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Obligatory sheep photo follows:
Posted on 06/10/2007 3:02:20 PM PDT by NYer
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.
Some of the effects of unrestrained belief can be amusing.
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.
Which brings me to something just as kooky, but less amusing.
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.
Ideas have consequences, especially crazy ones. Most crazy ideas do no harm.
Crazy ideas about the Middle East, backed by the force of arms, stand a better than average chance of killing millions.
Like a moth to flame .... - or a bug to a windshield!
Perhaps.
An old boss of mine used to say "Some days you're the bug and some days you're the windshield."
An old boss of mine used to say "Some days you're the bug and some days you're the windshield."
Like Luther's doctrines of "the Bible alone" or "faith alone"?
What about the notion that historical and theological truths not found in the Bible are false? Where's that in the Bible?
Doesn't the Bible tell us that Jesus taught much more than could be recorded? Would these teachings of Jesus be false, since they aren't recorded in the Bible?
We just came to the end of a related discussion on this thread. The debate was largely between agnostics and atheists on the one hand, and Christians and philosophers on the other. It began when I made the observation off-the-cuff that:
Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and [that] no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. – I Cor 12:3
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that [spirit] of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. – I John 4:1-3
The conversation obviously went into several different sidebars over some 200 posts. Without getting into all the rest of it, here is what I had to say about empiricism vis-à-vis the Christian walk:
If he holds a concept of God, and even if he has received that definitive divine revelation that Jesus Christ is Lord, he will nevertheless insist that God must comply with his own ability to comprehend Him.
On principle, whether he realizes it or not, He rejects the Spiritual insight that God’s ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts. He always anthropomorphizes God.
For instance, he would insist that God must comply with Aristotlean laws of logic, such as the Law of the Excluded Middle. Which is to say, in his mind God cannot speak two things which are to him mutually exclusive, e.g. do not kill, kill these. He will either reject such revelations in Scripture or seek to reconcile them by his own reasoning.
IMHO, some theologies look like pretzels because of this tendency to value sensory perception and reasoning above God's revelations.
Likewise, he would insist that God must comply with the physical laws and most especially causality, i.e. cause>effect. In his timeline oriented mind, God could not say that He hates Esau and loves Jacob before either of them were born.
That doesn’t mean the empiricist is a lost cause, however. Like doubting Thomas, the empiricist will always have a tendency to put himself above God by demanding physical or logical proofs. He is an idol worshipper and the idol is himself.
But if God reveals Himself to him, as Jesus did to doubting Thomas - he'll know. Doubting Thomas was an apostle, too. And God favored Job as well by revealing Himself to him even though he had deigned to judge Him (chapters 38 to 42.)
In his Christian walk, he’d be more like Martha in the story of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42) – cumbered about much serving, missing that good part which came so effortlessly to Mary. The physical doing would be more comforting to him than the spiritual being. In that respect, he would tend to be Spiritually unplugged - but not without hope if he takes in the full counsel of Romans 8 so that he will understand that he can let go and let God.
What we have here is a failure to, uh, procrastinate, is that right? Something like that, anyway.
I'm struggling to articulate that the colors and text sizes, the twisting of our terms into terms of mockery, the gratuitous "list of other fantasies" (when we already KNOW you don't think we're right on this doctrine) these not only obscure the communication of ideas (that's WAY subjective -- maybe I should limit it to us ADHD members of the DNA - National Dyslexics Association) but also raise the emotional temperature -- and that by now ample evidence has been given of that, and another body has been carried off the field and cast into the outer dorkness (typo intentional)
You respond that reading that you feel like I seem to feel when somebody says I'm just so wrong about X, where X is something neither I nor my Church maintain.
I would put that at about, say 85% sad frustration and the remaining 95% sudden impulse to kill puppies or express anger in some other way. Am I close?
When I was in seminary, where supposedly it's safe to try junk like this, I preached a (very self-)righteous sermon in my field work parish about how it was sorta kinda NOT a good idea to say "Lord, Lord" while carefully avoiding doing anything resembling the will of the Father, and it was more than sorta kinda dangerous to keep saying "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord" to reassure oneself that nothing bad was ever going to happen, when at the same time one was spititng into the wind and worse.
I received warm and affectionate from my auditors. Nearly everyone agreed that it was a fine sermon and they certainly hoped that THOSE people would hear it and profit from it. THEY themselves, however, were absoltuely in agreement and had always thought so.
Arrgh!
That was when I learned that I needed to offer not only what I said but how I said it to the Lord -- or when I began to learn it -- still kinda working on it.
So, I guess I'm thinking that part of consecrating, handing over, offering, blah blah your life to Christ is to hand over not only the quod but also the quomodo
Mind you, 5 years ago I had long hair and a beard and a flock of real not parabolic sheep, while now I sport a high-and-tight left over from sheriff office days and a mustache which is saved from sliminess only by it's being, to my chagrin, white (I was going for menacingly slimey - and all I got was geezer!). In other words, my unalienable right to look like a slob was in play when God called me back onto the field of battle.
And, for an even earlier example, the boss-lady says it was amazing how I cleaned up my language when I was head-teacher of a child care center.(This is the LORD's doing, and it is marvellous in our @#*&#$$&*&# eyes.)
Come on, beloved of the Lord, you KNOW that one thing The Lord of Hosts shares with the most brutal pagan god of some terrified and savage imagining is that He requires you to give to Him what is most dear to you. The difference is he gives it back a thousand-fold, with sprinkles AND glitter.
Which is NO reason to start using glitter in your posts.
(Enjoyed the Chesterton.)
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Obligatory sheep photo follows:
Romans 3:
[1] Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision?
[2] Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews are entrusted with the oracles of God.
Christians had no authority to determine the content of the Jewish Book (The Old Testament).
How many are drawn from the so-called Apocrypha?
I deliberately asked a similar off subject question to which there was no possible answer. I did, however, make my intention clear.
You, my friend, are missing something.
Would you care to identify them?
Wonderful analysis
but I prefer journalistic paragraphing for my aging eyes.
Thanks much.
That whole issue is more than tedious to me.
The history of the Canon is such that I’m not impressed by inclusion of the apocrypha. I understand RC’s differ.
To pretend that the Canon was a seamless and emphatically homogeneous conclusion from Peter on
is as silly and outrageous as pretending that Peter headed an organized structure implemented by Christ and flawlessly maintained from that time to this.
That’s wholesale UnBiblical, Unhistorical hogwash.
Dogma it may be. Truth, it’s not.
I hadn’t seen the Romans 3 argument before. Veeeeerry interesting.
Maybe I’m tired already.
But you’ve lost me.
I don’t really care to go back over the different sequential posts to try and sort it out.
If you can 1. 2. 3. summarize for me, I’ll try and respond somewhat intelligently and even somewhat graciously if I can find a 7/11 with a case of graciously left.
LUB,
Do I believe that faith can contradict reason?
= = =
I think contradict is a very unfitting and inappropriate word that does not apply.
The diamond is large. There are innumerable facets that our finiteness comprehends a rather finite set of.
Eternity will reveal at least much more of the diamond and resolve a lot of SEEMING contradictions that are not at all contradictions from God’s standpoint.
A lot of seeming contradictions will turn out to be BOTH/ANDS which seem contradictory in this time/space dimension but which are not when the spiritual is included.
I think Alamo-Girl and betty boop have a much better handle on such things than I do.
“Among those things which are said openly in Scripture are to be found all those teachings which involve faith, the mores of living, and that hope and charity which we have discussed.”
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine trans. by D.W. Roberston, Jr. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958)
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