Posted on 09/06/2007 3:27:02 PM PDT by annalex
The Marian dogmas were big problems. I still thought [around 1984] the Catholic claims on Mary were outrageous. I went back and read some essays, and concluded that the Bible alone wouldn't compel acceptance of the Marian dogmas; the Bible alone wouldn't lead you to them, yet sustained theological reflection on Jesus' relationship to His mother; if you take the humanity of Jesus with the utmost seriousness, and you take Mary as a real mother, not just a "conduit," and you begin to think about motherhood and sonship, and you think about what it means to receive a body from your mother: flesh . . . God didn't make Jesus' flesh in Mary's womb; He got Mary's flesh. If God had wanted to, He could have made Jesus as He made Adam: from the dust of the earth. But He didn't. He decided He would use a human being to give Jesus His humanity. And so what kind of flesh is Jesus gonna get? If He's gonna be perfect humanity, He'd better have perfect human flesh untainted by sin. To me the Immaculate Conception, seen in that light, made sense. The Assumption also seemed to me to make a great deal of sense. There were precedents to it: Enoch and Elijah, those who rose from the dead at the time of the rending of the veil of the Temple. And if Jesus is going to give anybodye priority; if He's going to truly honor His mother and father, wouldn't He give Mary, whose flesh He received, priority in the Resurrection? So I think that's what the doctrine of the Assumption preserves. I could go on and talk forever on the distinctive doctrines of the Church.
Artificial contraception . . . Dave wanted me to go into that [I had asked a question earlier]. I had a very difficult time seeing it as good logic. The Church insists that the multiple meanings of sexual intercourse always be exercised together. Since one of the meanings is procreation and another is intimacy or the what's called the "unitive function", those things can't be separated from one another licitly. I didn't like that, because it seemed to me that if intercourse served multiple purposes, then there's no reason why, at any particular time, one purpose ought to retain priority or even exclusivity in the exercise of that act. They were both good. I think that the change came when I finally hit upon an analogy; I had to see another human act in which multiple meanings had to be exercised together, and not separately. And I thought of eating food. Food serves multiple purposes: nutrition, secondly, pleasing our senses. God likes tastes; that's why He gave us taste buds. He wants food to taste good. What do we think of a person who says, "I really like the taste of food, so I'm going to disconnect my eating of food from nutrition, and I'm just gonna taste it." Well, we call him a glutton; we call him a "junk food junkie." What do we call a person who says, "I don't care about what food tastes like; I'm just gonna eat for nutrition's sake." We call him a prude or we have some other name for him. We think that they're lacking in their humanity. That helped me in understanding sexual intercourse. I think it's sinful just to eat for the taste, or merely for the nutrition, because you're denying the pleasure that God intended for you to receive, in eating good food. I say the same thing with sexual intercourse. You're sinful if you separate the multiple meanings of it. If you procreate simply to make babies, and you don't enjoy the other person as a person, I think that's sinful, and I think that if you merely enjoy sexual intimacy and pleasure, and are not open to sharing that with a third life: a potential child, then you're denying the meaning of sexual expression. That was a continuing realization that the Catholic Church had been there before me.
When I learned that you [me] were interested in the Catholic Church, it was kind of funny, because by that time I had been pursuing this on my own, and feeling like I was a little bit odd. So it was good for me, . . . I was their pastor for a while at Shalom, and Dave and Judy and Sally and I have known each other for many years, and I've always liked Dave and Judy. We've had some disagreements at times over the years, and a little bit of even, "combat," but I always was fond of them, because I always recognized them as people who were willing to live out their convictions, and that always means a lot to me. I like to be surrounded by people like that because it's very easy to just live in your head and not get it out onto your feet. So I knew that they were committed to living a Christian life. They were interested in simple living, and interested in alternate lifestyle. They saw themselves as being radical Christians. And I always liked that. So even when we disagreed, I was always fond of them, in that I respected what they were doing. So it was heartening to me, to find that my return to the Church was in its own way being paralleled by Dave's acceptance of Roman Catholicism. It was a queer parallelism. When we went to see Fr. John Hardon that night, I thought it was interesting and odd that you were doing it, but I told you that night: "it seems to me there are only two choices: either Orthodoxy or Catholicism." It was reassuring. I met Catholics through rescue that I actually liked, and that was heartening.
I returned to the Catholic Church, because, for all its shortcomings (which are obvious to many evangelicals), both evangelicalism and Catholicism suffered from the same kind of "immoral equivalency." All the things that I once thought were uniquely bad about Catholicism, I also saw in Protestantism, so it was kind of a wash. I stopped asking myself all the so-called practical questions, and made the decision based on theology alone. That way I got to compare theology with theology. People love to compare the practice of one group with the theology of another. So you end up with the theology of a John Calvin versus the practice of some babushka'd Catholic woman. And it's just not fair. You gotta compare apples with apples. Evangelicals tolerate pentecostal superstition and fundamentalist ignorance, without breaking fellowship. So why criticize the Catholics for tolerating some superstition and ignorance? Evangelical churches are largely made up of small, dead, ineffectual fellowships. Two-, three-generation fellowships that have lost their reason for existence, and they just keep rollin' along. The vast percentage of evangelical churches are about 75 people. And they're not doin' much. So what's the problem if Catholic churches are full of dead people too? It's a wash. Evangelicals tolerate and even respond positively to papal figures like Bill Gothard, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and men whose teachings or decisions explicitly or implicitly sets the tone of the discussion and suggests and insists upon right conclusions. And these men are not just popular leaders, they are populist leaders. In other words, they often appeal to the anti-intellectual side of the uneducated. They stir up resentments between factions in the Church Politic and the Body Politic. The pope, on the other hand, is not a populist leader. You don't see the pope, in the encyclicals I've read, taking cheap shots, driving wedges between the intelligentsia and the masses; you don't see them doing cheap rhetorical tricks, like you do find among popular evangelical leaders. If the pope plays his audience, it's usually through acts of piety. He's not trying to stir up resentments.
Evangelicals are currently seeking more sense of community and international community, more accountability -- you hear more talk about confessing your sins to one another; they're looking for a way to justify the canon, visible signs of unity. Catholicism has all these things. It offers them already. And then of course evangelicals seem only to be able to preserve doctrinal purity by separating, dividing, and splitting and rupturing the unity of Christ. That's their method for maintaining the truth: divide. And that to me is the devil's tactic: "go ahead, divide 'em; it's easier to conquer them that way." Even in the area of their strength (the Bible), evangelicals are not without serious shortcomings. Matthew 16 is a great example of that. What's worse?: to omit clear biblical teaching, or to add to it? Evangelicals omit fundamental biblical teaching about Peter as the rock, about the apostolic privilege of forgiving or retaining sins. These things are not unclear. They're only unclear in the Scripture if you've adopted a certain type of theology, and then you have to dance around, doing hermeneutical gymnastics to avoid the clear intention of the verse. The binding and loosing passages in Matthew 16 and 18 are as plain as the nose on your face.
So I returned to the Catholic Church because I am absolutely convinced that the Roman Catholic Church preserves and retains (for all its shortcomings) the biblical shape of reality. It retains sacramental awareness, human mediation (which is a very prominent biblical theme which has been lost in evangelical churches), a sense of the sacred, which is present in the Scripture; and recognizes typology as having not only symbolic value, or pedagogical value, but also ontological value. It retains memorial consciousness and corporate personality, the idea of federal headship, doctrinal development. All of these things are lectures in and of themselves. But these things that people always wanna talk about (purgatory, saints, Mary), all fit into those categories. The structure of biblical reality is more present in Catholicism than any other tradition that I'm familiar with. And I'm really quite convinced that I don't have extravagant expectations, either. I think these things are really there. It's not a pipe dream.
[someone asked, "why not Orthodoxy?"]
Competing jurisdictions, which basically told me, "you need a pope." If the point is that you need a visible display of unity for the work of evangelism to have lasting success, how can you have the Russians and the Greeks fighting with one another all the time? I know conservatives and liberals fight in the Catholic Church, but it's structured in such a way as to be able to end the debate at some point. God acts infallibly through the papacy. The discussion can be settled. It can't be settled in Orthodoxy at this point. They're always fighting over jurisdictions. The laxity on divorce . . . I heard a saying recently that "your doctrine of ecclesiology will affect your doctrine of marriage, or vice versa." If you believe in divorce, then you believe in the Reformation, because you believe that Christ will divorce part of His Body. If you believe that the relationship between Christ and His bride, the Church, is indivisible, then you will believe that (among Christians, anyway) marriage is indivisible. There should be no divorce. And I think that the Orthodox are lax in that area. I think that they're too ethnic - that's probably due to a type of caesaropapism, and that their views of culture don't seem to work out very well. Those are some of the reasons. Also, it just wasn't around. Where do you go? You have to work too hard to find a place, and then you have to worry about whether they'll do it in English. I went to St. Suzanne's first of all because it was around the corner, and I believe that geography has a lot to do with community.
[I asked, "what was the very last thing that put you over the edge?"]
It was very incremental. Instead of their being one moment of decisive realization, there were moments of little pinpricks of light along the way. In one sense I crossed the line when I heard Fr. Stravinskas describing the Mass as a re-presentation of Christ's sacrifice, and I realized that the worldview that he was presenting was the worldview that I had believed for a long time, but had not been able to articulate. But I didn't know where to go from there. I think it was the same day that that happened, the one man who had been most influential on my thinking on the relationship between religion and culture during the 1980s, Richard John Neuhaus, announced that he had become a Catholic. I said, "oh my God!" His book, The Naked Public Square, really shaped my thinking on the relationship between religion and public life.
And another one would be the Scott Hahn tapes on Mary. What Scott did for me was, he managed to draw enough suggestive biblical material, that my ideas of development now could be fed from the Scripture. You have to understand that the Marian dogmas just seemed excessive. It's not that I had any intrinsic hostility to them. I thought they were kind of nice in their own way. But I didn't see the biblical precedent to it. He gave me enough biblical material to ignite a spark of hope about them, and then when I began reading the theology on them, I said, "I can receive this now." We're talking months.
I remember now: I needed reassurance. I'd forgotten all about this. What was on my mind was the work of the kingdom, and whether I could be as effective within the Catholic Church, as I could be in the Protestant church. I hadn't nailed down everything about Catholicism, but I recognized that the shape of Catholicism was a lot closer to the Bible, than a lot of what I was seeing in Protestantism. But practically speaking, you don't see Catholic evangelists out there very much. It came down to this: what justified staying apart? "What reason do I have for not being there?"
Yep, but they aren't just her flesh. Those sons are the result of a combination of DNA from the father and the mother.
Since God is Spirit and has no flesh, there is no God "DNA" in Jesus' flesh, which means God created the flesh of Jesus in the womb of Mary. He may well have used some of her DNA to do so, but it wasn't all hers.
This is an extrascriptural explanation, and it strikes me as heretical. If there had been some man's DNA mixed in, then that would have given Jesus at least a virtual human father.
At any rate, I don't think Al is making a biogenetical point here, but rather that it pleased God to have a human mother, when He could have incarnated in some way that would avoid a human mother just like He was born without a human father.
“He started one hierarchical authoritarian sacramental Church.”
Nope, sorry don’t that man made definition. I prefer the one in the scriptures.
“He started one hierarchical authoritarian sacramental Church.”
Nope, sorry don’t buy that man made definition. I prefer the one in the scriptures.
I do not believe it is any more extrascriptural than saying the flesh of Jesus was all hers.
If there had been some man's DNA mixed in, then that would have given Jesus at least a virtual human father.
Not if there was never a human male with that DNA.
At any rate, I don't think Al is making a biogenetical point here
Perhaps, but it seemed to me that he was since he said the flesh of Jesus was her flesh.
pleased God to have a human mother, when He could have incarnated in some way that would avoid a human mother just like He was born without a human father.
Yes, God could have done that if He chose to do so. But instead, He chooses to work through the human beings, usually the ones thought by the world to be least likely to draw God's attention.
I believe that Mary deserves great honor, just as I honor all the great servants of God. We just need to be careful not to elevate her above the level of human being.
this is the statement I am objecting to...it is the Church that has declared it is so. Why can't the Protestant Church proclaim the same thing? Neither the Roman Catholic Church, nor Protestant churches, can declare that they alone possess the fullness of truth.
I just gave you, in close paraphrase, the scripture relating to the Church being one, hierarchical and with authority. There is more, but these verses were a good illustration of literal reading of the scripture as regards the Catholic ecclesiology.
The scripture mentions human mother of Christ, and God the Father. Looks like Al’s view is pure scripture, not yours.
It is true that Mary is not the only human instrument that God chose; the entire Church is such instrument as well. Nevertheless she stands out, for obvious reasons.
Once again, you're are right and history shows that the One Church is the same Church established by Christ, the Catholic Church. It basically celebrates the same liturgy as the Apostles and has not changed its beliefs in 2000 yrs.
“It basically celebrates the same liturgy as the Apostles and has not changed its beliefs in 2000 yrs.”
Ummm, perhaps and that’s a matter of opinion.
I prefer the one in the scriptures.
I do too. You keep getting so much right but you miss the mountain in front of you.
Actually, no, it is a matter of history. I challenge you to check it out.
Ignorant prejudice does nothing for me. If you have some real facts, (by that I mean no Jack Chick type fantasies) post them. I’m also not interested in your opinion but if you have real facts, by all means, I’m interested.
Oh yeah and I’m not interested in your own personal interpretation of scripture which is already colored by your own personal bias. I want you to show me how the early church was historically and liturgically different than it is today. That it believed something different than it does today.
that’s a 10-4. I could have sworn I hit the ‘I’ three times.
Well, does it matter that jo kus modified "fullness of truth" with the relative clause "that God has revealed to man."?
And anyway, why not? A church might not be able to provide an empirical proof of that claim but what is the a priori argument against it? Why couldn't my favorite church, the two-seed-in-the-spirit, foot-washin', poison-drinkin', snake-handlin', baptized by fire holiness Church of Hungrytown (really, there's a little cluster of houses near here which rejoices in the name of Hungrytown) have the fullness of truth in a way and/or to a degree that no other community had it?
No argument there.
Okay the"Who are my brothers ...." argument: I just don't see that as definitive and dispositive as others do. Again, that positioin maintains that Gabriel is mistaken when he says "Blessed are you among women", which is superlative form meaning, in contemporary English as she is spoke "you are the most blessed of women." It also suggests that Mary is mistaken in the Magnificat or that her statement is vague. It's going to be a tough sale to maintain that when she said,"All generations will call me blessed," She meant, "But of course everyone who does the will of God is just as blessed." Do you think that's what we're supposed to conclude from the Lukan account? I just can't go that far.
When looking and contemplating scripture, we should look and consider it in it's totality, and not as isolated parts.
Well, I seriously wonder if there can be any objectively measurable claim that Mr. A is better at handling the "totality" than Mr. B. I very much wonder what "prove from Scripture" means, because of that concern of mine. What I see happening in the classic fight of Prot and RC over works and faith is that the Prot seems to the RC to "explain away" James's saying that man is NOT saved by faith alone. Here on this forum there are folks who will quote "For it is GOD that worketh in you, both to will and to do for His good pleasure - and punctuate it as though it were a complete independent sentence. But, of course, it is preceded by "Work out your own salvatoin with fear and trembling," and to offer the dependent clause without the main clause is inecplicable to me, yet evidently these folks think it's "Taking the totality of Scripture into account."
As a principle,l of course it's fine. But as a diagnostic of somebody else's argument, I think it's dicey.
Actually St. Paul includes witchcraft in a list of works of the flesh. I take that to mean NOT work's of the spirit, NOT works that lead to or manifest life in Xt, but rather works that tend, as uninspired flesh does, to death.
I'm a fraid there IS a disjointed aspect to yo0ur post, which I suspect may have to do with (not only fatigue but) with having a lot of your opinions and thinking about what we think and teach and HOW we think about what we think informed largely by people who don't like us much.
I would suggest that to treat the Torah as only Mossissimus Moses, as ONVLY convicting us of sin, is to miss the meaning of the word Torah, inter alia. That is, the word is not just LAW, but also teaching. I like to use the word "instruction" because when one sees those dread words "some assembly required" (and, in the case of guys, after several attempts at asswembly have failed) THEN suddenly Law is Gospel, and the teaching frees rather than burdens.
And in respect of ABC, we do not hold it to be ritual law but moral law. So the "do not taste, do not touch" don't quite apply, we would hold. I'm all for bacon and pork sausage with eggs after chaste sexual intercourse ....
I'd like to see the Greek on the "human wisdom" passages. I'll bet its phronema sarkos or something of the kind. Here's why I have a problem with "human wisdom". If we are going to toss out the drawing of conclusions following normal patters of thought, then all we can do is quote scripture at each other, since everything else will be using "humaqn wisdom. Everything!
The ani marian dogma crowd are going to have to argue either thaqt Jesus was a bad son, OR that his goodness as a son was so far above what normal expectations of a good son would be that we can't really form any opinion of it. A non-divine human type son gives his mother what ever he can to make her happy, but Jesus is SO very good that he doesn't give his mother whatever he can to make her happy. And though merely touching his garment with faith leads to healing when it is a woman with an issue of blood, when Mary touches him, nothing happens?
If we cannot reason that way, then can we reason at all? God is good, but His goodness is so high above ours that it really has nothing to do with us, and in fact we only say He is good because, well, because this book says so, but we don't know wht we mean when we say it ...
I'm not saying YOU're saying that. I'm criticizing an kind of approach to interpretation on the grounds that it breaks its tools.
Rest. It's a pleasure to talk with you. Get good rest.
As a Protestant, I disagree with the Catholic stance in many ways.
However, I greatly respect the reasoning behind why you left the Episcopal church.
There is no such thing. The numerous communities of Protestantism are too independent of each other to reach a consensus on anything but the most basic Catholic belief, such as Jesus died on the cross for mankind - and even that is a toss up for some Protestants. (some calvinists insist that Christ only died for them! Imagine that!)
Christ established one voice, one Church that is visible, first with the visible apostles, and then, their visible successors, the bishops of the visible churches. The Catholic Church is the Church of the Incarnation - as Jesus was visible, so is His Church. The Apostolic Churches, to include the Eastern Orthodox, are truly Churches established by Christ, plainly visible for all of mankind to know the truth that God wants all men to possess.
Neither the Roman Catholic Church, nor Protestant churches, can declare that they alone possess the fullness of truth.
Why not? Isn't God leading the Church to all truth? Or do you think Jesus was speaking esoterically? Or maybe just making it up?
Regards
Well, at least someone noticed... :}
Regards
“I want you to show me how the early church was historically and liturgically different than it is today”
This early church? The one with no popes, no priests, no rituals save baptism and communion, no Mary worship, no indulgences, no say five hail marys and you’re forgiven til next time, that church? As for “apostolic liturgy” see Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the words in red.
Act 2:42 And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.
Act 2:43 And fear came upon every soul: and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles.
Act 2:44 And all that believed were together, and had all things common;
Act 2:45 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.
Act 2:46 And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart,
Act 2:47 Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.
Or the one that has added to the requirements given by Christ.
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