All things in moderation

Since this is my blog I am also the administrator. That means that I have the ability to moderate comments before they appear on the site. There are some discussion sites that block content they feel is not germane to their purposes. I suppose I would do the same if someone started directing their comment to unrelated issues such as politics or vegetarianism since this is not what we do. But I would never block content that challenged my beliefs or the beliefs of other commentators.

The only thing I insist on is civility and as open mind to other viewpoints. So I would like to propose some minimal ground rules.

• No ad hominem posts. Please do not attack a person for what she or he says or believes.
• No off-topic posts. Please address your comments to the actual matter at hand.
• Please start your comments by stating something positive. You can almost always find common ground. And even if you can't, you can thank the person and show that you understand their point of view.

I hope no one finds these guidelines onerous. I genuinely want my thinking to be challenged. I hope you each share that goal.


"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another" - Proverbs 27:17 NIV

Mea maxima culpa: how I lost sight of my goal

I just read two replies to comments I posted on chritiannews.net and suddenly realized how I had lost sight of my goal of joining Evangelicals and Catholics in harmonious action to defend the Christian faith against the evil of the world.

I started up this blog to further the efforts initiated by Charles Colson and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus delineated in "First Things" in 1994, an article that began my journey to the Catholic faith. I can't do much about the Evangelicals who see the Catholic Church as the work of the devil. When they are being polite they try to win me back the their faith. And when they are not I am given both barrels of every anti-Catholic misconception in vitriolic and personal fashion. It has been this experience that precipitated my descent into anger and unforgiveness.

But there are a few that take the time and effort to respond to me in a thorough and civil fashion. I have invited a few of them to join me on this blog and I sincerely hope some do. I have become a little discouraged by my inability to draw some of these folks here to have real discussions away from the heat of comment threads.

If you have responded to my invitation, my sincere welcome. Please post comments. Tell me if you think this joint effort can succeed. If the Lord chooses to use this venue to advance the cause then my joy in being in the His service knows no bounds. If not, then I rejoice as well that I am needed elsewhere.

In response to a tedious calumny

So once again on christiannews.net we are reminded that Catholics believe that salvation comes through good works. This is, of course, a tired and easily refuted accusation, but here's an analogy that may make clearer what Catholics actually believe.

Let's suppose my wife gives me a wonderful book as a gift. I am so grateful to have received it that I tell everyone about it. I praise my wife for caring about me so much that she was willing to make a personal sacrifice to obtain it for me. But I never actually read it. It sits unopened on the shelf in a place of honor. So ask yourself this: did I actually receive the gift she gave me?

It's much the same way with salvation. We don't do good works to obtain salvation. We actively participate in our salvation by living the Gospel in our lives. We have three choices: do evil, do nothing, or do good. Which do you suppose the Lord would have us do?

Who is BVM?

Luke 1:48: From now on all generations will call me blessed.

Do you call her "blessed?"

Isaiah 7:14: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Mary is "the virgin" not "a virgin."

Her name was Mary.

Do you call her the Blessed Virgin Mary?  If not, why do you claim to be scriptural?

Who wrote Genesis?

My college education was long and chaotic. Some might call it eclectic but it would more accurately called undirected. For a good part of the time I was an anthropology major at Wayne State University studying under Dr. John Cole, a student of the famous social anthropologist Leslie White. One of the foundational principles in studying other cultures is never to bring your cultural biases into your field work. Most of the field work of the nineteenth century was terribly flawed in this regard. "Civilized" anthropologists went out to study "primitive" cultures, imposing their values on what they observed. 

One of the most common errors was to treat oral traditions as "myths" in the sense of being fables or legends. They assumed that the indigenous people "believed" literally the stories they told. This was a bias made by members of a literate culture observing a non-literate (not illiterate) culture. The meaning of the concept of "belief" they held was much more concrete than the understanding of the speakers. 

The role of story-telling in preliterate cultures has a distinct evolutionary advantage. Stories are the means by which the deepest truths of the culture are preserved intact even after many generations because stories contain a relatively small number of details which must be preserved if the story is to make sense. Let me illustrate

Have you ever had the experience of hearing someone describe an event at which you were also present? Did you notice that the other person always got it "wrong" by leaving out facts, adding new ones or distorting some? Personal memory is a very unreliable way to store information, so if we are to transmit cultural wisdom we have to have some way to ensure that information is preserved intact through countless generations.

If you have children or grandchildren you must have told them some classic bedtime stories which are pretty much known throughout our culture. And did you notice that when someone else told them the details were pretty much exactly intact? Why? Because unlike the memory of actual events, they are not dependent on personal recollection but rather on the fictional details, repeated time after time.

So in preliterate societies, the story tellers were responsible for passing on the culture And we call these stories"myths." Myths are not untrue in a modern Western sense, but rather they contain essential truth wrapped in a fictional structure that protects that truth from distortion. As a culture begins to develop writing, these myths start to be written down, not so much as a historical record as a modern person would define it, but as a memory aid to ensure even more the accuracy of the story. When we approach these texts as modern Westerners, we tend to bring our understanding of textual criticism with us. And many people approach early texts incorrectly with that bias.

Creation myths are cultural universals, that is they appear without exception in all cultures. I happen to believe that the creation myths of the Jews were in fact inspired by the Holy Spirit and provide infallible information about God and our relationship to Him. I don't think one needs to read them in a literal, Western sense to understand the truth contained within. For instance, I do not need to believe in a literal Garden of Eden with a literal serpent in order to accept as true the fact of Man's fallen nature. I also believe that God is revealed to us in two manners: via the direct evidence of His magnificent creation, and by direct revelation through the Holy Spirit. They are each true in their own way and cannot disagree. When science seems to conflict with Scripture, I think it is reasonable to assume that our reading is where the problem lay. Bear in mind that God can only reveal Himself in the language and the mental constructs of the men (and women) he inspires. The fantastic vision that Ezekiel saw, of wheels within wheels, would have been described entirely differently by a native of of a mesoamerican culture that did not yet have the technology of wheels. God's revelation is so immense and so entirely beyond our ability to express it in words that anything we say is in one sense "mythic," not that it speaks of the untrue but rather of the unknowable.

So to answer my question, it would be entirely correct to say that God "wrote" genesis since He was the only one around at the time. But I also believe it was the earliest writers of the Pentateuch who received the revelation of God and passed it faithfully to us. For me, the most important thing is that God the Holy Spirit can speak directly to us via the Scripture in order to know Him and, in so doing, begin to know ourselves. 

I am not alone

I ran across this site in the christiannews.net comments threads and am happy to post a link.

http://truecreation.info

Not exactly what this site is about but close, and I recommend it as a well written and thoroughly researched defense of Christian faith and reason.

Off the rails

I just came out of an experience in the comments section of christiannews.net where, rather than defending the Catholic faith against uninformed attacks, I found myself sucked into contentious arguments with some thoroughly hostile people. And, being the pillar of spiritual perfection that I am, I was in there scratching and biting with them over such things as the supposed foolishness of "theists" or whether the Masoretic or Alexandrine texts were more reliable. So much for reasoned and dispassionate discussion.

I can only comfort myself in knowing that this is a really human tendency. But I tend to define all human tendencies as sin unless they are informed by the Holy Spirit. I would really prefer that people who disagree with me could come here for a little more civilized debate but that's apparently not exciting enough.

So I shall blog on. Whether or not anyone ever finds this site, I can at the very least use it as a journal and derive the benefit that always comes from committing one's thoughts to written form.