Category Archives: on Theology

Credo in unum Deum Patrem omnipotentem, factorem cœli et terra, visibilium omnium et invisibilium; et in unum Dominum Iesum Christum, Filium Dei….

on Theology

Analogy of Breath

A fascinating hurricane of commentary broke out when the following colloquial and conversational expression of truth was dropped into a context full of ardent Biblicists.  There were accusations of heresy, calls to “get behind me,” and everything!  All based on concern that somehow this thought–that Jesus Christ is more fundamental to Christian faith than the Scriptures–meant an abandonment of the Scriptures tantamount to “calling Jesus Christ a liar.”

All that from such a simple, flawed, honest, basically truthful expression:

Yesterday I heard an individual say “One of the problems with Christians is that their faith is based on the Bible, and not on Jesus Christ.” Was very humbling.

(source: Jacob Pierce – Yesterday I heard a individual say “One of the…, slightly prettified)

To which I reply as follows:

Analogy. That’s the concept you’re missing.

Why can the Son of God be called the Word? Is it because the Father’s language turns into a Son? Of course not. It is because among the Trinity there is a constant sharing based not only in their being one God but also in that one God’s being three perfectly loving Persons, all distinct and all wholly given to each other.

That sharing, or “communication,” is the basis for our being created–created so that we can become the friends of God (heirs, lovers, children, “so that he might be the firstborn of many brethren”).

It is not by accident that the words of Scripture describe that creation as being done by words and also by the Word, and that God-breathed Scripture describes humans as animated by God’s breath.

Notice that parallel. “Holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” By that self-same Spirit who makes the love of Father and Son perfectly real, the authors of Scripture (men breathing the “breath of life” from God) penned what God intended (the Scriptures into which “God breathed”). Those men, of course, had after Adam all fallen, as have we all, into sin (“their foolish minds were darkened”), and yet by God’s sanctifying grace there were “holy men,” chosen and prepared, for that writing.

So God’s breath speaks us into existence, breathes into us to make us a “living soul,” restores us to the proper use of that life/breath, and in some cases makes it possible for someone to speak using that breath so perfectly that the written record of that utterance may be called “God breathed.”

And in no case is that a matter of “private interpretation”; for there is one Holy Spirit who moves all of these, and that means that there is no substantive contradiction in that diversity of witnesses.

But if that is the case, then there must be some whole, some unity, some total frame of reference to which all the words of God-breathed Scripture refer. And those words, breathed from God, cannot be God Himself, or the objects of true worship, even though they may be lifted up above all other things made of human breath partly seized, held, expelled in an effort to make believe it comes from me, not from God. (I can only breathe God’s air, but I can drown trying to breathe water in a fit of pique.) Those words must be a part of what God, who breathed the words of Creation, whose breath is God Himself, a “life-giving spirit,” intends to communicate.

But what is the whole of this communication? Surely it must be Jesus Christ Himself, to whom the Spirit points us, through whom we know the Father? And if the Holy Spirit is a whole Person who makes the love and wisdom between Father and Son manifest, who makes us able to participate in them, how could it be odd that the Son Himself should be a whole Person who makes the Father known, who shares Himself with us so that we can share the Father with Him?

We come to know the Word Christ because He became one of us–because He became human, became the kind of “living soul” whose breath comes from God, while being the very God who gave that breath! His words were immediately the words of God, yet those very words were, He claimed, given to Him by the Father! He spoke, and the voice of the Creator stilled storms, healed the sick, commanded demons, raised the dead, and even forgave sins! He prayed with breath just as dependent on the laws of creation as yours or mine (being “born of a woman, made under the law”) and in language as embedded in history and subject to interpretation as yours or mine; yet He spoke “with authority” so that “even the wind and seas obeyed Him” and so that the “little girl” did indeed “get up” and Mary Magdalene did recognize Him and Thomas believed!

This is analogy, then: the words of Scripture are the Word of God in a manner analogous to the way that the Person of the Son is the Word of God, because the same reality is intelligible in both, and yet one can be comprehended as a part of what in the other case is an incomprehensible whole.

You will not exhaust the Scriptures, for they speak of Christ. But you can definitely read all of them, surround them with commentary, memorize them cover-to-cover (if you are very capable and dedicated; I am not so). None of these things are true of the Son of God (in fact, “if all of them were written down, I do not suppose the whole world could contain the books that would be written”).

When we read the Scriptures, we must do so with due attention to what they say about their own role in our spiritual life. ALL of the Scriptures are breathed by God, and they are ALL profitable. But the whole of the Scriptures do not contain the whole of the Son of God, “but these were written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through His Name.”

We elevate the Scriptures above all other books because they are the fullest and most perfect written records of God’s breath perfectly animating holy men (and women, not forgetting Miriam and Deborah and Hannah and Mary!) to speak the truth about God; but we do not elevate them above Christ Himself.

(Indeed, we cannot; we will pervert them if we try.)

Learn the wisdom of analogy: the Bible is the very Word of God, written, but the written Word is written *about* the very Word of God, Himself, who is the Son of God, and very God of very God.

Peace.

on Literature, on Theology, Public-Personal, Reflections

Back to Life, Back to Reality

I’m going to mention this post again, because in light of a stray (and on its own terms quite sensible) remark in an interview with Chicago’s new Archbishop Cupich and other comments I’ve seen, it seems relevant.

There are several word/thing relationships that we really MUST distinguish (not sever, sunder, separate, or believe to be exclusive–but observe that the terms do not refer to precisely the same thing in precisely the same way). Let me just enumerate as briefly as I can manage:

  1. marriage per se, or “natural marriage”
  2. marriage of the baptized, or “sacramental marriage”
  3. civil recognition of marriage
  4. ecclesial recognition of marriage

Each of these deals with either a state of affairs (1 & 2, a describable, observable, intelligible, verifiable condition) or an official notice that such a state of affairs exists, needed in order to adjudicate its consequents (3 & 4, instruments whose meaning is wholly contingent on acknowledgement of a state of affairs).

In dealing with these, we potentially encounter a whole realm of “other” terms, as well, terms which describe states of notification or transition or discovery with regard to #1-4: attempted marriage, putative marriage, nullity, “annulment,” marriage license, divorce, “remarriage,” etc.

What happens to people deeply confused by the radical nominalism that undergirds our entire system of Constitutional laws and classical liberal presuppositions about politics–that is, my fellow children of the Enlightenment (made children of dubious legitimacy by the discovery that we are also Heirs of God in Christ Jesus)–is that we confuse arguing about how to settle arguments about words about things with the actual constitution of things. We barely even notice that we have quit believing we can know things, know them good and well, without our knowing being subject to renegotiation by clever wordsmiths.

I spent over a decade of my life working hard to be a card-carrying post-structuralist literary critic/theorist while also arguing that «il n’y a pas de hors-texte» opened modernity to Biblicist interpretation of divine revelation. I do know well how profoundly we are ensorcelled by our own spelling of words, friends.

But it is quite impossible that any real state of affairs–in a community, in a family, in a nation-state, in a communion–should meaningfully persist across generations merely by continuous renegotiation of words.

We must–it is utterly essential that we do this–return to an understanding in which our language (including our legal language, and especially including our “science” of humanity, which has been so badly vitiated by the separation of the reality from the data) is subordinate to reality, serves our understanding of reality, and therefore can only carry authority to the extent that its claims are demonstrably about reality.

In such an understanding of reality, a cleverly construed counterexample to one register of a word’s meaning would not justify erasure of that word’s connection to the reality which is always, intrinsically, greater than the word. Where such an understanding of reality is institutionalized, nihilism is not permitted to win; it is prevented, with authority backed by power, from doing so. Only such an understanding preserves human life and provides for the flourishing of those who, body and breath, have “become a living soul” and may, by becoming “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” cause others to do the same.

And so, I apologize to those whose critiques of post-structuralist hermeneutics I scoffed at when I, like some who read me now, mistakenly believed that I could see the trajectory better than they. Their vantage was superior, and what I have said above is deeply dependent on the words of others.

But it really does come to this: a state of affairs exists; that state of affairs has consequences; those consequences implicate civil society and ecclesial communion; and the only just way to acknowledge that state of affairs and adjudicate those consequences is one which preserves the essential distinctions between one sort of thing–a marriage, that is, a potentially fecund, indissoluble, voluntary bond between a man and a woman–and whatever other sorts of things you might like to arrange.

It is this distinction, and not any larger “religious” versus “secular” distinction, which is really at issue, here. It is not a question of whose will is to be imposed, though our incoherent politics makes it so, but of what really *is* and whether we plan to compel each other to lie about it.

And it is the situation of this question at present as “you must all lie, or you will be treated as beyond-the-pale, as those who have no claim on justice while you persist in these views” to which the faithful have no choice but to vigorously and vehemently object, and which we are obligated to use all just means to resist, reverse, undermine, and nullify.

Or, as I said in the linked post:   Continue reading »

on Theology, Public-Personal, Quotables

When Teaching Morality Subverts Morality

Rine’s description, quoted below, rings true for both my upbringing (where my much-beloved summer camp’s wonderful director nevertheless felt the need to preach his signature sermon “Puppy Love Leads to a Dog’s Life” in the middle of every teen week) and my time among evangelicals.  It even tends to cover the spectrum beyond that, wherever one encounters any attitude better than “anything goes.”  And don’t get me wrong, this is slightly better than “anything goes”–but, as Rine discovers, not by much:

As I consider my own upbringing and the various “sex talks” I encountered in evangelical church settings over the past twenty years, I realize that the view of marital sex presented there was primarily revisionist. While the ideal of raising a family is ever-present in evangelical culture, discussions about sex itself focused almost exclusively on purity, as well as the intense spiritual bond that sexual intimacy brings to a married couple. Pregnancy was mentioned only in passing and often in negative terms, paraded alongside sexually transmitted diseases as a possible punishment for those who succumb to temptation. But for those who wait, ah! Pleasures abound!

There was little attempt to cultivate an attitude toward sexuality that celebrates its full telos: the bonding of the couple and the incarnation of new life. And there was certainly no discussion of a married couple learning to be responsive to their fertility, even as a guiding principle. To the contrary, the narrative implied that once the “waiting” was over, self-discipline would no longer be necessary. Marriage would be a lifelong pleasure romp. Sex was routinely praised as God’s gift to married couples—a “gift” largely due to its orgasmic, unitive properties, rather than its intrinsic capacity to create life.

(source: What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?)

Abandonment of the proper understanding of marriage among many American Christians is a key reason we find it hard, even when we try, to live and plan and teach as we know we ought.  Even when we know better, we are constantly made to feel that we are outliers, that we don’t quite “get it.”  We are vulnerable to the lie that ours is a holdout position, mere nostalgia for a past nobody wants.

Man and woman were made for God, first, and for each other; and marriage was made to ground and fecundate that reality; its proper fruit is children.

For this reason husbands and wives should take up the burden appointed to them, willingly, in the strength of faith and of that hope which “does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.  Then let them implore the help of God with unremitting prayer and, most of all, let them draw grace and charity from that unfailing fount which is the Eucharist. If, however, sin still exercises its hold over them, they are not to lose heart. Rather must they, humble and persevering, have recourse to the mercy of God, abundantly bestowed in the Sacrament of Penance. In this way, for sure, they will be able to reach that perfection of married life which the Apostle sets out in these words: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church. . . Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church. . . This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church; however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”

(source: Humanae Vitae)

on Theology, Public-Personal, Quotables

You Can’t Afford Peace; Just Accept It.

[St. Jude asked,] “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?”

Jesus answered him,

If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me does not keep my words; and the word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.

These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I go away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I go to the Father; for the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place, you may believe.

(source: John 14:18-31 RSVCE)

Do not be afraid.  And do not be deluded.

Peace has a price.

We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one.

And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, to know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.

Little children, keep yourselves from idols.

(source: 1 John 5 RSVCE)

So bow and welcome Christ’s blessing the next time you hear, “Peace be with you.”

You need it, just like I do.

Modest Proposals, on Theology, Public-Personal

Yes, let’s do that!

Two responses are needed to the point Douthat raises here:

the modern liberal mind is trained to ask for spreadsheet-ready projections and clearly defined harms, and the links that social conservatives think exist aren’t amenable to that kind of precise measurement or definition. How do you run a regression analysis on a culture’s marital iconography? How do you trace the downstream influence of a change in that iconography on future generations’ values and ideas and choices? How do you measure highly-diffuse potential harms from some cultural shift, let alone compare them to the concrete benefits being delivered by a proposed reform or alteration? How do you quantify, assess and predict the precise impact of a public philosophy of marriage — whatever that even means — on manners and morals and behavior? Especially when there are so many confounding socioeconomic variables involved —

(source: The Wild Ideas of Social Conservatives – NYTimes.com)

  1. How do we go about training people better than this?  It is simply not the case that humans can or should live by the measuring of quantifiable aggregations alone, not least because the overview of the data will never be available to most of them in any kind of reasonable decision-frame, nor can the training be made available to all humans at a quality and cost that will make it worthwhile, nor can the most important things actually be placed on that scale.  Who, given one clear look at the alternative, would choose to live in the foretaste of eternal Hell that we experience in this kind of world?  A world where there can be no devotion of sacred objects which removes them wholly from the economy, no quality of human flesh or fleshy connections which converts them wholly to what cannot yet be foreseen, rather than attempting to recapture them in a metric of the putatively known; a world where the specious present is legally and psychologically compelled to serve as the cash-out of that which is wholly personal, wholly devoted, and wholly eternal and nonetheless never can at all remain privatized, hoarded, or disembodied?
  2. And how do we demonstrate the concrete, visible, manifest consequences of our commitment to what is real, rather than what is willfully pretended?  To goods we can use, make, mend, improve, and share, rather than to demands for expectations for control of our future and the future of others, tentatively measured in dollars payable, dollars owed?  To marriages, rather than shams and fantasies, even among those actually capable of marriage?  To the commingling of financial and legal responsibility, so that there is no more Spouse A and Spouse B, but “one flesh” incorporated fully into the life of the Body of Christ and into living in this Material World?  How can we show this without constantly importing ideologies hostile to the reality we explore into this very research, at the outset–then wondering why we get results easily twisted or ignored?

And that is why it is absolutely vital that we maintain our grip on reality, stubbornly, first and foremost, while also doing our best to lay hold of whatever tools for describing, measuring, and representing that reality (and the consequences of distorting it) that we can.

Mine’s poetry, metaphysics, theology.  Yours might be oceanography, or economics, or anything.  The greeter at Wal-Mart can smile, help you find a cart, and speak respectfully of his wife.  The cashier can speak unapologetically of her husband and their children.  And we can admit it when we are dismayed that our own failures, or those of others, have bad consequences.

And then maybe we can make it better.  Continue reading »

on Theology, Public-Personal

Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter

In all Christian understanding, almost nothing is more important than knowing how deep your trouble goes, and wanting healing and correction from your Creator:

When they heard this, they stopped objecting and glorified God, saying, “God has then granted life-giving repentance to the Gentiles too.”

(source: Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter)

Did I say almost nothing?

Right.  There is ONE thing more basic, more important; ONE thing that comes before, behind, under, and ahead of our being and our becoming.  ONE thing that makes it possible to see yourself as truly wicked and offensive, and truly beautiful and able to receive love.

DEUS meus, ex toto corde paenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum, eaque detestor, quia peccando, non solum poenas a Te iuste statutas promeritus sum, sed praesertim quia offendi Te, summum bonum, ac dignum qui super omnia diligaris. Ideo firmiter propono, adiuvante gratia Tua, de cetero me non peccaturum peccandique occasiones proximas fugiturum. Amen.

(source: Actus Contritionis)

on Theology, Public-Personal

Sensus Fidelium Fidei, Part II

More heartening news, as the faithful continue to speak the truth back to the Church through whom they received the faith:

In union with our brother priests in England and Wales (conforming to the teachings summarized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1650-51), we make our own the petition they signed urging the Synod Fathers in the upcoming Synod to stand firm on the Church’s traditional understanding of marriage, human sexuality and pastoral practices:  

Following the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in Rome in October 2014 much confusion has arisen concerning Catholic moral teaching. In this situation we wish, as Catholic priests, to re-state our unwavering fidelity to the traditional doctrines regarding marriage and the true meaning of human sexuality, founded on the Word of God and taught by the Church’s Magisterium for two millennia.  

We commit ourselves anew to the task of presenting this teaching in all its fullness, while reaching out with the Lord’s compassion to those struggling to respond to the demands and challenges of the Gospel in an increasingly secular society. Furthermore we affirm the importance of upholding the Church’s traditional discipline regarding the reception of the sacraments, and the millennial conviction that doctrine and practice remain firmly and inseparably in harmony.  

We urge all those who will participate in the second Synod in October 2015 to make a clear and firm proclamation of the Church’s unchanging moral teaching, so that confusion may be removed, and faith confirmed.

(source: Statement of Belief, link added)

Sooner or later, the Church always finds herself in the right position, the barque of Peter catching the winds of grace in her sails:

on Theology

No Need to Run from Unam Sanctam

Following on from a wonderfully friendly and collegial conversation, a few results from my own re-studying of this document–one I have continually, since my conversion, regarded, not as an embarrassment, but as a crucial link in the anchor-chain of Christian faith. First, the important and controversial “outtakes”:

Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins, […] and she represents one sole mystical body whose Head is Christ and the head of Christ is God. In her then is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

(source: UNAM SANCTAM)

Therefore, if the terrestrial power err, it will be judged by the spiritual power; but if a minor spiritual power err, it will be judged by a superior spiritual power; but if the highest power of all err, it can be judged only by God, and not by man, according to the testimony of the Apostle: ‘The spiritual man judgeth of all things and he himself is judged by no man’ [1 Cor 2:15]. This authority, however, (though it has been given to man and is exercised by man), is not human but rather divine, granted to Peter by a divine word and reaffirmed to him (Peter) and his successors by the One Whom Peter confessed, the Lord saying to Peter himself, ‘Whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also in Heaven’ etc., [Mt 16:19]. Therefore whoever resists this power thus ordained by God, resists the ordinance of God [Rom 13:2], unless he invent like Manicheus two beginnings, which is false and judged by us heretical, since according to the testimony of Moses, it is not in the beginnings but in the beginning that God created heaven and earth [Gen 1:1]. Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.

(source: UNAM SANCTAM)

…aaaaaand everyone take a deep breath.

No, the Church did not just say that everybody outside the visible communion of the Church is ipso facto hellbound, and neither did I.  I am very sure that is not what this document states, and even more sure that is not what the Church has ever held authoritatively (though some have believed it, and for example some statements of Augustine’s about baptism probably suggest that construction–another reason not to take untempered Augustine as your sole theological source).  The case of Fr. Feeney should be plain enough on that count, even in the days between Vatican I and Vatican II.

First question, then:  is this a dogmatic definition?

Short answer:  Yes.   Continue reading »

on Theology, Public-Personal

Sensus Fidelium Fidei

In this situation we wish, as Catholic priests, to re-state our unwavering fidelity to the traditional doctrines regarding marriage and the true meaning of human sexuality, founded on the Word of God and taught by the Church’s Magisterium for two millennia.

We commit ourselves anew to the task of presenting this teaching in all its fullness, while reaching out with the Lord’s compassion to those struggling to respond to the demands and challenges of the Gospel in an increasingly secular society. Furthermore we affirm the importance of upholding the Church’s traditional discipline regarding the reception of the sacraments, and that doctrine and practice remain firmly and inseparably in harmony

(source: CatholicHerald.co.uk » Nearly 500 priests in Britain urge synod to stand firm on Communion for the remarried)

This is what it looks like when it’s working.  The faithful, shaped by the teaching of the Church, expressing that teaching back to the Church.  This is how disciples ought to behave.

on Theology

A Tangled Webb

Digressive Opening

As it happens, the day I read Stephen H. Webb’s latest was also the day my students presented on the Borges short story–which I think is parody as well as homage to its dedicatee, H. P. Lovecraft–“There Are More Things.”  The title, of course, is a reference to Hamlet (which, I am happy to report, the students readily traced to its origin and explained).  There is a sort of surreality to reading someone’s doubtful speculations on the application of quantitative infinity to deity (hint:  doesn’t work well) with Borges, Lovecraft, and the story’s reference to “Hinton’s cubes.”  A meander down that side street led to the following remarkable observation:

Where this gets interesting is if we pick up on the suggestion made by Smith, Berkove and Baker, that Flatland is a criticism of the misapplication of reasoning by analogy. They argue that Abbott was keen to critique what he saw as the over-extension of analogical reasoning of which Cardinal Newman, for one, was guilty, and what he saw as the tendency to obscure the linguistic roots of this rhetorical construction. They conclude: ‘Flatland is a cautionary tale about the dangers of the imagination when wrongly applied.’

(source: Flat Charles | The Fairyland of Geometry)

I think I disagree with this criticism, but I’ll have to reread Flatland to find out.  For the moment, suffice to say that I thought the juxtaposition of mathematization and the doctrine of analogy was pretty interesting.  (Enjoy a picture of Hinton’s cubes!)

(source: Hintonian Cubism (part 1))

Distressingly Obtuse

I keep wondering how Webb gets such a hearing, but then I also keep being reminded by his columns of side-trips and dead-ends in thought–in my thought, at times; more generally, in the history of theology.

The perplexing conclusion of Webb’s latest piece sounds like the sort of thing a Lovecraftian character in a Borges story might well say:

God is like a hypercube whose dimensions, if ever mapped for the purposes of notation, would have no apparent numerical end. If so, then it is not quite accurate to say that God is infinite, but it would make some sense to say that our potential knowledge of God most certainly is.

(source: Is God Really Infinite? | Stephen H. Webb | First Things)

As a rule, of course, any summary “God is like” statement can be expected to turn out badly.  This one is odd in two ways, though:  Odd in that, if it is intended to represent a traditional understanding of God’s “infinity,” it does so only by obfuscating what it pretends to elucidate; odd in that Webb seems to have unironically concluded that divine self-revelation and human understanding, to say nothing of the divine essence, can be spoken of in a language of quantitative specification.

Please understand:  I have myself, repeatedly, objected to the use of “infinity” as an excuse for irrationalism in theology.  I have been known, myself, to reject the conventional use of “infinity” in both Calculus and theology.  I think “infinity” too often stands in for such disparate notions as “unlimited potential” and “irrational presumption of unlimited magnitude or multitude of actual beings” and “a procedure that theoretically never needs to stop” and “really big” and “currently unspecifiable totality” without clear differentiation in popular discourse.  In those thrilling days of yesteryear when I finished my B.A. at the theological hothouse of The Master’s College, my polemics against a simplistic mixture of contemporary evangelicalism and Dordtian Calvinism triggered a relapse of rationalism, during which I would willingly have jettisoned divine aseity [which I had not come to understand properly yet], infinity in time [which I conflated with the simplistic and falsely spatialized “outside time” language that often short-circuits our understanding of the subject], and other teachings which, when read poorly and flatly through a tacit Scotist rejection of analogy and a nominalist account of divine volition, certainly seemed to describe a “God of the philosophers” who resembled the God of the Bible only very distantly.  It would take well over a decade for me to not only prefer a confessional, creedal, difficult orthodoxy to a simplistic rationalization, but also to embrace it with understanding and commitment; it would take me a long time to express how many, not merely conceptual, links were fitted in that chain.

He drew me with the cords of love,
And thus He bound me to Him.
And round my heart still closely twine
Those ties which naught can sever

(source: Hymn: I’ve found a Friend, oh, such a Friend)

I have been known to say, even recently, that when “infinity” is conventionally (mis)understood as a quantitative expression, we should probably reject the statement “God is infinite” out of hand:  God is One, which is finite; God is Three, which is finite; God is not both One and Three in the same way at the same time, so there is no ground for an irrationalism at the base of our theology.  (But of course, God is One in ways that none of His creatures are, both with regard to singularity and unity; and God is Three in ways no group of His creatures can be, not least in that these Three are One!)

When I encounter Webb’s thinking, then, I find myself entering my mental storage unit in search of the old Procrustean Bed I used to make up for God, in my poor hospitality:  a reductive framework that forces the whole of theology to shrink to the scale of the quantifiable–a theology which is scandalized by the singular. Continue reading »

on Theology, Public-Personal, Reflections

A Question of Life and Death

My excellent friend Jeff, who has all that medical background I lack, raises an interesting and potentially very important question on the back of a rather controversial Connecticut case:

the broad issue [seems to be] whether a government can rightfully force someone to undergo some treatment. […] Church teaching is that yes, there are medical cases in which a governing body can rightfully prevent the cessation of certain medical treatments because sometimes prevention of such cessation is a matter of justice.

(source: Not Moralizing a Hospital: Cassandra’s Lymphoma)

I concur.  I think Jeff and I are both hearing the same lesson.  So far, we agree in principle.  I would point out that we should differentiate “cessation,” as in, taking away a treatment, from initiating a treatment.  I think that whether to initiate a treatment was at issue in the case in point.  I’m going to emphasize some key moments in Jeff’s continued analysis, here:

Let’s assume [the cancer] was detected in its early stages and the chemotherapy drugs in question are the medical community’s standard treatment for [such] cases and tend to yield favorable results. Additionally, let’s assume that Cassandra’s proposed alternative treatments are considered by the mainstream medical community to probably be hogwash. Under these circumstances, Cassandra would be refusing a treatment that could reasonably be argued to not be extraordinarily burdensome […] and pursue a treatment that is about as effective as doing nothing[…]. To intentionally perform such actions is immoral, for it is morally obligatory for one to, barring treatment-based suffering that is disproportionate to expected results (some expected span of life), avoid your own death

(source: Not Moralizing a Hospital: Cassandra’s Lymphoma)

Let me just enumerate some points of agreement and disagreement in this analysis, then I want to propose some texts for careful study and reflection. Continue reading »

on Theology, Reflections

Harder To Believe Than Not To

they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false

(source: 2 Thessalonians 2:9-17 RSVCE – The coming of the lawless one by the – Bible Gateway)

People struggle with the sense that truth is already lost to them, that there’s no way to get to the bottom, that the traces are gone.  Some struggle with the sense that inside them, in their own fault or something God has done to them, lies a final alienation from truth.

These are things that happen to us in these days.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrlTeoFcf-Q?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0] Continue reading »

on Theology, Public-Personal, Reflections

Rubricating the Word

I really don’t think there’s anything I can add to this:

The last words from the mouths of the martyrs were “Jesus Christ.” We often read stories about early martyrs of the Church. We produce movies depicting their stories and lives, but nothing can capture it like the scene of men dying for their faith in their Savior and Redeemer. Sometimes we think of martyrs as being above human, as legendary figures who lived extraordinary lives, but these men were ordinary. They were men who lived normal lives, poor men who traveled to Libya to feed their families. Yet at the critical moment, they did not deny their Savior or run away from him. Pushed on their knees to be killed, they stood taller than their murderers. They stood tall for the whole world to watch what Christianity is all about.

(source: Martyred Copts Witnessed Their Faith, and Courage)

Perhaps I will only point out that these martyrs also stood taller than we do, which is why I cannot imagine what I could add to their witness:

The United States has even been reluctant to call this crime what it is. While many world leaders condemned this as a murder of Christians, the White House spoke of murdered Egyptians. Whether out of policy or simple ignorance, the White House has dishonored those men by refusing to acknowledge their sacrifice and their faith. The administration needs to be aware and develop a policy that places this not as an isolated incident but as part of an eradication campaign against Christianity in its birthplace.

(source: Martyred Copts Witnessed Their Faith, and Courage) Continue reading »

on Theology, Public-Personal

Assertions and Distinctions

From a state political figure whose views I often quite appreciate (and whose courage in more than one currently unpopular cause is exemplary), this story about a consortium attempting to raise funds to kill babies in Oklahoma City:

That’s what they think the women of Oklahoma need: More abortionists.

Personally, I can think of a whole slate of things the women of Oklahoma need more than they need another abortionist. I know a lot of Oklahoma women who’ve had abortions. Wish they hadn’t, but they did. Not one of them — not one — had any problem obtaining an abortion because of a lack of abortionists.

However, Trust Women, a group that may or may not open clinics around the country, has targeted Oklahoma for a fund-raising drive to open another abortion clinic.

(source: Group Raises Funds to Open Abortion Clinic in Oklahoma.)

There are a number of recent events that may well cause concern among those who measure “progress” by the ease with which those who make a living killing babies can reach their “target market” without competition from those who would like to ensure that mothers and children are protected from exploitation and slaughter:  arrests, laws requiring such “health care providers” to at least take minimal steps to care for health, and always and everywhere prayer, the mightiest weapon in the arsenal of those who love life and its Creator.

An army marches on its stomach, but the Church marches on her knees:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?  As it is written, “For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”  No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(source: Romans 8:31-39 RSVCE – God’s Love in Christ Jesus – What – Bible Gateway)

And mindful of that triumph, and grateful for all those who for any reason and from any perspective join in the good will of the Creator toward all living humans, I look forward to tomorrow.

While we’re here, though, let me slightly disagree with Hamilton on a different matter, in a different post.  Though I understand her sentiments, and agree that we don’t need to “get all in a lather” about this other matter, I wish she had expressed her thoughts slightly more carefully. Continue reading »

on Theology, Reflections

Now is a Very Acceptable Time

A little reading fit for the day, from T. S. Eliot:

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

(source: “Ash Wednesday” | On Being) Continue reading »