Category Archives: Faith

Matters relating to the Christian faith in general

Who Do You Love?

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I suppose that really ought to be “whom”, but be that as it may.

There is a significant dynamic in the Christian life. God loves us, and in order to receive that love we must pass it along to others. In fact, loving others increases our capacity for receiving God’s love; so not only must we love our neighbors as ourselves, but in loving our neighbors we are loving ourselves.

So who are our neighbors, and how do we love them?

First, there are those we know personally, and those we don’t. Those we know personally–our family, our friends, our co-workers–can be the easiest and that hardest to love. Easiest because they are right there, in front of us, and hardest because their faults are also right there in front of us. Of those we don’t, there are again two categories: those we see, and those we don’t see.

Those we don’t see are those in other towns, in other states, in other countries. These are generally quite easy to love: write a check, drop it in the mail. Say a blanket prayer for disaster victims in Myanmar. The check must represent hard-earned money, but writing and mailing it is pretty quick, and I don’t even need to leave my house. Saying a quick prayer is even easier.

The hard ones are the ones we see but don’t know: the hordes of people we see at the movie theater or the shopping mall or walking down the street. We don’t know them. We don’t know what they need. Most of them are not obviously hungry, or sick, or in need of alms-giving. There’s probably nothing they want our help with, and they’d be surprised and dismayed if we offered. (Try accosting someone at the mall, and asking them if there’s anything you can do for them. How would you react?)

How can we love them, in more than an abstract and theoretical sense? How can we let them know that it isn’t our own love we are offering, but God’s?

I can think of all sorts of things that won’t work. Is there anything that will?

The Life of Saint Dominic, by Augusta Theodosia Drane

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This life of St. Dominic was first published in 1857 in England; apparently it remains one of the best lives of St. Dominic in the English language, though it has its blind spots. In 1857, it was understood by everyone that the Rosary was given to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, and promulgated widely by him; more recent research has shown that the first mention of the Rosary in any text follows Dominic’s death by quite a long time, and that the origin of the Rosary is correspondingly more recent. There are likely other similar errors. But I gather that there aren’t that many biographies of Dominic in English; and one of the reasons, which is hinted at in the book, is that Protestant England has generally looked on Dominic without fondness.

Protestant England, as everyone knows, was frequently at war with Catholic Spain. The Elizabethans were skilled propagandists, and one of their favorite topics was the Spanish Inquisition, which consequently everyone expected. I wouldn’t want to whitewash the Inquisition, but a lot of what we English speakers think we know about it goes back to British propaganda. Now, as everyone knows, St. Dominic preached against the Albigensian heresy; and in fact the Inquisition was founded to combat the Albigensian heresy, and many of the early inquisitors were Dominicans. Dominic, in fact had nothing to do with the founding of the Inquistion (and it wasn’t the Spanish Inquisition in any event), and though there were excesses in the crusade against the Albigensians, so far as I can tell the inquisitors weren’t responsible for them. But be that as it may; Dominic was Catholic, and Spanish, and was around when the Inquisition was founded, and so, three centuries and more later, England used him as a symbol of everything she hated. Drane says remarkably little about all this, under the circumstances, but she takes some slight pains to clear the good names of St. Dominic and his early followers.

I found the book both interesting and frustrating. We are told quite a bit about the saintliness of Dominic’s life, and about his travels, and about various miracles that took place in his vicinity, all of which are interesting and about which I am glad to be informed. But Dominic founded the Order of Preachers, and I was really hoping to know just what he preached about, and how he preached it. Alas, his sermons generally weren’t preserved. Part of being a saint is the possession of the virtues in heroic measure, and that includes humility; where we know a lot about a saint’s life from the saint’s own hand, it’s generally because the saint was ordered to write about themselves by some superior. So Dominic wasn’t inclined to preserve his own words in writing, and apparently nobody else was either, alas, whether out of deference to him or out of a sort of corporate humility.

So. I enjoyed reading it; and I was left wanting much, much more.

The Future of Anglican Orthodoxy

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Although I’m pretty much just a spectator at this point, this is still good to see. The participants in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), a meeting of orthodox Anglicans from around the world that was held in Jerusalem this past week, have released a statement that amounts to a declaration of independence from those elements of traditional Anglicanism that refuse to uphold the orthodox faith.

Of course, what do they mean by “the orthodox faith”? The statement answers that as well. Here’s the meat of it from my point of view:

2. We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.

3. We uphold the four Ecumenical Councils and the three historic Creeds as expressing the rule of faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

4. We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.

It’s that part I bolded that concerns me. As an Anglican I was more-or-less an Anglo-catholic, while the Thirty-Nine Articles are an essentially Protestant and Calvinist statement of faith. Accompanying the Oxford Movement and the rise of Anglo-catholicism was a de-emphasizing of the Thirty-Nine Articles as normative. Consequently, this statement has the affect of putting the Anglo-catholic genie back in its bottle.

I have mixed emotions about all of this. On the one hand, the tolerance of doctrinal variance that allowed the members of the Oxford Movement to move in a strongly Catholic direction within the Anglican tradition also allowed the rise of the current leadership of the Episcopal Church. Consequently, I’m glad to see the GAFCON primates take a firm line on the content of the faith. On the other hand, if I were still Anglican I’d be having to look for the door, as I simply cannot accept a number of the Thirty-nine Articles—and if I were to remain Anglican despite that I’d be contributing to the very doctrinal wishy-washiness that I abhor.

I suspect that those remaining orthodox Anglo-catholics are going to be doing some hard thinking right about now.

More Blogging Aquinas

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I’ve got posts up at the Blogging Aquinas blog on the first two chapters of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Shorter Summa. Surely there’s someone who can drop by and help me relieve my ignorance? I’m actually going to try to post something there every day, as I work through the book; we’ll see how it goes.

Blogging Aquinas

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I’m starting a new project, involving study of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Compendium Theologiae, which is currently in print as Aquinas’ Shorter Summa. I’ve created a new blog just for this; if you’d like to join in, drop on by. (And please do! I need all of the help I can get.)

I do plan to keep blogging here as well.

Cities of God, by Rodney Stark

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This is a fascinating book.

Subtitled, somewhat flamboyantly, “The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome,” Stark’s book takes a quantitative and statistical look at how Christianity spread between Christ’s death and the year 250 AD. That sounds dry, but it’s anything but.

Stark begins by selecting the thirty-one major cities of that time, and then quantifying various facts about them. Did they first have a Christian community by 100 AD? by 180 AD? by 250 AD? Were they port cities or inland? Were they more or less Hellenic in culture? Were they centers of the cults of Isis or Cybele? Did they have sizeable Jewish communities? Then, given these and other data items, he begins to test a number of statistical hypotheses. For example, his results support the hypotheses that Christianity tend to first appear in port cities, and in cities that were part of the Jewish Diaspora. These are obvious conclusions, and most historians would agree with them; but as it notes, if his quantitative method is valid it should give the obvious answer when the answer is really obvious.

It’s his later conclusions that I found most interesting. He spends a great deal of time on the early Christian heresies, especially those which are collectively termed “gnosticism” these days. Some writers, notably Elaine Pagels, have in recent years claimed that there were many Christianities in the early days of the Church, that the Catholic Church suppressed the gnostic Christians, and that perhaps the gnostics had as much right to the name of Christian as those who retained it. Stark investigates this position and finds that it was far otherwise.

A digression. There are quite a few documents found in the last century that have been termed “gnostic”, mostly because it’s a convenient term. Of these, some had sizeable groups associated with them; some had small groups; of others, nothing of their authors or readers is known. The more sizeable groups all tended to share a similar set of beliefs: that the physical universe was not created directly by the One God, but by an evil deity, subordinate to the One God and disobedient to him, called the Demiurge. According to these groups, our souls are creations of the One God, but our bodies and all the things of the physical world are irredeemably evil. This led some groups to extreme asceticism, and others to extreme debauchery—if body and soul are separate, why not let your body do what it likes?—but on the evils of the physical world they were agreed.

Stark compares the locations of known “demiurgist” groups with those of known Christian congregations, and also with those of non-gnostic Christian heresies, the Marcionites and the Montanists. He finds that Marcionite and Montanists groups appeared in the same places as Christian congregations, which is what you’d expect of Christian heresies; they were drawing on the same pool of potential converts, and also from the orthodox groups. The presence of the Manichees and the Valentinians shows a significantly different pattern. These groups are correlated solely with the larger cities (then, as now, more able to support oddball groups), and particularly with those cities in which paganism remained strong the longest. He finds no significant correlation between the presence of Christian and gnostic congregations.

The conclusion is obvious: although the gnostic groups used semi-Christian imagery, they were not really an outgrowth of Christianity at all. On the contrary, they were outgrowths of classical paganism.

As I say, interesting stuff. Moreover, Stark provides all of the numbers (including the correlation coefficients, regression results, and so forth) that underly his conclusions (in an appendix, I hasten to add—the casual reader need not fear). I studied quite a bit of statistics once upon a time, and though I’ve not used it recently I’ve no doubt I could repeat his results with a bit of work, given the data in the book itself.

The book’s not perfect; I had a few quibbles here and there, and being a work of social science it naturally looks only at human-scale explanations and mechanisms, the truly divine being out-of-scope. That’s to be expected, though, and within those limits I think the book is outstanding.

On Reading Scripture

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Phil at Brandywine Books has a post on ways to read the Bible, and asks, “How do you read the Bible?” This reminded me of something I’d read recently that I’m trying to put into practice, and that I’ve been meaning to write about anyway.

Pope Benedict meets with many groups, and gets asked many questions. Our Sunday Visitor recently collated quite a few of these into a short book, the aptly named Questions and Answers, which was edited by Amy Welborn’s husband Michael Dubrueil. In one session, a 21-year-old chemical engineering student asks how he can read the Bible and understand it. The Pope answers that there are three ways for the believer to read the Bible, all of which are necessary. He begins,

It must first of all be said that one must not read Sacred Scripture as one reads any kind of historical book, such as, for example, Homer, Ovid, or Horace; it is necessary to truly read it as the Word of God—that is, by entering into a conversation with God…. One should not read Scripture in an academic way, but with prayer, saying to the Lord, “Help me to understand your Word, what it is you want to tell me in this passage.”

A great way to do this is the aptly named practice of lectio divina, which is a slightly more formal technique for doing the above; it involves reading the passage several times, chewing on and meditating on the words, and generally giving the Spirit the opportunity to point things out and make them plain.

So that’s the first way: to understand Scripture with the Lord, in this passage, in this moment. But what about trying to get an appreciation for the Bible as a whole, or to come to understanding of how the Old Testament relates to the New Testament? Benedict goes on,

Sacred Scripture introduces one into communion with the family of God. Thus, one should not read Sacred Scripture on one’s one. Of course, it is always important to read the Bible in a very personal way, in a personal conversation with God; but at the same time it is important to read it in the company of people with whom one can advance, letting oneself be helped by the great masters of lectio divina…. These teachers help us to understand better, and also how to interpret Sacred Scripture properly. Moreover, it is appropriate in general to read it in the company of friends who are journeying with me, who are seeking, together with me, how to live in Christ, to find what life the Word of God brings us.

In short, understanding the Bible is hard: we should rely on good teachers to bring us to understanding.

And then, the third way is read the Bible with the Church as a whole, in the Liturgy. Benedict concludes,

I think we should learn to do three things: To read it in a personal colloquium with the Lord; to read it with the guidance of teachers who have the experience of faith, who have penetrated Sacred Scripture; and to read it in the great company of the Church, in whose liturgy these events never cease to become present anew and in which the Lord speaks with us today.

I find that in my life I’m doing quite a bit of the third, through Sunday mass, and the Liturgy of the Hours every day; and quite a bit of the second, through the various books I’ve been studying, mostly recently Scott Hahn’s A Father Who Keeps His Promises (which I need to review Real Soon Now); the first I’ve been doing much less of, and I’m trying to change that.

Joyful Suffering

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Yesterday I said that “to love well is to suffer well.” I was pondering that today in the context of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, and realized that each of the Joyful Mysteries is shot through with suffering. The events themselves are joyful, indeed, especially in their significance for us, but there is significant suffering for the principles—especially when we remember that suffering is relative, and that little things can sometimes throw us more out of kilter than big ones.

In the Annunciation, we celebrate the coming of the messiah, and Mary’s amazing “Yes” to God. But Mary had to risk censure from her intended, Joseph, and no doubt from both his family and her own. I expect there were some tense moments. No sure does this happen than Mary travels off to her cousin Elizabeth’s house. Note this: Mary went way out of her way to help Elizabeth. Then, about seven months after the birth of John the Baptist, while on the verge of giving birth herself, Mary has to travel with Joseph to Bethlehem, there to be housed with farm animals. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us, I am given to understand, that Mary (being sinless) would have had an easy pregnancy and delivery, not bringing forth her child in pain and tears as Eve did; and if so, one can assume that Mary wouldn’t have had to deal with morning sickness, either. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that travelling (on a donkey if she were lucky) in the last week of pregnancy can have been all that comfortable. Eight days later, she and Joseph bring Jesus to Jerusalem to be presented in the temple. Travelling with a newborn, what fun. But this time, there’s pain to spread around. Simeon and Anna had been waiting for their entire lives for the messiah to come, and no doubt wondering if he ever would, and of course it all ended in a circumcision. And then, finally, we have the discovery of Jesus in the temple, following days of concern, worry, and anxiety.

Note that in every case, the pain or inconvenience is a necessary part of the event. If Simeon and Anna had not been waiting, they would not have rejoiced so when the messiah was before them.

Now, I admit that we aren’t talking about major torment. In these five mysteries we don’t see Jesus being flogged at the pillar, or carrying his cross to Calvary. St. Therese of Lisieux said that it isn’t necessary to do great things for God; it is simply necessary to do little things with great love. And that’s the key to each of these events: the pain, the inconvenience, the heartache, all are borne with great love, for God’s sake. And so they are ennobled; and so the joy is all the sweeter, because it came at a cost.

On Being Catholic, by Thomas Howard

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This book is one of the best I’ve read all year, and maybe longer. I can already tell that it’s one I’ll come back to, time and again–it’s that good. The author, a cradle fundamentalist, converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, and wrote a book about it entitled Evangelical is Not Enough. Ten years later, he wrote this book, an extended meditation on what it means to be a Christian of the Catholic variety.

Any religion has three components: a moral code, a set of beliefs, and the day-to-day practices. Howard skips over the moral code, which Catholics and other Christians largely agree about it; and he discusses doctrine only to the extent that Catholics and other Christians disagree about it. By far the largest chunk of the book is about the day-to-day Catholic practices that give serious non-Catholics the heebie-jeebies: praying with the saints, for example, but most especially and beautifully the Sacrifice of the Mass. He goes into great and beautiful detail about the Mass, and what it means, and why we Catholics do what we do.

This is not a dry, technical book, I hasten to add. What this is, really, is a love-letter to the Roman Catholic Church, and to Christ its Head, in thanksgiving for all of His many and great blessings. I learned a lot from it, not so much in terms of specific facts, but in terms of how everything in Catholic practice works together. He didn’t just show me the landmarks; he revealed all of the terrain between them.

If you’re a Catholic, and you want to get more out of your faith, I’d suggest reading this book; and if you’re a Protestant who’s worried that his Catholic friends might not be saved, I’d definitely suggest reading this book. And if you’re no kind of Christian at all, you might find it interesting to see what all the noise is about. Highly recommended.