The Sheepcat

Exodus in Jerusalem

Recently I was struck by a passage I've previously read hundreds of times while praying the Luminous Mysteries using the scriptural Rosary program I downloaded a couple of years ago: "They spoke of Jesus' exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem." (Lk 9:31 RSV-Catholic Edition)

I've never before noticed the word "exodus." Nor, for that matter, paid much attention to any speaking other than the voice from the cloud; when I think of the Transfiguration, I think of the visual event, the sudden appearance of Moses and Elijah, the dazzling white clothing of Jesus. Peter and the other two disciples saw his glory (Lk 9:32).

I've understood the Transfiguration to be foretelling Christ's Passion and death (not that I paid much attention to it before I became Catholic). That much we learn from Jesus' telling these closest disciples, as they came down the mountain together, that the Son of man was to rise from the dead.

The passage in Luke, though, unlike the parallel accounts in Matthew 17 and Mark 9, mentions (however enigmatically) the content of what Moses and Elijah had to say. Exodus symbolizes salvation, I noticed today in a footnote in Peter Kreeft's Summa of the Summa. I'm still puzzled by the significance of the word. The RSV (non-Catholic edition) says Moses and Elijah "appeared in glory and spoke of his departure which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem." Departure, exodus--why is the latter considered more fitting?

Born That Way

369 Man and woman have been created, which is to say, willed by God: on the one hand, in perfect equality as human persons; on the other, in their respective beings as man and woman. "Being man" or "being woman" is a reality which is good and willed by God: man and woman possess an inalienable dignity which comes to them immediately from God their Creator.²⁴⁰

There's no particular reason that different forms of disagreement with Church's understanding of human nature should be mutually consistent, and yet I can't help but be struck by the irony: in an era when some people are arguing that homosexual acts should be approved because gay and lesbian people are "born that way," other people (or occasionally the same people, just depending on whether the tides are high or low) are arguing that biological maleness and femaleness are basically irrelevant to what sort of people we are. To the latter camp, suggesting otherwise is the great sin of essentialism. "Biology is not destiny" was one of the classic feminist slogans.

Think about it.

We are sometimes asked, on the basis of far-from-conclusive evidence of "gay genes," to revise longstanding Church teaching on the morality of homosexual behaviour. It's simply not true that sexual "orientation" cannot be changed, even if most people's sexual tendencies remain relatively stable over time. But the significance of the incontrovertibly genetic matter of biological sex? So often, progressive folk both outside and within the Church treat differences between men and women as boiling down to culture and socialization. The fond hope is sometimes expressed that if nice gender-neutral models of behaviour are presented to kids at a young enough age, then the little ones may grow up to escape the trap of rigid gender roles. Well, funnily enough, most boys and girls, even when they've had hardly any time to be socialized into masculinity or femininity, still manage to display remarkably sex-specific behaviour patterns. (I'm not a parent, but I've attended a couple of birthday parties for four-year-olds.)

"Each for the other" - "A unity in two"

371 God created man and woman together and willed each for the other. The Word of God gives us to understand this through various features of the sacred text. "It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him."²⁴² None of the animals can be man's partner.²⁴³ The woman God "fashions" from the man's rib and brings to him elicits on the man's part a cry of wonder, an exclamation of love and communion: "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."²⁴⁴ Man discovers woman as another "I", sharing the same humanity.

372 Man and woman were made "for each other" - not that God left them half-made and incomplete: he created them to be a communion of persons, in which each can be "helpmate" to the other, for they are equal as persons ("bone of my bones. . .") and complementary as masculine and feminine. In marriage God unites them in such a way that, by forming "one flesh",²⁴⁵ they can transmit human life: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth."²⁴⁶ By transmitting human life to their descendants, man and woman as spouses and parents cooperate in a unique way in the Creator's work.²⁴⁷

Male and female God created us. The complementarity of the sexes is a gift. We'll discuss the main teachings on homosexuality some months from now (CCC 2357-2359), but for now it's important to point to how the moral law there in Part Three follows from the revelation of divine and human nature here in Part One. For many years I failed to understand this. The ol' Garden-of-Eden argument got nowhere with me. Adam and Eve might have been made to be complementary, for all I knew, but even if so, that story applied--I thought--to people with an essence different from mine. What Romans 1 says, though, even before Paul gets around to discussing homosexual perversion (1:26-27), is that the natural order is visible and knowable in light of natural reason (1:19-20). Man and woman were made for each other. This is not arbitrary; it's built into our flesh and bone.

More than could ever be the case for whatever mix of factors makes some people more prone than others to homosexual temptation: in the matter of maleness and femaleness, we are indeed born that way.

Note: I originally posted this on 3 June 2006 on the Catholic Catechism Discussion Blog. I was pleased to discover today that the contents of the CCDB are all archived online at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The bulk of the posts can be found by looking at the archive for 20 August 2006. For another application of the Wayback Machine, see the Sed Contra Archive, my way of helping readers access David Morrison's "Notes from a Life Lived Beyond Gay" blog.

The Good News of the God-Man with the Mysterious Footstool

When the Rev. Tim Chesterton of St Margaret's Anglican Church asks people what the essence of Christianity is, he's often told it's "Love thy neighbour." But as he points out, "Gospel" means good news. "Love thy neighbour" is not good news – it’s good advice.

Which verse from the Old Testament is most frequently quoted in the New Testament? A lot of people think it’s ‘love thy neighbour’, but it isn’t. The most frequently quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament is Psalm 110:1: ‘The LORD says to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”’. Over and over again, when the early Christian preachers tell the story of what God has done in Jesus, they quote this verse....

So the Gospel comes back to this shining conviction: God has made his Son Jesus Christ the Lord of all. And as Lord of all, Jesus is gathering together a people for himself, a people coming from every tribe and language and people and nation. He is making them citizens of the kingdom of God and teaching them the way of life of that kingdom. This is where ‘Love thy neighbour’ fits in, you see; it’s not the centre of the good news, it’s a consequence of it.

Read the whole sermon.

Link thanks to felix hominum.

ITC: Created in the Image of God

In July 2004 the International Theological Commission released a wide-ranging reflection titled "Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God." Human personhood, the significance of debates about cosmology and evolution, the sanctity of marriage as a sign of the love within the Holy Trinity, and our role as stewards of the natural world--there's lots of food for thought here. It's longish but well worth the effort to read it.

How Not to Put Inclusive Language in the Creed

Most of the kids did pretty well in the quiz I gave my Confirmation class today. There was one pretty funny error, though, in the section where they had to fill in the blanks with words missing from the Nicene Creed. One boy wrote,

For us men and for our   women    ,
he came down from     heaven      .

Pontificator on the Population of Hell

Pontificator respectfully disagrees with Pope Benedict.

I believe all such speculating on the numbers of the saved and the damned to be unhelpful, both to the spiritual growth of the faithful and to the evangelistic mission of the Church.
...
And if the majority, perhaps the large majority, of folks will be saved, then odds are I am included in their number! After all, I’m not nearly as wicked as Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. And thus I decline, without even realizing it, the summons to faith.

He points out the limits of what we can say about salvation.

However we may articulate the interior self-communication of God to sinners, we are not permitted to assert as fact that by his Spirit God has regenerated, and thus overcome original sin in, every unbaptized human being. This would reduce the Sacrament of Holy Baptism to symbolic announcement. We may and must proclaim, with John Paul II, that “man—every man without any exception whatever—has been redeemed by Christ” and that therefore “with man—with each man without exception whatever—Christ is in a way united, even when man is unaware of it” (Redemptor hominis 14); and again: “We are dealing with ‘each’ man, for each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption and with each one Christ has united himself for ever through this mystery” (13). We may and must proclaim the work of salvation objectively accomplished in the incarnate Word, who has regenerated human nature by sufferings, death, and resurrection. Yet divine revelation does not allow us to take that further step and announce that the work of salvation is subjectively accomplished in every human being or even most human beings.  There is mystery here that must be respected.

Link thanks to Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex.

Who Can Be Saved?

Avery Cardinal Dulles explains the development from New Testament times through Vatican II of Catholic doctrine on who can attain eternal salvation.

Meanwhile, Sherry at ID reports on a set of attitudes very common among young people, attitudes for which a youth worker called Christian Smith has coined the term Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It goes, she says, with an assumption that all of us are saved, and that all of us have earned our salvation.

The upshot: Most of us are humble where what is called for is magnanimity (the aspiration to accomplish great things for God and others) and we are presumptious where we desparately need a dose of humility. (Just how good am I, really, and what does Jesus Christ have to do with any of this?)

Tom of Disputations puts forward three possibilities:

1. My neighbors can go to hell for all I care.
2. I don't think believing in Jesus makes much of a difference in terms of salvation.
3. I've got to preach Christ to my neighbors.

If I'm skeered of 3 and disapprove of the callousness of 1, then that leaves the waffle of 2. Lord, grant me courage.

Augustine, Okay, But Barth?

According to this quiz, I'm theologically closest to St Augustine and Karl Barth. Judging by the list of candidates (does the name Thomas Aquinas ring any bells?), this quiz is trying to differentiate mostly among Protestant theologians. This might pose a bit of a category problem for Sts Augustine and Anselm, but we all know that Augustine was a proto-Protestant, don't we? Maybe Anselm was too? Ah, I see he was a Doctor of the Church and a Scholastic. Learn sump'n new every day.

Personally I'll be satisfied if I'm theologically in union with whatever our Holy Mother Church declares to have been revealed by God.

Link: Result of Which theologian are you?

           

Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Augustine You have a big view of God and also take human sin and depravity very seriously. Predestination is important for you.           Karl Barth           80% Augustine           80% Anselm           60% Friedrich Schleiermacher           60% John Calvin           40% Jürgen Moltmann           33% Martin Luther           27% Charles Finney           20% Paul Tillich           20% Jonathan Edwards           13%

Link via Simple Massing Priest.

A Structure for Love

(I originally posted this on 19 April 2006 on the now defunct Catholic Catechism Discussion Blog.)

"Structure" isn't the first word most people think of, I bet, when they hear someone talk about love. Probably not the second or the third either. I doubt if it so much as makes most people's top hundred. But here we have this great whopping Catechism with its Parts and Sections and Chapters and Articles and sometimes capital-P Paragraphs and then some subdivisions for which I haven't seen a name but that are labelled with Roman numerals and (pant, pant!) then occasionally some further unnumbered headings and finally (whew!) the numbered paragraphs. It's all a bit overwhelming, isn't it? and for heaven's sakes why do we need all this bleedin' structure if we JUST WANT TO KNOW ABOUT LOVE, DAMMIT! I mean, really!

But the Catechism is very clear that it is in fact directed totally towards love.

The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends. Whether something is proposed for belief, for hope or for action, the love of our Lord must always be made accessible, so that anyone can see that all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from love and have no other objective than to arrive at love. (CCC 25)

How can this be?

In The Cruelty of Heresy, FitzSimons Allison, a retired Episcopal bishop, documents the cruel practical consequences of distorted teachings about God. He spends a good deal of time looking at the Docetic heresy, which he identifies as "the teaching about Christ's spiritual and divine nature that sacrifices his human and historical nature." In Docetism there is effectively no real Incarnation. Genuine love is a matter of relationship, of ongoing engagement with real people with all their problems and all their suffering. Much of what we in the West have thought of as love since the twelfth century, he argues, is a romantic idealization.

Denis de Rougement in his book, Love in the Western World, claims that the repressive measures, ostensibly successful in eliminating the Albigensians, succeeded in driving some of these teachings underground, only to have them rise again as operative elements in the traditional of romantic love in Western civilization. The same ideal of platonic (ideal) love feeding on the romantic agony and exquisite anguish of forbidden or impossible love, and invariably ending in death, is an element of the Albigensian form of Gnosticism.

In the romantic tradition (think Romeo and Juliet),

Lovers scarcely know each other and are more in love with love than with each other. Death always intervenes before there is any significant chance for two people to know each other as they really are. Death, therefore, obscures the need for [the] self-giving kind of love (agape) to supplement and save this romantic love (eros) from its essential preoccupation with self and its idealized projections. The end or destiny of romantic love as a religion is always death, either of the love or of the lovers. Thus death obscures for its adherents the essential self-centeredness and flight that is characteristic of romantic love.

So our society's distorted, ethereal notion of love is one that can comfortably exist in the absence of any sense of structure or form. One revisionist former pastor of mine used to talk, I thought, as if structure were simply a matter of having lots of rules, and arbitrary ones at that, but it's not. Structure is a matter of how things fit together, one with another. God is love. The Holy Trinity is love. Everything we need to know about perfect love we can see in the relationships among the Persons of the Trinity.

In contrast to that fickle and momentary "love" whose end is death, genuine love longs for life, eternal abiding with the beloved. Writes Benedict XVI in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est:

Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25).

It is hardly any wonder that where "what can be known about God" is rejected (see Rom 1:19-21), the moral teaching of the Church is perceived as an arbitrary and unfair collection of rules, and love is believed to mean whatever we want it to mean. That is why it is so refreshing that the Catechism proceeds from the profession of faith as its Part One, in particular starting with the revelation "by which God addresses and gives himself to man" (CCC 14); the sacraments (Part Two), the life of faith (Part Three), and prayer (Part Four) are a natural outgrowth from this Part One.

"This catechism," paragraph 18 says, "is conceived as an organic presentation of the Catholic faith in its entirety" (emphasis in the original). St Paul's great chapter on love, 1 Corinthians 13, follows immediately after the analogy of the body as made up of many members, many organs, each giving of itself for the good of the whole.

The catechism should be seen "as a unified whole" (CCC 18 again). If we decide we don't need to believe in, say, the Assumption of Mary, the consequences may not be as immediately obvious as if we amputate a finger or a hand, but the damage to the integrity of the body is no less real. All the parts of the body have their functions; these may be too deep for me to apprehend in their entirety, but even so, I cannot afford to treat them as unnecessary.

So structure here in the catechism serves to illuminate relationship, serves somehow to lead our notion of love back from escapist Docetic fantasies and back to a more embodied reality. The catechism teaches us to love God as he really is instead of as we in our fallen state would rather have him be.

True Reform

Every true and lasting reform has ultimately sprung from the sanctity of men who were driven by the love of God and of men. Generous, ready to stand to attention to any call from God, yet confident in themselves because confident in their vocation, they grew to the size of beacons and reformers. On the other hand, any reformatory zeal, which instead of springing from personal purity, flashes out of passion, has produced unrest instead of light, destruction instead of construction, and more than once set up evils worse than those it was out to remedy. No doubt "the Spirit breatheth where he will" (John iii. 8): "of stones He is able to raise men to prepare the way to his designs" (Matt. iii. 9). He chooses the instruments of His will according to His own plans, not those of men. But the Founder of the Church, who breathed her into existence at Pentecost, cannot disown the foundations as He laid them. Whoever is moved by the spirit of God, spontaneously adopts both outwardly and inwardly, the true attitude toward the Church, this sacred fruit from the tree of the cross, this gift from the Spirit of God, bestowed on Pentecost day to an erratic world.
--Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge (14 March 1937), quoted by Dreadnought in response to Luke Timothy Johnson