Posted on 04/12/2002 8:52:15 AM PDT by Richard Poe
SHOULD WE TAKE everything in the Bible literally? Author and journalist H.W. Crocker III says no.
His new book Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church (Forum, 2002) accuses Protestant fanatics of destroying Christendom, through their obsessive Biblical literalism, thus paving the way for Nazism, Bolshevism and other bloodthirsty cults of the post-Christian era.
It took guts to write this book. With the media vilifying Catholics on a scale not seen since Nero’s Rome, Crocker has dared to pen a panoramic, 2000-year history of the Church that makes no – absolutely no – apologies or concessions to Catholic bashers.
It is a breathtaking act of defiance.
Crocker lashes into pagans, heretics, Saracens, Byzantines and other long-dead troublemakers, with a passion undimmed by passing centuries. His withering polemics could have emerged from a 13th-century scriptorium.
Triumph is to conventional history as matter is to anti-matter. Place this book too close to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the resulting detonation would probably have to be measured in kilotons.
Among other jaw-droppers, Crocker reveals that Catholic dogma never demanded a strictly literal interpretation of Scripture. "Aha!" cry the born-agains. "More proof that the Pope is the Antichrist!"
Well, maybe. But consider Exodus 19:4, in which God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites: "You yourself have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself."
Now, as anyone knows who has watched Charlton Heston stretch forth his staff over the Red Sea, the Hebrews walked out of Egypt. They did not fly "on eagle’s wings." Exodus 19:4 is clearly meant to be understood metaphorically, not literally.
But if the Bible speaks sometimes in metaphor, how do we know when to take it literally?
Learned doctors of the Church debated such questions for centuries, citing Aristotle as readily as St. Paul, in an intellectual free-for-all reminiscent of the Athenian agora.
But the illiterate masses did not take part in these discussions. They were given a simpler faith, of candles, statues, incense, processions, incantations and stained-glass windows.
The medieval Church thus resembled the lamaseries of old Tibet, where monks probed the mysteries of the universe, while peasants in the countryside spun their prayer wheels and celebrated their festivals.
It was a wise and orderly system, tailored for a flesh-and-blood world in which some people are just plain smarter than others, and better equipped to handle subtle ideas. In any case, the system worked.
Then along came Martin Luther, a 16th-century German monk whose writings reveal him as a violent, hate-filled man, tormented by visions of the Devil.
Luther urged every Christian to read the Bible and draw his own conclusions. In the chaos that ensued, a phantasmagoria of Protestant sects emerged, many preaching a nightmare version of Christianity, in which every thought and custom not found in the Bible was forbidden.
John Calvin outlawed, "dancing, singing, pictures, statues… theatrical plays; wearing rouge, jewelry, lace." Children had to be named after people in the Old Testament. In England, Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas, because it was not in the Bible.
Witch-burning – rare in Catholic countries – rose to genocidal proportions in Protestant lands. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," says Exodus 22:18.
Eventually, however, people began noticing that, if you took everything in the Bible literally, much of it just didn’t make sense.
Forced to choose between a literal interpretation of Scripture and common sense, many intellectuals, by the 18th century, gave up on Christianity altogether.
But religion is power. And power abhors a vacuum. With Christianity in retreat, new gods arose to take its place.
French revolutionaries promoted a new cult of the state. They butchered faithful Catholics, men, women and children. In Notre Dame, Christ’s altar was replaced with an altar to the Goddess of Reason. But the real god of the revolutionaries was the guillotine, their sacrament the spilling of blood.
Kings and emperors once feared the Church. The threat of excommunication tamed many a tyrant. But by the 20th century, blasphemous madmen like Hitler, Stalin and Mao laughed in the Church’s face while transforming the earth into a reeking slaughterhouse.
What comes next? Catholics are on the run today, as beleaguered, in some ways, as the martyrs of pagan Rome.
Yet even now, there is hope. The Goddess of Reason has worn thin her welcome, in many hearts. Led by "a few good men," Crocker suggests, the Church may yet emerge from its catacombs to astonish the world.
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Richard Poe is a New-York-Times bestselling author and cyberjournalist. His latest book is The Seven Myths of Gun Control.
It's not a matter of endurance, it's a matter of not wishing feeble-minded sheep to exercise the folly of their superstition on my behalf. I certainly don't lay awake nights hoping that reason and logic will intervene and put Christianity and Islam and religions into the history books alongside the Greek myths, where they so dearly belong.
If there are no standards in the universe, than smashing a pieta is as meaningful an act as scultping one. Flying a jetliner into a skyscraper is as significant an act as building the jetliner or the skyscraper.
OTOH, if there are absolutes "out there" that can be known, then some will understand them better than others. Some will be more right. Others will be more wrong. And some will be totally evil. The 20th century slaughtered 200 million civilians in the name of post-christian sophistication.
Our only point of divergence, I suspect, is the source and perhaps the meaning of those absolutes. To quote the master, "we feel the same, we just see it from a different point of view."
20 million to the Nazis, 60 million to Lenin & Stalin, Inc, another 100 million or so to Chairman Mao, and the remainder to the secular humanist "decolonization" fad wherein the US and the USSR cooperated to consign benighted millions back to barbarism.
That's funny it's in my Bible. Did Cromwell's Bible start after the birth of Christ?
"There are countless men who have tried to bury the Bible. Yet those men are buried, and the Bible is still here."
This would be the expected result of combining dozens of different documents, written by dozens of different authors who wrote over a period of at least a thousand years, together into one book -- then claiming that God was behind it all. And which Bible are we talking about? Evidently, God has "inspired" at least two major modern canons, the Catholic and the Protestant. I think Christians would do much better to just focus on the story of Jesus without insisting on the concept of biblical inerrancy. While the gospels may conflict in style and detail, they do agree on the crucifixion/resurrection story, which is the whole ballgame, after all.
Who created the earth, by the way?
How the hell should I know? I will tell you, though, that my inclinations tend toward "what," not "who."
This guy talks about witch burnings ("rare in Catholic countries") without considering the history of the Catholic church? Give me a break. Has he heard of the Inquisitions?
The church is in trouble. The lies and wickedness are just beginning to surfacing.
Okay, this line is a riot. I can't quite figure out how it is a 'nightmare' to be saved by grace through faith, and be eternally secure in that, while always working, never knowing whether one is saved is considered a non-nightmare.
You may chose not to believe the bible, but there IS a wealth of evidence, both historical and archeological, of its validity and accuracy. If you really want to know what that evidence is, I can give you a whole list of resources.
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