Christmas Reflections

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another,

Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pas, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them. (The Gospel According to Luke, Chapter Two, Verses 13-20)

Every Christmas, it seems, NEWSWEEK or TIME magazine will come out with an article featuring the "latest scholarship" concerning the "authenticity" of the Christmas story. The scholarly authorities cited are consistently and incorrigibly one-sided, usually including scholars like John Dominic Crossan who dissent from Church teaching, or more ostensibly mainline scholars like Raymond E. Brown (now deceased) who have been quite thoroughly corrupted by the Humean philosophical presuppositions of the historical-criticism of the biblical narrative. The upshot is always the conclusion, or at least the suggestion, that the Gospel writers are unreliable and not to be trusted, and certainly not to be taken at face value. Just how ludicrous this all is can be seen by almost anyone with a bit of intelligence and familiarity with literature, mythology, and history. One of the best examples of a powerful antedote to this kind of foolishness is a little essay by C.S. Lewis entitled "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," which is available in a collection of essays by Lewis entitled Christian Reflections [Amazon link] (1967; reprinted by Eerdmans, 1994). The following are some excerpts from Lewis' essay, which begins on p. 152 and contains four objections (or "bleats") about modern New Testament scholarship:

1. [If a scholar] tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour...

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one [of the stories in the Gospel of John, for example] is like this... Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative...

2. All theology of the liberal type involves at some point - and often involves throughout - the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars... The idea that any... writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance.

3. Thirdly, I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur... This is a purely philosophical question. Scholars, as scholars, speak on it with no more authority than anyone else. The canon 'if miraculous, unhistorical' is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it. If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the Biblical critics in the world counts here for nothing.

4. My fourth bleat is my loudest and longest. Reviewers [of my own books, and of books by friends whose real history I knew] both friendly and hostile... will tell you what public events had directed the author's min to this or that, what other authors influenced him, what his over-all intention was, what sort of audience he principally addressed, why - and when - he did everything... My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; the method shows a record of 100 per cent failure.

The 'assured results of modern scholarship', as to the way in which an old book was written, are 'assured', we may conclude, only because those who knew the facts are dead and can't blow the gaff... The Biblical critics, whatever reconstructions they devise, can never be crudely proved wrong. St. Mark is dead. When they meet St. Peter there will be more pressing matters to discuss.

However... we are not fundamentalists... Of course we agree that passages almost verbally identical cannot be independent. It is as we glide away from this into reconstructions of a subtler and more ambitious kind that our faith in the method wavers... The sort of statement that arouses our deepest scepticism is the statement that something in a Gospel cannot be historical because it shows a theology or an ecclesiology too developed for so early a date...

Such are the reactions of one bleating layman... Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the Vicar; he now tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more...

If you're interested in ordering the book, click on the link below:

C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper [Amazon link]

Merry Christmas everyone!

The problem with Hans Kung

The problem with Hans Kung is that, like the rest of that part of the post-Christian world that has been reluctant to let go of its sentimental attachment to Christianity, he wants to change the meaning of Christianity to conform to his post-Christian commitments rather than to admit that his beliefs are no longer, in any traditionally recognizable sense of the term, Christian. In short, Kung wants to belong to the historical Christian community without accepting key historical Christian beliefs. This is amply clear, once again, from his recently published autobiography, My Struggle for Freedom: Memoirs [Amazon link], in which he replays his old lamentations about the Vatican's "authoritarian repression" of his academic freedom to teach whatever he wants, even if the Church may consider it heretical, and its denial of his canonical right to present himself to the public as a Catholic theologian. He reminds me, in a way, of the members of the original British Humanist Association, all of them atheists, who used to gather in one of their homes to sing traditional Christian hymns for their sentimental value--a phenomenon not altogether different from the annual Christmas albums put out by entertainers not otherwise known for their piety.

Kung was born in 1928 and educated during the heyday of Protestant Liberalism, when that lovely legacy of the Enlightenment, the acids of the rationalistic historical-criticism of the Bible, were eating out the heart of mainline Protestant denominations. He was one of those Catholics who had already been drinking deeply at those contaminated Protestant fonts of biblical scholarship before the Second Vatican Council seemed to permissively fling open the doors of the Church to the world of non-Catholic scholarship. It is understandable, then, how he must have looked eagerly for Vatican II to sanction a revisioning of the Catholic Faith along lines that he saw as reasonable from his own studies of secular Protestant sources. His Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection [Amazon link] (1964) shows that he was already interested in drawing converging lines between Catholic and the secularized Protestant theologian, Karl Barth (pictured below right). I realize that many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, hold Barth in high esteem, viewing him as a champion of "Neo-Orthodoxy" in contrast to the "Liberalism" of demythologizing thinkers such as Rudolf Bultmann, and I realize that they might find my labeling of him as a "secular Proestant" offensive. Yet I make my remarks advisedly. Barth is deceptive. He writes and talks as if he believes in the traditional Christian doctrines. But he doesn't. As University of Edinburgh Professor J.C. O'Neill writes in his chapter on Barth in The Bible's Authority [Amazon link] (1991):

Barth begins from from the starting-point that none of the miracles in the Bible actually happened .... Opponents of Barth like Bultmann were infuriated by Barth's seeming to say that he believed that the resurrection happened (in the normal sense, by which he grave became empty and the transformed body of Jesus left this universe) when he did not believe anything of the sort--but Barth never really concealed his actual position from those who took care to read carefully what he wrote. (p. 273)

While other Protestant theologians, like Paul Tillich (pictured left), clearly distinguish when they're writing "devotionally" (when they sound like evangelical Christians) and when they're writing "scholarly" (when they sound like atheists), Barth is more subtle and requires greater discernment. Many of these Protestants continued to employ a Christian vocabulary while investing their terms with demythologized post-Christian meanings. Hans Kung is one of the numerous fatalities resulting from this historical development.

A sampling of Kung's publishing record is telling. The Church [Amazon link] (1967) offered several corrosive revisionings of the traditional understaning of the Church. Apostolic Succession: Rethinking a Barrier to Unity [Amazon link], an edited anthology (1968), shows ecumenical sympathies being enlisted in the less-than clandestine service of further revisionism. Infallible?: An Inquiry (1971), later reissued as Infallible?: An Unresolved Enquiry [Amazon link] (1994), continued Kung's crusade of dissent. On Being a Christian [Amazon link] (1979), offered a denaturing "up-dating" of Christian belief from the standpoint of modern secularist concerns, including an uncritical acceptance of radical historical-critical biblical interpretations and "demythologizations" of traditional doctrines. For example, the crucifixion "becomes an appeal to renounce a life steeped in selfishness." Lovely: the Passion of the Christ can be reduced to the message of Barney and Friends.

The same year, on December 18, 1979, the Vatican curia (finally!) issued a declaration against Kung's doctrinal views, withdrawing his canonical mission to teach Catholic theology, although his academic tenure was protected by the University of Tubingen. Kung, though stripped of his canonical mandatum as a Catholic theologian, continued his attack on the Church undaunted. In 1981 he published Does God Exist?: An Answer for Today [Amazon link]--a bizarre discussion in which he continues to affirm that, yes, God does exist, even though Jesus never existed, Noah's flood never occurred, the story of Exodus is a myth, the universe has always existed and has no need for a creator, and the Bible is a morass of contradictions, and he provisionally accepts a feminist notion about a "goddess" and primitive matriarchy. The Church in Anguish: Has the Vatican Betrayed the Council? [Amazon link], an anthology edited with Leonard Swidler (1997), exhibits Kungs hostility to the Vatican's insistance that Vatican II was never intended as a rupture with Catholic Sacred Tradition. Why I Am Still a Christian [Amazon link] (1986) offers a personal rationale for why Kung still wants to be identified as a Christian and a Catholic despite the fact that he's not, and despite his vociferous renunciation of Rome's authority, which he commonly refers to as the "Roman Kremlin."

Recently Hans Kung was interviewed by Stephen Crittenden for The Religion Report on Radio National (December 15, 2004). The interview, "A conversation with Number 399/57 i" is named after the file number that Kung keeps for life in the offices of the Inquisition, or Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In the interview, Kung describes his personal acquaintance with the popes since Pius II, and calls John Paul II a man of "the mediaeval, anti-reformation, anti-modern paradigm of the church." Remarks such as these must be understood on some level as grandstanding, since otherwise they would be nearly unintelligible. No pope, after all, has done more to address contemporary concerns centering on the subjective experiential dimension of the lived experience of the believer than Karol Wojtyla, the student of phenomenology, author of The Acting Person [Amazon link], The Theology of the Body According to John Paul II: Human Love in the Divine Plan [Amazon link], Love and Responsibility [Amazon link], the philosopher who wrote two dissertations (one in philosophy on Max Scheler, the other in theology on St. John of the Cross) and went on to become Pope John Paul II. Kung is not stupid. He knows this. But what irks him is that the Pope does all of this without in any way intending to compromise the objective authority and integrity of the dogmatic constitution of the Catholic Faith. This is what Kung cannot stand. Kung wants the personalism and subjective focus on experience without the authority of objectively binding dogma; but the latter is what keeps John Paul's (objectively grounded) subjective personalism from becoming Kung's (historically relativistic) personal subjectivism.

Prominent in the interview is Kung's admiration for the aforementioned Karl Barth, along with some grandstanding scare tactics refencing Opus Dei. He says:

The next [papal] election will certainly be very decisive, and there is no doubt that especially all these Cardinals from the Opus Dei, who are favourable for this secret organisation which is an authoritarian, Spanish organisation [... is he playing to the hype over Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code here? ...] which has a great influence and which was supported heavily already by Karol Wojtyla when he was Archbishop of Krakow. And the whole question will be: will now the Catholic church be dominated again by a clique of people who is in this authoritarian organisation which is, as a matter of fact, living in a mentality of, I would say, the counter-Reformation, of anti-Modernism, or will we have enough bishops who still remember the Second Vatican Council and who see especially the terrible situation in which our church is in, in the present moment?

What is even more remarkable is how Kung immediately goes on to characterize this "terrible situation in which our church is in, in the present moment":

If you see for instance that the Church of Ireland -- I know that a lot of bishops and priests in Australia too, come from this beautiful and most constructive Ireland -- I mean constructive in a way that they constructed a great deal of churches, especially in the Anglo Saxon world, and I admire very greatly these people, I was often there. But it's terrible to see what happens to a Catholic country like Ireland, that this country, who was practically sending priests, hundreds and thousands of priests all over the world, they are practically lost now. They had in 1990, they still had 300 ordinations a year. Last year they had eight ordinations. Eight! As a matter of fact, also in other European countries, and this will happen also to other parts of the world, I'm sure also in Australia, practically the celibate clergy is dying out. And we have already in our German speaking countries, more or less half of the parishes who have not anymore a pastor. We are losing the Sunday Eucharist, all because we do not want to have ordained married men, and why we don't want to have ordained women.

So the reason for the vocational crisis and plummeting Mass attendance in Ireland and Germany, according to Kung, is all because we do not want to have ordained married men or ordained women--when, in fact, it is the disbelief underlying such attitudes of revisionism and dissent that have rendered the Catholic populations of these countries indifferent to priestly vocations and Mass attendance!

Again, when asked his opinion of the present pontificate, Kung responded:

I would agree that [John Paul II has] preached the gospel for the poor, he was for human rights in the world. But all this was in blatant contradiction with what he has done in his own church, because he repressed human rights in the church, he repressed the rights of theologians and he reintroduced the Inquisition, he offended very often women because of his Marian piety, exalting the Virgin Mary as an example, and repressing women in the church discipline.

The fact that Kung sees a "contradiction" between the Pope's social teaching and his other teaching reveals Kung's secular commitments, because there is simply no contradiction at all when the matter is viewed from within the perspective of traditional Church teaching itself. Because the secular vantage point is inevitably superficial, it can easily misconstrue the Pope's affirmation of the traditional Catholic veneration of Mary as contradicting his affirmation of the traditional Catholic prohibition of women priests. Likewise, the Pope's support for human rights and compassion for the poor may seem to contradict his willingness to allow the Church to censure theologians (like Kung) who dissent from Church teaching. Yet there is altogether no contradiction between these things when seen from within traditional Catholic understanding of the matter. The problem comes only with unbelief: if one no longer believes in an authoritative Revelation, preserved and proclaimed by the Church under the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit, then everything caves in. There is no longer any objective basis for censuring views that dissent from traditional Catholic beliefs, because all beliefs are relative and subjective. The exclusion of women from ordained ministry then becomes no more than a long standing arbitrary and unjust convention of the Church; and one might as well lobby for the elevation of Mary into a "goddess" as to maintain that God is a triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What is evident throughout the interview is Kung's unrelentingly secular--that is to say, immanent, naturalistic (anti-supernaturalistic) viewpoint. This is particularly evident in his discussion of the pope's charism of infallibility. But I have discussed enough of Kung. He has done his share of damage over the past two generations. I am only too pleased that I did not waste much of my time as a student reading his books. My prayer is that others would not waste their time on him either, and, still more, that they would not be taken in by his misleadingly sophistical, tired reformulations of the failed and secularized Protestant/Enlightenment project.

Letters to a lapsed Catholic

Letter No. 1
Blosser:

Thanks for being forthcoming about not having been to church since last Ash Wednesday. So where is your relationship with God if you've left His Church out of it? Sounds either very Protestant or very indifferent--which would mean very apostate.

Pascal's Wager might be worth a few moments' reflection here. Regardless of whether we spend time thinking about it, we're gambling spiritually with our lives by the little decisions we make every day, aren't we! As Peter Kreeft once said, there are finally only two kinds of people in the world: saints who know they're sinners, and sinners who think they're saints; or, as C.S. Lewis preferred: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says: "Thy will be done."

If it's disillusionment with the local Catholic parish, I could write a book of my own about that. I find contemporary Catholic practice appalling. There's better music in Anglican and Lutheran churches, and better catechesis in Baptist and Presbyterian churches. The only problem is this little darn thing called truth: it's still the only real Church-- His Church. And I can't pretend to live obediently and garner His blessing apart from His Church. It's a blessing to me, actually, that Peter and Judas both betrayed Christ, not only because I realize that even those Jesus chose to be members of His varsity team were morally fallible, but because it shows me that those whom He placed in charge of His Church (Peter, at least) was morally fallible and yet to be obeyed. If you want a good illustration of that, read the first two chapters of Galatians, which relates the first meeting of Paul with Peter, as well as his later meeting with him. Imagine Paul, the most educated Jew in all Palestine-- the protoge of Rabbi Gamaliel, a Roman citizen, speaker of Latin and Greek as well as Hebrew and Aramaic, a Pharisee by training-- just imagine this Paul, converted independently on the road to Damascus, after three years going up to Jerusalem to submit himself to this head-strong and probably arrogant-seeming Joe Sixpack of a fisherman, PETER, accepting his authority as head of the Church!! A truckload to think about there.

Letter No. 2
Blosser:

One of the chief measures of being Catholic is one's willingness to submit himself to the Church as to Christ, believing those two things can't be separated in matters of faith and morals, doctrine and discipline. I can understand the subjective experience of emptiness in segments of one's spiritual pilgrimage. St. John of the Cross wrote about that in his Dark Night of the Soul, when he refered to those consolations (both sensible and spiritual) that God removes from us in order to help us grow. That has to be excruciatingly painful in some respects. They say that Mother Teresa lacked, for the great majority of her career in Calcutta, any personal sense of reassurance about God's will in what she was doing. And yet nobody--least of all the famished and dying Indians she pulled out of the gutters of Calcutta--would have ever known this: she had to go from day-to-day on sheer faith. This, it seems to me, is what we're asked to do when the externals of our faith life don't seem to "deliver." This is certainly the case for me at the moment, at least when it comes to Sunday Masses. The music and such seem to detract, rather than assist, the ascent of the soul to God.

Something very important to most of us from Protestant backgrounds is our feelings. We want to be personally connected, welcomed at church and experience (EXPERIENCE) the love of God through its horizontal expressions of hospitality and good will from those in the pews around us. I think the Catholic Church has moved considerably, if somewhat lamely, in this direction by its posting of greeters at church doors, it's often prolonged "passing of the peace" after the Our Father, etc., and sometimes Wednesday night church dinners, and such. All of this is well-intended, and I think there is certainly an important place in our faith journeys for interpersonal connectedness with other fellow-travelers. Yet I think these things can facilitate a loss of focus on what is importantly stressed in Catholic tradition: the sheer objectivity of grace communicated through the sacraments. We want to FEEL grace, when in fact all we can feel are either the physical effects of grace in the expressions of affection in those around us, or, worse, their self-induced expressions of enthusiasm. But grace, being supernatural, is incapable of being felt. This is why Catholic tradition has so many books like Ronald Knox's book on ENTHUSIASM-- emotional shows of spirituality-- condemning it.

All of this is both quite simple and quite challenging. It means that God gives us through His Church the objective means of salvation and His own authority and supernatural grace to back them up and make them truly effective. It means that when I believingly receive the Sacrament of His Body and Blood in a state of grace I receive grace objectively whether I feel anything emotionally or not. Furthermore, for Catholics it means that we place ourselves in a state of mortal sin and divine condemnation when we break the precepts of the Church (by failing to keep our Holy Days of Obligation or failing to receive the Eucharist in a state of grace after having confessed our sins) whether we personally FEEL any sense of guilt or not.

I recognize the tight spot you find yourself in somewhat, being the lone Catholic in your family, and so forth. But if you could have a talk with your dear patron saint, St. Ambrose, do you not think he would say, "Dear friend, get to confession and get yourself back to church!"? Furthermore, as to your heretical opinions, do you not think he would tell you, "Dear daughter, do you imagine that Christ established the Church only to undermine it by having her teaching held hostage by the opinions of the masses? Of course everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but do you think that following your own opinions, any more than following one's conscience, can possibly guarantee that one will do the right thing? Have we not the obligation to submit our opinions to the governance of the Church, to let our consciences and opinions be informed by her teaching? What would happen to the Church if we let her path be determined by majority vote or by the public media? Perhaps that is preciesly what is wrong with your American Church these days ... "

As important as feelings are, they can be so misleading and deceptive if not allowed to flourish in their proper place in relation to the intellect. One can feel as if God is smiling upon him when he is embarked upon the silliest and most deluded ventures. Try re-reading C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. Such fiction, unlike a lot of non-fiction these days, has the power to lead us closer to reality rather than further away from it. Lewis says that the notion of "humanity's search for the divine" strikes him a bit like talking about "the mouse's search for the cat"! I'm much more inclined to suspect Blaise Pascal is right when he says: "Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true." The cure for this, of course, is a more careful and ongoing study of what true religion involves--how it is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.

I see little sense in searching for the little experienced "epiphanies" of the sacred in a life divorced from submission to God's provision for us of a Church intended for us for our own ongoing governance, edification, and care. But if one's good is to be found within the precincts of the Church, then I'm all in favor of looking for every possible "sacramental sign" of His grace wherever it can be discerned.

There is so much falsehood about Opus Dei floating around these days, particularly as a result of that marvellously engaging but satanically misleading book by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. But one thing I will always treasure from my involvement with Opus Dei is the Plan of Life they provide [see one description here]. We would never undertake a mundane venture-- such as a trip or the building of a house-- without a plan. But most of us rush headlong through life without any sort of plan for our lives. Our ultimate purpose in life is one thing and one thing only: to get ourselves to heaven. Yet what sort of plan have we for getting there. Instead, we drift ... and then wonder why we are unhappy, confused, and distant from the shore.

Every day we should engage in at least 15 minutes of spiritually edifying reading, by which I don't mean anything New Agey or some secularized version of Christianity like Thomas More might provide. I mean reading that strengthens one's understanding of Church teaching, that builds one's desire to lead a disciplined life, that shows how to do this, and so forth. Most of Opus Dei literature is focused on the virtues, because without the cultivation of basic virtues, such as humility, we can't begin to expect to appropriate some of the most important kinds of knowledge. Scheler understood this principle, at least, when he pointed out how love (far from being "blind") actually opens our eyes to values in those we love (to which others who don't love them remain blind)!

Second--to continue to pick out several more items from the plan--in addition to 15 minutes of spiritual reading daily, we should pray daily at regular times. We should pray upon waking, at noon, and before retiring at night. And some of these should be set prayers, such as the Angelus, which it recommends at noon, or at 3:00pm, or the Rosary.

Third, we should meditate at least 15 minutes a day, by which I don't mean the mind-emptying form of meditation found in Zen Buddhism and other Eastern forms of mysticism, but rather a focusing of the mind upon Christ, an imaginative picturing of Him in some of the scenes the Gospels opens up for us, as well as upon aspects of our own relatedness to Him and to the saints. St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, used to hesitate briefly before passing through every door, because he would mentally allow his own guardian angel to pass through the door ahead of him-- not a bad excercise to remind us of the unseen reality all about us.

Fourth, we should make an examination of conscience every evening before retiring, in which we take inventory of how well we have stuck to the Plan of Life for that day, as well as any sins of commission or omission we have been guilty of that day. This way we will find that we have something concrete to confess by the end of the week, whether it's mortal or merely venial.

Fifth, we should assist at (go to) Mass whenever at all possible throughout the week as well as on the weekends.

Sixth, we should seek to sanctify ourselves and our work and all we do by practicing the presence of Christ throughout every moment of every day. Having a crucifix with you may facilitate this end.

Seventh, we should seek to sanctify others through our work. As they say:

Sow a thought, reap an act;
Sow an act, reap a habit;
Sow a habit, reap a character;
Sow a character, reap a destiny.

Then there's what C.S. Lewis says:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal,and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-- immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

Letter No. 3
Blosser:

You wrote:

There comes a point, though, when things are spewed out of one's mouth, quite involuntarily. Things that don't belong. Even churches.

I'm not sure I follow what you're intending here. It seems to me that one could involuntarily spew out of one's mouth some things one had intended to swallow, like vitamins, getting them confused with cherry pits or something (heh ...). On the other hand, your use of the word "belong" raises the question of what you may be assuming as a standard of judgment as to what does and what doesn't belong. Christ doubtless has His own standard, which neither of us is in a position to question, when He spews the lukewarm church of Laodicea out of His mouth in Rev. 3:14-22. But I wonder also whether any of us is in a position to assess whether Christ's Church warrants spewing out of our mouths, if that's what you mean.

Letter No. 4
Blosser:

Well, let's get away from the theme of getting sick "when things are spewed out" and vomited up, which I doubt is pleasant to anyone. Let me affirm a point that's important to you, however, namely your point about body wisdom, what your heart and body tell you. I think that's important too. Often our hunches represent intuitions that come from engrained habits of virtue. That's what allows the G.I. to throw himself on a grenade in a foxhole and save his buddies' lives at the cost of his own. He doesn't even have to think about it. It's instinctual.

Even more basically, I would agree that we can't help believing what we believe to be true and right, because it's what we really believe is true and right, after all. We can't will ourselves to change what we believe if we don't believe it's true. What is within our control, however, is to do our best to conform our ACTIONS to what we know in our heart to be honest and good and true-- to shun evil and selfishness, be generous and kind, to seek truth, to care about what is right and good, and to do what we can to seek the realization of these things. This in itself can allow us to see more clearly what is true, so as to avoid deluding ourselves, in case that could be happening-- and I include myself here along with anyone else.

Letter No. 5
Blosser:

It's always good to hear from you. I'm glad my email kept you thinking, as you put it. Just as C.S. Lewis said about reading, one cannot be too careful of one's thinking these days ... It could lead one kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God, the most reluctant convert in Christendom.

You comparison of sickness to God was interesting-- submitting to that over which one has no power.

In another vein, you mention The Church that Forgot Christ as a book that has influed you away from the Church. I've just purchased Goodby, Good Men, by Michael Rose, which is a nitty-gritty expose of the sexual scandal, but one which sees the scandal as a symptom of a much deeper underlying malady, which has to do not merely with slack discipline but unbelief on the part of many bishops who are supposed to be the "shepherds" of the flock. Horrible. The evil you mention is real. The temptation that Satan would want us to succumb to is that of thinking that we could find security by absenting ourselves from church and cutting ourselves off from the sacramental means of grace, of course. Here's where we're called upon by the Lord to be wise as serpents, and not merely innocent as doves.

Our battle, as Paul says, is not against flesh and blood, ultimately; but against powers and principalities in high places. This means that the real battle is taking place in the unseen world-- part of which is the world of the intellect, the world of ideas. Some of this shakes out in the "culture-wars" that divide our nation politically, in odd ways. Other parts of it manifest themselves in intellectual trends and fads. You mention having been exposed to "much anti-Christ is very subtle ways ...." This is doubtless true. It always is. But what if the subtlety is subtler than you'd ever guessed, and some of the ideas that have influenced us under the guise of a loving "peace," "equality," "embracing diversity," "empowering the marginalized," and so forth are actually a web of half-truths being spun by Screwtape to lead us to perdition?

"GOD" means no more than "DOG" apart from an apostolic tradition that can define Him who was revealed for us in Christ. Try reading Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, again. You will be glad of it. He's one of those authors who is not only a tremendous comfort, but offers some profound conceptual insights to back it up. You've probably seen Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger in the movie Shadowlands about his short-lived marriage to Joy Gresham, who already had cancer before they were married and died shortly afterwards. It's based on his posthumously published book, A Grief Observed.

Letter No. 6
Blosser:

You shouldn't fear reading Lewis' Screwtape Letters, I shouldn't think. I don't know of an author better equipped to bring us to that place where we're safest-- at the "center of God's will," as Corrie Ten Boom's sister put it. You're correct about Lewis not having been Catholic, even though he believed in Purgatory and went to weekly confession, which is more than one can say for most Catholics these days. At least (possibly 3) books have been written about Lewis and his relationship to Catholicism. One is by Christopher Derrick, whose father (I believe) was converted by G.K. Chesterton. Another, I think, is by Joseph Pearce (though I could be mistaken). But I think there's also one more. They all suggest that Lewis could have quite naturally gone on to become a Catholic had it not been for a couple of major cultural barriers, like the fact that his father had been an Ulsterman, which would make it about as hard to become a Catholic as it would be if you were a member of the KKK and were asked to consider joining the NAACP or Black Panthers. I LOVE the Sheldon Vanauken book, which you mentioned, A Severe Mercy. If you've never read it, there's at least one chapter in the sequel, Under the Severe Mercy--the chapter called "Crossing the Channel," which is well worth reading. There's also an article that was published in the New Oxford Review just before he died that's very touching, about his meeting with Davy's child that she had out of wedlock before they were born: he met her after Davy died, when her daughter was a young woman. He mentions the fact that Davy rejected the notion of having an abortion and how the two of them met in Virginia, and went and knelt and prayed in the church that Davy had attended while she was living. Very moving. Even if you do not 'hope to turn again' (pace T.S. Eliot), I will continue to keep you in my prayers as I have every morning since first hearing from you back when M. introduced us, and pray that God continues to enfold you with His grace and bring you to the place where you're confident, contented, and convinced that you are in His holy will.

(No, God is not male. He embraces both male and female. How could he not, since we're both--male and female--made in His image? Then why do we call Him "Him"? Because in relation to Him we're all feminine, and in relation to us He's masculine. We are His bride, the Church (which makes even us men feminine in relationship to Christ), and He is our bridegroom. Imagine what that does to those of us macho types for whom that conjures up images of ourselves in drag!)

Letter No. 7
Blosser:

Although you say that in relation to us God is also feminine, that overlooks the difference between metaphor and simile, in that God is never said to be a mother hen, although He is said to be like a mother hen, whereas He is said to be a Father, and Jesus obviously is not only masculine in relation to us metaphorically, but actually a man, and, if we are to believe the creed and hold that He is ascended as to His flesh, then He is still a man, as well as God.

There is a lot of reading about the female's experience of Catholicism that I find highly edifying-- for example, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux, or St. Edith Stein's work, Essays On Woman (Collected Works of Edith Stein). But if you mean the dour writing of embittered females who think that a patriarchal hierarchy is something "oppressive" to women, I find that sort of writing animated by an ideology entirely foreign to the spirit of Christianity and Catholicism. It blindly buys into an ideology developing in the West since the Enlightenment, writings of Rousseau, and the French Revolution, that has gone to seed in contemporary expressions of gender feminism that has, in my view, completely lost touch with what it means to be a human being. The notion that men and women share a common human 'nature' is dismissed as Aristotelian "essentialism," and in its place is foisted the notion of woman as a bundle of autonomous interests whose end lies in a sort of quasi-Nietzschean self-realization. Here are some secular examples of where this kind of thinking has led (though Catholic religious examples, like Mary Daly, are even further out). Note in particular the nobility in which they hold the traditional role of mother and homemaker, traditionally celebrated in Christian tradition:

• "[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed.... No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, "Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma," Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.
• "A parasite sucking out the living strength of another organism...the [housewife's] labor does not even tend toward the creation of anything durable.... [W]oman's work within the home [is] not directly useful to society, produces nothing. [The housewife] is subordinate, secondary, parasitic. It is for their common welfare that the situation must be altered by prohibiting marriage as a 'career' for woman." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.
• "[Housewives] are mindless and thing-hungry... not people. [Housework] is peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls. [It] arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity with an inevitably weak core of self.... [Housewives] are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps. [The] conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife." ~ Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963.
• "[Housewives] are dependent creatures who are still children ... parasites." ~ Gloria Steinem, "What It Would Be Like If Women Win," Time, August 31, 1970.
• "Feminism was profoundly opposed to traditional conceptions of how families should be organized, [since] the very existence of full-time homemakers was incompatible with the women's movement.... [I]f even 10 percent of American women remain full-time homemakers, this will reinforce traditional views of what women ought to do and encourage other women to become full-time homemakers at least while their children are very young.... If women disproportionately take time off from their careers to have children, or if they work less hard than men at their careers while their children are young, this will put them at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis men, particularly men whose wives do all the homemaking and child care.... This means that no matter how any individual feminist might feel about child care and housework, the movement as a whole had reasons to discourage full-time homemaking." ~ Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, 1986.

Letter No. 8
Blosser:

When you say you "guess the lack of a female voice is universal, in all subjects," I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean the world seems to lack religions in which the accent is on femininity as opposed to masculinity in the deity, I know that simply isn't true. Judaism was unique among all the religions of the Middle East at the time of its appearance in holding to a deity that was portrayed in masculine terms. This mascuilinity (God entering mother earth from outside of it, later in Christianity impregnating the Virgin in order to Incarnate His Son, etc.) speaks of God's transcendence-- His being beyond, other than, independent of the world He creates. All the other Canaanite religions and religions of the Middle East held feminine conceptions of divinity-- implying that their gods emerged from mother earth or the cosmos, or what the Greeks called 'Gaya,' rather than having created it. So I would suggest, if anything, that the "male voice" is the minority voice in the history of world religions, if by "female voice" you mean female conceptions of the divine. Only in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, & Christianity) is God portrayed as an all-transcendent deity in masculine terms, as far as I know.

As to the Hebrew name for God, "El Shaddai," I grant that the linguistic associations you suggest (with "breast") exist embedded among the other meanings. The upshot, it seems to me, is that God is to be understood as all-sufficient, as providing for every conceivable need; and certainly God is. He embraces the male and famale, since both genders are created in His image. In fact, Pope John Paul II has a remarkable notion of the image of God in which he suggests that we've been mistaken to think of this image in purely individualistic terms. Rather, he suggests, the fact that the human body is male and female, and that these forms bear the immanent teleology of being designed for one another, suggests that the body has a "nuptial meaning" and a "language of the body," entailing that the image we bear is one in which only male and female together is a complete image of God. Interesting, huh?! In fact, there's a huge development in orthodox Catholic reflection on the Catholic tradition stemming from the realist phenomenological tradition of which Pope John Paul II is a member, along with Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein (who wrote a dissertation On the Problem of Empathy [Collected Works of Edith Stein, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Discalced Carmelite, Vol 3] under Husserl, before being martyred at Auschwitz), and still living philosophers such as John Crosby (left), Josef Seifert (right), Kenneth Schmitz , and others. A popularizer of the Pope's theology of the body is Christopher West, who has out a number of very good books I've recommended to my kids. Excellent, really; even revolutionary, in terms of overcoming the pervasive cultural drift, which is anything but healthy. [For more on this, check this link.] I don't even think 'dating' is anything near healthy as practiced today. What animals we've become!

Letter No. 9
Blosser:

You write:

Right now I am busy at work. I am giving considerable thought about going back to regular attendance at Mass; I do think about it often, but, as I implied before, "something" (my body in particular is not cooperative) stops me.

I really feel stuck, in other words.

I'm trying to get rid of this image of your soul trying to pull your body towards you car, saying, "C'mon, body, let's drive to church!" and you body, reclined in a comfortable chair, stubbornly resisting. A nice Manichaean or Cartesian dualism, that.

Sometimes I find myself talking to my body (no longer as young as it once was) and using the language of St. Francis of Assisi, saying: "C'mon, brother Ass, move along now, like you should!"

Anyway, I think if you used the Skeptics' approach in going to confession and church, God would reward your faith (... you know ... as in the skeptic's prayer: "Oh God, if there is a God, have mercy on my soul, if I have a soul!") Which is to say that experience seems to show that God rewards the smallest tokens of faith, even has he tests us in other respects.

As to the external banalities of Sunday worship, trust me: I know. Each time we leave church we say to one another how glad we are to be done with that. It's a 'heroic' endurance just to go, because of all the external distractions and inanities, and such. But two things hold some help here: (1) the fact that there are often good souls in the precincts of the local church who can become wonderful spiritual friends, and, even more: (2) the knowledge that Christ is Himself there in His physical Body and Blood to meet our battered souls amidst the braying asses (I'm thinking of contemporary music) of His stable. (By the way, you've read Thomas Day's wonderful book, Why Catholics Can't Sing: Catholic Culture and the Triumph of Bad Taste (Amazon link), haven't you?)

Protestant Bible translations were not the first

As I argue in "Luther's Bible translation" (on my Musings of a Pertinacious Papist blog), Martin Luther's translation of the Bible was far from being the first. Catholics published many translations prior to Luther's. There were 18 German translations of the entire Bible prior to Luthers.

In response to this post, I received the following communication from a respected colleague:

Thanks for the information ... I wonder about two things:

First, as to whether Luther (pictured left) gets the credit he does on account of stumping for the Bible to be not only in the common language but also commonly available to those who were not priests and scholars. My guess is that Luther's translation was fairly shortly made available to all who could read and purchase ... perhaps the earlier editions had a more narrow circulation.

Second, though I do not doubt that there were earlier linguistic and philological scholars Luther's equal and superior (Erasmus, for one, comes to mind) ... Zwingli's critique is tainted by his widely known contempt for -- and perhaps jealousy of -- Luther. Zwingli's zeal for his own cause yielded a violent end. Theirs was not a time for civil academic exchange between scholars, but for diatribes and invective ... in which Zwingli, Luther, and Eck, among others, were now and again active participants.

To which I responded thus:

Good questions. The chief warrant for the association of Luther and the Protestant Reformation in general with the popular circulation of the Bible, in my opinion, comes from the rough historical coincidence of Protestantism with the advent of printing. What is also often overlooked is the fact that there was no widespread literacy among the laity until well into modern times, so that even when the Protestant biblical translations were first made, they were not read far beyond a small circle of literate academic intellectuals.

Zwingli (pictured left) was not only a pugnacious opponent of Luther but a philanderer and adulterer, though I do not know whether it follows that on this account what he said about Luther here is false. My main point in this post was to offer a corrective to the wide-spread assumption that the Catholic Church tried to keep the laity biblically illiterate. The laity were virtually all illiterate for the fist sixteen centuries to begin with, but this hardly meant that they were ignorant of the Gospel. Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-1580 (pictured right) has pretty well debunked that assumption in British scholarship. There were numerous of vernacular translations of parts of the Bible in existence from Anglo-Saxon times (Venerable Bede, etc.) up until Wycliffe, though their circulation naturally was confined to the literate minority (mostly priests). From Wycliffe until the Douay-Rheims (the authorized Catholic translation published by English exiles in Belgium and France before the KJV appeared), the Church did adopt a cautious stance toward Bible translations, not because it was afraid of the laity knowing the liberty of the Gospel (as Fundamentalists often suppose), but because of the proliferation of heresy (such as Wycliffe's).

Though it may not be quite "heresy," once can still see "de-Catholicizing" tendencies in many translations of Scripture today. To take just one example, there are thirteen instances of the term paradosis (usually in its plural form, paradoseis) in the NT, of which ten are critical of human traditions that have departed from God’s Word. In the other three cases, Paul commends traditions to the churches to whom he writes (1 Cor 11:2; 2 Thes 2:15; 3:6). Significantly all ten of the negative references are translated by the NIV (pictured left) as "traditions," while all three of the positive references are deliberately mistranslated as "teachings" -- the translation for didaskalia or didachê, not paradosis. Such a translation is regrettably tendentious and parochial, slanted in ways that North American evangelicalism's tastes are not offended and its predilictions are confirmed.

But perhaps this latter bit is a discussion for another time.

A conversation on the significance of Hippolytus' Christology (continued)

This conversation is continued from one that was posted earlier (here). Any new readers would be strongly advised to consult my opening statements to that exchange in order to more fully understand the context of this conversation and who Hippolytus was. Again, I begin with an earlier paragraph -- this one from Foster -- to contextualize the remarks that follow.

Foster:

Hippolytus died circa 236 C.E. While his writings may have been "unsystematic," as you say, there is almost no doubt (historically) that he was accused of being a "ditheist" by Bishop Callistus. W.H.C. Frend thinks that the bishop may have been justified in labeling Hippolytus thus. He also thinks that Hippolytus thought of the Logos as a created being, deified for a time. The Catholic writer Edmund Fortman in his book The Triune God also informs us that Hippolytus "rather deliberately seems to avoid putting the Holy Spirit on the same personal plane with the Father and the Son, and to regard Him more as a divine force than a divine person" (page 119). Granted, as Fortman writes, Hippolytus may not have highlighted the "personality" of the Spirit because he was not dealing with a heated issue that arose prior to 381 C.E., namely, the Pneumatomachi Controversy. Nevertheless,he does not seem to ascribe personhood to the Spirit of God and he appears to subordinate the Son (ontologically) to the Father.

Blosser:

I have no serious quarrells here, as far as I can tell. Muslims regularly accuse Christians of tri-theism, and Christians aren't always cautious to avoid being thus misunderstood. If you ask nearly any rank-and-file Christian to explain "God," he will almost always, if he ventures the least bit beyond the confessional formulations, end up saying things that could be understood either in the direction of modalism or tri-theism. Beyond that, it's an empirical fact that trinitarian concepts are refractory to facile understanding and that many people-- even theologians otherwise known for reasonably careful thought-- have expressed themselves incautiously or misunderstandingly on the Trinity.

Interlocutor:

The primary point I want to make about Hippolytus, however, is that his views do not stem from lack of precision or conceptual clarity. Nor do they originate from his being less than circumspect when it comes to articulating his theological concepts. Hippolytus expresses himself the way he does, I contend, because he believes that Christ is a deified creature, one who has gradually progressed from LOGOS ENDIAQETOS to hUIOS (i.e. LOGOS PROFORIKOS) to QEOS.

Blosser:

Well, I suppose we're both on shaky ground where speculating as to Hippolytus' subjective dispositions are concerned-- whether he was less than circumspect or deliberate and clear. I think what I'm more concerned with is the resulting Christological formulation, which, from the anachronistic perspective of post-Nicene theology, is awkward and weird. An orthodox Catholic just would not talk about Christ in such a manner after the Nicene and post-Nicene Christological dogmatic definitions and clarifications.

From a Catholic perspective, one would say, "Look, we know that the Ecumenical conciliar definitions are true, since they were ratified by popes and have the Church-mediated authority of God behind them. So we know that Christ is nothing less than 'true God of true God.' Now all of this is in perfect harmony with Scripture, even though there was a period of some three-hundred years prior to Nicea (AD 325) during which the Church hadn't settled on any particular official way of formulating the relationships between the Persons of the Holy Trinity. Thus there were a range of various Christological formulas proposed by different theologians-- some closer to what we would today call orthodoxy, others at a farther remove, and still others simply heretical. There were various theories (as you well know) -- adoptionist, Ebionite, docetic, gnostic, and so on -- some of which the Church took a position against (such as the wording in the Apostles Creed directed against a docetic view of Christ) and some of which she didn't immediately. St. Thomas Aquinas raised several questions about the tradition of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, which wasn't formally defined until 1854 by Pope Pius IX, but this didn't get him condemned as a heretic because the doctrinal tradition hadn't yet been defined and a degree of latitute was permitted in interpreting the matter. Likewise with Christology in the 3rd century. Hippolytus' formula would be condemned as utterly unorthodox in a post-Nicene milieu, but within the context of his time, it's not altogether incomprehensible to me how he might have come up with such an interpretation as he did. For one thing, there is a progressive dimension to the earthly life of Christ -- from His lowly birth, baptism, and transfiguration,
to his resurrection, ascension, and glorification, etc., which might suggest the sort of thing Hippolitus thought he saw in Christ. It's just not altogether surprising. But why should I want to follow Hippolytus' Christological speculations rather than the Church's official teaching -- especially when they contradict the latter?"

Interlocutor:

The problem, as Swete notes, is that the language of Hippolytus does not allow for the Holy Spirit being an eternal divine relation or Person--he also believes that the Son as such is not eternal--and his thought evidently contains elements of subordinationism. That is, Hippolytus is not just maintaining that the Son or Spirit are subordinate to the Father as respects function; they are subordinate PER ESSENTIAM. Such claims are utterly at odds with Nicene Christianity.

Blosser:

I find it difficult to be surprised by any of this. Until controversy compels the Church to publicly clarify her mind on a doctrinal issue such as this and define it (as at Nicea), one expects to find a great deal of latitude in what is believed and asserted about the question. This is the case at present with questions such as those eschatological questions concerning the anti-Christ, the meaning of the 'millenial' reign of Christ, the tribulation, the 'binding of Satan', etc., etc. And it was the case with other doctrines before they were defined.

Interlocutor:

I don't think the Church allows that much latitude. Bishop Callistus (who was evidently a modalist or Monarchian) accused Hippolytus of being a ditheist. Frend thinks Callistus was quite justified in appending this descriptive term to the Roman theologian. Moreover, if Hippolytus really did believe that Christ was a deified or apotheosized creature as suggested by Refutation of all Heresies, 10, this would put him outside the bounds of orthodoxy. We are not just talking about imprecise God-talk: the Christological ideas contained in the writings of Hippolytus are at odds with basic Trinitarian thought.

Blosser:

From what I just said above, it should be apparent that I have little to disagree with here. On the one hand, it may be ill-advised to judge the official position of the Church with regard to Hippolytus (if it had one) from the epithets of a modalist or Monarchian who was himself a heretic. [Here I retract an earlier assertion I made in ignorance that the Church never canonized Hippolytus, comparing him to Tertullian, since a brief perusal of an article on him made it clear that he had been, in fact, canonized. The matter is made exceedingly problematic by the fact that he developed Christological formulations that are highly heterodox and that he opposed the popes of his day, even getting his small band of followers to elect himself as a rival pope (what Rome calls an "antipope"), and by the fact that, despite these infelicities, he was later reconciled to the Church before he was martyred, earning canonization as a Christian martyr. These latter judgments of the Church, however, cannot be interpreted as approval of any part of his heterodox Christological doctrines.]

If Hippolytus held a form of subordinationism of the Holy Spirit or Son, this should not surprise us. Further, as mentioned before, there is a legitimate respect in which these two Persons of the Trinity ARE subordinate to the Father and proceed from Him, even if this isn't clearly articulated in the possibly deficient formulations of Hippolytus.

Interlocutor:

According to orthodox Trinitarian thought, the Son and Spirit may be subordinate to the Father in a functional sense--though Kevin Giles disputes this point--but no orthodox Trinitarian is going to openly or knowingly concede the second and third Persons of the Trinity are inferior in essence, which (as you know) is what subordinationism entails.

Blosser:

Yes, I know. My point is that the legitimate "functional" subordination of Persons in the Trinity helps us understand, at least, why heresies holding an "essential" subordination of Persons very likely emerged. I'm not sure, but this sort of distinction may not have even been entertained before Nicea (AD 325).

Interlocutor:

My beef with Mr Bowman is that he has illicitly employed Contra Noetum 10.1-2. This passage does not say what he would like it to say.

Blosser:

I have no quarrel with that.

Interlocutor:

Good, that means I can take a breather. :-)

Here I insert a prior paragraph of Foster's to clarify the context of the discussion following:

Interlocutor:

The problem with God willing the Son into existence, even if He did so by means of His own essence of substance, have been detailed by Jesuit Edmund Fortman (quoted earlier). Fortman lists what he calls two "grave defects" with Hippolytus' "theory" of the Father metaphysically (!) willing the Son into existence: (1) The Logos was not a person or the Son eternally, but only precreationally; (2) "The generation of the Son was not essential to God but only the result of a free decision of God. Hence God might have remained without a Son and thus might have remained only one Person" (Fortman, page 118). In other words, the generation of the Son, according to Hippolytus as interpreted by Fortman, was something that may or may not have transpired. It was a contingent divine act.

Blosser:

Yes, indeed. I don't dispute this. What I dispute is the notion that he can be taken for a careful trinitarian theologian. He's the theological equivalent of an Empedocles, and the notion that his writings can meaningfully be adduced against Nicea seem not more plausible to me than that Empedocles metaphysic should be proposed as counting against the Periodic Table of Elements developed in the 19th Century. At most, it seems to me, Hippolytus gives us one snapshot of the kinds of inchoate Trinitarian opinions that existed in the ante-Nicene period.

Interlocutor:

I wonder if Hippolytus can be taken for a "trinitarian theologian" at all. At what point does a person become a non-Trinitarian theologian? The problem I see with the paragraph above is that you appear to assume that Hippolytus is expressing an "inchoate" form of the Trinity doctrine in a non-precise manner. But I submit that a comparison between Ptolemy and Copernicus would be more apt. Hippolytus does not seem to espouse an inchoate form of Trinitarianism at all. His writings help us to see that the famed "way to Nicea" was filled with twists, turns and diversions. Nicea was firm in its insistence that the Son is begotten, not created. He is consubstantial with the Father (says Nicea), not by promotion or progressive divinization, but UT NATURA or PER ESSENTIAM. I don't believe that Hippolytus' statements were even headed in this direction.

Blosser:

As I intimated earlier, we have no choice but to judge Hippolytus' views heretical in terms of the later dogmatic definitions. We might also judge St. Thomas' questions about the Immaculate Conception somewhat short of the orthodox clarity of the 19th century dogmatic definition, though this is a comparison unfair to St. Thomas, who is canonized, after all, and an official Doctor of the Church.

You object to my appearing to view Hippolytus as expressing an "inchoate" form of the Trinity doctrine in a non-precise manner. That may be a bit over-stated. I see him as a "trinitarian" theologian in the sense that he engages in speculative theologizing concerning the Persons of the Trinity, much as you do -- which, I guess, makes YOU a "trinitarian theologian" in my sense (but don't tell the Watch Tower ).

I like your comparison of Hippolytus and Nicea to Ptolemy and Copernicus. I would expand on it only to add Aristarchus, whose heleocentric cosmology in 250 BC anticipated that of Copernicus in the 16th century. Thus, one could appropriately see Aristarchus as standing to Holy Scripture as Ptolemy to Hippolytus and Copernicus to Nicea. What SEEMED like a "Copernican Revolution" from the vantage point of heterodox thinkers sympathetic to Hippolitus, was merely the retrieval of
the original apostolic deposit of faith found anticipated in Scripture. But even that is probably giving far more importance to Hippolytus than is reasonable, for he was certainly no giant in theology like Ptolemy was in astronomy, and there were many other patristics more congenial to Scripture and Nicea than there were astronomers between Aristarchus and Copernicus who were congenial to them.

Interlocutor:

If the pre-Nicenes truly did not view Christ as "fully God," then the early Christians were not simply saying that Christ is subordinate to the Father. Augustine of Hippo writes that each divine Person is fully God or the whole of the Godhead is in each Person. To say otherwise, to deny that Christ is "fully God," is to blatantly contradict what Augustine averred. One who makes such a declaration is not merely insisting that Christ is subordinate in function to the Father. Rather, a Christian who does not affirm the full deity of Christ is subordinating him to the Father vis-a-vis being, essence or nature.

Blosser:

This is assuming that "fully God" can mean only what you think it means. But why should we believe that? It is also to assume that each ante-Nicene utterance regarding a Person of the Trinity is to be accorded the same weight you would accord it in a theological treatise on the Holy Trinity. But why should we think that? It seems to me that there are a wide variety of contexts in which men made reference to "God" ("Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit") in the first three centuries. If I were to respond in the affirmative to my young son's question "Daddy, did Jesus pray to God?" would this mean that I was denying that Jesus is "fully God"?

Interlocutor:

I use the terminology "fully God" as the Nicenes used it and as Augustine employed the nomenclature. For Augustine of Hippo, the whole of the divine substance is in each Person somewhat perichoretically. For Auggie, the Son is VERE DEUS, VERE HOMO. I understand this to mean that Christ (in Augustine's paradigm) exemplifies or instantiates every divine property exemplified or instantiated by the Father and the Holy Spirit, EX HYPOTHESI.

Blosser:

Yes, but that's exactly my point: you're understanding "fully God" in light of the full-blown Nicean and post-Nicean Augustianian formulae here; but I'm asking why we should think pre-Nicene Church Fathers should have understood by "fully God" all that. Wouldn't that be a bit like expecting Euclid to understand Einstein? We know that Einstein doesn't "refute" Euclid, but he certainly builds on him and develops and refines his understanding. When my father and mother first explained Jesus' relationship to His Father to me, I know I did not fathom the full implications of Augustine's "vere Deus, vere homo" or the Nicene "homoousios" and Christological hypostatic union. In fact, I'm not sure many Christians do, perhaps including myself.

I imagine something like this: even though I don't doubt for a moment the veracity of Trinitarian Christology, I do not suppose that Jesus' identity was grasped by his disciples very well, especially before His resurrection. This is clear from the NT, I think. They supposed He was someone special, even the Messiah, but I doubt they even began to fathom what that meant. Even after His ascension, I think it only natural that the more speculative types of individuals had long bull sessions over their beers brainstorming about what exactly the significance of this Messiah was. I have no doubt that it became part of the Apostolic deposit of Faith that Jesus was God made flesh. But I'm not sure what that meant to those with more speculative dispositions among the patristics in the sub-apostolic age. Some basically towed the Apostolic line. Others ventures farther afield. Eventually Nicea became inevitable and mandatory. The bishop-shepherds of Christ's flock could tolerate only so much confusion in their ranks before they had to pull rank and call the dissenters back to the Apostolic Faith.

Interlocutor:

One Catholic theologian writes:

"There are various aspects hence arising, which do not belong to the Divine Essence as such, but are peculiar to one of the other of the Persons and not common to all. These are the only differences between the Persons. They are not differences of substance or of the essential divine attributes; so they mark, not a multiplication of the Godhead, but of the personalities in the one Godhead."

Hence, "fully God" (as I see it) has reference to the divine essential attributes or necessary properties. So, in answer to your question, I would say that you are not necessarily denying that Jesus is God because you answer in the affirmative. Of course, your example has to do with Christ in his incarnate state though, and not with intra-Trinitarian relations per se. In any event, what I'm trying to say is that God is supposed to instantiate or exemplify certain properties, particular attributes. If a being does not possess such attributes EX TOTO, then the said entity cannot be "fully God." Therefore, if the Son (according to Hippolytus) is a deified creature or not eternal as such, how can he be fully God?

Blosser:

Well, of course such a creature could not be fully God; and you should have no doubts by now about my agreement with you that Hippolytus (like JW teaching) is heterodox! So I think I do see your point quite clearly. My argument has been that the existence of such thinkers as Hippolytus before the Council of Nicea is not to be regarded as a bizarre anomaly even on the supposition that the Nicean dogma of the Holy Trinity is true. It takes time for truth to clarify, especially when it's surrounded by those bent on subverting it.

Textual interpretation & infallibility (continued)

The following discussion is continued from an earlier one published here.

I begin with a statement I made in my earlier discussion, establishing the context:

Blosser:

Well, you might objectively be under that obligation but not subjectively know it, as you would agree, I think. You already accept the infallibility of the teaching of one pope, or at least one man to whom Catholics assign the title of the first pope, at least so far as his written teachings go in his two epistles, which you accept on the basis of tradition as comprising part of the NT. I would be curious about the supposition that God's ability to infallibly guide his servant, Peter, and the other apostles in the oral traditions they bequeathed to us (2 Thes. 2:15) and written traditions, suddenly ceased to be extended any longer with the death of the last apostle.

Foster:

It is possible that I'm objectively under the Pope's authority, but I am subjectively unaware of it. But you know the nature of logical possiblity over against metaphysical or physical possibility. Logically, it is possible that the Absolute is within me, as my old Hindu roomate in Glasgow used to say. However, conceding the logically possibility that the Absolute is within me does not mean that I think it is metaphysically possible that the Absolute can be found inside me.

Blosser:

This goes without saying.

Foster:

Concerning the apostles and infallibility: first, Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the apostles were fallible men that God once used to author infallible documents or utter infallible pronouncements. Notice that we do not think that the men themselves were infallible; only their message, and only some of their messages at that. What I mean by this is that there was no guarantee Peter would speak infallibly when he acted in his capacity as one of God's first century shepherds (Jn 21:15-17).

Blosser:

First, with regard to your assertion that the men themselves were not infallible, but that God used them to author infallible documents, this is a distinction without a difference: you believe what we believe.

Second, where we differ is that we do not believe that God left off His divine work of infallibly guiding his apostles or prophets. Further, we believe the infallibility that you see as extended to the written documents also infused their oral teachings (2 Thes. 2:15).

This means that Catholics would agree with you in denying that any human being is infallible in himself. No properly informed Catholic believes the pope is infallible in his mathematics, his opinions about world politics and world religion,
or even in his opinions about theology.

On the other hand, we simply spell out the implications of the infallible divine guidance of fallible human authors, which you readily grant, to embrace the whole context of God's historical revelation to His people and His ongoing protection of that "deposit of faith" (depositum fidei for your benefit, since you wouldn't understand the English, of course) in the teaching of the Church.

Foster:

Second, we believe that powerful works such as the ability to speak infallibly pretty much died out with the last apostle, who was evidently John. Christians living after the death of John the apostle sometimes report that miracles had ceased in their time, it seems. So there is no way that I could affirm the charism of infallibility obtaining in any man living today.

Blosser:

First, I don't think either of us really wants to speak of the charism of infallibility as an "ability," since we're not attributing infallibility to the human beings themselves but to the divine guidance gifted to them.

Second, I was taught that "miracles ceased" generally with the death of the last apostle at Westminster Theological Seminary where I studied. Miracles were seen as having the purpose of amplifying and reinforcing the divine natue of the great events surrounding the Incarnation and Resurrection.

Yet further study of the matter has led me to question whether this position was anything more than a knee-jerk reaction to any implicatin that real divine guidance could be thought to animate the on-going development and life of the Catholic
Church. St. Augustine gives account of numerous miracles that he witnessed while bishop of Hippo in his own day (5th century) in Book XXII, ch. 8 of Civitas Dei; and I find it interesting that the Scottish Presbyterian editors of the English translation of the Post-Nicene Fathers version of the work are at pains to dismiss these miracles as frauds by which the [Catholic] Church mislead and deceived her members!!

Again, the Protestant tradition affirms that the prophetic office has ceased. But on what basis? There are the usual assetions about the prophetic office having lapsed during the "inter-testimental" period, and "post-apostolic" period, etc.
But why should we assume this? There are plenty of counter-arguments. Newman, for example, is quite good on this. And there are some interesting statements in the NT itself.

The following remarks are, again, mine from the earlier exchange, included here to contextualize the discussion that follows:

Blosser:

Wait a sec: show me one fallible doctrinal pronouncement of an apostle. Where? Whom? Which?

Foster:

I use the word "fallible" in the sense of "being capable of error." Having the capacity or potential for error doesn't necessarily mean that a pronouncement will be erroneous or that a fallible person will speak in error. Since the apostles were fallible men, I believe that every apostle was fallible. This does not mean that the apostles could not speak infallibly, if God so willed. Do I think the apostles ever erred concerning dogma or doctrine? If they did, it doesn't seem that we find any instances in the Bible. Yet, I would say that they were capable of error. It is just the nature of sin.

Blosser:

Two things here. First, I have already stated my agreement with you that infallibility adheres to the divine guidance rather than to any "ability" of the human person in question. Having said that, I would not wish for one moment to speak of the doctrinal pronoucements of the apostles as fallible, since I take these to be the product of the aforementioned divine guidance.

Second, while I would agree that all men are as capable of error as they are of sin, I would want to carefully distinguish the two. Peccability (capability of sinning) is not, as you know, the same thing as doctrinal fallibility (capability of error). I think carelessness about letting the meanings of these slip over into one another can lead to a sort of hyper-pessimistic view such as one finds in the Lutheran view of sin. A Lutheran believes that because we are fallen, we are always sinful or in a state of sin. A Catholic denies this. An adult convert who has just been baptized (washed of the stain of original sin) and has confessed his sins (absolved of his actual sins) is in a state of grace. Now, even if it were true that he fell from this state of grace by committing a mortal sin five minutes later, it could still not be denied that for five minutes he went without sinning. A Lutheran will not admit this, but it seems silly to do so.

Now if this is true of sin, it is even truer of error. It is quite humanly possible to go all day working mathematical problems without committing a single error. This does not mean that one is not capable of error. But it does mean that it is possible for a fallible human being to produce results of mathematical calculation that are infallibly true and accurate. There is nothing odd or goofy about this.

The divine charism claimed for official Church teaching in the Catholic Church is that God infallibly guides the Church in such a way that whenever the Church declares in an official capacity and a public and solemn way what is true of apostolic teaching, God will infallibly prevent her from declaring something true that is false, or vice versa. There doesn't seem to me to be much that is odd or goofy about this either.

Here, again, is another earlier remark:

Blosser:

I think his fears are unfounded. In the first place, I think he'd readily agree that some interpretations of the biblical text, such as the intepretation that says that the apostles assumed the existence of an infinite-personal God, are infalliblly irrevisible. We're not going to come up with a legitimate "interpretation" of the NT that says that the apostles may not have believe in the existence of God.

Foster:

Vanhoozer no doubt would agree with you here.

Blosser:

Agreement is nice.

Regarding Vanhoozer, I had written earlier that I thought that what he fears is:

... losing interpretive "elbow room" where no definitive understanding has been attained by the mind of the Church. For example, some eschatological issues are far from settled in the Catholic tradition, such as the intrepretation of parts of the Book of Revelation. (Wild and wooly interpretations of this book are a dime-a-dozen, as you know, among some of the more fundamentalist sects, even among televangelists.) But the Church allows such interpretive "elbow room" when it comes to these sorts of things; so I think Vanhoozer's fears are unfounded.

Foster:

I think Vanhoozer may fear more than you're suggesting. He apparently thinks that no biblical interpretation should claim that it is absolutely correct. An interpreter should recognize that his view is provisional and subject to change and not just in matters of eschatology. Clearly, Vanhoozer doesn't think that this is always the case, even if it sounds like that is what he's saying. But neither do I think his comments are linked to adiaphora or eschatological issues either. I'll need to read further to see if my intutions are correct though.

Blosser:

My hunch is that you're right about Vanhoozer. I'm not claiming that HE restricts his concerns to adiaphora or eschatological issues, but that the Church allows for differences of opinon on such matters. Hence, I would argue against Vanhoozer where he suggests that no biblical interpretation can claim absolute certitude. This would seem to fall into the sort of skepticism that can be found in Pannenberg, as suggested by an earlier recent correspondence with you. I would insist, with the Church, that the basics of the Christian Faith are knowable and certain, even if this knowledge and certitude is dependent upon faith. For example, I would say that the proposition that the "virgin" cited in Matt 1:23 from the Septuagint Is. 7:14 refers to the mother of Jesus is indisputably certain (de fide) for a Catholic believer, as well as countless other intepretive propositions.

A conversation on the significance of Hippolytus' Christology

A graduate student at the University of Glasgow currently working on his doctorate in patristics, my Jehovah's Witness friend, Edgar Foster, has been corresponding with me of late about St. Hippolitus of Rome. I should state immediately at the outset that he is the expert here, not I, and my competence has been limited to offering a "sounding board" for Mr. Foster on how an orthodox Catholic might respond to the general outline of his treatment of a pre-Nicene Catholic theologian such as Hippolytus. I did not even know initially that Hippolytus had been canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint. Mr. Foster, if he knew this, was discreet enough not to mention it after seeing some of my assumptions, doubtless so not as to embarrass me. Furthermore, a quick check of the above link to the article on Hippolytus in the online Catholic Encyclopedia reveals that Hippolytus not only entertained seriously hererodox notions about the relationship between God the Father and God the Son bordering if not affirming a curious di-theism, the view that the Father and Son, in some fashion, constitute two independent gods. He also rejected the authority of the Pope, then turned around and had himself elected antipope, a rival claimant to the Holy See, by his small band of followers. The fact that he was later canonized by the Church is explained by the fact that, either immediately before or after his banishment to Sardinia, he was reconciled with the legitimate bishop of the Church of Rome. So Hippolytus is a complex figure indeed, whose theology must clearly be assessed with care and circumspection.

I begin with a paragraph I wrote to Mr. Foster in an earlier correspondence, which sets the state for the remarks that follow:

Blosser:

I would assert here that the writings of Christians in the early third century period (didn't Hippolytus die in the early 200's?) were notoriously un-systematic. Also there's your caveat ["While there are admittedly debatable passages..."] which suggests that whatever you're suggesting must be far from cut-and-dried.

Foster:

Hippolytus died circa 236 C.E. While his writings may have been "unsystematic," as you say, there is almost no doubt (historically) that he was accused of being a "ditheist" by Bishop Callistus. W.H.C. Frend thinks that the bishop may have been justified in labeling Hippolytus thus. He also thinks that Hippolytus thought of the Logos as a created being, deified for a time. The Catholic writer Edmund Fortman in his book The Triune God also informs us that Hippolytus "rather deliberately seems to avoid putting the Holy Spirit on the same personal plane with the Father and the Son, and to regard Him more as a divine force than a divine person" (page 119). Granted, as Fortman writes, Hippolytus may not have highlighted the "personality" of the Spirit because he was not dealing with a heated issue that arose prior to 381 C.E., namely, the Pneumatomachi Controversy. Nevertheless, he does not seem to ascribe personhood to the Spirit of God and he appears to subordinate the Son (ontologically) to the Father.

Blosser:

I have no serious quarrells here, as far as I can tell. Muslims regularly accuse Christians of tri-theism, and Christians aren't always cautious to avoid being thus misunderstood. If you ask nearly any rank-and-file Christian to explain "God," he will almost always, if he ventures the least bit beyond the confessional formulations, end up saying things that could be understood either in the direction of modalism or tri-theism. Beyond that, it's an empirical fact that trinitarian concepts are refractory to facile understanding and that many people-- even theologians otherwise known for reasonably careful thought-- have expressed themselves incautiously or misunderstandingly on the Trinity.

Here let me insert once more something I wrote in my earlier correspondence with Mr. Foster in order to contextualize the exchange that follows:

Blosser:

The NT itself partakes of such ambiguities, doesn't it. I see nothing prohibitively problematic about such things as calling God "one" and Jesus His "Son," then portrayhing Jesus in a subordinate role, while still assuming that Jesus too is God, though not God the Father. If the Trinity doctrine is true, what else would we expect but such seemingly confused language?

Foster:

The problem, as Swete notes, is that the language of Hippolytus does not allow for the Holy Spirit being an eternal divine relation or Person--he also believes that the Son as such is not eternal--and his thought evidently contains elements of subordinationism. That is, Hippolytus is not just maintaining that the Son or Spirit are subordinate to the Father as respects function; they are subordinate PER ESSENTIAM. Such claims are utterly at odds with Nicene Christianity.

Blosser:

I find it difficult to be surprised by any of this. Until controversy compels the Church to publicly clarify her mind on a doctrinal issue such as this and define it (as at Nicea), one expects to find a great deal of latitude in what is believed and asserted about the question. This is the case at present with questions such as those eschatological questions concerning the anti-
Christ, the meaning of the 'millenial' reign of Christ, the tribulation, the 'binding of Satan', etc., etc. And it was the case with other doctrines before they were defined.

This does not mean that there was no objective theological truth concerning the issue prior to its magisterial definition by the Church, or that the Church simply "fabricated" its doctrine out of thin air and then imposed it arbitrarily on her members. The objective basis for the trinitarian understanding of God is clearly evident in Scripture and tradition, we believe, even though this was likely not clear to everyone prior to her dogmatic definitions. This is true even regarding something as mundane as which books constitute the Bible-- which was anything but a definite article of faith prior to the close of the fourth century AD.

Hence, if Hippolytus held a form of subordinationism of the Holy Spirit or Son, this should not surprise us. Further, as mentioned before, there is a legitimate respect in which these two Persons of the Trinity ARE subordinate to the Father and proceed from Him, even if this isn't clearly articulated in the possibly deficient formulations of Hippolytus.

Foster:

My beef with Mr Bowman is that he has illicitly employed Contra Noetum 10.1-2. This passage does not say what he would like it to say.

Blosser:

I have no quarrel with that.

Foster:

The problem with God willing the Son into existence, even if He did so by means of His own essence oe substance, have been detailed by Jesuit Edmund Fortman (quoted earlier). Fortman lists what he calls two "grave defects" with Hippolytus' "theory" of the Father metaphysically (!) willing the Son into existence: (1) The Logos was not a person or the Son eternally, but only precreationally; (2) "The generation of the Son was not essential to God but only the result of a free decision of God. Hence God might have remained without a Son and thus might have remained only one Person" (Fortman, page 118). In other words, the generation of the Son, according to Hippolytus as interpreted by Fortman, was something that may or may not have transpired. It was a contingent divine act.

Blosser:

Yes, indeed. I don't dispute this. What I dispute is the notion that he can be taken for a careful trinitarian theologian. He's the theological equivalent of an Empedocles, and the notion that his writings can meaningfully be adduced against Nicea seem not more plausible to me than that Empedocles metaphysic should be proposed as counting against the Periodic Table of Elements developed in the 19th Century. At most, it seems to me, Hippolytus gives us one snapshot of the kinds of inchoate Trinitarian opinions that existed in the ante-Nicene period.

Again, I insert a quote from the earlier exchange to contextualize what follows:

Blosser:

I think this is merely a reflection of the fact that Christ is clearly in many respects subordinate to the Father. But even if we talked about the Petrine notion of our being "partakers of the Divine nature" in the Greek language of THEOISIS (or QEOSIS), neither you nor I could, strictly speaking, call one another or ourselves "God" even in the sense that Hippolytus calls Christ "God."

Foster:

If the pre-Nicenes truly did not view Christ as "fully God," then the early Christians were not simply saying that Christ is subordinate to the Father. Augustine of Hippo writes that each divine Person is fully God or the whole of the Godhead is in each Person. To say otherwise, to deny that Christ is "fully God," is to blatantly contradict what Augustine averred. One who makes such a declaration is not merely insisting that Christ is subordinate in function to the Father. Rather, a Christian who does not affirm the full deity of Christ is subordinating him to the Father vis-a-vis being, essence or nature.

Blosser:

This is assuming that "fully God" can mean only what you think it means. But why should we believe that? It is also to assume that each ante-Nicene utterance regarding a Person of the Trinity is to be accorded the same weight you would accord it in a theological treatise on the Holy Trinity. But why should we think that? It seems to me that there are a wide variety of contexts in which men made reference to "God" ("Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit") in the first three centuries. If I were to respond in the affirmative to my young son's question "Daddy, did Jesus pray to God?" would this mean that I was denying that Jesus is "fully God"?