You don’t understand!

One response drilled into me by years of telephone customer service is to show empathy in response to complaints by saying, "I understand." Just often enough, though, the quick, biting rejoinder comes back: "No, you don't understand! How could you understand!"

I've been out of work, or employed for inadequate wages, and unable to pay my bills. I've been double-billed. I've been treated rudely by people who weren't cut out for customer-contact jobs. I've had the wrong product delivered; I've had things "fixed" that weren't fixed correctly or weren't broken to begin with. In one case, a bill collector kept calling my cell phone to reach somebody else, whom I'd never even met; when I told him that he had the wrong number, he told me furiously, "You're lying!" … a clear violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

Oh, yes — I've been there. I do understand.

But that's not quite what many people mean by "You don't understand!" They mean, "If you really understood, you'd agree with me, you'd say 'yes', you'd give me what I want!" The abstract claims of reason, right and law, in their eyes, can't possibly equal or outweigh the concrete power of emotion; truth without passion is truth without traction.

Dumb "progressive" idea #637: Get rid of Hell

Back in February, I wrote in rebuttal to a silly piece of nature-worship fluff, “God loves us: this is a fact. But God desires us to become holy, for that is what’s best for us. To reject the path to sainthood because it’s difficult and causes us inconveniences — even suffering — is to reject Heaven. There is no third option, where we get to have our own way and still go on to some blessed comfort in the afterlife.”

The topic isn’t quite done.

Recently, TIME Magazine featured as its cover story a book titled Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, and its author, evangelical preacher Rob Bell. Bell was led to question the doctrine of hell by a note one of his parishioners left on a quotation of Mohandas Gandhi: “Reality check: He’s in hell.” Now, Bell speculates that Jesus’ redemptive sacrifice means that “‘every person who ever lived’ could have a place in heaven, whatever that turns out to be.”

And even more recently, the University of Oregon released a study of the effect of one’s perception of God on moral behavior. Sure enough, they found that students who believed in a God who punishes are less likely to cheat than do students who believe in a God who forgives. (The study was designed so that students could express belief in a God who both loves and punishes.)

Apologetics toolbox: The Real Presence

"I look at it under a microscope, and it still looks like bread and wine to me." I've heard this before; you probably will hear it yourself. It tempts me to retort, "Would you feel better about it if they looked and felt like flesh and blood?" (As has happened at least once, in Lanciano, Italy.)

As far as I know, only the Catholic and Orthodox Churches still maintain that the elements actually become the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ through transubstantiation. The Lutherans and Anglicans go more for consubstantiation: Christ is present "with, in and under" the elements.

Other Protestant churches hold the Eucharist to be symbolic, and that Jesus intended it to be so. Theologically "liberal" or "progressive" Christians also tend to hold that the Eucharist is merely symbolic, generally operating on the presumption that a literal transubstantiation is superstitious if not barbaric.

The problem with both consubstantiation and mere symbolism is that neither is true to the beliefs of the apostles and the Church Fathers. Without a literal understanding, its power as a symbol diminishes, though it doesn't quite become meaningless.

Have this mind among yourselves

... Which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that JESUS CHRIST IS LORD, to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:5-11).

Jesus the Anarchist Revolutionary-BORING!

For centuries, Catholics have looked on the Corpus of the crucifix and seen there the awful price of their salvation, the cost of their sins: the torture and death of God. “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to him’” (Ac 2:38-39).

Jamie L. Manson, writing for the National Catholic Fishwrap, wants us to look up and see another oppressed proletarian victim of the system:

When I read the passion narratives of the Gospels, I don’t hear simply that Jesus suffered and died for our sins. Rather, I hear the four evangelists very clearly say that Jesus’ suffering and death was the will of those who conspired against him—those whose political systems he had undermined, those whose religious convictions he had offended.

Jesus’ passion and death is a result of deeply-human intolerance, jealousy, resentment, hatred, and, most of all, fear.

Jesus’ death may have been the will of God, but it was also the will of both powerful people and ordinary people who preferred unquestioning loyalty to rigid, oppressive political and religious regimes to the profound challenges of God incarnate.

Jesus as a first-century César Chavez. How mundane.

"Kill the Cathlics"

Various crimes have targeted Catholic churches in California in recent years. In January one or more vandals spray-painted the misspelled phrase “Kill the Cathlics” on churches in Anaheim and Irvine.[1]

Sometimes it seems that we Christians aren’t happy if there’s no way we can convince ourselves that we’re being persecuted. At least, that’s what many non-Christians believe, and there were times in the past I would have agreed.

But I felt a frisson climb up my spine when I read this paragraph in a story about the burning of St. John Vianney in Hacienda Heights, California. How is this different from “Kill the Jews” or “Kill the n*****s”? How is this different from any church burned down in the Deep South in the time between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act?

So okay, nobody’s died yet. No priest has been lynched; no bishop is sitting in a jail cell on trumped-up charges; Catholics aren’t wearing yellow crosses or being forced to the back of the bus. So why won’t my hackles lie flat?

Apologetics toolbox: The sola scriptura problems (Part VI)

Scripture and Tradition

In the last part, we talked about the reason that Scripture is insufficient to act as the sole infallible rule of faith: the apostles never expected to teach Christianity out of a book, or even a series of books. There are lacunae in Scripture because the writers took for granted things they expected their audiences to know without being reminded. Moreover, the vast majority of people in the Roman Empire were functionally illiterate or semi-literate; Christianity was not the religion of the elite.

Instead, for most people, learning the faith was a matter of learning symbols, experiencing the liturgy of worship—and oral tradition.

Doctor Timothy Paul Jones, a Protestant minister and educator, cites 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 to illustrate the oral tradition as Paul used it: "For I delivered to you as of first importance that which I also received …." "Delivered" translates the Greek paradidōmi, and "received" paralambanō, which were used in the context of oral tradition. The pattern of and … and … signals the repetition of things to be memorized: that the Messiah died in accordance with Old Testament prophecy, and that he was buried, and that he rose on the third day, and so forth and so on. The same pattern is also visible in the same letter at chapter 11, verses 23-26, where Paul relates the events of the Last Supper in words that are echoed at every Catholic celebration of the Eucharist.[1]

Apologetics toolbox: The sola scriptura problems (Part V)

Formal sufficiency of Scripture

In Part I, we saw how the basic premise of sola scriptura (only Scripture is infallible) must implicitly contradict Scriptural promises of either the Holy Spirit's guidance or the Holy Spirit's reliability to be true. In Part II, we saw how sola scriptura effectively and logically denies anyone the authority of the Spirit, including the Protestant defender of sola scriptura.

Part III addressed the question of human authority as it affects the composition of Scripture. And in Part IV we looked at the Scriptural citations common to defenses of sola scriptura, and found that you can’t prove the material sufficiency of sola scriptura from them. Ironically, sola scriptura fails the “Show me in the Bible where it says” test.

Let’s be clear on the point: To say it’s not materially sufficient isn’t to say that it doesn’t have a lot. Certainly Jesus, the apostles and the Church Fathers got a lot of mileage out of the Bible, and it’s still the most important resource of the Church today. Nothing that the Church has ever said about sacred tradition or the magisterium of the Church contradicts Scripture’s God-inspired nature; in fact, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches were the first to uphold it.

But no one said getting a lot out of Scripture means you can get everything out of Scripture that you need.

Apologetics toolbox: The sola scriptura problems (Part IV)

Material sufficiency of Scripture

In Part I, we saw how the basic premise of sola scriptura (only Scripture is infallible) must implicitly contradict Scriptural promises of either the Holy Spirit's guidance or the Holy Spirit's reliability to be true. In Part II, we saw how sola scriptura effectively and logically denies anyone the authority of the Spirit, including the Protestant defender of sola scriptura.

Part III addressed the question of human authority as it affects the composition of Scripture. Again, the contradiction at the heart of sola scriptura denies the infallible authority of the Spirit to determine the canons: If the Church could be wrong about including the Old Testament deuterocanonical books, then all Christian churches could be wrong about denying a role for the Gospel of Thomas or the Book of Moroni.

In this part, we finally start to address the Scriptural backing for it. If we remember, the first principle of sola scriptura is: Scripture, taken by itself, is sufficient to act as the regula fidei, the infallible rule of faith. Although we haven't addressed this point directly, this is the key claim; if it's not true, then nothing else that follows from it can be true.

Apologetics toolbox: The sola scriptura problems (Part III)

Authority over the Bible

In Part I, we saw how the basic premise of sola scriptura (only Scripture is infallible) must implicitly contradict Scriptural promises of either the Holy Spirit’s guidance or the Holy Spirit’s reliability to be true. In Part II, we saw how sola scriptura effectively and logically denies anyone the authority of the Spirit, including the Protestant defender of sola scriptura.

Part III builds on both the previous parts, because authoritative teaching necessarily entails authority over Scripture’s interpretation and the doctrines that can be derived over it. Since Scripture is literally “God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16, the

ópneustos), giving it God’s authority, the person or institution who attempts to fashion doctrine from it must also have God’s authority to do so if the exercise isn’t to be one of astounding chutzpah verging on hubris.

But before we can decide what doctrines are supported by Scripture, we must decide what books are Scripture. This isn’t as obvious as it looks; besides the Protestant emendations which cast several books out of the Catholic canon, other groups look to add or subtract as befits their needs. For example, the “Jesus Seminar” wants to add The Gospel of Thomas, and the Latter-Day Saints propose the Book of Mormon for our acceptance.