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Friday, November 20, 2009
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Response to Protestant Inquirer #2
The following is a response sent to another dear Protestant friend. As in this post below, this student is in a mainstream, liberal-leaning divinity school and is having trouble maintaining the tension between his Evangelical convictions (about the Bible, in particular) and the historical critical questions raised by modern criticism of Scripture.
My response to him follows:
I think, even if my examples aren't always the most apropos, [this] captures the essence of my frustration with Evangelicalism - the sense that the entire foundation of my faith didn't really seem to get beyond me. It led to frustrations even in college, and I remember having a lot of talks with [a friend] who was going through a lot of the same things (though he didn't go the way I did). There was a burning sense that, when [a teacher] pointed out an error in the Scriptures, I felt that, if I didn't personally resolve the problem and disprove [the teacher], my entire faith would go plummeting down in flames. If I couldn't defend an article of faith in a debate with a fellow believer, then I had to adjust my entire system accordingly. That I was accountable to, and could depend upon, no one but myself.
I remember reading a debate between an Evangelical and a Catholic (when I was looking into this I looked up every debate I could find on the internet - there are a surprising number of them, many of them videotaped, and I never found one where the Evangelical came off looking smarter) where the Protestant ended the debate by saying something along the lines of, "All I want is for every Protestant to wake up every day and ask himself, 'why am I not Catholic?'" What he meant was that he felt that Protestants had drifted into a chummy, ecumenical co-existence with Catholics and had forgotten why the Reformation happened, and that being a Protestant meant being in a constant state of Protest against the Catholic enemy, and hence insisting again and again upon points like sola scriptura and sola fides, because when we forget those things, we forget who we are as Protestants, and what is most important to us. Well, the Catholic opponent immediately stood up and said that was exactly what HE wanted too - the Protestant to continually ask himself why he was not Catholic. So this seemed a good starting point. At the time I had been calling myself a 'Christian' instead of a 'Protestant', deliberately and self-consciously, because I wanted to transcend and stand above all of those differences. And I took some comfort in C. S. Lewis' 'Mere Christianity', which aims at something just like this. But soom I realized that I was 'cheating', in a way. Because one cannot simply be a 'mere Christian'. Such a creature does not exist. Lewis, in an essay I have never been able to find . . . speaks of the Christian hanging out in the 'hallway' between various rooms (the 'rooms' being denominations', and that the hallway between the rooms ('mere Christianity') is often more attractive than any of the rooms, but the Christian can only stay a while and then he will have to grow up and decide on a room. Simply because a hallway is not a home and one cannot live there. The denominations, like them or hate them, have provided the only stable, communal, structural Christian 'environments' where one can make a home. To avoid denominations is to be in a continual state of drift, which is to live a lie. So here I was, pretending that the great rifts of our history had never happened, and that we were all one happy family.
So now I began to ask myself the question that both apologists (Catholic and Protestant) had asked me to ask myself - why am I not Catholic? And I began to see the horror of the question, you see, which is that Catholicism is the default position, for the burden of proof lies with the Protestant. If one cannot come up with a satisfactory answer to the question, one is left with the option of Catholicism. So the question was framed in a way that seemed to pre-empt a thorough answer. But you see, one cannot really frame it any other way. One cannot ask the Catholic to ask 'why am I not Protestant', because Protestantism is not a default position. Protestantism exists precisely as a rejection of Catholicism, and identifies itself with a set of epithets (sola Scriptura, sola fides) which are really concise rejections of the Catholic system. Protestantism, is, by its very name, a protest against Catholicism. So it cannot very well be a default; it makes no pretenses of being 'mere Christianity'. But Catholicism is not like this at all. Catholicism is not a rejection of the Protestant system. Catholicism does not formulate its teachings in a polemical or antithetical manner.
This is exactly what made the Catholic church so horrifying to John Henry Newman, who is one of my heroes - an Anglican church historian from the 19th century who at the end of his life became Catholic. 'Unjudged, she judges the world', he says. In other words, the Catholic Church simply goes about her business teaching, and doesn't really seem to care what anyone else thinks of her teaching. She makes utterly preposterous claims - like being the one Church of Christ, His vicar on earth, an infallible vessel - with the same kind of flippancy with which one pronounces that one likes one's pancakes with syrup and not butter, without diffidence or defensiveness. And if challenged, she insists that she has always taught these things, and will never stop teaching them.
And the frightening thing is how well these claims stand up to the test. I went into church history for a reason, and the classes I took with . . . started this journey for me. Newman wrote a book called 'Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine', and he noted that Christian doctrine develops without changing. Using analogies from human and plant growth (think an embryo-->adult, or acorn-->oak tree), a thing develops and expands while remaining substantially the same. I knew that all of the doctrines the Catholic Church taught today (regarding Mary, the Pope, etc.) would never be found in the early Church. Not in the same form, that is. But I found that all of the doctrines that I held dear (the Trinity, the inerrancy of the Bible) were not taught in the early Church either. What I found in the early Church were early hints of those doctrines (Triniity, Bible), like acorns and embryos, which I could recognize as having some loose connection with the later development of the doctrines. The problem, of course, was that I found just as many hints (acorns and embryos) for all those Catholic doctrines (Mary, Papacy) I wished to avoid. In fact, in many cases, there was much stronger evidence in the early Church for the Catholic doctrines (Eucharist, purgatory, papacy) than for the doctrines I preferred.
Anyway, I'm sounding preachy and I'm beginning to annoy myself. You have to understand I've been teaching all weekend, a good deal of it on John Henry Newman, so I get in a certain mode, and I have to remember I'm supposed to be writing a personal email and not a sermon.
The point is, Newman famously said, 'to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant'. I found that to be true, and I've known very few Evangelicals who have survived the journey. It's true that not all have become Catholic - some have found happy homes in Orthodoxy or even (pace Newman) Anglicanism. There are some rare birds who are content to remain Evangelical, but these - if pressed - are often more Catholic in their doctrine than they want to admit. I can't guarantee that, had I been surrounded by Orthodox or Anglicans instead of Catholics, I wouldn't have gone that direction at the time, although in retrospect I can now say that neither could prove as satisfying. I met a guy at a conference in North Carolina last month who said he converted from Evangelicalism to Anglicanism because he just wanted to be an 'ecclesial' Christian, and I think that about sums it up. The Evangelical, to me, is not an 'ecclesial' Christian, because he does not live his Christianity in reference to other Christians. His gathering with other Christians on various occasions - Sunday worship or other social events - is a purely accidental feature of his Christianity. He does not allow other Christians to define his faith. He does not allow other Christians to define his mode of worship. He does not allow other Christians to modify or intervene in his relationship with God. The 'ecclesial' Christian, on the other hand, knows that his relationship to God subsists only through the medium of the Christian community - its creeds, its worship and its traditions. The most helpful book for me in making this realization was 'Evangelicalism is Not Enough' by Thomas Howard, who wrote this book after he converted to Anglicanism. (He later became Catholic.) I think both Orthodoxy and Anglicanism can be called 'ecclesial' communities, although (naturally) I think the logic of ecclesiality is realized most fully in Catholicism. (And perhaps Lutheranism is the most 'ecclesial' of Protestant communities, and Reformed coming somewhat after that.)
And I hope you understand, I bear no bitterness against my Evangelical past - I realize I keep referring to my 'frustrations' but I think I only realized I was frustrated in retrospect, like when you get in a warm bath and find yourself falling asleep within two minutes, and only then do you realize how hellish the day must have been that you've just been through, based on how dramatic the relaxation was (wow, how did I come up with that analogy?). I was raised as a Reformed Christian, and discovered my faith as an Evangelical, and I have the kindest, warmest memories of my time in Intervarsity [Christian Fellowship], where my faith bloomed. In fact, I think that it was the inner logic of this Evangelical experience that led me to the Catholic Church. I think, in retrospect, all of the positive, Christian values of Evangelicalism (what Louis Bouyer calls the 'spirit of Protestantism') - vibrant spirituality, disciplined prayer, zealous evangelism, biblical rootedness - is best protected, fostered and channeled within the ecclesiality of Catholicism. While at the same time, the exaggerations and dangers of Evangelicalism - emotionalism, individualism, anti-intellectualism (what Bouyer calls the 'forms' of Protestantism) - are avoided or carefully restrained.
So, it's late and I'm just dumping some thoughts on paper. I hope I don't come off as preachy. I've come so far from the days when I knew you that, sometimes, and it's hard to express this, I don't really know how I sound to Evangelicals anymore. The frustration of the convert is that 'once I was X, and I saw Y, and when I saw Y I realized with absolute clarity that I could no longer remain X - so, given that you are X, and you see Y, I assume you realize too with the same absolute clarity that you can no longer remain X.' When of course we realize that we are not talking X's and Y's but persons, each of whom has his own history and his own framework by light of which he sees things.
# posted by Jamie : 4:13 PM
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Email to a Protestant Inquirer
Below I am copying some correspondence between myself and a dear Protestant friend. He is currently in a Protestant Evangelical seminary and is grappling with the difficult problems raised by modern, historical-critical exegesis. Just in the case that some casual reader may benefit from this correspondence, it follows. Elipses below indicate that personal, identifying material has been removed:
His email:
I've been here . . . going to seminary , hoping to find some of the answers to all of the questions that had been bombarding me at liberal universities . . .. Most arguments I believed were invalid because they relied on the assumption that God does not exist and that prophecy is impossible. But a lot of arguments sounded extremely logical and difficult to refute. Those types of questions multiplied when I went to [a graduate school in theology], but I always assumed that just because something looked suspect and hard to account for didn't mean that there was not an answer.
So when I got here, I couldn't wait to hear how conservative scholars handle these types of issues, but surprisingly there were not many explanations I had not encountered before. When I took a class on the history of doctrine, it just left me wondering why it took so long to formulate the canon, and why so many people, believing themselves to be Christians, believed so many different things about Jesus early on.
I've taken a special interest in Christian origins and NT textual criticism, looking closely at theological development and textual variants. When I started to read each book of the Bible independently, as they no doubt originated, I began to notice how much of my "orthodox" theology I have to import into each one on order to make it also sound "orthodox." For 11 years I've had the same view of the scriptures, and so I went kicking and screaming into a realization that something might be wrong with that view. Just reading the two birth narratives again (Mt and Lk), I could see that there were problems in thinking that both of them could be historical. I started considering the evidence for identifying the pastoral epistles as pseudonymous, and it was very convincing.
And after taking all of the problematic issues into account, it was impossible to still think of the Bible as the inspired, infallible, word of God. So I was tempted to do what my theology had taught me to do, which was just junk it all. If you can't trust one part, you can't trust any of it. But that seems extreme. So now I'm trying to reconstruct a theology around a view that sees scripture as a witness to revelation, rather than absolute, undiluted revelation straight from the mouth of God.
I just wondered if you had come to terms with any of the findings of historical criticism in this respect, but I have a sense that you might have the same views I had up until about 2 months ago. I agree that there is everything wrong with reconstructing historical events, but what if the events that were recorded were not historical? For 11 years I refused to consider the possibility that the Bible could be wrong about anything, but why? Is there a scripture that says that all Christians must believe that every book that would eventually come to be placed in the NT canon must be believed in its entirety? Or is that something that has been developed later? It's comforting to think that God superintended the formation of the canon, and inspired all of scripture contained therein, but there seems to be too many problems with that view for me to continue with it honestly.
My response follows:
First off, as I’m sure you recall, my response to this question will be different from yours simply because I’m a Roman Catholic. (Although, I’ll add, part of the reason I became Catholic is because of the problems you raise. I found that Evangelical Protestantism proved to be a dead-end in answering the questions posed by modern secularism, whereas only Catholicism (in my experience – if there’s another church that does, I’m not aware of it) provided answers). In sum, I have (historical, biblical) reason to believe that Christ, while on earth, founded an authoritative Church, built on the foundation of the apostles, to teach in His name, and that the Pope and bishops of the Catholic Church are the legitimate successors to these apostles, and hence hold their authority. Thus, I do believe that the Scriptures are ‘inspired’ and ‘inerrant’ (without error), and I believe this on the authority of the Church, since the Pope and bishops have always proclaimed these doctrines. To quote St. Augustine, the 4th century African Father of the Church, ‘I would not have believed the Gospels themselves, unless the authority of the Church moved me to do so’. Naturally, you haven’t been convinced by the Catholic arguments, so your approach would be different, but I wanted to state right out (without getting into an argument over this, since I’m not terribly interested) that I’m in a very different position than yourself when it comes to this. My position is, as it were, easier than yours. I don’t have to bother with refuting each and every argument posed by the historical-critics, because I have it on a higher authority that they are simply wrong. (Naturally, the truth is much more complicated than this, but I’m simplifying.)
For the Protestant, who is reluctant to allow for the authority of an institutional church, as I see it, you have two routes to securing biblical inspiration and inerrancy:
1. The easy way: accept by way of an ‘inner testimony’ of the Holy Spirit that the Scriptures are true; God speaks in my heart that they are true and I will not doubt God – just as God testifies to my eternal salvation (as most Evangelicals believe), He testifies to the authority of Scripture. And not only the authority, but the contents of the canon. As my roommate . . . (you’ll remember him) told me, ‘I cannot accept that God would allow me to be deceived as to the contents of the Scripture’. This sounds good as far as it goes, but there are obvious problems. How do you distinguish between the ‘inner testimony’ of God and a mere psychological confidence? I don’t know about you, but there are a lot of things I thought God was telling me that later proved out to be ‘mis-readings’ on my part of His will. And as I told my roommate, as far as the canon goes, the Protestant has to believe that God allowed every Christian from the 5th century to the 16th, including all Catholics to the present day, including Mother Theresa herself, to be deceived about the contents of Scripture, since all these Christians accepted a different canon than you. (The Catholic canon, of course, is different than the Protestant’s.) So, if God would deceive these gazillion Christians, why would He treat you any differently? (Unless, of course, you take the route that none of these people were ‘true’ Christians, and Mother Theresa is burning in hell. Fine then, that’s a way out. But also, to rest the inspiration of Scripture on an inner psychological sentiment (which sounds Mormon to me) proves remarkably weak when you begin to confront the hard challenges posed by historical critical scholars. As in your case – you have to set the self-evident proof of errors on the page against your inner certainty that they are not really errors. You’re not going to win that fight.
2. The hard way: Do the historical critical work better than the scholars do, and disprove them. Every ball they toss at you, bat it back at them. Every error they point out, prove that it’s not an error. This has been the ‘labor of love’ performed by countless Evangelical scholars over the years, and has typically been the route they’ve gone. Admittedly, they’ve been pretty good at it, and most of the errors proposed to be in the Bible have been pretty handily resolved by Evangelicals. Most. Not all. The problem is that, again, this is harder than it seems, and requires a great amount of faith. Some problems in Scripture, like the discrepancy between John and the Synoptics as to which day Jesus died on (John has it on Saturday, the Synoptics on Friday, as I recall) can be resolved in historical critical ways, such as pointing out that John and the Synoptic authors used different calendars. Fine. Others are not so easy. I needn’t point out examples to you, but there are some problems (in the genealogies, e.g., or in the Genesis stories) which appear intractable, and for which I have yet to read a satisfactory response. And who knows, other problems could be pointed out in the future, or others may be out there I haven’t heard yet. So I have to have faith, that these seemingly intractable problems do indeed have a solution, and that every problem posed in the future will have a solution, but again, that’s not resting on empirical evidence, but on faith (back to the ‘inner testimony’), and the longer you stay in the game, the harder the fastballs keep coming. This seems to be what you hoped to find in Dallas – better batters who could return the fastballs – but the hard truth is that most of the batters have long since given up.
Those are the only suggestions I’ve been given by Protestants. As you can tell, I’m not terribly sanguine about them in retrospect, and they didn’t convince me at the time. The other possibility:
3. As the liberal Protestant concludes, we can just abandon the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy. Admit that the Bible does have errors in it, or find a compromise, that the Bible is inerrant on ‘matters of faith and morals’, but not on historical/scientific matters. (Many liberal Catholics take this route.) Or deny inspiration, and claim that the Scriptures are simply the historical testimony to the faith of specific historical people, and is ‘inspired’ only in the loose sense, that it ‘inspires’ faith in the reader. That is, not ‘inspired’ but rather ‘inspirational’. The trouble is, as you know, this is simply the first domino in a long stack. For the Protestant, whose faith rests on ‘sola Scriptura’, the authority of Scripture alone, once you abandon the notion that Scripture has any authority, what else do you have? Or once this authority is admitted to be full of errors, then its authority has to be qualified – it is authoritative, but only when it has been ‘vetted’ by historical critical scholars to remove the erroneous parts. And this gives biblical scholars a kind of ‘Magisterium’ or authority over Scripture, and they get to pick and choose what parts are authoritative. Don’t you know what parts they will remove? I teach a class on Paul’s letters, and can you take a guess at what parts of Paul’s letters most scholars think are illegitimate, i.e. not by Paul? 1 Corinthians 11, which says women ought to submit to their husbands, Romans 1, which condemns homosexuality, etc. . . . . In the Catholic Church we complain about ‘cafeteria Catholicism’, where people pick and choose what doctrines they like and don’t like, as though they were in a cafeteria. Once Protestants accept that Scripture includes errors, prepare yourselves for ‘cafeteria Protestantism’. Should it be any surprise to you that the liberal Protestant denominations, which abandoned biblical inerrancy in the late 19th century (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans) are now ordaining homosexuals and approving divorce, abortion, and all the rest? You ask if there is a scripture that suggests that everything in the canon must be believed in its entirety – well, no, of course not. There is, of course, 2 Tim. 3:16, but this hardly says that. But, naturally, once you suggest that parts of the canon need not be accepted, you can hardly call yourself a self-respecting Protestant. (I think the absence of any such passage speaks more of the weakness of the Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura than of errors in the canon, but that’s another matter.)
There is another path, of course. You speak of Scripture being a ‘witness to revelation’, rather than revelation itself. Well, yes, fine – this is, of course, the Catholic position, more or less. But I’d ask you – what exactly is this revelation you speak of? What, exactly, does Scripture testify to? Here’s the problem. If Scripture is not revelation but a witness to revelation, then Scripture itself has no direct authority – revelation does, and Scripture only has authority INASMUCH as it testifies to revelation, and if (as the scholars tell us) Scripture does a rather poor job of testifying to revelation (since it is, supposedly, full of errors), then Scripture only has a very limited, qualified and mitigated authority. In other words, one can play off Scripture AGAINST revelation – I have heard these arguments used to justify gay marriage. God’s Revelation is of absolute, unconditional love for all, and Scripture is only meant to testify to this; if parts of Scripture do a very poor job of this, since they are written by bigoted, hatemongering sycophants (such as whoever wrote Romans 1), they we ought to defy or ignore such passages, and in the name of our holy obedience to God’s Revelation, we should accept the holy sanctity of gay sodomy. In other words, in the name of our obedience to Revelation, we ought to defy Scripture. There’s a sick kind of logic there, but that’s the slippery slope you get on. So, I’m find in following you in saying that Scripture is a testimony to revelation rather than the sum total of revelation itself. (I happen to believe Scripture is an inspired, inerrant, authoritative testimony, but we’ll save that discussion for later.) But if you don’t specify exactly what you mean by revelation, but leave it up to the vain speculations of individual Christians to define for themselves, you see where the slope slides. Is this revelation some vague idea, or is it concrete, historical, flesh & blood revelation? If you can’t actually point to what this revelation is, then your only solution is to abandon any notion of Scriptural authority and part ways with the Reformers. This is, of course, exactly the service which the Catholic provides, which is to:
4. Identify God’s revelation with ‘Tradition’. ‘Tradition’, in the Catholic meaning, does not refer to a collection of ‘secret doctrines’ which are not found in Scripture (I strongly suggest this article by a convert to Catholicism). Rather, Catholics speak of God’s full revelation as consisting in the Incarnation of His Son and the sending of His Spirit. Thus, while on earth, Jesus showed us not only a fragmentary revelation of God (Hebrews 1), but the Full Revelation of God Himself, i.e. the very face of God. He left all of this revelation to His apostles, subsisting in the giving of the Spirit as the ‘guarantee’ or ‘deposit’ of truth, which would bring to their minds what He taught them. This truth, then, was ‘handed on’ from Christ to the apostles, which they ‘handed on’ to the Christians after them. (‘Tradition’ – Latin ‘traditio’, Gk. paradosis- literally means ‘to hand over’). Some of these teachings are enshrined in Scripture, but not all (Jn. 21:25 – the world count not contain the books which would include everything He taught), and thus St. Paul (2 Thess. 2:15) urges his churches to obey all the traditions (paradosis = ‘what is handed on’) which he taught them, whether by word of mouth or by letter (e.g., not only the Scriptures he wrote, but also his preaching). ‘Tradition’ is not a set of secret doctrines but rather the whole life of the Church, which is the teaching of Christ – doctrine, creeds, worship, prayer, songs, virtues, stories, practices, the whole kit & caboodle. As the Catholic teaching puts it: Now what was handed on by the Apostles includes everything which contributes toward the holiness of life and increase in faith of the peoples of God; and so the Church, in her teaching, life and worship, perpetuates and hands on to all generations all that she herself is, all that she believes...So, this ‘revelation’ which Christ brought is simply the life and teachings of the community of the Church. Scripture is simply a witness to this revelation. Scripture itself, after all, is a work of tradition, a part of that which is ‘handed’ on, but hardly the whole thing. (Even if it is, of course, the central thing.) Catholics, for their part, are happy to agree that all doctrines are found in Scripture, as long as we maintain that Scripture is never to be read ‘in a vacuum’, but only within the community of the Church, taking into account the larger ‘tradition’, including the creeds of the early Church. This, of course, also allows for some authority of church leaders (bishops or what not) to preside over this tradition and distinguish true from false traditions. Does it bother me that the canon was not formalized until the 5th century? No, of course not. It bothered me as a Protestant, since I had to wonder what it was that the early Christians used as their authority in the first 400 years – naturally, it was ‘tradition’. And how did Church authorities know which books to include in the canon? They tell us themselves (read Jerome) that they chose those books which best embodied the ‘tradition’ which came from the apostles. Does it bother me that Christians very early on came to different interpretations of the Bible? No, of course not. Because I believe that God has provided a means, outside the canon, as a guarantee of a right interpretation of the canon – that is, the tradition, as interpreted by Church authority. Arius, who denied Christ’s divinity, misinterpreted the canon because he denied the tradition of the Church and was condemned by a church council. But if one believes in NO authority outside the canon, one is sort of up a creek, for the history of doctrine will be bewildering. Find me any thinker in the early Church, before Luther, who believed that the Bible alone was an exclusive source of authority, and that tradition had no authority.
I don’t mean to get detained with Catholic arguments. That wasn’t, as I said, my point, and I’m not much of a debater on these things. But, when you deny that the Bible alone is an adequate and exclusive source for authoritative revelation, and suspect that there must be some source of authority outside the canon, of which Scripture is a partial but not exclusive witness, you should be aware that this is exactly the position of the Catholic Church, and I am unaware of any other Christian denomination (save perhaps the Orthodox, and maybe the Anglicans) who will tolerate such conclusions. And, again, it was exactly this logic which led me to consider the Catholic Church in the first place. I did not find #1, #2, or #3 above to be viable options, and simply couldn’t find a fifth. Obviously, again, you have (so far, at least) found a different route than mine, so more power to you.
As a final comment, a word on the Catholic view of Scripture, which may prove helpful. You might peruse, just as a supplement to your own studies, the Catholic document on divine revelation, Vatican II’s Dei verbum. Chapter 3, in particular, speaks of Scripture. You’ll note that Catholics believe in ‘inspiration’, defined as the notion that the human authors of Scripture wrote only those things which God wanted them to write, so that the text can be considered ‘divinely willed’, with God as its primary author. Also, Catholics believe in ‘inerrancy’, since the texts are held to teach ‘solidly, faithfully and without error’ divine truth. Note, however, that in the Scriptures God speaks to us ‘in a human fashion’, and that the human authors spoke of things using their own free wills and minds, and from their own points of view (so, e.g., they speak of the sun ‘rising and setting’, which is ‘true’ as it goes, from a human point of view) – so we don’t expect the Bible to be a ‘ready-made encyclopedia’ of scientific knowledge. In particular, ‘anything asserted by the human authors’ is asserted by the Holy Spirit, who cannot deceive or be deceived, and so exactly this is inerrant. Thus, the importance of historical-critical study, to determine exactly what the human authors ‘asserted’. We should allow that in cases of metaphor (‘God is a rock’) or ‘hyperbole’ (‘the mustard seed is the smallest of seeds’), or poetry (Job’s reference to sea monsters, or leviathans; perhaps the six days of creation?) we should understand that what the human author is ‘asserting’ should not always be taken literally. This alone accounts for a good number of so-called ‘problems’ of Scripture, and is a healthy ‘balance’, I think, between the need for historical-critical study and the authority of the text. But, in the end, whatever the human author can be identified as asserting is believed by the Catholic church to be inerrant and trustworthy. On that I tow the line.
# posted by Jamie : 2:02 PM
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Bleg
A break from my non-blogging hiatus for a friend. Let me just point out, you would be working for this guy.
Director of the Bishop Helmsing Institute
Full time faculty position in Theology, to begin in July 2006 -- or sooner, if feasible. The successful candidate will possess a Ph.D. or S.T.D. The Institute is seeking an established scholar with recognized contributions to the field of Theology to direct the newly founded Institute and to teach and author courses in our integrated core curriculum.
Applicants should be conversant with patristics, moral theology and all magisterial teaching. In addition to suitable credentials, applicants should demonstrate experience in pastoral settings, a knowledge of and commitment to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, competency in Latin or Greek desirable, ability to travel regularly, management and leadership skills, and the classroom skills appropriate to the educational needs of a markedly diverse student body.
In addition, the successful applicant will be committed to the educational mission of the Diocese, which is the education of the whole person in the Catholic liberal arts tradition, as articulated in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Veritatis Splendor, and Fides et Ratio.
Applicants should submit a letter of application, a short statement relating the diocese's mission to their philosophy of teaching, curriculum vitae, official transcripts, and three letters of recommendation to: Rhonda Stucinski, Human Resources Director, Diocese of Kansas City ~ St. Joseph, Post Office Box 419037, Kansas City, Missouri 64141-6037. Electronic applications are preferred. Review of applications will begin upon receipt and continue until the position is filled. The Diocese is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
# posted by Jamie : 9:23 AM
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Wednesday, February 08, 2006
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Ad Limina, for now, signing off...
I've delayed this for far too long, but if I wait any longer it'll be far more difficult. I'm at a point now where I am temporarily suspending the Ad Limina blog. I'm feverishly writing my doctoral thesis, a few teaching assignments and conferences have come up, not to mention balancing family and work. This blog, in spite of the devout following of a handful of loyal readers, is no longer able to get the attention it deserves. I hope to resurrect it within six months or so, perhaps sooner, perhaps later. In the meantime, once the pressure to publish a blog subsides, I will be able to spend more time reading other blogs, which I enjoy far more than writing my own. Thanks to you all.
# posted by Jamie : 4:27 PM
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Wednesday, January 25, 2006
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My own university was deprived of the great Fr. Shanley last year, as was the Dominican community next-door. But as long as he is cleaning house in Rhode Island, I suppose I can bear to forgive him. For this link and the two below, hat tip to CWNews.
# posted by Jamie : 12:24 PM
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What bothers me most about ridiculous pieces like this, which NCR seems to run about every two weeks, just to keep a dead issue on life support, is not that it sensationalizes the issue of women's ordination. It's the way that the journal, through its editorial presentation, accepts the women's ordination as matter of fact, by off-handedly referring to how "Rev. Victoria Rue of Watsonville, Calif., [was] ordained last summer on the St. Lawrence Seaway," and using headlines like "After 'illicit but valid' ceremony, they find ways to serve."
# posted by Jamie : 12:15 PM
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Excellent interviews with Bishop Bruskewitz and Corrada on Vatican II. Skip the introductory banter and go right to the interviews. Bruskewitz is predictably good, but Corrada, the Jesuit Bishop of Tyler, is refreshingly clear-headed as well.
# posted by Jamie : 12:11 PM
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Wednesday, January 11, 2006
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Newman and Augustine
What gave me pause in taking up Newman's autobiographical sketch was the possibility of its personal irrelevance. After all, Newman wrote it to defend himself against specific accusations leveled against him in print, and the work is littered with historical details, mostly trivial in nature. Only about ten percent of the text is actually theological in nature.
I found the work surprisingly relevant. Newman's gradually-increasing awareness of the impossibility of remaining Anglican finds echoes in our modern situation. Newman held out as long as he did only because he held an increasingly 'Catholic' interpretation of Anglican dogma (as expressed in the 39 articles, specifically). Earlier, he was convinced that this was the true sense of the articles, as their authors had understood them. Later, he acknowledged it was probably not their original sense, but insisted that the Catholic interpretation of them was valid nonetheless. His Catholic interpretation of them was tolerated long enough by the authorities, but eventually grudging tolerance moved towards ambivalence and eventual condemnation. Besides, Newman grew frustrated that the Anglican episcopacy continued to tolerate the existence of outright heretics in the Church, which in itself seemed inconsistant with its tolerance of the Catholic interpretation.
What I found especially delightful was Newman's reading of early Church history, and his shocking realization that it was the 'Roman' side of the debates which always ended up vindicated by history. Best of all, the shadow of Augustine is long as ever.
"It was difficult to make out how the Eutychians or Monophysites were heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also; difficult to find arguments against the Tridentine Fathers, which did not tell against the Fathers of Chalcedon; difficult to condemn the Popes of the sixteenth century, without condemning the Popes of the fifth. The drama of religion, and the combat of truth and error, were ever one and the same. The principles and proceedings of the Church now, were those of the Church then; the principles and proceedings of heretics then, were those of Protestants now. I found it so,-almost fearfully; there was an awful similitude, more awful, because so silent and unimpassioned, between the dead records of the past and the feverish chronicle of the present. The shadow of the fifth century was on the sixteenth. It was like a spirit rising from the troubled waters of the old world, with the shape and lineaments of the new. The Church then, as now, might be called peremptory and stern, resolute, overbearing, and relentless; and heretics were shifting, changeable, reserved, and deceitful, ever courting civil power, and never agreeing together, except by its aid; and the civil power was ever aiming at comprehensions, trying to put the invisible out of view, and substituting expediency for faith. What was the use of continuing the controversy, or defending my position, if, after all, I was forging arguments for Arius or Eutyches, and turning devil's advocate against the much-enduring Athanasius and the majestic Leo? Be my soul with the Saints! and shall I lift up my hand against them? Sooner may my right hand forget her cunning, and wither outright, as his who once stretched it out against a prophet of God . . . . "
"The Donatist controversy was known to me for some years . . . [T]he case was not parallel to that of the Anglican Church . . . But my friend, an anxiously religious man, now, as then, very dear to me, a Protestant still, pointed out the palmary words of St. Augustine, which were contained in one of the extracts made in the "Review," and which had escaped my observation. "Securus judicat orbis terrarum." (ed. "the secure judgement of the whole world ") He repeated these words again and again, and, when he was gone, they kept ringing in my ears. "Securus judicat orbis terrarum;" they were words which went beyond the occasion of the Donatists, they applied to that of the Monophysites. They gave a cogency to the Article which had escaped me at first. They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity. Nay St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! not that, for the moment, the multitude may not falter in their judgment,-not that, in the Arian hurricane, Sees more than can be numbered did not bend before its fury, and fall off from St. Athanasius,—not that the crowd of Oriental Bishops did not need to be sustained during the contest by the voice and the eye of St. Leo; but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription, and a final sentence, against such portions of it as protest and secede. Who can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. To take a familiar instance, they were like the "Turn again Whittington" of the chime; or, to take a more serious one, they were like the "Tolle, lege,-Tolle, lege," (ed. "Take, read") of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself. "Securus judicat orbis terrarum!" By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized."
# posted by Jamie : 1:26 PM
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Tuesday, January 10, 2006
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Happy 2006
After taking a week or two off for the holidays, I'm back in action once again. The holidays were spent with close family, a box of wine, and a hot tub (convincing my son that fearsome, man-eating manitees roamed the hot-tub actually increased, not decreased, his desire to swim in it). I ended up with a copy of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf in my hands, which my sister-in-law brought with no intention of reading  . Meanwhile, my wife, who is deeply convinced of my untested ability to write fiction, informed me on Christmas Eve that she wanted a short story for her Christmas present. I began promptly, and two days later had 3-4 pages of what I thought was a knock-dead story. I was then informed that my story was 'revolting' and 'disgusting' and that she had no intention of reading past the second page. What can I say?: I'd been staying up late reading the Steppenwolf for three days straight. I also brought with me something a little more uplifting: The Venerable-soon-to-be-Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. I'll have more on that in a bit. In short, the more things change, the more they stay the wame.
# posted by Jamie : 3:42 PM
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Tuesday, December 20, 2005
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'High Justice' and the Death Penalty
I've been meaning to blog on this issue for some time, though due to my own constraints the article which occasioned it is now approximately two months old. Joseph Bottum's August/September 2005 article in First Things, entitled 'Christians and the Death Penalty', barely even caught my attention, and my first reading was little more than a skimming. Bottum's writing style is not one I find congenial to rational debate: I like him more as a poet than as a columnist. It was only when the next issue featured a virtual flood of vitriolic hate mail against Bottum, which the author admitted was only the tip of the iceberg, that I gave the article a re-reading. The criticisms made of Bottum were so confused and irrational that they made Bottum's argument seem rational by comparison. Only on my second reading did I grasp what Bottum was trying to argue, and his argument was so eminently rational that it jumped off the page.
A bit of background. Pope John Paul, of happy memory, won few friends on the Christian right by the legacy he gave us in Evangelium vitae 56. Here he argued that, since "[t]he primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is to redress the disorder caused by the offence', the state "ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity," cases which, in the Holy Father's opinion, "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."
Cardinal Avery Dulles has argued, on several occasions (including one in the same journal), that the primary reason why the Church has always defended the state's right to execute is not a matter of self-defense, but rather of retributive justice. Dulles claims that modern societies have abandoned the death penalty due not to moral progress, but "to the evaporation of the sense of sin, guilt, and retributive justice." The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from Dulles' repeated arguments is that, even if execution is not necessary to protect the citizens of a given society, it may nonetheless be appropriate as a means of executing justice. Some have taken the additional step of claiming that Pope John Paul's condemnation of the death penalty, in focusing exclusively on the state's need for self-defense (which leads to the foregone conclusion that such penalty is not necessary), ignores the more important reason for executing capital criminals, that of retribution. This I shall call the 'justice argument'.
Bottum's article in First Things should be seen, in this humble blogger's opinion, as a full-fledged refutation of the 'justice argument'. Bottum eventually makes this clear when, after mentioning "several sets of bad arguments for the death penalty," notes that "the worst of these, for a Christian, is the argument from justice."
Bottum continues by analyzing the way society generally responds to accounts of crime. Accounts of most crimes (robbery, arson, even rape) tend to elicit demands for what are, more or less, reasonable and restrained punishments. Restitution and varying lengths of imprisonment reflect a certain 'correlation' with the crime committed. The punishment is seen as representing what is necessary to protect society and restrain criminals, and no more. This is what Bottum calls 'normal justice'.
With the crime of murder, however, a completely different attitude emerges, as the cries go up for bloodletting. This reaction of society to the crime of murder is mythologized in the story of Cain and Abel, where Abel's blood "cries out from the ground" for retribution. And Bottum admits that this reaction is, to an extent, justified: "blood really does cry out from the ground." And in response to this cry, society feels the license, no, the responsibility, to "break free from the social aims of normal justice and pursue closure for a story of high, cosmic justice." The restrained, naturally correlated order of 'normal justice' simply will not do: only the execution of the murderer can quiet the cry of the bloodstained ground. And execution is "an entirely different thing [than normal justice] that aims at restoring the universe and matching a deadly crime with a similarly deadly punishment."
The difference with 'normal justice' is clear. As Bottum points out, we don't demand that rapists be raped, or arsonists be burned. But murderers must die. Why? To bring the story to a close. Bottum speaks of the 2005 execution of Michael Ross as a satisfying story:
It has a completeness, a satisfaction, a narrative arc. It gives a feeling of rightness and a sort of balance restored to a universe gone wrong with the taking of innocent life. It aims, as satisfying stories must, at what we used to call poetic justice: the killer killed, the blood-debt repaid with blood, death satisfied with death.
But, as Bottum points out, as real as this story is, it is ultimately a pagan story, and "Jesus turned all our stories inside out. Especially the old, old ones about blood and blood's repayment." That is why John Paul II, of happy memory, began his encyclical Evangelium vitae with a reflection on the story of the first murder. Abel's blood cries out from the ground, but the Lord refuses to allow anyone to impose the penalty:
The biblical story emphasizes the reality of the blood-debt and the universe thrown out of balance by murder - and nonetheless adds a prohibition against claiming repayment for that debt . . . In Evangelium vitae, John Paul II holds to a delicate line . . . . [T]wo elements in the Cain and Abel story are vital for Christians: the genuine truth that spilled blood calls for justice, and the refusal to demand that this blood-debt be paid with yet more blood.
What Bottum is speaking of here is a genuine demarcation in human thought, brought on by the novelty of the New Covenant. The Incarnation of the Eternal One represented the radical relativization of the temporal realm: the True God showed our false gods for what they were. One of these gods was the divinity of kings, which may have translated into the pretended divinity of modern democratic states.
"What kind of justice - high, low, divine, poetic-," asks Bottum, "can a Christian allow modern democracies to claim for themselves?" In the execution of a murderer, or at least an execution carried out for the purpose of retributive justice, the state is attempting to "balance the cosmic books, to stabilize a shaken universe." Few will doubt that states have the rights to defend themselves - in a just war, for example - Bottum even permits that the state's right to self-defense might in some cases require execution. But he will not allow that the state's right of selfe-defense allows for anything more than what we have defined as 'normal justice' - it does not give the state the license to attempt revenge or 'high justice.'
This whole discussion can't help but bring out the Augustinian in me. The institution of the state can never claim to itself eternal prerogatives, which are the exclusive right of the City of God. If the state pretends to do so - and Bottum believes that retributive executions are exactly such a pretension - it becomes an idol, a false god, that must be cast down. For then, in Bottum's words, it is "overreaching its claim to power to balance the books of the universe - to repay blood with blood."
Cardinal Ratzinger in 1996 described the Pope's teaching on the death penalty as a 'development of doctrine'. Part of this development, if Bottum is right, may be a subtle but definitive rejection of the 'argument from justice'.
# posted by Jamie : 1:00 PM
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Victor at Right-Wing Film Geek has an incisive reflection on the film 'Brokeback Mountain,' which cuts quite a bit deeper than most of the knee-jerk reactionism currently prevailing on St. Blog's. Worth reading, if you are into reading book-length entries.
# posted by Jamie : 12:58 PM
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