Posts Tagged “Jesus”
Kenneth Hynek • 29th Jan 2010 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Catholicism, Society, Men and Women, Religion, Theology • adultery, Babylon, baptism, Catholic Church, Christ, Eucharist, faith, Family, God, Heaven, Jesus, Mark Shea, men, ordination, Priesthood, rape, salvation, sexuality, the Church, twitter, women, women's ordination
I don’t usually do requests, but every so often I’ll entertain one.
The issue of women’s ordination briefly came up in a conversation I got into on twitter, with an atheistic tweep (hey, don’t look at me…that’s apparently the technical term) firing off a couple of tweets at me commenting on the intransigence of the Catholic Church on this issue. I’m not sure what it is about this issue that some atheists find attractive or useful — are they declaring that they would convert and become religious in a heartbeat, if only they could have a female pastor? — but it came up all the same.
And I’ve actually addressed this issue before, though not in an article exactly. I did, however, address it in a comment once, when talking with The Barefoot Bum. Which makes this a bit of ancient history.
Let’s start with the statement from Barefoot that actually precipitated the discussion, what say?
The Babylonians did actually have laws limiting male sexuality –- penalties for rape, and adultery, child support rights for wives, inheritance rights for daughters (and even concubines). These laws were not perfect — nor were they put into perfect effect — but they were quite enlightened for the time with respect to women’s rights. I guess I could deride your ignorance at this point but Monty Python didn’t make many jokes about Babylonians.
Unfortunately, they did not — Barefoot is right. Shall I count that, though, as an admission that his own “knowledge” of Catholic teaching comes from said comic troupe?
Anyhow, on the the point: the Babylonians did have some legal recognition for the status of women…but at the same time, other aspects of their legal reality were very much against women (the wife could, through the marriage contract, become an indentured servant to other, older women in the man’s life, for example; wives could taken as payment of pre-marital debts of the husband; a bad wife could be stripped of her dowry and, if she was unable to prove that her ‘badness’ — what constitutes ‘bad’ is nebulously defined — was the result of neglect or cruelty on the part of her husband, she might be drowned for it).
Babylonian law also allowed marital infidelity in limited contexts, although any children that resulted from that union were to be left with the father; they were taken away from the mother.
And let’s not even get in to the comparison and contrast between the Babylonian, property-based view of children and the Church’s teaching, which states the opposite: children may never be considered to be the property of a parent.
So in a sense, Barefoot is right — the Babylonians were a bit more progressive, in their laws, than some of their Ancient Near Eastern counterpart cultures…but that still isn’t saying much. Truly unique teaching on Family and sexuality emerged from an otherwise insignificant Hebrew nation to the west of Babylon.
Barefoot continued:
So says the male orthodox Catholic. It appears women in both your and Peter’s life disagree – have you considered that they just might be onto something?
This got back, actually, to a notion I discussed previously in that same comment thread, about the difference between equality and equivalence. I discuss it below, for the reader’s benefit. And while I’ve no doubt that Barefoot probably dismissed it as arrogance when I said, as I will now, that yes, the women (and men) who have articulated their opinion that the Church is being sexist are ignorant and know not of what they speak, that is in fact the case. Ultimately, it’s an issue of truth — I can come to no other conclusion than that they are wrong and that they misunderstand the issue.
And indeed they do. It’s not an issue of “rights” at all, which is the first mistake they make.
Now, since I can’t count on the possibility that Barefoot read the article I linked him to regarding this issue, let me cite a part of it here that is relevant:
One need not seek far to find rhetoric like this:
“The prohibition against women priests is based on the ancient idea of the inferiority of women. But we are all created in God’s image and have the same rights; and the fact that Jesus was male does nothing to negate this. That, along with the fact that all the Apostles were male, is the only thing upon which the Church bases its male-only priesthood. But in the days when Jesus was on earth, it would have been unthinkable for him to select women for his ministry. Not because women weren’t capable, but because they would not have been accepted.”
The first difficulty here is that ordination, like all sacraments, is not a “right”, but a gift. Nobody has the “right” to baptism or Eucharist, much less Priesthood. Trying to apply “rights talk” to sacraments is like threatening to sue Heaven for the free gift of salvation. If God gave us humans what we deserved according to strict justice, we would all be damned. Christ came to save us from, not give us, what we deserve.
And yet, aren’t we are all “equal” in the sense that “God is no respecter of persons.” Yes. And Paul knew better then anybody in antiquity that male and female were “equal” in Christ in the sense of having identical dignity before God. It was he, after all, who said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Paul saw nothing inferior about woman’s dignity. But he, like the other apostles, did see something which kept him from ordaining women.
“Right,” says the modern critic. “He saw blinkers. Like Jesus, he was prohibited by his culture from doing something that no ancient would accept. But now times have changed. Now we know women are competent to pastor and preach, so they should be made priests.”
This common objection is founded on a number of misconceptions about what the sacrament of ordination is and what Jesus and the apostles did. First, it is simply unhistorical to say that Jesus was worried about “what everybody would think.” Jesus did and said lots of shocking things. He horrified his hearers by saying, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). He prompted his fellow Jews to form a lynch mob by declaring “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He touched lepers, ate with whores, and excoriated the ruling class in Jerusalem. He challenged conventional wisdom in a thousand ways. His message (and that of the apostles) was indeed, so conciliatory to his contemporaries that they welcomed him with crucifixion and hailed his disciples with stonings, beatings, and assassination attempts. Bottom line: If Jesus had wanted woman priests he would have ordained them, public opinion or no. The “Jesus was hamstrung and/or blinded by his culture” thesis is utterly lame. And this is doubly so because Greco-Roman culture had oodles of women priests. So let’s forget this ahistorical appeal to poor Jesus’ jitters at offending.
Similarly, appeals to women’s pastoral and rhetorical competence are quite beside the point. The Church has in her tradition abbesses, theologians, doctors of the Church and teachers aplenty in skirts and habits. The question revolves, not around pastors and preachers, but around the priestly office. Anybody can do pastoral, teaching, preaching, or administrative work. But that is not the essence of the priesthood. The essence of the priestly office is celebration of Christ’s Sacrifice in the Mass.
And that is why all such arguments are not addressing the issue, for the issue is the nature of the sacrament. What is a sacrament? It is a thing which not only does what it symbolizes but symbolizes what it does. In Baptism, the obvious symbol of cleansing, drowning and new life is water, not wine. And so wine, for all its admirable qualities, is not the right “matter” for the sacrament of Baptism. Likewise, in Holy Eucharist, wine — the blood of the crushed fruit — is the obvious symbol which signifies the blood of Christ, who was crushed for our iniquities. Like the blood of Christ, wine invigorates, inebriates, and reminds us of the tang of death and new life. Here again, water, despite being the right matter for Baptism and not in the least “inferior” to wine, is the wrong matter for the sacrament of the Eucharist. In short, certain things are natural images. It’s not a question of “equality” but of fittingness.
Now, Christ is, as he himself teaches, the “Bridegroom” to the Church’s “Bride” in the great eschatological Marriage Feast of the Kingdom (Matthew 25:1-13). Gender has, in Christ’s teaching, a real meaning and is not simply an accident of nature. And he ought to know, since he designed the human person and made it a participant in the mystery of maleness and femaleness. And so, every mass is a local “Marriage Feast of the Lamb” whereby we enter into the self-sacrificial love of that Cosmic Bridegroom for his Bride.
And that gets us right back to the question of symbols. For as with water in Baptism and wine in Eucharist, it is not that a man is “superior” to a woman in being “matter” for the priesthood. It is that man is a fitting symbol of the Bridegroom and woman is not. The priest is an “alter Christus” to the Bride in the mystery of the mass. He signifies. He does not primarily “administrate” or preach or pastor.
Ordination, then, is not a right. It’s a gift. It’s a sacrament that does what it symbolizes and symbolizes what it does, like all sacraments. Symbols therefore matter (particularly those which Christ himself has instituted) and the Church has no power to alter such symbols in their fundamentals. Christ and the apostles revealed what the “matter” of ordination should be just as they revealed what the matter of Baptism and Eucharist should be. The Church merely obeys. That is why the Pope says, “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
* Let’s be clear — the priest signifies the bridegroom, Christ, in complement to the Church as the bride of the Lord. It is precisely the specific gender of the priest that is the symbol. And women are no less equal to men even though Christ does not, in the teachings of the Church, make provision for their ordination, because equality is not achieved on the basis of role.
Aside: When we state that men and women are “equal”, what basis absent the divine can we found that claim on? Oh, we can say that men and women are equal “before the law”, but laws are fickle and can be changed by successive governments. We enshrined equal rights for women into Canadian law about a century ago, but a century from now some later government would still have the ability to strip those legislations out again.
So secular law is not a good basis on which to found the notion of equality. And while we can state that both men and women are human — in an attempt to appeal to naturalistic categories — the naturalistic view quickly breaks down as well: men and women have several key physiological differences, our bodies mature in different ways, and disparities emerge between genders in things like average physical strength, average body mass, and so forth. Also, men and women are ‘wired’ differently, think differently, look at the world differently, reason differently, and use both reason and emotion in wholly different ways and wholly different quantities.
So the naturalistic perspective is also not a good basis on which to found the notion of equality.
And so it goes — pick any other category that does not involve a notion of external divinity, and it will become rapidly apparent that the category in question is an insufficient basis upon which to base the notion that men and women are “equal”. Take it one step further, and begin adding different secular categories together, and still you will not have adequate foundation for the notion of equality.
Ultimately, the only category which gives any credence, foundation, or strength to the notion of male/female equality is the one that invokes an external divinity: men and women are equal in the economy of salvation, equal before the Lord, equal in God’s eyes. And any appeal to the notion of male/female equality must therefore necessarily be an appeal to some conception of divinity, because there is nothing that exists only in this world that can sufficiently justify and serve to defend said notion.
And here’s the point that needs to be stressed: just as, in salvation, works are meaningless, so too is it the case that in male and female equality, works are meaningless. By which I mean: true equality is equality of personal dignity which comes from the Lord. True equality is not the entitlement to perform the same roles. Nor should it be.
Men and women play different roles in many aspects of life outside of their faith — why wouldn’t they play different roles in God’s plan for humanity, in the economy of salvation, and in the life of the Church? That’s the second error that the various objectors that I know make; they erroneously assume male/female equality to mean equivalence, which it does not.
This is not the Church’s decision, in the end — this is a part of the ongoing revelation of the Spirit that the Church humbles herself to.
Kenneth Hynek • 25th Jan 2010 • Religion, Catholicism • Catholic Church, Catholicism, Dave Armstrong, Jesus, the Church
From Dave Armstrong’s list:
I am a Catholic because I sincerely believe, by virtue of much cumulative evidence, that Catholicism is true, and that the Catholic Church is the visible Church divinely-established by our Lord Jesus, against which the gates of hell cannot and will not prevail (Mt 16:18), thereby possessing an authority to which I feel bound in Christian duty to submit.
The first thing to understand, I suppose, is that being Catholic is both a question of choice and of duty, and then in a way that allows the two concepts to interweave. To love and serve the Lord to the fullest extent (the real meaning of life) requires both the personal decision to strive for and pursue that goal, and also the understanding that as a creating being, one is duty-bound to love, serve, and obey the Creator and the Church His son established.
Kenneth Hynek • 23rd Dec 2009 • Religion, Catholicism, Religion, Christianity, Religion, Holy Days and Feast Days • Bethlehem, Calvary, Christ, Christmas, Chrysler, commercialism, Edmonton, Ella, food bank, God, Grace, iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch, Jesus, love, Salvation Army, Sebring, soup kitchen, TV, Vermilion, Wordpress
I’m tapping this out on the WordPress app for my iPod Touch whilst seated next to my baby girl in the back seat of the car. We’re on our way, the fam-jam and I, to see Grace’s parents in Vermilion for Christmas Eve dinner; weather permitting, we’ll be headed back to Edmonton for Christmas Day, to see my family.
Grace is driving, Ella is sleeping, and I’m thinking that it’s high time I posted an update to the site; that, and it’s time for my customary Christmas greeting.
In the past, I’ve subdivided greetings into categories (for fellow Catholics, fellow Christians, other believers, and non-believers), and if I weren’t typing on an iPod’s tiny keyboard, I might have opted to repeat that format this year. But as it is, I’m sitting in the back of a Chrysler Sebring tapping away on my iPod, so I think a more general greeting is warranted.
Whether, good reader, you are a believer or not, and whether you are a Christian or not, hopefully you can recognize that Christmas has a deeper and more powerful meaning that goes beyond the usual trappings of the season. Past the gifts, the trees, the feasts, past the rank commercialism and sappy TV specials, and even past the gatherings of family and friends, there is something deeper that infuses this time of year.
That thing is love, and in particular is a special kind of love, one that most certainly can be (and is) shared between friends (in good friendships) and family members (in functional families), but which can also be shared between complete strangers. it can even be shared in a way such that the recipient of it remains ignorant of it.
Christians will recognize what I’m talking about; this is the love that Christ exuded with every breath, word, and action, and then in no way more powerfully than by His death on the Cross. But that same love’s first act was the humble birth of a baby in a stable in Bethlehem. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” That humble birth was the first step on a road that lead inexorably to Calvary; the infant born that night was already bound, in His own small way, for the encounter with Pilate and then the Cross. But out of love, Jesus humbled Hinself to be born as one of us, for He desired to bring us a gift beyond any we might ever imagine receiving.
And that’s a gift offered to all of us. Granted, we don’t all — or always — see that gift. But even so, there it is, bestowed whether or not we are ignorant of it.
That’s the kind of love that infuses Christmastine; self-giving, humble, unexpactant love of others, and a desire for their betterment, even if only in some small way.
Now, before I turn this into a sermon, and before Ella wakes up, let me come to the point. It’s Christmas; to every reader, I wish a truly joyous Christmas and an earnest prayer that its days will be filled with the warmth and love of family and friends.
But I would also like to offer a challenge. We’ve all likely dropped some change in the Salvation Army collection bowl, or dropped a few cans of food off at a local food bank. My challenge, then, is: do even more, if at all you are able. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Check a local shelter’s website to see if they need help with anything. Help hand out presents at a children’s hospital. Bake cookies and hand them out to street people downtown. Put aside aprehension, misgivings, and critiques for a while and just help someone, directly, in his or her immediate need.
In other words: love, to the maximum extent you are able. If you take no other meaning or message away from these days, take that much. And if you do take deeper meaning away from these days, you already know why I’m asking this.
Merry Christmas, everyone. Now go be excellent to each other.
Kenneth Hynek • 15th Nov 2009 • Photography, Pic of the Day • Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, Francis Winspear Centre for Music, Jesus, the Bible, UAMC, University of Alberta, University of Alberta Mixed Chorus
Pictures taken at the dress rehearsal (and also after the performance) for the 2005 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at the Francis Winspear Centre for Music.
The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, incidentally, is a yearly project of the various Christian chaplaincies at the University of Alberta, and of the University proper. People familiar with the format of such events will know that it features nine readings from the Bible that either prophesy or chronicle the birth of Jesus. Between each such "lesson," a hymn is sung.
Which is where the Mixed Chorus comes in.
This is the massive overhead light board at the Winspear Centre. It also houses a number of speakers, and is an integral part of the facility’s acoustics.
Kenneth Hynek • 19th Oct 2009 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Catholicism, Religion, Christianity, Site News, Reader Comments • atheism, Blessed Virgin, Book of Genesis, Christianity, Christmas, Christopher Hitchens, Criss Angel, Easter, Ella, evil, God, heresy, Holy Scripture, ICR, Jesus, Kirk Cameron, lolcat, Mary, Matt Dillahunty, parable, Ray Comfort, revelation, Richard Dawkins, schism, science, sin, The Atheist Experience, the Bible, truth, YouTube
…allow me to instead re-post, for a wider audience, my reply to Rich Chappell’s comment on the Atheism Demotivators article.
You are quite good at debating this topic. Probably the best I’ve seen from your side of the argument.
Thank you kindly, but I shudder to think of what examples of “my side of the argument” you have been witness too, then; I could name perhaps a dozen people off the top of my head, some of whom I know from having met personally, who would be hear, shoulders, and torso above me in this debate, in terms of their ability to argue for Christianity.
I can hold my own, I suppose, though it helps when the other side fields their B team.
You’re certainly a better debater than I am, so I probably ought to keep my mouth shut.
But where’s the fun in that?
You actually raised some very good questions I’ll have to try to answer for/about myself, like, would I accept evidence if it were presented to me. I don’t know that I would accept what you consider evidence, but now I need to at least consider that my standards may not be fair.
Well, that’s cool. And in a way, it’s made my day. Not that I expect your worldview will come crumbling down, but one doesn’t usually expect to effect even this sort of small change in a person by writing something on the Internet.
I was somewhat disappointed that you never seemed to want to define the evidentiary standard in your debate with Korinthian, instead asking him to define it and then telling him that his standard didn’t count because he couldn’t prove that it was the only possible standard worth using.
That is because the point was not to establish the standard proper. Sorry if it seemed that way, but the intent was to ridicule strict empiricism as self-defeating. Ultimately, I never got to the point where I could do more than imply as much, because Korinthian declined to respond.
That’s an impossible proof, so it’s irrelevant. What standard do you propose?
I don’t, actually. The point, again, is to demonstrate that strict empiricism — to which many atheists cling — is ultimately a self-contradicting standard; it is self-defeating.
I understand that it’s important to be sure you’re talking about roughly the same thing, but evidentiary standards can be debated after the evidence is presented.
Not to seem rude, but this sounds like another attempt to set up mobile goalposts.
Since Korinthian never answered certain questions, I’ll do it for him. Yes, children can be programmed atheist too (as well as Republican, Democrat, or even an Ohio State fan like I was). Parents don’t realize how much of what they do and say is absorbed by their children, and it’s very difficult to keep one’s own biases out of a child’s upbringing.
I agree with the first part, and should note that it articulates something close to the point I was driving toward. I admit that I expected Korinthian to answer in the negative, and to proclaim that his atheism is a freeing from the shackles of childhood programming…which would of course not be true even if he was raised in a religious household.
This is because it is not just children who can become programmed; adults are similarly vulnerable, in certain circumstances. I’ve known too many people who’ve abandoned their faith for “reason” (read: atheism, which is not the same thing) in the wake of some terrible personal tragedy…this in spite of the fact that Christ promises us, His followers, that our lives will know tragedy, in spite of His promise of salvation. I’m not sure why my acquaintances consider it “rational” to have abandoned a faith for living up to some of its tenets…but I suspect that the tragedies suffered left each of them vulnerable to suggestion and errant thinking.
Or to programming, as Korinthian has put it.
To your last point, I agree with reservation; I think parents should take care as to what they allow of themselves to imprint on the child. It does not necessarily follow, however, that this restraint should be total.
Let’s face it, people think everything they believe is necessarily correct (or why would they believe it), and thus believe they have a moral imperative to pass it on to their children.
That might be the case for most, but a guy like me can honestly admit that what beliefs he personally holds might not necessarily be correct. In fact, I will go one further and admit that to the degree that they deviate from the articulated, documented teachings and doctrines of the Church (and there are deviations), my beliefs are incorrect.
In which case, it is my moral imperative to pass on to my child the truthful teachings, rather than my personal permutations thereof. But to the degree that I am correct in the faith I profess, it is my duty to pass on those correct teachings as well.
This gets us back to what I said just previously; a parent should refrain from passing some things on to his children, to the degree that he holds to wrong or incorrect things.
Luckily, we all have the power to overcome our programming as we gain knowledge and (hopefully) wisdom.
It is at times a lucky thing, and at times not. Man’s reason is fallen, and while it more or less works most of the time, it can easily lead man astray, or be led astray itself. We do have the ability to overcome our programming, but we need to ask the additional question of whether our programming needs to be overcome. If we’ve managed to come into adult life having absorbed an entirely correct set of beliefs and teachings from our family and friends, there’s really no need to strive to break out of that framework…and to do so would, in fact, be a grave error.
(This leaves open the question of whether an entirely correct set of beliefs and teachings exists, of course, and also leaves unspoken the point that it is still good to test the boundaries of correct teachings, if only to discover (or re-discover) their inherent rightness.)
It is entirely possible that the bad things from my childhood pushed me in the direction of atheism (or at least agnosticism). I grew up in a household that was supposedly Christian (Church of Christ, then Lutheran after my mom died when I was 10), but I had an abusive alcoholic father.
I realized I’m interjecting here before your point is complete, but it’s worth noting that there is apparently some level of statistical correlation between “daddy issues” (or, more broadly, parental authority issues) in childhood and atheism in adulthood.
As a child, I would pray for the abuse to stop. Years later, when I discovered that the Bible says if a believer asks for something in Jesus’s name he WILL receive it (no equivocation that I could find), I had a hard time justifying my faith given that my prayers weren’t answered.
I could ramble on at some length about the dangers of personal Biblical interpretation, as this is a prime example. Instead, I will merely note that while there’s no equivocation in that teaching cited per sé, it is a broader teaching than simply the promise that every question will be rewarded with the requested answer.
In particular, one notes that the foremost articulation of “ask and ye shall receive” is followed up with the observation that ” If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” What this ultimately means is that in the tension between what we ask for and what we need (since we humans, being fallen and imperfect, do not necessarily always know what we truly need, and so do not ask for it), God will come down on the side of addressing the need, not the want.
I realize that the easy assumption is to assume that I’m asserting that living in abuse was what you needed to be doing; I am not so asserting. But do I suppose, for one moment, that some plan for good was not at work in the circumstance you describe? No, not for one moment.
As an adult, I came to the realization that the God of the Bible wasn’t real, but it’s possible my childhood experience was a contributing factor.
I’d say so, and will again refrain from a tangential rant about the dangers of radical private interpretation of Scripture. I do find it interesting that you attribute your present lack of faith, in part, to a child’s interpretation of a complex theological teaching; given that said interpretation was almost certainly in error in some way, that would rather mean that your subsequent atheism is ultimately built on a foundation of sand or straw, rather than concrete.
You say you came to the realization that the God of the Bible “wasn’t real.” I would be interested to hear of how this realization took place, and what informed it, in more detail. There’s a certainty in the word choice that I find most curious, in that I wonder what prompts it — certainly, it does not derive from weight of (empirical) evidence.
The “bad things happen to good people” argument isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) used as an argument against God, but rather as an argument against one of the traits attributed to God by his followers… that he is benevolent.
Two points.
Firstly, if you can argue against the existence of a benevolent God, you can argue that the Christian God does not exist.
Or, you could try to do so, but it would still not be a rational argument. This is because, secondly, the argument that the existence of suffering or evil precludes a benevolent God still makes the error of not differentiating between action and the capacity for action; it does not differentiate between being able to do X and actually doing X. A benevolent being can still allow for evil and suffering to exist, if to do so is to the greater benefit of…well…us.
As a parent, I can say I know as much; it would actually be to be one year old’s detriment if I took pains to prevent her from ever coming to injury, no matter how slight. What I mean by that is that obviously it is my duty to protect her from serious harm. By the same token, it is also my duty to allow her the risk of the occasional bopped nose or faceplant — she wouldn’t learn to walk properly if I constantly held her up and supported her every movement. In a few years, when she’s learning to ride a bike, it will be my duty to prevent her from coming to serious harm, by teaching her about how to safely ride her bicycle in situations where automobile traffic is present. It will also, however, be my duty to let her take the risk of the occasional skinned knee, or even a broken wrist…as it will one day be my duty to let go of the bike seat, to let her ride using only her own balance.
That’s a “micro” example, effected in the lives of imperfect and fallen human beings. It stands to reason, however, that in the perfect existence of the divine, the “macro” of that example also exists; some evil and some suffering are necessary parts of the human experience, because we — and others around us — cannot grow without them.
And just as I, the parent, more or less have the ability to prevent most harm from coming to my daughter (though only by essentially condemning her to life in a bubble), so too does God have the ability to prevent us from ever coming to suffering or being set upon by evil. And unlike myself, God’s capacity to do so is both unlimited and perfect.
But there is, of course, a difference between possessing a capacity and acting upon it. I could keep Ella in a bubble, but that would do more harm than good. God could likewise keep us in an essentially perfect state of existence…but I suspect the result would be equally ruinous to us as my bubble-fication of Ella would be to her.
There’s one further error that is made in the “argument from evil/suffering,” which is to assume that God is the lord of this world. But unless you’re intimately familiar with the full implications of Jesus’ temptation in the desert, that’s not a discussion we should verge into.
The “things seem to run fine without God” argument is really just a plea to avoid adding unnecessary elements to the equation.
I get that…but the question that has not been settled is whether God is an unnecessary element in the equation, or whether God is not still present in the equation even if we don’t necessarily see the need to mention Him directly. This argument speaks from the standpoint of human reason, which is necessarily fallen and flawed; how do we know that we are correct in thinking that there is no “need” to include God in the equation?
We know that 1 + 1 = 2. It would be unnecessary to say “1 + 1 = 2 because God made it so”. The God element in that statement is not required, and therefore should not be added.
You’re building a ton of assumptions into that statement concerning the necessity of God. To be fair, I don’t see the need to attach divine attribution to the end of answers submitted on math exams…but that doesn’t mean that the piece of the order of the Universe governing what results when 1 and 1 are added was not defined by the Creator.
In other words, my stance is both/and on the matter: I’m fine with just noting that 1+1=2, but if asked I will confess in no uncertain terms that this order was set in place by the Almighty.
Miracles are a tricky issue, largely because the term is so mis- and over-used these days to describe everyday natural occurences like childbirth. And also because our senses are so easy to deceive. I once saw Criss Angel pull a woman apart at the waist. The bottom half stood up, and the top half crawled away screaming. Should I believe that Criss actually pulled a woman in half, or does it make more sense to believe that there was some other explanation? I would expect a true miracle to be the main topic of every news source in the world for an absurdly long period of time.
You’d think so, but I think you’re far too charitable in your assumption of what the various media outlets of the world would see fit to report. The Catholic school in my wife’s home town is lucky if it can get the local newspaper to run a classified add for it, but the public school can get full-page spreads announcing its events. Media systems, being one more human creation, are necessarily imperfect, and are vulnerable to bias. And while a miracle might be a newsworthy event from a strictly objective standpoint, if reporting on it doesn’t fit a pre-conceived narrative bias, it will go unreported.
As to the Criss Angel remark, this is an interesting (but still tired) re-hashing of the “mass delusion/mass illusion” argument that has been deployed in the past to no great effect. 70,000 people from all walks of life, dozens of different countries and several different belief systems all seeing the same miraculous dancing of the Sun is a far different thing than some optical effects making it look like a woman has just been sliced in half. Also different from said sliced woman is a nun suddenly cured of a well-documented, medically-attested case of advanced Parkinson’s disease…this after seeking the intercession of John Paul II.
The logic you’re using here is the same logic as that of the recent “debunkers” of the Shroud of Turin, whose basic argument seems to be that because they were able to produce a forgery of the Shroud, the Shroud itself must be a forgery as well. I will grant that our senses can be fooled, a fact which different people exploit to different purposes. But equally, the fact that our senses can be fooled does not mean that every single instance of witnessing something profound and apparently supernatural is necessarily an illusion wrought by a human actor only.
Perhaps you can help me out with something that has confounded me for years. How is it that every Christian seems to have a different definition or understanding of God and Christianity? If there’s one God, shouldn’t everyone who truly believes (not your Christmas and Easter believers, but the real deal) have the exact same beliefs?
I’ve often lamented that the divisions we Christians presently suffer have the negative effect you give voice to above: who, indeed, should trust us and the message of salvation we carry, if we cannot even agree on lunch, let alone on the proper recognition owed to the Blessed Virgin?
But humans are sinful, especially prideful, and Jesus predicted that division and strife would afflict Christians. Heresies and schisms are no new thing to the Church, regrettable though they may be. All these differences truly mean is that some Christians are in error, while others are not. That’s the human condition, and the risk God took in using human beings to spread and give voice to the message of salvation that is faith in His Son.
And how do we tell the difference between parable and stone cold truth in the Bible? In my experience, once something is proven inaccurate (like Genesis 1-11) it is labeled a parable or metaphor, while equally extraordinary things that can’t necessarily be disproved (like the virgin birth or the resurrection) are not.
In a sense, it all comes down to a single hermeneutical rule: truth does not contradict truth. Scripture and science are both complex things, requiring interpretation by suitable authorities (I could insert another rant about private interpretation here). Both are also, in their own ways, living things, ever-changing in response to learning and avenues of inquiry.
Truth does not contradict truth: if there is an apparent conflict between an interpretation of Scripture and a theory or postulation of science, then the problem is not with the science or the Scripture, but with our understanding of one or both. If we have to re-think one or both in light of this revelation, then so be it.
As to how we can go about discerning what parts of Scripture are meant more as metaphor than as e.g. historical accounts, there are many means of literary analysis which can be (and are) brought to bear. There are also means of theological analysis which can be brought to bear, to achieve the same end. I’ve no time to expound upon these matters here, as they are beyond the level of complexity of this discussion. If you would learn more, I can offer some recommended reading material.
BTW, both LOLcats and Zombie Jesus are hilarious, but that could just be because I love all things zombie or cat.
I’ve actually never gotten into zombies in general, either as objects of humour or staples of horror movies. But I love cats.
BTBTW, Dawkins and Hitchens are bullies. Funny sometimes, but not overly intellectual. I expect my intellectuals to be considerably more intelligent than I am. Their books are disappointing in their lack of detailed explanations in the same way that apologist books are. They all (both sides) claim to be able to prove or disprove something, but then never even TRY to accomplish that goal. I’m sad that they and Bill Maher are the face of atheism these days. I’d much rather it be someone like Matt Dillahunty from The Atheist Experience TV show in Austin, TX (hundreds of clips on YouTube, in case you haven’t seen him).
I could go on at some length about how I wish the public faces of Christianity were, in many cases, different faces; if nobody ever mentioned Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort again, or the Institute for Creation Research (or whatever “ICR” stands for), I wouldn’t be upset at all. Religion (or lack thereof) does not prevent idiots from being…well…idiots, nor does it prevent vocal idiots from being vocal idiots. At least, not in all cases; the Christian exhortation to humility has hopefully muffled a few fools along the way.
Kenneth Hynek • 13th Oct 2009 • Religion, Catholicism, Religion, Christianity, Religion, Evolutionary Creationism, Religion, Judaism, The Sciences, Research, Religion, Theology • Book of Genesis, Christ, creation, Earth, Ellen van Wolde, faith, God, Jesus, Mesopotamia, Old Testament, Radboud University, the Church, the Netherlands
This isn’t actually news to me, I should begin by saying. Anyone with a gram of knowledge about ancient Hebrew texts shouldn’t be surprised by the news that according to the Book of Genesis, God did not create the waters and the Earth. Or, rather, He might have created them…but the book doesn’t actually tell us whether He did or didn’t. Genesis begins in media res, with the spirit of God floating over the face of the waters.
Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.
Now, granted, I find this claim to be a bit dubious, not because my faith will be inexorably shattered if the translation of Genesis read in exactly the above-highlighted way, but because I find it hard to believe that a translation of the text that has been broadly accepted by Jews and Christians alike for…well…thousands of years, in many languages other than, but also including, English, is actually wrong. Put more plainly, I find it strains credulity to believe that this one professor is right, and thousands of years of Jewish and Christian scholars who have upheld the traditional translation of the text are wrong.
Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.
She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.
The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth”
According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the Earth out of nothing.
Of course, most modern scientific theories about the origin of the Universe teach something similar. But let’s not mention that bit, shall we?
Here’s the thing: Genesis 1:1 isn’t actually the first line of a narrative; it’s actually the book’s title. We give the book the title of “Genesis,” but the original manuscript’s title is…well…a bit more descriptive. The real “first line” of Genesis is Genesis 1:2, more or less, and it’s an in media res beginning: God’s spirit is hovering over the face of the waters of a dark and unformed Earth.
Did God create the waters? It doesn’t say…which to me suggests that the author of the ancient text didn’t consider that to be an important point. God goes on the create everything thereafter, leading up to the creation of man; that’s the main point of the text.
Not that it’s a literal account anyhow, of course! It’s a histographical myth (I use the term in its proper, academic meaning), not a historical discourse chronicling the literal events of the world’s first week. So in a broader sense, it really doesn’t matter whether Genesis says God made the waters and the formless Earth; that sequence of events never transpired!
Of course, Prof van Wolde contradicts herself here:
She said technically “bara” does mean “create” but added: “Something was wrong with the verb.
“God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?”
This is the problem with trying to be smarter than you are, good reader. Or, rather, it’s the problem with trying to take your piece of pet knowledge and turn it into something which is meant to refute established theological wisdom, rather than trying to see if there is already an answer for it within that body of knowledge.
Why indeed did God create not just one thing, “but always more?” Well, it could be that God wasn’t actually creating new things, and that He was merely dividing extant things into new categories. Or it could be that God is love, and that the nature of divine love is outwardly directed, life-giving, and principally ordered toward the creation of new ideas, new things, and new beings.
You know…all those things that the Judeo-Christian God is.
Prof van Wolde’s translation work is novel, though probably not correct. But even if it is correct…so what? Genesis can’t be read literally; it was never meant to be read literally! Granted, there’s no harm in reading it that way, but that was not the Spirit’s intent when He inspired the ancient author(s) to reach for the ink and the parchment.
In the end, whether the water was already there at the beginning of the narrative matters not a whit to me, or to my faith, or to the Church…so long as Christ, the Son of God and Second Person of the Trinity, died and rose again three days later. Genesis is an important text…but not so important as Jesus. And novel interpretations of Genesis are…well…novel…but that’s about it. Insofar as those novel translations do not alter our understanding of the nature of Christ, they are utterly unimportant, except as matters of curiosity.
(hat tip)
