is being lost. The slogans have caught this. They have done the market research and found Christian positions were seen as purely negative. So their slogans are positive and that is good. But there needs to be a positive moral and spiritual good that is behind that slogan. Something we can argue for from a very broad religious base.

It is all there in Catholic tradition. To whom much is given much will be expected. We have been given so much and we will need to answer for what we did with it.

Almost Christian

There is a lot of talk about this book. I think something similar was brought up a few years ago on White Horse Inn. I blogged about it on my old blog but it but we do need to be discussing it more. So the book is a great wake up call. What does it say?

You refer to this "moralistic therapeutic deism" quite a bit in your book. Can you unpack this term for us?

That's the name the NSYR came up with to describe the "belief system" of the majority of teens surveyed. The shorthand of moralistic therapeutic deism is that religion helps you feel good and do good, but God pretty much stays out of the way. Now, you can call on God if you need God to solve a problem, but God's track record on solving problems is pretty bad. So the primary God-images that the kids had were either as the "cosmic therapist" or the "divine butler." The therapist serves as the one who helps you feel good about yourself; the guidance counselor image comes to mind here when working with teenagers. The divine butler is somebody who comes when called upon but otherwise stays away. Those images were identified in the study as being dominant among teenagers. And that was very true with the teens I talked to as well. They believe that:

• A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. 
• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to Heaven when they die.

So what is happening with the youth we are not losing to atheism is they are arriving at a very truncated version of the Christian faith. In fact it is a stretch to call it Christian. It includes Jesus and the cross but you could remove Him completely and not really have to change a thing. Jesus is not central or essential. But this is what most kids who are going every week to church believe. It is not what most of those churches preach. But most teens are watering down what they hear on Sundays with the feel-good morality of the culture.

Now when you get a wake-up call what do people do? They say the problem is the ideas I disagree with. They must somehow be causing this. The liberals blame the conservatives and vice-versa. It is difficult to do much with the Catholic numbers. I think the Catholic church is in flux so a single point in time piece of data would not tell us how the shift towards more orthodoxy is moving the numbers.

I am not even convinced that more people leaving the church is bad. People might be honestly seeing that they believe in moralistic therapeutic deism and that is different from Catholicism so they should leave. Some leave to become nothing and some leave to become protestants. But how many remain moralistic therapeutic deism followers?

But we do need to get better at proposing the Catholic faith and making clear exactly how it is better than moralistic therapeutic deism. Making the difference clear is step one. Making the difference appealing is harder. How do we do that?

The one thought I had was to tell people to do what they would do if the Catholic faith was really true. That sounds so simple it is insulting. But I don't think Catholic do this very well. Everyone who joins the church points this out. Catholics say they believe Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. But do they celebrate the mass like that is true? Most don't even show up on any given Sunday. Kids have really good BS detectors. You say the Catholic church has the fullness of God's truth. Do we live that truth? Do we learn that truth? Do we even respect it?

The people who teach moralistic therapeutic deism really believe it. They live like it is true. They speak passionately about it. It is a pathetic theology. Just a small step from atheism. But a pathetic theology authentically believed is a lot more attractive than the gospel taught by hypocrites. If the Catholic faith is true it is worth dying for. Our youth can see that. But they can also see most Catholics are a long way from being willing to die for their faith. Most priests are a long way from challenging anyone to get ready. So what are they going to believe? It is easier to believe their parents were smart enough not to go all in on false faith. Nobody wants to believe their parents betrayed the true faith.

St Paul

Today is the feast day where Catholic celebrate the conversion of St Paul. I have been thinking a bit about Paul lately. A man at the prison was talking about the New Testament. He said it was written by those who knew Jesus best. I correct him. There were many people who knew Jesus better than Paul or Luke. But they wrote a large percentage of the New Testament. It surprised people.

The simplest way to produce the New Testament would be to have Jesus just write it. The next simplest would be for his disciples to write it. They wrote some important books for sure. But so much of it was written by St Paul. A man who came to the faith several years after Pentecost. Why would God do things that way? One of the things it does is it makes the genuineness of the conversion of St Paul central to the faith. If you believe in Jesus and His miracles and His death and His resurrection you could still deny that Paul's story about Jesus appearing to him on the road to Damascus was authentic. If you think about it Paul's word is all we have about this incident. People don't like to believe stories like that.

Paul is the apostle that is not one of the twelve. Some questioned that early on but the church accepted it. At some point the questions stopped being asked. But if you ignore the consensus of the early church the whole thing seems quite open to question still. That is the point. You can't ignore the consensus of the church. It is the only thing that makes St Paul and St Luke legit. Otherwise they are just people who experienced some things and wrote some things but they are not really in a different category from other people's amazing stories and other people's spiritual insights.

But this consensus building is not a well documented process. We can imagine church leaders played an important role. But it was a time of persecution for the church and the records are sparse. So we don't know what the discernment process was. I think that is providential. It tells us the how is not as important as the who.

Right around the same time as the church was discerning that the writings of Paul were from God they also discerned that the chair of Peter was legit as well. We don't know the process there either so we can't find some difference we can hang our hat on. The same people also discerned some things about the Eucharist. The list goes on.

By using as an instrument a person that was not connected with Jesus God forces us to trust the church one one very important question. It means Ecclessial Deism can't really get off the ground.

Incorruptible?

There is an article on Catholic Exchange about Downs Syndrome. It tries to make the point that children with Downs are "God’s most pure, innocent, and incorruptible persons." I don't doubt that this is true of this person's daughter but my son seems quite capable of getting into trouble. I was lying the couch after reading this article. John came over and hit me in the head with a pillow. I pretended like it really hurt. It didn't. But he started winding up and hitting me with all hit might. When he got me a good one he bust out in uncontrollable laughter. He does not often laugh that loud. He never seemed to tire of this game. It went on for many iterations. Very cute. But I got to thinking about the article. The picture is a bit more complicated. The word incorruptible does not always fit.

There is a tendency for us parent of children with Downs Syndrome to think we know the disorder. But we don't. We just know one example of it. OK, we hang out with more families that have children with Downs. But we still tend to extrapolate quite quickly from our sample size of one. Chloe sounds like a special little girl. I am happy to read about her. But if it shows me anything it is how different two people with the same diagnosis can be.

Counterfeit Gospels

A guy named Tervin Wax wrote a book on Counterfeit Gospels. He says he did not want to write a gospel that points out what is wrong with everyone else. So he wrote about the "doubts and struggles of people in my own congregation." That still sounds like someone else.

IT has been said the definition of heresy is to take one Catholic truth and use it to reject another Catholic truth. I think that is what is going on here. These are not fake gospels. They are out of balance. They have truth that we need to embrace but we can go too far and make one aspect of the gospel the whole thing.

Then there is always the question of what gives Trevin Wax the authority to declare anything to be heresy? Who says what he teaches is closer to the true gospel than the movements he deems counterfeit? He seems to imply that he is immune to the issues that caused these movements to go astray. He is not. The truth is in the protestant world all gospels are counterfeit. Which one is least counterfeit? There is no good way to know. Nevertheless, I thought it might be useful to comment on the counterfeits he sees.

Therapeutic Gospel: Sin robs us of our sense of fullness. Christ’s death proves our worth as humans and gives us power to reach our potential. The church helps us find happiness.

This is all true. Healing is an important part of what Jesus is all about. Just count the healing stories in the gospels. Sickness is like sin in many ways. But one important difference is that sin involves our choice. So repentance involves a change in our behavior. We need to stop doing certain things and start doing other things. An over-use of the healing model can leave this fuzzy. The temptation is there because secular people respond much better to being told they are hurting than being told they are sinners.

Formalist Gospel: Sin is failing to keep church rules and regulations. Christ’s death gives me an agenda, so I can begin to follow the predescribed forms of Christianity.

This is a caricature. Nobody describes the sin or Christ's death this way. People do notice that certain behaviors lead people closer to God. Prayer, bible devotions, church attendance, confession, etc. But God is not a machine. It is not as simple as managing inputs to achieve outputs. Doing these things can become a substitute for the change God wants rather than a way of achieving it.

As a protestant I was probably too afraid of the dangers of formalized religion. I think most protestants are. There is a tendency to try and manufacture a life-transforming moment. You listen to enough testimonies and you start to think that is the way God works. But often God works most powerfully through long slow processes where we repeat the same things many times and the grace kind of slowly soaks down deep. Regular mass, rosaries, adoration, etc. are very powerful this way.

Moralist Gospel: Our big problem is sins (plural) and not sin (nature). The purpose for Christ’s death is to give us a second chance and make us better people. Redemption comes through the exercise of willpower with God’s help.

This is true as far as it goes except of course for the explicit denial of our sinful nature which is almost never done. Protestants would object to the tying of redemption and moral living but that part is actually right. What is often the danger here is the focus on the big sins and not enough on the inner heart transformation. We want to have a heart that does not even desire mortal sin because it is like God's heart.

Judgmentless Gospel: God’s forgiveness does not need to come through the sacrifice of His Son. Judgment is more about God’s goodness, not the need for human rebellion to be punished. Evangelism is not urgent.

This is where you need to go if you are not willing to formally exclude people who engage in publicly known sin. Modern secular people don't want to exclude anyone for sexual sins. They do feel there are some sins like racism and pollution but they don't look to scripture or the church to define morality.

Evangelism is not really lacking in urgency. It is just impossible. The church cannot call people to live up to a higher standard so the church only makes sense to those who have been raised with the idea of going to church. You don't have to get up on Sunday mornings to not be judged. You can just sleep in.

Social-Club Gospel: Salvation is all about finding fellowship and friendship at church. The gospel is reduced to Christian relationships that help us enjoy life.

I don't think this can be called a gospel. It is more of a symptom of a church where people don't actually believe. They tend not to close their doors. They just move on and become a society of niceness. It is like the emperor without clothes. You don't notice what is missing for quite a while. Nobody talks about God except in cliches. Nobody challenges anyone to grow closer to God, to turn from sin and embrace the gospel.

Activist Gospel: The kingdom is advanced through our efforts to build a just society. The gospel’s power is demonstrated through cultural transformation, and the church is united around political causes and social projects.

This is a real challenge. The truth is that the church has to be socially active. But how do you take on such a huge thing and not have it become the center of your ministry. Jesus is God. If we make him an agent of social justice that is good but not good enough. We must proclaim Him as God and nothing less. Pope Benedict has said if we do this we will not just fail at evangelization but at social justice as well.

Churchless Gospel: The focus of salvation is primarily on the individual, in a way that makes the community of faith peripheral to God’s purposes. The church is viewed as an option to personal spirituality, or even an obstacle to Christlikeness.

The proper name for this counterfeit is protestantism. This is what the reformation was all about. To deny the visible church. But they do sense the importance of a church-like organization. So much so that they think someone saying it is unimportant is teaching a counterfeit gospel. Yet somehow they excuse Luther of exactly the same thing.

Mystic Gospel: Salvation comes through an emotional experience with God. The church is there to help me feel close to God by helping me along in my pursuit of mystical union.

Not sure what the problem is here. Seems fine to me. You need to be more precise about exactly how the church helps. Maybe he is keying on the word "emotional" and the word "feel." But mystical does not mean emotional. Maybe to him it does.

Quietist Gospel: Salvation is about spiritual things, not secular matters. Christianity is only about individual life change and is not concerned with society and politics.

I think most don't even feel religion is about life change. If you change your life you will change society and change politics. But the "religion is a private matter just between you and God" people don't typically have any dramatic changes in their life from their faith.