Sex Education

Catholicism is offensive. Ken Howell found that out when he tried to teach sexual morality in a class about Catholicism. His university fired him. That is sad. He was doing a lot of good there. But we need to understand the church does not grow without martyrs. He was calmly and rationally explaining why the church teaches certain sexual acts are immoral. He wasn't even using religion. He was just appealing to natural law. But these arguments are powerful. Not everyone will react to such power with charity. So much of the establishment has already committed to defending positions that such arguments expose as wrong.

Schools understand the importance of teaching children to think morally. They teach them not to use drugs. They teach them to take care of the environment. They teach them to respect each other. Generally schools teach pretty good morals and moral reasoning skills.

Somehow when it comes to sex everything changes. Suddenly teaching morals is impossible. Morals are now assumed to be irrational and subjective. The subject should not even be brought up. Kids should figure out sexual morals for themselves. In every other area of life we are happy to pass on the wisdom of previous generations. In this one area we just think that is immoral. But we can't tell you why because that would involve a question of sexual morality.

So a guy like Ken Howell comes along and lets the cat out of the bag. He tells students that people have been thinking about sex for a long time. Some of their ideas are pretty good. There are solid reasons to believe they will lead to better choices around sex. That will lead them to have stronger families. They don't even have to believe in God. They just need to believe there should be consistency between the way we are made and the way we act. It is like looking at the Gulf of Mexico and saying it is immoral to spill oil into it because it was not made that way and the spill disrupts the natural processes that are meant to take place. The same logic can be applied to sex and family life. Figure out what was meant to be and don't mess it up.

The Essence of Woman

Hail Mary, Full of grace
Blessed are you among women
And blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus

 This is part of the Hail Mary prayer. It teaches us that the essence of womanhood has something to do with their womb. This is a pretty radical truth these days. We live in a pornographic culture where the essence of woman is seen in their ability to excite a man sexually. If you had to associate it with a part of the anatomy it would not be the womb but rather the breasts or the genitals. You often hear how the church hates women. But the reality is it just hates the way our culture views womanhood.

This is not something easily learned. That is why I am grateful Catholic tradition has encouraged me to say many Hail Mary's. It is the sort of thing you can't just pick up in one sitting. It has to be contemplated. Women give their children their very selves through their DNA but also through the intimate nurture of a womb. Everything they do effects the baby. It is such a beautiful picture God gives us of what love must be.

That is why contraception is so unthinkable. Because the moment we declare ourselves closed to gifts of God that require self-sacrifice that is when we stop being who we are. Women stop being women. Men stop being men in a similar way.

Think of the Good Samaritan. The priest and the levite had simply decided they had opened themselves to enough self-sacrificial love. They were going to Jerusalem probably to lead in prayers for a week. That is one big sacrifice. But God gifted them with another. An injured man on the road can be a gift. A person we can love, Often we can love all mankind by loving one such person. We might think we are too busy but we need to let God overrule that if He so chooses.

Augustine and Gandhi

Should the opinion of early church fathers carry more weight for Christians than those on non-Christian thinkers? As a protestant it seemed to me that they should. That there should be some principled distinction between the respect I would give to some like Gandhi and the respect I would give to someone like Augustine just because I am a Christian and I want to be shaped by Christian thinkers moreso than secular ones. But I could not see how that was so. I came into contact with many examples of early church fathers contradicting my protestant faith. I just shrugged them off. It wasn't any different than I would shrug off something by Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra. Sure I agreed with and valued many things the ECF's said but the same was true of secular writers. I would assess their arguments and decide whether to accept or reject their ideas based on whether it fit into my overall thinking. 


The reality was that mostly I just didn't read the ECF's. I encountered non-Christian religious thought more and more in the secular world. I encountered modern evangelical thinkers quite often. But I didn't have much exposure to ECF's. When I did it was typically just a few words cherry picked to fit into a pastor's sermon. But even then modern pastors were much more likely to quote Stephen Covey than Thomas Aquinas. So I had to admit that secular thinkers had a big advantage just because of the number of times and the number of ways I woiuld be exposed to them.


So it made sense to me that I should be less likely to dismiss a respect early church father than some guy who has written a book the culture seems to love. But I could not see how. What was the principle that would drive this. I could see the Catholic principle. There were popes, bishops, doctors, and saints. Different opinions had different weight. If defined something called Catholic tradition. But protestants had that too. It was less formal but it was there. But protestant tradition was always ignorable. It was just too easy to decide this was one of those cases where as strong consensus of Christian thinkers were in error.


The obvious principled difference for Catholics was infallibility. The belief that tradition could rise to a level where it could be trusted as revealed by God. It seemed like one should be able to respect tradition without going that far. But I could not find any examples of it. People love their own opinions. If you leave the door open just a crack to the chance they could be right and the traditional Christians position could be wrong then people will go through that crack frequently. We need a firm No. Protestantism cannot say a firm No.

Faith, Reason, and the Bible

Devin has a post about the problems of making the canon depend on things like apostolic authorship which we can never know for sure and must depend on scholars for any certainty we have. But the problem is deeper than that. Scripture scholarship often runs into the problem of doing a natural analysis of the supernatural and getting strange conclusions. For example, if you look at the gospel of John you can analyze it naturally and say it is a great piece of Greek literature.It is not hard at all to see why that leads many to conclude that a fisherman from Galilee could not have written this. To me that is valuable information. Now for me to conclude the apostle John didn't write the 4th gospel but rather to conclude that he had supernatural help. Most scholars are not that humble. They come out with statements like "we know this gospel was not written by John". What they are doing is assuming no supernatural event took place.

So it becomes quite impossible to have scholars analyze the 27 books of the New Testament and any other candidates for canonization you might have and expect them to produce reliable results. The word of God is something you would expect to have scholars in disbelief. It should not fit into ordinary human categories of literature.

So how do we analyze these books? We need to use faith and reason. We can't use pure faith. That has led many to conclude the Book of Mormon is the word of God. We must use reason. Taking scholarship into account but also looking at the testimony of early Christians. We can see there are very good reasons the church made the choices it made about what to include in the New Testament.

But more is required. Good reasons are not enough of a foundation to base the New Testament on. We need to be sure. We need the question to be closed. If someone says John does not belong in the New Testament there has to be a sense in which that opinion is out of bounds. The bible is something to which we all need to give ascent of faith. So we need a process that can put it in such a category. Catholics have such a process. Protestants do not.

So protestants turning to secular scholarship to support the truth of the bible is a bit of desperation. It is also a good example of the limits of science. Science cannot study peculiar acts of God. They can only study things that follow patterns that are reproducible. Many things are that way. But to say all things are that way is to rule out God intervening in human history.

Church Shopping

Bryan at CtC has put his finger on one of the things that is fast destroying protestant churches. The idea of church shopping. It is unfortunate the discussion has drifted in the direction of people finding parishes they like. It does that often. It misses the point. What happens when protestants shop for churches is that everything is up for grabs. They can choose between a Calvinist church to an Armenian church and not even consider the theological differences between the two. When Catholics choose between parishes they are choosing between two different expressions of the same faith. They typically are both under the same bishop. With protestants you are choosing between different faiths.

It was not always so. When I was a young adult I remember having a conversation in which I said that if I moved to another city I would look up the local Christian Reformed church and join it. I had that loyalty back then. It was already breaking down among many young adults at that time, around 1990. Now it is harder to find.

That is bad but the flip side is worse. When churches focus on bringing in the church shoppers.Most of them do focus on this. Many pastors measure their success almost entirely by how many people they have attending their services as compared with other protestant churches. But the people they are trying to attract care about the gospel only at the most shallow level. They want a bible church that preaches salvation by faith in Jesus. Pretty much everything else is up for grabs. There is a lot of trust put in the pastors.

So you have this circle. The pastors focus on the people and the people focus on the pastors. God can get squeezed out. Not really squeezed out but re-imagined in a way that makes Him fit nicely into this church pastor's community focus and the church community's pastor focus.

Does this effect their theology? How could it not. For example, most protestants believe that worship style does not matter. Whatever worship experience works for you is OK with God. Is that in the bible? No. The bible has precise instructions for worship and sacrifice that were expected to be followed closely. In fact, the very nature of worship demands we come to God on His terms and not ours. So why do most protestants believe without question something that goes against scripture and logic? Because it allows them to have the Sunday morning experience they want.

From Privileged to Persecuted

There is a ton going on with the church these days. John Allen has a good summary. He talks about the church moving from a culture shaping majority to position to a defensive counter-cultural position. This has been happening for a long time but it is getting more intense all the time. The scandals have quickened the pace of the change for the moment but many of these things would have happened anyway.

Pope Benedict is embracing this. It is sad to see that so many are rejecting the faith but it is in some ways easier than dealing with a majority with luke warm faith. He is constantly proposing a radical living out of the truth of the gospel. It is hard to do in countries full of nominally Catholic people. We see it in the appointments he has made. He has appointed theologians to positions that have been traditionally held by diplomats. First at Secretary of State, now at the Congregation of Bishops and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He is looking to be Catholic without compromise. The emphasis is on who we are and not on dialoguing with others.

For me, this is normal. Growing up Christian Reformed we were never the majority. Sure they are huge in Holland and a few dutch enclaves in North America but I never lived in those places. My church was always the creative minority. Smaller numbers meant greater zeal. It was a good dynamic. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, you live at peace with everyone (Rom 12:18). But most of all you just focus on doing what God is calling you to do.

Historically the church has gotten into trouble many times when it has tried to make alliances with political powers. It has done well when it has risen above petty politics regardless of the consequences. We are going there and the consequences might be severe. But there is much hope. There are no stats for orthodox Catholics but it seems their numbers are growing. They have more children. They produce more priests. The defend their faith because they can. A cultural Catholicism is not rationally defensible.

When the church becomes what it is called to be then it grows. That is easier to do when you are being persecuted. Nobody sees sacraments as their right. People expect you to be offensive.

Thoughts on Tradition

Thinking a bit about tradition outside the realm of religion. I went camping with my family this weekend. Camping has a lot of traditions for me. But when it came to taking down the tent my son started doing it in a way that seemed wrong to me. I didn't know why it seemed wrong. I didn't want to seem like an oppressive father provoking his children to anger so I just let him do it. It became apparent why it was not such a good idea. The point is I knew based on tradition how to do it right. There was a rational explanation for the tradition but I had forgotten that part. I just knew it seemed wrong. That was enough for me but not enough for my son.

The other area where I have been thinking of tradition a lot is soccer. Europeans, the same ones despise religious tradition, are very traditional when it comes to soccer. Why do you need an off-side rule? Because if an offensive player could just run past all the defenders and receive a pass that would ruin the game. But that is allowed in football, hockey, basketball, etc. It does not seem to ruin the game. In fact, they are some of the most exciting plays. We call it the long bomb in football or a break away pass in hockey or basketball. Nobody wants those out of the game. But traditional soccer fans can't see it.

So tradition can be right and it can be wrong. One key is to remember the reasons for the tradition rather than just the tradition. The off-side rule was designed to prevent from waiting for long passes near the opposing goal. Hockey does that with lines on the ice. That is a lot better than making the attacking player worry about where the defender is. The attacker should worry about the ball and the goal. A slow or out of position defender should not be his problem. It should be his opportunity. The point is if you understand the real reason for the rule you can be open to better ways of achieving that end. If you don't then you have two options. You either ignore the tradition assuming there is no good reason for it or you can respect the tradition assuming it cannot be improved upon. Both are irrational. Traditions have reasons. Assuming they are not good reasons is irrational. Almost everything in life can be improved upon. Assuming this is one of the rare exceptions is irrational as well.

This becomes all the more important when it comes to faith. Matters of faith involve very subtle errors that sometimes take generations to become obvious. Look at Sola Scriptura. So many people operate under it and have not seen the problem with it. We are talking about smart people who sincerely want to serve Jesus. It is not like taking down a tent wrong when the error becomes obvious after a few minutes. The disease takes a long time to kill its victims and when it does nobody connects it back to its true cause. When some people figure it out the solution is so radical it gets dismissed quickly.

Thinking about this you can start to understand how much we need God to sort out good tradition from bad tradition. That we would have no chance without the Holy Spirit leading the magisterium into all truth. It is one thing to get soccer wrong. It makes for boring games but it really is only a game. It would be hard to believe that if you were in Holland right now but it is true. We can get sport wrong. We can even get politics or science wrong. We cannot get God wrong.