Art of Attack

2011-12-04T13:57:00.001-08:00

The Gospel According to St. John

The Catholics Apologetics Study Bible

Volume 6

Translation and Commentary by Robert A. Sungenis

A Review by Art Sippo

Dr. Bob Sungenis continues his ongoing series in The Catholic Apologetics Study Bible with a Volume on St. John’s Gospel. As in the earlier volumes in this series, Bob brings to bear his masterful command of the Biblical Languages (in this case the Koine Greek of the New Testament) to provide us with and in depth grammatical and exegetical analysis of the Biblical text. Bob also is cognizant of the traditional Patristic and Magisterial teachings on the text as well as more modern commentaries both Catholic and non-Catholic. His goal in this series is to provide a commentary which addresses not only the exegesis of the biblical text but also the relevant apologetic topics that arise in defending the Catholic faith against the erroneous views of those who attack the Church and her teachings.

Bob gives us not only and in depth running commentary but includes several Apologetic excurses on relevant topics which themselves are worth the price of the book. Bob’s erudition in the explication of the biblical text is evident from the very beginning. He engages not only in exegesis but also in comparisons between the various textual sources available to us from antiquity. As such, this commentary will appeal to readers on several levels from the scholarly to the Catholic layperson wishing to develop a deeper understanding of the Gospel of St. John. The exegetical notes are well written and comprehensible to the interested reader as well as providing detailed information for the more advanced student.

What is most laudatory about this commentary is that it is written from a thoroughly CATHOLIC viewpoint that is cognizant not only of the Church’s teachings but also of wider biblical scholarship. One need not fear finding heterodox interpretations or modernist advocacy in this text which is not always the case with other commentaries by allegedly “catholic scholars.”

By its nature, this commentary does not chase down all the possible interpretations of each portion of the text. It instead gives the most logical interpretations based on the simple flow of the narrative in harmony with the rest of the New Testament and Catholic teaching. Various scholarly controversies are mentioned when they are relevant to Catholic apologetics or when they are helpful in explicating the text.

St. John’s Gospel is a unique voice in the New Testament. While it is obviously dependent in part on the Synoptic Tradition that underlies the other three Gospels, St. John’s Gospel includes material that is unavailable elsewhere and which was critically important in the development of dogmatic theology especially in regards to Christology, the Trinity, Mariology, the sacraments, and ecclesiology.

There are numerous passages in which Jesus speaks about his relationship to the Father (e. g., John 3:35, 5:17, 6:57, 10:15, 10:30) and to the Holy Spirit (e.g., John 14:26, 15:26, 16:13, 20:22,). The locus classicus for the necessity of water Baptism for salvation is in John 3:5ff. Chapter 6 contains the ‘Bread of Life Discourse’ (John 6:48-69) which clearly explicates the Real Presence of Christ – body, blood, soul, and divinity – in the Holy Eucharist. The Blessed Virgin Mary also figures prominently. In this Gospel she encourages Jesus to perform his first public miracle at the wedding feast of Cana (John 2:1-11). And she is there at the foot of the Cross where Jesus as he was dying placed her in the care of the Beloved Disciple to be his mother. The story of the Good Shepherd (John 10) juxtaposed with the post resurrection story where Jesus tells St. Peter “Feed my lambs, tend my sheep” (John 21:15-18) is one of the strongest biblical witnesses to the divine origin of a permanent Papal office in the Church.In fact, many new converts to Christianity have found reading St. John’s Gospel to be beneficial in their initial walk with Christ. Properly expounded, St. John’s Gospel is an important witness to the biblical origin of the Catholic Faith.

The narrative of this Gospel is seen from the perspective of an unnamed eyewitness to the events depicted therein who is described as the “Beloved Disciple.” Traditionally this person has been identified with St. John, the son of Zebedee and brother of St. James the Greater. Other scholars have proposed a different identity for the beloved disciple but Dr. Sungenis convincingly defends the traditional identification in his commentary. He also makes it clear that the gospel was written so that we the readers of the Gospel can identify with the Beloved Disciple and put ourselves into his place in the story. Everything Jesus addressed to the Beloved Disciple therefore is to be understood as addressed to the reader. The giving of the Blessed virgin to the Beloved disciple as his mother therefore takes on special relevance for the reader. She is meant to be our mother as well. Thus, this viewpoint makes the narrative more personal and immediately compelling than any other text in the New Testament.

The excurses in this volume –as in all the volumes of The Catholic Apologetics Bible Series – are of excellent value and deserve to be read and studied carefully several times. The is one on the Christological heresies, three on the Eucharist, a very timely one on the Inerrancy of Scripture, and one on the Council of Trent and its teaching on Confession.The three excurses on the Eucharist are particularly noteworthy. Bob interacts with several anti-Catholic controversialists and refutes their objections with his superb knowledge of Greek. Bob also bring to the defense of Catholic teaching certain modern Protestant exegetes (most notably Rudolph Bultmann and C. K. Barrett) who acknowledge that the Bread of life discourse is clearly referring to the Holy Eucharist and that the sacramentality of St. John’s Gospel at this point is very ‘High’ and realistic as opposed to being merely symbolic as some Protestants have tried to claim.

This is an important commentary that I think everyone involved in Catholic apologetics, evangelization, and catechesis should own and study. It is a serious piece of Catholic Scholarship that remains accessible to the people in the pew. It is almost indispensable for anyone leading a Bible Study on St. John’s Gospel in a parish. I hope that this book receives a wide readership because I think it will bear great fruit within the Catholic Church.Ilook forward to further volumes in this series.

A Brief Refutation of Gregg R. Allison's Critique of Catholicism

2011-08-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

A Brief Refutation of Gregg R. Allison's Critique of Catholicism

In a recent book of essays from the Protestant perspective (The Lord's Supper: Remembering and Proclaiming Christ Until He Comes edited by Thomas Schreiner and Matthew R Crawford) Gregg R. Allison wrote an article “The Theology of the Eucharist according to the Catholic Church.” In this article, Mr. Allison portrays himself as an ‘expert’ on Catholicism alleging that he had worked closely with various Catholic evangelistic organizations. Maybe he was around those organizations, but not as a sympathetic observer. Rather he was an undercover saboteur trying to find fault with Catholicism. Mr. Allison’s hatchet job on the Eucharist and the Catholic understanding of it is quite typical of Protestants. He first asserts the superiority of his own personal interpretation of the Bible and then acts as if the Catholic Church is remiss for not agreeing with him. It never dawns on him that much of his interpretations are colored by modernist skepticism and confessional bias. His presupposition is always that the Catholic Church is wrong and the Protestant Deformers were right. He is never able to transcend his own wishful thinking and to confront the reality that the religions that have resulted from Protestant Pandemonium are in direct contradiction with the LITERAL words of Scripture at the most fundamental point imaginable and that there may be other ways of interpreting the Bible other than his own.

As a Catholic, I have always attempted to understand the Protestant viewpoint from their perspective of Sola Scriptura. Invariably, when doing so, I have found that their interpretations were forced, highly selective, and contradictory to the very words of Scripture. It is particularly disturbing that they ignore what Jesus Christ himself had to say and put their misrepresentations of St. Paul in pride of place over the clear literal words of my Lord and Savior.

It is also quite disturbing that so much of their objections to Catholicism are virtually identical with secular skepticism. When they attack the Church, they act like infidels. When they confront atheists, they fall back on Catholic authorities such as St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Molinos, and G. K. Chesterton. Furthermore, they advance the Bible as an independent authority with which to attack historic Catholicism while ignoring the fact that everything they claim about the Bible (authority, inspiration, canon, devotion, etc.) is derived from the actions and teaching of the Church. The false religions of the Deformation presuppose the authority of the Catholic Church while simultaneously denying that authority and in fact mocking it.

And to make matters worse, the scions of the Deformation assert that the authority of mere human scholarship is capable of discerning the eternal verities revealed in Scripture. Meanwhile they dismiss the Teaching Authority of the Catholic Church as if it were mere human opinion, identical in kind to their own man-made systems of thinking.

In fact Catholicism has always taught that the Scriptures, Tradition, and the Magisterium all have the Holy Spirit as their guarantor of truth. Human scholarly efforts have always been made subservient to the superintendence of the Holy Spirit in the church throughout the ages. The opinions of mere men – no matter how educated or erudite – must be subservient to the Gospel which has been preserved in the Catholic Church.

By comparison, the multitudinous and contradictory ravings of the Deformers and those whom they have duped is merely the attempt of sinful men to create for themselves religions that ‘tickle their ears’ and have no divine warrant behind them. This is nothing more than disobedience and rebellion against God, his Christ, his Spirit, and the Church that they have founded for us. Protestantism is theological Pelagianism where the grace of God is absent in ecclesial affairs and in teaching doctrine. Instead, glib demagogues oppress people searching for Christ using mere human rhetoric.

There is a large amount of objectionable nonsense in Mr. Allison’s article. I will focus on just a few themes to demonstrate how poorly he understands the topics he claims to know and to show how fallacious certain of his assertions truly are.

The following is a quotation from pages 180-181 of the book cited above:

The formal principle of Protestantism is Scripture only; its material principle is justification by grace through faith alone. This doctrine also clashes with the Catholic doctrine of salvation and its insistence that the call to God's beatitude is experienced through (1) keeping the law; (2) justification, consisting not only of the reception of forgiveness of sins and divine righteousness, but including the renewal of sinful human nature. (3) cooperation with grace so as to love and engage in good deeds, by which sanctification is increased and eternal life is merited; and (4) involvement in the sacramental economy of the Church, especially through participation in the seven sacraments by which grace is communicated. From an evangelical perspective, (1) no one can keep the law and be justified before God (Rom 3:20; Gal 2:16-21); (2) justification is the forensic declaration of God that one is not guilty, but righteous instead, not because of any intrinsic righteousness of one's own or infused righteousness from the sacraments, but because the righteousness of Christ is imputed to one's account (Rom 3:21-4:8); and (3) the synergy of the heart in the Catholic notion of human cooperation with divine grace destroys grace and merits nothing more than condemnation, for salvation leading to eternal life is the gift of God apart from human works (Eph 2: 1-10).

As for (4) the sacramental economy of the Catholic Church, this concept is so far removed from Scripture (and even early church history) that no Protestant denomination has an ecclesiology that even remotely resembles it. The explanation for how Christ's sacrifice on the cross nearly 2,000 years ago is re-presented each time that Liturgy of the Eucharist is celebrated -- an appeal to the Pascal mystery's participation in the eternality of God -- is a theological construct without biblical warrant.

Mr. Allison begins by asserting without warrant – biblical or otherwise – what he considers to be the formal and material principles of Protestantism. The claim that the Scriptures alone should formally determine doctrine is NOT taught in the Bible. Nor was it ever held in the Church prior to the Deformation. In fact there are several places where it is clearly stated in Scripture that the Bible does no stand alone as the source of the Christian religion.

2Th 2:15 Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

2Th 3:6 ¶ Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walks disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us.

1Cr 11:
23 For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread,
24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

So we can see that St. Paul himself clearly advocated the authority of Christian tradition. So much so that he equated such traditions to the Scriptures themselves.
This next quotation is critically important because it relates some post-resurrection appearances of Christ that are attested to nowhere else in Scripture. The entire Church had received these stories as part of their traditions and St. Paul bears witness to the authority of those traditions:

1 Cr 15:
1 Now I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand,
2 by which you are saved, if you hold it fast -- unless you believed in vain.
3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,
4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,
5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

The next quotation is often twisted by Protestants to mean the exact opposite of what it says. It is critically important to read this quotation IN CONTEXT to fully understand it:

2Ti 3:
12 Indeed all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted
13 while evil men and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceivers and deceived.
14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it
15 and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
16 All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

In this quotation St. Paul says that there are 3 sources for sound doctrine and moral teaching:

1. Continue in what you have learned (Tradition)
2. Knowing from whom you learned it (Magisterium)
3. And… you have been acquainted with the sacred writings (Scripture)

Note well that Tradition comes first, Magisterium comes second, and Scripture comes third. This is not a minor matter. What distinguished the early Christians from the Pharisees was not that the use of Scripture because the Pharisees themselves were Scriptural experts. What distinguished the early Christians from their Jewish counterparts was their INTERPRETATION of the Scriptures (i.e., the Christian Tradition) and the TEACHING AUTHORITY of the Apostles who because of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost were ALONE capable of rightly dividing the word.
The position of Scripture in this quotation therefore was as a SUPPLEMENT to Tradition and Magisterium. It does not stand on its own and it certainly is not considered to be solitary in its importance. It is by adding Scripture to Tradition and the Magisterium that the man of God is made complete.

Pope St. Peter in his second Encyclical wrote to confirm this:

2Pt 1:
12 Therefore I intend always to remind you of these things, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have.
13 I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to arouse you by way of reminder,
14 since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ showed me.
15 And I will see to it that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things.
16 For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
17 For when he received honor and glory from God the Father and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,"
18 we heard this voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.
19 And we have the prophetic word made more sure. You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
20 First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation,
21 because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

Pope St. Peter makes it clear that the Christian people have the “prophetic word made more sure.” The ‘prophetic word’ here clearly refers to the Bible. St. Peter reminds the reader that he was present at the Transfiguration and the deepest of truths was revealed to him by God himself. He and the other Apostles were “men moved by the Holy Spirit who spoke from God” and were not the purveyors of their “own interpretation” as Protestants claim to be. The Holy Spirit revealed guided St. Peter and the Apostles so that their teaching is “a lamp shining in a dark place” and so the Christian people “do well to pay attention to” them.

This echoes the words of Jesus in St. John’s Gospel:

John 14:
12 "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father.
13 Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son;
14 if you ask anything in my name, I will do it.
15 "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
16 And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you forever,
17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you…
25 "These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you.
26 But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

John 15:
26 But when the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me;
27 and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning.
John 16:
7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.
8 And when he comes, he will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment:
9 concerning sin, because they do not believe in me;
10 concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no more;
11 concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.
12 "I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
14 He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
15 All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Jesus clearly says that he will send the Holy Spirit to the Church after his Ascension (which is what happened at Pentecost). That Spirit will be the spirit of truth that will not only remind us of what Jesus said but also lead us into all truth. That Spirit will be “he dwells with you, and will be in you.” Clearly this is referring to the Spirit that St. Paul describes as being given at the time of ordination of the Apostle St. Timothy to the Christian ministry:

2Tim 1:
6 Hence I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands;
7 for God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control.
Jesus also taught this to the Apostles:

Matthew 10:
17 Beware of men; for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues,
18 and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them and the Gentiles.
19 When they deliver you up, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour;
20 for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

So obviously this promise of the Spirit was to those in ordained ministry which is why Apostolic Succession is critical. No Protestant sect has Apostolic Succession and thus none of them are protected from error or guaranteed to teach sound doctrine. The minister ordained in Apostolic Succession receives the Holy Spirit and will not speak by his own authority (or his own scholarship, or his own opinion). He will rather bear witness to Christ and glorify only him.

Another serious deficiency in Sola Scriptura should be noted. Protestants constantly refer to the Pauline Epistles – most notably Romans and Galatians – as the very touchstones through which sound doctrine should be defined, yet the Book of Acts which describes the time period in St. Paul’s career when the major Pauline epistles were written makes no mention of their composition or their collection. Neither does Acts mention the composition of any of the Four Gospels even though we know that at least one of them (i.e., Luke) was written before Acts. In short, the Epistles of St. Paul and the Gospels were not considered important enough to be mention in Acts. The authority, collection, exposition, and inspiration of the New Testament is a dogma of the Church, not a teaching of the Bible. The Protestant claim otherwise is pure hypocrisy.

Now I am aware that Protestants have tried to cobble together new interpretations of some of these verses in order to justify their disobedience and rebellion. I have read their objections and they are laughable. They do exactly what Pope St. Peter warned us about in his Second Encyclical:

2Pet 3:
14 Therefore, beloved, since you wait for these, be zealous to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.
15 And count the forbearance of our Lord as salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him,
16 speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.
17 You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, beware lest you be carried away with the error of lawless men and lose your own stability.
18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.

We see that the formal principle of Protestantism is not biblical. The material principle fairs no better.

‘Justification by faith alone’ was called by Luther “the doctrine on which the Church stands or falls.” Mr. Allison rephrases this material principle of the Deformation as ‘justification by grace through faith alone.’ It doesn’t matter. Neither formulation is present in the Bible, his alleged ‘sole rule of faith.’
In fact there is only one verse in all of scripture in which the words ‘to justify’, ‘faith,’ and ‘alone’ occur together:

James 2: 24 You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

This fact always astonished me. Protestants are arrogant and self-righteous. They treat Catholic as if we were morons who do not know the Bible. Yet here the material principle upon which their entire apostasy was based LITERALLY CONTRADICTS the simple words of Scripture.

As a Catholic, I am not interested in slogans or snippets taken out of context as the Protestants do so often. I will quote the larger context in which this verse occurs so there will be no ambiguity as to what St. James writing under divine inspiration was clearly saying.

James 2:
14 What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him?
15 If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food,
16 and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?
17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
18 But someone will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.
19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe -- and shudder.
20 Do you want to be shown, you shallow man, that faith apart from works is barren?
21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar?
22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works,
23 and the scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness"; and he was called the friend of God.
24 You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.
25 And in the same way was not also Rahab the harlot justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way?
26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead.

Protestant controversialists have several dodges for avoiding the obvious problems here. Some claim that St. James was not talking about justification in the soteriological sense but merely in the simple demonstrative sense before men. They try to justify themselves by pointing to verse 18 and claiming that good works are merely the fruit of justification so that other people can see that you are saved. Verse 14 above, though, demonstrates that this won’t work. It asks the rhetorical question whether a faith without good works save a man. The implied answer in the Koine Greek idiom and in English is “No.” Clearly, the justification St. James has in mind is soteriological. Furthermore, verse 18 is pointing out the hypocrisy of the claim that faith lone saves. Anybody can say they believe and there is no way to prove it one way or the other. But real faith results in actions. (N.B. - It does not START with actions but results in them. Mr. Allison in his essay repeats the common slander that Catholics think that their works done in co-operation with grace saves them. This is a lie as I will show later.)

St. James clarifies his position in verse 22 where he says that “that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works.” St. James sees good works as an integral part of faith, not an optional or merely incidental result of it. In fact faith in jesus is INCOMPLETE without good works.

None of this is new. It echoes the teachings of both Jesus himself and St. Paul:

Matt 7:
13 "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.
14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.
15 "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
16 You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?
17 So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit.
18 A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.
19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
20 Thus you will know them by their fruits.
21 "Not everyone who says to me, `Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
22 On that day many will say to me, `Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?'
23 And then will I declare to them, `I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.'

This following quotation from Jesus is most important because in it, he roundly condemns the whole idea of ‘justification by faith alone’ and the external imputation of an alien righteousness to one’s account.’ Clearly Jesus wants his disciples to have an intrinsic righteousness.

Matt 23:
23 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.
24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!
25 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you cleanse the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of extortion and rapacity.
26 You blind Pharisee! First cleanse the inside of the cup and of the plate, that the outside also may be clean.
27 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.
28 So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
Jesus also tells us several times that we are to keep the commandments::

Matt 19:
16 And behold, one came up to him, saying, "Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?"
17 And he said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments."
18 He said to him, "Which?" And Jesus said, "You shall not kill, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness,
19 Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Luke 10:
25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
26 He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read?"
27 And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."
28 And he said to him, "You have answered rightly; do this, and you will live."

John 14: 15 "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

John 15:
9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love.
10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.
11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

St. Paul echoes this:

Rom 2:
5 But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.
6 For he will render to every man according to his works:
7 to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life;
8 but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.
9 There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek,
10 but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek.
11 For God shows no partiality.
12 All who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.
13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.
14 When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.
15 They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them
16 on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

Rom 13:
8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.
9 The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet," and any other commandment, are summed up in this sentence, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

Gal 5:
1 For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
2 Now I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you.
3 I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is bound to keep the whole law.
4 You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.
5 For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness.
6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love…
13 For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another.
14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself…"
19 Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness,
20 idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit,
21 envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
23 gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law.
24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.

Mr. Allison claims that Rom 3:20 and Gal 2:16ff show that a man cannot be justified by works. Strictly speaking, we Catholics agree with this. Works ALONE cannot save. Neither can works after justification merit eternal life in the strict sense. Yet it is clear that the Bible teaches that good works are necessary for salvation. We will explore how this is explained later on.

The problem with Mr. Allison is that he has been duped by the errors of Luther in reading St. Paul. Luther assumed that the phrase ‘works of the law’ used by St. Paul meant that no works done according to any moral principle could possibly please God. This lead him to misinterpret these following verses:

Rom 3:20 20 For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Gal 2: 16 yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified.

Happily, the New Perspective on St. Paul (a Protestant scholarly movement based on Sola Scriptura) has pointed out the deficiency here and is trying to correct it. The phrase ‘works of the law’ does not refer to all attempts at acting according to moral principal. Rather it is referring SPECIFICALLY to keeping all of the precepts of the Mosaic law according to the Sinai Covenant.

This was obvious to me when I first read Romans and Galatians. I was shocked to find out that Protestants who allegedly were committed to the Bible could not see this.

This quotation in Romans makes the point succinctly:

Rom 3:
28 For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law,
29 or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also,
30 since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith.
31 Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

According to St. Paul, the ‘works of the law’ that he is opposing are those that God expects of Jews and not from Gentiles. The only law that fits this profile is the Mosaic law. So it is only distinctly JEWISH works that St. Paul finds to be unnecessary. Truly good works that proceed from love of neighbor actually fulfill the moral requirements inherent in the Law of Moses (Rom 13). It is the LETTER of the Mosaic Law that is not necessary. The SPIRIT of that law is still required.

St. Paul gives us a clear definition of what it means to be saved in Romans 6. Sadly for Mr. Allison and his co-religionists, it is the diametric OPPOSITE of what they believe. I will quote that chapter in its entirety:

Rom 6:
1 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?
3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
6 We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.
7 For he who has died is freed from sin.
8 But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.
9 For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.
10 The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.
11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.
13 Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness.
14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
16 Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,
18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification.
20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
21 But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death.
22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life.
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

St. Paul tells us here that we are regenerated by baptism and made into a new creation. That means that we are truly made righteous and have been infused with the very Spirit of Christ himself. We are no longer slaves of sin but now we have become slaves of righteousness. We have: “become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed” (v. 17). But even more importantly, “now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life.” So we find that it is not justification that gains us eternal life but sanctification which even Protestants agree is the renewal of the whole person by the grace of God working within us.

So in Romans 6 we see:
1. The necessity of the sacramental life for the salvation of the Christian
2. Baptismal regeneration
3. The renewal of the inner man that make the baptized Christian inherently righteous
4. We become a new creation and are now empowered to please God
5. Our walking in newness of life sanctifies us more and more
6. It is this process of sanctification that secures for us eternal life
7. The entire process is by grace and thus is a gift from God and not from our own efforts.
8. Nor is this a combination of our efforts and God’s grace.
9. Grace works within us and all the responsibility for our salvation rests in God

This 9 point schema is in fact the Catholic dogma with regard to salvation.

One last point I want to confront is Mr. Allison’s assertion that “The explanation for how Christ's sacrifice on the cross nearly 2,000 years ago is re-presented each time that Liturgy of the Eucharist is celebrated -- an appeal to the Pascal mystery's participation in the eternality of God -- is a theological construct without biblical warrant.”

First of all the New Testament is clear that Jesus Christ offered himself as an eternal sacrifice and an ongpoing mediator for mankind:

Heb 7:
14 For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests.
15 This becomes even more evident when another priest arises in the likeness of Melchizedek,
16 who has become a priest, not according to a legal requirement concerning bodily descent but by the power of an indestructible life.
17 For it is witnessed of him, "Thou art a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek."
18 On the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness
19 (for the law made nothing perfect); on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.
20 And it was not without an oath.
21 Those who formerly became priests took their office without an oath, but this one was addressed with an oath, "The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, `Thou art a priest forever.'"
22 This makes Jesus the surety of a better covenant.
23 The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office;
24 but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues for ever.
25 Consequently he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.
26 For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners, exalted above the heavens.
27 He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did this once for all when he offered up himself.
28 Indeed, the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect for ever.

Heb 9:
11 But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation)
12 he entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.
13 For if the sprinkling of defiled persons with the blood of goats and bulls and with the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purification of the flesh,
14 how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
15 Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred which redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant.

Heb 9:24 For Christ did not enter a holy place made with hands, a mere copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us;

Rom 8:34 who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.

1 John 2:
1 My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;
2 and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

We also have the clear words of Jesus that the Eucharist IS his body and blood and not a mere representation of it:

John 6:
48 I am the bread of life.
49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.
50 This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die.
51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh."
52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
53 So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you;
54 he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
55 For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
56 He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.
57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.
58 This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever."
59 This he said in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.
60 Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?"
61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at it, said to them, "Do you take offense at this?
62 Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before?
63 It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
64 But there are some of you that do not believe." For Jesus knew from the first who those were that did not believe, and who it was that would betray him.
65 And he said, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father."
66 After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.
67 Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?"
68 Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life;
69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God."

The usual Protestant denial of the clear meaning of this quotation is that Jesus was merely speaking figuratively, not literally. It is easily refuted. First of all, the Jews obviously took Jesus at his word and did not think that a figurative explanation was what he intended. Secondly, Jesus could very easily have allayed the objections of the Jews by saying that he was merely talking in symbols, but he did not. He insisted that they take him literally.

Another Protestant objection is that in verse 63, Jesus says that he is talking “in spirit and in truth” which they claim once again implies a merely ‘spiritual’ or symbolic meaning. But Jesus is saying something far more profound and disturbing. He is warning the crowds that they who do not accept the necessity of eating his literal body and blood are not true believers and have not received the Holy Spirit. They are merely carnal people who cannot discern the truth of God’s word. In short, those who deny the Substantial Presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist are manifesting a sign of not being members of the Elect of God.

Finally, Mr. Allison and others of his ilk fall back on the old standby that Jesus was OBVIOUSLY talking symbolically about the Eucharist. Sadly, this is the most egregious calumny of all. Mr. Allison and his confreres try to force fit their modern secular skepticism as if it were normative in the First Century. As I noted earlier, the Jews who heard Jesus did not think he was speaking figuratively and neither did the Christians who followed the teachings of the Apostles. The Consensus of the Church Fathers was that Christ was substantially present – body, blood, soul, and divinity – in the Eucharist. Retrojecting modern skepticism into the New Testament is poor scholarship. Jesus meant LITERALLY what he said and I have faith in him. I will follow what he has taught. I have no faith at all in Protestant dissembling.

With regard to the ‘re-presentation’ of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, it was no accident that Jesus chose the Passover Seder for the institution of the Eucharist. The Seder was regarded by the Jewish people (and still is regarded by Orthodox Jews) as a‘re-presentation’ of the Exodus of the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt. In fact, participation in the Passover Seder was a biblical requirement for all members of the Mosaic Covenant as an eternal ordinance. One who failed to keep the Passover was to be banished from the Land of Israel. According to Numbers 9, if a stranger was in a Jewish home over Passover he was not permitted to participate in the Seder unless he and his entire household (including man servants and slaves) were circumcised and took on the obligation to live according to the Torah from that day forth.

Modern Rabbinic commentators see the obligation to celebrate the Passover as an act of covenant renewal between God and the Jewish people. The Passover is celebrated synchronically in order to capture the original experience of the Hebrews Exodus from Egypt under Moses. This is not merely a remembering but a full participation in this historical event.

In like fashion, the Holy Eucharist is a synchronic celebration of the sacrifice of Christ started at the Last Supper, and ongoing through Jesus’ death and resurrection, culminating in his Ascension into Heaven as an eternal Ascension Offering.

As in Baptism, in the Eucharist we participate in the death, resurrection, and eternal offering of Christ to the Father in Heaven. I cannot imagine anything that is more biblical than that.

A lot more could be said, but I wanted to make my remarks as brief as possible without sacrificing the necessary contextual citing of the Scriptures to give a robust biblical defense of the Catholic faith. Me. Allison obvious does not know his Bible very well. Even worse, he is still blinded by his confessional bias so that he refuses to see what is clearly in Scripture. He is not the expert on Catholicism or on Scripture that he thinks he is. He needs to stop and reflect on his own inadequacies and accept that the modernist views of Protestants are not the only possible ways of interpreting Scripture.

Book Review: "Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision" by N. T.Wright

2010-08-02T15:51:00.000-07:00

The theological position of Martin Luther, John Calvin and the other 16th Century Deformers has for almost 500 years been claimed to be the result of sound biblical interpretation of the writings of St. Paul. In particular, the Deformers and their descendants have emphasized St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans and in a lesser way his Epistle to the Galatians as providing proof that righteousness before God was a matter of faith alone in Christ and his promises without the necessity of good works. Over the centuries the strident anti-nominanism that the original Deformers advocated was often modified such as in the Arminian-Wesleyan Tradition. But mainstream Lutherianism insisted that the act of human faith alone was salvific while Calvinoids insisted that the irresistible grace of regeneration given only to God's elect must precede the act of faith for it to truly save. In virtually all Protestant systems the imputation of an alien righteousness -- that is, an external righteousness applied to the believer in some sort of forensic exchange -- was what made a person righteous before God. The process was seen as passive with any disposition to good works being seen as a mere by-product that had at best evidentiary value but did not contribute in any way towards ones standing with God. This process was known as Justification. In the more mechanistic versions of this doctrine, the sinfulness of humans was imputed to Christ while the perfect human goodness of Jesus was imputed to the believer. Thus God punished Jesus as a sin bearer for human offenses and there was no need of our suffering at all. This was the doctrine of penal substitution that has been most popular in Calvinism and the more Puritanical forms of Anglicanism.

Patristic and Medieval Catholicism as well as Eastern Orthodoxy insisted that the process of becoming righteous before God was not a merely forensic declaration or an imputational exchange but an a transformation of the person brought about by the active power of grace. Catholicism always saw the relationship between the believer and God primarily as one of "adoptive sonship" in which the believer is changed from a condition of wrathbefore God to that of a partaker of the Divine nature. Orthodoxy uses the term 'Divinization.' This transformation was initiated by an act of faith that lead to baptism which itself was seen as an instrumental means of one joining the household of God. (See Romans 6.) The exact details of this transformation were a matter of discussion among different schools.

The official Catholic doctrine itself was not as strictly defined as those of the various Protestant groups and would continue to develop over the centuries. It would not be until the Jansenist controversy in the 18th Century that some of the fine points would be hammered out. Even so, there is still much more diversity in Catholicism on this issue than there is in any individual Protestant sect.

The difference between Catholics/Orthodox and Protestants was between a divinized humanity and a re-humanized humanity. Between being children of God or servants of God.

The crucial distinction came down to what it meant when St. Paul said we were "justified by faith apart from works of the law." If he meant by this ANY works of ANY law, then no transformation is needed and righteousness could be imputed. Good works then MIGHT flow from gratitude but were not necessary for one to be considered in right relationship with God. If it was more narrowly construed to mean works of a particular law (e.g., the Mosaic law) then it was only one condition that did not necessarily exclude others and this opened up the possibility that being righteous before God could be construed as a new covenantal relationship. That is, a relationship of the reciprocal donation of God's life to us and our life to Him.

Since the early 1960s there has been a growing movement among PROTESTANT biblical scholars which began to recognize that the focus of St. Paul's letters was primarily on the place of the Gentiles within the Church and not on works righteousness. They all so emphasize that the anti-nomianism of Luther et al is notoriously absent from the Bible. Krister Stendahl from Harvard wrote the first major piece mentioning this and others have followed including W. D. Davies, E. P. Sanders, and James D. G. Dunn. Collectively the position of these men and others who have had this insight have been known as "The New Perspective on Paul." (As a Catholic, I insist on calling it "The New Perspective on St. Paul .")

The most recent contribution to the New Perspective is a book by the Anglican scholar N. T. Wright entitled "Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision." This represents the watershed of the New Perspective on the matter of Justification and is essential reading for any Catholic Apologist. With only minor quibbles, I believe that Wright has gotten it right! He shows the flaws in the Protestant position which are due to a systematic theological anti-Semitism which sees far too many discontinuities between St. Paul and pre-Christian Judaism.

Dr. Wright is the author of a three volume work called "Christian Origins and the Question of God." The three volumes are:

The New Testament and the People of God

Jesus and the Victory of God

The Resurrection of the Son of God

He also did a supplementary volume that dealt with his views on the law in St. Paul:

The Climax of the Covenant: Christ And The Law In Pauline Theology

The volume under review here distills Dr. Wright's views from these very technical books into a format accessible to a more popular audience. In it he also addresses numerous criticisms that have been made of his position by Protestant dogmatists like John Piper who want desperately to affirm Protestant systematic theology no matter what the Bible actually says.

Dr. Wright is a critical advocate of the New Perspective. He finds some of the material by Sanders and Dunn to be too theological and not well informed enough by an understanding of 1st Century Judaism. Nevertheless, he makes it clear that the theological and exegetical views of Luther and later scions of the Deformation with regard to St. Paul can no longer be maintained. He also makes it clear that he follows the New Perspective in seeing St. Paul's primary opponents within the nascent Church as the Judaizers who wanted to extend the need for circumcision and a full Torah lifestyle to Gentile Christian converts. The question of "works righteousness" from the later Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian controversies really has no place here.

As Dr. Wright sees it, St. Paul envisions the righteousness of God as covenant faithfulness. God had promised Abraham that he and his descendants would be a blessing to all the nations. In return, they would be God's own chosen people. While Israel had failed to keep up their end of the covenant with God, God did not falter on His end and He sent Jesus so that His promises could be fulfilled. Dr. Wright favors the general views of John Calvin with regard to Israel over that of Martin Luther. Luther generally found the law to be a negative standard that brought troubled consciences to despair. Calvin on the other hand understood that "the Mosaic law was given as a way of life for a people already redeemed." {Wright, Justification, pg 72} In other words, Israel was redeemed by God FOR the Law that they should walk in it afterwards. (This echoes St. Paul's teaching in Ephesians 2:8-10.)

But Calvin went too far making it seem that there was no need for the pursuit of a moral life. In his view, if one has been elected, then one was guaranteed to be saved and works performed after receiving the grace of justification played no part in one's righteous state before God. As Dr. Wright points out this viewpoint is inconsistent with Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and for that matter with the moral exhortations in the rest of Scripture in both Testaments {Wright, Justification, pg 75}. Instead, St. Paul makes it clear in his letters that a New Covenant has come in Christ as prophesied to Abraham (Gen 18:18), Isaiah (Isa 49:6-7; 55:5, 60:3, 66:18-21), Zechariah (Zec 8), and Jeremiah (Jer 1:5, 3:17, 4:2, 31:31ff). This New Covenant will not be just with Israel but all of the nations.

Most importantly, Dr. Wright understands that the New Covenant will come with new responsibilities that we are expected to carry out as God's Holy People. He points out that there are 3 concepts used by St. Paul to described the work of Christ in His followers: justification, sanctification, and redemption. There has been a tendency to see these words as interchangeable but in fact they represent 3 different aspects of salvation.

Justification is the new standing that we have before God through our union with Christ. Dr. Wright spends quite a bit of time explaining this in the book. It is crucial to understanding his views. He sees justification as the declaration in the here and now that God has accepted the Christian as a member of His people in anticipation of the consummation of all things at the Eschaton. So it has both an already/not yet character. The inherent tentative state this places the believer in puts Wright at odds with dogmatic Calvinism. For him, justification looks to the future, not to some 'eternal decree' in the deep distant past. Dr. Wright also sees this condition in covenantal terms. The justified are related to God as covenant partners and so reciprocal obligations are placed on both God and the believer. These important distinction cause quite a bit of trouble for Wright among his Protestant confreres.

Sanctification in St. Paul is "the actual life of holiness through the power of God working in them by the power of the Holy Spirit." {Wright, Justification, pg 156}. Redemption is the accomplishment that God has made on our behalf. All three of these are necessary for salvation in Wright's interpretation.

This understanding is very important for it supports the Catholic view on Justification. The Council Trent teaches that Justification is best described as "the adoption of sons" {Trent, Session 6, Chapters 2 & 4}. This is in essence our new standing before God.

Sanctification is the process by which we are inwardly renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit {Trent, Session 6, Chapters 7, 10, & 11}. St. Paul clearly teaches that it is through that we gain eternal life (Rom 6:22).

Redemption is the work done by God that enables us to be justified and sanctified. Apart from this redemptive work, we remain sinners before God and nothing we can do will please Him. {Trent, Session 6, Chapters 2, 3, & 6}.

Dr. Wright's exposition of St. Paul clearly rejects the main themes from Deformation theology while giving ample Biblical support for the Catholic Church's own views on salvation.

Dr. Wright makes some brief comments on the Catholic view showing very sadly that he does not understand it. Following the misinterpretations of the Caroline Divines of his own Anglicanism, he assumes that the Catholic understanding of redemption "goes too far" expecting us to made virtually impeccable by sanctifying grace. This error led many Anglicans in the past to seek a 'via media' (middle way) for their theology between the 'extremes' of Protestantism on the one hand and Catholicism on the other.

To the contrary, the Catholic view is that we are enabled by grace to grow in the knowledge and wisdom of God and to conform ourselves to the image of His Son. The grace of initial conversion is not the end for us but the first steps as children in God's own family. Growing grace is the Catholic way of understanding anticipation of the Eschaton. It is why - following Judaism - we Catholics believe there is purgation after death to prepare the soul for the resurrection.

Dr. Wright's book is absolutely indispensable for any Catholic who wants to understand what St. Paul actually taught and how to understand the Pauline corpus in the New Testament. Reading it you will see the biblical foundations of Catholic theology made plain and you will better understand why the Church rejected Luther, Calvin, et al for their errors.

READ THIS BOOK!

Where have you been Dr. Sippo?

2010-06-15T14:38:00.001-07:00

Hi, folks!

Sorry I have been inactive here. My life has become quite busy in the last few year and I have not been doing much on this blog. Nevertheless, I will be back. More time is opening for me and I anxious to get some new postings up.

Coming soon:

Review of N. T. Wright's book "Justification: God's Plan and Paul's vision"

Review of John Salza's book, "The Mystery of Predestination"

Review of Gordon Fee's lecture series on Romans

So stay tuned!

Book Review: Catholic Apologetic Study Bible Volume III: The Epistles of Romans and James by Robert Sungenis PhD

2009-10-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

Catholic Apologist Dr. Robert Sungenis has published a landmark book which in my opinion should be read by anyone who is serious about Catholic Apologetics. It is the Catholic Apologetic Study Bible Volume III: The Epistles of Romans and James. Bob is a former Protestant Minister who converted to Catholicism in the early 1990s. He brought with him a great love of the Scriptures and in depth knowledge of the Greek language which he has used effectively in writings and debates with non-Catholics. Bob has a somewhat controversial history and he and I have agreed to disagree on several points, but he is a first class biblical exegete and his new book is likely the best commentary on Romans and James that is available for the Catholic Apologist.

St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans and St. James' Epistle were the two biblical books that were most controversial during the Protestant Rebellion of the16th Century. Protestants from that time up to the present have tried their level best to twist and distort the clear words of these Scriptures to their own perdition often making reference to esoteric interpretations of the Koine Greek language to justify their errors. Since Bob has published his commentary, this obfuscation will no longer be possible. He deals in depth with the rules of Greek grammar and vocabulary demonstrating that the Protestants have misrepresented the texts and that the Catholic teaching on the matters of justification, nature/grace, and soteriology are thoroughly biblical.

Bob make his own literal translations of the two epistles with extensive footnotes that refer back to standard scholarly commentaries both Catholic and Protestant as well as to other relevant biblical texts, the works of the Church Fathers, the Ecumenical Councils, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, other approved Catholic theological sources, and the Papal Magisterium of the Popes up to and including John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

The content of this commentary is intended for the study of Catholic apologetics and it is both informative eminently readable. After the line-by-line commentary here are several excurses that deal with apologetic topics such as "Expiation or Propitiation?," "What is Justification by Faith?," "What is Concpiscence?," "Living in the Spirit by the Principles of the Law," "The History of the Protestant Rebellion," "James' Teaching on Justification by Works," and "The Sacrament of Extreme Unction" to name just a few.

All of these excurses are superbly done and they alone are worth the price of the book. I would single my personal favorite: "Expiation or Propitiation?" This section has no parallel in any Catholic book with which I am familiar. Bob defends the idea of Christ's work being a true propitiation showing that this is entirely in line with defined Catholic teaching and approved scholarship. I have been looking for over 30 years for a solid Catholic treatment on this and I am overjoyed that my friend Bob Sungenis has produced what I consider to be the definitive exposition on this topic to date.

The long excursus on "The History of the Protestant Rebellion" is another absolute gem that once again has no parallel in any other Catholic work to do date. It is worth reading slowly and attentively.

Bob is not an advocate of the 'New Perspective on St. Paul' which has arisen over the last 30 years from within Protestant Scholarship. In myself favor the New Perspective, but it does remain controversial and many Protestant controversialists reject it vehemently because they know that it makes the traditional Protestant interpretation of St. Paul virtually impossible to justify. Even though I would have like to have Bob appropriate the New Perspective into his work, his apologetic method is probably even more effective because it utilizes the same perspectives and methods as traditional Protestant scholars and demonstrates their inherent contradictions and failures to rightly divide the Word. In essence, Bob hoists them with their own petard.

Bob does take some minority positions. For example he believes that the Epistle of St. James was written before Romans which is not the opinion held by the majority of biblical scholars. He also does not think that a mass conversion of the Jews will occur as a sign of the coming of the end times. He does believe that many Jews will convert in the end but as individuals joining the Church, not as a distinctly Jewish movement into Christianity. This places him at odds with the majority of Christian biblical scholars.

These unconventional opinions do not detract from the central theme of the work and such things are to be expect whenever a scholar takes pen in hand to take a fresh look at the Biblical text.

I cannot recommend this book more highly. I encourage anyone interested in Catholic Apologetics to get this book and study it carefully. I also want to congratulate Dr. Robert Sungenis on a great work of Catholic Apologetics.

The book is available for purchase on Bob's website:

http://www.catholicintl.com/cubecart/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=3

As an additional note, Bob has recently updated his classic book Not By Faith Alone which is his in depth exposition on the doctrine of justification. In this Second Edition, he answers the objections of Protestant critics and has added a new section on the joint declaration of the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation on justification. It is avaialable as an e-book download on his website:

http://www.catholicintl.com/cubecart/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=70

Corrigenda to "The Sources of Catholic Dogma" 1957 Edition

2009-06-25T06:02:00.000-07:00

The most recent translation of the Denzinger Enchiridion Symbolorum into English was done by Fr. Roy J. Deferrari in 1957. It is the most common English translation of Denzinger that has been reprinted. Unfortunately, it also had some 16 serious errors in its text and a Corrigenda has been available which corrects them.

It has recently come to my attention that the Corrigenda is not available on the Internet so that people who purchasde this fine volume may correct their text.

As a public service, I am publishing the Corrigenda on my blog:

Corrigenda

(The Sources of Catholic Dogma)

Page 31, number 74, read "is true God" for "is not true God."

Page 49, number 111a, from lines 3 through 6 read: "that the Word, in an ineffable and inconceivable manner, having hypostatically united to Himself flesh animated by a rational soul, became Man and was called the Son of Man," also lines 11 through 14, read;"For it was no ordinary man who was first born of the Holv Virgin and upon whom the Word afterwards descended; butt being united from the womb itself He is said to have undergone fleshly birth, claiming as His own the birth of His own flesh."

Page 61, number 148, second column, line 15, read "nowhere removed" for “removed”

Page 87, number 218, read "but not as if the word of God" for "but as if the Word of God."

Paige 87, number 219, substitute the following for the first three lines: "If anyone speaking on two natures does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ is acknowledged as in His Divinity as well as in His Manhood, in order that by this he may signify the difference of the natures in which". Also the following for the last six lines but one: "if he accepts such an expression as this with regard to the mystery of Christ, or, acknowledging a number of natures in the same one Lord our Jesus, Christ the Word of God made flesh, but does not accept the difference of these [natures] of which He is also composed, which is not destroyed by the union (for one is from both, and through one both), but in this uses number in such a way"

Page 102, number 257. Insert after "Jesus Christ" and before "consubstantial": “consubstantial with God and His Father according to His divine nature and".

Page 117, number 296. Insert in line 5 after Holy Spirit: "just as God is the Father, God is the Son, God is the Holy Spirit"; also read; "which according to substance" for "according to substance which"

Page 194, line 3, read "voiding" for "voicing"

Page 219, number 691, for lines 12 through 16, read: "And since all that the Father has, the Father himself, in begetting, has given to His only begotten Son, with the exception of Fatherhood, the very fact that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, Sol], the Son himself has from the Father eternally, by whom He was begotten also eternally"

Paige 225, number 703, add after "one eternity" "and all these things are one"

Page 250, number 797, read "does not do nothing at all" for "does nothing at all”

Page 259, number 818, "we flee to the mercy of God" for "we flee the mercy of God”

Page 316, number 1096, read "intended" for "understand", and add "alone" after "predestined"

Page 457, number 1839 read "by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority defines" for "in accord with his supreme apostolic authority he explains”; also "possesses that infallibility" for "operates with that infallibility”; also "His church be endowed" for "His church be instructed”, and “of themselves” for "from himself”

Page 556, number 2164, read "it is permitted for exegetes to dispute freely" for "it is impossible etc."

Page 633, number 2302, last sentence. Read "in no sense of the word historical", for "in a sense of the word historical"

Blessed are You When Men Hate You: The Attack on Patty Bonds and Stephen Ray

2009-04-10T17:48:00.000-07:00

Patty Bonds converted to the Catholic faith in 2000. She was one of many thousands who did so that year in the United States. There was no great fanfare about it. Many of us who had come to know her were pleased to receive her as our sister in Christ. There was one person though who was not pleased and who has been very vociferous in his condemnation of her over the years for her conversion. This was her brother, James White who is a Reformed Baptist minister with a terrible animosity towards the Catholic Church.

Patty had published her spiritual autobiography -- Out of the Darkness -- on the web and it was a thoughtful reflection on her conversion and her joy on discovering the Catholic Church. Very recently, she revised this autobiography to include the claim that she was sexually molested by her and James' father who himself was a Reformed Baptist pastor.

I have been privy to this information for several years but have kept it confidential. She had told this to me so that I might understand the kind of family life in which she and James had grown up. Indeed such a morally dysfunctional family and the hypocrisy of a minister who condemns Catholics for allegedly being immoral while he continued to sexually violate his own daughter could help explain many features of Mr. White's personality. Patty hoped this information would help me to understand and forgive her brother for some of the things he had said about me.

I have avoided mentioning Patty's connection with her brother, James White. She is a private person and I had no desire to embarrass her or her family. Now that she is making her allegations public, I feel the need to support her. She is doing a very brave thing by talking about this.

Incestuous sexual abuse is a problem that no one wants to talk about and its prevalence is greater than most people can imagine. The victims feel helpless and often times they have no one to whom they can turn. And the abusers themselves are in need of serious help as well. It is only when we face up to the reality of this problem that we can deal with it effectively.

Patty Bond's revised autobiography was featured at Stephen Ray's website and on his blog. here are those addresses:

http://www.catholic-convert.com/Default.aspx

http://blog.catholic-convert.com/?p=3332

Patty Bonds has her own website and an apostolate directed at Catholic apologetics and spirituality. Patty has appeared on EWTN's program The Journey Home twice, the audios of which can be found HERE and HERE. You can judge for yourself how articulate she is.

Steve Ray has been a friend of mine for over 15 years. He, his wife Janet and their children are converts to Catholicism from the Baptists and he has been a terrific apologist for our faith. Steve has written several books including Upon This Rock, Crossing the Tiber, Papacy Learning Guide, St. John's Gospel: Commentary and Study Guide, We Have a Pope, and his latest book Faith for Beginners: Understanding the Creeds. He is also the producer and star of the Footprints of God Video Series which was filmed on location in Israel, Turkey, and Rome.

Steve used to teach a weekly bible class that I attended at Domino's Farm in Ann Arbor, Michigan when we lived in Toledo, Ohio. On St. Valentine's Day in 1995, his apostolate held a dinner for married couples at which my wife and I re-took our marriage vows. Steve and Janet are wonderful Christian people and they have done tremendous good in and for the Catholic Church.

Steve had previously written about Patty Bonds HERE and HERE.

After Steve featured Patty Bond's revised conversion story on his website, it provoked a reaction from Mr. James White who was understandably upset. There is currently a viral video on You Tube in which Mr. White not only denies his sister's allegations but personally attacks her intelligence and integrity along with that of Steve Ray. In fact White DEMANDS that the Catholic Apologist community "silence" Steve and rebuke him not only for his support of Patty but for other disagreements that Ray and White have had over the years.

Steve has responded to him here:

http://blog.catholic-convert.com/?p=3637

Patty Bonds has posted a response to her brother's attack HERE.

While I can understand that Mr. White is upset about these revelations, I think that he has crossed a line. It is one thing to deny allegations made about your family. It is another to vilify your sister and to make ridiculous demands concerning the right of free speech. Mr. White has constantly charged Catholics with being ignorant and under the thrall of the Pope which is rabid nonsense. White glories in the fact that as a Protestant no one call tell him what to say. Now he demands that somebody shut up his sister and Steve Ray and violate the very rights to free speech that he demands for himself. To say this is hypocritical is understating the case.

Furthermore, White's own behavior over the years has often struck those of us unfortunate enough to have to deal with him as showing signs of moral disorder and mental aberration. If Patty's allegations are true, it explains a lot about James and it makes it imperative that he get some counseling.

Several times in the past I have recommended to the sad and dysfunctional Mr. White that he needed to seek professional help for his aberrant state of mind. He has dismissed this out of hand. But his current disgraceful shenanigans lead me once again to beg him to get some help. As always I keep James in my prayers in the hope that someday God will show him the error of his ways and convert him to Christ.

In the meantime, I give my full personal support to Patty Bonds and Steve Ray and their respective apostolates. They are both fine Catholic apologists and personal friends of mine. I will keep them in my prayers. Here are their respective web sites:

http://abbaslittlegirl.blogspot.com/

http://catholic-convert.com/

Catholic Apologist and budding theologian William Albrecht has composed his own You Tube video in response to White's attack on Patty and Steve:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbYElJcrPMc

My friend and long time Catholic Apologist Pat Madrid wrote an article about his experiences with Mr. White in 1993 which is still relevant today:

http://www.patrickmadrid.com/whitemansburden.htm

Please keep Patty, Steve, and James in your prayers.

Arthur C. Sippo MD, MPH

Why 'Embryo Rescue' is not Ethically Acceptable

2009-04-02T01:29:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I attended the Annual Bioethics conference at Notre Dame University. This was a superb conference. I had the opportunity to meet Catholic physicians and ethicists who are struggling to live their faith in a world where the Culture of Death plots to coerce medical personnel to act against conscience and directly cooperate in intrinsically evil acts. Also present at this conference were non-Catholic physicians and academics who also are struggling to be faithful to their Christian witness in our modern.

One of these was Lutheran scholar Gilbert Meilaender, Richard & Phyllis Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. In a session discussing the recent directive from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Dignitatis Personae, Dr. Meilaender noted that the document made the following statements with regard to the possibility of embryo rescue for those excess embryos created during the process of In Vitro Fertilization:

12. With regard to the treatment of infertility, new medical techniques must respect three fundamental goods: a) the right to life and to physical integrity of every human being from conception to natural death; b) the unity of marriage, which means reciprocal respect for the right within marriage to become a father or mother only together with the other spouse;19 c) the specifically human values of sexuality which require “that the procreation of a human person be brought about as the fruit of the conjugal act specific to the love between spouses”.20 Techniques which assist procreation “are not to be rejected on the grounds that they are artificial. As such, they bear witness to the possibilities of the art of medicine. But they must be given a moral evaluation in reference to the dignity of the human person, who is called to realize his vocation from God to the gift of love and the gift of life”.21 In light of this principle, all techniques of heterologous artificial fertilization,22 as well as those techniques of homologous artificial fertilization 23 which substitute for the conjugal act, are to be excluded. On the other hand, techniques which act as an aid to the conjugal act and its fertility are permitted...

19. With regard to the large number of frozen embryos already in existence the question becomes: what to do with them? Some of those who pose this question do not grasp its ethical nature, motivated as they are by laws in some countries that require cryopreservation centers to empty their storage tanks periodically. Others, however, are aware that a grave injustice has been perpetrated and wonder how best to respond to the duty of resolving it...

The proposal that these embryos could be put at the disposal of infertile couples as a treatment for infertility is not ethically acceptable for the same reasons which make artificial heterologous procreation illicit as well as any form of surrogate motherhood...

19 Cf. CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Instruction Donum Vitae, II, A, 1: AAS 80 (1988), 87.

20 CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Instruction Donum vitae, II, B, 4: AAS 80 (1988), 92.

21 CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, Instruction Donum vitae, Introduction, 3: AAS 80 (1988), 75.

22 The term heterologous artificial fertilization or procreation refers to “techniques used to obtain a humanconception artificially by the use of gametes coming from at least one donor other than the spouses who are joined in marriage” (Instruction Donum Vitae, II: AAS 80 [1988], 86).

23 The term homologous artificial fertilization or procreation refers to “the technique used to obtain a humanconception using the gametes of the two spouses joined in
marriage” (Instruction Donum Vitae, II: AAS 80 [1988], 86).

Dr. Meilaender noted that Dignitatis Personae (DP) merely affirms that the rescue of embryos is not ethically acceptable without giving an extended argument to justify this assertion. He mentioned the important distinction that Kirkegård made between a genius and an apostle: the former argues to make a rational case while the latter proclaims the word. In essence, Dr. Meilaender was acknowledging the difference between the merely human wisdom of the scholar and the prompting of the Holy Spirit such as we have in the Catholic Church's Magisterium.

But as a Lutheran, Dr. Meilaender really wanted more than someone who "taught as one that had authority, and not as the scribes" (Matthew 7:29, Mark 1:22). It seems that he was not satisfied with the explanation from paragraph 12 of this same document. It was not enough to convince him that embryo rescue was morally reprehensible.

Dr. Meilaender is not alone. In fact several moralists - Catholic and Non-Catholic - have wrestled with this question over the last decade . In all honesty before DP was published, I also had struggled with this question.

But based on my Catholic faith I was able to understand the issues involved and discern the rationale behind the prohibition of embryo rescue in a way that a non-Catholic really is not equipped to do.

It is one of the sad legacies of the so-called "reformation" that the sacramentality of Christian marriage was abandoned and replaced with a secular contractual theory in which divorce and remarriage were permitted. This was true in every branch of the so-called "reformation" even though divorce and remarriage had been directly forbidden in the Bible by Jesus and St. Paul and likewise forbidden universally in Christian Tradition .

Luther himself was notorious for his opinion that the sexual urge was "just an itch to scratch" and that "There is no need to burn with passion while willing maidens abound." He along with his cronies Melanchthon, OEclampadius, and Bugenhagen wrote papers justifying polygamy at the request of Philip of Hesse. Ulrich Zwingli was known for having affairs with women in his congregation and for frequenting prostitutes. Calvin was a staunch supporter of a bourgeois view of marriage as a human institution devised by God. Even so, he had no interest in marriage until put under pressure by his Protestant peers to marry as a sign of his break with "Romanism." Henry VIII was the most flagrant abuser of marriage among the scions of the so-called "reformation" marrying six women in his lifetime and taking many mistresses.

Despite all of this, the conventional wisdom is that the so-called "reformation" attempted to reform Christan marriage and return it to a central place among the Christian faithful. But this was not the case. Marriage was secularized and human sexuality de-sacralized. Despite Protestant protests to the contrary, the so-called "reformation" took a very mercenary and utilitarian view of sex and marriage. It likewise denigrated any form of consecrated celibacy or continence as unhealthy despite the teachings of Jesus (Matthew 19:12) and St. Paul (1Corinthians 7) to the contrary.

In historic Catholic Christianity, marriage has always been seen as a sacrament. As such, the Church has seen marriage as not merely a human institution but a divine one that like the sacraments of Baptism, Eucharist, Reconciliation, Anointing of the Sick. Marriage is a source of divine grace through Christ. In short, a sacramental marriage contributes to your salvation as means of grace.

To find the source of this teaching we need to go to the early chapters of Genesis . In Genesis 2:18, God sees that Adam is lonely in Eden. Out of love for the man, God created a woman Eve to be his helpmate. In this sense woman was the love of God for Man made flesh.

Marriage in Eden was God's divine gift. It was only after God had made them "male and female" (Gen 1:27) that he found the world to be not just "good" (Gen 1: 4, 10,12,18,21), but "very good" (Gen 1:31). Woman was the crown jewel of creation and marriage was the feast celebrated on the first Sabbath. That is why the Sabbath day was to be kept holy. On that day was celebrated the love of God for Man. That is why Jesus taught us that "The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27).

When the Devil tempted Eve to commit the original sin (Gen 3), he used her to get to her husband. From that point onward men and women were estranged. Immediately, our First Parents realized they were naked and were ashamed to be seen by each other. Adam blamed Eve for his sin (Gen 3:12). As part of her punishment, God made bearing children more painful and he said that woman would still desire her husband who would "lord it over" her (Gen 3:16).

Never again would man and woman see each other as helpmates. Never again would they treat each other with mutual respect. Man would physically intimidate women and treat them like chattel. A man's wife would be numbered among his slaves and his property (Exodus 20:17). The good gift of God's love made flesh was reduced to another commodity to be used, abused, and discarded at will. God's one concession to women in the law of Moses was that the men in his covenant would be obliged to give his wife a bill proving that she was divorced and thus free of him and free to marry again if anyone would have her.

Among the rabbis, women were looked upon as second class citizens. Rabbi Hillel taught that a man could divorce his wife for virtually any reason, even for merely burning his dinner.

But God reserved one promise for woman. He would put enmity between the Devil and the woman. Through her, god would bring about the destruction of all the Devil's plan for humanity. She would crush the serpent's head (Gen 3:15).

And so a virginal maiden named Mary (more correctly Miriam) was approached by an Archangel Luke 1:26-38) just as Eve had been approached by a fallen angel (Genesis 3). Through Mary's submission to the word of God, she bore Christ, our Savior, who was the fruit of her womb and whose flesh and blood would nourish us in the Eucharist. The process by which humanity fell was reversed.

During his ministry, Jesus revealed that the compromised form of marriage which God had permitted under Moses' "because of the hardness of your hearts" would no longer apply (Matthew 19:8). Marriage was returned by Jesus to what it was "in the beginning" (Matthew 19:4). Jesus as the New Adam was returning marriage to its Edenic Purity.

This fact is often overlooked by those who prefer either a hammartiocentric or a creation-centered scheme. The restoration of marriage by Jesus actually heals the rift caused by Original Sin between man and woman and by doing so, restores the symbolism of the human gender relationship as the sign of God's love for man made flesh. I have come to believe that this is the far more important in the economy of salvation than most theologians have recognized. Thankfully, the Church has always taught that marriage is a sacrament and fruitful reflection on this will allow us to discern the full significance of marriage.

But even more importantly, the stories from the Old Testament where "Yahweh is the husband of his people" (Hosea 2:16, Isaiah 54:5, Jeremiah 3:20) were now referred to Christ and the ultimate culmination of the work of Christ was seen as the wedding of Christ to his Church (Ephesians 5:31-32; Revelation 19:9, 21:9) . So marriage is the ultimate biblical metaphor for salvation, and not the forensic and transformation models that have predominated in modern theologies.

So to recap, marriage was a Divine institution that symbolized God's gracious loving care for man and was intended as a mutual bond between spouses of deep theological significance. As Jesus restored the nuptial bond from Eden, His Church has recognized it as a sacred rite in which the spouses are the ministers -- if you will, the priests -- who administer the grace-giving sacrament to each other and share it with other family members, especially their children. The pinnacle of marriage is the marital act itself. In light of the sacramental meaning of marriage, this is properly understood as a priestly act.

It is well known that Temples in the ancient world were seen as representing the human body. In fact, Jesus used a pun concerning his own body while ostensibly talking about the Temple in Jerusalem (John 2: 19-22).

St. Paul himself (1Corinthians 6:15-20) in discussing Christian sexual mores makes the point that are our bodies are members of Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit and that it is therefore unseemly -- in fact sacrilegious -- to fornicate with them. We give ourselves exclusively to our spouses and to no other.

The Christian husband is like the High Priest who alone is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies of his wife's body. In the Temple of Jerusalem, anyone other than the High Priest who tried to enter the Holy of Holies was to be put to death. Even the High Priest was only permitted to enter it on Yom Kippur under threat of death.

Seen in this way we can understand why the Blessed Virgin had to remain Perpetually Virgin. As it says in Ezekiel:

Eze 44:1 Then he brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, which faces east; and it was shut.
Eze 44:2 And he said to me, "This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the LORD, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut.
Eze 44:3 Only the prince may sit in it to eat bread before the LORD; he shall enter by way of the vestibule of the gate, and shall go out by the same way."

The Sanctuary of Mary's Body was consecrated to God and to his Christ. It could not be entered by any other man without sacrilege.

Once we realize this, we have the reason why 'embryo rescue' is not ethically acceptable. No one but the husband is permitted to enter the sanctuary of his wife's body. And no one other than the child who is the product of their marital act has any right to be there.

Those women who have a desire to offer their womb to rescue an embryo --even if that embryo is their own child by their husband -- are flying in the very face of God because they are allowing a non-marital act by a third party to violate the sanctity of the marital act.

In order for an embryo that is outside of a womb to be rescued -- even the womb of its rightful mother -- several morally abominable acts must have taken place:

-Collection of sperm
-Harvesting of ova
-Extra-Corporial Fetilization
-Extra-Corporial Embryo development
-Embryo Freezing
-Embryo Defrosting
-Embryo implantation

Those are seven potentially mortal sins.

In order to "rescue" one of these embryos, a volunteer surrogate mother would need to be willfully complicit in 2 seriously disordered acts that are potentially mortal sins.

Human genitalia, human gametes and the marital act which unites them are all sacred are not open to mundane secular use. While the desire to rescue an embryo appears laudable, it is an act of willful human interference in the sacred order established by God. to cooperate in this would be a sacrilege and is therefore not not morally permissible.

The horror of this whole problem is that it places us in a moral conundrum where there is no clear morally acceptable solution. To rescue the embryo is just as evil as to let them die. At this time the Church has not discerned what can be done, if anything ,to put an end to this moral dilemma.

Once again we see that when man tries to create a good for himself that ignores, defies or tries to supersede the good that God has made, it takes us into moral ruin.

I hope this brief article helps to explain why the Catholic Church takes the stand that she has on this issue.

Arthur C. Sippo MD, MPH

Jason Banns me for telling the truth

2009-01-19T15:10:00.000-08:00

It seems that the alleged "Rev." Jason Spellman just cannot handle the facts. He has decided to ban me from his board (which is his prerogative) because I do not recognize the 'legitimacy' of the Protestant apostasies. He and his co-religionists have been self-deluded into thinking that they can do whatever they want and call it "christianity." When I tell the truth about their false man-made religions, they can't take it. They prefer irenic clap-trap that places the will of man over the will of God.

Jason, when apostates lay hand on each other, they convey no ordination. As such you are not and cannot be a minister of God. You are in open rebellion against Jesus Christ and his chosen ministers. Unless you repent, you risk paying a heavy price.

It is also thoroughly hypocritical for Protestants to keep declaring "justification by faith alone" claiming that it is Biblical when the Bible LITERALLY contradicts it in James 2:24. I am familiar with all the dodges and self-deception which has helped your false religions to perpetuate this delusion among its adherents and they don't work. Martin Luther himself is one of the few Protestants who had the integrity to admit that his teaching contradicted that of St. James. On that one point I wish you would emulate him.

Sadly, Jason and his Bully boys are offended by the uncompromising truth about Catholicism. They continue to perpetuate the myth that the Bible supports Protestantism and that it's inspiration can be affirmed apart for the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. As I clearly showed, it self-deception and hypocrisy to affirm the Bible which the Catholic Church gave us and then deny the teaching authority by which she did so. The idiotic notion that God infallibly led the Church but that Protestants were and are free to ignore the Church's authority is just one more hypocritical and illogical notion that supports disobedience and rebellion against the revelation of God in Christ.

I do not make a habit of going to Protestant sites because evangelism is not my calling. I am an apologist and my job is to protect the Catholic people from the lies and attacks of the enemies of God. I made this one foray to open dialogue on the presuppositional method of evangelism and how it can be used to defend the Catholic faith.

Jason and his bully boys ignored that and gave us the typical Protestant schtick that the opinions of mere men are of greater value than the promises of God. They wanted to argue about history and in doing so ignored the biblical material which I quoted to them at length and also ignored the logical conclusion that if God founded a Church and promised that Church His Holy Spirit, it is BLASPHEMY AGAINST THAT HOLY SPIRIT to rebel against the rule of His divinely ordained ministers. The question of Presuppositional Apologetics gave way to Protestant arrogance, hubris, and self-aggrandisement once again. They felt that it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. So be it. I say with St. Paul:

Gal 1:6
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who
called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel--
Gal 1:7
not that there is another gospel, but there are some who
trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.
Gal 1:8
But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to
you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be anathema.
Gal 1:9
As we have said before, so now I say again, If any one is
preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be
anathema.

Protestantism in all its Pandemonium is just "another gospel". Those who debase themselves with it shall come to a bad end and risk their eternal souls. The Scriptures have warned them. Why do they not heed them?

Defending Catholic Presuppositionalism

2009-01-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

At the De Regnius Duobus blogspot, there is a thread called "Cogito, Ergo Sum [Protestant]? "

http://deregnisduobus.blogspot.com/2009/01/cogito-ergo-sum-protestant.html

It is critical of the use of a vanTillian presuppositional argument to defend Catholicism. Sadly I think that the reformed blogger (Rev. Jason J. Stellman) does not really understand the arguments of vanTil or his student Greg Bahnsen very well. As such, I felt compelled to post the following comment on the blog:

I fear that you do not understand VanTil or his disciple Bahnsen very well at all. Nor do you see how their method can be used by us Catholics to defend the one true faith founded by Christ and perpetuated through His Apostles and their successors.
What vanTil's Presuppositional method did was to recognize that when you argue about the truth or falsity of a proposition, you had to assume certain things to be true BEFORE you could proceed.

For example, if one wanted to determine if the law of non-contradiction was true or false, you have to first assume it to be true in the very statement of the question.
When it come to the question of God's existence, you need to first assume the existence of rationality, the rules of evidence, and the basic laws of logic among other things. But these things themselves require explanation. You need a sufficient, robust, and comprehensive cause for these things.

Well God alone meets these criteria. In a purely chance universe where anything can happen and there are no moral or intellectual standards, you can prove nothing. There can never be a methologically compelling argument nor can there be any moral obligation for us to submit to its truth.

So when the atheist argues in favor of atheism, he needs to assume the very presuppositions for which we theists have an explanation and he (or she) does not.
So, as vanTil trenchantly noted, Atheism presupposes Theism.

In applying this to Catholicism, the ultimate source of the Catholic Church was the ministry of Jesus Christ. It is he who established His Church and promised that the Holy Spirit would speak through it (Matt 10:17-20) and that the Spirit would lead us to all truth and not just rehash what Jesus taught (John 14:26). And it was also Jesus who established St. Peter in the office of the "Rock" (Matt 16:18) who would confirm the brethren in the faith in time of crisis (Luke 22:29-32).

It is from this promise that all Christian teaching flowed including the canon of the Bible, its inspiration, its inerrancy, and its authority WITHIN the Church.
This is why the whole Protestant enterprise falls like a house of cards. In order to accept the authority of Scripture, you must assume the authority of the Catholic Church to teach without error what it had received from Jesus.

Now the Christian Bible itself did not exist until it was definitively collected in the late 4th and early 5th Century. It was not something that Jesus or teh Apostles taught us. It was through the Catholic Church that the Scriptures were discerned, canonized and expounded.

And of course, the distinctive teachings of Protestantism such as 'sola fide' and its denial of Apostolic Succession, the sacraments,and the Mass dates from no earlier than the 16th Century. In fact the whole panopoly of contradictory opinions that makes up Protestant Pandemonium are man-made innovations based upon 16th Century philosophical and social ideas. The allegation that Protestantism relies on the Bible is not true, but even more importantly, belief in the Bible as the inspired word of God is the only vestige from the Historic Catholic Church that virtually all Protestants accept as true.

As such Protestantism presupposes Catholicism on this point and for the balance of its ideas, it has no realtionship to the Historic Catholic Church and her teachings. But the Protestant critique of Catholicism is allegedly based on Scripture which once again requires them to formally affirm the very authority they are trying to deny.

So Presuppositionalism does defend the integrity of the Catholic faith without the need for arguments from history. If you do not assume the authority of the Catholic Church, you have no Bible and from that point it is logically inconsistent to deny the infallible teaching authority which you need to justify your arguments.

That is why all Protestant objections to Catholicism fail. Any allegedly biblical argument that denies the Catholic Church's authority to teach infallibly destroys the Bible's special character which we only believe because the Catholic Church taught it.

I hope this helps to clarify the matter.

Arthur Sippo MD, MPH

The Prodigal --Pseudopodeo-- Runs Away

2008-10-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that the Protestant controversialist known as Pseudopodeo has turned down my offer for an online debate and has written an extended note slandering me personally. It was not what I had hoped for but I am afraid that this is not unexpected of him. I had hoped that he would be a man and face me in a secure neutral venue where we could have an honest exchange of ideas in full view of the general public. In this way, there would have been no question of who said what or who did what. The whole world could just see us discussing the issues. But that is not what Pseudopodeo wanted. He wants to control every aspect of the debate because he is afraid that he will be bested if he doesn't.

But what is most telling here is the personal animosity that Pseudo holds towards me. My Lord and Savior taught that we were to love our enemies and do good to those that hate us. All Pseudopodeo wants to do is to insult and defame those of us who disagree with him. He has been taught in his strange little religion that Catholic are to be treated with contempt and that it is not necessary to treat us as human beings. To this end, Pseudo feels it is permissible to lie, insult, and misrepresent us Catholics. I find this very sad, and frankly it leads me to question his alleged commitment to Christ.

My challenge remains open. Anytime that Pseudopodeo wants to, he may open negotiations for an online debate. I am willing to put all of his derogatory remarks behind us and start fresh. It would be nice if Pseudopodeo would apologize to me for the lies he has told and for his animosity, but it is not necessary. We Christians are used to being roughly handled.

As St. Paul wrote:

1Cr 4:9
For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men.
1Cr 4:10
We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.
1Cr 4:11
To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless,
1Cr 4:12
and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure;
1Cr 4:13
when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things.
1Cr 4:14
I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children.

I take these words seriously. I expect that the enemies of Christ and His Church will do whatever they can to destroy the simple faith of us who have remained loyal to the Gospel revealed once and for all to the Saints and who have not been "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the deceit of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive" (Eph 4:14) as have the sad victims of the so-called 'reformation" apostasy.

My offer was made in good faith and it remains open. I forgive you, Pseudo, for anything you may have done to injure me. I ask your forgiveness for any sleight I might have made towards you. When you are ready to discuss the issues, I will be here waiting. I still pray for you at every Mass that God will convert your heart of stone to one of flesh and that you will join us who live gloriously in the reign of God.

Art Sippo MD, MPH

An Open Challenge to Pseudopodeo

2008-10-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that the Protestant controversialist know affectionately as "Pseudopodeo" is jonesing for a debate. He is trying to sucker some unwitting Catholic into another of his one sided lynchings in a Protestant venue with an Anti-Catholic moderator.

Tsk, tsk, Pseudo. You have proposed that tactic to several of us and we have told you the terms are not acceptable.

But I have a proposal for you.

I would be happy to debate you ON LINE here on my blog site. I will choose a neutral moderator (Yes, I really will!). He will assure that there is no name calling or ad hominem personal attacks. We will stick to the issues.

You and I will discuss the rules directly BY EMAIL and then we will talk on the phone IN PERSON a recording of which I will retain so that there will be no disputes about what is said.

Once it is clear that you are serious and that you intend to conduct yourself in a gentlemanly manner, we can set up our phone discussion. We need to talk directly in person. Otherise, it will be a deal breaker.

I propose the following for our debate. These are open to negotiation:

Topic: The Catholic Doctrine of Justification is Biblical

So that there will be no mistake about what the Catholic Church teaches, we will post the Canons from the Sixth Session of the Council of Trent and we will base our debate on them. Biblical quotations from the ENTIRE Catholic Bible will be permitted to establish the truth or falsehood of the topic under discussion.

I will take the affirmative and go first.
You will take the negative and go second.

Our opening statements will be a maximum of 5000 words.

These will be followed by first responses. The first responses will be limited to 2000 words each.

We will then in turn pose questions to each other in alternating order. You will ask me a question, then I will ask you a question. The response should be no longer than 1000 words. No complex questions and no "did you stop beating your wife" questions. Ask one simple question. It is permitted to preface your question with a brief build up of no more than 2 sentences. NO EDITORIALIZING. Questions only.

After one of us gives an answer, the questioner will be given a 250 word rebuttal.

Then there will be final summations limited to 2000 words. Since we will be alternating all through the debate, I will give my final summary followed by you giving yours.

The entire debate will be done on line and will remain permanently on this blog site. oth of us will have the right to publish the debate IN ITS WHOLE UNEDITED FORM.

All the statements will be sent to the Moderator and will not be published until he is certain that they are of the right length and of an appropriate tone. No personal insults nor accusations will be tolerated. If the Moderator feels that the contents need to be revised, he will send it back to the author. Only what the Author and the Moderator agree upon will be published on the web.

If for any reason, the Moderator and the Author cannot agree on a modification, said author will lose the Debate by default and a full disclosure of the problems with his comments will be presented by the moderator. No baloney.

There will be no declaration of formal victory at this debate. Each reader will be allowed to decide for his or her self which arguments were most persuasive.

The debaters will agree NOT to do an extended "re-debate" of the responses in this debate in any form of media for a full calendar year from the date of the posting of the last final statement. It will be permissible to discuss the issues brought up by the debate freely.

I propose as the Moderator a Protestant Attorney, Mr. Rob Robinson.

I am awaiting a response.

Art Sippo MD, MPH

"Why are you so mean to Protestants?"

2008-07-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

I have received several emails from Protestants who think I am too mean to Pcoma and who further think that I used too broad a brush in condemning Protestantism. Sadly the people who wrote SOME of these are not aware of the 17 year long campaign of personal slander that Pcoma has waged against me and of my several attempt to open dialog with him. His behavior has been abominable and sub-Christian. It also has showed what I truly consider signs of serious psychopathology including delusion of grandeur, flight of ideas, confabulation, and paranoia. I have asked Pcoma to seek professional help, but he refuses. He is living in his castle in the sky and those of us who are calling him back to reality are seen as enemies. He is a sad spectacle.

What is even sadder is that some honest people who have come in on his side are unaware of his continuous campaign of personal vilification against me, and that it is he who has prolonged and deepened the animosity between us. It is never a good idea to come in on the tail end of an argument and try and play peacemaker. You never know what started it or who is at fault.

My conscience is clear. Pcoma has told numerous lies which tickle the ears of his co-religionists and make them want to believe him. Sadly the Protestant people have been lied to so much by their "ministers" that they are under the impression that Catholics are either fools or stupid or malicious. Protestants have been taught to look down on Catholics and to treat us like the enemy. When we fight back and actually start to WIN, it is like the world has been turned upside down.

But Protestantism in all of its forms was an abandonment of the Gospel and its replacement with amoralist humanism. Justification by faith without works is not a biblical doctrine but in fact LITERALLY CONTRADICTS the Bible (See James 2:24). The idea that being righteous before God is just a formal declaration with no ontological change in the person is a medieval Nominalist idea not a Biblical one. In fact most of the innovations of Protestantism are from Medieval via moderna philosophy with only a biblical veneer.

Folks, the Christian Church from the beginning was CATHOLIC. There is no Protestantism in the Early Church. The 16th Century Deformers knew this but they LIED about it. Luther was seriously mentally disturbed and suffered from some kind of manic-depression disorder. Calvin has a motherless traumatic childhood and became cold, heartless monster who was far happier to worship a God of infinite power than one of infinite love. And Henry VIII... nobody pretends that he was anything but a greedy power-hungry money-grubber. The men he chose to run his "established church" were men of low morals themselves who coveted the power and wealth of the Church.

Historical Christianity has always been Catholic Christianity. Men like Pcoma tell multiple lies to deny this and they become rabid when a knowledgeable person rises up to defy them. Meanwhile they glory in phony doctorates and in puffing themselves up with titles like 'bishop' to which they have no right.

I am just a simple Catholic layman who has become tired of being pushed around and slandered by bigots whose sole motive is stoking their own ego. The Gospel is about detachment from the world, not about personal aggrandisement.

Catholicism has the one true Gospel. The various Protestant religions contradict that Gospel AND EACH OTHER! For this reason I condemn Protestantism as a demonic deception and I warn those seeking Christ that they will not find him there.

I know that Protestants do not want to hear this, but they NEED to hear it. Their souls are in jeopardy and I would be remiss if I said otherwise.

I call on any one seeking Christ to leave the Massa Damnata of Protestant Pandemonium before it is too late.

Art

He's So Vain, He Probably Thinks This Blog is about Him...

2008-07-03T07:04:00.000-07:00

I can always tell when Summer is really here. The Anti-Catholic bigots of the world have just been let out of Kindergarten for the Summer Holidays and they have time on their hands. So they start trying to bait Catholics and slander us while they have the chance.

(Please note that I am not implying that the Anti-Catholic bigots are all whining petulant children who cry for their mommy whenever the big bad Catholics fight back. Oh , NO! Many of them are semi-functional adults who have little or no need of Depends at this point in their lives except when the Pope comes to visit the United States. It is just that they have been left back in ACCREDITED schools so often that they just can't get that grammar school GED, and Kindergarten is such a big step for them. Hang in there guys. The Columbia School of Broadcasting and Bible Studies will grant you a doctorate in toilet training for the right price so you can fake it and sit at the grown-up table with pride. For those who cannot afford this there is always Mrs. Puff's Boating School. She is used to dealing with Students who just can't graduate.)

In any case a certain Protestant Controversialist of My Acquaintance -- call him Pcoma -- has started off the Summer emulating the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell's novel 1984 and pretending that he never held to a position that was in fact the backbone of one of his arguments about interpreting the NT. I do not want to embarrass the little nimrod by being too specific. After all there are LIBEL laws in this country and one must be careful just how nasty one wants to be in attacking a private person. Suffice to say, his denial that he ever held to this position makes Bill Clinton under oath look like George Washington.

Pcoma, ol' buddy, you need to get real. We were all there at the debate. We heard you. You not only mentioned this particular matter in several speeches which are on tape. You also put it in your books and on your website.

Ah, but after all, you have no interest in the truth. For you, the woile apologetics game is about egoism, bluster, and who is the better debater. All your efforts in attacking me on this issue boil down to you apologizing for yourself and your behavior. It has nothing to do with the Gospel or the truth of the Christian faith. That is your problem.

It is not all about you, Pcoma. This blog today is about being a disciple of Jesus Christ conformed to his image and being subject to his will for us. You made a mistake early in your career. You need to admit it, say that you regret the error, have since repented of it and moved on. That's all. That is what Jesus would do if he were in your shoes. (Of course Jesus would never have made a mistake about a matter of faith or morals so He actually would never have to do any of this so it is more accurate to say that this is what Jesus would want YOU to do.)

Apologetics is not a game. It is not a spectator sport where the apologist puffs himself up as the defender of the faith who never loses to any opponent. It is not about winning every debate.

It is as Pope St. Peter counseled us in his First Encyclical:

1Pe 3:8
Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love of the brethren, a tender heart and a humble mind.
1Pe 3:9
Do not return evil for evil or reviling for reviling; but on the contrary bless, for to this you have been called, that you may obtain a blessing.
1Pe 3:10
For "He that would love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking guile;
1Pe 3:11
let him turn away from evil and do right; let him seek peace and pursue it.
1Pe 3:12
For the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those that do evil."
1Pe 3:13
Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is right?
1Pe 3:14
But even if you do suffer for righteousness' sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled,
1Pe 3:15
but in your hearts reverence Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence;
1Pe 3:16
and keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are abused, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
1Pe 3:17
For it is better to suffer for doing right, if that should be God's will, than for doing wrong.

Apologetics is supposed to be a witnessing to the truth of Christ against the objections of men, not a defense of our own egos.

It is possible for intelligent grown ups (yes, even those in Depends) to agree to disagree without all the rancor and posturing that we have been subjected to by you and your fellow Anti-Catholics. Whatever the case may be, Pcoma, you are not infallible by your own admission. You can make mistakes and it takes an honest man to admit when he has blundered.

I have admitted to my mistakes and apologized to you for any unfair slights I have said in the past. Have you ever done that? Have you ever apologized to me for trying to deceive me in our original debate? Or for your unsportsman-like insults at the end when you have clearly lost? Or for the lies you have told about me publicly for the last 2 decades? Or for your abominable sub-Christian conduct when we were trying to come up with a venue for a debate? Or your uncharitable snipes at Pope John Paul the Great as he lay dying. Do you ever examine your conscience, admit you are a sinner, repent and try to make amends? As far as I can tell the answer to all of these is "No!" and you are proud of it. You are a very poor advertisement for your religion.

Well, Pcoma, I am a disciple of Jesus who told us to let the dead bury their dead. I have better things to do than trade nitpicking insults with you. You know I am telling the truth. Everyone in the Catholic Apologetics movements knows it. And any Protestant with integrity who can read your books and website knows it. Your posturing is hypocritical and unnecessary. Jesus said it was the truth that would set us free, not our attempts at spin doctoring. Your actions are cynical that those of an atheist who believes in no moral limits on his behavior as long as you can do harm to those whom you hate.

To the general public I give a warning. Beware of men who come to you using their personal opinion about the Gospel as a club with which to beat people. Beware of men who place their own honor ahead of the honor due to God. Be leery of the fellow who wastes time and resources attacking individuals he hates without appreciating the points they are making. There are two sides to every story and if you cannot have sympathy for your opponent, you cannot validly criticize him.

Pcoma and his crowd are enamored with the antinomian opinions of the Protestant Deformers and with the idea that they don't have to do anything to be considered righteous by God.

As a Catholic I prefer the Biblical view:

Rom 3:27
Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but on the principle of faith.
Rom 3:28
For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.
Rom 3:29
Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also,
Rom 3:30
since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith.
Rom 3:31
Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

Jam 2:14
What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him?
Jam 2:15
If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food,
Jam 2:16
and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?
Jam 2:17
So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Jam 2:18
But some one will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.
Jam 2:19
You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe--and shudder.
Jam 2:20
Do you want to be shown, you shallow man, that faith apart from works is barren?
Jam 2:21
Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar?
Jam 2:22
You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works,
Jam 2:23
and the scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness"; and he was called the friend of God.
Jam 2:24
You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

Rom 6:1
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
Rom 6:2
By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?
Rom 6:3
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
Rom 6:4
We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Rom 6:5
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
Rom 6:6
We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.
Rom 6:7
For he who has died is freed from sin.
Rom 6:8
But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.
Rom 6:9
For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.
Rom 6:10
The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.
Rom 6:11
So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Rom 6:12
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.
Rom 6:13
Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness.
Rom 6:14
For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
Rom 6:15
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
Rom 6:16
Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
Rom 6:17
But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,
Rom 6:18
and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
Rom 6:19
I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification.
Rom 6:20
When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
Rom 6:21
But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death.
Rom 6:22
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life.
Rom 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is the Gospel as we Catholics have received it from Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the teachings of the Popes and Councils (especially Trent). We stand on this solidly founded word from God and condemn as contrary to scripture any attempt to reduce salvation to a mere naked faith and trust in God with no need for submission to His will in the works we choose to do.

This is the faith of the Catholic Church and what this blog is really about.

A Book Review: "The Truth of the Cross" by R. C. Sproul

2008-03-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

A Book Review:
The Truth of the Cross
by R. C. Sproul
Reformation Trust Publishing, 2007

Through the generosity of Ligonier Ministries, I have been given permission to review this book by R. C. Sproul. Rev. Sproul is a Presbyterian minister who has had an active multimedia apostolate for over 30 years. I have listened to many teaching tapes from his oeuvre and have found them to be very educational and enlightening. His excellent series on historical apologetics covers the Church Fathers up through the modern day and has a fine exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas. He also has a short series on Roman Catholicism which I found to be most interesting and helpful for showing us Catholics how we are perceived by some of our separated brethren. Rev. Sproul is a great popularizer of the Christian faith who is able to take complex ideas and render them into understandable form for the masses.

Rev. Sproul is very much an ‘old fashioned’ five-point Calvinist and has not been much influenced by any of the major modern movements in Calvinist theology. This has both positive and negative connotations for Catholics who read or listen to his work. In many ways his approach to the Bible – especially the Old Testament – is quite traditional and helpful for Catholics. For example, I recommend his lectures on the Holiness of God most highly.

Sadly, when it comes to New Testament exposition, he has some very serious blind spots in which he allows the systematic speculations of conservative Calvinism to interfere with his explanation of the Biblical text. In particular, Rev. Sproul still holds to a very narrow, 16th Century understanding of the Protestant doctrine of “Justification by Faith Alone” which ignores the more recent contributions of the New Perspective on St. Paul and the re-evaluation of the place of the Epistle of St. James in the wisdom tradition central to the ministry of Jesus.

The focus of his new book “The Truth of the Cross” is on the atonement that was wrought by Christ on the Cross. This is not intended to be a scholarly study, but a popular exposition aimed at informing the person in the pew what it was that Jesus accomplished for us by His death.

The first 4 chapters give a superb exposition of the Biblical background that led up to the need for atonement. They even gave a brief treatment of some of the Patristic and early Medieval developments in our understanding of the Atonement. It is important for Catholics to remember that we are thoroughly Augustinian in our soteriology. I think Christians of all stripes will find these chapters both useful and accessible. By the time you finish these chapters you will understand the several different theories of the atonement and how each scheme can play a part in God’s overall plan for salvation.

In Chapter 5, he began a discussion of substitutionary atonement which is again quite traditional and accessible. I particularly liked his treatment of propitiation and expiation in which he shows both their differences from each other and how they are complementary. This chapter is filled with excellent biblical exegesis and exposition.

After all the good exposition of the first 5 chapters, Chapter 6 was a major let down. It is the weakest chapter in the book and, coincidentally, the one with the least biblical exegesis. Rev. Sproul tries to make the case for a theology of imputation in which the righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer while at the same time the sinfulness of the believer is imputed to Christ. This is a traditional Calvinist theological speculation which in recent years has come under fire from among Calvin scholars.

John Calvin had a strong notion of ‘union with Christ’ which was distinctly his own and different from both the schema of Luther and of later Calvinist theologies. This can be seen in books such as “Union With Christ and the Extent of the Atonement in Calvin (Studies in Biblical Literature, Vol. 48)” by Kevin Dixon Kennedy, “Union with Christ: John Calvin and the Mysticism of St. Bernard” (Columbia Series in Reformed Theology) by Dennis E. Tamburello, and “Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ” (Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology) by J. Todd Billings.

I was very disappointed that Sproul did not interact positively with this cutting edge theme in Calvin scholarship.

Catholic and Arminian scholars have been pointing out for several centuries that there is not a single verse in the Bible which describes any imputative exchange of righteousness and sinfulness between Christ and the believer. What the Bible does say is this:

Romans 4:9 …We say that faith was imputed to Abraham as righteousness.
Romans 4:20-25
20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God,
21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.
22 That is why his faith was "imputed to him as righteousness."
23 But the words, "it was imputed to him," were written not for his sake alone,
24 but for ours also. It will be imputed to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord,
25 who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

In short, it is our faith in Jesus as our Savior that is imputed or reckoned to the Christian as righteousness, not any transferred ‘righteousness of Christ.’ By this faith we are united with Christ in Baptism and made into a new creation (Romans 6:4). We cease being “slaves of sin” and become “slaves of righteousness” which leads inexorably to sanctification and to the fruit of that sanctity, eternal life (Romans 6:22). This is not the language of a forensic exchange but of an ontological transformation in Christ.

The whole idea of a forensic exchange of moral attributes is based not biblical presuppositions, but rather on the late medieval philosophy of Nominalism. Nominalism denied that there were any universal essences. Alleged universal concepts were merely names that described particular objects. As such, the universal ideas of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were arbitrary designations. God, as the most powerful entity, was permitted to name his creatures whatever he liked by an exercise of His Divine will. Since the titles ‘righteous’ and ‘sinner’ were nothing but arbitrary names, God was permitted to have the last word on which designations that describes his particular creatures.

In an Essentialist worldview such as we see in the Bible, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is not possible to treat ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as mere external labels. What is needed to change a bad person into a good person is a true ontological change in the essential nature of the being in question.

Failure to grasp these philosophical points leads Sproul to misrepresent Catholic teaching:
The Roman Catholic Church holds the position that man’s character is not completely tainted, but that he retains a little island of righteousness. (Page 85)

This is not correct. Catholicism insists that man possesses several natural goods to which his human nature tends without the necessity of grace. But these are not supernatural goods, do not lead to salvation, and garner no merit before God. But they are the very seeds upon which grace works in order to elevate the merely human good work to one that pleases God. We insist that grace builds upon nature. It does not supersede or destroy the good found inherently in the natural man. Instead, it elevates it to another level so that joined with Christ we are able to please the Father in our lives as He did in His own incarnate life.

The Protestant view of ‘total depravity’ is a rarefied form of Manichaeism in which the imputation of sin is placed below the level of moral agency – that is the mind and will – and fixed in the very members of the human person. Thus any inclination of the human being towards any appetite is inherently sinful in Protestant eyes because it does not lead inexorably in the natural man to acts which please God. The distinction Sproul makes between ‘total depravity’ and ‘utter depravity’ is moot. If everything human beings do is sinful, the degree of sinfulness is unimportant. The central problem is that in Sproul’s system, to take in a deep breath is sin in defiance of God. There is absolutely no biblical warrant for such a notion.

Catholicism counters that human inclinations are morally neutral until the mind and he will are engaged. The sinfulness of an act is determined by one’s understanding and intention in the act. Condemning every act of the human person as sinful as the Protestants do is ludicrous. It does not make the right moral distinctions and fails to locate the real source of human sinfulness. This is the consequence of a Nominalist view of morality in which sin is the result of a ‘name-game’, and not a ‘real’ problem. It creates a ‘legal fiction’ in which guilt and innocence are assigned arbitrarily by God without regard to who and what we are.

Sproul does not really appreciate the problems inherent in his thesis. Condemning every human act as sinful makes it seem that it is a sin just to be human. There can be no true examination of conscience or firm purpose of amendment because sin wells up in our members spontaneously and our wills merely rubber stamp our natural impulses. This type of anthropology is pastorally destructive of any true moral discipline.

In my opinion, Chapter 6 is a total wash and I advise Catholic readers to skip over it on a first reading. They may return to it later along with a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to more properly critique Sproul’s views from a Catholic perspective.

Chapter 7 takes up the story of the “Suffering Servant” from the prophet Isaiah. This is a fine exposition and very helpful in showing that he suffering of Jesus was not a Christian innovation but had been foretold many centuries earlier. I will quibble with Sproul on his interpretation of Genesis 3:15 (Page 116). I believe that the three clauses in this verse are an example of synthetic (or synonymous) parallelism and that they all refer directly to the Woman, and only indirectly to her seed. This includes the final clause in which she is prophesied to “crush the head of the serpent.” Franciscan theologians have seen in this verse the predestination from all time of Jesus and Mary together as the New Adam and the New Eve who overthrow the curse of Original Sin and defeat Satan.

Chapter 8 continues to show the continuity between the Cross and Old Testament themes. The exposition is quite good. Sproul accepts St. Thomas Aquinas’ view that Jesus was truly forsaken by God the Father in his humanity while on the Cross as a way of Jesus fully experiencing the alienation of sin. St. Thomas believed that Jesus had the Beatific Vision in his Divine person from the moment of his conception and that during this time of abandonment Jesus did not allow his Divine personhood to confer consolations to the faculties of his human nature. From a Catholic viewpoint, this was a particularly good chapter.

Chapter 9 was a long defense of a particular understanding of the Calvinist idea of ‘Limited Atonement.’ Sproul breaks with Hyper-Calvinists by seeing the atonement wrought by Christ to be sufficient to save all men while not necessarily being effective to save all men. The distinction here is very helpful and is in fact part of Catholic orthodoxy. On the whole, Catholicism is willing to see a wider franchise than what Sproul favors in this chapter. He implies that an explicit faith in Jesus is necessary for salvation. It has always been the Catholic position that an implicit faith could be accepted by God as worthy of the grace of salvation purely at the Lord’s good pleasure. There is no salvation by ignorance of the truth, but there can be salvation by God’s saving knowledge of us and the exercise of His graciousness towards sinners in circumstances which He deems fitting.

The 10th and final chapter consists of a series of questions and answers. It delves a little more deeply into theological issues and makes some comments on the signs of the times. I found all of the answers to be helpful and I think many Catholics will benefit from them.

In summary, I found this to be a very useful and inexpensive book for explaining the traditional understanding of the Cross and the Atonement from a conservative Protestant perspective. It also can be helpful to Catholics and makes fine Lenten reading. I have noted several caveats above primarily with regard to Chapter 6. I would hope that in future editions, Sproul will deal with other theories of the application of the benefits of Christ other than the double imputation schema. I would especially recommend that he deal with the “union with Christ” schema which is at the cutting edge of Calvin studies and can play a major role in increasing ecumenical understanding.

Arthur C. Sippo MD, MPH

The Perpetual Virginity of Mary

2008-02-27T18:59:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back, I got a dyspeptic note from a Protestant Minister in training who took umbrage to my views on the illegitimacy of the various Protestant religions. In his note, he took especial umbrage to the Catholic dogma of the Perpetual Virginity acting as if there was no justification for this teaching.

I was planning to do an entire expose on this fallacious notion, but my good friend Matt1618 beat me to it.

He has a fine Catholic Apologetics Website:

http://matt1618.freeyellow.com/

His treatment of the PVM is excellent and I recommend it highly:

http://matt1618.freeyellow.com/mary.html

This is a condensed version of the same article:

http://matt1618.freeyellow.com/mary2.html

The following is an article by a Hebrew Catholic, Br. Anthony Opisso, M.D., who has since gone before us marked with the sign of faith:

http://www.cin.org/users/james/files/talmud.htm

This is a treatise on the PVM written by St. Jerome, the greatest Scripture Scholar of the Patristic period:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3007.htm

The following is a variety of quotations from the Church Fathers on the PVM:

http://www.catholic.com/library/Mary_Ever_Virgin.asp

Here is s list of documents including Papal teaching on the PVM:

http://www.ewtn.com/vlibrary/search2.asp

The following is a link to the website of of my friend and Catholic Apologist Dave Armstrong:

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/

Here are some of his articles on the PVM:

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2005/10/replies-to-protestants-alleged.html

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2005/10/dialogue-on-supposed-biblical_27.html

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2005/10/dialogue-on-supposed-biblical_31.html

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2004/02/luther-calvin-and-other-early.html

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2004/02/why-catholics-believe-in-perpetual_05.html

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/davearmstrong/112907309560033175/#17898

The following is a term paper written by an Anglican arguing in favor of the PVM:

http://www.btw3.com/classfiles/HT1/PerpetualVirginity.pdf

Here are some articles by my good friend Mark Bonocore defending the PVM:

http://www.catholic-legate.com/articles/ohbrother.html

http://www.catholic-legate.com/articles/jesusbros.html

http://www.catholic-legate.com/articles/maryvirgin.html

Here is an article by Protestant Scholar Paul Owen on the PVM:

http://www.catholic-legate.com/articles/reformedpv.html

And here is an article by my good friend and Catholic Apologist John Pacheco:

http://www.catholic-legate.com/articles/heoshou.html

So despite the pretensions of my Protestant 'minister-in-training' there is indeed lots of evidence in support of the PVM and absolutely nothing before the 18th Century even questioning it except for 3 people (Jovinian, Helvidius, and Bonosus) who were condemned as heretics. So in this matter -- as in so many others -- Protestantism is seen to be a modernist fraud that supports clearly heretical notions in the service of man-made religion.

Art

Bob Sungenis and his Ordinary

2008-02-23T05:52:00.000-08:00

The continuing controversy over the content of Robert Sungenis' web site has taken a new turn. Mr. Sungenis has said things about the Jewsih people - both inside and outside of the Church - which have brought him open criticism from many sources.

It has been the hope of many of us who are concerned about Bob that he would accept fraternal correction on these matters and bring his public views into line with the positions held by the Popes and Vatican II over the last several decades. Sadly, Bob has not done so. In the last year, his Ordinary, Bishop Kevin Rhoades, took action in the name of the Catholic Church to prevent Bob from promulgating his views as if they represented Catholic teaching. In particular, Bob published a commentary on the Book of Revelation in which he made several comments about the Jews that were scurrilous in tone.

Bob's response was half-hearted at best. He made a show of submitting to the Bishop,at first, but now he is openly accusing Bishop Rhoades of holding to heretical notions. Bob is refusing to obey the Bishop's order that he cease and desist writing about any matters having to do with the Jewish people.

I want to take a stand here in support of Bishop Rhoades and I call on Bob Sungenis as a professed loyal son of the Catholic Church to submit to his Ordinary in this matter. We Catholic apologists are the victims of the lies and bigotry of Anti-Catholics all the time. We should be very careful ourselves not to promote falsehoods about other people. And in particular, we need to be on the guard against Anti-Semitism. It is a persistent prejudice that has led to untold injustice, suffering, and even genocide. We as Catholics must never again allow such things to occur and we need to oppose this error vigorously.

The following links document the most recent events in the Sungenis controversy:

Breaking the Silence: http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/breaking-silence.html

1) Bishop Rhoades Sets the Record Straight: Bishop Rhoades refutes Sungenis’ “slanderous and erroneous” charges
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/bishop-rhoades-sets-record-straight_21.html

2) Saying “Peace!” When There Is No Peace: A discussion of the many “apologies” and promises of Robert Sungenis
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/saying-peace-when-there-is-no-peace.html

3) More Definition Difficulties: Sungenis’ misuse of “disavow” and “libel” http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/more-definition-difficulties.html

4) CASB2's Missing Imprimatur: The Real Reason the Bishop Said "No"Sungenis’ anti-Jewish animus comes to light in CASB2
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/casb2s-missing-imprimatur-real-reason.html

5) Response from the USCCB on page 131 of the USCC: Must one see heresy on page 131? How should one approach our bishops? http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/response-from-usccb-on-page-131-of.html

6) Is Sungenis Schismatic? The Verdict in Sungenis’ Own Words: Documentation of how Sungenis has chosen a path he has formerly criticized
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/is-sungenis-schismatic-verdict-in.html

7) The Theology of Prejudice: A discussion of how Sungenis’ animus against Jews taints his theology
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/theology-of-prejudice.html

8) The Theology of ADL Conspiracy Theories? Specific proof that even now, Sungenis is violating his most recent promises http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/theology-of-adl-conspiracy-theories.html

9) Sungenis and the New Good Friday Prayer: A recent example of Sungenis’ exaggerations and contentiousness with Jews http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/sungenis-and-new-good-friday-prayer.html

10) Sungenis Singled Out by Jewish Blogger: An example of how Sungenis is seen by moderate Jewish people
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/sungenis-singled-out-by-jewish-blogger.html

11) Clearing Roy Schoeman of Sungenis’ Slander by Ben Douglass: Sungenis refuses to retract and apologize for quote he knows to be false http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/clearing-roy-schoeman-of-sungenis.html

12) New and Old Postings by Ben Douglass: Ben Douglass re-posts his Sungenis articles and defends Roy Schoeman
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/new-and-old-postings-by-ben-douglass.html

13) When Like Finds Like:Evidence from Sungenis’ own followers that all is not well at CAI-BTF
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/when-like-finds-like.html

14) The Clinton Connection: A comparison of the tactics of Bill Clinton and Robert Sungenis
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/matter-of-character.html

15) The Matter of Character: An examination of a fundamental issue underlying Sungenis’ difficulties
http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/clinton-connection.html

16) Timeline: A helpful timeline detailing what has occurred with Sungenis and when http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/2008/02/timeline-of-events.html

Please keep both Bob Sungenis and Bishop Rhoades in your prayers.

Art Sippo

Honoring our Mother, the BVM

2008-02-13T08:00:00.000-08:00

Over on his apologetics board, Patrick Madrid has made the followin comment concerning the recent move by several Cardinals to request that the Spirtual Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin be declared a dogma of the Church:

Personally, I hope the pope does not act on this petition. I see it as theologically problematic, due to the high likelihood of it being misunderstood and misconstrued by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The petition is pastorally unnecessary and hugely inopportune.

Patrick is a good Catholic man and one of the great Catholic apologists of our time. He is also my friend. The position he is espousing here is taken by many other good Catholics as well so I am not questioning his Catholicity or his faithfulness to the Church. But on this matter I must take exception with him.

I don't agree. Every Mariology text book in the last 100 years has included the rationale for seeing the BVM as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of all Graces. The Patristic evidence for the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary dates back to the mid 2nd Century and includes statements by St. Justin Martyr and St. Irenaeus. The Popes in the last 160 years -- up to and including Pope John Paul II -- have been strong supporters of the Spiritual Motherhood of the BVM and taught such in their encyclicals. The Eight Chapter of Lumen Gentium specifically gave the BVM the titles Advocate, Auxiliatrix, Adjutrix, and Mediatrix. This statement by a General Council means that the Spiritual Motherhood of the BVM is already OFFICIAL CATHOLIC TEACHING. Raising such a teaching to a dogma therefore adds nothing to the Catholic faith that has not already been proclaimed by the Magisterium but it does make it clear that the BVM has a role to play in salvation and that this is a central tenet of the Holy Catholic Faith that is not negotiable.

The opinions and sensibilities of Protestants and other non-Catholics about Catholic teaching should be of no concern to the Catholic Church. These outsiders are a mish-mash of unbeleivers, heretics, apostates, and schismatics albeit most of them are only materially so. Are we not to proclaim the divinity of Christ because the Jehovah's Witnesses might take offense? Are we going to suppress calling Jesus the Son of God because it makes the Muslims unhappy? Do we avoid calling Jesus the Messiah because the Jews will balk?

What other things are we going to suppress to assuage the Protestants? The Substantial Presence of Christ in the Eucharist? Apostolic Succession? The indissolubility of SACRAMENTAL marriage? The anathemas of Trent?

If we Catholics are people of faith, we must profess a robust faith, not one that bends to the objections of infidels. My experience with anti-Catholic bigots is that they have no scruples about dissing us no matter what concessions we make. So we should make no concessions. None of them have any scruples about mocking Catholics, our Church and our beliefs. I am unaware of any Protestant denomination that has refrained from taking a doctrinal position becasue it might offend Catholics. Think of it: women priests, women bishops, LESBIAN bishops, abortion, contraception, divorce with remarriage, Homosexuality, IVF, defective forms of baptism. If they do not restrict their doctrine to assuage us, why are we doing so to assuage them?

Vatican II made a few off-hand comments that anyone with savvy would have recognized as attacks on Communism. Yet it never attacked the Communists by name. Many Traditionalists saw this as a capitulation to the enemy. Now 40 years later we can see it for what it was. Communism was a flash in the pan and it did not deserve anymore than trivial attention. Mere men did not know that in the 1960s. They did not know that within 25 years, Communism would be relegated to the ash-heap of history. But the Holy Spirit knew, and he moved the Council to basically ignore Communism except as a trivial nuisance. Protestantism deserves the same kind of pejorative neglect.

Meanwhile the BVM in her own words "magnifies the glory of God". She prophesied about herself that "all generations shall call me blessed".

Glory and honor is due to the greatest human person who every lived: the Blessed Virgin Miriam, Mother of God and Mother of the Church. Do not let the whining of non-Catholics silence our praises of her and her Son!

Art
Omnes semper - ad Jesum, per Mariam, cum Petro.

James Swan and why he should repent

2008-02-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

I did something that I normally don't do today. I went over to the bulletin board of anti-Catholic James Swan. One of the prots who haunt the Envoy Apologetics board had been asked to take his discussion with me over here to my blog and he had just started posting on Swan's "Beggars All" board instead. While I was there I noticed that my name was in the index and I followed the links.

Low and behold! I am vilified multiple times for the crime of not thinking that the excommunicated apostate Martin Luther was a worthy Christian thinker and for following the line of thinking that had originated back in the 16th Century that he was mentally deranged and which has excellent support in modern Luther scholarship.

Mr. Swan even had the temerity to go out looking for Catholics to personally condemn me. You see among the Anti-Catholic elite it is far more important to insult and defame Catholics than it is to refute them.

Well, the sad and hypocritical Mr. Swan needs to get his facts straight. This is why I dismiss Luther as an enemy of Christ and I condemn the entire Protestant Deformation as a demonic deception:

1) The Church as it came form the hands of Christ passed to the Apostles with St. Peter chosen by Christ to be his vicar. About this Scripture and Tradition are absolutely clear.

2) The Apostles ordained men as their successors and these men ordained their own successors. This pattern has persisted to the present and this succession has been preserved in both the Catholic Church and in the Eastern Orthodox Churches.

3) Ordination was not seen in either the Bible or Tradition as a mere human institution, but it conveyed he power of the Holy Spirit to tech to sanctify and to rule the Church.

4) The possession of the Holy Spirit in the hierarchy by the laying on of hands is what preserves the Catholic Church from error, not the opinions of scholars, the repetition of what people did and thought in the past, or the private interpretations of mere men.

5) No Protestant religion possess valid Apostolic Succession. In fact the Deformers all rejected Apostolic Succession thereby taking themselves out of the Church with no authority or power to teach, to sanctify, or to rule God's people.

6) The central tenet of the Deformation - 'justification by faith alone without good works' (JBFA) - is contrary to the Gospel as taught by Jesus and was explicitly condemned as an error in James 2:24

7) JBFA was used by Luther to sow anarchy within the Church of his day. It continues to wreak havoc in our own time.

8) Luther was excommunicated and his works condemned by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

9) The religions Luther invented or inspired do not have valid ministers, valid sacraments (Baptism a possible exception in some groups), sound doctrine or right morals. As such, Protestantism as a whole is totally corrupt and none of the groups within it or spawned from it meet the criteria for valid Christian Churches from the 1st Millennium.

10) Despite paying lip service to 'sola scriptura', when the Bible conflicts with Protestant doctrine, the Bible is ignored, marginalized or explained away. Examples of this are in James 2:24, Romans 2:5ff, Matthew 16:16ff, 2Peter 3:15ff, John 6:53ff, and NUMEROUS other examples.

11) Meanwhile the Protestant Deformers (including Luther and Calvin) along with the groups they founded have openly and explicitly condemned Catholicism and the Pope as the Anti-Christ. This can be seen throughout Luther and Calvin's writings, in Deformed creedal statements such as the Westminster Confessions, and in the books, lectures, and web sites of Anti-Catholic bigots in our own day.

12) Insulting labels have been created by Protestants to be used when talking with and about Catholics: Romanist, Papist, Romish, Popish, jesuitical, Pope's Nose, Popery, Popedom, etc. Yet these same people have very thin skins when you tell them that the Protestant apostasy of the 16th Century reformed noting and actually DEFORMED Christain doctrine and Christian
history.

13) Among Martin Luther's supporters in the last 3 centuries have been vituperate anti-Semites most notorious of which was Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.

14) Modern studies of Martin Luther's writings disclose a man with a serious mental disturbance. He suffered from depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, flight of ideas, and loose association all of which are symptoms of a bipolar manic-depressant disorder

15) Luther's theology was used by him as a catharsis for his periods near suicidal depression.

16) Luther became a poor exegete of the Bible who read his own mental illness into the text as he got deeper into the 'reform'.

17) Luther was guilty of excessive cursing, vulgarities, obscenities, and inappropriate speech which his fawning sycophants constantly try to explain away.

18) Hypocritically, when a Catholic says anything negative about Luther or condemns Protestantism, or uses pejorative terms about the conduct of Protestants, he or she is held to a standard much stricter than what Protestants tolerate for Luther.

19) Protestants are constantly on the attack against the Catholic Church. When Catholics try to defend themselves, they are attacked as uncharitable. There is double standard here.

20) Protestantism is FALSE RELIGION. It openly contradicts the Bible, ignores Tradition, supports immoral practices (divorce with remarriage, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, homosexual behavior, persecution of Catholics, Anti-Semitism, etc.), tries to misrepresent Catholics, and attempts to seduce Catholics out of the Church.

For these reasons among others, I do not tolerate the insulting and ignorant comments made by Protestant Anti-Catholics. When some Protestant tells me that I should adopt the opinion of card carrying Nazi party member Fr. Josef Lortz toward Luther in preference to that of other more critical Catholic scholars and then insults me because I refuse to follow Lortz's Nazi party line it proves to me that this Protestant is not a person of integrity nor is he being honest with the fact of history.

Luther, the Nazis, and Fr. Lortz are being relegated toe the dustbin of history. Modern biblical scholarship is highly critical of Luther and finds no justification for his version of JBFA in the Bible. And the pioneering work of Fr. Denifle in pointing out Luther's serious personal failings as the source of his aberrant and heretical views has been bolstered by modern psychiatry.

The New Perspective on St. Paul objective condemns Luther as being WRONG about JBFA. Church history shows that Luther's JBFA did no exist at anytime in Church history and was an innovation of the Deformation. Fr. Denifle, Fr. Grisar, Preserved Smith, Paul Reiter, Richard Marius, and Herbert David Rix have all shown that Luther was seriously disturbed and that this mental disturbance was the source of his deviations from sound doctrine. The religions that Luther founded do not meet the ecclesiastical standards of the earliest Church.

On all counts, Protestantism is a damnable fraud and the defection of all those millions into apostasy was a serious error. It is a Pandemonium of warring cults united only in their antipathy towards the Catholic Church and those of us who defend her.

Protestants all LEFT the Church cursing those of us who stayed as they did. They have no legacy within the Church founded by Jesus but are robbers and thieves trying to enter the kingdom by any means other than through the sheep-gate. Unless they renounce their errors and submit to the Vicar of Christ, they endanger their souls.

As such their is no compromising the truth. Protestantism and its false doctrines and empty sacraments cannot save anyone. The faith they preach is not that which was delivered once and for all to the Saints but a subjectivist counterfeit designed to assuage the endogenous depression of a seriously disturbed monk. Had there been Prozac in the 16th Century, we would have been spared the whole Deformation disaster.

Please understand that this is where I am coming from. There is no possibility whatever that Luther or any Protestant was correct when They contradicted the teachings of the Catholic Church. The only hope for ecumenism is for the prodigal Protestants to come to their senses and return to their Father's house. The Catholic Church is large and her practices diverse. There is room for everyone and we welcome whatever good things our separated brethren may bring with them. But they must abandon the loose living and false teachings that led them and their ancestors astray and submit themselves to the rule of their Father. Submission and humility are the virtues they need. They must cease trying to justify the errors of the past and seek true reformation and true repentance. They can only do so in Catholicism.

Art

Dumb and Dumber: The Professional Anti-Catholic and his Sycophants

2008-02-05T10:21:00.000-08:00

One of the joys of being a Catholic is the depth and breadth of the Catholic faith. Catholicism is a feast for the eyes (e.g., Chatres Cathedral, Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Raffaele, and Titian), ears (e.g., Gregorian Chant, Palestrina, Polyphony, Mozart, and Beethoven) and even the nose (e.g., incense for the hoi polloi and Benedictine Liquor for the aficionado) and the tongue (e.g., Dom Perignon, and anything from French or Italian Cuisine). By comparison, the Protestant English are still trying to hawk kidney pie as if it were edible, and the only prot painter worth his salt is Rembrandt who IMHO is highly over-rated.

But our Protestant confreres do corner the market in one absolutely remarkable commodity: They have the most entertaining anti-Catholic bigots in the world. Now there are lots of anti-Catholic atheists they are a mean-spirited group who are generally drunk and disorderly or so full of themselves that even their friends are embarrassed by them. But when it comes to the prot anti-Catholic, you not only have vehemence and verve, but such a gross streak of dishonesty and demagoguery that they are just to comedic for words. The best part is that they take themselves so seriously!

Your average prot Anti-Catholic starts out mouthing biblical platitudes, then moves on to misinterpreting and misrepresenting Catholic teaching and Catholics themselves. They never do so with a 'holier-than-thou' attitude since that would require charity and humility. Nope! They do so riding on their high horse and looking down their noses on anyone who still kowtows to "ROME" that great city of the Anti-Christ. It is from here that they weave utterly fantastic conspiracy theories so convoluted and dastardly that paranoid schizophrenics can only look on in envy (and suspicion).

But the best part is when they come up against anyone with the smallest smattering of knowledge in the area of theology, Church History, or Scripture study. Here I must admit that it doesn't really matter whether said knowledgeable person is a Catholic or not. Real Protestant Scholars -- especially when they question the correctness of the biblical exegesis, Patristic citation, or historical musings of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Cranmer, or any of their successors -- art denounced as 'liberals' or as 'abandoning the legacy of the Reformation.' Imagine these revisionist curs! Throwing aside the opinions of the 'Reformers' for the sake of the truth! What are they thinking!

But in any case, as the professional Anti-Catholic plies his wares in the marketplace of ideas, it becomes glaringly apparent that many of his views are not supported by the facts and in other cases, it is possible for a rational person to disagree with him. (It is usually a him. Anti-Catholic women are more passive aggressive and prefer to write nasty books.) At this point, the pundit has no choice but to play the ad hominem card and try to discredit his opponent as mean or unecumenical.

There is no limit to the absurd lengths that the Anti-Catholic will go. I have had these guys tell me that I am 'under the wrath of God' for being a 'Romanist', or that I am a fool for not accepting the opinions of their favorite Catholic historian even though he was a card carrying member of the Nazi party before, during and at the end of World War II.

Then there was the pundit who claimed on the Internet that the term Mother of God for Mary was inconsistent with Patristic theology (he dismissed the Council of Ephesus as an anti-Council and claimed that St. Augustine did not accept it despite several quotations that showed he in fact did) who further claimed that the dogma of the Perpetual Virginity was a 6th Century invention (despite the Protoevangelium of James from the 150s, the excommunication of Bishop Bonosus in the 3rd Century for his denial of this doctrine, and St. Jerome's treatise in defense of it from the 4th Century) . I openly challenged him to produce any quotations from an orthodox Church Father to support his views. Instead he whined at how mean I was to him and threatened to denounce me to AOL as a spammer.

Then there was the well know 'scholar' who had a been a teacher of our own Dr. Scott Hahn. This man claimed in a popular magazine article that St. Thomas Aquinas was a Protestant . In fact that was the title of the article. When I read it, I expected to see some comparison between St. Thomas' views and those of Luther, Calvin, and others. In 1969, Fr. Henry McSorley had written a book Luther: Right or Wrong comparing the views of Luther and Aquinas on justification and I expected that he would refer to it. To my surprise, the article was a rambling hodge-podge of criticism aimed at Catholic doctrine, the views of Alister McGrath, and modern theology. McSorley was not referenced at all. In fact there was only one quotation from St. Thomas which was on another topic altogether unrelated to the central thesis of the paper.

I wrote this man 3 letters and spoke with him on the phone twice. I pointed out to him that he had not proven anything in his article and I referred him to several parts of the Summa Theologiae in which St. Thomas clearly sided with Trent (and with McGrath's assessment of Trent) against Luther's views. He asked me what I thought justification was and I answered him by quoting VERBATIM from the Summa:

Justification implies a transmutation from the state of injustice to the aforesaid state of justice.

{Summa Theologica > First Part of the Second Part > Question 113> Article 1}
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2113.htm#1

He sputtered at me in disgust that I did not understand Aquinas at all. When I indicated that I had just QUOTED st. Thomas. He said I had taken it out of context. At that point, I told him quite honestly that I thought that he must have reasons for claiming that Aquinas was a Protestant but that I found nothing in the article to convince me. I asked him to provide me with quotations from St. Thomas to substantiate his allegation. He refused and told me that he was under no obligation to provide me with anything. He whined about how obtuse I was and so childish in "following Rome'" Furthermore told me I had insulted him by not just "taking my word for it." I had impugned his integrity and he would not answer anymore insulting questions. He then told me that he was a real 'catholic' and that I was not. At this point I realized he was being deliberately provocative and evasive. He knew that he had been caught out and he was making excuses for his refusal to defend what he knew was indefensible. The conversation was over.

Dealing with these people is like being caught in the middle of a Monty Python episode. The absurdities continue to mount and then as one points this out to them there is a rude outburst of personal invective.

But the real cherry on top are the fawning sycophants who hang on every word these "experts" burble forth. These lay people feel that they have been thoroughly armed to slay the Catholic Beast by quoting the inanities of their favorite Anti-Catholic pundits. They get a rude awakening when they find that Catholic Apologists are smart, good debaters, and thoroughly informed on the topics under discussion. After making fools of themselves quoting nonsense from the Anti-Catholic stable of lies, they promise to return with a response and then slowly fade into the sunset looking for easier prey: some other Catholic who is less well informed on whom to try their lies and other attacks. When pressed to respond, they come back with the usual excuse that they have not been treated 'nicely.' This is a code word for "I lost the debate and I am running away."

So my advice to the Catholic people is to stay away from these Anti-Catholic ne'er do wells. They have nothing of value to tell you and you have no need of them. Let the Catholic Apologist handle them. if they cause trouble, refer them to us. We will take it from there. That way, they will not be back to bother you.

Art

Dr. Sippo utterly refutes Webster on the Canon

2008-01-31T15:10:00.001-08:00

{Once again, the perfidy and gross dishonesty of Protestant anti-Catholic bigots rears its ugly head. About 11 years ago, I answered an e-mail inquiry about the assertions made by the apostate William Webster concerning the Old Testament Canon in the Catholic Church. This was an off-hand note in a private correspondence done in between patients at my medical office that was never intended to be published openly on the Internet. Nevertheless Webster got hold of it and made a scathing attack on me. He had some valid critques of the content, but basically, he failed to answer any of the significant points I had raised and continue to perpetuate his lies and errors about matters of fact.

In response, I sent a rebuttal directly to Webster correcting the mistakes in my e-mail and definitively refuting his errors. In fact over the last decade I have sent this response to him 3 times, but he has never done me the courtesy of acknowledging it. Instead, he is still harping on that original e-mail and posts it on his bulletin board while refusing to deal with any of the points that I raised in my rebuttal to him.

Someone over on the Surprised by Truth Apologetics Board is now throwing this same old e-mail back in my face. I am therefore placing the full text of my rebuttal here on my blog for the whole world to see. This will prove that Mr. Webster is neither a scholar nor a man of integrity.

It is my sincere wish that he will openly acknowledge his errors and admit them to himself as well as to the world to the glory of Jesus Christ.

Art Sippo}

Dr. Sippo Answers "Billy Burro"*
OR
Mr. Webster's Errors on the Canon Refuted

“A burro can ask more questions than a wise man can answer.”
(Old Mexican Proverb)

(* For those lacking in a knowledge of “reformation” polemical literature, this title is shamelessly based on the treatise “Dr. Luther replies to Goat Emser.” Turnabout is fair play.)

I note with dismay the response that Mr. William Webster made to my critique of his position paper on the Catholic Canon of Scripture. Mr. Webster is a well-known anti-Catholic author who writes books misrepresenting the Catholic Church and her history in order to impress uneducated Protestants. He specializes in taking known facts from history and then "explaining" them in novel ways that support his prejudices while ignoring the interpretations of serious historians. He refuses to accept the conclusions of normative historians when they conflict with his own and fails to appreciate the legitimacy of interpretations other than his own.

Webster is not a serious student of Church history and has no real desire to understand the sitz im leben of the pre-Reformation Church. He commits numerous errors and yet is very defensive about his opinions. He is not open to correction about his mistakes. His personal hatred of the Catholic Church blinds him to the possibility that we Catholics may have a rationale for our position even if he does not agree with it. Consequently, he needs to be constantly engaged in tenacious ad hominem personal attacks against anyone with the temerity to challenge his views. I for one wish he would appreciate the complexity of Church History and stop trying to interpret it in “black and white” terms using anachronistic Protestant presuppositions.

The sources of his "arguments" usually come from the works of Protestant controversialists of the 19th and early 20th Centuries many of which have been found wanting by subsequent scholarship. There is no appreciation of the wider context of Church History or of studies done apart from an anti-Catholic fortress mentality. He has no familiarity with the more genteel and exacting ecumenical work in Church History that has been done since World War II that cuts across denominational lines. He also has no idea what to make of modern religious studies. The significance of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls is lost on him. He also cannot understand the diversity of opinions among believing Christians throughout history. Like other ‘Low Church’ types, he thinks that Christianity was meant to be static and unchanging so that any development in doctrine or practice over the millennia must necessarily represent corruption.
(For some reason, he fails to see that the rapid and unrestrained “changes” in Christian teaching and practice during the Reformation must -- in light of his stasis theory -- be even more problematic.)

He has no appreciation for the historic Catholic Church and its body of teaching as works in process under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit. In short, he wants to invent his own better Church in competition with the one that Jesus founded.

My previous comments on Mr. Webster's position paper on the Catholic Canon of Scripture were written off the cuff and relied on my memory alone as a source of information. They were written in private correspondence in response to an e-mail inquirer. They were not meant for publication. There were some minor lapses in areas of fact that I will attempt to rectify. I apologize for these inaccuracies. In substance though, I agree with the bulk what I wrote and will demonstrate once again that Mr. Webster has not been telling the truth. There are both specific faults in Mr. Webster's position and more general methodological ones. I will deal with the latter first as an aid to specifically refuting each of the points he tried to defend in his response to my first critique.

A) What is official Catholic teaching?

Mr. Webster likes to decide for himself which historical documents represent official Catholic teaching. His criteria for this are simply whatever he thinks will support his conclusions. As such, he dismisses the Canons of the Council of Hippo and the Bulls promulgated by Pope Eugene IV during the Ecumenical Council of Florence as unofficial. Meanwhile he raises to infallible and ecumenical status the Commentary on Job by St. Gregory the Great, the 12th Century Glossa Ordinaria on Scripture, the 102 Canons of Quinisext, and the opinions of individual Christian scholars such as St. Jerome. Let us clear up the confusion.

Let us define what the Catholic Church means by its Magisterium:

Magisterium (Lat. magister, a master): The Church's divinely appointed authority to teach the truths of religion, "Going therefore, teach ye all nations... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matt. xxviii, 19-20). This teaching is infallible: "And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" (ibid.). The solemn magisterium is that which is exercised only rarely by formal and authentic definitions of councils or popes. Its matter comprises dogmatic definitions of ecumenical councils or of the popes teaching ex cathedra, or of particular councils, if their decrees are universally accepted or approved in solemn form by the pope; also creeds and professions of faith put forward or solemnly approved by pope or ecumenical council. The ordinary magisterium is continually exercised by the Church especially in her universal practices connected with faith and morals, in the unanimous consent of the Fathers (q.v.) and theologians, in the decisions of Roman Congregations concerning faith and morals, in the common sense (q.v.) of the faithful, and various historical documents in which the faith is declared. All these are founts of a teaching,
which as a whole is infallible. They have to be studied separately to determine how far and in what conditions each of them is an infallible source of truth.

A CATHOLIC DICTIONARY (THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPÆDIC DICTIONARY)
Edited By Donald Attwater
New York, The Macmillan Company, 1962.
(Copyright 1958, Third Edition)

The only documents that are considered Magisterial by the Catholic Church are those that are promulgated by the Pope (with or without an Ecumenical Council) and directed towards the Universal Church as definitive teaching. In some cases, the Popes have acknowledged the unique contribution of a particular author or local synod in setting forth the teaching of the Church. In such cases, documents originating from sources other than the Pope or an Ecumenical Council have been promulgated by the Popes as Magisterial. This includes the Council of Hippo, the Councils of Carthage, and the Council of Orange II. A collection of magisterial documents can be found in the compendium known as the Denzinger Enchiridion Symbolorum. It contains excerpts from the most important documents in chronological order. If a document is in Denzinger, it is considered to represent official Church teaching. If it is not in Denzinger, it can still represent magisterial teaching if it meets the criteria noted above. Many important Christian documents -- including some written by the Popes - do not meet the criteria to be considered official Church teaching. Many divergent opinions were held by the Church Fathers even on matters of doctrine.

Many Protestant controversialists think that this disproves the truth of the Catholic faith. Strangely, they claim that an infallible teaching authority ought to lead to a static, dictatorial, and unanimous agreement in theological matters from Apostolic times up to the present. (I find this odd since their own system of interpretation - which they claim to be infallible - has not resulted in any such uniformity.)

The Catholic Church has never claimed this nor has she sought such uniformity. As the Catholic Church matured from the 1st Century onwards, there has always been open discussion of controversial matters within the community of faith. On occasion, the Magisterium has stepped in to authoritatively assert the correct solution to a dispute. In some cases it has intervened to tell both sides that they cannot condemn their opponents as heretics because the matter was not clearly decidable. The policy has been unity in what is essential, tolerance in what is not, and charity in everything.

The writings of the Fathers are therefore not considered “official” teaching per se. Rather, they are witnesses to the periods in which they lived and to the ideas and traditions that were then current. The Council of Trent taught that the consensus of all the Fathers on any matter of doctrine would render it infallibly taught (e.g., the divinity of Christ, the necessity of the atonement, baptismal regeneration, the sacrificial nature of the Mass, and the substantial presence of Christ’s body & blood in the Eucharist). In those matters where there was less than full consensus, disputes sometimes arose and it often would take an act of the Magisterium to settle the issue. Ultimately, it was neither the opinion of any particular Father nor the overwhelming majority of Fathers which decided the case but the superintendence of the Holy Spirit acting through the hierarchy.

Therefore, despite Mr. Webster’s heartfelt desire, the mere fact that a document had been written by a Church Father does not automatically raise it to magisterial status no matter how popular it might have been at one time. By a strange coincidence, all of the documents Mr. Webster dismisses in his reply are recognized in Denzinger as magisterial. Meanwhile none of the ones he supports are even quoted. Yet he claims that the Catholic Church officially followed St. Jerome’s critical attitude towards the Deuterocanonical material of the Old Testament up until the Council of Trent. Since none of the works he quoted meets the criteria for magisterial status, we can see that Mr. Webster has created a phony “straw-man” Catholic Church whose teachings are not those of the real Catholic Church. He has done this to flimflam the unwary. As we will find that is not the least of his prevarications.

B) What does the term “infallible” mean when used by Catholic authors?

Mr. Webster has taken exception to my claim that the Canon of Scripture was infallibly defined by the Magisterium long before the Council of Trent. He rests his opinion in part on the use of the term “infallible” by some Catholic authors with regard to this question. In particular he alleges that Fr. Schroeder states in his translation of the documents of the Ecumenical Councils that the Council of Trent was the first instance in which the Canon of Scripture was declared infallibly by the Magisterium. He also quotes the New Catholic Encyclopedia to this effect as well. I think we can extend to Mr. Webster some leeway for his error here. Not being a Catholic scholar, he is not familiar with the conventions used in our literature. For many Catholic an author, saying that a teaching was “infallibly” taught was the equivalent of saying that it was taught by the Extraordinary Magisterium: either by a canon in an Ecumenical Council or by an ex cathedra statement of the Roman Pontiff.

Unfortunately, this use of terminology is seriously flawed and does not represent a precise understanding of defined Catholic teaching. The First Vatican Council taught the following with regard to the infallibility of the Church’s teaching:

Vatican I, Session 3,
Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith,
Chapter 3, Section 8

Wherefore, by divine and catholic faith all those things are to be believed which are contained in the word of God as found in scripture and tradition, and which are proposed by the church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed, whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal magisterium. Infallible statements are therefore not restricted solely to the Extraordinary Magisterium (i.e., “solemn judgment”), but extend also to the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium of the Popes, the Hierarchy in union with him, or of a General Council.

This means that any teaching promulgated in a definitive way to the Catholic Church with the consent of the Popes is formally infallible. Some Catholic authors have been reticent about acknowledging infallibility in any document that was not formally an act of the Extraordinary Magisterium.

Note this section from the article on Infallibility in The Catholic Encyclopedia on the New Advent Web-Site:

As to the organ of authority by which such doctrines or facts are determined,three possible organs exist. One of these, the magisterium ordinarium, is liable to be somewhat indefinite in its pronouncements and, as a consequence, practically ineffective as an organ. The other two [Papal ex cathedra teaching & Ecumenical Councils], however, are adequately efficient organs, and when they definitively decide any question of faith or morals that may arise, no believer who pays due attention to Christ's promises can consistently refuse to assent with absolute and irrevocable certainty to their teaching.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07790a.htm

The authors whom Mr. Webster quoted were following this scruple. They considered a teaching only to be clearly infallible when given by the Extraordinary Magisterium. In the light of Church Tradition and the teachings of Vatican I, they were technically in error. If you understand that they were using a common convention of their time, you realize that they were pointing the faithful to those sources of teaching that they thought were most unequivocal and “adequately efficient” in teaching Catholic doctrine infallibly. This unfortunate literary convention has confused many people so we can’t blame Mr. Webster for being among them.

This matter was a hot issue during the Modernist controversies in the middle of this century. Many theologians wanted to dismiss the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium as contained in Papal teaching such as encyclicals, apostolic exhortations, and other official documents.

Pope Pius XII responded to this in the encyclical Humani Generis (1949) paragraph 21:

Nor must it be thought that the things contained in Encyclical Letters do not of themselves require assent on the plea that in them the Pontiffs do not exercise the supreme power of their Magisterium. For these things are taught with the ordinary Magisterium, about which it is also true to say, 'He who hears you, hears me.' [Lk 10. 16]. . . If the Supreme Pontiffs, in their acta expressly pass judgment on a matter debated until then, it is obvious to all that the matter, according to the mind and will of the same Pontiffs, cannot be considered any longer a question open for discussion among theologians.

There was further refinement on this matter by Vatican Council II in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, paragraph 25:

In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the
faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking…

And this infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to be endowed in defining doctrine of faith and morals extends as far as the deposit of revelation extends, which must be religiously guarded and faithfully expounded. And this is the infallibility which the Roman Pontiff, the head of the college of bishops, enjoys in virtue of his office, when as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful, who confirms his brethren in their faith (cf. Lk 22:32), by a definitive act he proclaims a doctrine of faith or morals. And therefore his definitions, of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, are justly styled irreformable, since they are pronounced with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, promised to him in blessed Peter, and therefore they need no approval of others, nor do they allow an appeal to any other judgment. For then the Roman Pontiff is not pronouncing judgment as a private person, but as the supreme teacher of the universal Church, in whom the charism of infallibility of the Church itself is individually present, he is expounding or defending a doctrine of Catholic faith.

I want to present a recent case in point. In 1995, Pope John Paul II issued a document Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in which he reaffirmed the constant teaching of the Catholic Church that women are not valid matter for the sacrament of Holy Orders.

The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith made the following statement in response to a request for clarification on this matter:

This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium 25, 2). Thus, in the present circumstances, the Roman Pontiff, exercising his proper office of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32), has handed on this same teaching by a formal declaration, explicitly stating what is to be held always, everywhere, and by all, as belonging to the deposit of the faith.

The Sovereign Pontiff John Paul II, at the Audience granted to the undersigned
Cardinal Prefect, approved this Reply, adopted in the ordinary session of this Congregation, and ordered it to be published.
Rome, from the offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on the Feast of the Apostles SS. Simon and Jude, October 28, 1995.
+ Joseph Card. Ratzinger, Prefect

What these quotations prove is that infallibility extends beyond the Extraordinary Magisterium and includes any definitive Papal teaching on the content of the Catholic Faith as such. The Canons of Ecumenical Councils are considered to be Extraordinary Magisterial teaching. The other published material (i.e., the exposition preceding the canons and other documents promulgated in accordance with the Council’s decisions) are not considered part of the Extraordinary Magisterium, but part of the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium. In practical terms, whatever these documents affirm is considered infallible and must be acknowledged as such.

The entire corpus of quotations in Denzinger meets the above criteria for infallibility. That is why this is an appropriate source for determining what is and isn’t Catholic doctrine. Hopefully, Mr. Webster will now appreciate how important Denzinger is to an understanding of real Catholic teaching.

Having addressed these two methodological issues, I would now like to proceed to comment on specific claims by Mr. Webster:

1) The Councils of Carthage and Hippo did not establish the Canon for the Church as a whole…

The Council of Hippo (393 AD) was one of a series of important local councils in North Africa held in the late 4th and early 5th Centuries. This series of councils was held to bring about reform and renewal in the North African Church and to deal with the Donatist and Pelagian heresies. Each council issued canons on matters of doctrine and discipline while reaffirming explicitly the canons of the other councils in the series that had preceded them.

This is the actual canon from the Council of Hippo according to Archbishop Hefele’s History of the Councils of the Church (vol. II, page 400). This canon was reaffirmed at every subsequent Carthaginian council in the series:

Canon 36.
ITEM, that besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in church under the name of divine Scripture. But the Canonical Scriptures are as follows:

THE OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis.
Exodus.
Leviticus.
Numbers.
Deuteronomy.
Joshua the Son of Nun.
The Judges.
Ruth.
The Four books of Kings.
The Two books of Parlipomena. [Chronicles]
Job.
The Psalms of David.
The Five books of Solomon.
The Twelve Books of the Prophets.
Isaiah.
Jeremiah.
Ezekiel.
Daniel.
Tobias.
Judith.
Esther.
The Two Books of Esdras.
The Two books of Maccabees.

THE NEW TESTAMENT
The Four Gospels.
The Acts of the Apostles.
The Thirteen Epistles of St. Paul
The One Epistle of St. Paul to the Hebrews.
The Two Epistles of St. Peter, the Apostle.
The Three Epistles of St. John the Apostle.
The Epistles of St. James the Apostle.
The Epistle of St. Jude the Apostle.
The Revelation of St. John.

Concerning the confirmation of this canon, the Transmarine Church shall be consulted. On the anniversaries of Martyrs, their acts shall also be read.

(N.B., The term “Transmarine Church” means literally “the Church over the sea” and is clearly a reference to Rome, which was directly on the opposite side of the Mediterranean Sea. The four books of Kings include the two books of Samuel and the two books of Kings from the Hebrew Bible. The books of Baruch and Lamentations were considered part of Jeremiah. The five books of Solomon were the wisdom books: Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, and Sirach.)

Explicit confirmation was given to this list by Pope St. Innocent I in 405 AD and 414 AD. The ultimate conclusion of the series was the Council of Carthage held in 418 AD. This was a major synod involving 200 bishops in which the North African Church presented its brief against the Errors of Pelagius and his disciple Coelestius who had appealed their case to Rome.

In his History of the Christian Church, Protestant Philip Schaff makes the following comment about the canons promulgated by this council:

Volume III
Chapter IX
Section 149

…These things produced a change in the opinions of [Pope] Zosimus, and about the middle of the year 418, he issued an encyclical letter to all the bishops of both East and West, pronouncing the anathema upon Pelagius and Coelestius (who had meanwhile left Rome), and declaring his concurrence with the decisions of the council of Carthage in the doctrines of the corruption of human nature, of baptism, and of grace. Whoever refused to subscribe the encyclical, was to be deposed, banished from his church, and deprived of his property.

The canons of the council of Carthage (418 AD) were thus declared by Popes Zosimus to represent authentic magisterial teaching to the whole Church. For this reason they were numbered among the 50 synods considered authoritative in the Western Church and the 85 Synods considered so in the East.

Mr. Webster insists that the decision of the Council of Hippo was unimportant and ignored by the Church as a whole. This position is rejected by virtually every major scholar -- Protestant or Catholic -- who has reviewed the evidence.

For example, Philip Schaff says:

History of the Christian Church
Vol. II
138. The Holy Scriptures and the Canon
The first express definition of the New Testament canon, in the form in which it has since been universally retained, comes from two African synods, held in 393 at Hippo, and 397 at Carthage, in the presence of Augustin, who exerted a commanding influence on all the theological questions of his age. By that time, at least, the whole church must have already become nearly unanimous as to the number of the canonical books; so that there seemed to be no need even of the sanction of a general council…

Soon after the middle of the fourth century, when the church became firmly settled in the Empire, all doubts as to the Apocrypha of the Old Testament and the Antilegomena of the New ceased, and the acceptance of the Canon in its Catholic shape, which includes both, became an article of faith.

Vol. III
118. Sources of Theology. Scripture and Tradition.
In the Western church the canon of both Testaments was closed at the end of the fourth century through the authority of Jerome (who wavered, however, between critical doubts and the principle of tradition), and more especially of Augustine, who firmly followed the Alexandrian canon of the Septuagint, and the preponderant tradition in reference to the disputed Catholic Epistles and the Revelation; though he himself, in some places, inclines to consider the Old Testament Apocrypha as deutero-canonical books, bearing a subordinate authority.

The council of Hippo in 393, and the third (according to another reckoning the sixth) council of Carthage in 397, under the influence of Augustine, who attended both, fixed the catholic canon of the Holy Scriptures, including the Apocrypha of the Old Testament…

This canon remained undisturbed till the sixteenth century, and was sanctioned
by the council of Trent at its fourth session.

Another Protestant scholar F. F. Bruce in his book The Canon of Scripture (page 97) says:

In 393, a church council held in Augustine’s see of Hippo laid down the limits of the canonical books along the lines approved by Augustine himself. The proceedings of this council have been lost but they were summarized in the proceedings of the Third Council of Carthage (397) a provincial council. These appear to have been the first Church Councils to make a formal pronouncement on the canon. When they did so they did not impose any innovation on the churches; they simply endorsed what had become the general consensus of the churches of the west and the greater part of the east.

Still another Protestant, Harry Y. Gamble, says the following in his book The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (page 55-56) –

The final resolution of the many variations [in the New Testament canon] we have noted began to take place in the late fourth century, primarily through the actions of ecclesiastical councils… In the west, two North African synods of the late fourth century promulgated lists of authoritative books. The Council of Hippo (393) and the Council of Carthage (397) both named the 27 books of our New Testament….

A broad uniformity of usage which closely approximates our [New Testament] canon cannot therefore be dated before the close of the fourth century… The canons of Hippo were recognized in later Church history for their orthodoxy and importance.

The Western Church had formally accepted all of the canons from Carthage as normative as we had noted earlier. With regard to the Eastern Church, Canon II of the Quinisext (Trullan) Council included explicit affirmation for all of the canons from Council of Carthage in 418 AD including the one on the Canon of Scripture from Hippo.

The Ecumenical Council of Nicea II (787) formally reaffirmed the following:

Anathema 4: If anyone rejects any written or unwritten tradition of the Church, let him be anathema…
Canon I : …We joyfully embrace the sacred canons and we maintain complete unshaken their regulation, both those expounded by those trumpets of the Spirit, the apostles worthy of all praise, and those from the six holy universal synods and from the synods assembled locally for the promulgation of such decrees, and from our holy fathers…

It is the universal opinion of all scholars whose work I consulted (i.e., Hefele, Schaff, Percival, & Tanner) that this affirmation was intended to extend to all of the canons of the Council of Carthage including the one from Hippo on the Canon of Scripture.

In summary, the Council of Hippo was a significant turning point in Church history. Prior to it, there was extensive debate as to the limits of both the Old and New Testament Canons. Afterwards, the limit of the NT Canon was fixed definitively for the Church and this list has become the universal norm. Its OT Canon became the norm in the Church as well but some reservations continued among certain Fathers concerning the exact status of the Deuterocanonical books within the Canon. While it did not have the status of an Ecumenical Council in itself, the decision of the Council of Hippo with regard to the Canon of Scripture was recognized by the Popes and subsequent Patriarchs and Bishops to be the norm of the Catholic Church. It has remained so to this day.

In my previous comments, I indicated that ‘the Council of Lyon’ had also affirmed this. I was in error. Neither of the Councils of Lyon deal with this matter. What I actually had in mind was an explicit quotation of the book of Sirach as scripture used by the Council of Basle/Florence. Such a usage implicitly reaffirms the authority of the Deuterocanon. I apologize for the oversight.

When I went back to the recent work of Fr. Norman Tanner SJ, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, I found that in fact there had been 14 separate instances where an Ecumenical Council held between 787 AD and 1440 AD had quoted authoritatively from the Deuterocanonicals. In 3 cases the book in question (i.e., Sirach) was explicitly referred to as Scripture. In two instances (i.e., one each for Sirach and Wisdom) the equivalent phrase “it is written” was used.

The details are:
Deuterocanonical Quotations from the Ecumenical Councils:

Nicea II:
Canon 16 (787) - Sirach 1:32 (scripture)

Constantinople IV:
Canon 10 (869) - Sirach 11:7 (scripture)

Lateran IV:
Section 70 (1215) - Sirach 2:14, 3:28 (it is written)

Vienne:
Section 14 (1311) - Sirach 24:23
Section 24 (1311) - Wisdom 5:6
Section 38 (1312) - Sirach 24:41-42, 1:5; Susannah/Daniel 13:42

Basle/Florence:
Session 21(1435) - Sirach 18:23 (scripture)
Session 3 (1438) - Wisdom 10:19 (it is written)
Session 6 (1439) - Tobit 12:20
Session 7 (1439) - Susannah/Daniel 13:9
Session 9 (1440) - Wisdom 5:21

This means that for a period of over seven hundred years prior to the “reformation,” the Magisterium of the Catholic Church had been quoting from the Deuterocanonical books as Scripture in its highest level of authoritative teaching. All five of the above councils gave their implicit witness to the inspired and canonical status of these books and used them on an equal footing with the rest of Scripture. This would not have been possible if – as Mr. Webster has tried to claim - it had been “the practice of the Church as a whole from the time of Jerome up to the eve of the Reformation ” not to give the Deuterocanonical books “status on a par equal with the inspired Scripture.”

We then also have the history of the Deuterocanonical material is its use by the Fathers and the Scholastics. Here is what Protestant Bruce Metzger says in his book An Introduction to the Apocrypha, page 178ff:

Whether it was owing to the influence of Origen, or from some other reason, from the fourth Century onward, the Greek Fathers made fewer and fewer references to the Apocrypha as inspired…In the Latin Church, on the other hand, a much higher estimate was accorded to the books of the Apocrypha. Following the example of Tertullian and Cyprian, Augustine frequently quoted from them as if they were not different from the canonical books of the Hebrew Old Testament.

Furthermore, more than one Synodical Council justified and emphasized their use. Jerome, standing in this respect almost alone in the West, spoke out decidedly for the Hebrew Canon, declaring unreservedly that books, which were outside that canon, should be ranked as Apocryphal… But St. Jerome - critic as he was of the Deuterocanon - continued to use these books and to quote them as Scripture long after registering his objections.

As J. N. D. Kelly has written in his book Jerome: His Life Writings and
Controversies (page 160-1):

Since Origen’s time it had been recognized that there was a distinction to be made between the Jewish canon and the list acknowledged by Christians, but most writers preferred to place the popular and widely used Deuterocanonical books in a special category (e.g., calling them ‘ecclesiastical’) rather than to discard them. Jerome now takes a much firmer line. After enumerating the “twenty-two” (or perhaps twenty-four) books recognized by the Jews, he decrees that any books outside this list must be reckoned ‘apocryphal’: “They are not in the canon.” Elsewhere, while admitting that the Church reads books like Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus [Sirach] which are strictly uncanonical, he insists on their being used solely for ‘edifying the people, not for orroboration of ecclesiastical doctrines.” This was the attitude which, with temporary concessions for tactical or other reasons, he was to maintain for the rest of his life - in theory at any rate, for in practice he was to continue to cite them as if they were Scripture.”

{In a footnote, Kelly refers to the book San Girolomo by A. Penna (pages 387-9) which documents a large number of such quotations made by St. Jerome up to the very end of his life. Many of the quotations were preceded with comments such as “it is written,” “Scripture says,” etc. The same thing is documented in Jay Braverman’s monograph Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel.}

This pattern of using the Deuterocanonical books as Scripture holds true for virtually all of the Church Fathers, including the ones who - like St. Jerome - voiced some objection to their place in the Bible. All you need to do to see this is to check the Scripture index in the back of the volumes of The Ante-Nicene Fathers and The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers in the Edinburgh patristic collection edited by Schaff and Wace. This fact is also clear in the works of the Great Church Fathers such as St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Bonaventure, St. Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernard and the majority of the Scholastics.

With regard to the Eastern Church Bruce Metzger wrote in his book on the Apocrypha page 192ff:

The position of the Eastern Orthodox Church regarding the canon of the Old Testament is not at all clear. On the one hand, since the Septuagint version of the Old Testament was used throughout the Byzantine Period, it is natural that the Greek theologians, such as Andrew of Crete, Germanus, Theodore the Studite, and Theophylact of Bulgaria, should refer indiscriminately to Apocryphal and canonical books alike. Furthermore certain Apocrypha are quoted as authoritative at the Seventh Ecumenical Council held at Nicea in 787 and at the council convened by Basil at Constantinople in 869. On the other hand, writers who raise the issue regarding the limits of the canon, such as John of Damacus and Nicephorus, express views which coincide with those of the great Athanasius, who adhered to the Hebrew canon… At the time of the Reformation…. [by] way of reaction, other leaders of Eastern Orthodoxy found it expedient, in confessions of faith and in decrees of synods, explicitly to place the Apocryphal books on level with the canonical books… What was perhaps the most important synod in the history of the Eastern Church was convened at Jerusalem in 1672. Chiefly directed towards the continuing influence of Cyril [Lucar of Constantinople] and ‘the party of the Calvinists,’ the Synod expressly designated the books of Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, Bel and the Dragon, Susanna, the Maccabees and Ecclesiasticus as canonical.

We can see that the extremely critical view of St. Jerome was never in the majority in the Church - either in the East or in the West - though there were always some scholars who accepted his position. Those who gave unqualified support to the Deuterocanon were more numerous. As time went on, while a significant number of scholars began to raise issue with the Deuterocanon, virtually every author in the pre-“reformation” period quoted from these books as Scripture. It is clear though that anyone who objected to the canonicity of the Deuterocanon after the triumph of the North African Councils was out of touch with Christian history, the mainline of Christian scholarship, and with the teaching of the Magisterium.

In summary, the use of the Deuterocanonical books as Scripture can be traced to the earliest times of the Apostolic Church. It continued in the Church up to the time of the “reformation” and beyond that to the present day. When we review the facts of history and the way that the majority of scholars in this area have interpreted them, clearly Mr. Webster is not telling the truth.

2) The New Catholic Encyclopedia actually affirms the fact that the Canon was not officially and authoritatively established for the Western Church until the Council of Trent…

The New Catholic Encyclopedia is a wonderful compendium, but it has its limitations and it certainly is not a magisterial document. I am under no obligation to agree with its conclusions. Based upon the above analysis of the North African Councils, I submit that the Canon of Scripture was fixed both de facto and de jure when the Popes formally accepted the canons of Hippo and Carthage. I stand on the clear history of the Church and its constant use of the Deuterocanonicals. This was an immemorial tradition confirmed by local synods, promulgated by the Popes to the Universal Church, and in constant use by Catholic Pastors, scholars, and teachers.

I have already mentioned the problem with the improper use of the term “infallible” by some Catholic authors. As I noted earlier, some authors use this to refer only to acts of the Extraordinary Magisterium, whereas defined Catholic doctrine extends infallibility to the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium as well. I apologize to Mr. Webster for the confusion caused by the poor use of terminology by Catholic authors, but what I am insisting upon is the correct interpretation. The fact that the canons from the Council of Hippo are included in Denzinger along with other similar material bears that out.

The questions concerning the extent of both the NT and OT canons resurfaced in the 15th Century with the rise of the Humanist movement. The Humanists mistrusted the received wisdom of tradition and wanted to get “back to the sources” of art, music, science, philosophy, rhetoric, and religion. They were obsessed with critically establishing the true content of ancient texts and of purging them from corruptions, bowdlerized editing, and forgeries. The criticism of the Deuterocanonicals by St. Jerome was quite appealing to them ideologically since he insisted that the authentic OT was the original Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint (LXX) Greek OT generally came on rough times in this environment. A preference was shown for the Hebrew text. The best Hebrew texts of this time were based on the Masoretic Text (MT) which was thought to be authentic. (We now know that it originated in the 8th Century AD.) The MT had added nikudot (i.e., vowel marks) to the Hebrew consonantal text as a way of ‘clarifying’ the meaning of the text. There were some significant differences between the LXX and the MT, which the Humanists usually chalked up to corruptions that had crept in with the translation from Hebrew into Greek.

Based on studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now believe that there was a Western Palestinian variant of the Hebrew text of the Bible which was used during the time of Christ and which is closer to the meaning of the LXX than the MT in many places where they differ. (See Frank Moore Cross’s book Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text.) On this point at least, it appears that the assumptions of the Humanists were wrong.

The Humanists also assumed that the biblical canon of the ancient Church must also have been the same as that of the Jews at least initially. It is now widely accepted that there was no clearly closed ‘canon’ among the Jews until the 3rd Century AD. While the Pharisees had a canon formed in the mid-2nd Century BC, it was not held as normative by all Jews. According to the Talmud, the Sadducees only accepted the authority of the Pentateuch. The Qumran sectaries had their own view of the canon, which apparently included Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, 4QMMT, and possibly some others. Even in the mainstream of Pharisaic thought, there were disputes about the canon as late as 90 AD. The canonicity of Ezekiel, Song of Songs, Chronicles, and Ecclesiastes were questioned at the end of the 1st Century AD and there were strong moves to include Sirach and Wisdom. There was a text of Sirach found in the Cairo Genizah that dates from the 2nd-3rd Century AD which used several of the textual conventions reserved only to Scriptural books . There was no clear consensus among the rabbinical schools until well into the Christian era.

There have been recent attempts by Protestant fundamentalists such as Roger Beckwith to claim that the Jewish canon was closed definitively in the 2nd Century BC. Unfortunately, there are several problems with this scenario. First of all, Beckwith relies heavily on the existence of a mythical Great Sanhedrin (or some other official body), which would have had the authority to close the Canon. There is no evidence that this Sanhedrin ever existed. Beckwith claims that the prophetic voice was stilled in Israel after the Babylonian Exile so that any books written subsequently could not be inspired. He also assumes that Jews of all differing parties would have accepted this closure of the Canon. This puts him at odds with what the Talmud explicitly says about the Sadducees, and with the evidence from Qumran, the Cairo Genizah, and Jewish tradition. Finally, he cannot answer for certain who closed the canon, where it was closed, when, why, or by what authority. He proposes answers to these questions, but his answers are merely speculative. It all ends up looking overly simplistic and is not terribly convincing.

Besides if Beckwith is correct and the prophetic voice was silenced in Israel, then Jesus and St. John the Baptizer could not have been considered real Prophets by their contemporaries. That would have undermined their missions to say the least. There is also evidence form Josephus that there was genuine prophecy going on in Israel up to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD (See Prophetic Figures in Late Second Temple Jewish Palestine by Rebecca Gray).

And if the Canon of Scripture had been closed before the coming of Christ, then there could have been no NT. The very existence of the NT proves that the Canon of Scripture in the objective sense was not yet completed before the time of Jesus.

In the 1960’s, Protestant A. C. Sundberg did his doctoral dissertation at Harvard on the origin of the Canon of the OT in the Early Church. His conclusion was that the long OT Canon - including the Deuterocanonicals - was a product of the Christian Church in the 2nd Century. He debunked the idea of a longer ‘Alexandrian’ biblical canon among Greek speaking Jews. His work is very important because it shows that the long OT canon is distinctively Christian and was not dependent upon Jewish opinion.

Mr. Webster also asserts that the listing of the Canon of Scripture in the Bull of Union with the Copts written by Pope Eugenius IV was not an infallible document. Again he bases this on his quotation of ‘experts.’ If we actually look at the Bull it says the following:

[The Holy Roman Church] professes that one and the same God is the author of the Old and the New Testaments - that is the Law, and the Prophets, and the Gospels - since the saints of both testaments spoke under the inspiration of the same Spirit. It accepts and venerates their books whose titles are as follows: [the long Canon of the OT and the 27 books of the NT]… After all of these explanations the aforesaid abbot Andrew, in the name of the aforesaid patriarch and of himself and of all the Jacobites, receives and accepts with all devotion and reverence this most salutary synodal decree with all of its chapters, declarations, definitions, traditions, precepts, and statutes and all the doctrine contained therein, and also whatever the holy apostolic see and the Roman Church holds and teaches.

This is a strong statement concerning a profession of faith in the Roman Church’s teaching. It was intended to be definitive and to represent the requirements of union between the Jacobites and the Roman Church. As such it qualifies as an act of the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium and so is considered formally infallible.

The following is taken from the article on the Canon of the Old Testament from the New Advent Online Catholic Encyclopedia:

In 1442, during the life, and with the approval, of this Council, Eugenius IV issued several Bulls, or decrees, with a view to restore the Oriental schismatic bodies to communion with Rome, and according to the common teaching of theologians these documents are infallible states of doctrine.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03267a.htm

So I rest my case on this point. The inspiration and canonicity of the long Old Testament Canon was accepted by the Magisterium for over 1100 years before the “reformation” and whenever the Magisterium was confronted with this question down through the centuries, it always gave the same answer.

3) … even such an authority as Pope Gregory the Great rejected the Apocrypha as canonical:

As I stated in my original comments, St. Gregory made no magisterial pronouncements on the Canon of Scripture. The comment quoted by Mr. Webster was from his Commentary on Job also known as his Magna Moralia, which was a private work of interpretation and not a Magisterial document. Mr. Webster refuses to accept this conclusion because it does not suit his desired conclusions. Let me make my case clear.

By Mr. Webster’s own admission, the Moralia was started in 578 AD while St. Gregory was in Constaninople and he completed the last section (Book XXXV) in 595 AD. According to Protestant Rev. James Barmby DD (in NPNF 2nd Series volume XII, St. Gregory, page xxxi) it was “in a great measure written during his residence in Constantinople.” St. Gregory was Pope from 590 to 604 AD. Hence this work was started twelve years before he was Pope and was mostly composed before he assumed that office. In no way could this be considered an official magisterial document. It is a work of private speculation and has no authority beyond the
scholarship used in its composition.

Mr. Webster alleges that St. Gregory, “would never have purposefully expressed a view contrary to that which he knew had been authoritatively established by the Church.” I commend Mr. Webster on his faith in St. Gregory’s orthodoxy, especially since St. Gregory was an ardent champion of the jurisdictional primacy of the Roman See! But I don’t think Mr. Webster can really speak to St. Gregory’s state of knowledge when he wrote book XIX of the Moralia while in Constantinople. What he knew or did not know at that time concerning the teaching of the Church on the Canon is a matter of speculation. Regardless this was a private work of theology written long before he was Pope and so it has no bearing on the official status of the Deuterocanon within the Church.

Let us review that quote of Pope St. Gregory the Great more carefully:

With reference to which particular we are not acting irregularly, if from the books, though not Canonical, yet brought out for the edification of the Church, we bring forth testimony. Thus Eleazar in the battle smote and brought down an Elephant, but fell under the very beast that he killed.” (1 Macc 6:46)

[Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, (Oxford: Parker, 1845),
Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, Volume II, Parts III and IV,
Book XIX.34, p. 424]

So St. Gregory did not subscribe to St. Jerome’s extreme view of the Canon. He accepted the moderate view that the Deutrocanonicals were ‘ecclesiastical.’ But notice that he is apologizing for using 1Maccabees. He is not saying that it is of no value but rather that he felt the necessity of using this book despite doubts about its canonicity. This is very significant. The inspired character of 1Maccabees showed through despite the doubting of mere men. St. Gregory sensed it and was drawn to use it. Thus he is witnessing against the extreme view of Mr. Webster, which would dismiss the Deuterocanonicals as uninspired and useless to the Church. Mr. Webster tries to make St. Gregory’s comments into a Church wide standard that rejected the Deuterocanonicals. As we have seen, the level of reception for the Deuterocanonicals varied among churchmen during this period but the mainline of Christian tradition supported their canonicity.

In fact St. Gregory himself supports their canonical status in his own works. In his Book of Pastoral Rule which was written after the Moralia but while he was Pope, he quotes 12 times from Sirach, 2 times from Wisdom, 1 time from Tobit. Frequently with these quotations he uses the formula “it is written,” which he reserved for references to canonical Scripture. So like St. Jerome, St Gregory was inconsistent in some of his private opinions about the Deuterocanonicals compared to the way he used them in his published work. The inspired character of these books kept shining through despite his doubts.

4) There are major Fathers in the Church prior to the North African Councils who rejected the judgments of these councils.

There was no clear Tradition from the Apostles about the Canon of Scripture. It was the spontaneous use of the books by Christians over the first 300 years of Church history that firmly established the sacred books in the life of the Church. There was a great deal of dissention in the Early Church about both the NT and OT Canons. In fact, every pre-Hippo Father who championed the Hebrew Canon in the Church also had a NT Canon which was different from ours, including St. Athanasius.

Why did some early Fathers reject the longer OT Canon? Every expert whom I have consulted says the same thing: the objections arose among those Fathers who learned Hebrew and who had direct apologetic contact with Jews. This began in the late 2nd and early 3rd Centuries with such notable figures as St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. It is clear that before prior to that contact these same Fathers all accepted the longer OT Canon and quoted from it as Scripture. These Fathers wanted to argue with Jews using only the OT Scripture that the Rabbis accepted. This was the genesis of the whole problem. Because they wanted to beat the Jews in debates they questioned the authority of the Holy Spirit within the Church to discern the canonical limits of the inspired Word of God.

5) The books called 1 & 2 Esdras at Hippo and Carthage are not the same as the books of the same name recognized at Trent.

This is a complicated issue. For the sake of convenience I will use the following conventions in referring to these books:

LXX1Esdras = Apoc1Esdras = Vg3Edsras
LXX2Esdras = Ezra + Nehemiah
Hebrew-Ezra = Vg1Esdras
Hebrew-Nehemiah = Vg2Esdras

I first want to compliment Mr. Webster on coming up with a truly new issue in the study of Church History, which is worthy of serious scholarly study. The exact meaning that the fathers at the Council of Hippo gave to the ‘two books of Esdras’ is not clear. It is rare in apologetics that you discover a new issue that is worthy of extended investigation. I fear that I do not possess the necessary tools and expertise to settle this issue. But I am afraid that it does not have the apologetic importance that Mr. Webster thinks it does. First of all, the Council of Hippo had no magisterial authority of its own, but derived it from the support given to it by the confirmation of the ‘Transmarine Church’ (i.e., Rome). Consequently, what the fathers of Hippo meant when they spoke of the “two books of Esdras” is really immaterial. It is what the Popes intended when they promulgated the Council’s teaching that counts.

In Septuagint manuscripts, LXX1Esdras was an apocryphal book composed mostly of parts of Hebrew-Ezra with some other materials added. LXX2Esdras was a combination of the complete texts of Hebrew-Esdras and Hebrew-Nehemiah. When the Latin Vulgate was composed by St. Jerome, Hebrew-Esdras became 1Esdras (Vg1Esdras), Hebrew-Nehemiah became 2Esdras (Vg2Esdras),and LXX1Esdras became 3Esdras (Vg3Esdras) or what later came to be known as Apocryphal 1Esdras (Apoc1Esdras).

Since 383 AD, St. Jerome had come to accept the concept of ‘Hebrew Verity.’ That is, in disputes over the canon and textual content of the bible he deferred to the Hebrew text as being most correct. This was well known at that time and was one of the guiding principles for his translation of the Bible into Latin that had been requested by Pope St. Damasus. Really the dispute over the authentic text of the ‘two books of Esdras’ had started with Origin’s Hexapla texts 140 years earlier. This was nothing new. St. Jerome was actually in the process of translating Ezra and Nehemiah from 393-394 AD according to Kelly and the New Catholic Encyclopedia. This means that his work on these books was contemporary with the Council of Hippo and his decision as to the nature of the authentic text of the Esdras material had been made earlier. It is likely that the council fathers at Hippo knew of this work and they may have agreed with St. Jerome’s opinion on this matter. Unfortunately, we do not have the Acta from the council and so we probably cannot reconstruct the deliberations on this.

Whatever the case, St. Jerome completed the translations for the Vulgate by 405-406 AD. When the Popes reaffirmed the Canon of Scripture from Hippo/Carthage in 401, 414, and 418 AD there is no doubt of their intentions. They saw the ‘two books of Esdras’ as identical to the books of Esdras in St. Jerome’s Vulgate translation, which were based upon the Hebrew text of Ezra and Nehemiah. It was this understanding of the text of the ‘two books of Esdras’ which was promulgated ever after in the Church and which was adopted by the Councils of Florence and Trent.

The quotation of LXX1Esdras by St. Augustine in The City of God to which Mr. Webster refers is an interesting historical note but is of no consequence. It is the intention of the Popes who promulgated the Canon from Hippo which counts and their position is quite clear.

6) Hippo and Carthage state that Solomon wrote 5 books of the Old Testament when in actuality he wrote 3.

Mr. Webster apparently did not do his homework. He alleges that “It was not the common practice of the Church to refer to these [5 wisdom] books as Solomon’s.” Kelly states on page 236 of Jerome that St. Jerome wrote a letter in which he debunked the supposed authorship of the books of Sirach and Wisdom “that were widely believed to be also by Solomon.” St. Augustine says in his treatise On Christian Doctrine Book 2, Chapter 8:

“For two books, one called Wisdom and the other called Ecclesiasticus, are ascribed to Solomon from a certain resemblance of style, but the most likely opinion is that they were written by Jesus the son of Sirach.”

Pope St. Gregory the Great in his Book of Pastoral Rule refers to the author of Sirach as “Solomon” in a quotation in Chapter XV (NPNF, 2nd Series, vol. XII, page 39).

Nothing more needs to be said. Mr. Webster again is not telling the truth.

7) The universal practice of the Church as a whole up to the time of the Reformation was to follow the judgment of Jerome who rejected the Old Testament Apocrypha on the grounds that these books were never part of the Jewish Canon.

We have already covered this matter in detail. The universal practice of the church from the time of St. Jerome up to the “reformation” was to argue about the canonicity of these books but to simultaneously quote from them as Scripture. While there were people who did not accept these books as canonical, the mainstream of Catholic thought (typified by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Ecumenical Councils) always did. In retrospect, this was the traditional position inherited from the early Church and confirmed by the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium of the Church.

A quick word about the Glossa Ordinaria. This was a popular compilation of scriptural comments from the 12th Century that was used extensively during the Middle Ages. It was never an ‘official’ commentary and had no magisterial status. It collected a variety of opinions on the biblical texts from many sources.

I discovered something on the Internet the other day. Southern Methodist University had a display of rare biblical texts a few years ago from the collection of Charles Ryrie who composed the Dispensationalist study bible that bears his name. One of the listings was as follows:

This manuscript contains the "Sapiential" Books of the Bible, pertaining to the wisdom of God: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus. Produced in France early in the thirteenth century, it consists of 180 vellum leaves illuminated with red and blue initials, paragraph markings and chapter numbers. The gothic scripts of the biblical text, glossa ordinaria, interlinear gloss, and marginal commentary are written in various sizes by at least four different hands.

So there were Glossa Ordinaria pertaining to the Deuterocanonical books as well as to the Protocanonicals.

8) The Opinions of several late Patristic and medieval authors rejected the
Apocrypha. (e.g., Rufinus, Cajetan, etc)

This points out one of the great errors of the Protestant revolt. Protestantism was founded on the revolt of certain men with university training who denied the authority of the Historic Catholic Church and her Hierarchy to teach and preserve sound doctrine. Their whole movement was founded on rhetoric and well-structured academic debates rather than on faith in the Holy Spirit’s power to superintend the Church. Ever since then in the Protestant world, academic standards and the consensus in the universities have replaced Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium as the norms for interpreting Scripture. As such, Protestant theologies are built upon a ‘Pelagian’ attitude towards doctrine. As long as there was some scholar with a body of work that was stylistically compelling, or particularly well argued, there would usually be some Protestant who would turn that man’s speculations into an article of faith. Meanwhile they condemned the simple Catholic people who placed their implicit faith in the Church’s teaching claiming that they had not worked hard enough in understanding their faith.

Right is right if no one is right. Wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. A mere show of hands among “acknowledged experts”, a rhetorical flourish in written form, or even an opinion from someone with an academic degree can do nothing to make a falsehood become true. Some people are spectacularly wrong. Others are banal yet correct. It doesn’t matter how many people Mr. Webster can dredge up who objected to the Deuterocanonical books. They were wrong.

The vast majority of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologians down through the centuries have accepted these books as canonical. But even if the Popes in each age stood alone and held out for their canonicity, that would be enough. Doctrine is not determined by a show of hands by theologians, but “men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” (2Peter 1:21).

9) Roman Catholic apologists often assert that the canons of Carthage were authoritatively received by the 6th Ecumencial Council [Quinisext]. What they never add is that this council also received the canons of Athanasius and
Amphilocius which also have to do with the canon. (The 102 canons of Quinisext (Council of Trullo) have always been considered part of the 5th and 6th ecumenical council by the Seventh Ecumenical Council and by the Roman Church.)

This is a particularly egregious misrepresentation by Mr. Webster because he is obviously familiar with the sources that I am about to quote. I think these quotations will speak for themselves:

History of the Christian Church
by Philip Schaff
Volume IV
Chapter XI
Section 114.
Concilium Quinisextum. a.d.
692.
....The fifth and sixth ecumenical councils passed doctrinal decrees, but no disciplinary canons. This defect was supplied by a new council at
Constantinople in 692, called the Concilium Quinisextum, also the Second Trullan Council, from the banqueting hall with a domed roof in the imperial palace where
it was held. It was convened by the Emperor Justinian II. surnamed Rinotmetos, one of the most heartless tyrants that ever disgraced a Christian throne. He ruled from 685-695, was deposed by a revolution and sent to exile with a mutilated nose, but regained the throne in 705 and was assassinated in 711. The supplementary council was purely oriental in its composition and spirit. It adopted 102 canons, most of them old, but not yet legally or ecumenically sanctioned. They cover the whole range of clerical and ecclesiastical life and discipline, and are valid to this day in the Eastern church. They include eighty-five apostolic canons so called (thirty-five more than were acknowledged by the Roman church), the canons of the first four ecumenical councils, and of several minor councils, as Ancyra, Neo-Caesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, etc.; also the canons of Dionysius the Great of Alexandria, Peter of Alexandria, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzum, Amphilochius of Iconium, Timothy of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, Gennadius of Constantinople, and an anti-Roman canon of Cyprian of Carthage. The decretals of the Roman bishops are ignored. The canons were signed first, by the emperor; the second place was left blank for the pope, but was never filled; then follow the names of Paul of Constantinople, Peter of Alexandria, Anastasius of Jerusalem, George of Antioch (strangely after that of the patriarch of Jerusalem), and others, in all 211 bishops and episcopal representatives, all Greeks and Orientals, of whom 43 had been present at the sixth ecumenical council. The emperor sent the acts of the Trullan Council to Sergius of Rome, and requested him to sign them. The pope refused because they contained some chapters contrary to ecclesiastical usage in Rome. The emperor dispatched the chief officer of his body guard with orders to bring the pope to Constantinople. But the armies of the exarch of Ravenna and of the Pentapolis rushed to the protection of the pope, who quieted the soldiers; the imperial officer had to hide himself in the pope’s bed, and then left Rome in disgrace. Soon afterwards Justinian II. was dethroned and sent into exile. When he regained the crown with the aid of a barbarian army (705), he sent two metropolitans to Pope John VII. with the request to call a council of the Roman church, which should sanction as many of the canons as were acceptable. The pope, a timid man, simply returned the copy. Subsequent negotiations led to no decisive result.

The seventh ecumenical Council (787) readopted the 102 canons, and erroneously ascribed them to the sixth ecumenical Council. The Roman church never committed herself to these canons except as far as they agreed with ancient Latin usage. {Emphasis added} Some of them were inspired by an anti-Roman tendency. The first canon repeats the anathema on Pope Honorius. The thirty-sixth canon, in accordance with the second and fourth ecumenical Councils, puts the patriarch of Constantinople on an equality of rights with the bishop of Rome, and concedes to the latter only a primacy of honor, not a supremacy of jurisdiction. Clerical marriage of the lower orders is sanctioned in canons 3 and 13, and it is clearly hinted that the Roman church, by her law of clerical celibacy, dishonors wedlock, which was instituted by God and sanctioned by the presence of Christ at Cana. But second marriage is forbidden to the clergy, also marriage with a widow (canon 3), and marriage after ordination (canon 6). Bishops are required to discontinue their marriage relation (canon 12). Justinian had previously forbidden the marriage of bishops by a civil law. Fasting on the Sabbath in Lent is forbidden (canon 55) in express opposition to the custom in Rome. The second canon fixes the number of valid apostolical canons at eighty-five against fifty of the Latin church. The decree of the Council of Jerusalem against eating blood and things strangled (Acts 15) is declared to be of perpetual force, while in the West it was considered merely as a temporary provision for the apostolic age, and for congregations composed of Jewish and Gentile converts. The symbolical representation of Christ under the figure of the lamb in allusion to the words of John the Baptist is forbidden as belonging to the Old Testament, and the representation in human form is commanded (canon 82).

These differences laid the foundation for the great schism between the East. and the West. The supplementary council of 692 anticipated the action of Photius, and clothed it with a quasi-ecumenical authority.

Protestant Henry R. Percival said this about Quinisext:

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (Second Series)
VOLUME XIV: THE SEVEN ECUMENICAL COUNCILS
Page 355ff
The Canons
of the Council in Trullo; Often Called the Quinisext Council.
a.d. 692.
Elenchus.
Introductory Note.
From the fact that the canons of the Council in Trullo are included in this volume of the Decrees and Canons of the Seven Ecumenical Councils it must not for an instant be supposed that it is intended thereby to affirm that these canons have any ecumenical authority, or that the council by which they were adopted can lay any claim to being ecumenical either in view of its constitution or of the subsequent treatment by the Church of its enactments... {Emphasis added}

Pope Sergius refused to sign the decrees when they were sent to him, rejected them as “lacking authority” (invalidi) and described them as containing “novel errors.” With the efforts to extort his signature we have no concern further than to state that they signally failed. Later on, in the time of Pope Constantine, a middle course seems to have been adopted, a course subsequently in the ninth century thus expressed by Pope John VIII., “he accepted all those canons which did not contradict the true faith, good morals, and the decrees of Rome,” a truly notable statement! Nearly a century later Pope Hadrian I. distinctly recognizes all the Trullan decrees in his letter to Tenasius of Constantinople and attributes them to the Sixth Synod. “All the holy six synods I receive with all their canons, which rightly and divinely were promulgated by them, among which is contained that in which reference is made to a Lamb being pointed to by the Precursor as being found in certain of the venerable images.” Here the reference is unmistakably to the Trullan Canon LXXXII.

Archbishop Hefele’s summing up of the whole matter is as follows: (Hefele, Hist. of the Councils, Vol. V., p. 242.)
{***The following paragraph in brackets is added by Dr. Sippo from page 242 in Hefele to show the complete statement of Bishop Hefele about the papal response to Quinisext. It immediately precedes the part quoted by Percival:}

["Probably Tarsius of Constantinople had also written to the pope what he persuaded the Second of Nicea to, that the same fathers who held the sixth Synod had added the appendix four or five years later... This historical and chronological assertion, Hadrian, as well as the members of the Seventh Ecumenical Council seem to have believed. That, however, the pope would not have approved of all the Trullan Canons we read in his words quoted above: He approved those 'quae jure ac divnitas promulgatae sunt' {'which were rightly and divinely promulgated'}. Hadrian I seems here to have done as subsequently Martin V and Eugenius IV did in the confirmation of Constance and Basle. They selected such expressions as did not expressly embrace the confirmation of all the canons, but -- properly explained -- excluded a certain number of the decrees in question from the papal ratification.] ***
"That the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicea ascribed the Trullan canons to the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and spoke of them entirely in the Greek spirit, cannot astonish us, as it was attended almost solely by Greeks. They specially pronounced the recognition of the canons in question in their own first canon; but their own canons have never received the ratification of the Holy See."

I would add only a few further comments. If as Mr. Webster alleges Quinisext was accepted in the West as ecumenical, then why were none of its canons ever enforced in the Latin Church? The 102 Quinisext canons are not included in Denzinger or in the collections of the Documents of the Ecumenical Councils done by Fr. Schroeder or Fr. Tanner. Virtually no mention is made of Quinisext in any Catholic Church history books such as the sets by Fr. Philip Hughes or Fr. Hubert Jedin.

This does not mean that the Latin Church’s view of Quinisext was entirely negative. Quite the contrary, we have accepted it as an expression of Eastern Christian practice and discipline. It is the basis for the Eastern Rite canon law code among Eastern Churches in Union with Rome and for similar codes among the Orthodox as well. The Catholic Church has just never considered it ecumenical.

As to the “contradictions” between the canon of Hippo on the Canon of Scripture and those of St. Amphilocus & St. Athanasius, there was actually a total of 5 different listing of the Canon of Scripture among the 102 Canons at Quinisext. None of them are identical with each other. To counter the argument that they were contradictory to each other, Percival opined that the affirmation of these canons was “not specific but general” (page 611). In other words, Quinisext was giving a general witness to the usage of the Scriptures in the Early Church with these different canons. As in any law code, there are bound to be portions of that code which are obsolete, superceded, or over-turned by judicial authority. Since the long Canon has always predominated in the Eastern Church we can only surmise that Quinisext would have given pride of place to the Canon of Scripture from Hippo/Carthage.

Once again, we must conclude that Mr. Webster has not told us the truth here either.

Epilogue:
I hope it is obvious that the position that Mr. Webster espouses has some serious problems. He has not done his homework and is patently wrong about many things. On the other hand, he has pointed out some very interesting questions that have helped me to further understand the history of the Christian Church. While I appreciate his spunk in trying to find numerous hard questions for us Catholic apologists to answer, the time has come for him to admit that his thesis concerning the Canon of Scripture and Church History is untenable. While there was some debate in the Early Church over the extent of the Biblical Canon, there never was a time when the Church officially rejected the Deuterocanonical books. The mainstream of Catholic thinkers supported the long Canon. The few defectors from Catholic Tradition were simply out of touch with Magisterial teaching. Happily the Holy Spirit always maintained superintendence over the Church and, whenever the question arose about the canon of Scripture, the Church responded faithfully that the long Canon was part of the Sacred Tradition that she had received from the Early Church. I hope that Mr. Webster will see the light and turn his attention to some other more credible project. I also hope that this has been enlightening for him and that he will take the time to re-evaluate his position before God. The time to commit himself to Christ is now, not later. Time is running short and there is no salvation outside of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church founded by Jesus. I invite Mr. Webster to come to his senses and to leave his bondage to the Protestant lie and join us on the Barque of Peter. May God bring him to everlasting life!

Art Sippo MD, MPH
Omnes semper - ad Jesum, per Mariam, cum Petro.

Where have you been, Art?

2007-10-30T20:37:00.000-07:00

Hi folks! I have been recuperating from an operation and during that time, I was doing several medical opinions for attorneys. It left me with little time to get my thoughts together. I am now back at regular work and I will get into the swing of things. There will be more posts to to come!

I Told You So!

2007-07-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I have had many discussions with non-Catholics: some amiable, some not. One thing I have always reminded them about is that, in the end, the Catholic Church is the One True Church founded by Jesus Christ and that apart from her, there is no salvation. This has, of course, led to many a heated discussion with Prots lining up Bible verses that speak about faith while ignoring those that speak about the Church. After I have demonstated conclusively that the Bible clearly teaches a corporate message of salvation, not an individual one, the last line of argument of my opponents has always been: "Well, the Second Vatican Council called us separated brethren and you're are not compatible with that."

In rebuttal, I have always pointed these folks to Lumen Gentium 14 which says:

14. This Sacred Council wishes to turn its attention firstly to the Catholic faithful. Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, it teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation. Christ, present to us in His Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation. In explicit terms He Himself affirmed the necessity of faith and baptism(124) and thereby affirmed also the necessity of the Church, for through baptism as through a door men enter the Church. Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.

They are fully incorporated in the society of the Church who, possessing the Spirit of Christ accept her entire system and all the means of salvation given to her, and are united with her as part of her visible bodily structure and through her with Christ, who rules her through the Supreme Pontiff and the bishops. The bonds which bind men to the Church in a visible way are profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical government and communion. He is not saved, however, who, though part of the body of the Church, does not persevere in charity. He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but, as it were, only in a "bodily" manner and not "in his heart."(12*) All the Church's children should remember that their exalted status is to be attributed not to their own merits but to the special grace of Christ. If they fail moreover to respond to that grace in thought, word and deed, not only shall they not be saved but they will be the more severely judged.(13*)

Catechumens who, moved by the Holy Spirit, seek with explicit intention to be incorporated into the Church are by that very intention joined with her. With love and solicitude Mother Church already embraces them as her own.

124 Cf. Mc 16, 16; Jn. 3, 5.

(12*) Cfr. S. Augustinus, Bapt. c. Donat. V, 28, 39; PL 43, 197: Certe manifestum est, id quod dicitur, in Ecdesia intus et foris, in corde, non in corpore cogitandum. Cfr. ib., III, 19, 26: col. 152; V, 18, 24: col. 189; In Io. Tr. 61, 2: PL 35, 1800, et alibi saepe.

(13*) Cfr. Lc. 12, 48: Omni autem, cui multum datum est, multum quaeretur ab eo. Cfr. etiam Mt. 5, 19-20; 7, 21-22; 25 41-46; Iac., 2, 14.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html

But like good prots, they do the same thing to the Documents of VCII that they do to Scripture: they ignore the parts of VCII that do not meet their preconcieved conclusions.

When the document Dominus Iesus was promulgated back in 2000, we had another spurt of criticisms by the unlettered who claimed that it "reversed" the teaching of VCII. But in fact it reitereted what LG 14 had said:

16. The Lord Jesus, the only Saviour, did not only establish a simple community of disciples, but constituted the Church as a salvific mystery: he himself is in the Church and the Church is in him (cf. Jn 15:1ff.; Gal 3:28; Eph 4:15-16; Acts 9:5). Therefore, the fullness of Christ's salvific mystery belongs also to the Church, inseparably united to her Lord. Indeed, Jesus Christ continues his presence and his work of salvation in the Church and by means of the Church (cf. Col 1:24-27),(47) which is his body (cf. 1 Cor 12:12-13, 27; Col 1:18).(48) And thus, just as the head and members of a living body, though not identical, are inseparable, so too Christ and the Church can neither be confused nor separated, and constitute a single “whole Christ”.(49) This same inseparability is also expressed in the New Testament by the analogy of the Church as the Bride of Christ (cf. 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:25-29; Rev 21:2,9).(50)

Therefore, in connection with the unicity and universality of the salvific mediation of Jesus Christ, the unicity of the Church founded by him must be firmly believed as a truth of Catholic faith. Just as there is one Christ, so there exists a single body of Christ, a single Bride of Christ: “a single Catholic and apostolic Church”.(51) Furthermore, the promises of the Lord that he would not abandon his Church (cf. Mt 16:18; 28:20) and that he would guide her by his Spirit (cf. Jn 16:13) mean, according to Catholic faith, that the unicity and the unity of the Church — like everything that belongs to the Church's integrity — will never be lacking.(52) The Catholic faithful are required to profess that there is an historical continuity — rooted in the apostolic succession (53) — between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church: “This is the single Church of Christ... which our Saviour, after his resurrection, entrusted to Peter's pastoral care (cf. Jn 21:17), commissioning him and the other Apostles to extend and rule her (cf. Mt 28:18ff.), erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth' (1 Tim 3:15). This Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in [subsistit in] the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him”.(54) With the expression subsistit in, the Second Vatican Council sought to harmonize two doctrinal statements: on the one hand, that the Church of Christ, despite the divisions which exist among Christians, continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church, and on the other hand, that “outside of her structure, many elements can be found of sanctification and truth”,(55) that is, in those Churches and ecclesial communities which are not yet in full communion with the Catholic Church.(56) But with respect to these, it needs to be stated that “they derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church”.(57 )

17. Therefore, there exists a single Church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him.(58) The Churches which, while not existing in perfect communion with the Catholic Church, remain united to her by means of the closest bonds, that is, by apostolic succession and a valid Eucharist, are true particular Churches.(59) Therefore, the Church of Christ is present and operative also in these Churches, even though they lack full communion with the Catholic Church, since they do not accept the Catholic doctrine of the Primacy, which, according to the will of God, the Bishop of Rome objectively has and exercises over the entire Church....(60)

22. With the coming of the Saviour Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31).(90) This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism “characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another'”.(91) If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.(92) However, “all the children of the Church should nevertheless remember that their exalted condition results, not from their own merits, but from the grace of Christ. If they fail to respond in thought, word, and deed to that grace, not only shall they not be saved, but they shall be more severely judged”.(93) One understands then that, following the Lord's command (cf. Mt 28:19-20) and as a requirement of her love for all people, the Church “proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way,
the truth, and the life (Jn 14:6). In him, in whom God reconciled all things to himself (cf. 2 Cor 5:18-19), men find the fullness of their religious life”.(94)

(47) Cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen
gentium, 14.

(48) Cf. ibid., 7.

(49) Cf. St. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmos, Ps. 90, Sermo 2,1: CCSL 39, 1266; St. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, Praefatio, 6, 14: PL 75, 525; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 48, a. 2 ad 1.

(50) Cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen
gentium, 6.

(51) Symbolum maius Ecclesiae Armeniacae: DS 48. Cf. Boniface VIII, Unam sanctam: DS 870-872; Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 8.

(52) Cf. Second Vatican Council, Decree Unitatis redintegratio,
4; John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Ut unum sint, 11: AAS 87 (1995), 927.

(53) Cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, 20; cf. also St. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, III, 3, 1-3: SC 211,
20-44; St. Cyprian, Epist. 33, 1: CCSL 3B, 164-165; St. Augustine, Contra adver. legis et prophet., 1, 20, 39: CCSL 49, 70.

(54) Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen
gentium, 8.

(55) Ibid.; cf. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Ut unum sint, 13. Cf. also Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 15 and the Decree Unitatis redintegratio, 3.

(56) The interpretation of those who would derive from the formula subsistit in the thesis that the one Church of Christ could subsist also in non-Catholic Churches and ecclesial communities is therefore contrary to the authentic meaning of Lumen gentium. “The Council instead chose the word subsistit precisely to clarify that there exists only one ‘subsistence' of the true Church, while outside her visible structure there only exist elementa Ecclesiae, which — being elements of that same Church — tend and lead toward the Catholic Church” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Notification on the Book “Church: Charism and Power” by Father Leonardo Boff: AAS 77 [1985], 756-762).

(57) Second Vatican Council, Decree Unitatis redintegratio, 3.

(58) Cf. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Mysterium Ecclesiae, 1: AAS 65 (1973), 396-398.

(59) Cf. Second Vatican Council, Decree Unitatis redintegratio,
14 and 15; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter Communionis notio, 17: AAS 85 (1993), 848.

(60) Cf. First Vatican Council, Constitution Pastor aeternus: DS 3053-3064; Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 22.

(90) Cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen
Gentium, 17; John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris missio, 11.

(91) John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris missio, 36.

(92) Cf. Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Mystici corporis: DS 3821.

(93) Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen
gentium, 14.

(94) Second Vatican Council, Declaration Nostra aetate, 2.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html

But they were STILL not persuaded, and I was open to more vilification.

Well, now we have the new document "Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church" which leaves no doubt as to what the Catholic Church teaches on this matter. In particular:

SECOND QUESTION:
What is the meaning of the affirmation that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church?

RESPONSE:
Christ “established here on earth” only one Church and instituted it as a “visible and spiritual community”[5], that from its beginning and throughout the centuries has always existed and will always exist, and in which alone are found all the elements that Christ himself instituted.[6] “This one Church of Christ, which we confess in the Creed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic […]. This Church, constituted and organised in this world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the Bishops in communion with him”.[7]
In number 8 of the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium ‘subsistence’ means this perduring, historical continuity and the permanence of all the elements instituted by Christ in the Catholic Church[8], in which the Church of Christ is concretely found on this earth.

It is possible, according to Catholic doctrine, to affirm correctly that the Church of Christ is present and operative in the churches and ecclesial Communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church, on account of the elements of sanctification and truth that are present in them.[9] Nevertheless, the word "subsists” can only be attributed to the Catholic Church alone precisely because it refers to the mark of unity that we profess in the symbols of the faith (I believe... in the “one” Church); and this “one” Church subsists in the Catholic Church.[10]

[5] Cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, 8.1.

[6] Cf. Second Vatican Council, Decree Unitatis redintegratio, 3.2; 3.4; 3.5; 4.6.

[7] Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution, Lumen Gentium, 8.2.

[8] Cf. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Mysterium Ecclesiae, 1.1: AAS 65 [1973] 397; Declaration Dominus Iesus, 16.3: AAS 92 [2000-II] 757-758; Notification on the Book of Leonardo Boff, OFM, “Church: Charism and Power”: AAS 77 [1985] 758-759.

[9] Cf. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Ut unum sint, 11.3: AAS 87 [1995-II] 928.

[10] Cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, 8.2.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070629_responsa-quaestiones_en.html

So to all of those people who have given me grief over the years and told me that I did not understand the teaching of my own Catholic Church: I TOLD YOU SO!

Springtime for Luther and Germany!

2007-07-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

Bouncing around the web, I have run into several articles where Mr. James Swan and other dyspeptic Protestants have taken umbrage to my opinion of both Martin Luther, arch-heresiarch and apostate, and Fr. Joeph Lortz, a Catholic priest who was a fan of both Martin Luther and ADOLPH HITLER.

Yes, you heard me correctly. Fr. Lortz was both an admirer of Hitler and an APOLOGIST for Nazism. When Mein Kampf was published it was widely scorned in the Catholic Press. Fr. Lortz on the other hand wrote a pamphlet DEFENDING the book and making the case that Nazism and Catholicism were compatible. In fact he was a card carrying member of the Nazi party from 1930 all the way through the end of World War II. After the war, Fr. Lortz claimed that he had tried to quit the party when he had seen the excesses of Nazism, but that they wouldn't let him. Like Michael Corleone, "Everytime I tried to get out they pulled me back in." All we can say is that at the cessation of hostilities, Fr. Lortz's party dues were paid up.

Mr. Swan and his refluxing compatriots extol Fr. Lortz because he took a positive attitude towards Luther and broke with the usual Catholic criticisms of the man as a heretic who was intemperate in word and deed as well as mentally unstable and emotionally disturbed. Mr. Swan in particular likes to poke fun at the works of German priests Fr. Heinrich Denifle and Fr. Hartmann Grisar who both wrote multi-volume studies of Luther's life and writings and who found several serious flaws in the man. Fr. Denifle was a world class expert on medieval texts and Fr. Grisar was a renowned Church historian. Their works evaluated Luther in greater depth than the cursory pseudo-hagiography that he receives in most Protestant biographies.

Fr. Grisar's multi-volume work on Luther in English translation is available free on the Internet:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Grisar%2C%20Hartmann%2C%201845-1932%22

Fr. Denifle's books are also available on line in German:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=denifle

In America in the 1910s, Professor Preserved Smith from Amherst College wrote several articles and books analyzing Luther from a Freudian perspective and finding evidence of psycho-pathology in him.

In 1937, a Copenhagen Psychiatrist, Paul J. Reiter MD wrote a 2 volume study, Martin Luther's World Character and Psychosis and the Influence of These Factors on his Development and Teachings which also demonstrated in detail from his own writings that Luther was mentally disturbed.

There is a review of Reiter's book here:

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=PAQ.012.0261A

There was a brief summary of the findings of these scholars given in the Presidential address by Dr. William Langer delivered at the annual dinner of the American Historical Association at the Statler Hotel, New York City, on December 29, 1957:

Most striking, however, is the case of the greatest of the reformers, Martin Luther, who seems to me to reflect clearly the reaction of the individual to the situation I have been sketching. Luther left behind almost a hundred volumes of writings, thousands of letters, and very voluminous table-talk, suggesting an unusually self-analytical and self-critical personality.56 From all this material it has long been clear that he suffered from an abnormally strong sense of sin and of the immediacy of death and damnation. Tortured by the temptations of the flesh and repeatedly in conflict with a personalized demon, he was chronically oppressed by a pathological feeling of guilt and lived in constant terror of God's judgment. So striking were these traits that some of Luther's biographers have questioned his sanity.57

Here it is interesting to recall that one of our own colleagues, the late Professor Preserved Smith, as long ago as 1913, attacked the problem in an article entitled "Luther's Early Development in the Light of Psychoanalysis."58 Smith, who was remarkably Conversant with Freudian teaching when psychoanalysis was still in its early stage of development, considered Luther highly neurotic--probably driven to enter the monastery by the hope of finding a refuge from temptation and an escape from damnation, and eventually arriving at the doctrine of salvation by faith alone only after he had convinced himself of the impossibility of conquering temptation by doing penance. It may well be that Smith overdid his thesis, but the fact remains that his article was treated with great respect by Dr. Paul J. Reiter, who later published a huge and greatly detailed study of Luther's personality. Reiter reached the conclusion, already suggested by Adolf Hausrath in 1905, that the great reformer suffered from a manic-depressive psychosis, which, frequently associated with genius, involved a constant struggle with, and victory over, enormous psychological pressures. The point of mentioning all this is to suggest that Luther's trials were typical of his time. In any event, it is inconceivable that he should have evoked so great a popular response unless he had succeeded in expressing the underlying, unconscious sentiments of large numbers of people and in providing them with an acceptable solution to their religious problem.59

56 . Karl Holl, "Luthers Urteile uber sich Selbst," Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, I, Luther (Tübingen, 1921); Heinrich Böhmer, Road to Reformation; Martin Luther to the Year 1521 (Philadelphia, 1946), foreword; Karl A. Meissinger, Der katholische Luther (Munich, 1952), p. 2.

57 . Hartmann Grisar, Luther (London, 1913-1917), I, 110 ff.; VI, chap. xxxvi, discusses many of these views but Grisar takes a more moderate stand. The most recent Catholic biography is that of Joseph Lortz, Die Reformation in Deutschland, which is a very model of reasonableness.

58 . Amer. Jour. Psychology, XXIV (1913), 360-77.

59 . Hausrath, Luthers Leben (Berlin, 1905); Reiter, Martin Luthers Umwelt, Charakter und Psychose (Copenhagen, 1937, 1941); Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm (4th
ed, Munich, 1956), pp. 375-78. See also Walther von Loewenich, "Zehn Jahre Lutherforschung," in Theologie und Liturgie, ed. Liemar Hennig (Cassell, 1952), pp. 119-70 and Martin Werner, "Psychologisches zum Klostererlebnis Martin Luthers," Schweiz. Zeitsch. für Psychologie, VII (1948), 1-18, who follows Smith's thesis closely. The argument hinges on the harshness of Luther's upbringing and the extent of his father fixation. Smith noted that on at least one occasion Luther asserted that he had entered the monastery to escape harsh treatment at home. His father's unalterable opposition to this step may have played a part in Luther's later decision to leave the monastery. According to Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York, 1950), pp. 288 ff., Luther's decision (in 1525) to marry was at least in part due to his
wish to gratify his father's desire for progeny. Recent writers tend to explain away the harshness of Luther's youth, which indeed was probably less unusual and less important than Smith supposed. See Otto Scheel, Martin Luther (Tübingen, 1916); Böhmer, Martin Luther; Meissinger, Der katholische Luther; Robert H. Fife, The Revolt of Martin Luther (New York, 1957), pp. 5, 9, 99, 117 ff.; Bainton, Here I Stand, pp. 23, 25, 28 and chap. xxi passim, who insists that Luther's psychological troubles were of a strictly religious character, due to "tensions which medieval religion deliberately induced, playing alternately upon fear and hope."

More recently there have been other books on Luther which have confirmed much of what the two priests originally said:

Luther: An Experiment in Biography by Richard Marius (1975)

Luther: the Man and the Image by Herbert David Rix (1985)

Luther: The Christian between God and Death by Richard Marius (1999)

Here is a compilation of many worrisome statements by Luther that his defenders wish he had not written:

http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/matluther.htm

But still, Mr. Swan is on a one-man crusade to ignore this strand of modern scholarship and discredit people like me who want this information more widely disseminated. He insists that Fr. Lortz gives a more balanced picture of Luther and that all the rest of us are loony bigots. He dismisses scholars like Fr. Denifle, Fr. Grisar. Prof Smith, Dr. Reiter, Dr. Rix, Dr. Marius, etc. with a wave of his hand and we are supposed to believe that Luther was a great Christian hero who championed truth, justice, and the German way! We poor benighted Catholics need to get on the bandwagon and march to a Lutheran beat of rampant amoralism, purely forensic justification, and a religion based solely on what we have decided that we want to believe for ourselves.

And a Nazi shall lead the way...

Well, I think Mr. Swan needs a reality check. My pointing out Fr. Lortz's Nazi sympathies is not a mere ad hominem dismissal. Nazism -- as all ideologies -- had intellectual consequences and, as a Nazi, Lortz's admiration for Luther was not merely based on "fairness" or "scholarship". It was politically motivated and was a direct outgrowth of his Nazi ideology and Pan-German idealism.

The Nazi's LOVED Martin Luther. He was to them a great German hero who resisted the corrupting influence of non-Germanic outsiders like the Pope and the Southern European non-Aryan masses. Catholicism was to them an effeminate religion. Luther with his boldness and his support of unrestricted force (including rape, torture, mutilation, and execution) by the German Princes against the peasantry was their kind of guy. Luther was also a vituperate anti-Semite and recommended putting Jews to the sword in some of his writings. From a Nazi perspective, what's not to love?

There is a book Martin Luther: Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor by Peter F. Wiener that was published during WWII in England which is available free online which speaks about the admiration both Hitler and the Nazis had for Luther. You can read it here:

http://www.tentmaker.org/books/MartinLuther-HitlersSpiritualAncestor.html

William Shirer in his magnum opus The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich also repeats this charge.

And then there is Karl Barth, the great Swiss Protestnst theolgoian. He had been teaching in Germany when the Nazis took over and he was instrumental in composing the Barmen Church Declaration which stated that Christianity and Nazism were incompatible. For his part in this, Barth was targeted for elimination and had to flee to Switzerland for his life.

Protestant scholar Robert McAfee Brown, wrote in Kairos: Three Prophetic Challenges to the Church, (Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1990):

“Almost immediately after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, Protestant Christians faced pressure to "aryanize" the Church, expel Jewish Christians from the ordained ministry and adopt the Nazi "Führer Principle" as the organizing principle of church government. In general, the churches succumbed to these pressures, and some Christians embraced them willingly. The pro-Nazi "German Christian" movement became a force in the church. They glorified Adolf Hitler as a "German prophet" and preached that racial consciousness was a source of revelation alongside the Bible. But many Christians in Germany—including Lutheran and Reformed, liberal and neo-orthodox—opposed the encroachment of Nazi ideology on the Church's proclamation. At Barmen, this emerging "Confessing Church" adopted a declaration drafted by Reformed theologian Karl Barth and Lutheran theologian Hans Asmussen, which expressly repudiated the claim that other powers apart from Christ could be sources of God's revelation. Not all Christians courageously resisted the regime, but many who did—like the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Roman Catholic priest Bernhard Lichtenberg—were arrested and executed in concentration camps.”

Karl Barth argued that the Lutheran doctrine of the Two Swords made German Lutherans more susceptable to totalitarian takeovers and more passive towards unjust actions by the state. This doctrine originated with Luther himself. During the Reformation, political passivity and absolute support of the Prince/state to keep order was one of the prices that Lutherans had to pay in order to win the nobility away from Catholicism. By saying that Church and State wielded separate "swords" and that the Church should not interfere in state matters desensitized many Lutherans towards the horrors of the Nazi system. Around 85% of Lutheran ministers joined the pro-Nazi German Christian movement and large numbers of them wore Nazi regalia in the pulpit while preaching on Sunday.

For a balanced view of this complex historical issue see:

http://www.spindleworks.com/library/peet/german.htm

There is further evidence of the Nazi appropriation of Luther. Consecrated in 1935, the Martin Luther Memorial Church still stands in Berlin. Originally the Church bells and altar contained the swastika, but they were later removed because of post-war law that outlaws swastikas in Germany. Nevertheless, the church still retains many of the Nazi symbols and icons, including a muscular Aryan Jesus, Iron cross chandeliers, statues of Nazi stormtroopers, and a bust of Adolf Hitler. During the 30s, Nazi party members made up two thirds of the church attendance, where they also baptized their children.

The above picture from the church shows Nazi Soldiers and Aryan women surrounding a muscular Aryan Christ.

And above we have Adolph Hitler's likeness carved into the baptismal font. He is holding an SS serivce cap with a death's head emblem on the brim.

And here is a Nazi Luthertag [Luther Day] Commemorative Badge struck for Germany's Martin Luther Day on 10th November 1933. Strictly speaking not a Nazi award but, nevertheless, it was issued after Hitler's rise to power. Broad segments of the Nazi Party participated in Luther Day ceremonies across Germany every year.

Here are some quotations from Nazis about Luther especially highlighting his antipathy for Jews:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/luther.htm

Luther was openly praised by Hitler in Mein Kampf. He referred to Martin Luther as a great warrior, a true statesmen, and a great reformer, alongside Richard Wagner and Frederick the Great. Here are some statements in this book about the Jews:

http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/documents/part1/doc4.html

NB: This is the same book to which Fr. Lortz gave a glowing review.

The point of all this is to show that Fr. Lortz as a Nazi party member did not approach his study of Luther with scholarly detachment. He was motivated ideologically and politically to see Luther as not only a great man, but a great German, and a forerunner of Nazi ideology up to including its nacent anti-Semitism. Even after the war, Fr. Lortz continued to support a strong political leadership with totalitarian authority and found the democracies weak and ineffective. He had the same agenda for unifying Europe based upon Germanic Culture, an agenda that was not merely eurocentric but chauvinistic. He longed for the pre-Renaissance period in European history when the First Reich flourished. And he was still suspicious of foreign cultural influences. In essence, after World War II, Fr. Lortz was promoting the same things as a cure for the ennui of modernity that he had been advocating when the Nazis were in power except without the Swatikas, goose-stepping, and cool uniforms. And he never to my knowledge apologized for his involvement in Nazism. He just tried to "explain" it.

Meet the new Lortz: same as the old Lortz.

In summary, Fr. Lortz ignored a long standing school of Luther studies which had deep roots among Catholic scholars and replaced it instead with a "new direction" which just so happended to coincide with the Nazi appropriation of Luther as a German cultural icon. Meanwhile, support for the older critical view of Luther was growing even among Protestant scholars like Marius.

I proudly stand in the tradition of Fr. Denifle et al and I warn people that the foundation of the Protestant Deformation was in the psychopathology of one man-- Martin Luther -- whose melancholy and bipolar disorder touched a personal chord with many Northern Europeans but which had NOTHING to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It caused them to revolt against historic Christianity and to invent a new family of disparate religions that catered to bourgeosie morality and subjective personal needs, and not to either theological integrity or moral rectitude.

Fr. Lortz revolted against that tradition for political reasons and made excuses for Luther and Lutheranism in support of Nazism and its political agenda. As a Nazi, he saw Luther as a spiritual ancestor and forerunner of German cultural supremacy. Lortz's support of Nazism must be seen also as a support for all the horrors that the Nazis perpetrated on their world and the Nazis justified their program in part by referring back to Martin Luther and his teachings.

I leave it to my readers to decided which of us made the correct choice, and whose assessment of Luther is the most credible.

Aren't We always in a State of Mortal Sin?

2007-06-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

During our debate in 1991, Mr. White asked me the following question:

Jesus told us that to gain eternal life we were to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength. But isn't it true that no one ever does that? Don't we always fail to love God enough? Isn't any sin a failure to keep that first and most important commandment? Aren't we always therefore in a state of Mortal sin?

What Mr. White was trying to justify the Calvinoid heresy of Total Depravity. But he had asked this question in other debates with Catholics so I was prepared for it. I responded:

That is a very poetic statement. but judged by the standards of poets, all of us are clumsy, anemic, and colorless boors. That is the problem with your interpretation. If we follow your reasoning to its logical conclusion, then we must do nothing but love God every minute of every day. We would not go to work. We would not feed our
children. We would not sleep or eat. Even the act of breathing would detract from our obligation to love God with everything we have.

No, James, this portion of Scripture is not meant to be taken in a crassly literal fashion. It is hyperbolic and allegorical. When I tell my wife that her eyes are limpid pools, and that I couldn't live without her, she actually knows that they are muddy brown and that if she were gone, I would learn to struggle on somehow. We need to understand the words of Jesus as an ethical statement that must be understood
practically. All he was telling us is that our love of God must be the first and most important relationship in our lives before all others. That is what the Three Evangelical Counsels undertaken by vowed religious are supposed to signify. These are Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. The vow of Poverty means that you do not let any created thing come between you and God. The vow of Chastity does not merely deal with sex. In the religious life there is the discipline of "no particular
friendship" that also falls under this rubric so that you do not let any person come between you and God. Finally the vow of obedience is where we submit ourselves so totally that even your own self does not come between you and God.

God does not want to monopolize us. He just wants to be first in our affection. And He intends to reciprocate in kind. As St. Augustine taught, "God loves YOU as if you were the only creature that he had created."
If God gave us this commandment and told us that we needed to fulfill it but then set the standards so high that it was impossible, He would have been dishonest and cruel. Only a monster would place salvific obligations on mankind that were impossible to keep. But Jesus told us that his yoke was light and his burden was sweet. Therefore, he would not ask of us more than we could do and we need to interpret this commandment in a practical way, not an overly idealistic one.

Well, you can imagine Mr. White sputtering and his charges of how "unscholarly" and naive I was. He took umbrage because he thought that I was calling him a monster instead of warning him of what he was making God out to be.

But over the years I have realized that my answer was inadequate. There was more that needed to be said.

This is what Jesus actually taught in context:

Mat 22:35
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him.
Mat 22:36
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?"
Mat 22:37
And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
Mat 22:38
This is the greatest and first commandment.
Mat 22:39
And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Mat 22:40
On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets."

On rereading this I realized that verse 39 is extremely crucial. It really does not add a second commandment. It tells us that that this other commandment is just like the first! But this other commandment tels us not only to love our fellow men and women, but also to love to love ourselves. At first I was confused but then I remembered what had been said elsewhere in Scripture:

Mat 25:31
"When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.
Mat 25:32
Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats,
Mat 25:33
and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left.
Mat 25:34
Then the King will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;
Mat 25:35
for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
Mat 25:36
I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.'
Mat 25:37
Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink?
Mat 25:38
And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee?
Mat 25:39
And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?'
Mat 25:40
And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.'

Gen 9:5
For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man's brother I will require the life of man.
Gen 9:6
Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.

And it all became clear to me. God has already told us that an ordinate love of our neighbor --and an ordinate love for ourselves -- is in itself love for God. All human beings carry God's image and so when we see ourselves and our fellow humans we should be seeing the image of God within. Loving our neighbor, feeding our children, eating, living, and breathing are all acts that honor God and glorify Him. When we fail to acknowledge the image of God in our fellow humans and in ourselves we are not breaking merely the second commandment. We are breaking the first. This extends even more so to those like Mary and the saints who bear in their lives a greater likeness to God than the ordinary person. To fail to honor them in proportion to their bearing of God's image is to fail to honor God rightly. And THAT would be a mortal sin.

Was the Good Samaritan Saved?

2007-06-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

When I debated Mr. James "Pseudopodeo" White on the topic of Justification back in 1991, I asked him the question:

Was the Good Samaritan saved?

It was a trick question. No matter how he answered it, his Calvinoid system was in trouble. He did not realize that but he smelled a rat and instead of answering the question gave the dishonest excuse that since the Good Samaritan was not areal person, it was impossible to know.

In this post, we will explore this Gospel story and I will give you my response to Pseudopodeo's pitiful attempt at evading the obvious.

This is the story taken from St. Luke's Gospel:

Luke 10:25
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
Luke 10:26
He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read?"
Luke 10:27
And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."
Luke 10:28
And he said to him, "You have answered right; do this, and you will live."
Luke 10:29
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
Luke 10:30
Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
Luke 10:31
Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.
Luke 10:32
So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
Luke 10:33
But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion,
Luke 10:34
and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
Luke 10:35
And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.'
Luke 10:36
Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?"
Luke 10:37
He said, "The one who showed mercy on him." And Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

The story begins when a Jewish scholar who was learned in the Mosaic Law (a kind of Rabbi) asks Jesus to give his interpretation of what was needed to gain "eternal life". In short, how does one get to heaven? Jesus responded by asking the scholar for his own opinion. The scholar answered quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 and Jesus affirmed that he was right.

But the scholar in good rabbinic fashion wanted to unpack this further and so he asked "And who is my neighbor?" St. Luke tells us that he actually wanted to "justify" himself. This is a euphemism for trying to make himself look good at Jesus' expense. There was an on going debate among the Rabbis whether or not a Jew had the same moral obligations to people outside the Mosaic Covenant that they did to those within the Covenant. For the sake of gaining eternal life, did one's conduct towards non-Jews "count".

Jesus turns the tables on him and tells a story instead of a non-Jew who comes to the aid of a Jew whom other Jews did not help. He even upped the ante. The ones who refused to help were a Priest and a Levite.

We need to make an important point about the story. The Jew who had been assaulted was "left half dead". This is a critical part of the story. Priests and Levites were ministers of the Temple and were forbidden to touch dead bodies or even blood other than that of sacrificial victims. Even in Jewish cemeteries today, there is a special area reserved for those of priestly lineage (kohanim) so that they will not render themselves unclean when attending a funeral or visiting a grave. When the Priest and the Levite passed by on the other side of the road, they were doing so out of a RELIGIOUS OBLIGATION. For all they knew, the man was dead and touching him would only defile them.

But then along comes the Samaritan. Again it is important that we understand who he is. The Samaritans were a Semitic people who lived in the area surrounding Mt. Gerizim in Israel. They were apparently descended from the Jewish tribes of Ephraim and Mannaseh, but when the Assyrians conquered Israel and carried most Jews into captivity, these people remained in Israel. The implication was that they were collaborators with the Assyrians. When the Jews returned from the exile, they shunned these people and the communities have been religiously separate ever since. The Samaritans have their own version of the Torah and their own traditions of observance separate from those of mainstream Judaism. they did not worship at the temple in Jerusalem but instead had their own rites performed on Mt. Gerizim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritan

At the time of Jesus, the Samaritans were looked upon by the Jews as heretics and infidels. They were considered even worse than the Romans because instead of being merely Gentiles (goyim) they were apostates. Family squabbles are always the worst.

So when the Samaritan came upon the injured Jew in the parable, he would have been considered the lowest of the low, a moral reprobate, and allegedly a person with no religious scruples. But because this man allegedly had no religious scruples (unlike the Priest and the Levite) there was nothing to prevent him from going to the wounded man's aid. Even the Jewish Scholar had to admit that the real neighbor to the injured Jew was the non-Jew who showed compassion to him. And Jesus advised the Scholar to be like that Samaritan and not like the Priest and the Levite.

So in this revolutionary parable, Jesus turned the world upside down. In the minds of the Jews in Jesus' day, the idea of a "good Samaritan" was an oxymoron while Priests and Levites were the most strictly observant of all Jews. Jesus extended the franchise for one's neighbor to include everyone even those considered to have abandoned the Mosaic Covenant. And he made it clear that such love was necessary to gain eternal life.

Now back to the debate.

After Pseudopodeo gave his evasive answer, I told him that it was a good thing that he did because whether he said "Yes" or "No" he would have been in trouble.

If he had said that the Good Samaritan was saved, it would have meant that someone who was NOT a Christian had gained eternal life by good works and not by faith in Christ.

If he had said that the Good Samaritan was not saved, then Jesus was holding up the behavior of a reprobate unbeliever as an example for us to emulate instead of the religious faithfulness of the Priest and the Levite.

Pseudopodeo became extremely angry and went into a tirade against me in his rebuttal, but he never dealt with the issue. That was pretty much how he responded during the entire debate.

So what of it? Was the Good Samaritan "saved"? We Catholics have no problem in accepting this. We understand that faith without works is dead and that good works are the fruit of a heart that loves God and -- more importantly -- is loved BY God.

It is obvious that Jesus rose above the bigotry of his Jewish co-religionists (and many of his subsequent followers) in seeing the good in men's hearts, even when they did not practice the true religion (which in his day was Judaism). As St. Peter would later say:

Act 10:34
And Peter opened his mouth and said: "Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality,
Act 10:35
but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.

If we are to be disciples of Jesus Christ we too must understand this. Jesus told us that Samaritans could be good (Luke 10:25-37), Publicans could be justified(Luke 18:10-14), and that a Roman Centurion could have more faith than any other man in Israel (Luke 7:9).

This can be a bitter pill for many religious people to swallow, but is essential to Christian discipleship that we acknowledge the good we find in other people who do not share our religious views. You see, salvation is a rescue mission, not a catechism quiz. It is God who saves us by his love and power, not we who save ourselves by our faith or our works. Those who seek him with an upright heart cannot fail to find him, even if they only do so with a flash of insight at the moment of death.

I wish that Mr. White could see that. But over the years he seems to have hardened his heart against his fellow men -- even those of us within Christianity -- who do not share his views. He continues to take every opportunity to attack, defame, misrepresent, and insult believers of other faiths. This is a danger about which all of us apologists need to be aware.

The real question each of us needs to ask himself is whether I have been a good neighbor, or just another religious pundit like the Priest and the Levite who has passed his brother on the wayside and left him for dead.

The Stupid Athiest: A Tautology

2007-06-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

A Mason is obliged by his Tenure, to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a STUPID ATHEIST, nor an irreligious libertine.

The above declaration is read at the induction ceremony of a first degree Mason. I am not a Mason (No good Catholic can be) but I ran across this quotation in my reading and I have always admired the brashness of it. (Especially in light of the atheistic proclivities of Grand Orient Freemasonry.) Christians would think it terribly unkind to call an atheist "stupid" but unfortunately the reverse is not true. Being of a contentious sort myself, I think that we should "tell it like it is" and frankly, I find atheism to be the STUPIDEST idea I have ever heard.

Atheism is fraught with many internal contradictions. It attacks the act of faith IN God by affirming an epistemically similar act of faith AGAINST God. It declares that ultimately, nothing is ultimate! (?) The meaning of life is that there is no meaning to life. Human beings come from nowhere for no good reason and end up as rotting corpses having served no purpose in their lives. This is described to us as the "rational" way of life which will lead all men to true harmony. But since there is no melody, how can there be any harmony?

Then there are the self-serving denials. While we theists have to live down a rogues gallery of notorious religious fanatics, atheists have developed a virtual cottage industry in denying that any prominent atheist rotter was a "real" atheist. Lenin may not have believed in God, Enver Hoxha may have totally a suppressed religion in Albania, Stalin may have mocked Christ, Mao murdered millions in the name of no gods, and Hitler denied any need for a Supreme Being, but you will be happy to know that they were really not "real" atheists! They actually were non-theistic religious believers! Of course, that is not what collective atheism said immediately after the October Revolution. At that time they were all for the Communists. It seems you can only tell a "real" atheist in retrospect when he doesn't screw up. The strange thing is that as far as I can tell, atheist leaders have ALWAYS eventually screwed up and we poor benighted theists have had to go in and pick up the pieces. It seems that our modern atheists have decided that "rational" people not only must not believe in God. They also must not believe in anything. There can be no over-arching principle that might be the driving force behind one's life because THAT would be a religion. If we take that to its logical extreme and learn from the mistakes of the atheists of history, that means that atheists need to eschew the principles of atheism itself! Otherwise they will turn atheism into a religion. But isn't that notion of atheism a commitment to an over-arching principle? Doesn't that mean that all forms of atheism are a form of religious faith? Not according to the "real" atheists. They try to make a distinction between "real" atheists and "religious" atheists. But isn't that just a form of self-deception?

In other words, atheism reinvents itself in each new generation as the belief in no beliefs! (?) They do this in the hopes that everyone will be stupid enough not to connect previous forms of atheistic malfeasance with "new and improved" atheism. Then they go on to repeat the same mistakes that atheists had committed in the past. This is intellectual dishonesty and anarchy brought to a whole new nadir.

Christian theism has always tried to maintain a rational basis for its beliefs and practices from the very beginning. With regard to atheism, the Bible says:

Psalm 10:4 In the pride of his countenance the wicked does not seek [God]; all his thoughts are, "There is no God."

Psalm 14:1
To the choirmaster. Of David. The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none that does good.

Proverbs 1:7
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Romans 1:19
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
Romans 1:20
Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse;
Romans 1:21
for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.
Romans 1:22
Claiming to be wise, they became fools...

So our Masonic friends have basically got it right. According to the Bible, the atheist is a fool and a moral reprobate. But there is something even more than that.

The very First Commandment of the Decalogue in Jewish tradition is:

Deuteronomy 5:6
YHWH is your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

The next chapter expands this commandment:

Deuteronomy 6:4
"Hear, O Israel: YHWH is our God, YHWH is one ;
Deuteronomy 6:5
and you shall love the YHWH your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
Deuteronomy 6:6
And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart;
Deuteronomy 6:7
and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
Deuteronomy 6:8
And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
Deuteronomy 6:9
And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The point is that acknowledging YHWH as the one true God is COMMANDED of us. It is not an option. We are not merely permitted to believe in YHWH. We must do so.

Therefore atheism is not merely a foolish set of self contradictory ideas that leads to immorality. It is a sin against the first and greatest of the commandments. In short, atheism is a MORTAL SIN.

That is why the atheist must be rebuked. He is not being rational, or moral, or intellectually honest. He is committing the most fundamental of all sins and the one that make all forms of evil possible.

To commit a mortal sin is to act as if their were no God and no moral standard decreed by Him. It is functional atheism. Furthermore it is the stupidest act imaginable. Atheists themselves will try to argue that it is "better" to be an atheist. They thus acknowledge a hierarchy of values while at the same time denying that any such abstract hierarchy exists. The consistent atheist will admit that there are no moral standards and that anything goes which brings one personal satisfaction. But few atheists are consistent. Only people like De Sade, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Hoxha, Pol Pot, et cetera have lived consistently as atheists and their fellow atheists feel honor bound to condemn them.

It is this attachment to some sort of moral value, that is the last vestige of rationality in the atheist. Once the atheist abandons moral values, he has abandoned his reason and descended into both moral and intellectual stupidity. But it is so hard to get atheists to see this because they want to believe in something as long as it is not God. But any abstract idea such as right and wrong can have no universal epistemic value unless it exists in a mind. If there is a universal idea, there must be a universal mind: a Divine mind. And we are back to God.

The Reformed apologist Cornelius van Til stated it this way: Atheism presupposes Theism. I think he was right. Whenever someone thinks it is "better" to be an atheist than a theist, they are stating a universal idea that presupposes a universal hierarchy of values in a universal mind. They must believe in God in order to deny Him.

Atheism is the most serious of sins and it leads inexorably to all the other serious sins. as Jean Paul Sartre stated: If there is no God then all things are permitted. Yet "real" atheists go to great lengths to deny this. They need to listen to their own advocates to realize what they are really espousing.

Several years ago I was in dialog with an atheist on the web, and I asked him how he accounted for the existence of the universe. He told me that it "just was." I replied to him:

"I see. So this is what you are telling me:

Question: Why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?
Answer: It just does.

Question: Why do people get malaria?
Answer: They just do.

Question: Why are people starving in Africa?
Answer: They just are.

Question: Why is there something instead of nothing?
Answer: There just is.

Essentially, you are copping out. The question "Why?" requires a comprehensive robust explanation for EVERYTHING and there is no final answer to it in the physical universe. The only sufficiently comprehensive answer to the question "Why?" is God. But in order to avoid admitting this, you have picked an ARBITRARY stopping point to forestall any further causal inquiry. Such an arbitrary stopping point can be set anywhere. Such a position represents the death of science, inquiry, knowledge, wisdom, and truth."

Theism gives us the most complete and intellectually valid understanding of the nature of reality. In grounds the existence of everything in a robust comprehensive cause that explains not only physical objects but ideas as well. Theism insists that things are as they are for a reason. Atheism ultimately can give us no satisfactory causal explanations. The idea of causation is one thing that makes man different from the animals. We can probe the depths of the ultimate causal question to its ultimate answer: God. He alone can explain why we are here. As such human epistemology is inherently theistic. As soon as we search for the reason why things are the way they are -- the ultimate act of rationality -- we are assuming a theistic worldview. As such, our reason OBLIGATES intellectually and morally us to believe in God.

So despite their protests, the atheists are stupid. They are guilty of intellectual and moral failings linked to their refusal to submit to any higher authority than their own preferences. But in their hearts many of them they know that there is a hierarchy of values and this is the one thing that can still save them. "The fear of YHWH is the beginning of knowledge." Until they realize that, they are not being intellectually honest, morally upright, logically consistent, or rational.

Another look at Judas Iscariot

2007-06-16T05:53:00.000-07:00

The most vilified man in the history of Western civilization has been Judas Iscariot. His name alone conjures up the image of the ultimate betrayer. The conventional wisdom says that he was one of the 12 Apostles but was always a crook and a rotter who eventually betrayed God- Incarnate to his executioners for 30 pieces of silver. And then , wracked with guilt, Judas committed suicide.

Jewish author Hyam Maccoby in his book Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil (1992) opined that there was no historical Judas but that he was a personification of the Jewish people invented by the Early Church to vilify those Jews who did not follow Jesus. The very name "Judas" means "Jew" and Maccoby sees Judas Iscariot as the first Christian target of anti-Semitism.

Some modern authors have tried to rehabilitate Judas and make him into a(n) (anti-) hero who has been misunderstood. Such is the case in Tim Rice's Musical musical Jesus Christ: Superstar.

Recently, a 2nd Century gnostic Gospel of Judas has been discovered which portrays the other 11 Apostles as opportunists trying to set up a new "fleshy" religious system to make themselves rich. Judas is depicted as the only disciple to really understand Christ's message of "spiritual" salvation. For this reason, Judas betrays Jesus so that his "fleshy container" enclosing the God-spirit can be destroyed and the spirit let free. Judas acts out of contempt for the body at Jesus' behest. As a result, the 11 other Apostles supposedly stoned Judas and made up the story of his suicide.

I submit that all of these are ridiculous distortions of Judas that do not pay attention to what the Bible actually says about him. I submit the following ideas as an attempt to better understand who Judas really was, what he did, why he did it, and how we should understand him.

First of all, Judas Iscariot was one of the Twelve Apostles chosen by Jesus himself to be in his inner circle and literally in his messianic Sanhedrin. For this reason, even as a child I could never understand why Jesus would have let an evil person get so close to him. There must have been something good -- if not exemplary -- in this man for Jesus to have elevated him to such an intimate relationship with Him. I cannot believe that Jesus would pick someone just to be His betrayer. There must have been more depth and character to Judas of which we are unaware.

Much is made of Judas's surname "Iscariot". It is believed to be a variant on the word "Sicarii" which is the plural of the Latin word for "dagger" and was used as a euphemism for a contract-killer. There was a Jewish insurgent group called the Sicarii who advocated the overthrow of the Romans and were prone to violence and murder. But Judas became a follower of Jesus who did not advocate the use of force but of love of God and neighbor and reasoned discourse. If Judas had been a Sicarii, he must have given it up to follow Christ. Jesus made fools of his enemies by tripping them up and outsmarting them. Jesus was always eloquent and no one bested Him an an argument. By becoming not only a follower of Jesus but an Apostle, Judas must have eschewed the use of force in favor of didactic disputation. In many ways, Jesus' method was like that of the great prophets of old who likewise used words and stories as their primary way of motivating the people. Judas may have seen Jesus Messiah as a new prophet/king who would come to rule Israel with wisdom and truth.

The Gospels tend to magnify Judas' faults and portray him as a hypocrite. We are told that he held the common purse of the group and stole from it (John 12:6). But is that not a mere peccadillo of which many of us are guilty? Who hasn't padded an expense account or somehow funded a pet project from company funds? Mea culpa! I find the fact that Jesus trusted Judas with money to indicate that he was a better candidate to do so than any of the other disciples. He may have dipped into the till, but he also may have been very careful with how the money was spent and kept everyone on a budget. Maybe the other Apostles resented how Judas controlled the purse strings. Nobody likes a bean-counter.

We are also told that Judas was possessed by Satan (Luke 22:3, John 13:2) who goaded him into betraying Jesus. Demonic possession is rarely willed by the victim and one cannot necessarily be held responsible for one's actions when the possessing spirit has taken active control of the body.

In St. John's Gospel, Jesus is depicted as controlling all events. After the Devil enters Judas, Jesus says to him "What you are going to do, do quickly." and Judas went out to fetch the mob to arrest Jesus. Was he addressing Judas, or Satan, or both of them? It is obvious from all the Gospels that Jesus knew Judas was gong to betray him ahead of time. Yet He let it happen.

In summation, we have a highly placed and trusted disciple of Jesus with a history of violent insurgent activity in his past who had flaws and was the victim of demonic deception. This is the man who betrays Jesus to the High Priest and the Sanhedrin. And it looks like Jesus knew what he was up to and encouraged him to do so. Why did he do it? Did he intend to have Jesus killed? Was he just after money? Was Judas alone in his betrayal of Jesus?

At this point I want to draw attention to a parallel between Judas and St. Peter. BOTH were highly placed and highly trusted disciples. BOTH had a penchant for impulsiveness and violence. BOTH were warned by Jesus that they would betray Him. And BOTH were depicted as being possessed by Satan when they opposed our Lord's teaching about himself. But I think there was a specific difference about them.

St. Peter expected Jesus to declare himself the true Davidic king of the Jews and to lead a revolt against the Romans. he was willing to fight to try and save his Lord from the mob in the Garden of Gethsemane and actually followed Jesus into the High Priest's house in order to try and set Him free.

Judas Iscariot had eschewed his violent past and had become the disciple of the wisest man in Israel who could out-think and out-argue the cleverest Pharisee or Sadducee. He was looking forward to a non-violent kingdom where Jesus by His preaching would be acclaimed as King of the Jews without the need for any fighting.

We know what happened to St. Peter. He tried violence and it didn't work and so he resigned himself having his Lord be crucified. And we know how Jesus later forgave him and rehabilitated him.

What happened with Judas?

I sincerely believe that Judas did not intend to betray Jesus to his death. Instead I think that was trying to goad Jesus into a final confrontation with the High Priest which he thought Jesus would win.

Likely Judas had high hopes that when Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph He would cleanse the Temple and depose the Sadducean priestly faction which had charge of it. There were at least six other competing priestly groups that could have filled that void. But instead, Jesus tells parables and embarrasses the Pharisees and Sadducees, but does not depose them or try to alter the status quo.

Judas could have perceived this as a missed opportunity and decided that all Jesus needed was the right venue and the right situation to undermine the Jewish leaders and have the people rise up against them. With His eloquence, Jesus would make fools of them and they would be run out of town.

So he decided to go to the High Priest and offers to turn Jesus over to him to be tried as a heretic. Judas knew that under Roman occupation, the High Priest had no power to execute anyone and with Jesus' popularity Judas doubted that the Sadducees would ever try to have him assassinated. They would be the first suspects and the Romans would have taken that as an excuse to execute them. He was also quite sure that no Jew would ever turn a fellow Jew over to the hated Romans over a purely religious dispute. I think that he expected Jesus would have had a public trial before the Sanhedrin where His rhetorical skills would triumph and no one would get hurt.

When they offered Judas money, it was icing on the cake. The fools would be paying for their own destruction! Meanwhile, the money could go back into the purse and would be used to subsidize the Church.

(There is an interesting parallel here with OT sacrifice rules in the Book of Leviticus:

Lev 5:14
The LORD said to Moses,
Lev 5:15
"If any one commits a breach of faith and sins unwittingly in any of the holy things of the LORD, he shall bring, as his guilt offering to the LORD, a ram without blemish out of the flock, valued by you in shekels of silver, according to the shekel of the sanctuary; it is a guilt offering.
Lev 5:16
He shall also make restitution for what he has done amiss in the holy thing, and shall add a fifth to it and give it to the priest; and the priest shall make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering, and he shall be forgiven.
Lev 5:17
"If any one sins, doing any of the things which the LORD has commanded not to be done, though he does not know it, yet he is guilty and shall bear his iniquity.
Lev 5:18
He shall bring to the priest a ram without blemish out of the flock, valued by you at the price for a guilt offering, and the priest shall make atonement for him for the error which he committed unwittingly, and he shall be forgiven.
Lev 5:19
It is a guilt offering; he is guilty before the LORD."

Note that Jesus was "bought" for thirty shekels of silver (the going value for a male slave) and that Judas tried to make restitution by buying Jesus back from the priests with silver. The priests took the money and they still sacrificed Jesus, the Lamb of God as a guilt offering for sin albeit unwittingly.

It should be noted that an "unwitting sin" was considered any unintentional breaking of the Torah or any intentional violation of it of which the sinner has repented so that he now wishes it had never happened.)

So I submit that Judas was not really intending to betray Jesus or sell Him out. He was trying to get him a "bully pulpit" so that He could make fools of the religious leaders of the Jews and lead to their downfall. And he certainly did not think that Jesus was in any physical danger.

This was Judas' way of forcing the issue and goading Jesus into taking the action that Judas thought he needed to do. Just like St. Peter, Judas was not listening when Jesus predicted his betrayal, passion, and death. Judas had his own agendas and wanted to "help Jesus along" with his mission.

Then everything started to go wrong. Jesus was not arrested in an orderly fashion. He was assaulted by a mob that beat him. There was no public trial but an informal (and illegal) private interrogation in the High Priest's house. Instead of dazzling his enemies with His eloquence, Jesus remained silent throughout the proceedings. He did not say anything in His own defense. At the end, the Sanhedrin voted him guilty of blasphemy and then they did the unthinkable: they decided to turn Jesus over to the Romans as a seditious revolutionary who advocated the violent overthrow of Roman rule. Jesus was thus condemned to death for being what Judas Iscariot himself had been before he became a follower of Our Lord!

Judas had never intended this to happen. He went back to the priests and tried to buy Our Lord back from them, but they refused. It was crazy, but Jesus was actually dying in Judas' place for the very crime of sedition that Judas had been guilty of!

Judas' plan had not only failed but Jesus was going to pay the ultimate price and in Judas' eyes he had single-handedly caused the downfall of the Messiah. It is no wonder that he became depressed. So depressed that he went out and hung himself in a secluded place. His body remained hanging for so long that his bowels became inflated with bacterial gases and his abdomen literally exploded and his bowels gushed out.

And so ended the life of Judas the betrayer of Christ.

I find the fate of Judas very sad. He likely never intended what had happened and he did not gloat about it. In fact, he regretted it all. So much so that he could not live with himself afterwards.

In a world that was motivated by pure justice in which the punishment fit the crime, Judas deserved no more than damnation. But we must remember that God does not work that way. He is the God of mercy and love who justifies the ungodly, rejoices more in the repentance of the sinner than in one hundred just men who have no need of repentance and counsels us to forgive our brethren from our hearts

We do not know the state of Judas' soul at the moment of his death. Most likely he received the just deserts for what he did. But I always hold out a hope that the man who told us to forgive our brother 70 times 7 times might forgive Judas this one time. He might count Judas' suicide as a disordered act of penitence by a man so sorry for what he had done that he could not think straight. Like my Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked should turn from his evil ways and live (Ezekiel 33:11).

And this hope serves a higher purpose. If there can be hope for Judas Iscariot, then there is hope for the rest of us! And to be honest, I identify better with the poor screw-up who blew it than with those sleek and sassy saints who never seem to have taken a misstep. May God have mercy on us all!

Art

Sippo lays down the law!

2007-06-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

In medical school and residency, there was an old dictum:

"See one, do one, teach one."

This was how you learned to do procedures and then spread the wealth of your knowledge and experience to other physicians-in-training.

When I was a med student at Vanderbilt, I expanded this dictum to encompass a the totality of a medical career. This became Sippo's Rule for Success in Medicine:

"See one, do one, teach one, publish one, name one after yourself."

Well, I have published several things, but I have never officially named anything after myself. That changes today. I have decided to formally introduce Sippo's Laws concerning life, Sippo's First Rule of Parental Discipline, an interesting mathematical conundrum that I call Sippo's Pizza Paradox, and finally Sippo's Lawyer Joke which has an interesting story behind it.

At this time there are three rules about life that I have developed which I call Sippo's Laws:

1) Sippo's First Law:

Anytime someone says "Everybody is {X}", it is an autobiographical statement.

Basically this rule states that pundits who make sweeping statements about human nature are actually talking about themselves, not other people.

For example, Sigmund Freud claimed that all boys want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. This is the (in)famous Oedipus Complex which subsequent research has shown DOES NOT EXIST! The desire for patricide and maternal incest were Siggy's personal problem. He just felt less dirty if he could say that all boys have the same fantasy.

Another example is John Calvin's claim that all human beings are "totally depraved". In reality, we all have our faults, but "total depravity" overstates the condition of mankind. But go back and check out how M. Calvin treated his opponents (e.g., Bolsec, Servetus, and Castellio). If anyone could be described as follows, it was Calvin:

Romans 3:13 "Their throat is an open grave, they use their tongues to deceive." "The venom of asps is under their lips."
Rom 3:14 "Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness."
Rom 3:15 "Their feet are swift to shed blood,
Rom 3:16 in their paths are ruin and misery,
Rom 3:17 and the way of peace they do not know."

So ask not to whom the pundit refers. He refers to himself.

2) Sippo's Second Law:

Paranoid ideation is the projection of a guilty conscience.

This law says that what people fear the most from other people is exactly what other people need to fear the most from them. When Islamic terrorists say that they fear being polluted by Judaism and Christianity, having their families slaughtered, and their religion undermined, you can GUARANTEE that this is exactly what they plan to do to us.

3) Sippo's Third Law:

Life is a Chess Problem.

While it might be interesting to figure how the board got this way, the only really relevant question is, "What's the next move?"

In the breech, look forward into your problems, not backward into their causes. There will be time enough for that once the crisis is over.

Next we have Sippo's First rule of Parental Discipline:

Make Daddy (or Mommy) happy.

On those long car trips with kids, parents are always having to make up new rules on the fly for child behavior: "Stop looking at your brother. Quit blowing in her face. Stop touching his arm. Don't smile at her...." You feel like you are holding a Constitutional convention in a third world country populated by creatively malignant yet subtle sociopaths. We've all been there.

The above rule has several advantages over the usual ever-expanding list:

The rule is simple and uncomplicated. So much so that even TEENAGERS can understand it.
It selects one parent to be the disciplinarian: either Mom or Dad. That way there is no separate court of appeals.
There is no need to elaborate on specific do's and don't's. If something is not going to make Daddy/Mommy happy, then it is wrong.
It is designed to maximize parental satisfaction and not cater to a child's creative casuistry.
It allows the parent a very wide latitude in determining which behaviors are and are not acceptable and whom to blame for the disruption.
You don't have to care about who did what to whom. What counts is how it makes YOU -- the designated parent disciplinarian -- feel.
Instituting this makes you look and fell feel smarter than both Dr. Spock AND Mr. Spock.

Now, on to Sippo's Pizza Paradox:

When you get a round Pizza Pie, it may have 6, 8 or even 12 slices.
In any case as you and your cohorts eat the pizza, you will inevitably reach a point where eating one more piece from either one side or the other of the remaining pie will leave you with half of a pizza.

The Paradox: Invariably the two pieces from which you can choose will be of different sizes!

In other words, taking either a larger or smaller amount from the same partially eaten pie will leave you with the same amount at the end: half a pizza. I know this sounds crazy, but like every rule of nature, this one always applies. I think it is a variation on the Banach-Tarski Paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox

Pay attention next time when you get a pizza.

BTW, there is a solution to the Sippo Pizza Paradox: Eat the Bigger Piece and you will still have half a pizza left! By eating the bigger piece, you make your pizza larger!

Finally we have Sippo's Lawyer Joke. There is a story behind this one. When I was teaching the US Army Flight Surgeon's Course section on Chemical Warfare back in 1984, we had a woman in the class from the Southern California National Guard who was also a practicing attorney in Los Angeles. The folks in the class were teasing her about being a lawyer and one guy told this joke:

Q. Do you know why they are thinking of using lawyers instead of white rats for medical experiments?

A. Because there are more lawyers than there are white rats!

I overheard this exchange as I was setting up my notes and I chimed in. "No, the joke is okay, but it needs multiple punchlines reaching a climax." And on the spot, I told Sippo's Lawyer Joke:

There are three reasons why we should use lawyers in medical experiments instead of white rats:

There are more lawyers than there are white rats.
You don't get as attached to them.
There are certain things that white rats will refuse to do!

The reason I bring this up is that 6 years later in 1991, I took my children to see the movie Hook starring Robin Williams as a grown-up Peter Pan. During a banquet sequence, he told my lawyer joke! I was incensed! Flattered. But incensed! It was a great joke, and now HE would get the credit for it. Well, this is my opportunity to tell everyone where that joke REALLY came from. I am not looking for royalties. I just want to set the record straight.

Why did St. Peter Deny Jesus?

2007-06-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

One of the most misunderstood incidents in the NT is the denial of Jesus by St. Peter on the night of his arrest. Many commentators see this as an act of cowardice on St. Peter's part where St. Peter denies Christ in order to save himself from arrest.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The denials were for a very different reason.

Let us study exactly what happened.

St. Peter like the other Apostles believed Jesus to be the Davidic Messiah-King who would free Israel from pagan bondage. He expected Jesus to lead the Jews to victory over the hated Roman occupation.

When Jesus told St. Peter that it would be necessary for Him to suffer and die, the conversation went like this:

Matt 16:21 From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.
Matt 16:22 And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you."
Matt 16:23 But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men."
Matt 16:24 Then Jesus told his disciples, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
Matt 16:25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. "

At the Last Supper, Jesus and St. Peter had their last conversation before Jesus' death. Jesus prophesied that:

Matt 26:31 ..."You will all be scandalized because of me this night; for it is written, 'I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.'

But St. Peter would have none of it:
Matt 26: 33 Peter answered and said unto him, Though all [men] shall be scandalized because of thee, [yet] will I never be scandalized.

{The Greek verb that I translate as "scandalized" is skandalizō which has the meaning "to cause a person to begin to distrust and desert one whom he ought to trust and obey".}

Jesus responded:

Mat 26:34 Jesus said to him, "Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times."
Mat 26:35 Peter said to him, "Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you." And so said all the disciples.

After the Last Supper, Jesus and some of his disciples went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. Luke 22:38 makes it clear that the disciples had two swords with them. When the cordon of Temple Guards -- at least a dozen armed soldiers -- came to arrest Jesus, only one of the disciples raised a sword in his defense: St. Peter (John 18:10). The disciple with the other sword ran away. St. Peter alone took up arms against a group of professional soldiers in Our Lord's defense. It was only when Jesus told him to put the sword down that St. Peter withdrew (Mat 26:52). These were hardly the acts of a coward who feared for his personal safety.

Nor do his actions afterwards show cowardice. While the rest of the disciples hid in fear, St. Peter and St. John followed the mob as they took Jesus to the High Priest's House (John 16:15ff). Why had St. Peter come? Did he intend to testify on Jesus' behalf. No! He kept his identity secret. Was he afraid of being captured. NO! For if he were he would hardly follow Jesus all the way into the house. It was a risk that he had to take.

The only logical explanation for his actions was that he was there waiting for an opportunity to set Jesus free by stealth or force. He believed Jesus to be the true King of Israel and St. Peter was prepared to fight to free Him so that He could overthrow the Romans and their puppet Tetrarchs.

Jesus himself told us something important:

John 18:36 Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingdom is not from the world."

St. Peter was acting EXACTLY the way a faithful servant of an earthly king would have acted.

But to pull this off, he needed to be incognito. If everybody knew who he was, he would not be able to act stealthily. So when people began to recognize him as a follower of Jesus, St. Peter had to deny it. St. Peter could not save Jesus if his identity was known. It was his duty as the loyal subject of the rightful king of Israel to conceal himself. And so he denied Jesus. Three times. In fact at the last time:

Mar 14:71 But he began to curse and to swear, [saying], I know not this man of whom ye speak.

Then it happened:

Matt 26:74 ...And immediately the cock crew.

Mat 26:75 And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.

Why did he then go out and abandon his plans? Why did he weep? Was it because of fear. No.

St. Peter realized that Jesus had warned him that He was not the conquering Messiah, Son of David, but the suffering Messiah, Son of Joseph, from Jewish legend who would suffer and die for his people as it said in Isaiah 53. St. Peter was clinging to his messianic dream of monarchy and glory but this was not to be fulfilled at that time.

His dilemma reminds me of a famous news quotation from the Vietnam War. During the Vietnamization program, the people of the village of Ben Tre were re-located to a government settlement and their village was burned to the ground. A newsman who witnessed this asked what was happening and an American Major responded:

"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

This is what happened to St. Peter. It became necessary for him to deny his Lord in order to save him. St. Peter realized the contradiction in that. If he really believed in Jesus, he had to let Him suffer and die. The only way that St. Peter could have interfered was if he did not believe all the things that Jesus had told him.

"My kingdom is not of this world..." That is why Jesus' followers could not fight to free Him.

And so St. Peter realized that his plan to rescue Christ would have been the undoing of God's plan. And to do so would be to reject his own faith in Jesus. He knew how close he had come to throwing it all away.

But it was too late. He had denied his Lord three times. In Semitic culture, a three fold denial is irrevocable. All a man needed to do to divorce his wife was to say to her three times "I divorce you" and it was done. St. Peter who had been Jesus' friend and right hand man had denied him forever. No wonder he wept bitterly.

But then a few weeks later after he had gone back to fishing, St. Peter was having a bad fishing day (John 21ff), and some smart-aleck on shore told him to dip his nets one more time on the right side of the boat. When he did, the net was almost too heavy with fish to pull in. This had happened once before, when St. Peter had first met Jesus (Luke 5:4). St. Peter immediately recognized his master and impulsively jumped into the water and swam to shore.

In this last know meeting between them, Jesus asked St. Peter three times "Do you love me?" And St. Peter said "Yes, Lord, you know I love you" all three times.

It was like they had started all over again from the beginning. By this three-fold declaration, St. Peter's three denials were undone. And The Good Shepherd, named St. Peter to be his vicar as the ONE shepherd of the ONE flock (John 10:16).

There is a warning here. Many times we seek after gods made in our own image. It is hard to submit ourselves to the will of the One True God. But loyalty to Him is the measure of true wisdom. And God is neither beholden to us not fully comprehended by us. But He is good and true and what He tells us can be trusted.

Many of us learn this the hard way like St. Peter did. One reason why we venerate the saints is to study their lives and learn from them. Let us learn submission to the will of God from St. Peter.

Are there errors in the Latin Vulgate?

2007-06-01T17:33:00.001-07:00

The title of this essay comes from a question posed to me by my Protestant confrere rr1213. It is a very complex question actually and I have been trying to do some research on it. I have found to my surprise that the Wikipedia article on Vulgate is just plain kickin'! I suggest that anyone interested in this topic start there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate

I just have few comments to make.

First of all, the Latin Vulgate was intended to be a vernacular translation for the people of the Roman Empire in their common tongue. It was commissioned by the Pope and composed by the greatest of the Patristic biblical scholars, St. Jerome. He used the best critical texts and methods of his day. There isn't a biblical scholar in any Christian group who would not give his eyeteeth to gain access to St. Jerome's original source manuscripts, including some of the apocryphal works that he mentioned in passing as "spurious." It may not be as good a translation as we would do today with newer critical methods, but in the Fourth Century this was state-of-the-art.

Secondly, Jerome was not trying for a critical text with apparatus but for a readable text for use in the liturgy. Nevertheless he reviewed many variant texts in different editions and languages and tried to give the best text he could. As a result, the Latin Vulgate gives us a window into what the Hebrew OT and Greek NT were like 300 years before the Jewish Masoretic Text was created and 500 years before the Byzantine liturgical text that was the basis for Erasmus' Textus Receptus. The Masoretic text has been the basis of most Hebrew Bibles since the 8th Century and was used by the Reformers. The Textus Receptus underlies all of the Reformation vernacular NTs including the KJV. As such, there are several variant readings in the Vulgate that are more CORRECT than those in the KJV. For example. Jerome's original does not have the Johannine Comma, the long doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer, and is missing some of the "Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture" about which Dr. Bart Ehrman wrote his doctoral dissertation (later published by Oxford University Press). Some of these textual variants were incorporated into later editions of the Vulgate.

Thirdly, the Latin Vulgate was a scholarly attempt at reconstructing the Bible unlike the various codices we have from the early 4th Century. This is a great paradox. The Roman Emperor Constantine in the wake of the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD commissioned 50 codices of the Bible in Greek so that one could be enthroned in honor in each of the major cities of the Empire. The texts we know as the Bodmer Papyri, Codex Siniaticus, and Codex Vaticanus most likely are the remaining copies of these bibles. Unfortunately, these were NOT critical editions, but more like commemorative copies from the Franklin Mint or BOMC. While they give us the earliest most complete Bible texts in Greek, they may not have been as representative of the original autographs as what St. Jerome used 60 years later. These early Greek NT texts therefore IMHO must be considered just one early witness among many. The Peshitta texts in Aramaic may be better witnesses of the period before 300 AD. And the Septuagint Greek text appears in may cases closer to some of the Hebrew Biblical texts from the 1st Century Dead Sea Scrolls than the later 8th Century Masoretic text.

The Medieval Humanists (and their Protestant disciples) argued against some of St. Jerome's choices for his translation from Greek in Latin. They argued that dikaioo (to justify) and its cognates had a forensic character that the Latin word iustificare did not. The Latin word implied a tranformation from a state of unrighteousness to a state of righteousness. But better philological studies in the last 200 years have shown that the dikaioo family of Greek words did also have a transformative meaning even within the NT itself (e.g., Romans 5:19, 2Cor 5:21).

Some have also argued that the translation of the Greek metanoia as the Latin poenitentia was incorrect. This was the word Jesus used when he said "REPENT and believe the Gospel!" (Mark 1:15). Metanoia they claimed was more of an intellectual and emotional response while poenitentia implied the need to do works of penance. This may have been true in pagan Greek. The problem was that the Greek word metanoia was probably used to translate the Hebrew word teshuvah which means "turning". In the Jewish religion this encompassed such things as fasting, wearing sack cloth and ashes, and other works of mortification. St. Jerome's choice here took cognizance of the wider Jewish context of the NT.

So in the end, St. Jerome did the best job possible for his time. What makes a "good" Biblical translation changes from one time period to another and what works in one period may not work as well in another.

Art

Dr. Robert Koons and the Case for Catholicism

2007-05-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

Recently, Lutheran Scholar Robert Koons PhD joined the Catholic Church. He has been received by Catholics with open arms and sent off with gracious regrets by many of his co-religionists. But as we have come to expect he has also been vilified by the usual suspects among the Death Eater crowd of anti-Catholic bigots.

Dr. Koons has given us a detailed explanation for why he decided to join the Catholic Church. What I find most interesting is that gives many arguments that I have used in defending the Catholic faith against Pseudopodeo and his fellow travelers. I think this essay is quite good and a Catholic Apologetic classic. Here it is for your perusal. Download it and savor it carefully:

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/case_for_catholicism.pdf

Art

Anti-Semitism is Fascist Pornography

2007-05-28T04:11:00.000-07:00

There is a voluble, virtually rabid controversialist who has been targeting we Catholic apologists who have opposed Anti-Semitism within our ranks. This gentleman hails from California and seems obsessed with claiming that Jews practice bestiality and sexual molestation of children and he has the Talmud quotes to PROVE IT! Or does he. Sadly this kind of accusation concerning Jewish people is not new. It is, in fact older, than the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and equally spurious. But on searching the net, you can find this fellow's name associate with Neo-Nazi web sites, anti-gun-control groups, pro-militia causes, and letters to the editor condemning homosexuals. This man has also come to the defense of a certain "Catholic" controversialist whose attitude about the Jewish people had become so outrageous that he attacked JPII and the then Cardinal Ratzinger for their advocacy of better Catholic-Jewish relations complete with quotations from Nazi sources. As you can see, a pattern is forming here and it is not pretty.

Spurious stories of moral (usually sexual) turpitude on the part of people of other religions has been fairly common in times past. We Catholics were the target of many of these salacious stories told by Puritans in England and America in which lascivious priests seduced women in the confessional and nuns in the convents siring bastard children that were smothered and buried in secret tunnels connecting the rectory to the convent. These stories were told in such lurid detail that some commentator have described this form of Anti-Catholicism as "Puritan Pornography".

Well now SOME Catholics are passing the buck and attacking Jewish people in a similar fashion. And they seem to share values with Fascist groups that foment racial hatred. They are extremists at best on the fringe of Catholicism and at worst well outside the Church in the LA-LA land where the Sedevacantists long for a strong reactionary Pope and an even stronger reprise of the Inquisition.

This sad controversialist seems to me to be very disturbed and I have elected not to argue with him directly. There is nothing worse than arguing with a madman about his delusions. It just agitates him and frustrates you. I have advised him that he needs to seek professional help, but in his case that probably means hiring some guy from the Soldier of Fortune magazine personals to have me whacked.

Christian-Jewish relation have not been very good over the centuries. There has been inappropriate behavior towards each other from both sides, but in all fairness we Christians have almost always out numbered the Jews and most of the uncharitable behavior must be blamed on us. The watershed of Christian anti-Semitism was the Holocaust in which one third of all the Jews in the world were the victims of Nazi genocide. This event was a wake-up call to western Christians and it prompted a reevaluation of Judaism and a deeper appreciation of it as part of our Christian heritage and on its own merits. The Second Vatican Council specifically addressed Judaism in the document Nostrae Aetate

Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so
great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues.

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.

Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

JPII later apologized for any suffering caused to Jews by those claiming to be Catholics and he did more than any other Pope to build bridges between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.

In light of this I am embarrassed that there are still many "Catholics" who harbor prejudices against the Jewish people and who perpetuate scurrilous myths about them. We already know where such prejudices come from: the Fascist mindset with its racist and genocidal agendas. And we know where they lead: Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen.

When I was growing up, I was blessed to live in a home where racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice did not exist. My family had friends from among people of all faiths (and none) and we were taught to respect them and to appreciate the diversity in American culture. On the residential street where I lived, there was an Orthodox Jewish Synagogue across the street, an American Baptist Church on the opposite corner, a Pentecostal house church on the next block, and our Catholic Chapel across the main drag. And everybody got along just fine.

During my life I have know many Jewish people who were friends and colleagues. My attitude towards Jews was shaped by them and by the respect that I was taught on my mother's knee for people from whom Jesus and Mary came to us. They represent a short roll of honor:

-Mr. and Mrs. Sender who ran the store where we got most of our clothes as children and who extended credit to us when we needed it.

-Sam Goldberg the Rabbi's son from across the street who loved comic books as much as I did and who was my best friend.

-Mike Knapp from college who was in ROTC with me and helped us with the drill team even though he was not a member.

-Barry Wind my classmate at Vanderbilt Med School whose family welcomed us students into their home and openly shared their faith with us. His Mom and Dad were like surrogate parents for many of us. And they taught me how to chant the Berakah over dinner.

-Dr. Rosenthal my Orthopedics professor who taught us medicine with panache and a wry sense of humor.

-Dr. Eugene Winter and the several other Jewish house staff at Vanderbilt and Walter Reed took the time to teach me the craft of medicine

-Ginny, the girl that Barry married. During my residency, her family opened their home to me and treated me like one of their own.

-American Army Captain Drickey and his wife who were my sponsors upon my arrival in England as an exchange officer. They let me stay with them until my RAF quarters were ready and drove me to Mass on Sunday and waited for me in the parking lot until it was over to take me home.

-My friend Lou who commanded the OHARNG Med Det during the transition in the mid 90's. He was a good commander and an even better friend.

-David and Kathleen Moss , Marty Barrack, Athol, Ariela and the others at the Association of Hebrew Catholics who have been good friends and fellow Catholics and who share a love of what is good and beautiful in our common heritage.

Maybe that is the problem with our sad Anti-Semite controversialist. He has gone through life with blinders on and never been able to see the good people around him who were different. To him, Jews were always "THOSE people" and never his friends and neighbors. Let us pray for him and for all of those who have been too blind to see.

Bernie gives his private opinion

2007-05-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

Bernie writes:

I was once a Catholic. Catholicism is probably the best religion there is. The Priests and Pope have great costumes, great cathedrals, burning incense, etc. However, it is all really detracting from a Christ-like life. Anyone who has a devotion to Mary or the Saints, they should instead be having a devotion to Christ Himself. Don't be afraid to approach Christ. You don't have to go through His mother to reach Him. Also, I think it is sick how Catholics have relics in churches (fingers of dead saints, etc.). Gross.

This may come as shock to you, Bernie, but you are still a catholic and will be judged as one on the Last Day.

I agree with you Catholicism is not only the BEST religion, it is the ONLY true religion. No one can be saved apart from the Catholic Church. Placing yourself outside the Church has endangered your salvation. You need to repent and return to the Lord.

The self serving drivel about how the trappings of Catholicism detract from following Christ is a damnable lie and I rebuke you in the name of Christ! Our entire devotional life is directed towards Christ in the Mass and the sacraments. The veneration of angels and saints are accessory devotions that enhance our fellowship with other members of the body of Christ. We venerate the angels and saints because we are all siblings who have God as our Father, Christ as our brother, and Mary as our Mother in the Holy Spirit. Hatred of the saints in glory is hatred of their Father. All of our liturgical prayer and worship is drected to God and His Christ.

The use of relics proves that ours is a real historical faith and that the martyrs and saints were real historical people. The Protestant cults do not have this because they are all man-made religions with no historical depth that are cut off from the physical reality of the Church. The Protestant cults have been tainted with gnostic error and are afraid that Created beings will lead men away from God. In Catholicism creation is redeemed and under grace we have nothing to fear from created things. All of creation is good and can lead us to God if we rightly order ourselves before Him.

I feel sorry for you, Bernie. You have sold your birthright and now are even afraid of the mess of pottage you traded for it.

Art

Bernie asks about Bible translations

2007-05-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

We have an apostate from the Catholic Church named Bernie who thinks he so smart. He asks the following:

I still don't understand. If the Roman Catholic Church is the one true church and all others have errors, then why can't the Catholic Church produce the best Bible translation?

Well, first of all we Catholics WROTE the NT and that original text is the "Best Bible" that there is. Translations are ephemeral contemporary phenomena that become less useful with time. For example, the KJV is practically worthless these days for many reasons: forced translations, poor original language texts, anachronistic vocabulary and grammar, etc. There will never be a definitive vernacular paraphrase of Scripture. In each time period, older versions will be supplanted by newer ones for good or ill.

As I tried to explain to you, no translation is ever perfect. It cannot be. One always has to make compromises in trying to translate from one language to another. We have an old saying in Italian: Tradutore traditore! (The translator is a traitor!) Any serious biblical scholar will tell you that certain portions of Scripture are difficult to interpret and can be understood in different ways. It is simple Protestant arrogance to think that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the words of the Bible and what it is trying to convey. In many cases the same verses give us several different pieces of information. So any serious study of the Biblical text has to take account of the original languages and cannot be restricted to any vernacular paraphrase.

There are two tendencies in biblical translation: literal and dynamic. Literal translations try to convey an almost mechanical translation from the original languge to the vernacular. It does not take into account figures of speech, hyperbole, or other literary devices which are hard to translate. Dynamic versions try to use linguistic equivalents in the translation to make it more readable. It tries to give one the flavor of the original as a reader of the language might have understood it, but it deviates from the literal meaning of the text and sometimes, makes many compromises in the translation. In the end, neither method is perfect.

We have several excellent Catholic versions in English: the DRV, NAB, JB, Challoner, Confraternity, Kleist-Lilly, and Knox. These have good study notes and critical apparati. We use the NAB at Mass in the USA and it is perfectly fine. But to make the NAB and JB more readable, the translators made them less literal.

The most literal version remains the RSV. It was done by Protestant translators who tried very hard to avoid figures of speech. But they still made some translation decisions that I do not carte for and so I always have my Greek NT and other language helps to elucidate complex passages. The RSV-CE has corrected some of these dubious renderings, but even it is not perfect.

Why would we use a Protestant translation instead of making a new one for ourselves? For one thing, the actual content of the biblical text is not in question between Catholics and Protestants and there are fewer problems when a translation remains as literal as possible. Why waste time and effort reinventing the wheel? The RSV is good enough and readily available. For another, as an apologist, I like to use an ecumenically common version as much as possible so we can all be talking about the same text. Thirdly, the RSV uses modern word order and syntax and is just plain more readable while tacking close to the literal meaning. Nevertheless it is choppy in some places reflecting what you have in the origianl text. The NAB and JB were designed really to be read at the Mass and have tried to smooth over some of this chopiness. The other Catholic translations are older and not as readable or current in their language.

Modern biblical scholarship is an ecumenical effort. One of the most widely used books by Protestant seminarianss on the Greek NT is written by Fr. Max Zerwick S.J. And during the composition of the RSV, NEB, GNV, and NRSV, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish scholars were consulted.

The really serious question you have to face Bernie is that in ALL the good translations James 2:24 says that "Justification is not by faith alone but by works." In essence, the Bible openly, literally, and diametrically contradicts the false premise at the heart of the prot apostasy. I think you need to deal with that plank in your own eye before you start questioning us about the splinter you perceive in ours.

Art