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.

Timing

This post concerns a comment by a reader "John" of christiannews.net. I quote:

First of all I certainly am against killing of the innocent. The timing of the abortion (how far along the pregnancy is) is important to me. I certainly am against late term abortions.

I have invited him here to discuss this in a more temperate atmosphere.

Here are a few questions that I need clarified if we are to have an intelligent debate on the subject.

1. Why are you "against late term abortions?"
2.  Is your opposition based on objective principles or are you just uncomfortable with the practice?
3.  Do you believe there is a right to an abortion that ends when it becomes " late term" or is this right absolute?

What do you say?

The Elephant in the Sanctuary

Respect for another's beliefs is impossible if one does not in fact know what the other believes. If this exercise is ever to fill a need, then it is necessary that we approach boldly those things on which we are most divided.

My evangelical brothers would of course point to things like salvation through works and the "worship" of Mary, but these things are trivialities compared to the amputation of the very center of Christian worship. I am referring to the denial of the True Presence of Christ's Body and Blood in the Eucharist.

Here we find evangelicals backed into a corner. The discussion usually focuses on all the things that Catholics do that aren't in the Bible, but when it come to the True Presence we are suddenly told that the clear sense of Scripture is not in fact saying what it appears to be saying. You may thank John Calvin for that. Martin Luther had no problem with it, although his enmity toward Rome may have compelled him to find a middle ground, namely consubstantiation vs. transubstantiation. I sincerely doubt that any Bible believing evangelical could accept either one.

Scripture clearly shows that Jesus was emphatically not speaking metaphorically when He said that unless you drink His blood and eat His flesh you have no part in Him. The Patristic texts also show that it was central part of Christian worship less than a century after Jesus' death. There are plenty of resources outside this blog if anyone cares to look them up. That's not my purpose here.

The point of this post is to raise two very important points:

1. If Jesus was, in fact, speaking in a metaphor, where else in all of scripture does he say "this" is "me?" There are numerous examples of His use of metaphors which evangelicals use to buttress the argument that this was not different. "I am the door..." Was Jesus saying He was a door? Of course not. Same thing with "I am the vine.." "I am the Way.." etc. But there is no other passage that says "this is me" or "this is my." Metaphors don't work that way. One may say to one's beloved "Your hair is golden flax," but if you say "this golden flax is your hair" the definite pronoun means that golden flax is the thing present and the hair is present as well. That is not a metaphor. So when Jesus says with respect to the bread He is holding in His hand, "This is my body.." he is saying that the bread is a real and present thing and it is referring to His real and present body. This is no metaphor.

2. The Eucharist had been the center of Christian worship for centuries. Why, them did the Reformers attack that first? Were they scandalized by its implications? If so they were in familiar company:

John 6:60, 66
⁶⁰ On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
⁶⁶ From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

When I was an evangelical Protestant, I knew nothing of the true meaning of the Mass. I had a vague sense that it was all a bunch of meaningless ritual, no different in kind from the frankly arbitrary nature of evangelical worship. When I began to educate myself as to what Catholics actually believed, I was forced to see the Eucharist as either a horrendous abomination or else the very center and focus of Christian worship and piety. 

That is the challenge I place before my readers: either prove that it is an abomination or admit that it is what the Lord truly intended. There is no middle ground.