Thank God For the Magisterium

Many modern people have the notion that the principal mission of the Catholic Church is to impose belief on unbelievers. The reality is that most of its time is spent trying to restrain belief in everything from spoon-bending to the aliens who allegedly speak to us through a cat in Poughkeepsie.

The riptides and cross-currents of religious enthusiasm in American culture are kaleidoscopic and dizzying. Cradle Catholics can be forgiven for just ignoring the whole thing and many of them do. But it’s still worth taking into account because some religious trends can have decided real-world effects.

For instance, after five centuries of being told by Protestant polemicists that we “Romanists” do not trust the saving grace of Jesus Christ and ignorantly seek salvation by the works of the law, it is a weird thing for a Catholic to see the spectacle of kooky apocalyptic Protestants eagerly excited about the birth of red heifers because this will (they hope) be the prelude to rebuilding the Temple of Solomon and the re-institution of the Mosaic sacrificial system. Just how that Temple will be rebuilt when the Dome of the Rock is situated on the site of the Temple is not quite as clearly worked out.

Recently, James Dobson, a leading Evangelical and a usually sensible man, hosted on his show one Joel Rosenberg, author of something called Epicenter: Why Current Rumblings in the Middle East Will Change Your Future. Rosenberg claims to know “what the Bible says” about what is happening in the Mideast and is not shy about making “predictions regarding the fate of the Middle East regarding issues such as Iran’s nuclear threats against Israel, the arms race and ultimately ... Armageddon.” Here’s a snippet:

Dobson: “Well, Joel, let’s explain to everybody how Ezekiel 38 turns out, because Israel is about to be attacked, and a huge number of troops from Russia and Iran are coming toward Israel to destroy it, and what happens?”

Rosenberg: “Well, God is going to move. You won’t find in the Scriptures that the United States is coming to rescue Israel or the European Union, but God says he is going to supernaturally intervene — we’re talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake, diseases spreading through the enemy forces. It is going to be such a clear judgment against the enemies of Israel that Ezekiel 39 says that it will take seven months to bury all the bodies of the slain enemies of Israel. “

Such standard-issue Evangelical prophetic cocksureness is an excellent example of why a magisterium is so useful and necessary.

Not only does the magisterium help us know what is essential to the faith, it also helps us remain free of what is unessential. For the various species of Protestantism, in addition to denying real biblical truths such as the Real Presence or infant baptism, also have a tendency to invent “biblical truths” that do not exist and impose them by means of a sort of cultural pressure via charismatic preachers with pet theories who, in their own sphere, are granted an infallibility the Pope could never dream of.

Now, a Catholic is quite free to have a kooky private reading of Ezekiel 38-39 as a prophecy of the “coming resurgent Soviet Union” and its alliance with Muslims, communist Chinese or whoever, all in a vast Cecil B. DeMille battle against Israel. The Church has all sorts of room for eccentrics, and everybody needs a hobby.

But a Catholic is not free to go around telling everybody that “this is the clear teaching of the Bible” and demand it be believed. For the fact is, this kooky theory is emphatically not the clear teaching of the Bible, nor does it have any sanction whatsoever from the Church, the tradition, the Fathers, the councils or the popes. It is a pure novelty we can and should ignore.

What we should not ignore is Rosenberg’s claim that, “Given the events going on in our world today, people at the Pentagon, people at the CIA, people at the White House are asking to sit down and talk about these issues, to understand the Biblical perspective, because it is uncanny what is happening out there and it deserves some study.”

I suspect that Rosenberg is exaggerating his clout with the big cheeses in DC. I doubt that the Pentagon’s intel meetings are dominated by exegeses of Ezekiel 38.

But I do think it matters if a significant portion of the American polity drinks in such bizarre theories as if they were God’s revealed Truth.

Crazy ideas about the Middle East, backed by the force of arms, stand a better than average chance of killing millions.

I laughed and laughed friendly laughs at your fine post.

This is very . . . significant:

My expectation is this, more or less: We are discussing issues which demand the best from our will and our minds as each of us offer them to God and ask Him to bless our work. We all know, or should know, that raising the emotional temperature by mockery and personal assault, by careless and disparaging misstatement, and the rest is more than likely to obscure communication and to hinder thought, and to make charity less likely. Yet it seems that many of us, on all sides, bring to the table only rhetoric which vastly diminishes the probability of true communication in charity. I’ve done it myself. I’m trying HARD not to do it. This is hard work and it is important work.

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I don’t know how to articulate where I am on such things better. But the above paragraph strikes me as it strikes you when folks say: THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH WHAT YOU BELIEVE when you know it’s not what you believe.

I do understand that

that IS how I come across to you often enough. And, I’m sad about that. Therefore what . . . will have to continue to prayerfully ponder. I’m sad that the result may still be me, being essentially me in this or that list of ways or specifics.

And, I’m NOT trying to excuse some perverse part of me in any sort of license sort of way.

Anyway . . . I still love you greatly. Am at the college and was just going to peek without responding before I went back to the mud on the wheel.

I’m always intrigued when “pathological” is used as a pseudo-moral condemnation. It is the ravings of the sane that trouble me. The ravings of the ill are pathetic. -- or maybe the disease metaphor is inadequate.

A semi-relevant excerpt from Chesteron's "Orthodoxy"

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth." Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!"

I think if you look at the histories the view of Jerome that the books were apocrypha predominated,

Jerome was in the minority, and although he questioned their canonicity, he grudgingly accepted the deuterocanonical books of the Bible out of obedience to the Church and Sacred Tradition. Jerome included all of the deuterocanonical books of the Bible in the Vulgate.

certainly at periods of time across a millenia,even after the councils of Hippo, etc., . For example, Gregory the Great viewed the Maccabees as not being part of the Canon.

The statement I found attributed to him on-line is:

"With reference to which particular we are not acting irregularly, if from the books, though not Canonical, yet brought out for the edification of the Church, we bring forward testimony. Thus Eleazar in the battle smote and brought down an elephant, but fell under the very beast that he killed"
--Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, Volume II, Parts III and IV, Book XIX.34, p.424.

There is a simple explanation for this. The books of the Bible which Protestants identify as "the Apocrypha" are called the "deuterocanon" (or "second canon") by the Church. Gregory is quite correct in identifying 1 Maccabees as not belonging to the "first canon."

The distinction between the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament and the other books of the Old Testament is somewhat analogous to the distinction between the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament, in the sense that they are of different importance, but canonical nonetheless.

Basically, I think you overstate your case! I say that where there is dispute, there is not scripture.

Luther pushed the book of James to the back and unnumbered section of his translation of the NT, because he objected to James' teaching regarding faith and works.* Jerome said that James "is claimed by some to have been published by some one else under his name, and gradually, as time went on, to have gained in authority".

So given your rule regarding disputed Scriptures, wouldn't we have to remove the book of James from the Bible, since its canonicity was disputed by Christians?

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*specifically: "You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone." (James 2:24) Luther saw this "epistle of straw" as a threat to his doctrine of salvation through faith alone.

I’m not sure I buy your characterization of Gregory’s words, he said Maccabees wasn’t canon. The fact that it was declared deuterocanon shows the books are treated differently in church history, different than canon. In Protestant terms “apocrypha” in Catholic “deuterocanon” or 2nd canon. I’m not sure that there would be an issue if it were only the term that is applied by Protestant or Catholic or if they continued to be treated differently within the Catholic church, that would be within tradition as evidenced by Gregory. Jerome didn’t translate the entire vulgate, but only parts of it, as I understand it, and to my knowledge wasn’t forced to accept any of the deuterocanonical books . . . he died and then there was the council of Hippo. To fully display my ignorance, I do not know if the council of Hippo was his church (diocese?) or Augustine his bishop, but the Council of Hippo itself, to my knowledge was after his death. I’m at the end of my knowledge on the matter, but I have appreciated and learned from the discussion!

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