Posted on 05/11/2005 10:04:08 AM PDT by NYer
It has to be one of the strangest things in the world: So many Christians who love Jesus with all their hearts recoil in fear at the mention of His mother's name, while many who do love her find themselves tongue-tied when asked to explain why.
Most of the issues people have with Mary are really issues about something else. "Where is the Assumption of Mary in the Bible?" isn't really a question about Mary. It's a question about the validity of Sacred Tradition and the authority of the Church. "Why should I pray to Mary?" isn't really about Mary, either. It's actually a question about the relationship of the living and the dead in Christ. "Do Catholics worship Mary?" isn't a question about Mary. It's concerned more with whether or not Catholics countenance idolatry and what the word "honor" means. And curiously enough, all these and many more objections both pay homage to and completely overlook the central truth about Mary that the Catholic Church labors to help us see: that her life, in its entirety, is a referred life. Sublime Neglect The Cultural Obstacles The Heart of Marian Doctrine Defeating Destructive Ideologies
Mary would, after all, be of absolutely no consequence to us if not for her Son. It is because she is the mother of Jesus Christ that she matters to the world at all. If He hadn't been born, you never would have heard of her. John, with characteristic economy of expression, captures this referred life in her own words: "Do whatever He tells you" (Jn 2:5). And, of course, if this were all the Church had to say about her, Evangelicals would be more than happy to let her refer us to Jesus and be done with it. What baffles so many non-Catholics is the Church's tendency to keep referring us to her. "Ad Iesum per Mariam!" we say, to which many non-Catholics nervously respond, "Isn't Christianity supposed be about a relationship with Jesus Christ? Why do Catholics honor Mary so much?"
That question sounded reasonable — right up until another question began to bother me: If Catholics honor Mary too much, exactly how do we Evangelicals honor her "just enough"? For the reality was that my native evangelicalism recoiled from any and all mention of Mary.
This was odd. After all, Evangelicals could talk all day about Paul and never feel we were "worshipping" him or giving him "too much honor." We rightly understood that God's Word comes to us through St. Paul, and there's no conflict between the two (even though Paul exhibits more character flaws than Mary).
Yet the slightest mention of Mary by a Catholic immediately brought a flood of warnings, hesitations, scrutinies of her lack of faith (allegedly demonstrated in Mark 3:21), and even assertions that Jesus was less pleased with her than he was with His disciples (because he called her "Woman," not "Mom"; and because He commended His own disciples as "my brother and sister and mother" (Mk 3:35)). And all this was despite the fact that not just God's word (e.g. the Magnificat), but God's Word, came to us through Mary (Jn 1:14). As Evangelicals we could say, "If not for Paul, the Gospel would never have reached the Gentiles." But we froze up if somebody argued that, "If not for Mary, the Gospel would never have reached the earth." Suddenly, a flurry of highly speculative claims about how "God would simply have chosen somebody else!" would fill the air, as though Mary was a mere incubation unit, completely interchangeable with any other woman on earth. "No Paul, no Gospel for the Gentiles" made perfect sense. But "No Mary, no incarnation, no death, no resurrection, no salvation for the world" was just too extreme.
Indeed, from evangelical piety and preaching as it is actually practiced, one could be forgiven for getting the sense that Jesus didn't really even like His mother (like a teenager irritated because Mom just doesn't understand him). Having "Mary is No Big Deal" hammered home whenever her name was raised tended to give you the feeling that — after her brief photo-op for the Hallmark Christmas card industry — Jesus was glad to spend time away from the family, in the Temple discussing higher things. The position in evangelicalism was more or less that we should do likewise and not lavish any attention on the mother who was too dim to understand Who He was, and whom He "rebuked" by saying, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"
And so, our claims to honor her "just enough" effectively boiled down to paying no shred of positive attention to her beyond singing "round yon Virgin, mother and child" each Christmas. The rest of the time it was either complete neglect or jittery assurances of her unimportance and dark warnings not to over-emphasize the woman of whom inspired Scripture said, "From this day all generations will call me blessed."
It was a startling paradigm shift to realize we treated her so allergically — and one which, I have since noticed, isn't unusual for converts. Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society, told me once that when he was still hanging back from the Church because of Mary, a blunt priest he knew asked him, "Do you believe her soul magnifies the Lord? It's right there in Scripture." Ahlquist reflexively answered back, "Of course I do! I know the Bible!" But even as he replied he was thinking to himself, "I never really thought of that before." It can be a disorienting experience.
But, in fact, it is right there in the Bible. Her soul magnifies the Lord, and from that day to this all generations have called her blessed. So why, when we Evangelicals looked at Jesus, did we never look at Him through the divinely appointed magnifying glass? Why were we so edgy about calling her "blessed" and giving her any honor? That realization was my first clue that it was, perhaps, Catholics who were simply being normal and human in honoring Mary, while we Evangelicals were more like teetotalers fretting that far too much wine was being drunk at the wedding in Cana.
Part of the problem, I came to realize, was that evangelical fears about Mary are visceral and not entirely theological. Indeed, much of the conflict between Catholics and Evangelicals is cultural, not theological. Evangelical culture (whether you're a man or a woman) is overwhelmingly masculine, while Catholic culture (again, whether you're a man or a woman) is powerfully feminine. And the two groups often mistake their cultural differences for theological ones.
The Catholic approach tends to be body-centered, Eucharistic, and contemplative. Prayer, in Catholic culture, is primarily for seeking union with God. Evangelical approaches to God tend to be centered on Scripture, verbal articulation of belief, mission, and on the Spirit working in power. Prayer, in such a culture, is primarily for getting things done. Both are legitimate Christian ways of approaching the Gospel. Indeed, they should both be part of the Catholic approach to the Gospel. But because of these unconscious differences Evangelicals and Catholics often clash about culture while they think they're debating theology. The feminine spirituality of the Catholic can regard the masculine evangelical approach as shallow, noisy, and utilitarian, lacking an interior life. Meanwhile, Catholic piety can be seen by Evangelicals as a cold, dead, ritualistic, biblically ignorant, and cut off from real life. Thus, Evangelicals frequently criticize the Catholic life as a retreat from reality into rituals and rote prayers.
Not surprisingly, the heroes of the two camps are (for Evangelicals) the Great Human Dynamo of Apostolic Energy, St. Paul; and (for Catholics) the great icon of Contemplative Prayer Issuing in Incarnation, the Blessed Virgin Mary. As an Evangelical, I found Paul much easier to appreciate, since he was "biblical" — he wrote much of the New Testament, after all. You could talk about Paul since he'd left such a significant paper trail. Not so with Mary. Apart from the Magnificat and a couple remarks here and there — plus, of course, the infancy narratives — she didn't appear to occupy nearly as much psychic space for the authors of the New Testament as she did for Catholics. Marian devotion looked like a mountain of piety built on a molehill of Scripture.
Looks, however, can be deceiving. For as I got to know the Bible better, it became obvious to me that the authors of Scripture were not nearly as jittery about Mary as my native evangelicalism. Furthermore, they accorded to her honors which looked a great deal more Catholic than evangelical.
Luke, for instance, likens her to the Ark of the Covenant in recording that the Holy Spirit "overshadowed" her. The same word in Greek is used to describe the way the Shekinah (glory of God) overshadowed the tabernacle in Luke 1:35. Likewise, John makes the same connection between Mary and the Ark of the Covenant when he announces in Revelation 11:19-12:2:
Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of His covenant was seen within His temple; and there were flashes of lightning, voices, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail. And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery.
The chapter goes on to describe the woman as giving birth to a male child who rules the nations with an iron scepter and who is almost devoured by a great red dragon.
As an Evangelical, my own tradition found it remarkably easy to detect bar codes, Soviet helicopters, the European Common Market, and the Beatles encoded into the narrative of Revelation. But when Catholics suggested that the woman of Revelation might have something to do with the Blessed Virgin occupying a place of cosmic importance in the grand scheme of things, this was dismissed as incredible. Everyone knew that the woman of Revelation was really the symbolic Virgin Daughter of Zion giving birth to the Church. A Jewish girl who stood at the pinnacle of the Old Covenant, summed up the entirety of Israel's mission and gave flesh to the Head of the Church saying, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word" — what could she possibly have to do with those images? Why, that would suggest that she was the Virgin Daughter of Zion and the Flower of her People, the Model Disciple, the Icon of the Church, the Mother of Jesus and of all those who are united with Him by faith and...
Come to think of it, Scripture was looking rather Catholic after all.
That was the revolutionary thought that made it possible for me to press on, as a new Catholic, to find out what the Church was trying to get at with her Marian teaching. In coming to understand this, it seemed to me, I'd come a long way toward understanding why Mary figures so prominently, not merely in the heads, but in the hearts of Catholics.
The first question that arises, of course, is, "Why Marian dogma at all?" Why not just dogmas about Christ and let Catholics think what they like about Mary? Why bind consciences here?
The answer is that Catholics do think what they like — not only about Mary, but about lots of things. And sometimes they think deeply erroneous things. When they do, and that thought imperils some revealed truth to the point it threatens the integrity of the Church's witness, the Church will, from time to time, define its doctrine more precisely. This is a process that's already at work in the New Testament (cf. Acts 15), and it continues until the return of Christ.
So, for instance, in the fifth century there arose (yet again) the question of just who Jesus is. It was a question repeated throughout antiquity and, in this case, an answer to the question was proposed by the Nestorians. They argued that the mortal man Jesus and the Logos, or Second Person of the Trinity, were more or less two persons occupying the same head. For this reason, they insisted that Mary could not be acclaimed (as she had been popularly acclaimed for a very long time) as Theotokos, or God-bearer. Instead, she should only be called Christotokos, or Christ-bearer. She was, they insisted, the Mother of Jesus, not of God.
The problem with this was that it threatened the very witness of the Church and could even lead logically to the notion that there were two Sons of God, the man Jesus and the Logos who was sharing a room with Him in His head. In short, it was a doorway to theological chaos over one of the most basic truths of the Faith: that the Word became flesh, died, and rose for our sins.
So the Church formulated its response. First, Jesus Christ is not two persons occupying the same head. He is one person possessing two natures, human and divine, joined in a hypostatic union. Second, it was appropriate to therefore call Mary Theotokos because she's the Mother of the God-Man. When the God-Man had His friends over for lunch, He didn't introduce Mary saying, "This is the mother of my human nature." He said, "This is my mother."
Why did the Church do this? Because, once again, Mary points to Jesus. The dogma of the Theotokos is a commentary on Jesus, a sort of "hedge" around the truth about Jesus articulated by the Church. Just as Nestorianism had tried to attack the orthodox teaching of Christ through Mary (by forbidding the veneration of her as Theotokos), now the Church protected that teaching about Christ by making Theotokos a dogma. That is a vital key to understanding Marian dogmas: They're always about some vital truth concerning Jesus, the nature of the Church, or the nature of the human person.
This is evident, for instance, in the definition of Mary as a Perpetual Virgin (promulgated in 553 at the Council of Constantinople). This tradition isn't so much explicitly attested as reflected in the biblical narrative. Yes, we must grant that the biblical narrative is ambiguous in that it speaks of Jesus's "brothers" (but does it mean "siblings" or merely "relatives"?). However, other aspects of the biblical narrative strongly suggest she remained a virgin.
For instance, Mary reacts with astonishment at the news that she, a woman betrothed, will bear a son. If you are at a wedding shower and tell the bride-to-be, "You're going to have cute kids" and she responds "How can that be?" you can only conclude one of two things: she either doesn't know about the birds and the bees or she's taken a vow of virginity. In short, the promise of a child is an odd thing for a betrothed woman to be amazed about... unless, of course, she'd already decided to remain a virgin even after marriage.
Likewise, Joseph reacts with fear at the thought of taking Mary as a wife. Why fear? Modernity assumes it was because he thought her guilty of adultery, but the typical view in antiquity understood the text to mean he was afraid of her sanctity — as a pious Jew would be afraid to touch the Ark of the Covenant. After all, think of what Mary told him about the angel's words: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God."
I'm not even a pious Jew, but with words like that echoing in my ears about my wife, I'd find it easy to believe that Joseph, knowing what he did about his wife, would have chosen celibacy.
"But nothing is sure, based on the text alone. It's still ambiguous," says the critic. Right. The biblical text alone doesn't supply an unambiguous answer to this or a myriad of other questions, including "Is the Holy Spirit God?," "How do you contract a valid marriage?," and "Can you be a polygamist?" But the Tradition of the Church in union with the biblical text does supply an answer: Mary had no other children, a fact so commonly known throughout the early Church that when Jerome attacks Helvidius for suggesting otherwise, nobody makes a peep. In a Church quite capable of tearing itself to pieces over distinctions between homoousious and homoiousious, you hear the sound of crickets in response to Jerome, punctuated with the sound of other Fathers singing hymns to "Mary, Ever-Virgin." The early Church took it for granted and thought Helvidius as credible as Dan Brown.
But why a dogma about it? Because, again, Mary's life is a referred life. Her virginity, like Christ's, speaks of her total consecration to God and of our call as Christians to be totally consecrated as well. Her virginity is not a stunt or a magic trick to make the arrival of Messiah extra strange. It is, rather, a sign to the Church and of the Church. And that matters for precisely the reason I'd thought it did not matter when I was an Evangelical: because Christianity is indeed supposed be about a relationship with Jesus Christ. But a relationship necessarily involves more than one person.
It comes down to is this: Jesus can do a world of wonderful things, but there is something even Jesus cannot do: He cannot model for us what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus. Only a disciple of Jesus can do that. And the first and best model of the disciple of Jesus is the one who said and lived "Yes!" to God, spontaneously and without even the benefit of years of training or the necessity of being knocked off a horse and blinded. And she continues to do so right through the agony of watching her Son die and the ecstasy of knowing Him raised again.
This is why the Church, like the Gospels, has always called Mary our Mother: because Mom is the best model for training children. The command to call her "Mother" comes, of course, from Jesus Himself. John doesn't record the words "Behold your mother" (Jn 19:27) because he thought his readers might be curious about domestic arrangements for childless Jewish widows. Rather, as with everything else John writes, "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name" (Jn 20:31). In other words, he doesn't record everything about Jesus, only those things that have a significant theological meaning. This includes Christ's words to the Beloved Disciple. For the Beloved Disciple is you and not merely John. Mary is your mother and you are her child. And so we are to look to her as mother and imitate her as she imitates Christ.
This brings us to the last two (and intimately related) Marian dogmas. Given that Marian dogma is always a commentary on Christ and His Church, what is the Church saying in its dogmatic teaching that 1) Mary was preserved at the moment of her conception from the stain of all sin, both original and actual; and 2) Mary was assumed bodily into heaven at the end of her earthly existence?
The great crisis that faced the Church in the 19th century (when the Holy Spirit, doing His job of leading the Church into all truth, led the Church to promulgate the dogma of the Immaculate Conception) was the rise of several ideologies — still very much with us — that called into question the origins and dignity of the human person. Darwin said the human person was an unusually clever piece of meat whose origins were as accidental as a pig's nose. Marx said humans were mere ingredients in a vast economic historical process. Laissez-faire capitalism saw people as natural resources to be exploited and thrown away when they lost their value. Eugenics said human dignity rested on "fitness." Much of Protestantism declared humans "totally depraved," while much of the Enlightenment held up the myth of human innocence, the "noble savage," and the notion of human perfectibility through reason. Racial theory advanced the notion that the key to human dignity was the shape of your skull, the color of your skin, and your membership in the Aryan or Teutonic tribe. Freud announced that your illusion of human dignity was just a veil over fathomless depths of unconscious processes largely centering in the groin or emerging out of issues with Mom and Dad.
All these ideologies - and many others - had in common the degrading rejection of human beings as creatures made in the image of God and intended for union with God (and the consequent subjection of the human person to some sort of creature). In contrast to them all, the Church, in holding up the icon of Mary Immaculate, held up an icon of both our true origin and our true dignity. That she was sinless was a teaching as old as the hills in the Church, which had hailed her as Kecharitomene, or "full of grace," since the time of Luke, and saluted her as Panagia, or all-holy, since the early centuries of the Church. So then why did the Holy Spirit move the Church to develop and focus this immemorial teaching more clearly?
Because what needed to be said loud and clear was that we were made in the image of God and that our fallenness, though very real, does not name or define us: Jesus Christ does. We are not mere animals, statistical averages, cogs in a machine, sophisticated primordial ooze, or a jangling set of complexes, appetites, tribal totems, Aryan supermen, naturally virtuous savages, or totally depraved Mr. Hydes. We were made by God, for God. Therefore sin, though normal, is not natural and doesn't constitute our humanity. And the proof of it was Mary, who was preserved from sin and yet was more human than the lot of us. She wasn't autonomously innocent, as though she could make it without God. She was the biggest recipient of grace in the universe, a grace that made her, in a famous phrase, "younger than sin." Because of it, she was free to be what Irenaeus described as "the glory of God": a human being fully alive. And as she is, so can the grace of Christ make us.
The 19th-century ideologies didn't, however, remain in libraries and classrooms. In the 20th century, they were enacted by the powers of state, science, business, entertainment, education, and the military into programs that bore abundant fruit in such enterprises as global and regional wars, the Holocaust, the great famines, the killing fields, the "great leap forward," the sexual revolution, and the culture of death, which is still reaping a rich bounty of spiritual and physical destruction. In short, as the 19th-century philosophies assaulted the dignity and origin of the human person, so the working out of those philosophies on the ground in the 20th century assaulted the dignity and destiny of the human person.
So what did the Holy Spirit do? Once again, in 1950, in the middle of a century that witnessed the biggest assault on the human person and on the family that the world has ever seen, the Church again held up Mary as an icon of who we really are and who we are meant to become by promulgating the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. Just as the Immaculate Conception held Mary up as the icon of the divine dignity of our origins, so the Church, in teaching "that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory" was now holding her up as the icon of the divine dignity of our destiny.
The Church is repeating, in effect, that the God Who loves the world does not will that our fate be the oven, the mass grave, the abortuary, the anonymity of the factory, the brothel, the cubicle, or the street. The proper end of our life is supposed to be for us, as it already is for her, the ecstatic glory of complete union with the Triune God in eternity. Once again, God shows us something vital about our relationship to Himself through her, His greatest saint.
And that, in the end, is the point of Marian devotion and theology. Through our Lady, we see Jesus Christ reflected in the eyes of His greatest saint. But we also see "what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power in us who believe, according to the working of His great might" (Eph 1:18-19). For what He has already done for her, He will one day do also in us.
Um, yes in the bible the Apostles were not handing out bibles. That is true. The bible says that it would be impossible to "detail" the life of Jesus.
The Epistle writers generally only addressed problems in their respective churches, such as division at Corinth. Thus, the more common and agreed-upon teachings would not be normally commented upon, correct?
No, you are now emptying out the scriptures right before my eyes. I must say that I knew it would come to this because it always does when I have a good long heart to hearter with an RC. I feel that you are pouring out the bible like sand at our feet as I read. It is such a sad and tragic thing for me to see you do this. This is why I can really assume with confidence that you have not been reading it 3 times per year for the 18 or so years. Oh man this just crushes me.
Why goes into detail on the How's of worship if Ephesus is getting it right? NO writer of Scripture was intending on writing an extensive theological treatise on Christianity.
More sand poured out at our feet. What will be left when I get to the last paragraph. It is so becoming so clear to me why I don't find RC's who read the bible. A studious RC, also a rare find, will be led to other writings. I think I need a tissue. I see why RC's reflex to Word of God = Jesus and not the scriptures because an RC would not start emptying out Jesus like this.
That didn't occur until later when defending against the Jews and Pagan writers. Can you see where this is going?
Boy can I.
There is absolutely no need or warrant to believe that EVERYTHING that we are to believe is written explicitly in Scripture. We realize that God revealed to us His Word - ALL of it was initially given orally. Some of it got written down. Some of it was later used to argue with future heretics. I challenge you, from "Scripture alone", to defend the fact that Jesus is God.
Here again, that is an easy thing to do. There are cults out there that make it their corporate letter head and business vision to prove that Jesus is not God, like JW's and Mormons, but you will never prove anything from the scriptures to such people. Believe me, I know. The Scripture tells us everything that we could possibly need to know about the Lord Jesus Christ. But it is not in engineering requirements form, which is why we are charged to read it so much.
Arius found within the SAME Sciptures verses that questioned your idea of the clarity that Jesus is the same ESSENCE as God. There is plenty of evidence, from Scripture alone, to take Arius' viewpoint, that Jesus was like God, but not God. Without Correct Apostolic Tradition, how are you to KNOW which is the correct meaning of the writers of Scripture? YOU CANNOT!
You are so wrong here. I have no problem proving this to those who will believe, but as the bible says, those who won't believe won't believe if someone rises from the dead and tells them. If what you implied was true, than how could anyone resist RC rhetoric? But they certainly can.
Evidence of this is seen today within the THOUSANDS of Bible alone Protestants who argue over the "clarity" of Scripture without the use of Apostolic Tradition.
I don't want to start dissing the RCC again at this time, but I will only say here, that I've never seen 2 RC's who believed or understood their own doctrine the same way so this argument is hollow,,,sir. ;-) We're still keeping this nice. But if we were in my favorite bar sharing a picture of Bud Lite, I think my verbal response to this would probably start drawing attention.
Actually I should be saying that. What a terrible accusation I made and now that I read 962 I see that it was all just typed and to me. I will be giving it my attention one paragraph at a time since you spent all that time on me.
The "other" children of the woman in Rev. are you, me, and everyone else given to her by Christ from the cross, "Behold, your mother..."
"17Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus."
A wonderful bookend to Genesis! The "woman" (Mary) is declared the mortal enemy of the serpent (dragon) in the Garden, and her "offspring" (not only Christ - but by virtue of His gift of her from the cross, you, me, the whole Church) will do battle against him. In Revelation, John writes of this continuing battle taking place until the end of time, with the Mother of the Church suffering in sorrow as the dragon persecutes the Church. Yet she is brought to a place of shelter by the Lord, who promised that "the gates of hell shall not prevail".
Nice job on 1000.
***Nice job on 1000.***
(tips hat)
Fantastic post. One of the fundamental (no pun intended) flaws in "fundamentalist" interpretation of Scripture is the glaring refusal to apply context to their studies.
My favorite is the continual citation "call no man your father" as proof that priests are blasphemous creatures. Yet, this same group conveniently ignores the direct commentary of Christ that "no one is good but God". So by their standards, every utterance that a human being is "good" should also be blasphemy, but their standard applies only to verses that they believe provide fodder against Catholicism.
The same goes for the discourse on the Eucharist. Every verse in the Bible MUST BE READ LITERALLY according to fundamentalism, "but NOT John Chapter 6! No, not that chapter. That chapter is only SYMBOLIC, and don't try to prove otherwise because every other verse is literal but not JOHN CHAPTER 6!"
The other "do not touch" issue for fundamentalists is the whole "your church is not led by the Holy Spirit" label they put on Catholicism. Yet they blindly accept the four gospels from a Church not-led-by-the-Holy Spirit in its weeding out from nearly forty other gospels that were floating around Europe and Asia Minor when the canon was affirmed. Add to that the fact that for 300 or so years, the Church was evangelized through oral tradition and the letters of Paul, which were not for public consumption, only sought to advise church leaders on their catechesis, and furthermore predated the actual Gospels written in the late first century.
The next issue is the notion that the early church willingly refused to hand out Bibles to the flock in order to keep them submissive to the Bishop of Rome. This of course assumes that a mostly illiterate population could read (and of course, these were the people who naturally gravitated to the teachings of Christ), and it also assumes that the Church had a means of mass producing Bibles, since this was, oh, about a THOUSAND years before Gutenberg.
Heresy after heresy was uncovered, beaten down, and sent away during the early church, which was apparently not led by the Holy Spirit, which by logical extension, leaves every Protestant vulnerable to the distinct possibility they are following precepts affirmed and re-affirmed by a Church that held close to its traditions and rejected alternative, "protestant" points of view.
So the fundamentalist POV, which is extremely narrow, does not welcome context to its study of scripture, which is their fatal flaw. Some things are literal, some things are figurative, as you so well pointed out. God inspired the authors of the Old and New Testaments and made use of not only their knowledge, but literary devices which their contemporaries understood and employed in kind. So Revelation, for example, reads not only as an apocalyptic writing, but also a fascinating insight into the persecution of the Church while John was exiled on Patmos. The story of Job is not only a moral tale that expresses the omniscient authority of God, but a prophetic foreshadowing of Christ Himself. The major and minor prophets prophesied not only for their time, but every "time" thereafter, including the end times, which are solely focused on by fundamentalists.
There's limitless depth to Scripture. We cannot possibly unearth all of its treasures in one lifetime. The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, has unearthed nothing that is not already in Scripture, but within context and understanding of God's will, there is much more to be learned in the times to come. So when people decry the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption and the Co-Redemptrix, I feel sorry that they have reduced God to the role of an ancient-Hebrew Dominick Dunne and refuse to look below the surface of the miracle that is the Bible itself.
See you at 2000?
This popped up on my Pings today and thought it was somewhat relevant to the thread here.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1404783/posts
Hope this is clickable! I always have trouble with that!
I believe you key idea is "'Scriptural evidence' is always a matter of interpretation."
So you are basically promoting Catholic Relativism (but not really, for only RCC interpretation unlocks the absolute truth - right?).
Truth, as such, is subjective and "it's [truth is] always a matter of rival interpretations". Furthermore, you state: "No text by itself proves anything self-evidently".
On this thread and on many others where we have debated, I and many others have explained the Catholic (and on these points, the Eastern Orthodox largely agree with Catholics) view of authority in detail. You read what we write then restate it unrecognizably. In this case you accuse us of subjectivism.
We believe that Christ authorized a way to maintain non-subjective interpretation of Scripture: bishops. We recognize that others do not believe that Christ did this. We recognize that others (you) read Scripture in such a way as to deny the fundamental authority of bishops. But notice that they are then replacing that authority with another authority (their denomination's, their pastor's, their individual purportedly Holy Spirit-guided authority). We are not subjective and we do not say that truth is subjective. We say that one arrives at firm, non-subjective truth by a combination of Scripture plus authoritative interpretation.
We believe in this Christ-given apostles/bishop structure on the basis of the historical record: the Church recorded her history and it includes ample historical evidence that bishops succeeded the apostles as authoritative teachers and intepreters of Christ's message entrusted to them (which exists also in the NT which these apostles wrote down). This historical record outside of the NT is fully compatible, does not contradict anything in the NT, we conclude.
Of course, rival interpretations of the historical record exist. I am trained as a professional historian. I have studied how these rival interpretations of the historical record emerged. I have come to believe one interpretation of the historical record (Catholic-Orthodox) and to reject the others (Protestant Reformers, secular Enlightenment are the two main ones). Why? Because the Catholic-Orthodox one has been around continuously all the way back. The others consist in saying, "the Catholic-Orthodox interpretation of the historical record represents a manipulation of the record to buttress the illicit power of the bishops." But the people making that accusation (Protestant Reformers, Enlightenment philosophes) had an axe to grind: they had already concluded that bishops were the problem. So they seemed to me to be reading into their interpretation of the historical record their a priori prejudices against bishops.
Okay, as a thought-experiment, let's stipulate that bishops are the problem, that they did, having custody of the Church's record (both in Scripture and the tradition of their own predecessors in office), distort it and create a falsely-claimed Christ-given authority for apostle-bishops. If that's truly what happened in history (and this is an interpretation of the historical record), then how in the world would anyone be able to arrive at the true alternative reading of the historical record? Any alternative will be subject to the various a priori assumptions of the interpreter.
So, we are stuck: either (1) the apostle-bishops were really authorized by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit to receive and take care of and pass on and write down and interpret Christ's own message in Scripture and in authoritative bishop-interpretation, in which case we have access to the true story of who Jesus was and what he did
or (2) we have no way of ever knowing for sure what he said and did because these untrustworthy, non-Christ-authorized apostles-bishops are the sole source of the written record (the NT and their own surviving writings and homilies on the NT). If the successors to the bishops are not Christ-authorized and guided to intepret the historical record (including the NT), then we, 1000, 1500, 2000 years later will read into that record whatever we wish to, reflecting our own pre-dilections, assumptions, pre-judices etc.
Now, you may well say, "but the authorized interpreter of the NT that I believe in is the Holy Spirit. That's how I know that we can know the true meaning of Scripture, and the true meaning is not Christ-authorized apostle-bishops. I know that through the Holy Spirit."
The problem is that a thousand other well-meaning "Bible Christians" and mainline Protestants--pastors, congregations, individuals, denominations--each claims the Holy Spirit guided them to a slightly or greatly different "Clear and True Interpretation" of Scripture regarding infant baptism, bishops, ministers, Communion, praise bands etc. If that's how the Holy Spirit solves the problem, then why bother with Christianity at all? It would seem that the Holy Spirit has failed abysmally in making the meaning of the NT really clear.
So, you wanted a boiled-down version of our beliefs? Here it is: either the apostle-bishop system is Christ-given and Holy Spirit guided and true or there's simply no way to know what did happen "back then," no way to know that Jesus of Nazareth died and rose from the dead. In short, either the apostle-bishop system is true and trustworthy or Christianity is a pipe-dream, infinitely malleable to whatever modern-day "Christians" wish to make of it.
You continued: I am shocked that your idea of truth is so subjective. But I guess you perceive that it is in your favor to downplay the ability of God to communicate clearly through His Word and thereby to enhance the supposed authority of your group by believing you hold the correct "interpretation" without which the Word is inaccessable.
Get over your shock and listen carefully. You say we play down your claim that God can speak clearly through Scripture and give the true interpretation to your group. You insert motives, cynical motives in our heads.
But you surely believe that you have the correct interpretation just as we believe we do. If you did not believe really, truly, that you have the true interpretation, you would not be so persistent in rejecting ours and insisting that yours is the true, Holy-Spirit-given clear meaning of Scripture.
What's so hard about this? Neither of us is subjective. We both believe, not in "subjective" truth but in objective truth. We differ over the means by which God reveals the real, objective truth, the true interpretation of Scripture. We say it's by way of the bishops (authorized by Christ, based on a set of Scripture passages and additional early Church historical records that, we say, shows him doing that). You say, "no bishops," rather, God speaks directly through the Scriptures--but to say God does not use bishops is itself an interpretation of the various passages and, in fact, while you don't have bishops, you do not get your interpretation straight from Scripture anymore than I do. You listened to Pastor X and read commentary Y as you formed your interpretation of Scripture.
Yes, to be sure, you believe that it was the Holy Spirit working through Pastor X and commentary Y that brought you to your present clear understanding of the true meaning of Scripture. But we believe that the Holy Spirit did exactly that with our apostle-bishops.
Does this leave us with a simple "he said, she said" stand-off (your premise that I'm claiming total relativism)? No. You believe the Holy Spirit has clearly guided your group (and whatever other Bible-Christians or denominations largely agree with you) into the true meaning without apostle-bisops. (A) You offer "Scripture+Holy Spirit" while (B) we offer "Holy Spirit+bishops (+Scripture written by apostles)" It's not a mere standoff because A leaves us hopelessly fractured into 1000s of "true Holy-Spirit interpretations of Scripture" which in fact end up looking suspiciously like whatever basic cultural trends were taking place at the time the 500th or 888th or 945th "true Holy Spirit interpretation" came into being: Luther, Calvin (2nd generation Protestant), Pietist, Latitudinearian, Finneyite, Pentecostal, Seeker-Friendly etc.
Whereas (B) leaves us with Orthodox and Catholics who agree on virtually everything except the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome (on original sin and the procession of the Spirit we effectively end up at the same place by different routes). You can, of course, try to portray Catholics and Orthodox as hopelessly divided, but I'm sorry, if one steps back and surveys the 1000s of Protestants disagreeing over infant baptism, the nature of Christ's present in the Eucharist (even whether it's mere Communion or something more), predestination and free will, the role of the minister/priest, the role of bishops--on all these points and hundreds more, Catholics and Orthodox agree while Protestants disagree massively. The immense degree of unity among Catholics-Orthodox--those who have stuck with the Apostle-Bishop structure and the comparatively immense disunity among all (no exceptions) Christians who have abandoned the Apostle-Bishop structure in favor of "Scripture/Holy Spirit" is simply overwhelming.
You continued: Therefore it follows that a person must accept your interpretation of the Bible BEFORE he or she can understand it.
Close but misleading. What provides the key to interpreting the Bible the way we do is that we believe Christ gave us apostles/bishops. The role of these apostles/bishops are described in the NT but we believe that they existed and functioned as interpreters of Christ's message before that message was written down in Scripture, that Christ authorized them simply to preach his message. Part of their preaching was to write it down. Another part was to interpret it as disputes arose over his message. The disputes arose very early. So yes, prior to approaching the interpretation of Scripture one must decide what one believes about how Scripture came into existence and how its authority relates to Christ's authority and to the authority of Christ's apostles (and bishops).
You claim to believe that God communicates clearly and directly via Scripture and accuse us of downplaying that cynically because it serves our purpose.
Look, the reason we believe that Scripture alone cannot communicate clearly is logic and experience: the meaning of any set of words, the US Constitution, the Charter of the United Nations, the Torah, the Quran, Shakespeare's Henry IV--can be and inevitably is disputed.
It's a simple fact that, given a long enough period of time (a few weeks or months, usually) people do not agree about any set of words, formula, document. And it's a simple fact that those who claim, like you do, that the meaning of God's word is selfevident, clear because God makes it clear, do not agree among yourselves about what that selfevident meaning is--you are divided into thousands of groups based on your principle of self-evident meaning. Are your prepared to condemn to hell all those Protestant groups who disagree with you over infant/adult baptism, the nature of Communion, the meaning of the "gifts of the Holy Spirit," whether "praise bands" are good or bad, whether formal Creeds should be used or not and a thousand other things? Or do you say, "well, at least in large measure they agree with me on sola scriptura instead of bishops so I guess those who at least reject Catholic/Orthodox bishop-interpreters and accept "clear, self-evident Bible teaching" are on the right track"?
Experience shows that the Bible simply is not clear about its meaning. If it were, all Christians would agree about what the meaning is--unless you are prepared to say that those who disagree with you have rejected the clear meaning that God makes clear to those who will listen. But that would mean that those who don't see the meaning that is so obvious to you are rejecting God and headed for hell. DOn't you see that this leaves you and however many hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of Christians agree with you broadly or in detail alone on the way to heaven and billions of other people who say they are CHristians headed for hell because they refused to see the "clear" meaning of Scripture. If the meaning of Scripture is so darn clear, why do so few people see the same clear meaning that you (and some, relatively few, others) see?
You asked in conclusion: Is this (sans my editorializing) a correct summation of your position?
No it was not.
"Calm down now. First, I have read plenty. Secondly, my pastor didn't have to tell me. I'm over 50, and have been to several RC weddings and a couple of funerals. I could not count the times I saw clergy and parishoners bow to statues of 'Mary' and 'saints'."
Bowing is not worship. I suggest you read the OT more closely and see the countless times that David bows to Saul and other such things. Kings have been bowed to throughout the history of mankind. Are you suggesting that during all of this time, men were considering the king as gods?
Regards
"OK, so you didn't just type them up between posts but you already had them written somewhere"
Sorry to disappoint. I typed it up as I went along...If you'll look closely, some of the syntax is pretty rough and there are a couple verb/noun tense disagreements. But like I said, my back won't let me sit too long... I did think over what I was going to say to you for 15 minutes or so before I began. Does that help? :-)
Regards
I'll get to your points asap.
But may I say in the meantime, your are truly a prolific poster!
Do your fingers hurt?
***Finally, God's beard is not biblical.***
Hey!
God the Son had a beard!
(and probably still does.)
Yes, it was a great post. Though I agree for different reasons.
I'm sure we all agree to disagree... but the conversation is worth it.
The only biblical hair is Samson's, Mary Magdalene's, and that anonymous slob's who had them counted. Repent.
"No, you are now emptying out the scriptures right before my eyes."
I don't understand what you mean. Does the Scripture give specific Liturgical formulas for Baptism? For the Eucharist? For the Laying of Hands to Commission? What EXACTLY is the worship like for these first generation Christians? Consider the Didache. It was written about the same time as the later section of the NT. You will note that there ARE such specifics in there, such as how to Baptize in case there is not cold running water nearby to immerse one in. These are just not in the Bible, but they are necessary, aren't they? What procedure did Corinth use to excommunicate the pervert in 1 Corinth? There are MANY such questions that are just not in the Bible. I am not emptying anything. The fact of the matter is that the Bible is made up of Letters written to different communities who were having problems with Judaizers or factional problems. They were not catechetical manuals. I am sorry to tell you this, but the Church did not need the Bible to continue to preach and teach the Word, to administer the sacraments, or to continue worshipping and praying to God and Jesus.
"This is why I can really assume with confidence that you have not been reading it 3 times per year for the 18 or so years."
I can only smile at that. I know people who are agnostic and have studied and read the Bible more than I have. Reading the Bible is meaningless unless the Spirit opens the meaning to the reader. Knowledge puffs up, remember?
"A studious RC, also a rare find, will be led to other writings."
Yes. That is why it is absolutely necessary that we accept Apostolic Tradition. If we read the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, we see how THEY interpreted Scripture. How they worshipped - specifically. What they thought of the Eucharist, Mary, Bishops, and Tradition. Thus, we SHOULD look outside of the Bible to fill in the gaps. Nowhere does the Bible itself say that it is the only thing necessary to come to a personal relationship with Christ.
"Here again, that is an easy thing to do. There are cults out there that make it their corporate letter head and business vision to prove that Jesus is not God, like JW's and Mormons, but you will never prove anything from the scriptures to such people. Believe me, I know."
Very good. Exactly the point I am making. The Bible alone does not lead to the Truth revealed by God. The Bible itself frowns on private interpretation - and this is why. We don't get the whole truth without the guidance of the Church.
"I have no problem proving this to those who will believe"
Now, you are refuting what you just said above.
"I've never seen 2 RC's who believed or understood their own doctrine the same way so this argument is hollow"
If that is true, then all I can say is that you don't know very many Catholics. I would say the vast majority within this thread agree on the role of Mary and the 4 dogmas defined by the Church. The Church allows flexibility on other matters, such as her role as Mediatrix. However, ALL Catholics believe in the dogmas defined by the Church -otherwise, they are Catholic no more. They have excommunicated themselves from the communion of the Church because Paul says we are of one faith.
Regards
It's not a matter of disrespecting, it's just plain inaccurate. Catholics are free to disagree about some things but must agree about other things or they cease to be Catholics. And that is different from Protestants, because of different authority structures. If two Catholics disagree about whether the Virgin Mary appeared at Fatima, they both remain loyal Catholics. If Catholic A adamantly and persistently (after being warned) insists that we lack free will or that Christ did not authorize the apostles (and their successor bishops) to absolve from sin, then the denier has denied irreformably defined Catholic doctrine and is no longer Catholic. This is true precisely because we have an agreed-upon structure for resolving disputes over free will and predestination or over the authority of bishops and even for resolving the question whether one has to accept Church-approved private revelation--in other words, what we are free to disagree over is itself defined, not because we just love to run around having our bishops define things but because disputes always are going to be arising and, unless we want to abandon any hope of unity, a means of resolving disputes has to be in place. We believe Christ authorized the Holy-Spirit-guided apostle-bishop way to resolve disputes and preserve unity.
And it has worked to the degree that an identifiable Catholic and Orthodox agreement over free will, bishops, priests, Eucharist, Scripture/tradition, etc. has lasted 2000 years. Yes, Orthodox and Catholics disagree about some things and are in schism over the role of the bishop of Rome, but the degree of agreement over 2000 years is unparalleled in recorded history. Have we failed always to listen to the Holy-Spirit-guided bishops? THe existence of our schism shows that we have failed. Yet despite that failure, we agree on an immense array of things over which thousands of different Protestant groupings disagree.
When you assert that there's no difference in the degree of unity with regard to (A) Protestants and (B) Catholics/Orthodox (then apostle-bishop tradition) you make an assertion that is mere blustering. Secular historians, Buddhists, Muslims--all outsiders who take any decent look at the array of Christian groups can see that on the one side is a fundamentally agreeing but messy-around-the-corners block of Catholic-Orthodox apostle-bishop Christians and on the other side a massively fissiparous, variegated set of thousands of disagreeing non-Catholic/Orthodox Christians who do not agree about baptism, free will and a host of other things.
The any two RCs that you claim are always disagreeing are either disagreeing about things on which loyal Catholics rightly may disagree while maintaining Catholic unity or, if one of them truly does not adhere to a clearly defined Catholic teaching, then by definition he has removed himself from the Catholic faith.
You might say, now that's too neat and easy--you just declare to be "non-Catholic" whatever person disagrees with Catholic teaching.
But if you respond that way, you have missed the point. Catholics (and Orthodox, in a slightly different manner) can make this declaration because there is such a thing as defined Catholic (and Orthodox--they maintain their boundaries by different means but fundamentally it goes back to the authority of bishops and councils) beliefs. In the case of fundamental disagreement for us, one of us ceases to be Catholic and the other remains Catholic based on adherence/rejection of apostle-bishop-teaching. Yes, the rejector can go around claiming to represent the "true" Catholic teaching (which is what Luther and Calvin did), but unless he's a bishop, he's blowing smoke.
Factually speaking, we are not divided in the same way you are. You are just blowing smoke when you assert equivalent disunity.
Excellent post on bishops and the history of the Church.
What is interesting is that conservative Protestants will deny the Church's authority, yet they accept those same bishops' determination on what IS Scripture AND they also deny the warped history of the Da Vinci Code and other such Neo-Gnostic history. They accept the same determinations made at Nicene regarding Christ (although it is clear that Scripture alone is undecided on the Essence of Christ compared to the Father). Why, if the Church's authority is unacceptable, do they unwittingly accept the Church's authority on these matters? Are they Catholic and don't realize yet? What is interesting also is the arrogance that they have when they think they know more than the combined writings of 2000 years of spiritual thought of God's revelation, some of which was written less than 100 years after Christ's resurrection...
Thanks for your posting.
Brother in Christ
Thank you for your comment.
I, too, find some interesting disconnects in Protestant theology. One of my favorite recent ones is the total denial of admitting the full meaning that the SAME COUNCIL considered the OT AND NT Deuterocanonicals as Scripture! So why do they toss out Tobit, but keep Revelation? The disconnect in logic is astounding!
Regards
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