Is the Bible a Perverse Book?
My post on what I called a perverse prayer on Facebook prompted some questions about the possibility of similar perversity found in Sacred Scripture. In another forum, I have faced accusations of heresy, sacrilege, blasphemy, and impiety for my adamant insistence that the wish to harm another is a perverse wish whether we find that wish in mostly harmless jokes or in the sacred pages of the Bible. I had and have no qualms about stating that we can find perversity in the writings of the sacred writers. Some statements in the scriptures express or point to ideas that are perverse, immature, or downright evil.
I find, for example, the following statement to be perverse, by which I mean that the idea (in this case an imperative) expressed by the statement is perverse: “Utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them; but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling.” I find any and all imperatives to kill babies (among others) to be perverse and evil. Now this statement I quoted is contained in the Bible. In fact it is attributed to the Lord! Therefore, I am led logically to say that this statement contained in 1 Samuel is perverse, by which I mean that it is a perverse imperative, an imperative to commit an evil act. That the sacred writer makes God the speaker of this imperative certainly gives me food for thought, but it doesn’t make the conclusion not follow from the premises. If that imperative an imperative to do evil, and reason tells me that it is, and if that imperative is found in the Bible, then we find in the Bible an imperative to do evil.
Now what I am not saying is that Bible is a perverse book or that we worship a perverse God. I’m not saying that God didn’t have a reason for having the statement in the Bible or that he didn’t have a reason for having the imperative attributed to him. I’m not saying that the author of Samuel is acting perversely or in error in his task as a sacred writer. Nor am I saying that God is acting perversely or in error by having perverse statements in the Sacred Scriptures. I am not denying or undermining the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, though, of course, what I say speaks to how I understand inerrancy. I affirm that “the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,” but my affirmation doesn’t preclude me from recognizing cultural and even barbaric cultural influences upon those same scriptures. The Bible chronicles salvation history, and there’s not a little perversity in that story.
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The Bible chronicles salvation history, and there’s not a little perversity in that story.
Thumbs up!
Well, I’m guessing that if you think the punishment of the Amalekites is perverse, then you have real issues with the flood story and the final judgment where the “accursed” will be cast “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Kyle, do you believe that the inspired author of 1st Samuel erroneously attributes to God an imperative which He never commanded? Or perhaps he accurately records that which he apparently did not know was an instance of false prophecy on the part of Samuel?
Kyle
Or, you could take the way of many fathers and say — wherever it appears God orders an evil, in reality, we must not read that text as literal. Thus, killing children was often seen as an allegory of the mind destroying its own evil ideas. I’m not saying this is the only way to deal with the questions, but it is clear — the fathers themselves saw these problems and thought there was a need to deal with it.
Remember what Dei Verbum says: “The principal purpose to which the plan of the old covenant was directed was to prepare for the coming of Christ…These books, though they also contain some things which are incomplete and temporary, nevertheless show us true divine pedagogy”.
Incomplete and temporary. I do not believe God invoked the curse of destruction. Such a God might be acceptable to the voluntarists, but he is not the God of reason or true revelation.
The rationalizations offered in this thread do not fit with a proper orthodox Catholic understanding of scriptural inerrancy. It is not proper exegesis to simply dismiss a passage by categorizing it as non-literal if it conflicts with our pre-conceived notions of what is and what is not permissible to God. The literal meaning of scripture is what its inspired human author intended to assert as true, and that is best ascertained hermeneutically by judging the text according to its literary genre, taking into account language, idiomatic expression, culture, era, etc. If this passage was not intended by its human author to convey the historical events depicted by its words, what IS the literal meaning? You need to know that before you can determine a spiritual, allegorical or anagogical sense, as the latter build on the literal sense.
The “foremost and greatest endeavor” of exegetes “should be to discern and define clearly that sense of the biblical words which is called literal.” (Pope Pius XII, Divino afflante Spiritu)
Or, as J.F. McCarty put it simply in his lesson on the four senses of sacred scripture: “It is necessary to determine first what the sacred text really says before one can come to understand what the sacred text really means.”
I will, at this time, remind Kyle and his well-intentioned commentator-responders that all lives belong to God, so it cannot be evil for God to end any human life for any reason. Murder is impossible for God, not just because He is all-good and thus is incapable of evil, but because it is entirely within the divine prerogative to kill, or order the slaying, of any human being, for whatever reason He judges, and it is not our place to deny Him this prerogative or to intepret as false inspired and affirmed statements in scripture because we cannot easily reconcile divine morality to human morality. Be careful of the error of Job’s friends.
Kevin
As St John of the Cross points out, the writer of an inspired text (locution, prophecy, etc) might have a wrong understanding of the text and still be inspired. In other words, though it is important and interesting to consider what they might have thought about a text, it is clear that Christ, who is the focus of Scripture, is still a surprise.
THE PONTIFICAL BIBLICAL COMMISSION
THE JEWISH PEOPLE
AND THEIR SACRED SCRIPTURES
IN THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE
The theme of the land should not be allowed to overshadow the manner in which the Book of Joshua recounts the entry to the promised land. Many texts 250 speak of consecrating to God the fruits of victory, called the ban (chérèm). To prevent all foreign religious contamination, the ban imposed the obligation of destroying all places and objects of pagan cults (Dt 7:5), as well as all living beings (20:15-18). The same applies when an Israelite town succumbs to idolatry, Dt 13:16-18 prescribes that all its inhabitants be put to death and that the town itself be burned down.
At the time when Deuteronomy was written — as well as the Book of Joshua — the ban was a theoretical postulate, since non-Israelite populations no longer existed in Judah. The ban then could be the result of a projection into the past of later preoccupations. Indeed, Deuteronomy is anxious to reinforce the religious identity of a people exposed to the danger of foreign cults and mixed marriages. 251
Therefore, to appreciate the ban, three factors must be taken into account in interpretation; theological, moral, and one mainly sociological: the recognition of the land as the inalienable domain of the lord;the necessity of guarding the people from all temptation which would compromise their fidelity to God; finally, the all too human temptation of mingling with religion the worst forms of resorting to violence.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/pcb_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20020212_popolo-ebraico_en.html
God Bless
God is not exempt from morality. Murder is murder no matter if you are mortal or divine. And the deliberate taking of an innocent human life is always murder, according to our Church. Therefore, abortion is always a grave sin. Therefore, God, being all good, will never perform an abortion.
Or does anyone here think that God would abort a baby, and that if he did so, it would be good? If you believe that God can be a just abortionist, then how do you explain the Church’s infallible teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion?
I have always found Ezekiel 20:25 to be striking:
This scripture references the false practices that the Israelites had taken upon themselves, but attributes their idolatry to God himself. The scripture has a better way of putting it – that God ‘delivers’ or ‘hands over’ men to their sins, to death. I think this is the proper way of reading about the death of innocents at the hands of God or his servants. It isn’t that God gives evil commands or that God does evil, but rather that God permits evil, and even permits his people to do evil in his very name. He does this for good reasons that are baffling to us, but he does it nonetheless.
Kevin appears to have succinctly summed up the voluntarist position. Is the voluntarist position actually the “proper orthodox” Catholic understanding? I know that it is the proper orthodox Calvinist understanding. Among Catholic theologians, I know that Ockham was a prominent voluntarist, and that Aquinas was a prominent intellectualist. Has the Catholic Church definitively decided the matter on the side of Ockham?
Again, I think Girard’s word is helpful here. What we see in the Scriptures is an unfolding realization – not revelation, but realization – of what it means to serve the true God, a God who desires “mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”
The movement from the sacrificial to the sacramental required (requires!) a fundamental reordering of human consciousness, but that reordering always takes place on an uneven path, marked by switchbacks, dangerous curves, and a long, slow ascent. Scripture, it seems to me, is a record of that reordering, that ascent, with all its attendant ugliness.
The revelation of the innocence of victim began on Mount Moriah and concluded on Calvary with the centurion’s declaration “Surely, this man was the Son of God.” The space in between is a record of God’s preparation of a particular people for a universal savior.
But my original questions still stand – does the inspired author erroneously attribute to God the command to eradicate the Amalekites? If so, how can this understanding be squared with a meaningful Catholic, orthodox understanding of inerrancy? If not, what IS being affirmed here under divine inspiration? Is it simply that God’s permissive will decrees certain evils to occur in His name? Such a position does terrible violence to exegesis, and since the Bible affirms of some events an origin in divine decree and denies them of others, such a position strikes me immediately as insupportable.
Having struggled with the issue of inerrancy for years, I am familiar with all the easy excuses and blind alleys. I have hidden in all these nooks and crannies myself at one time or another. They are not consistent Catholic orthodoxy. Many of them have, at various times, been explicitly condemned as heretical.
“God is not exempt from morality. Murder is murder no matter if you are mortal or divine.”
God is the source of morality, and murder is immoral killing. God’s absolute divine prerogative over life and death makes murder an impossible charge to lay against Him regardless of who dies at His hand for whatever reason.
“As St John of the Cross points out, the writer of an inspired text (locution, prophecy, etc) might have a wrong understanding of the text and still be inspired”
Nevertheless, what is asserted by the human author is guaranteed to be true because the primary author of scripture is the Holy Spirit.
God is the source of morality, and murder is immoral killing. God’s absolute divine prerogative over life and death makes murder an impossible charge to lay against Him regardless of who dies at His hand for whatever reason.
This is the philosophy of religious terrorists.
does the inspired author erroneously attribute to God the command to eradicate the Amalekites?
Oh, for sure.
The Jewish Rabbis long ago taught, for example, that not everything written as “God said” in scripture was said by God, they held that some was just written by Moses.
Nevertheless, what is asserted by the human author is guaranteed to be true because the primary author of scripture is the Holy Spirit.
That would only be true if one had a proper understanding of “asserted”. Inspiration works thru human authors who are merely “vessels of clay” with all their limited human understanding, theology and worldview.
The idea that it would be OK for God to murder but not OK for man to murder broke down at the incarnation. Once God became man, what was immoral for man was also immoral for God.
God Bless
“What we see in the Scriptures is an unfolding realization – not revelation, but realization – of what it means to serve the true God…”
I agree with you, Mark.
Kevin, am I correct in saying that you believe that God can abort babies and rape women and torture kittens, and still be righteous?
Kyle, do you believe that the inspired author of 1st Samuel erroneously attributes to God an imperative which He never commanded?
Kevin,
I certainly believe that. Here’s 1 Samuel 15:1-3 from the New American Bible:
I my message above, there should be an end blockquote tag after the first quoted paragraph which ends ” . . . oxen and sheep, camels and asses.’”
The Problem of Evil has given rise to more fancy dancin’ than any other philosophical question I can think of.
The idea that it would be OK for God to murder but not OK for man to murder broke down at the incarnation. Once God became man, what was immoral for man was also immoral for God.
Chris,
I certainly never heard this before. Where does this notion come from? There are many, many problems with it, not the least of which is that there is no before and after for God. God is outside of time. Also, God is immutable. God couldn’t “change” at the time of the incarnation.
Remember what Dei Verbum says: “The principal purpose to which the plan of the old covenant was directed was to prepare for the coming of Christ…These books, though they also contain some things which are incomplete and temporary, nevertheless show us true divine pedagogy”.
This is basically an assertion that the Jews didn’t understand, and still don’t understand, their own scriptures. Or at least they didn’t see and still overlook the “principal purpose.” I think there has been some evolution of Catholic Biblical scholarship since 1965.
In 1 Samuel 15:1-3, the literal sense of the term Samuel uses, “This is what the LORD of hosts has to say:”, would be what the prophet Samuel meant by that term, not necessarily what a 21st Century English speaker would infer from reading that term.
The term appears to be a forumla expressing the prophetic nature of the following statements, which would be the prophets INTERPRETATION of what he thought God was saying thru him.
In the Talmud, Sanhedrin 89a, the Jewish sages comment that the prophet interprets his understanding of the divine communication IN HIS OWN WORDS.
Scripture is replete with examples of prophets who got the word of God very wrong.
there is no before and after for God
I take from this that what would be immoral for man would also be immoral for God eternally (ie before and after the incarnation). The incarnation makes this readily apparant to us rather than suddenly changing what was moral for God.
God Bless
I don’t believe that God actually commanded the the imperative in question, and I don’t think my acceptance of the inerrancy of Scripture requires me to believe that God commanded it. The Bible has all sorts of what we’d call errors, but these do not lessen its inerrancy as they do not pertain to how the Bible is inerrant.
“The Bible has all sorts of what we’d call errors, but these do not lessen its inerrancy as they do not pertain to how the Bible is inerrant.”
Is that from “1984″ or “Animal Farm”?
It’s not an Orwellian statement, so far as I know, though I suppose it might sound like one. The inerrancy of the Bible pertains to “that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”
The Bible can err in several ways without actually being fundamentally erroneous. For example, it is sometimes scientifically incorrect in matters such as the sun’s passage around the earth, but that does not destroy the meaning of the work.
I believe Nate and David hit the nail on the head. God does not willfully order evil, but he does permit it. Evil in and of itself is nonexistent, just as cold is nonexistent. Cold is a lack of heat, and evil is the lack of a due good. Therefore, when God ordered the smiting of Amalek, it was on order of destruction, yes, but it is an allowance of their own lack of good to consume them.
A good example would be St Luke’s description of the census bringing Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. There is no historical record of a census at this time.
It appears that St Luke situated the birth of Jesus along with the census according to what he knew of the events (he was writing perhaps 80 years after the birth of Christ so exact historical details may have become fuzzy in human memory).
It doesn’t lessen the inerrancy of scripture to admit that St Luke’s census information may have in fact been incorrect, because his intent (the literal meaning of scripture) was not so much what we would today call historical accuracy, but to describe the events as best he could reconstruct them from his investigations (as outlined in the prologue to Luke in Lk 1:1-4).
God Bless
David Nickol,
You ask:
“Can’t we trust the New American Bible on the web site of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to contain “orthodox” Catholic Biblical scholarship?”
In a word, no. You have hit upon a major pet peeve of mine. The problems with the footnotes in the New American Bible are plentiful and egregious. At times they come dangerously close to crossing the line of heresy, and other times they leap across that line and dance gleefully on the other end.
“Do you believe God actually said…?”
Insofar as the inspired human authors of the scriptural passages you quote above assert under divine inspiration that He did say that, I am required to believe that He did say that. Do you deny that the inspired human authors assert that, and can you support that denial?
To quote River from the television show Firefly: “Noah’s arc is a problem.”
I am not going to pass a modern judgment on an ancient act. I will pass a modern judgment on a current act. Joshua was commanded to free the land of contamination. But history is a journey of understanding. We must still free the land of contamination, but we cannot contaminate ourselves in doing so. There is a reason the old law has been superseded by the new. And we have enough to do to judge ourselves and our own times.
To Chris Sullivan -
Your position, while well argued from your own perspective, is incompatible with the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding what we are calling scriptural inerrancy.
“The idea that it would be OK for God to murder but not OK for man to murder…” — is not an idea defended by me, nor is it relevant to the scripture we are examining. What I have said is that it is impossible to rightly attribute murder to He who has absolute authority over life and death. It is absurd to say that a given divine act is murder but is “ok” for God for several reasons, the most trivial among them being that God may bring any human life to end without being guilty of immoral killing, and He need not justify Himself to us.
““What we see in the Scriptures is an unfolding realization – not revelation, but realization – of what it means to serve the true God…”
In this Mark and Melody agree, but FWIW, they agree against the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding scripture as expounded by Pius XII, Benedict XV, Leo XIII, the First Vatican Council, which reaffirmed Trent, and the testimony of the Fathers, and the teachings of scripture concerning itself. In short, they agree against sacred scripture, sacred tradition, and the Magisterium. But at least they agree with each other. Agreement is nice.
“I think there has been some evolution of Catholic Biblical scholarship since 1965.”
Dei Verbum is not a work of mere Catholic scholarship, it is a document of an Ecumenical Council, covered by infallibility.
–The inerrancy of the Bible pertains to “that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”–
That scriptural inerrancy covers that which pertains to salvific truth is certain, but if you take that statement to be a limitation of the scope of scriptural inerrancty, you take a position that has already been specifically condemned.
God may bring any human life to end without being guilty of immoral killing, and He need not justify Himself to us.
Kevin,
The problem with what you are saying is that in the passage we are discussing, God doesn’t kill anybody. He commands human beings to kill all the men, women, children, and cattle of the Amalekites. As I understand Catholic teaching, things are not wrong because God says they are wrong. If God says something is wrong, it is because it is wrong. God cannot “change the rules” and declare that rape is good and feeding the hungry is evil. The goodness of some things, and the evil of other things, is not a matter of them arbitrarily being designated good or evil by God. God can’t make what is evil good, and what is good evil. So commanding an army to kill even innocent children is commanding men to murder.
Kyle, I sympathize with you and even more so with River (young on-screen hotties are easy to sympathize with). This is not easy stuff, and I struggled with it for a long time – it played no small part in my having left the Church when I was in my twenties. But sympathy is one thing, and faith is another.
It would be a mistake to divorce the historical and other types of passages of the Scriptures from what God wanted revealed about himself. Even if it can be shown that the Bible contains, for example, geographical errors, we shouldn’t dismiss these passages as having no connection with what God wanted said. In the case of the passage I quoted in my post, I don’t think God actually commanded infanticide and genocide, but do believe that God wanted the imperative put in the Bible and even attributed to him erroniously. The passage reveals a truth about our salvation.
The Scriptures teach, without error, that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation. Every word of Scripture has a part to play in this revelation of truth, but not every word or set of words is itself true. Yet God can speak the truth through human errors–this is key! For example, to understand the meaning of what was meant by calling God “Father,” we have to understand how the audience understood the idea of fatherhood. Their cultural understanding, as I understand it, was based on a biological error: the idea that the new life of the child had its origin in the father, but not in the mother, who was perceived as the ground in which the seed grew. So God actually revealed a deep theological truth about himself using an erroneous conception of fatherhood!
To James H.:
You say that “The Bible can err in several ways without actually being fundamentally erroneous. For example, it is sometimes scientifically incorrect in matters such as the sun’s passage around the earth, but that does not destroy the meaning of the work.”
In reply, I respectfully offer my denial that the Bible errs at all there, as I deny that geocentrism was asserted by any of the inspired human authors in any passage (note: I do not deny that they BELIEVED that the earth was the center, but that they asserted that to be true). What is being affirmed (the literal sense) of every passage where geocentrism is apparently present? I submit that the apparent geocentrism is never the the point of what is being literally affirmed by the inspired human author.
Nevertheless, what is asserted by the human author is guaranteed to be true because the primary author of scripture is the Holy Spirit.
Kevin, you’ve adopted a standard of inerrancy that owes more to fundamentalist Protestantism than Catholicism. Scripture is indeed inerrant, but that is not the same as impeccability. Matthew 1 and Luke 3 present very different geneologies of Joseph. By your standard they must both be right, but that’s impossible. Similarly, the Gospel of John depicts the Cleansing of the Temple as occuring near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, while Mark places it in Holy Week. As a factual matter, it would seem one of them is wrong. But neither is really in error if the “truth” about the Cleansing of the Temple isn’t related to the precise date at which it occured.
My point about revelation/realization is that what Scripture divinely reveals is a primitive people growing in the realization that the one true God is utterly different from other gods, especially in his demands for violence and sacrifice.
Do you deny that the inspired human authors assert that, and can you support that denial?
Kevin,
I don’t know how to discuss this with you, since you have claimed that the New American Bible contains heresy. What can I cite as an authority if you reject something approved by the USCCB? It seems to me you are in a position of having to reject mainstream Catholic Biblical scholarship of the last 30 years.
“Therefore, when God ordered the smiting of Amalek, it was on order of destruction, yes, but it is an allowance of their own lack of good to consume them.”
The Amalekites did not magically dissolve. According to the passage, God specifically commanded that Saul kill the Amalekites. That this is a difficult passage, very hard for a faithful Catholic to accept as compatible with moral character of God who is Love is undeniable, but Catholic teaching renders certain interpretations out of bounds for faithful Catholic exegetes.
Chris, every statement you offer on Luke and the census is wrong for many reasons, far more than I have the patience to correct. I will limit my response to what I have been saying already – yours is a position that, however well-argued on its own terms and coherent, is incompatible with the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Kyle, I see no connection between the fatherhood of God as affirmed in scripture and the culturally accepted biological error you allege. I certainly do not see that error being asserted in any literal sense the way the human authors of scripture assert that God ordered the deaths of the Amalekites. In any event, the documents that I have already cited are very clear on these points, and if you read them, you will see that your position is incompatible with them.
Every word of Scripture has a part to play in this revelation of truth, but not every word or set of words is itself true.
Kyle,
This is a rather grand claim given that there are obscure and even unintelligible passages in both the OT and the NT.
David, it is fairly clear from what I said that my position is that the footnotes contained between the covers of the St. Joseph Edition of the New American Bible contain heresy, not that the Bible itself is heretical. If you want a tip on how to argue against my position, I will offer you this one free of charge – ask me to substantiate this claim of mine. Challenge me. That’s what I would do if I were in your position.
Mark, what you allege is fundamentalism and not Catholic is practically a quote from a Catholic encyclical. Your position on the genealogies is also mistaken – there is nothing in the gospels you cite indicating that both lines are traced through Joseph’s biological father.
We find the connection in how those hearing God spoken of as “Father” understood the meaning of the word “Father.” The sacred authors knew their audience and how their audience would interpret the meaning of the words they used. So while the sacred writers were not making a statement about biology, their theological point was built upon the biological understanding of the audience. God meets us where we are and reveals himself in ways we understand–even when our ways of understanding are not quite correct.
A grand claim it may be, David, but it’s how I understand Dei Verbum.
Kevin,
To accept that God commanded the killing of innocent human persons, or killed them himself, is incompatible with Pope John Paul II’s teaching on intrinsic evil in Veritatis Splendor and the immorality of killing innocents in Evangelium Vitae.
That’s because the killing of innocents is the kind of moral act which is in and of itself always evil.
God never does or commands that such acts be done.
If he did, he’d be an evil god.
God Bless
From Evangelium Vitae:
Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.
Note that JPII here teaches that such killing is ALWAYS wrong. Not only if done by man. It is the killing itself which is wrong regardless of the divinity or otherwise of the one doing it.
God Bless
The bible is inerrant in that it teaches what to do and what not to do. The interpretation can be perverse depending on the disposition of the interpreter.
If love is the disposition of the interpreter then something new appears on every page.
Chris, nothing in the documents you name place limits on God’s authority over all life and death. The acts referred to as intrinsically evil are human acts throughout, and since much of the evil of murder is in the human arrogation of the divine authority over life, the fact that it is limited to human acts is significant.
Kyle, your position is that the word “Father” as it is used in scripture means what those who heard it thought it meant based on a misunderstanding that is not even implicitly present in the text and employs their misunderstanding to affirm some truth. Not only do I not grant that the misunderstanding is present in any sense, I do not think it supports your position that God inspired the human authors of scripture to assert erroneously that God commanded something He did not command. Your position is incompatible with Catholic teaching on divine inspiration and is utterly at odds with what the Bible says about prophecy. If Samuel, speaking for God, attributed to Him that which He did not say, He would be guilty of a capital crime. Insofar as the inspired author affirms that Samuel spoke for God, he is either inspired by God and thus telling the truth, or He is not. Your view of inspiration as compatible with the assertion of false statements and attributions of that falsehood to divine origin is absolutely outside the bounds of any coherent idea of scriptural inerrancy, let alone the Catholic one.
It is every bit as absurd for a Catholic (or any other) exegete to insist that mutually contradictory biblical statements are both–in any sense–true, as it is to argue that God can make a rock so heavy that he can’t lift it. Logic prevails over the interpretive needs of patchwork doctrine.
What “good” thing does God teach us about himself, and/or about salvation as presented in the New Testament, by ordering genocides and the slaughter of innocents?
While I agree that points of historical and/or scientific accuracy are irrelevant to the overall truth of any narrative, I cannot agree that the same is true of points of morality. A thing is either good or it’s not; it can’t be both, and it can’t be sometimes one and sometimes the other.
If you want a tip on how to argue against my position, I will offer you this one free of charge – ask me to substantiate this claim of mine.
Kevin,
Could you provide two (or more) examples of heresy from the notes in the New American Bible? I would prefer at least one of them be from the New Testament, but it’s up to you.
Mark, what you allege is fundamentalism and not Catholic is practically a quote from a Catholic encyclical.
Yes, but the “practically” is important, because by it you mean “almost,” and I would suggest that it is in that difference that you are mistaken. I would also guess that when you left the Church in your twenties you absconded to a severe form of five-point Calvinism, complete with biblical hyper-literalism and a notion of God’s sovereignty that is incompatible with His own self-revelation as a God of love.
Did God order Saul to slay the Amalekites, including their children? No, because if he did then God would be a monster.
Did Saul understand God to have ordered him to slay the Amalekites? Yes, because he, Saul, was still deeply under the sway of a sacrificial habit of mind.
This is the only way to square the God of the Old Tesament with the Father revealed in the Gospels, of Whom Jesus says, “The Father and I are one.”
So let me ask you, Kevin: If you understood God to have ordered you to kill, say, George Tiller. Would you? Or would what you know of Jesus Christ and his Gospel stay your hand?
I’m find it really strange that people are arguing that God cannot kill an innocent person, that God is bound by our morality, that since killing an innocent person is intrinsically evil then God can’t do that.
This is incorrect. God is not bound by morality, because He is the source of morality. He can kill an innocent person. From the Summa II-II, q64, a6: “God is Lord of death and life, for by His decree both the sinful and the righteous die. Hence he who at God’s command kills an innocent man does not sin, as neither does God Whose behest he executes.”
It is intrinsically evil for us to kill the innocent, but it is not intrisically evil for God to kill an innocent. When we kill an innocent, we are taking something (ie, life) from someone that we do not have a right to take. When God kills someone, He is taking from something that which He has a right to take. At every moment of time, God holds us in existence; He holds our life, our life is God’s. And since our existence and life is owned by God, He can take away our life without a breach in morality.
All of us have a right to life vis-a-vis another human being. None of us has a right to live vis-a-vis God. At some point, on my death bed, God will take my life away from me, and it’s foolish to think that I’ll be able to accuse Him of being unjust to me.
Thousand of innocent people die every day because their body, which is being held in existence by God, fails; the body could continue working, if God wanted it to, but He decides against that and a person dies. It’s silly to say that God is committing thousands of murders in this way every day.
Kevin,
If my view of inerrancy is outside the Catholic sphere, then the God of Catholics is a God who commands human beings to commit genocide; I do not believe in such a God. More to the point: such a conception of God makes no sense in light of Catholic theology.
You refer to church documents in support of your assertions, but your reading of these documents seems to be incorrect.
Kyle
Actually, what Kevin seems to offer is the voluntarist fideism which Pope Benedict was rejecting at Regensburg.
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which – as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated – unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul – “λογικη λατρεία”, worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history – it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.
[...]
Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought.
[...]
The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too
[...]
Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress
[...]
Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.
This is incorrect. God is not bound by morality, because He is the source of morality. He can kill an innocent person.
Thales,
Can God command a human being to kill an innocent person? It would seem to me that if an act is “intrinsically evil,” God could not require a human being to do it.
If things are moral or immoral only because God says so — and I note that you haven’t asserted that — then God, who makes the rules, can change the rules, or exempt certain people from following them. What would a Catholic say to a woman who said, “I know abortion is wrong, but I am convinced that God is telling me to have an abortion”? What if I am very close to being convinced that I have had a private revelation that I must kill abortion doctors? Would you be able to talk me out of it if you believe that God has the power of life and death over everyone and can delegate human beings to kill the people he has decided should die?
Thank you, Henry.
It is satanic to assert that God may righteously abort, rape, and torture, simply because he is transcendent. I notice that Kevin did not address my question. Is abortion, rape, and torture too hard of a question? How about this: child molestation.
May God justly molest children, and then slit their throats, and then eat them? May we become holy saints by following a divine command to molest children, slit their throats, and then eat their mutilated bodies?
If you refuse to perceive a line beyond which God will not cross (his own good nature), then your god is the devil.
It seems to me that it is a serious thing to assert that the notes in the New American Bible are heretical. I do not know whether the imprimaturs and nihil obstats in it pertain to the text only, or to the text and to the notes, but if they do pertain to the notes, then to assert that the notes are heretical is to assert that the theologians who gave the nihil obstats and the bishops who gave the imprimaturs are themselves heretics. That is a grave charge.
I can understand that a studious lay Catholic might be confused if he finds things in the Fathers and Doctors that are inconsistent with things he finds in modern scholarship. It is reasonable to deduce that someone, somewhere, has erred. I do not understand why any studious lay Catholic would deduce that the error must be in the theologians and bishops, and not in himself. This is the kind of thinking that leads people out of the Church, not into it. Though the Church teaches that it is a good thing to read the Bible, and there are even indulgences to be had for doing it, the Church, and I think with foresight, has also warned that there are dangers in lay Bible reading.
The Catholic Church has long struggled with the apparent contradiction between what the Old Testament says about God and what the New Testament says about God. The problem is not with the texts, but with how they are read. It is my understanding that the Church has been able to integrate these two very different texts because the Church, unlike the Protestant churches, has not adhered to the principle that Scripture must be read as self-interpreting. If it were self-interpreting, we would not need, or even benefit from, a Magisterium. But we do have a Magisterium. The assumption seems to be that the Magisterium has either a natural competence, or a supernatural competence, or both kinds of competence, to interpret Scripture that we private individuals do not entirely participate in.
If Scripture is not self-interpreting, then there are, there must be, some kind of first principle that the Church uses when it decodes the puzzles, unlocks the mysteries, and integrates the apparent inconsistencies. I may be mistaken about this, but I had thought that the principle they use, or one of the principles they use, is the traditional theological understanding of the nature of God. God is good.
The principle that God is good is used in interpreting Scripture. The deduction that some things, particularly in the Old Testament, like the ordering of the summary execution of infants, must be non-literal is a natural consequence of the application of this principle.
If I may be permitted to over-simplify things for the sake of space, this principle was first seriously challenged in the late scholastic period, and it was challenged in the context of the voluntarist opposition to intellectualism, and by voluntarism I mean the late scholastic hypothesis that the divine will was prior to the divine intellect, and that, therefore, “good” was defined as “whatever God wills.” One can see how this could impact the interpretation of Scripture, and it did. Voluntarism and literalism go hand-in-hand. In fact, they both go hand-in-hand with, and are the logical consequences of, Nominalism.
Mr. Wildermuth draws a very interesting conclusion, which I restate as follows: The Voluntarist God is the Devil.
This is a very interesting hypothesis indeed, and draws into the discussion the question of Gnosticism, and to what degree its doctrines may still be haunting us even today.
The Gnostics addressed the “problem” of the Old Testament God differently. The ancient Catholic Church accepted the Old Testament God as God, but (for the most part) did not attribute to him, literally, the evil things recorded there, like the summary execution of infants. The Gnostics, however, did attribute, literally, the evil things to the Old Testament God, but they did not accept the Old Testament God as God. They identified him with the Devil.
It always returns to God is Love. Henry, or someone else help me here. There is a verse in one of the old testament books which states that the true prophet of God is not one who plans the overthrow of kings and kingdoms, rather, he is a prophet of peace.
Another point is that the kings who waged war were not allowed to build a temple. It also seems that each king who waged war died in a violent way. That seems to be the natural consequence which God related to Noah after he left the arc.
Love is the most difficult path to understanding the bible.
David Nickol: “Could you provide two (or more) examples of heresy from the notes in the New American Bible? I would prefer at least one of them be from the New Testament, but it’s up to you.”
My response:
Excellent – I did not think you were going to take me up on this, but you challenged me anyway. I am impressed. I also admit that I am somewhat taken up short. There are so many problems with the footnotes, commentary and some of the introductory essays in the NAB-SJE, I almost don’t know where to begin, and I am not at all sure that I will pick the clearest, most egregious examples. The stench of modernism wafts from almost every page, but it is rare indeed for the scholars to unequivocally and boldy assert their heresies. It is far more common to see them imply the heretical positions in fuzzy language so that the meaning is clear enough if they are read uncritically by a trusting soul who has no suspicion that the overall thrust of what they are being presented with and the inevitably obvious conclusion they are meant to draw is formally condemned, but flexible enough to avoid a heresy charge. It all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. Nevertheless, I proceed, and, furthermore, I will limit my selection to New Testament footnotes in order to better meet your reasonable demand. I offer two from the Gospel according to Mark.
1. In Mark 6:3, they offer an interpretation of Mark’s assertion of the brothers of Jesus that they may have been understood by the evangelist to be literal brothers, other sons of Mary. If their speculation is correct, the assertion of the evangelist would be utterly contrary to what the NAB scholars admit at the end of the footnote (CYA time) to be part of the faith of the Church. If the Church is teaching the truth regarding the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Mother, then the speculation of those scholars regarding the meaning of Mark’s statement is utterly opposed to the Catholic doctrine of inerrancy. The dilemma is inescapable – they canot weasel word their way out of it.
2. In Mark 9:1, the footnotes offer two possible interpretations of the text. One is Catholic, the other is a formally condemned heresy from Lamentabili Sane (#33, to be exact). Which of the two do they endorse as more probable? The heresy. In fact, I daresay that if you go down the list of heretical propositions condemned in Lamentabili Sane you would be hard pressed to find even one that is not either offered by the scholars who wrote the NAB footnotes as a viable Catholic position or, at various points, not so much asserted, but simply assumed to be true. The modernistic readings are omnipresent. The gospel writers (all committees, no individuals) were all second and third generation, none of them were apostles or eyewitnesses, they supplemented their accounts with rumor, legend, or just made up stuff. The Suffering Messiah is a Lucan invention, nowhere present in any other Biblical text, Old or New Testament, let alone any Jewish literature (Talmudic, Targums), etc. The Documentary Hypothesis, Q, the Two Source Hypothesis, Marcan Priority – they are all solid facts, no scholarly doubt about them whatsoever and nothing remotely heretical implied by them at all, yada yada yippity yap.
For those who are confused about the positions that I have argued here — namely, that the Church’s teaching on the plenary inspiration of scripture is such that it is incompatible with any exegetical position that admits assertions of error on the part of any of the inspired human authors of any part of scripture, and that it would be nonsense to lay a charge of murder against the Supreme Being who has the absolute right, authority and prerogative as the Creator to end any life that He has created for any reason that He, in His wisdom, deems fit — they are not, and have nothing to do with, voluntarism.
David,
True, God cannot sin, because he is all good. He cannot do something intrinsically evil, because he is all good. But for God, taking the life of someone innocent is not intrisically evil, because He “owns” the life. The innocent person does NOT have a claim to his own life, over and above God’s claim to the life.
God takes the lives of thousands of unborn children every year – they’re called miscarriages.
God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Was God ordering Abraham to commit a sin?
Thales, God was ordering Abraham to sin. However, He stopped him from sinning. Why?
Love does not murder. Love creates. God is Love. The foundation of God is Love, and from that Love will expresses the creative act.
Miscarriages are the result of something other than God which is a natural process of gene expression in relationship to environmental influences.
The innocent person does have a claim to her/his life because that claim was ordained in the person’s creation by God. God gives us our lives.
Ronald, God gives us our lives as stewards, not as owners. God retains ownership and absolute authority.
The way many approach the Hebrew Scriptures reminds me of this well-known Buddhist story.
When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, a cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. One day the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice.
Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.
The main mistake made is to measure the Hebrew Scriptures by contemporary historical standards. It wasn’t written as a scholarly historical work. Historicity wasn’t the main concern of the authors. The moral of a story doesn’t even depend on its real or fictitious nature. How many Christians seriously believe that Noah & family were the only people left on the plant ? That Adam & Eve were actual people talked to by an actual snake ? It was common practice to use individuals as stand-ins for tribes, groups etc. Their very names frequently indicate that. The Hebrew Scriptures are a narrative of the Jewish people, of the evolution of their customs and beliefs.
In the Christian Scriptures, we find a grave example of disconnect – the book of Revelations. A literary genre, apocalypses, a way to write in “code” – and today Sarah Palin and cohorts base their foreign policy on it, oblivious of what the author meant.
Kevin,
Are you among those who regard Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI as a modernist? How do you regard the Society of St. Pius X?
Kevin, A little aside. Did you say you left Catholicism? The perspective of authority and the perspective of love will determine how we view God. I do not view God as an authority. I view God as the source of Love and as such the source of my life that He gave me to live with spark of Love that He implanted in me which has always sought the path of Love and eventually led me to Him.
If you left catholicism did you leave because of the failure of authority?
I will return in a couple of hours.
Thanks for your consideration Kevin.
Ha! This question came up during my comps yesterday, and I really flubbed it. Anyhoo, the Thomistic position, already outlined above is that God is the master of life and death and can give and take life as he sees feet, even using men to fulfill his will in this. But is this a version of divine command theory? Not at all. God has created us with a specific nature, and he does not go against his creative word by taking the life even of an innocent, because that nature is inherently mortal. But if God were to command something that violated the nature he created, then it would be a contradiction of his own creative word. So, yes, God is the master of life and death, but given the nature he has created, there are things that he cannot command without contradicting his creative word.
“Miscarriages are the result of something other than God…a natural process of gene expressions…etc.”
There would seem to be an inherent set of contradictions between doctrine of ensoulment at conception, personal creation by God, and the teaching that “not a sparrow shall fall…”, and the idea that miscarriages occur somehow without God’s involvement.
Is this really about affirming or denying that Scripture is true or inerrant? An assertion that not all parts of Scripture are true is not the same thing as an assertion that not all parts of Scripture are literally true.
If one insists on literalism, and one insists on private interpretation, which is connected with literalism, then one will deduce that God can order the summary execution of infants, and one will involve oneself in voluntarism. One’s notion of how the Bible must be read creates an image of God consistent with that notion. The two are inextricably interconnected. Once one has affirmed that God has literally ordered men to put infants to death, one has changed the definition of God, and one has changed moral theology. If God did order the execution of infants, and if God is good, then it is good to execute infants. We can deduce, we must deduce, that the execution of infants is not intrinsically evil.
This is not a question of God’s sovereignty. It is a question of God’s nature, and of the nature of what is good and what is evil. The radically literalistic hermeneutical principle necessarily and radically redefines the nature of God. That is at the root of the debate between voluntarism and intellectualism, because the voluntarists did appeal to Scripture, and they did appeal to its literal sense, and they did appeal to it in parts of Scripture where it had been traditional to subordinate the literal sense to other non-literal senses.
This is not about who believes the Bible is inerrant and who believes it is errant. This is about the nature of God, whether God is God, or the Devil.
Gerald – great story and insight!
The main mistake made is to measure the Hebrew Scriptures by contemporary historical standards.
This is true of the New Testament as well. Of course, the Gospels don’t fall into the same category as, say, the story of Adam and Eve. But nevertheless to read them as history or biography is to misread them.
Kevin,
I generally agree with what you have written. Indeed, at times you are charged with having a fundamentalist hermeneutic when in fact this only demonstrates the liberal protestant hermeneutic of your accusers. Your accusers are mistaking an opinion which has been more or less begrudgingly tolerated by the Catholic Church in the past 60 years for “the Catholic approach to Scripture.”
I wish to suggest to you that, particularly in the Old Testament, there is a third category beyond the dichotomy between the “passive will” and “active will” of God. I would call this the “conditional will,” wherein God commands something he would not otherwise command. There are are multifarious situations that elicit this expression of the divine will, but what they share in common is what I would generally render by the Scriptural phrase, “for the hardness of your hearts.”
In order to understand God’s will in these circumstances, we must, first, correctly understand the concept of “salvation,” and, second, understand the absolute primacy of this concept in God’s interaction among men. To accuse God of perversity in a command such as the genocide of the seven nations occupying Canaan fails to understand one or both of these factors. Moreover, we must understand all expressions of God’s conditional will are overturned with the promulgation of the New Covenant. This might be hard for some people to understand, but there are some things that were previously moral and righteous that became immoral and unrighteous at a moment simultaneous with the hearing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I’m afraid that such people have failed to fully grasp the ontological impact of the person and message of our Lord and Savior.
As to the NAB footnotes and other matters of heresy, we must understand the distinction between “heretical” and “heresy.” In order for something objectively heretical to actually be heresy, there must be a disposition variably rendered “obstinacy” or “pertinacity.” This disposition has a ontological existence known to God as well as a juridical expression known to the Church.
Whether or not Kyle or the NAB commentators are actually heretics is known only to those on the other side of eternity. However, they cannot and should not be called heretics by anyone on this side of eternity until they have been judged by the Church. This is so (1) because we are presuming to see something we cannot see until we are on the other side of the veil between heaven and earth, 2) because we are sinning against charity by failing to think the best of their subjective dispositions, and 3) because we arrogating to ourselves an authority which Christ entrusted to the living teaching authority of the Church alone.
Carl
P.S. The earth is most certainly the center of the universe. I am not a geocentrist (i.e. one defends a geocentric model of the universe using the principles and evidence gathered from astronomy) but I am simply one who knows that Galileo could no more disprove the earth’s centrality with his science than he could disprove that the Eucharist is not bread. Galileo was a wonderful scientist, but I’m afraid that he was a terrible philosopher and an even worse theologian.
Rodak, I see what you’re saying. Miscarriages are not separate from God. I separated them from God because I did not connect the dots all the way back to the beginning. My mistake of course. Natural law set in motion through Love and then mutations occurring through the influence of friction within the human and natural environment.
That is a start for volumes of discussion if you wish.
Ronald–
The problem is finally one of reconciling ensoulment at conception, combined with the unique creation of a person by God, with the almost immediate (in many cases) termination of that creation and the omniscience of the Creator. Why would God go through the motions of creating a person on Tuesday, only to allow (or cause, depending on how you see it) that person to perish on Thursday, knowing “in advance” (from our perspective) that this would be the outcome?
Ronald, I brought up the Abraham-Isaac story because that is the example that Aquinas brings up in his question “Whether it is lawful to kill the innocent?” I would propose that the normal way the Isaac story is interpreted is not that God commanded Abraham to sin (because that would be a strange way for God to test Abraham’s love: “Do you love me so much that you’ll do this grave sin?”), but that God’s command was not immoral.
But let’s set that aside, because there are plenty of other examples: Did God order Moses to commit a sin when he told Moses to let the water flow back on the charioteers? Or what about God ordering Joshua to kill the Amorites?
Now I concede that the God of the OT acted differently from the NT and from today, and that today, we should have full confidence that God doesn’t act through direct revelation, commanding people to kill in His name. It doesn’t bother me to say that the world was different back in the OT and that God revealed Himself differently later through the Incarnation.
Now I know that God is all-good, even back in the OT. The way I reconcile His all-goodness with his OT killing is by thinking that God can take life without violating morality. [I realize, however, that even though the OT is the inspired Word of God, the OT authors sometimes described God and His actions symbolically (eg, parts of Genesis) and sometimes imperfectly (think of God being described as "wrathful" and "jealous"). So perhaps my reading of OT killing should be modified with the realization that it could be a symbolic or imperfect description of the events.]
Re: miscarriages and natural deaths: God holds all of creation in existence right now. Now, He has ordained that nature proceed along according to natural processes, so in miscarriages and natural deaths, God is not stepping outside of nature in order to kill these innocent people. But God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and He can certainly step in from outside of nature in order to reverse the natural order, and He actually does that sometimes through miracles (the Resurrection, being the most obvious example). So, I grant that natural deaths today are different from God stepping in from outside of nature to kill someone and they are different from God telling someone to kill someone.
But since it doesn’t bother me if God permits an innocent child to die from leukemia (even though God could have stopped it) because the child doesn’t have a right to life over and above God’s right, likewise it doesn’t bother me if God takes an ancient Egyptian’s life more directly.
Why would God go through the motions of creating a person on Tuesday, only to allow (or cause, depending on how you see it) that person to perish on Thursday, knowing “in advance” (from our perspective) that this would be the outcome?
As I never tire of pointing out, by the best estimates I can find (Early Embryonic Development: An Up-to-Date Account), the number of “people” who fall into this category amount to 60% to 80% of all human beings:
Jesus said, “He who has ears, let him hear.” But 60% to 80% percent of all human beings (assuming life/personhood/ensoulment begins at conception) don’t live long enough to have ears (or eyes, or hearts, or brains).
“…it doesn’t bother me if God permits and innocent child to die from leukemia…”
If it doesn’t bother you, it must be because you see that death as good. How is it good? Since God did it (or allowed it, if that distiction has any meaning w/r/t God), it is not only good, but also necessary; it could have been no other way. How is it necessary?
Now, I can imagine answers in the case of a child who dies of leukemia. That child was still a gift to her parents for the time she lived; she still experienced human love and the joy of existence, etc. But this does not explain why God would create a unique person, in a conception that is never even known about by either “parent,” only to destroy person a few hours or a few days later.
Carl, thank you for coming here and adding your valued input. I agree that it would be gravely uncharitable of me to assume that the NAB scholars are guilty of formal heresy, though the materially heretical nature of much of what they write is beyond serious doubt. I was actually genuinely hoping that you would prove me wrong in that regard. I grew up with the NAB, it was my first Bible, and there is much that I like about it. I did not take my position about the footnotes therein lightly.
Now to address other questions and comments – since I have been asked, no I am not a SSPXer/Lefebvrist schismatic, no His Holiness is not a modernist, though he has been known to joke about how he used to be considered liberal. In my later teen years, dissatisfied with the unmistakably impious and heretical tone of the comments in the Catholic Bible I grew up with, I embraced evangelical fundamentalism in all about name and church attendance. Then, in my first year of college I took a class on the New Testament and confronted full blown modernist heresy in a nominally Catholic college – the teacher was both a self-professed agnostic and a Catholic theologian (this was nothing new to me – I went to a Catholic military high school, and my religion classes in my junior and senior year were taught by laymen – one was a Rosicrucian, and the other was communist adherent to the Liberation Theology that was in vogue at the time, respectively.) My fundamentalism gave way before the barrage of scriptural problems that were being presented to me as outright errors and falsehoods in the text, and I saw no reason to continue to believe the Bible at all on any point. I left Christianity entirely and became an agnostic and remained one for nine years. I returned to the Catholic faith in 1998. So this issue is one that is pretty close to me – I know first hand the danger of the modernist heresies, and I know modernism when I see it the way a victim knows the face of her rapist.
Why would God go through the motions of creating a person on Tuesday only to allow the person to perish on Thursday?
To me, this is the same question as why would God go through the motions of creating a person who dies at birth because of anencephaly? Or why would God go through the motions of creating a person who dies in a car crash a few days after birth?
The answer: God’s ways are unknown.
It is neither “liberal” nor “protestant” to assert that there are parts of Scripture in which the literal sense is subordinate to the non-literal sense, assuming that all parts have both literal and non-literal senses. In fact, one could argue that the literal sense is always subordinate to the non-literal, that the spirit always takes precedence over the letter.
It may be “liberal” and “protestant” to assert that there are parts of Scripture that are false or in error, but the two assertions are quite different assertions. Conflation of the two is a typically Protestant error.
Though the Church has had respected theologians who have expounded voluntarist propositions, the Church has never formally endorsed them. Voluntarism has however been enthusiastically embraced by some Protestant traditions, most notably the Calvinist traditions. The Calvinist mentality has infected the thinking of much of the American Church, a fact that many Catholic bishops and theologians have noted over the years.
“The answer: God’s way are unknown.”
That’s not an answer. That’s an evasion of the issues raised by the question. Once you say “God is…good, omniscient, omnibenevolent, etc.”, you need to be able to make consistent statements in support of those claims.
R Rockliff is right: this is not a question of God’s sovereignty. It is a question of God’s nature, and whether it is even possible for Him to do that which is objectively evil.
Put another way: Is God limited in any respect? I would answer, “Yes. God is limited by His own nature, which is infinitely holy. He is Goodness itself.” Therefore, it is impossible for God to choose to do evil, which is opposed to Himself. And since the Church teaches that the intentional taking of an innocent human life is intrinsically evil, it is impossible that God positively commanded Saul to slay the Amalekites.
The Hebrew word olah in Gen 22:2, where God told Abraham to olah his son Isaac means to ascend, to go up (hence to ascend Moriah), to offer up, at an altar.
The Jewish understanding of how one worked out an appropriate offering up of one’s firstborn son was not as the surrounding pagans did (to kill him) but to offer an animal sacrifice. As Joseph and Mary offered up two birds for their firstborn Jesus.
Interpreting olah as a command to kill one’s son is a bit like St Francis of Assisi interpreting a command to “rebuild my Church” in the sense of rebuilding the old and fallen down building he happened to be in at the time – missing the point of what the Church really is and what rebuilding really is.
We miss a lot of the literal meaning because we don’t look closely enough at the actual meaning of the original text in the source languages and what the sacred author actually meant by the words he chose.
God Bless
Kevin, thanks for the biographical sketch. It is very revealing.
Thales and Rodak, You two have too much good stuff in there to address it with a limited amount of time and energy.
First, ensoulment at conception. I can only answer from experience. At age 3, as I discovered decades later when I told what happened to my mother and aunt, I was observing from the ceiling with a mature detached awareness what I assumed at the time was my body crying hysterically when my mother and aunt(although I did not know them as them at that time) entered the room and attempted to comfort the child. I was told that I started crying the moment their father died in another room. It was at that moment that I now theorize that my soul connected to my body and began to form a human identity associated with suffering and death. As for Aquinas, I am beginning to read his Theologica and I can see this is going to be fun. I believe that he is afraid of the passion of being human and reason is his defense and outlet for his passion. With this in mind, we begin in Catholicism with a basic misunderstanding of what it means to be human and it follows that we misunderstand God as Love and focus more on authority.
Thales, I am going to have to read Moses and Joshua again.
Kevin, why did you return? I returned after 40 years away 2005 only because I saw, heard and then knew that God is Love. Nothing other than Grace through miracles brought me to Catholicism. No words from anyone could convince me.
What a hoot. Ronald King has just begun to read the Summa and already he’s making critical judgments about the psychological disposition of a man from the 14th Century. Ronald, what if I told you that after reading your numerous (and voluminous) entries here on Vox Nova, I have concluded that you are afraid of the passion of being human and that psychologizing is your defense and outlet for your passion?
R.K.,
Thanks for asking. It is nice to be able to talk about this. I had a personal encounter with the Lord. I will keep the detaisl to myself, but I will reveal here that I knew in my heart without any doubt at that I was in contact with the divine, and I also knew with equal certainty, totally against my intellectual beliefs and attitudes (and for that matter, my personal preferences), that He was and is Jesus Christ. So I had to come back to Christianity. At first I thought I could get away with an unhistorical, vaguely spiritual liberal Christianity – which delighted me, because that would have allowed me to fully embrace the modernist cafeteria Catholicism that I knew so well from my New American Bible. But God was not done with me, and when I was no longer demanding answers to my questions as a condition of my faith, the answers that I always wanted to every question that ever plagued me came roaring my way like a sudden deluge, and it was soon clear that I was being led to be a faithful, loyal-to-the-Pope-and-the-Magisterium Catholic.
Chris, I don’t think your reading of olah is supported by the text. It is inconsistent with what the angel says when he stays Abraham’s hand. I think Abraham knew what the word meant better than you, and I can only imagine that if there was any flexibility in the term that would have allowed him to believe that God was NOT ordering Isaac’s sacrificial death – clearly intended to prefigure Christ’s sacrifice -, he (Abraham) would have been very very very very very very strongly motivated to sieze upon that ambiguity and NOT attempt to kill his son! The idea that Abraham’s intention to kill Isaac originated not in his intention to obey God but primarily in a misunderstanding of what God asked, is inconsistent with Abraham being a Biblically recommended model of faith, isn’t it?
Kyle has been kind enough to hold this discussion bothon his own blog and here. At some point he shared the relevant text of a document that informed his thinking – it was a Vatican II text. I think that the words of that passage did inform his beliefs on inerrancy, though I do not think he is as fully conformed to them as he believes he is.
I have decided to offer a text that has informed my own thinking as well. Since it is not a conciliar document, and since it predates Vatican II and the enlightened post-conciliar scholarship that goes into making the NAB what it is, I risk exposing my source to scorn, but I will offer it anyway. It is from a work whose title is, translated – God of Providence. It is from a 19th century Italian theologian, Count Vincenzo Pecci. I start at a passage where he is criticizing the liberal modernist scholars (and I think it fairly applies to the NAB scholars who wrote the footnotes and commentaries):
“Some of these writers display not only extreme hostility, but the greatest unfairness; in their eyes a profane book or ancient document is accepted without hesitation, whilst the Scripture, if they only find in it a suspicion of error, is set down with the slightest possible discussion as quite untrustworthy. It is true, no doubt, that copyists have made mistakes in the text of the Bible; this question, when it arises, should be carefully considered on its merits, and the fact not too easily admitted, but only in those passages where the proof is clear. It may also happen that the sense of a passage remains ambiguous, and in this case good hermeneutical methods will greatly assist in clearing up the obscurity. But it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it-this system cannot be tolerated. For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican. These are the words of the last: ‘The Books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the decree of the same Council (Trent) and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as sacred and canonical. And the Church holds them as sacred and canonical, not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without error; but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author.’ Hence, because the Holy Ghost employed men as His instruments, we cannot therefore say that it was these inspired instruments who, perchance, have fallen into error, and not the primary author. For, by supernatural power, He so moved and impelled them to write-He was so present to them-that the things which He ordered, and those only, they, first, rightly understood, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in apt words and with infallible truth. Otherwise, it could not be said that He was the Author of the entire Scripture. Such has always been the persuasion of the Fathers. ‘Therefore,’ says St. Augustine, ‘since they wrote the things which He showed and uttered to them, it cannot be pretended that He is not the writer; for His members executed what their Head dictated.’ And St. Gregory the Great thus pronounces: ‘Most superfluous it is to inquire who wrote these things-we loyally believe the Holy Ghost to be the Author of the book. He wrote it Who dictated it for writing; He wrote it Who inspired its execution. ‘
It follows that those who maintain that an error is possible in any genuine passage of the sacred writings, either pervert the Catholic notion of inspiration, or make God the author of such error. And so emphatically were all the Fathers and Doctors agreed that the divine writings, as left by the hagiographers, are free from all error, that they laboured earnestly, with no less skill than reverence, to reconcile with each other those numerous passages which seem at variance – the very passages which in great measure have been taken up by the ‘higher criticism;’ for they were unanimous in laying it down, that those writings, in their entirety and in all their parts were equally from the afflatus of Almighty God, and that God, speaking by the sacred writers, could not set down anything but what was true.”
The 60%-80% spontaneous abortion rate, if accurate, is profoundly disturbing. I have a deep suspicion that there are many other profoundly disturbing things like this yet to be discovered. It is unfortunate that we do not have any great minds with us to help us to confront these disturbing things. It is difficult to know what an Anselm, or a Bonaventure, or a Scotus might have had to say about them.
R. Rockliff, against Origen, the Church fathers and early Councils, frequently asserted that the literal sense of Scripture is the basis of the other senses and that any interpretation that contradicts the literal sense must be rejected as erroneous. This is reflected in CCC 116 and Providentissimus Deus 14-15. The Catholic Church teaches, “All other sense of Scripture are based on the literal.” Whether Calvin also taught this would be like asking whether Calvin also thought bananas are yellow. What makes Calvinism a heresy is not to be found here, which means accusing this view of Calvinism is, at best, an association fallacy.
All this being said, it is frequently perhaps always the case that the literal sense may be said to be “subordinate” to another sense (e.g. compared to the prophetic meaning of Is 7:14, what the prophet may have intended by his words is really of very little importance). In many cases, elements of the original human writer’s intention are lost beyond recovery and yet his words continue to bear fruit in the life of the Church. The relation here is comparable to the foundation and the rest of a building.
What’s at stake here, however, is not the relative hierarchy of the senses of Scripture but the accusation of “perversity” against the literal sense (!). I don’t think even Origen for all his contempt of the literal sense would have gone this far. Whether the literal is higher or lower, it is not perverse. Such a view destroys the building (i.e. the divine inspiration of Scripture) from its foundation (i.e. the literal sense) all the way to its mystical pinnacle.
M. Gordan – I think the real issue is whether any of the apparently evil things which God commands in Scripture are really evil. This might sound strange when one considers that God explicitly commanded the genocide of seven nations. Isn’t genocide always evil? Yes, since the promulgation of the Gospel it is, but when the dichotomy was between killing an evil nation or giving oneself over to their evil, genocide was not merely justified, but a moral imperative.
Carl,
When you say, the Church fathers and early Councils, you are in great error. The Church Fathers and even early councils were not univocal in their thought. Many of them followed Origen, and actually outdid what we find in Origen — if you read St Maximus the Confessor, for example, you will find him to criticize literalism as leading to spiritual death! Although there will be some Fathers who try to engage the letter even an Augustine will end up saying, at times, the letter is not acceptable. You will find many people will take their words out of context to try to suggest a literalism which they did not know or comprehend.
Kevin,
Previous passages in Exodus have shown Abraham to be remarkably comfortable with killing people off. Even his other son Ishmael in the desert.
The Stone Edition Chumash translates the verse
“…bring him up there as an offering upon one of the mountains which I shall tell you.”
The Jewish midrash Genesis Rabbah. 56:8 reads the text as:
“What, do you think I meant for you to slay him ? No ! I said only to take him up … and now I say take him down”.
Rashi comments that God did not want Abraham to slaughter Isaac, but only to bring him up (עלה) to the mountain and to prepare (עלה) him as a burnt offering.
All this is from the ancient Jewish rabbinic tradition. Nothing modernist there.
God Bless
The idea that Abraham’s intention to kill Isaac originated not in his intention to obey God but primarily in a misunderstanding of what God asked, is inconsistent with Abraham being a Biblically recommended model of faith, isn’t it?
Not at all.
The lesson here is that of careful discernment of the will of God. And the dangers of Abraham’s individual sola scriptura discermment.
Heaps of the bibles model’s of faith had serious human failings eg the Apostles.
God Bless
Kevin,
Both Vatican I and Vatican II considered models of inerrancy along the broad lines as yours and rejected them.
God Bless
R. Rockliff:
Would we recognize such great minds if they walked among us today, or would we fabricate charges against them insisting that they aided and abetted the priest abuse scandal and do everything in our power to stop our ears from hearing their wisdom? Would we not drown out their voices with our shouting? I am less convinced that there is less wisdom in the world than I am convinced that the world has less ability to recognize wisdom.
On the subject of spontaneous abortion, regardless of its rate, I see no need for a great mind. The difference between 1% spontaneous abortion and 99% is a difference not in nature but in degree. If it happened only one time in human history it would pose more or less the same philosophical problem as if it happened many billions of times.
The answer to this an many other questions is found in Romans 8:18-25. Just because an event occurs in nature without direct human causality doesn’t mean it reflects the Creator’s plan for creation, because ‘creation is in groaning in labor pains awaiting the revelation of the sons of God.’
Mark G., You may be correct, but, I doubt it. I have freedom to say what thoughts enter my mind brought on by overcoming a social phobia, graduating 180 out of 200 in my high school class, working on a loading dock at a trucking company for a year before being asked to join the Air Force in 1966 because they did not want me to get drafted, attending Penn State and directly experiencing the humiliation of freezing in the classroom everytime I had to introduce myself, continuing to obtain a psych degree and then 2 years of work experience, getting married, getting my master’s because of the fear of not being intelligent enough to get my Ph.D., then 28 more years doing psychotherapy and learning the new science of interpersonal neurobiology and being in my private practice for the last 20 years, all the while facing the pain of another person across the room and learning from each other how to be more loving and courageous human beings. I hope this is not arrogant but it is my life in a nutshell.
I am no longer afraid to be face to face with anyone. As for Aquinas, I will back my statement or admit my wrong because I am not afraid to be wrong.
VN has my permission to give you my email address if that is possible. Also, within my voluminous comments I did leave my phone # if you want that.
The 60%-80% spontaneous abortion rate, if accurate, is profoundly disturbing.
R Rockliff,
Just a technical note. The 60% to 80% figure applies to the embryos that fail to implant in the uterus. In this kind of medical research, pregnancy is considered to begin when the embryo implants. So failure to implant is not thought of as a spontaneous abortion. (If you consider pregnancy to begin with conception, then they are spontaneous abortions, or the equivalent.)
Assuming the 60% to 80% figure is correct, only about 20% to 40% of conceptions result in implantation and a successfully begun pregnancy. After that, the rate of spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) is still somewhere between 20% and 50%. The figure of 30% seems to be quoted often. Many of these miscarriages take place before the woman even knows she is pregnant.
So taking the most optimistic figures from above, for every 100 conceptions, there are 40 pregnancies, and 32 of those end successfully with a live birth. This is, of course, if nature is allowed to take its course and there is no procured abortion.
If you want to look at it this way, the question is why God causes (or allows) two thirds of all people conceived to die before birth (and without any possibility of being baptized).
According to the old Baltimore Catechism, “God made me to know, love, and serve him on this earth and be happy with him forever in heaven.” But if all of these estimates are correct, two thirds of all people conceived die a natural death before they get a chance to have a life on earth. The Church does not claim to know what their fate is. Up up until recently, they were frequently said to go to Limbo. Now, the Church hopes (but does not declare with certainty) that they go to Heaven.
Kevin,
Am I stating your position correctly by saying that it is impermissible for a Catholic to maintain that Mark believed Jesus had true brothers and sisters, and it is also impermissible to believe that Jesus thought (mistakenly) that the parousia was going to happen during the lifetime of at least some of those he was speaking to?
Kevin, Thank you for sharing your journey. I believe that the whole church lives a cafeteria style of faith simply because we live a borderline identity as human beings. We are incomplete in our development and as a consequence any interpretation of the bible is insufficient due to our incomplete understanding of God’s infinite Love.
Every line written in the Bible, in my opinion, must be examined through our imperfect sense of God’s Love rather than God’s law.
In my opinion man did not fall, rather, she/he continues to evolve into a fuller awareness of love or stagnates at whatever point love is experienced or love is lost and lives out life from that particular lens.
Henry,
Believe it or not, I actually one of my CHILDREN after Maximus the Confessor. I’m not even kidding.
Anyway, you will see that the affirmations of Maximus, the other fathers and indeed Scripture itself (2 Cor 3:6) describes the Jewish view that no interpretation that goes beyond the letter can be considered valid. The affirmations stand as a rejection of a “literal sense alone” approach to Scripture, not as a rejection of the literal sense taken as a basis for the spiritual senses.
The specific context of the statements of Maximus the Confessor was in answering the specious claim that because the terms “monotheletism” and “dyotheletism” are not contained in Scripture, one should refrain from using affirming either doctrine (as was legally required by first the Ekthesis and then later the Typos of Constans). Maximus was not denying anything written in Scripture, but denying that we must refrain from using language beyond that used by Scripture. This was the error of the Synagogue, perpetuated to this very day by “Bible Alone” Protestants.
Where the authentic fathers depart from Origen – the only possible exceptions being found in some ambiguous statements made by the Cappadocian father, St. Gregory Nazienzus (ambiguities which caused Maximus to write his seminal work by the title “ambiguum”) – is in actually criticizing the affirmations of Scripture. One who restricts authentic interpretation to the literal sense of Scripture closes himself to the living interpretation of the Holy Spirit by and in whom the text was composed and inevitably ends in distorting even the literal sense.
Origen, in an attempt to justify his erroneous doctrines (eventually condemned as heretical), such as apokatastasis and subordinationism, is forced to depart from the literal sense of Scriptural texts to the contrary. Origen’s Allegorism, which is really what this conversation is about, is itself among the errors of Origen condemned as heretical.
I know that it’s now the vogue thing to do to defend Origen – even advocate for his canonization – and I am sympathetic inasmuch as he lived, wrote and died centuries before the Church condemned his opinions. But it cannot be forgotten that his errors must now and forever more be considered heresies in the formal sense (Justinian’s anathemas were confirmed at Constantinople II and at subsequent Councils that explicitly condemn Origen as a heretic). The Origenist controversies have left an indelible mark on the history of doctrine and dogma that can’t be wished away.
The specific context of the statements of Maximus the Confessor was in answering the specious claim that because the terms “monotheletism” and “dyotheletism” are not contained in Scripture, one should refrain from using affirming either doctrine (as was legally required by first the Ekthesis and then later the Typos of Constans).
St Maximus wrote quite a bit more than on the two-wills of Christ, and his commentaries on Scripture go before that crisis. So, no, that was not the context of St Maximus when he points out that the letter kills.
“If you want to look at it this way, the question is why God causes (or allows) two thirds of all people conceived to die before birth (and without any possibility of being baptized).”
Well, they’re not people. A 3-day-old egg is not comparable to David Nickol posting on blogs. I feel that personhood depends on relationships to others. To be is to know people and share their experiences. Something that never had a thought or even sensation is not what I’d understand by the term person. Where to draw the line is another question.
If there is something like resurrection – which is as unfathomable as the lack thereof, such is the fun of the human condition – doesn’t there have to be BE a someone to resurrect ? Is it maybe memory that works resurrection ? Does a supreme being remember us into existence ? Is the good we did for others an amplifying force ? Call it Karma or intercession :)
I have gone back over the thread and found some posts I missed. I respond to them here:
“The problem with what you are saying is that in the passage we are discussing, God doesn’t kill anybody. He commands human beings to kill all the men, women, children, and cattle of the Amalekites.”
It is well within the prerogative of God to command His servants to carry out His will, and that command would be sufficient to justify that which He commanded. This is true because it cannot be immoral for God, either by Himself, or through an agent that He authorizes to carry out His will in this matter, to take the life of any creature. God owns every life and has absolute authority over it. If a human being kills an innocent of his own volition, apart from a divine sanction, that is murder in no small part because taking a life, like giving life, is a divine prerogative. Prior to the Incarnation, and because it was, as a part of salvation history, necessary for the Incarnation to occur, God sometimes authorized people to carry out a divine command to kill people, and not all of those people were personally guilty of sin. The charge of murder cannot be imputed to God because He has the absolute right to give or take life. It also cannot be imputed to those who were commanded by God to kill because they were specifically authorized by the one Being who could morally authorize that – not because God can make murder right, but because it is not murder to kill if one has that right, and God does, and He also has the right to authorize those who He would to carry out His divine will with divnely granted authority in that regard.
Kyle: “You refer to church documents in support of your assertions, but your reading of these documents seems to be incorrect.”
That statement is promising – it opens up a line of dialogue. I am, of course, not a theologian, nor a Latin scholar. I am open and eager to accept substantive correction on exactly that point. In what way is my reading of those documents incorrect?
Nate: “It is satanic to assert that God may righteously abort, rape, and torture, simply because he is transcendent. I notice that Kevin did not address my question. Is abortion, rape, and torture too hard of a question? How about this: child molestation.”
In this case, I did not miss the original question. I did not address it because it was unworthy of my attention. As it still is, I will say no more about it.
Rockliff: “It seems to me that it is a serious thing to assert that the notes in the New American Bible are heretical.”
It certainly is, and I am open to correction on this point.
“I do not understand why any studious lay Catholic would deduce that the error must be in the theologians and bishops, and not in himself.”
I operated under the assumption that the misunderstanding was entirely my own for years, and I did not question that assumption, let alone reject it, lightly.
“This is the kind of thinking that leads people out of the Church, not into it.”
As my own experience indicates, it is the impious liberal modernism of the footnotes and commentary in the NAB leads people out of the Church, not the opposition to heresy on the part of the faithful. When we stand before God we will know the exact dimensions of this infernal exodus from salvation and I do not doubt that it will be deeply shocking.
As to the charges of voluntarism, radical divine command moral theory and nominalism, I deny them.
“It is neither “liberal” nor “protestant” to assert that there are parts of Scripture in which the literal sense is subordinate to the non-literal sense, assuming that all parts have both literal and non-literal senses. In fact, one could argue that the literal sense is always subordinate to the non-literal, that the spirit always takes precedence over the letter.”
This looks like a response to Carl, so I will leave it to Carl to answer it, except to say that if that were the only reason those who have been criticizing me have implied that I was a fundamentalist, Cark would have very likely agreed with my critics, not with me. The position that all parts of scripture have both literal and non-literal senses, and that sometimes the non-literal one is more important, is, FWIW, true, but, in my view, not really relevant to the passage that Kyle has characterized as perverse. I stand ready to be corrected on this point, but I hope those who do so will pay attention to the genre of 1st Samuel.
“Though the Church has had respected theologians who have expounded voluntarist propositions, the Church has never formally endorsed them.”
Once again, voluntarism has no place in this discussion. As far as I know, no participant is a voluntarist. I am certain about myself – I am no voluntarist.
Rodak Says: R Rockliff is right: this is not a question of God’s sovereignty. It is a question of God’s nature, and whether it is even possible for Him to do that which is objectively evil.
God cannot do that which is objectively evil. But it was not objectively evil for God to command the killing of the Amalekites because God has absolute sovereignty and moral authority over the lives of His creatures, and no creature’s right to life, not even an innocent child’s, can trump God’s absolute moral authority over life and death. To put it simply, our rights are with respect to our fellow creatures and obligate them. We do not obligate God. God obligates us.
Chris Sullivan Says: “Previous passages in Exodus have shown Abraham to be remarkably comfortable with killing people off. Even his other son Ishmael in the desert.”
The Biblical account of Abraham is in Genesis, not Exodus, he didn’t kill his other son Ishmael, nor was he eager to. Chris, I find it remarkable that so far you have a 100% track record of being deonstrably wrong on every substantive point you raise.
“Rashi comments that God did not want Abraham to slaughter Isaac, but only to bring him up (עלה) to the mountain and to prepare (עלה) him as a burnt offering.”
He was to burn him alive then?
“All this is from the ancient Jewish rabbinic tradition. Nothing modernist there.”
Nor relevant, for that matter.
“The lesson here is that of careful discernment of the will of God.”
Not according to every New Testament passage that references this event, and not according to the passage itself. In each and every passage of scripture, the lesson is one of faith and obedience. Careful discernment is never mentioned because it was not an issue. Your reading of scripture is very peculiar, and I submit that your refusal to accept traditional orthodox Catholic inerrancy is rooted in your peculiar private exegesis.
“Both Vatican I and Vatican II considered models of inerrancy along the broad lines as yours and rejected them.”
That assertion, backed up by nothing, has no force, but I do find it interesting. Is this is response to the Pecci text I quoted?
David Nickol Says: “Am I stating your position correctly by saying that it is impermissible for a Catholic to maintain that Mark believed Jesus had true brothers and sisters, and it is also impermissible to believe that Jesus thought (mistakenly) that the parousia was going to happen during the lifetime of at least some of those he was speaking to?”
If Mark believed that Mary had other sons but did not assert it, that would not be a problem. But if the meaning of the word “brothers” in the passage is intended to be an assertion that other biological sons of Mary were present, then either the Church’s doctrine on Mary’s perpetual virginity would be false, or that passage in Mark would not be inerrant. There is no logical middle ground there for a faithful Catholic to take a stand. As for Jesus’ “thought” about the paraousia, yes, it is absolutely forbidden to take the position that Jesus “thought (mistakenly)” that it was temporally imminent and that such a misunderstanding led Him to teach that error. As I pointed out, that is not just my position. That error is explicitly condemned.
http://www.ancient-future.net/bible.html
I think that offers a good understanding of biblical inerrancy as understood by the fathers.
73. “So long as we see the the Word of God take flesh in the letter of Holy Writ in a variety of figures we have not yet spiritually seen the incorporeal and simple and singular and only Father as in the incorporeal and simple and singular and only Son. As Scripture says, ‘The one who has seen me has seen the Father,’ and also ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me.’ It is, therefore, very necessary for a deep knowledge that we first study the veils of the statements regarding the Word and so behold with the naked mind the pure Word as he exists in himself, who clearly shows the Father in himself, as far as it possible for men to grasp. Thus it is necessary that the one who seeks after God in a religious way never hold fast to the letter lest he mistakenly understands things said about God for God himself. In this way we unwisely are satisfied with the words of Scripture in place of the Word, and the Word slips out of mind while we thought by holding on to his garment s we could possess the incorporeal Word. In a similar way did the Egyptian woman lay hold not of Joseph but of his clothing, and the men of old who remained permanently in the beauty of visible things and mistakenly worshiped the creature instead of the Creator.”
74. “The meaning of Holy Writ reveals itself gradually to the more discerning mind in loftier senses when it has put off the complex whole of the words formed in its bodily, as in the sound of a gentle breeze. ”
St Maximus the Confessor, Second Century on Knowledge. [from the Classics of Western Spirituality translation]. This is one of many texts of St Maximus on Biblical interpretation. He takes this to heart in many of his writings.
St Bonaventure also offers us some good reading:
Whatever a part of Scripture has a kind of literal and spiritual meaning, the one who is explaining ought to determine whether the attributed meaning serves a historical or a spiritual purpose, unless perchance it is incapable of serving either. If, however, it fits both, then there ought to be affirmation of its literal and spiritual meaning, but if only a single purpose is indicated, there should be only a spiritual interpretation: just as the statements that the sabbath of the law is perpetual., the priesthood is eternal, the possession of the land is eternal, and the rule of circumcision is eternal, all have reference to a spiritual meaning.
Breviloquium, Prologue, VI.3.
Notice how he is quick to point out cases where the literal understanding are not to be held to, and only the spirit is?
Let me come at my conclusion from a different angle. If God truly did (and can) command human beings to commit genocide, and it is morally okay for human beings to commit genocide so long as they are commanded to do so by God, then we as believers cannot simply dismiss a person’s reasoning today who claims that God gave order to commit an act of terrorism, abort a baby, commit infanticide, invade a country, or set off a WMD. The person could be right! If they were just following God’s commandment, then we have no theological or seemingly moral ground to object. This conclusion is madness. It gives legitimacy to the worst of religious-inspired violence.
Kevin, you won’t answer my question because you can’t. Your line of reasoning must end with justifying the rape, torture, and molestation of the innocent. Or do you simply draw the line at murdering the innocent? It is worth your attention, because it undermines your entire thought process.
Henry, Thank you so much for providing the simple beauty of the wisdom of the early church fathers in this fascinating discussion.
I have enjoyed reading all of the comments and challenges exchanged on either side and I admire the intelligence and passion for seeking the truth of God’s nature.
What I love about the search for God’s nature is that in this search I am assisted in defining myself as God’s child.
God Bless.
Kyle,
I don’t think that your argument works here, namely because the time of public revelation is at an end. A person who kills in virtue of some private revelation can be safely judged to have been deceived by the devil.
Nate,
I think that your line of questioning has a certain legitimacy, but it should be kept in mind that although God can (or could) command the slaying of the innocent, he could not command, say, a homosexual act. The reason for this is that the human condition entails mortality, but “sins against nature” violate the creative word of God in giving us such a nature.
Hence, for us it is intrinsically evil to take another human life because it violates the order of divine justice, the order of civil justice, and the order of fraternal charity. A homosexual act, on the other hand, is a violation of the very nature that God has created, and God could not command such an act without violating his own creative word. So this would be intrinsically evil not only with respect to us, but with respect to the divine will itself.
Rodak,
You don’t like my answer that “God’s ways are unknown.”
I’m trying to answer the question “Why would God create a person in the form of a fertilized egg/embryo that then dies after a couple of days?” This question, in my opinion, is similar to the questions:
-”Why would God create a foetus that dies after 6 months in the womb?”
-”Why would God create a baby with anencephaly that is condemned to death as soon as it is born?”
-”Why would God create a 2-day old infant that is killed in a car accident on the way home from the hospital?”
-”Why would God create child who dies from leukemia?”
-”Why would God create the thousands of foetuses which are unwanted by their mothers and which He knows will be aborted?”
You say that you can understand the leukemia example because the child was a gift to her parents and experience love and existence. What about all the other examples I give?
My answer to all these questions, “God’s ways are unknown”, is not a cop-out, but maybe I can give a better answer: Maybe the mere fact of existence, maybe the good of “being” versus “non-being”, is reason enough for God to create all those foetuses with anencephaly and all those foetuses who will be aborted and all those multi-month miscarriages, who are destined to never see the light of day. If God, in His mysterious ways, sees much good in creating all those human beings who die so early on in their development, then it is not too different to conclude that God also sees good in the thousands of fertilized eggs and embryos which die after a few days.
Kyle–a) Do you see what I mean by recitation? b) Your 7:21 a.m. comment is precisely why I said on your blog that I am in the camp of Marcion w/r/t the OT: it inspires more hatred than it does love in this world.
Nate,
We’re having this discussion because there are instances in the OT where God directs someone to kill innocent life. I don’t think that the OT has any instance of God directing someone to rape, torture, or molest the innocent. (Those things might happen in the OT after God had directed to kill the innocent, but I think that it is possible to argue that these are examples of the Israelites going beyond what God directed – which is not unusual for them.)
So there is a dilemma: I think we all agree that the OT is the unerring Word of God, and that God is all-good and incapable of committing or ordering someone to commit evil. How do we reconcile this with the OT stories of God ordering genocide? I see two ways:
1. God can take (or order someone to take) innocent life, because God has authority and ownership over all life. To respond to Kyle’s objection a few comments up about someone today claiming that he had received a command from God to commit evil, I think the response would be that before the Incarnation, God spoke His Will by direct revelation, and that since the Incarnation, He no longers speaks in that way (but instead, through His Son and the Church), and so anyone who today claims a direct revelation from God to kill anyone, we should dismiss as crazy.
2. That the OT stories are not literally correct, even though they are still the truthful Word of God: that the OT prophets and authors wrote about God imperfectly or that they misinterpreted His commands or that the OT story has a symbolic rather than literal meaning.
Is that a far assessment of the situation?
There is no logical middle ground there for a faithful Catholic to take a stand.
Kevin,
You raise many interesting questions (not least among them the status of the Syllabus of Errors and more recent pronouncements specifically about the interpretation of scripture), and I would like to give some thoughts on the two passages from Mark and the notes in the NAB. However, I am at work today and simply don’t have time (and also don’t have access to my library). I hope to do some work on these issues over the weekend.
Nate, I think the question, phrased that way, is worthy of my attention. I will begin my response by asking you to make one point clear – can we put the rape, torture and molestation of the innocent that you ask about under a general category, such as “the infliction of gratuitous suffering on the innocent”?
Henry, the link you offer is generally helpful. There is little to take issue with there, so I, for one, would like to express appreciation for your having posted it. I think that, on the whole, what it says about traditional Biblical inerrancy is accurate. I would have liked to see a greater emphasis, though, on the fact that the literal meaning of a scriptural passage is based on what the inspired human author intended to assert. It can then be granted that not everything mentioned or alluded to is asserted, and that can go a long way in eliminating a good many problems, at least the minor ones. One tiny little complaint – I think the writer of the article is a bit hasty in characterizing the variations in the gospels as “contradictions”, but that is understandable since the article seems to be written for a general audience, not a philosophical or theological one.
Kyle, since you posted that same conclusion in another blog (teresamerica) and I replied to it there, I will let that response stand, and leave it to someone else, Carl perhaps, to respond to that conclusion here.
Let me come at my conclusion from a different angle. If God truly did (and can) command human beings to commit genocide, and it is morally okay for human beings to commit genocide so long as they are commanded to do so by God, then we as believers cannot simply dismiss a person’s reasoning today who claims that God gave order to commit an act of terrorism, abort a baby, commit infanticide, invade a country, or set off a WMD. The person could be right! If they were just following God’s commandment, then we have no theological or seemingly moral ground to object. This conclusion is madness. It gives legitimacy to the worst of religious-inspired violence.
Henry:
On St. Maximus – you cannot continue to blindly refer to fathers, saints and doctors of the Church to support your argument without providing reference texts. When you do this, you leave it to me to guess what passage you might be referring to. If I make a mistake in this, it is your own fault. You need to start providing references and quotes if you want to marshal these authorities into this argument. What is particularly disturbing is that you rebuke me without providing any text as the basis of your rebuke!
Anyway, let’s a look at Maximus’ non-polemical writings. I am thinking specifically of the 91st Chapter on Knowledge: “For the one who says that the text of Scripture is flesh and that it’s meaning is spirit or soul does not stray from the truth.” This text shows us a couple things:
1) Like St. John of the Cross, Maximus is refering to the literal sense in a more general way than the magisterial documentary tradition of Providentissimus Deus. Whereas the latter refers us to the meaning intended by the original human writer, the former refers us to the meaning which is more apparent to the senses.
2) In rendering an analogy between the literal-spiritual and the body-soul, Maximus is advocating an interpretation that takes the two together, not in opposition to one another. As the body must be the basis of our contemplation of the soul, so must the literal sense be the launching point and reference point of our spiritual contemplation.
This is in stark contrast to Origen’s allegorism – which you seem to advocate – a view tht allows us to dispense with and even contradict the literal sense (understood according to the sense understood in the tradition of P.D).
On St. Bonaventure – the problem here is caused by the translation of Hebrew and Greek scriptures into the Latin. The Hebrew and Greek terms (i.e. ‘owlam’ and ‘aion,’ respectively) imply more of a perpetuity than eternity, which is the emphasis of the Latin ‘sempiternum.’
This means that the literal meaning of statutes regarding the sabbatical law, the levitical priesthood and the law of circumcision need not be understood as “eternal.” But even the literal meaning is open to the Christian interpretation that these laws are co-extensive with the dispensation of the Old Covenant, which is STILL in the process of “becoming obsolete” (compare Heb 8:13 and Mt 10:23).
The rule here is epistemological: if one cannot see the agreement between the original Jewish sense and the subsequent Christian sense of an Old Testament passage, he should forget the literal sense and focus on the spiritual. It isn’t that there’s something wrong with the literal sense, but that the spiritual sense is, as you rightly say, more important in such cases.
Carl
If I gave no references, how come you are debating about references? Funny that. And that is exactly demonstrative of your overall problem here. I gave sample references, not complete arguments, but they are indeed references — because this is a comment’s box; I am answering things quickly. In the middle of a conversation, one is not going to say “sorry, stop, let me open up my books and get 100 references.” But your tactic here is quite similar to the tactic of many fundamentalists I encounter on the net. And your interpretation of the passages indicate, once again, a lack of familiarity with the topic at hand, and a forced, modern hermeneutic into the texts which would have no sense of that hermeneutic! St Maximus, throughout his writings, engages the spiritual, and often will be critical of the literal; I provided a key instance in where you can find his own method is being expressed here. Indeed, you show you do not know 1) Origen’s method, 2) St Maximus who, when working with Scripture, is very allegorical, more than Origen), 3) the fact that St Maximus in is indeed pointing out that the “flesh” is to be dispensed , 4) St Bonaventure, you claim, has just a problem with translation problems — but that is not his point! His point is that there will be Scripture where only one sense is allowed, and if that is the case, it is the spiritual — he is not saying ‘because of bad translations’ — that he might be using a bad translation doesn’t dismiss his point which transcends the issue of translation.
What I am offering and saying are not controversial in the fields we are discussing. The fact that you do not know this is not my problem; I simply do not have the time to type up hundreds of references. I would recommend honest study on St Maximus; I already had to deal with the absurd claim his texts are within the context of the monothelite crisis; the fact that someone would say that shows they don’t know Maximus and his writings. And the fact that you completely turn around what he said to be supportive of “the flesh” is indicative you don’t know what he means by the flesh. Get a copy of his works and read it. Flesh in this context is not a positive.
For example, he says, “‘Flesh’ is desire, and ‘blood’ is anger. And naturally, the one who does nor cleanse himself of these things ‘is not able to inherit the Kingdom of God.’” (QD 72).
Kyle,
You are again underestimating the ontological impact of the coming of Christ and the promulgation of the Gospel, because of which, divine commandments which are conditioned on the hardness of his people’s hearts have been definitively abrogated (e.g. divorce, genocide, what have you). Therefore, God cannot, since the coming of Christ, issue the sorts of commands Islamic fundamentalists misconstrue to be of divine origin. Admitting that God could issue such commands under the dispensation of the Old Covenant does not force us to admit that he might issue such commands today.
Nate,
Kevin can answer for himself, but since I seem to agree with him on this point (i.e. I defend divine origin and the virtuous human execution of the command to commit the genocidal slaughter of the seven pagan nations of Canaan), let me take a stab at your supposedly “unanswerable” question…
The command and execution of this genocide was based on the fact that the only alternative was Israel falling into “the abominable practices which they do in the service of their gods.” The genocide was necessitated by Israel’s proclivity to the idolatry, sexual immortality and human sacrifice (among other abominations) characteristic among these seven nations. The only alternative to the physical destruction of these nations was the spiritual destruction of Israel.
Certainly, this motive cannot justify the rape, torture or murder of the innocent. It was precisely in order to keep Israel from committing such evils that the Lord commanded them to commit this genocide in the first place. These nations were not innocent and the Israelites were not permitted to rape or torture but only destroy them.
It therefore does not follow that our justification of this particular genocide stands as a justification for any other genocide, much less any of the evils you describe.
Kevin,
Just as there are different grades of theological certainty, ranging from formally defined dogma to tolerated opinion, there are also different grades of theological error, ranging from tolerated opinion to formal heresy.
I’ve already defended the NAB footnotes – and you agreed – on the grounds that they fall short of formal heresy on the grounds that they are not asserted with juridically established obstinacy.
I’d be willing to go a step further and try to defend them on the grounds that they fall short of the objective requirement for heresy (i.e. the contradiction of dogma). My defense of these footnotes, however, must always be qualified because I generally disagree with these footnotes on serious theological and philosophical grounds.
By the way, I also generally disagree with the RSV footnotes.
HERMENEUTICS: Linguistically, the literal is prior to the non-literal. However, metaphysically, the non-literal must be prior to the literal, because, metaphysically, spirit is prior to letter. All words in human language, historically, began with literal physical meanings. In time, some of these words have developed non-literal metaphysical meanings. In all cases, the physical meaning is historically prior to the metaphysical meaning. Etymology bears this out. In most languages, the word for “spirit” (ghost, spiritus, pneuma, ruach), originally, meant “air,” or “wind,” or “breath.” All physical things. The physical thing bears a metaphorical or analogical relation to the metaphysical thing, and “points” to it. This fact of human language does not, however, mean that whenever we read the word “spirit” we must assign semantic priority to the literal meaning of the word, and therefore read “air.” This, in fact, is the method used by non-theistic “exegetes.” Because Scripture is indeed composed of words, it is the most logical method, indeed it is the only logical method, to read it the way we read words. All words start with literal meanings, and all Scripture starts with literal meanings. However, as we do not assume, when we read the word “spirit,” that the physical meaning of the word is more important than the metaphysical meaning, we must not assume, when we read a verse, that the literal meaning of the verse is more important than the metaphysical meaning.
CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS: The slogan “Cafeteria Catholic,” can, in all justice, be applied to many Catholics at every point on the spectrum. There are “liberal” Catholics who are selective about what they quote. However, there are also “conservative” Catholics who do the same thing.
ABRAHAM AND ISAAC: Abraham is indeed an exemplar of faith. He is also an exemplar of obedience. Different theologians have placed different stress on the faith and the obedience, because the implications of stressing one are different from the implications of stressing the other. If one stresses the faith, then one can suppose that Abraham was thinking of God’s promise to give him descendants. One can suppose that Abraham might have suspected that he was being tested, and that in the end Isaac would not be dead. If one stresses the obedience, then one can suppose different things. The point of the story (and by calling it a “story” I do not imply that it is not historical, by “story” I mean that it has a “point”) is that a substitutional victim was supplied. God did not intend for Isaac to be the victim. Some theologians have suggested that Abraham did not correctly understand what God had commanded, that Abraham misinterpreted the command by interpreting it literally. If so, one would think that this important fact would not be omitted. This is a problem. However, it is also a problem, of a sort, to represent God as giving contradictory commands. First he says to sacrifice Isaac, then he says not to sacrifice Isaac. God is supposed to be immutable. Repeatedly, we find this problem. What we know about God’s nature is set in opposition to the literal words of an often obscure text.
PROBLEM(S) OF EVIL: There is a distinction between (1) “natural” evil (like Guinea Worms), (2) “human” evil (like murder), (3) God’s “permissive” will, whereby things like Guinea Worms and murder are permitted to occur, and (4) God’s “commanding” things that would otherwise be classified as human evil. The fourth item is what started this discussion. I think it is possible to have questions about item #4 without implicating God of evil under items #1-#2-#3. Item #4 is particularly difficult, and despite repeated denials, it does touch upon theological issues beyond how we interpret Scripture (i.e. Intellectualism vs. Voluntarism). Because it is not necessary to interpret all verses as principally literal, the decision to interpret some verses in that way is theologically motivated, whether these motivations are conscious or not. If God is capable of commanding (A) Do not kill infants, and (B) Kill infants, then the implications, theologically, are nothing short of catastrophic. It obliterates the objective basis of morality. It is the ancient Catholic belief that things are good or evil because of the natures of the things, and because of the relation of these natures to God’s nature. God’s nature cannot change. His disposition toward killing infants cannot change. God is immutable.
It is quite a spectacle to behold insistence on God’s immutability described as “liberal” and “modernist.” One could argue that the literalist position is the “modernist” position, in that it substitutes a “process” God for the metaphysical God. In fact, I am inclined to argue precisely that.
These nations were not innocent and the Israelites were not permitted to rape or torture but only destroy them. . .
Carl,
Certainly the children were innocent. If you make a case that defenseless children can be killed for a good reason, you make a case for abortion.
“These nations were not innocent and the Israelites were not permitted to rape or torture but only destroy them.”
Perverted reasoning. not to mention the ludicrous concept of collective guilt. This is
what ideology does, abandoning common decency in order to uphold something deemed
sacrosanct.
David,
By concluding that a defense for abortion could be possibly be drawn from Carl’s argument for the facticity of the divine origin of the command to destroy the various pagan nations that are Biblically depicted as destroyed by Israel under such an imperative, you ignore a key point that has already been clarified: The destruction of those nations was necessary for the spiritual survival of Israel. If the obvious must be stated, let me do so right now – the spiritual survival of Israel was necessary for the coming of Christ, which was necessary to prevent the universal eternal damnation of every human soul. Any chance that the people who were slain had of being saved and enjoying heaven forever depended, in those instances, on what happened to them. EVERYONE’S salvation hinged on it – everyone who has been and ever will be saved, that is.
I anticipate that the next point will be the argument that the end does not justify the means. But as I might be guessing wrong, I will hold my argument in response to such a point in abeyance
The salvation of humanity depended on the death of children? It is my belief that the salvation of humanity depended on the death of Christ. One might argue that Canaanite men and Canaanite women might spiritually destroy Israel. It would not be difficult to do. Israel made the golden calf without Canaanite help. Imagine what they could do with Canaanite help. But, in what way could the children of the Canaanites spiritually destroy Israel?
It has been said here also that God ordered only killing. He did not order rape. Were there not other occasions on which, according to the literal interpretation of the Old Testament, God ordered the men killed, and the married women killed, but the virgin women taken captive? What did that mean? I know what that meant when it occurred on any other occasion in the ancient Near East. Am I perverse for believing that it probably meant that many of these virgin women were raped? How many young women, whose fathers and brothers were executed, would willingly marry the men who executed them? Why were they spared?
Kevin, Are you saying that the pagan nations are a sacrifice for their benefit and all of mankind? However, the pagan nations were not destroyed and the history of violence and gene expression in response have created a modern man capable of mass destruction with less sensitivity to consequences of violent actions and words to the innocents and more of a propensity to sacrifice another for self-preservation whether material or spiritual.
We have evolved into a callous species that uses law as the foundation of a relationship with God. We can say we love God and follow His commands but we murder and destroy His Creation. Those who have not mutated to the extent that others have are in the minority and do not fit in with the masses who continue to use aggression as a basis for problem-solving.
Perversion occurs when God is mutated from Love to vengeful.
God can take (or order someone to take) innocent life, because God has authority and ownership over all life.
While that might be true in some strictly philosophical sense of God’s rights as creator, it is most certainly NOT TRUE that God does this, because his nature is love and love never kills (especially not innocents).
If we believe it is OK to kill to relieve some human suffering then we are a very long way down the road to justifying euthanasia and even abortion. That’s a place we must not go.
While those peoples subject to the ban might not have been innocent, the infants and children killed certainly were innocent.
God Bless
R Rockliff Says:
“The salvation of humanity depended on the death of children? It is my belief that the salvation of humanity depended on the death of Christ.”
Christ had to born before He could die.
“One might argue that Canaanite men and Canaanite women might spiritually destroy Israel. It would not be difficult to do. Israel made the golden calf without Canaanite help. Imagine what they could do with Canaanite help. But, in what way could the children of the Canaanites spiritually destroy Israel?”
Children do not stay young and innocent.
“It has been said here also that God ordered only killing. He did not order rape. Were there not other occasions on which, according to the literal interpretation of the Old Testament, God ordered the men killed, and the married women killed, but the virgin women taken captive? What did that mean? I know what that meant when it occurred on any other occasion in the ancient Near East. Am I perverse for believing that it probably meant that many of these virgin women were raped?”
I don’t think that you will be able to support an argument that God ordered them raped even by the most rock-ribbed fundamentalist reading of the text (which I deny mine is).
Ronald King Says: “Kevin, Are you saying that the pagan nations are a sacrifice for their benefit and all of mankind?”
No, not really. I don’t think what I said implies that.
In response to my statement “God can take (or order someone to take) innocent life, because God has authority and ownership over all life.”, CHRIS SULLIVAN Says:
“While that might be true in some strictly philosophical sense of God’s rights as creator”
My reply:
If it is true in principle, that eliminates the principled argument that has been used to deny that God ordered the deaths of the Amalekites, the Caananites, the Hittites, the Girgashites and the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.
” it is most certainly NOT TRUE that God does this, because his nature is love and love never kills (especially not innocents).”
I agree – in the present tense. God does not do so – not anymore. It is no longer necessary.
Subject change -
I would like to jump back to an earlier part of this discussion. In your posting listed as from 6:58 pm yesterday, you said that both Vatican Councils considered models of inerrancy “along the broad lines” as mine and “rejected them.” I found the statement intriguing despite its lack of support and said so in my post listed at 10:27 pm, and at that time I asked if you were referring to the quote I posted at 5:03 pm, which I presented as informing my thought on inerrancy. Were you?
Henry:
Based on what you’ve written, it seems to me that you are confusing your impressions of these authors for what they actually believed and wrote. I am fairly confident that I have read AT LEAST as much of the writing of Origen and Sts. Maximus, Bonaventure and John of the Cross as you have, and I am convinced that they never said what you are trying to make them say.
Before I proceed to Maximus, I will say a brief word on Bonaventure. I didn’t express this as well as I should have, but in my last post I intended to make two distinct but closely related claims: 1) I disagree with Bonaventure’s interpretation that these aspect of the old covenant (circumcision, etc) were ever asserted as “eternal.” Bonaventure’s misunderstanding of the literal sense of these passages is based on his reading the Latin “sempiternus” (i.e. “eternal”) into the Hebrew “owlam” and Greek “aion” (i.e. “on-going”). It’s an understandable mistake but a mistake. 2) I am claiming that you, Henry, are misrepresenting Bonaventure’s “setting aside” of the literal sense for an admission that the literal sense is erroneous. Bonaventure is saying that when one cannot find a “purpose” for the literal sense – because the literal sense might be difficult or even impossible to understand – he should confine himself to the spiritual sense. On to Maximus!
You are wrong about the negative implication of the 91st Chapter on Knowledge. The meaning of Maximus’ phrase “abandoning the corruptible” is immediately provided in the next passage: “The Law is the flesh of the spiritual man which is Holy Scripture, the prophets are the senses and the Gospel is the spiritual soul. Through the flesh of the law and through the sense of the Prophets the soul is activated and expresses its own power in its activities.”
It is therefore clear that Maximus is speaking of the literal and spiritual as a mutually interdependent organism and he is no respect saying anything negative about the literal sense as flesh. Indeed, the negative association of the flesh found in Catholic tradition is, without fail, bound to the flesh being treated as an “end in itself” rather than as a “doorway to the spirit.” This is the difference between Catholicism and Manichaeanism.
And this is what’s really at issue here. Henry, you are advocating a kind of manichaeanism in biblical interpretation, not merely distinguishing but separating the spiritual sense from its foundation, which is the literal sense. In doing this you are cutting off trunk and branch from its very root. Just as tree cannot live when it is cut off from its root, faith in divine inspiration – a true accommodation of the divine word to human language – cannot survive when the literal sense of Scripture has been abused.
Quaestiones et dubia 72 seeks to shed light on a confusing passage in 1 Corinthians in which St. Paul seems to be denying the very resurrection of the body which he just affirmed not a paragraph previous. Maximus is essentially saying that Paul is speaking of flesh and blood in a figurative sense. In other words, the literal sense of 1 Cor 15:50 is figurative. “Flesh and blood” in the sense of man’s bodily aspect will indeed be transfigured and thus inherit the kingdom of God, but “flesh and blood” in the sense of those who imprisoned to their worldly attachments (i.e. “desire,” “anger”) are incapable of inheriting the kingdom of God.
This is a completely different context than is found in the Centuries on Knowledge, wherein flesh is spoken of as the bodily aspect of Scripture, without implication that it is in any manner sinful. Indeed as we’ve seen, Maximus explicitly calls Scripture “the spiritual man” (chapter 92) which is St. Paul’s shorthand for one who is completely free from sin (1 Cor 2:15).
I will leave the last word in rebuking you to a theologian who – unlike yourself – could actually back up his pretense to patristic scholarship: “The spirit is not separate from the letter but is contained and, at least initially, hidden within it. The letter is both good and necessary, for it leads to the spirit: it is the instrument and servant of the spirit. If the high priest wore two tunics in ancient Israel, this has the effect of signifying to a later generations the dual acceptation of the divine Law, according to the letter and according to the Spirit” (Henri de Lubac, Scripture in the Tradition, p. 87).
Do you imagine thatyou know more about the fathers than Cardinal de Lubac? Perhaps you are going to accuse him of having fundamentalist tendencies?
Carl
Once again, I will only answer briefly (in the sense that I am not going to offer a 20 page essay going through the material to demonstrate my points — you claim you have read at least as much as I have, and seem to suggest you think you have read more; maybe you have read more (I doubt it), but I question your understanding of what you have read; the fact that you began with a St Maximus only concerned with the monothelite crisis showed to me you didn’t understand Maximus and his development; that you said his interpretation of scripture was to defend his Christological position is very interesting, because such work of his predates the crisis, and wasn’t concerned with it — it comes from the monastic environment, and is very Evagrian).
1) Manichaeanism? Because I point out that the literal is not necessarily what is to be followed for all texts, as St Bonaventure (and many many many others say). This is not to say no passage has a literal meaning which is fine, the point is, it is not always to be followed.
2) St Maximus is indeed interpreting Paul. But this is a key verse and this thought here is used throughout his writings. Once again, I was showing how and what he means when he saysflesh. This is common throughout his work. The fact that he calls Scripture “the spiritual man” points this out — Scripture is the spiritual man ONCE one has gone beyond the flesh with it. Indeed, what you failed to quote from the FIRST CENTURY 91 is the ending sentence, which again affirms my point. “The wise man is certainly the one who abandons the corruptible and belongs wholly to the incorruptible.” This is especially clear when one reads I:91 in context with his overall discussion aorund I:91. He is making it clear that the MEANING is SPIRIT, not the letter. He recognizes the letter as the means to getting to the spirit, that it is a preparatory phase, that the meaning is to be in spirit not the letter/flesh. Thus, in 89 — “The grace of the New Testament is mysteriously hidden in the letter of the Old. This is why the Apostle says that the Law is spiritual. Thus the Law is rendered old and obsolete by the letter and becomes useless, but is made young and thoroughly active by the Spirit. For grace is completely free of old age.” In other words, here, we see once again what I quoted from QD is indeed how he views his use of “flesh” when talking about Scripture. The physical flesh which became old and useless, though it was not always useless because it pointed to, as a shadow, the truth of Christ, and in mysterious form, grace was in it (notice he didn’t say, however, that the grace is the letter, but only hidden in it). So we see him saying that the wise man abandons what is corruptible, and that he said in 89, that the letter/flesh is corruptible. This goes to show that context is important, and context includes knowing what Maximus means by flesh helps interpret the few words of his you quoted.
3) St Bonaventure is not saying “if you can’t find a purpose.” One could easily make for purposes for those things which he says are not literally true. You might think his examples are wrong, fine. But nonetheless, he is making it clear, there are times when he thinks the literal is not true and cannot be true. This goes entirely against your presentation which thinks that the literal must always be accepted; Bonaventure says quite the opposite!
4) Henri de Lubac — I do not have that book of his to know the context of the quote. But I don’t really seeing it as saying your particular point. No one is denying that the literal text is the means by which the spirit is to be found. The spirit is not separate from the letter but is contained and, at least initially, hidden within it. So far, sounding like St Maximus who also points out that the value of the letter is that it is the vehicle for the hidden grace of the spirit, not that the letter is to be held to. The letter is both good and necessary, for it leads to the spirit: it is the instrument and servant of the spirit. The letter is good because it is an instrument to achieve a certain end –what end, to get to the spirit. Again, no dispute there. No one is saying that the letter is not useful or important as a device by which we go beyond the letter to the spirit, the meaning behind the letter. It is, however, the problem when the instrument is seen as the end itself. So the Lubac quote is affirmed!
The destruction of those nations was necessary for the spiritual survival of Israel. If the obvious must be stated, let me do so right now – the spiritual survival of Israel was necessary for the coming of Christ, which was necessary to prevent the universal eternal damnation of every human soul.
Kevin,
Your argument seems to be that God had to order the extermination of the Amalekite children in order for his plans for Israel to work out. In other words, God had no choice! That is a very strange argument to make about an omnipotent God.
David Nickol:
Why do you think it is certain that the children were innocent? Why do you believe that we are born with a blank slate rather than a running tally of all the sins of our ancestors?
Gerald Naus:
Do you think the doctrine of original sin is “ludicrous”? What about the concept of karma? I am not a believer in the concept of karma, but – for my part – I would never insult such a venerable, millennial tradition by calling it “ludicrous.”
At any rate, the condition of the world is now such that the only truly “decent” thing to do is evangelize others, seeking their conversion and baptism. Thanks be to Christ that we now have this option. The world is a much darker place without it.
R. Rockliff:
Christ was sent “at the fullness of time” – if you read Galatians 4:4 closely, you will see that St. Paul is asserting that it as though time itself grew pregnant, went through labor pains and finally gave birth to him. This could not have happened if time had miscarried during the spiritually corrupt epoch of the Judges.
One need not “argue” that the pagan nations of Canaan “might spiritually destroy Israel.” This is in fact a divinely revealed truth beyond all doubt. God explicitly says so in Deuteronomy 20:18.
Kevin:
The first time that anyone (man, woman or child) becomes innocent is at the moment of their Baptism. Children do not start innocent and then get guilty, but they start guilty and then get innocent.
Everyone:
“The wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
Under the regime of sin, all mankind deserves exactly what was given to the seven nations of Canaan. It is only by the infinite mercy and free gift of God that any of us have been given something better. Why is such an affirmation even remotely controversial on a supposedly Catholic website? You know, this is exactly why groups like the SSPX exist. What a scandal it is when Catholics forget the most basic doctrines of their religion!
Spirit is connected to the flesh first. Spirit is neither good nor bad. The interaction of spirit and flesh in response to the external influence on the flesh begins the process of the human identity formed by the spirit. In other words the body is the hardware of the soul and gives expression to the spirit. That hardware determines how spirit will be acted out and it gives evidence to the quality of its connection to its creator and the essence of that creator.
If that hardware tends to be more domineering and aggressive in its disposition then the flesh acts according to its conditioning.
R
My discussion of hermeneutics was meant to be about the history of Christian interpretation of the Tanakh — that is, early Christians didn’t think one had to accept the most literal interpretation of the texts in every instance; that is, they didn’t look to it as moderns look to a history text.
R Rockliff Says:
“The salvation of humanity depended on the death of children? It is my belief that the salvation of humanity depended on the death of Christ.”
Christ had to born before He could die.
Yes, Christ had to be born. But your answer just doesn’t follow. Are you saying God could not have incarnated himself if these children were not killed? Are you saying they were needed as a human sacrifice in order for God to have the power to be born?
And if it is still being claimed that I am giving St Maximus the wrong interpretation, I’m going to do this just once (take the time to type up passages). So, here goes.
I will begin with the Fourth Century of Various Texts, 76:
When a man sticks to the mere letter of Scripture, his nature is governed by the senses alone, in this way proving his soul’s attachment to the flesh. For if the letter is not understood in a spiritual way, its significance is restricted to the level of the senses, which do not allow its full meaning to pass over into the intellect. When the letter is appropriated by his senses alone, he receives it Judaic-wise merely in the literal sense, and so lives according to the flesh, spiritually dying each day the death of sin on account of his forceful senses; for he cannot put his body’s passions to death by the Spirit in order to live the life of bliss in the Spirit. ‘For if you living according to the flesh, you will die,’ says St Paul, ‘but if through the Spirit you put to death the body’s pursuits, you will live’ (Rom 8:13)<.
Then, we can move on to the Fifth Century, which I will quote from the most.
31:
He who understands the written law in a literal manner does not nourish his soul with the virtues.
33:
In the case of the one who confines himself to a literal observance of the Law, the matter which he engenders is the act of sin that he commits, while the form that he devises in a materialistic fashion is the intellect’s assent to the sensual pleasures that attract him to the act of sin. He who understands Scripture in a spiritual way puts to death both the acts of sin, which corresponds to matter, and the assent to it, which corresponds to form; and he also put to death the misuse of the senses for the sake of pleasure.
36:
Interpretation of the outward form of Scripture according to the norms of sense-perception must be superseded, for it clearly promotes the passions as well as proclivity toward what is temporal and transient. That is to say, we must destroy the impassioned activity of the senses with regard to sensible objects, as if destroying the children and grandchildren of Saul (cf. 2 Sam 21: – 9); and we must do this by ascending to the heights of natural contemplation through a mystical interpretation of divine utterances, if any way we desire to be filled with divine grace.
37:
When the Law is understood only according to the letter, it is hostile to the truth, as the Jews were, as is anyone else who possesses their mentality. For such a person limits the Law’s power merely to the letter and does not advance to natural contemplation., which reveals the spiritual knowledge hidden mystically in the letter; for this contemplation mediates between figurative representations of the truth and the truth itself, and leads its adepts away from the first and toward the second.
And he even says we are to entirely do away with the literal in 38:
A Man totally obliterates the outward or literal sense of Scripture when through the practice of natural contemplation he destroys his soul’s pleasure-provoked and body-indulging subjection — promoted by the written Law — to the restless and evanescent world of materiality. In this way he slays, as though it were Saul’s children and grandchildren, his earth-bound understanding of the Law. At the same time, through this natural contemplation on the heights of spiritual knowledge, he openly confesses his error or previously interpreting the Law according to its outward form..
Then he gives in 39/40 a discussion of spirit and letter:
Consequently, the letter whose nature it is to kill – must be killed by the life-giving Spirit. For what is material in the Law and what is divine — namely, the letter and the Spirit — cannot co-exist, nor can what destroys life be reconciled with that which by nature bestows life. 40. The Spirit bestows life, the letter destroys it. Thus the letter cannot function at the same time as the Spirit, just as what gives life cannot coexist with what destroys life.
Of course, I could keep giving more examples from his texts. But his viewpoint should be clear from these. The flesh, the matter, the external is just the vehicle for something beyond itself; it is good in that it provides the means to the spirit, but it must be put off if we want the spirit. He is very strong against an adherence to the literal interpretation: he even said that such an interpretation ends up against the truth. So this affirms what I said about QD and Maximus’ interpretation of flesh must be understood when he discusses the literal level of Scripture as being flesh.
For David Nickol AND Henry Karlson -
Even an Omnipotent God is limited by the logical consequences of His own choices, and the divine choice to incarnate means the divine choice to have an ancestry, a past, a nation, a cultural background of a particular sort. As I have already argued, it is clear from the the text in this and other passages that preserving a certain degree of spiritual purity was a divine imperative. It is also clear in hindsight what the purpose of that purity from the standpoint of salvation history.
Kevin
God could have preserved the lineage without the need for any killing. You say he chose the blood line; but that does not mean he chose killing as the means to defend the bloodline. Indeed, you are saying he was unable to do so other than to require human people to kill the babies of others, to basically say, infanticide and abortion are actually good? You confuse the fact that God can still make a good after evil is done as though it is the intention of God to make the good out of that evil — thereby saying God intended evil so that good can come out of it. This is not a Catholic reading of the situation — and again, this is exactly the interpretative scheme Pope Benedict says is bad in various Muslims schools of thought (not all Muslims think in this way).
Henry Karlson,
One more thing – I have already adressed the question about human sacrifice (8:55 pm last night) – I have nothing more to add on that note.
Original sin ? Sure, if you believe in Adam and Eve. But even then it’d be an insulting, unfair thing. As there weren’t just two people around, as there weren’t just eight around after the great climate change, etc it is pointless to discuss something based in fiction. Not to mention that Jews, who wrote the so-called Old Testament, don’t believe in original sin. You’d think they know their own book. Almost a millennium ago, Peter Abelard already deconstructed Augustine’s construction. If I were Catholic, i might view the world not as fallen but as “not risen.” everyone is called to get off their butt,
Karma is usually used improperly, through Western eyes. It’s a law like gravity, cause and effect. Not everything, as the Buddha said, is determined by karma, to reject a Calvinist-ish predestination idea. We simply act within a framework of laws, mechanics.
Gerald
You are right, for Buddhism, karma does not predetermine the future, but I would point out that within Hinduism, there were those who held such a view, which is why Siddhartha had to oppose it (and rightfully so).
Henry Karlson,
Your statement about what God could have done to preserve the bloodline implies two untenable assumptions on your part:
1. That the lineage was all that required preserving, and not a sufficient cultural and spiritual purity as well (the latter was revealed in the text of scripture as the chief reason for the divinely ordered exterminations).
2. That you understand better than an omniscient God what was necessary for the Incarnation.
When you bring in the Muslim problem, you continue to overlook the key role that the Incarnation, the promulgation of the Gospel and the Inauguration of the New Covenant has on this point. The Muslims deny the Incarnation, the New Covenant and the gospel – they see the world as continuing to be what it was before, and it is in this is the root of their doctrinal justification of violence.
Kevin
1. You are assuming cultural and spiritual purity is to be done via genocide. That’s rather odd. So, let’s be pure by committing grave evils?!
2. You are assuming your reading as to God’s understanding, which is typical of fundamentalists, who cannot separate their interpretation with God’s interpretation. There are many ways cultural purity could have been done (and indeed, some would suggest that they misunderstood God as a war God is indicative that cultural purity was not achieved — it is clear that Jesus rejects much of the cultural understanding of the Jews when he is preaching).
3. And so you confuse that God can make good out of error as indicative of God wanting the error to do good. This is the problem.
4. You are the one who is giving a doctrinal justification for violence (not all Islam does), and you are doing so in the way Pope Benedict has criticized:
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
This is exactly the kind of response you are giving us, that he is not bound with our moral categories. Indeed, Pope Benedict is making it clear — this is his concern, that people have separated reason and its categories to create an arbitrary God:
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.
See, Pope Benedict makes the direct link to one school of Islamic thought with this voluntarism, and points out that it leads to a “capricious God” who is not even bound to “goodness.” That is exactly the issue and concern here: intrinsic evils are said to be good (genocide, killing of infants, etc). Pope Benedict is very strong in the rejection of this:
God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which – as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated – unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language.
This is why I bring up Islam — and why you continue to fail to think in and through Scripture with a Catholic sensibility that keeps God as just and through a voluntarist “because God wills it, it is just.”
And as your quote from Kyle:
” For my part, I have no faith in a god who orders genocide. If that is God, then color me atheistic.”
This is a very recent quote from Kyle on his own blog, and it shows that discussions such as these are not merely academic. They are serious and can lead to serious consequences
Yes, the consequences are serious. Pope Benedict has denied your vision of God. Kyle is right to be an atheist in accordance to that kind of God. Again, read what Pope Benedict has pointed out. You are denying the analogous dimension, that there is indeed a mirror between our language with our discussion of God. Pope Benedict has pointed out this is exactly the error which he criticized within a school of Islam, and within the voluntarist position — because it denies logos:
God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul – “λογικη λατρεία”, worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
” For my part, I have no faith in a god who orders genocide. If that is God, then color me atheistic.”
This is a very recent quote from Kyle on his own blog, and it shows that discussions such as these are not merely academic. They are serious and can lead to serious consequences. This is the second time that Kyle has made a statement of this sort – I don’t think he is being flippant or using hyperbole. He is actually requiring that the goodness of God conform eternally to his own limited, human moral intuitions as a condition of his faith. That means that the worst thing that could happen would be that someone holds the position for which Carl and I have argued should convince him that we are right about the meaning of the scripture in question, which he calls perverse, and of the content of the doctrine of inerrancy, because then he would lose his faith and possibly his soul. I must therefore begin to decrease and eventually eliminate my participation in this subject heading. Once someone sets his will and hardens his heart to the truth in this way, I cannot continue to engage in this discussion without the serious risk of being a near occasion for great sin. If continuing to participate in these sorts of discussions means that I am required to choose between wasting my time batting my head up against a brick wall or inadvertently tempting someone to apostasy, clearly I must disengage. I urge all others whose participation poses the same danger to Kyle to do the same.
Incidentally, if anyone is confused on this point, I am not arguing that God orders genocide (note the present tense). I doubt anyone participating in this discussion is arguing that.
Henry or anyone who would like to comment on this please feel free.
Bod had to become a human being for several reasons.
1) God had to experience life in the flesh to become aware of the reality of a physical passionate life through the senses.
2) Only through the senses could He develop the empathy necessary to say from the Cross “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
3) As Jesus, He shows us how to live a passionate life and yet be detached from identifying ourselves with it.
4) He validates the spirituality of women as God’s Gift of Love to this world by Mary’s body only creating God into a man.
5) The DNA of Mitochondrea, the life sustaining molecules in every cell in our bodies, only come from women. Perhaps, Adam learned something from the knowledge he took in when he named the woman Eve.
6) I totally agree with Henry’s assessment.
Ronald
There is much which one could say to your points. Interpreted in the right way (and the way I think you mean it), they remind me much of Balthasar’s thoughts (it would take quite a bit of time to explain all the connections). Balthasar is not easy reading (sometimes, because of his own fault, I would say) — but I do think you are on the right track in pointing out that Christ serves to transform the passions into something good (St Maximus, who himself is critical of the passions as they are normally experienced, nonetheless does point out how they transformed by Christ and can become positive). However, what makes Balthasar controversial is that he not only says the empathy is found on the Cross, but in his death, on Holy Saturday, where he believes Jesus experienced the full depth of hell, more than anyone else, so he can be in solidarity with everyone, where they are at, so as to offer them a way out of that hell.
There is also a great deal that one can say about women – it is not just that he is incarnate through one, but the Spirit also connects with her, and that also is something which many theologians find important (Mary is the Spirit bearer par excellence).
Even an Omnipotent God is limited by the logical consequences of His own choices . . .
Kevin,
It does not make good theological sense for God to say, “Oh, no. If I don’t have my Chosen People commit genocide against the Amalekites, Jesus won’t be born to the Virgin Mary in Roman-occupied Palestine centuries from now.” You speak as if God were watching events minute by minute and intervening when developments that threatened his plans were causing it to veer off course. It is theologically very unsound to imply that God needs to make “midcourse corrections.” God is outside of time.
You are correct that I am not being flippant or using hyperbole, Kevin. I am very serious. It is precisely my pursuit of truth (not my hardness of heart) that leads me to reject the conception of God for which you, Teresa, and Carl have been arguing. It is a conception that is incompatible with both my faith and my reason. I am as likely to believe it as I am to believe in Zeus, Thor, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I’ll ask the same question here that I asked at Journeys in Alterity:
Is it easier to believe that God is a demon or that the OT authors got it wrong?
Where there is obvious evil, there are human agents as the cause of that evil.
R Rockliff Said:
“But, in what way could the children of the Canaanites spiritually destroy Israel?”
Kevin Said:
“Children do not stay young and innocent.”
Kevin:
Are you saying that the Canaanite children had some racial predisposition to immorality? I can understand that, if the Canaanite parents were habituated to immorality, they could be incorrigible, and they could therefore corrupt the Israelites. I cannot understand the same being true of the Canaanite children. Even if this were true of the children, I cannot understand it being true of the infants. Are you saying that Canaanite children were somehow biologically different from Hebrew children, by nature, and that therefore they would grow into depraved adults, even if they were loved and educated by spiritually pure Hebrew parents? This is a very interesting theory. Are there still “reprobated” races today with this genetic “total depravity?”
Everyone:
This is not about hermeneutics. If it were, the literalists would be insisting that the word “spirit,” every time it occurs in Scripture, denotes a physical “wind,” and does not denote a subtle essence. In fact, if they followed the literalistic principle to its logical conclusion, they would insist on something like that. The literalists have a particular conception of God, and their interpretation of Scripture conforms to this conception. We non-literalists are not questioning Scripture, we are questioning the literalist conception of God. This conception of God is of an arbitrary God. If the literal interpretation of a verse suggests an arbitrary God, then, for them, the literal interpretation is the proper one. The literalists are influenced by their concept of God as the non-literalists are by theirs. However, the literalists, with less candor than the non-literalists, insist that it is illicit to be influenced by what we know about God’s nature when we interpret Scripture. If this is not sola scriptura, then it looks a lot like it. It is no accident that (1) sola scriptura, (2) literalism, and (3) voluntarism all logically cohere. They are all the consequence of Nominalism, which I do not have any realistic (or Realistic) expectation of discussing here.
The most conspicuous clue is the swift, and improper, application of the name “Liberal” to any opinion that the literalists disagree with. This word is borrowed from Protestant usage. Any Catholic who describes himself as a “Conservative Catholic” might as well describe himself as a “Conservative-Protestant-Style Catholic,” or as a “Catholic Who Models His Ideology On Conservative Protestant Ideology,” because that is what it really means. The categories “Liberal” and “Conservative” are not applicable to Catholicism. Any appeal to these categories is indeed suggestive of a “Fundamentalist” mentality, and such appeals are often informed by (1) sola scripturism, (2) literalism, and (3) voluntarism. Evasion of the metaphysical-theological dimension of this disagreement only strengthens the suspicion of Fundamentalism.
Then again, if we are to credit the idea of an ulterior motive beneath the literal level of the OT scriptures, maybe we should consider the possibility that God inspired the OT writings as a test? Perhaps those who reject the concept of God as a homicidal maniac are those predestined to “get” the Gospel message? While those who believe that their God slaughters the innocent…well, yes.
Why do you think it is certain that the children were innocent? Why do you believe that we are born with a blank slate rather than a running tally of all the sins of our ancestors?
Golly, if we’re going to use that argument (however much it might have been part of the ancient mindset) then we’re basically into eugenics.
But it does illustrate the kind of community responsibility philosophy which went into the ban.
Kevin,
My reference to Vatican I and II’s rejections of what seemed to me to be elements of your position on inspiration, is from the New Jermome Biblical Commentary article on Inspiration.
God Bless
Chris, my position on inerrancy isn’t published in the St. Jerome Commentary, so you could only get it from me in this blog. Which specific post or posts, if any, gave you the impression of it that you have? Did you have a chance to review the text I quoted on the 29th of April at 5:03 pm? If not, please do me the favor of giving it at least a quick skim and comparing the view of inerrancy expressed therein to the one you favor, especially if it is from the New Jerome Commentary, which, if I remember it correctly — it was quite a while ago that I read it — is even more infected with modernism than the commentary of the NAB, if that is even possible. Let me know the result of your comparison. I am interested.
God Bless you as well, brother.
Chris, my position on inerrancy isn’t published in the St. Jerome Commentary, so you could only get it from me in this blog.
Kevin,
I think that’s the problem. You have your own personal theory of inerrancy, but you claim it is the official position of the Catholic Church, and the major contemporary Catholic scholars — including those whose books are published with Nihil Obstats and Imprimaturs — are Modernists. (This, of course, means that those who granted the Nihil Obstats and Imprimaturs are either careless, ignorant, or Modernists themselves.)
That said, I think you raised interesting examples of what you think are impermissible understandings regarding the brothers and sisters of Jesus and his beliefs about the timing of the parousia. I am still looking into those questions.
Henry:
Given that you provided no context for your original mischaracterization of Maximus, I was left to try to figure out what text you might be referring to. My mind was drawn to a text from his trial which – in my opinion and the opinion of Hans Urs von Balthasar – “illustrates well Maximus’ attitude to the Scriptures” (Cosmic Liturgy, p. 53). In this text, Maximus is responding to the suggestion that it would be better to stick to the words of Scripture: “It seems you want us to become like the Jews, who have filled their minds with the ‘simple words’ of the Bible – in other words, with the letter of Scripture alone – as if it were so much rubbish, and so having fallen away from the truth; they carry a covering over hteir hearts, so as not to see that ‘The Lord is Spirit’ (2 Cor 3:17) hidden within the letter, and that he says, ‘The letter kills, it is the Spirit that gives life.’”
I could think – and still cannot think – of any text from Maximus that would seem to give greater support to your misinterpretation. On careful examination, however, we see that Maximus is attacking the idea that we must CONFINE ourselves to the literal sense as if it was the only sense that really matters. He is not advocating the idea that the literal sense is sometimes erroneous and perverse. The problem with the “Jews” (sic) is not that they accept the literal sense, but that they reject the spiritual senses of Old Testament passages.
You are exaggerating the influence of the Origenist Evagrius in your interpretation of Maximus’ approach to the Scriptures. There is no doubt that it was a fundamental part of Maximus’ “project” to recover the virtuous ascetic and monastic elements found in the writings of the heretic Evagrius, but his method of Biblical interpretation is much more informed by the Areopagite, in whom we see a spiritual ascent that begins with a careful material interpretation and affirmation of the words.
For the record, this “literal sense” (Dionysius/Maximus) cannot be strictly identified with the “literal sense” affirmed in the tradition of Providentissimus Deus. Whereas the former indicates a material interpretation of the words, the latter indicates an historical study of the meaning as originally intended by the sacred writer. This distinction has profound ramifications whenever the sacred writer intended to say something figurative or metaphorical. How Dionysius would understand the “literal sense” of such passages will not be how the Pontifical Biblical Commission would understand the “literal sense.” This difference is produced by the fact that the two are operating under different definitions of “literal.”
In the particular case of the charam (i.e. command of genocide), however, the difference does not matter because there is nothing figurative about what the sacred writers intended to communicate. The difference, however, does apply to varying degrees as we expand our conversation to the hermeneutical principles of biblical interpretation.
1) You repitition of the word “many” seems like a pathetic effort to transform a false statement into a true one. In any case, the Church teaches that the literal sense, although not always obvious, must always be followed (e.g. Divino Afflante Spiritu 23, 26, 35, 54). In other words, one may affirm that the world was not created in six material days, but to justify such an affirmation, he must simultaneously affirm that the sacred writer had no intention to make such a claim. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong. And if this affirmation takes place prior to the Church having spoken, he can be considered mistaken. If subsequent, however, he is in theological error, which is a very serious matter.
Secondly, the problem is that Kyle has condemned not an interpretation but the the very words of Scripture itself. This is heresy. And in defending this, you risk rendering yourself, at the very least, an accomplice to heresy.
Thirdly, my accusation of “Manichaeanism of Biblical Interpretation” stands because you despise the literal sense in a very similar way that Manichaeans despised the flesh. You do not accept the flesh as a means to an end, but for the sake of the end are willing to destroy the means. You do not realize it, but by despising the means (i.e. the literal sense) you are actually cutting yourself off from the end (i.e. spiritual senses). For the sake of flight, you are despising the runway. It’s a losing proposition.
2) I think you were gambling that I wouldn’t have read Quaestiones et Dubia and have a copy readily at hand and that I therefore wouldn’t be able to look up the context and catch you in the lie. Now you are just digging yourself in deeper.
QD 72 does not give us a definition of what Maximus means by “flesh” every single time he uses the term, but what Maximus thinks “is meant by the Apostle’s saying” (sic) in 1 COrinthians 15:50. This fact not only proved by the very words of QD 72 that you failed to quote, but by the context already provided in the Centuries on Knowlege.
I’ve been waiting for you to bring up the issue of “corruptible,” a term about which we seem to agree. In the Greek Fathers (Gregory Nazienzen and Dionysius the Areopagite are of particular importance to Maximus) this term refers to the nature, operations and conditions of this passing world of “becoming” and “decay.” The corruptible is not bad, but in itself insufficient. What’s bad, therefore, is those who project onto the corruptible a sufficiency that is improper to it. God created the corruptible and reveals himself within the corruptible in order to draw us to the incorruptible. I will happily provide proof for any assertion that you dispute.
Henry, my problem with your opinion is not simply that you move beyond the literal sense, but that you are willing to render it into something sinful and erroneous. There might occasionally be some justification for this if we understand “literal” as the most obvious, material sense of the words (e.g. if one were to use Ps 18:31 to deny the spiritual nature of the Godhead) but not if we understand “literal” as the Church understands it (i.e. the meaning originally intended by the sacred writer). Now, it would certainly be sinful and erroneous to confine ourselves exclusively to the literal.
3) The context of his comments are, in his own words, how a passage might serve “a historical or a spiritual purpose.” Saying that the literal sense might not serve or fit “a historical or a spiritual purpose” is a very different question from whether it might be erroneous! St. Bonaventure did not say that the literal sense can be erroneous. You are forcing this interpretation where it doesn’t belong.
4) Pay attention: Henri De Lubac attributed to the fathers “a dual acceptation of the divine Law, according to the letter and according to the Spirit.” Christians. Accept. The. Letter.
By the way, Scripture in the Tradition is available online for less than $25. You really should obtain this book, which is the most important book ever written on the subject of patristic biblical interpretation. You need to read it if you wish to continue pontificating on this subject.
Carl
1) You ignore much of what I write — from Maximus to Benedict
2) I wasn’t gambling on anything. I am still not gambling on anything — even that you will give me a reasonable response and deal with what is provided. But hey, your method continues to be similar to fundamentalists, including as if you treated one text (falsely) you have answered everything. Nope. I connected QD to other works, which shows what he says about the letter. You still ignore it. But again, this blind spot is quite obvious.
3) Bonaventure MADE A CLEAR CASE where he thought the LETTER was erroneous! You say he was wrong about the letter, but nonetheless, he was showing examples where he said the letter was impossible!
4) Pontificating? That’s you. Not only do I have the more comprehensive work of Luabc (which is why I don’t spend on the less), I showed how that one quote relates to Maixmus. You confuse “the letter has value” (as an educational device) with “therefore, it holds.” It’s like saying what I am taught in 3rd grade math must be held true, even when things which I was told you can’t do, you end up doing in calculus.
5) The pontification is by you, who is claiming people to be in heresy, and being incapable of doing proper reading, even if Kyle. Kyle did not say what you said — he did not condemn Scripture at all. That you continue to misrepresent me, Kyle, and others shows why you can’t understand the distinctions of Maximus and other subtle writers.
6) Which leads me to this: I’ve said enough. You continue to ignore what was said, and show you are unwilling to properly engage what I or others say. You create strawmen. As with other fundamentalists, so with you — I tire of such games. You can think you are better than me, that you made me “flee” whatever. I have better things to do with my time than to continue to respond to someone who is dishonest about what others say, and ignores major portions of what they say, and thinks so much of themselves and yet shows so little ability of comprehension. Just look at how you just said Kyle said your God is the God of Scripture. No, he didn’t say that. You assume your interpretation, like a fundamentalist, and then say that’s the God of Scripture, so if people reject your interpretation, they reject the God of Scripture. I am so used to this.
Kyle,
At best, you viciously insult and mock us when you imply that Theresa, Kevin and I believe in a ‘god’ that is roughly equivalent to “Zeus, Thor, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”
In reality, however, our God is – by your own admission – the God of Scripture, whereas your God is the invention of your own personal sensibilities. Therefore, what you have said is not merely against us, but against the God of Sacred Scripture. It is not “Zeus, Thor or the Flying Spaghetti Monster,” it is the feel-good invention of a mind that has been cooked by modern, liberal ideologies.
Kevin,
I’ve re-read your Pecci quote and I disagree most strongly with his “at the dictation of the Holy Ghost” interpretation of inspiration.
That is not Magisterial teaching, no matter how much it might once have been a common Catholic understanding (although it was always hard to reconcile with some of the comments on inspiration expressed by the patristic fathers and with the talmudic rabbis).
Inspiration works thru and respects the integrity of the human writer, who expresses his understanding of the divine inspiration in his own way, using his own words, his own worldview and his own theological understanding.
God does this because of his nature as Love, and love ALWAYS respects the dignity and the personhood of the one loved and never imposes oneself on the beloved, as mechanical dictation would be.
The basics of our disagreement is a disagreement over the nature of Love.
Love never kills innocents and never commands the killing of innocents. Because that’s a moral object incompatible with love (intrinsically evil as JPII taught).
Love also respects the individuality and creativity and worldview of the human writer of scripture.
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary is an excellent and orthodox work. One of its editors, Fr Raymond Brown was TWICE appointed to the Pontifical Biblical Commission by Papal warrant. Clearly demonstrating that in the Papal View he is no modernist (as much as he might be unpopular with American fundamentalists, even of the Catholic brand).
God Bless
Everyone who has a position on anything at all has his or her own. When it comes to the teaching of the Catholic Church, every faithful Catholic believes his or her position on a given teaching is the official Catholic position. I doubt you are any different. But I could be wrong. Why not beat Chris Sullivan to the punch and check out the text I quoted, as I aksed him to, and tell me where it goes wrong.
Carl,
I meant no insult or mockery, but I am sorry for giving that impression. My intent was only to explain the likelihood of my believing in a diety who ordered genocide.
It is from a work whose title is, translated – God of Providence. It is from a 19th century Italian theologian, Count Vincenzo Pecci.
Kevin,
Of course, Vincenzo Pecci was Pope Leo XIII, and the passage you quote is from his 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus. Leo XIII did not have the last word on Biblical scholarship, and what he wrote has to be read in the light of everything that has come after, including the work of the 20th-century Italian aristocrat Eugenio Pacelli known in translation as Inspired by the Divine Spirit.
I am not sure why you find it necessary to play games.
When it comes to the teaching of the Catholic Church, every faithful Catholic believes his or her position on a given teaching is the official Catholic position.
Kevin,
Actually, I have found it quite rare, except on Catholic blogs, for faithful Catholics to be so certain of their own position that they make accusations of widespread heresy in things like the New American Bible and the The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Regarding the latter, I really don’t know Roland E. Murphy well, but Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer are giants of Catholic Biblical scholarship, and they are definitely not heretics.
So, Chris, if I understand you correctly, the New Jerome Biblical Commentary has a one point of view, and Pecci has another, and they are in disagreement. You take the NJBC’s part, and I am in the Pecci camp. Fair enough. I grant you that the quote about “dictation of the Holy Ghost” certainly sounds like an outdated view, and not orthodox one. In any case, whatever is meant by the author when he used that phrase, I affirm the Catholic view of inspiration, which is that Spirit of God inspired human authors who are authors in their own right, and did not merely dictate books verbatim to scribes. Well and good. And thank you very much for your frank appraisal. Was it just that turn of phrase, on which we are more or less, inclined to agree, or was it the whole tone of the quote that you found objectionable, with that particular quote brought up as an example, rather than the sum total of your criticism?
And what do others think? Does anyone else agree with Chris about this? David Nickol, perhaps?
Does anyone else agree with Chris about this? David Nickol, perhaps?
Kevin,
I did not fall into your little “Count Vincenzo Pecci” trap! :-)
Well, Mr. Nickol, I was wondering when (or if) anyone was going to figure out that the view of inerrancy that I have been promoting was actually the Catholic one. I am relieved. I could have simply used the occasion of Mr. Sullivan’s taking issue with the text to pull a gotcha, but I felt that it wouldn’t be fair since his only objection to the text was quite reasonable. So I thought it mught be worth my while to offer others a chance to either engage that text, or to figure out what I was doing. As to why I offered the quote the way I did, it should be obvious – I wanted those who have been challenging the Catholicity of the position I have taking to feel free to engage the text I quoted critically if they were so inclined. The view of inerrancy expressed very clearly in Providentissimus Deus, as well as other papal encyclicals and conciliar documents (I have listed them elsewhere) is the one I have been defending. I have been accused of voluntarism and fundamentalism because I accept a view of inerrancy that has been taught infallibly by the Popes and Magisterium in a very consistent fashion down through the ages. If the choice is between option A – the teaching of the Popes, the Magisterium, Sacred Tradition, and the teaching of holy scripture about itself, and option B – the theories of fallible “giants” of Biblical scholarship scripture who regard those doctrines and traditions of the Fathers, Popes, Doctors and Councils as something to look past with a casual hermeneutic of suspicion before divining the “true” meaning of the text from their own speculations about the Sitz im Leben in which it originated, I will take option A.
Kevin
Once again you assume a “the” which is not there. You equate your reading of the popes, tradition, and magisterium as the reading of such – ignoring evidence to the contrary. That’s the last I will write to you on this subject; like Carl, you do not deal with the difficulties presented to you.
As you know I am not a theologian and with time and Grace I can only hope to scratch the surface of the readings which all of you have mentioned. I admire your passion for the knowledge of God.
What I do know have knowledge of is the human creation and how this creation thrives when there is love and dies without love.
Does anyone know the passage where it is stated that the true prophet of God is not one who dictates the overthrow of kings and kingdoms but, rather he is a prophet of peace. I read that several years ago in the OT and haven’t found it since. Now, I could be wrong.
Inspiration v dictation? Dictation implies channeling. Inspiration implies the influence of the human being and her or his unique history and the complex reactions to that history on the “message” that God wants to reveal to all of us. In the NT the Jews were waiting for the “literal” materialistic king who would deliver them from bondage and restore their materialistic power. In essence, that gives a clue as to what kind of God they historically related to.
Even though there are many beautiful passages of God’s Love in the OT which transcend human understanding, likewise, there are many passages which resonate with human problem-solving styles of political materialistic power over one another.
I do not choose to believe in either representation of God. It is not a choice for me. God’s Love has been too miraculous in my life to limit God to a materialistic political force of power. I am drawn to that Light that has no heat and is not produced by friction.
Calling others a heretic or implying one is close to heresy is political power and causes friction rather than a common search for the meaning of God’s Love working within the flesh in order to free us from the influence of the old and transforming us into something new.
I can see and actually feel the friction present in these comments. I have created some also with my anger. I am sorry if I have offended anyone.
I do love the passionate search for truth and that passion is something that God gave us to show the world that He is real and He is defined by how we love one another.
Kevin,
That scripture is inerrant may be a firmly established Catholic teaching. How it is inerrant is not a settled question. Just because something is in an encyclical does not mean it is an infallible truth. Infallibility, like inerrancy, is a very complex topic. If I am not mistaken, there are only two papal pronouncements universally agreed to be infallible (the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary). It is definitely not an infallibly defined truth that Mark could not possibly have believed those he referred to as brothers and sisters of Jesus to be be true siblings.
From what I have read so far, inerrancy is not a particularly concept in Catholic interpretation of scripture. Inspiration is the important topic. The two are of course related, but not identical.
There’s a book coming out in July that looks very interesting titled Inspiration and Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Sacred Scripture by Denis Farkasfalvy, O.Cist. I am looking forward to reading it.
There may be some issues on which you can quote hundred-year-old church documents without distorting the position of the Catholic Church today, but Biblical Scholarship isn’t one of them. (Another one would be relations between Catholics and Jews. Yet another would be freedom of conscience.)
Arrogance, accusations of heresy, attempts to “trip up” others. Arrogance and accusations of heresy are often seen with a peculiar kind of new convert, and, I suppose, we need to be as patient with them as we can. Attempts to set traps for others, however, are a sign of malevolence. I have seen these mentalities and these tactics before. They are characteristic of anti-Catholic debaters.
Kyle posed a reasonable question, and in doing so he made no heretical or blasphemous assertions. He was all but summarily denounced for “liberalism,” “modernism,” and “heresy.”
You cannot discuss anything with fundamentalists, because they do not want to discuss anything at all, all they want to do is prove you are a heretic. If they have already anathematized half the bishops and theologians in the Catholic Church, what chance do you have of discussing anything with them?
Kevin,
Actually I found the rest of your Pecci quote quite agreeable.
I don’t think one needs to read Leo XIII literalistically. One would need to determine what he meant by the phrase “dictation of the Holy Ghost”. Certainly it isn’t the modern English meaning of the word “dictation”, in the sense of a word for word writing what one hears, is it ?
I do think Pecci illustrates two important points:
1. Theological understanding develops. Our understanding of scripture and inspiration has developed since Pecci and so has understanding of the morality of genocide developed since certain OT passages on the ban.
2. The importance of determining the literal meaning (what the human author meant by the words used, be he Samuel or Pecci) rather than the literalistic meaning (what the modern reader understands by the modern 21st Century English plain meaning of the words).
I accept a view of inerrancy that has been taught infallibly by the Popes and Magisterium
I think your claim to infallibility here is incorrect. But I’d like to see the evidence as to exactly what is infallibly defied on scriptural inerrancy (and I wouldn’t see every phrase in every Encyclical or documents of Vatican II (a pastoral council) as infallible although I would go substantially further than David Nickol’s limitation to two recent dogmas).
I think that precision is important when claiming infallibility.
God Bless
Henry:
1) Even ignoring much of what you write, my responses are already long. I am trying to respond to what I see as essential problems in your thinking. I have wanted, for example, to respond to your accusation that I have mischaracterized Origen’s methodology, but have omitted this because I see it as more of a defense of myself than as a matter essential to the Catholic faith. The essential problem is that you are defending the idea that the literal meaning of Scripture does not come from the Holy Spirit but from a misunderstanding of the Holy Spirit. This is heretical.
2) The term “flesh” can be understood in different senses. Miriam-Webster, for example, understands the term in seven senses. “thefreedictionary.com” has 11 definitions. But according to you, St. Maximus the Confessor has “only one true meaning.” And you accuse me – a patristic loving, Henri de Lubac quoting, masters in theology from the “dynamically orthodox” Francisan University of Steubenville – of fundamentalism? Preposterous. How would I have passed – let alone gotten high marks in – classes taught by Dr. Scott Hahn, Andrew Minto and others who’s noteworthy opposition to fundamentalism is so well established?!? Absolutely preposterous. If I were a fundamentalist, I would have been rooted out long ago.
3) St. Bonaventure did not make a clear case the letter was or could be “erroneous.” Using strong language and capital letters doesn’t turn falsehood into truth. The text you quoted claims that the literal meaning does not always serve “a historical or spiritual purpose” (and with Henri d Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, among others, I respectfully disagree with him on that, but that’s another matter entirely). St. Bonaventure never says or implies that the literal meaning might be “erroneous.” How silly!
4) You are obviously flustered (“Pontificating? That’s you” – clearly the expression of a cool, collected mind…). Let me again quote Henri de Lubac: “It cannot be doubted that the literal meaning comes from the Holy Spirit” (Scripture in the Tradition, p. 19). Is that clear enough for you? Hans Urs von Balthasar: “We must never seek the spiritual meaning behind the letter, but always within it, just as we do not find the Father behind the SOn but in him and through him.”
Henry, please ask yourself, do “fundamentalists” quote Henri de Lubac or Hans Urs von Balthasar? I’ve been kicked of “angelqueen.org” for quoting these authors. You are very confused. You wouldn’t know a fundamentalist if you spent “six days” in a hotel room with him.
5) The claim was made that the sacred writers misrepresented the word of God. End of discussion. Regardless of your equivocations, the claim is not remotely Catholic. Indeed, as I listen to you it is no wonder that schismatics decry the “new religion of Vatican II” and, meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI cries out that Vatican II must be interpreted according to “a hermeneutic of continuity with Tradition.” Psst, they’re talking about you.
6) Kyle has been kind enough to host this conversation on his blog as well as here, and I think (and hope) we may have come to an agreement. He is a family relation and I consider him a personal friend. I look forward to seeing him at our brother-in-law’s wedding in a few weeks. In criticizing the opinion expressed here and elsewhere as “heretical,” in no way do I imply that I believe him to be “obstinate” in such a way that would make him guilty of “heresy.” As a person, I have only known him to be of good humor and thoughtful mind. I believe he understands this. I consider him to be an exceptionally good man, married to an exceptionally good woman. I am proud to have waited their table when they were dating. I am more proud to have been in attendence at their wedding. I have shared in the joy of their first born and I have shared in their sorrows as well. Therefore tread softly, Henry, in your assumptions. I have nothing but the greatest respect for Kyle.
The opinion expressed by Kyle and defended by you does not take exception to “an interpretation of Scripture” but with the literal meaning of the sacred text. Whereas all of Catholic tradition says – in the exceptionally clear words of Henri de Lubac – “It cannot be doubted that the literal meaning [of Scripture] comes from the Holy Spirit,” you say otherwise. This is the problem.
You have misinterpret several texts and can undoubtedly misinterpret thousands more, which all proclaim that the literal meaning alone does not exhaust the intention of the Holy Spirit in inspiring sacred writ. But each text you bring forward only serves ultimately to illustate the foundational primacy of the literal sense.
You can continue to call me a “literalist” and “fundamentalist” but in this you expose only your own ignorance. I acknowledge 1) that the literal sense is not necessarily the most obvious sense of a passage but rather that which was intended by the original human author and 2) that the Holy Spirit also intended, beyond the literal, meanings which were entirely unforeseen by the original human author. The first acknowlegment clears me of any accusation of “fundamentalism” and the second clear me of any accustion of “literalism.”
I might be wrong, but I suspect that your “weariness” in this conversation is feigned: a convenient excuse for your timely withdrawal from scrutiny. To be clear, I suspect you are a wolf that enjoys prowling upon the simple faith of those who are impressed by your elusive references to authority and your pretense of erudition.
From what I’ve seen in this conversation, I think I can say without the slightest boasting that I’ve forgotten more than you’ve ever read. The reason this is not a boast is because it reflects your ignorance far more than my expertise. Moreover, I think your whole “schtick” is a bunch of crap and, quite frankly, it’s worth calling you on it because of the threat that you pose to those whose faith is childlike.
In complete sincerity,
Carl
Corrections:
1. In response 4) “…clearly [u]not[/u] the expression of a cool, collected mind…” The omission of the negative makes the parenthetical remark seem sarcastic, when my intention was sincere.
2. “…kicked [u]off[/u] angelqueen.org. Seriously, look up that website.
3. “You have [u]misinterpreted[/u] several texts…” – an obvious typo.
Rockliff:
An accusation of “heresy” is different from calling an opinion “heretical” because an accusation of “heresy” implies “obstinacy.” I apologize for assuming that you would understand this canonical distinction. It was not Kyle that was “denounced” – even less “summarily” – but the opinion he expressed. Kyle’s character has never been at issue as this is a matter in favor of which I am personally very willing and able to speak very favorably.
Your own inability to “discuss anything” with fundamentalists says at least as much about you as them. Fundamentalism is a reactionary movement, reacting – that is – against excesses in philosophy and theology which undermine the simplicity of faith. Understanding this, I have found fundamentalists – although disagreeing with them on many points – no less capable of discussion than the general population. Actually, for all their faults, I have found fundamentalists far more willing and able to explain their beliefs than the average American.
Therefore, I find your condemnation to reveal more about yourself than your opponent.
Carl,
An accusation of “heresy” is different from calling an opinion “heretical” because an accusation of “heresy” implies “obstinacy.” I apologize for assuming that you would understand this canonical distinction.
I understand the canonical distinction. You assumed correctly and no apology is necessary. I understand that you do not have the authority to condemn anyone here as heretic. You (and some others here) need to understand, however, that you also do not have the authority to condemn anything written here as heretical. It is not a lay prerogative to publically denounce an opinion as heretical. The opinion may in fact be heretical, and you may in fact know it to be heretical, but you do not have the authority to make the public denunciation. Your denunciation is ultimately just another opinion. Once it is forgotten that it is the Church, and not private individuals, that has the authority to condemn persons and ideas, the distinction between calling a person heretic and calling his idea heretical is largely lost. The “fundamentalist” party to this discussion has, in effect, “poisoned the well” by denouncing as “heretical” the opinion being discussed.
Your own inability to “discuss anything” with fundamentalists says at least as much about you as them.
You have deduced correctly that I have an inability to discuss anything with fundamentalists. I think I have made a good faith effort to do so, but I also think you are correct that I have not succeeded. The conclusion that I have an inability to discuss anything with fundamentalists presupposes that I have been unsuccessfully engaging fundamentalists. I think you are correct about that. We both agree that the people I have been engaging are fundamentalists. We both also agree that I have been unsuccessful. You have deduced that my inability to succeed in a discussion with fundamentalists says something about me. We both agree again. I do not have much ability in engaging fundamentalists on their own terms, and they do not have much ability in engaging me on mine. I have reflected on why that might be.
From the start, I did not believe that this discussion was about whether or not Scripture is perverse, or whether or not God is perverse. I think I can safely say that no Catholic believes that either Scripture or God is perverse. I think the question was about how one interprets Scripture, or about how one defines God. I believe that the question of God is “prior” to the question of Scripture. My “contribution” to this discussion, if that is what you want to call it, was an (unsuccessful) attempt to frame the question of the interpretation of Scripture within the “larger” question of the nature of God. That was where I collided with the fundamentalists. I am unable to see the edification in thinking about the interpretation of Scripture divorced from the larger context of the nature of God. I cannot presume to understand why fundamentalists would object to this, but apparently they do. Where I see edification, they do not see it. Where they see edification, I do not.
One observation that I would make about the larger context of Scriptural interpretation is this. In the beginning of the Church, one of the important differences between the Jewish community that became Christian, and the Jewish community that did not, was a difference in disposition toward Scripture. The Jewish community that became the core of the early Church was distinctly “apocalyptic” in disposition. It placed a greater emphasis both on the “apocrypha” and on non/literal interpretation. The apocrypha contained many important allusions to doctrines that are distinctly Christian. Non/literal interpretation revealed that the Old Testament spoke about Christ. When the Jewish community divided, the first Christians retained the apocrypha and non/literal interpretation, while the other Jewish communities became more suspicious of both the apocrypha and non/literal interpretation. This rejection of the apocrypha and non/literal interpretation was repeated by the Protestants in the Reformation. Thus, the Catholic Church has been distinguished, throughout its history, as the Church which understands the spirit to be above the letter. It is a distinctly Catholic principle. I am disposed to believe that this principle is relevant and that it is necessary to a proper understanding of questions about the nature of Scripture and the nature of God. However, as you rightly observe, I am unable to discuss the questions in the absence of this principle, and the fundamentalists are unable to discuss the questions in its presence. We do not speak the same language.
R Rockliffe, Your elegance and clarity of expression are music to my ears.
Thank you for seeing and clarifying the spirit of the word and the discussion.
Kevin,
Just a note for your future theological reflection. If your line of inquiry leads you to the conclusion that God would (better: could) command someone to slaughter an infant or child, you have essentially done a reductio ad absurdum on your own argument. Reconsider your premises and/or whether your conclusion is entailed by those premises. While your desire to understand and defend the Church’s teaching on biblical exegesis is commendable, it is impossible that this teaching could commit one to a incoherent doctrine of God or moral barbarity.
Rockliff -
Divine revelation is PUBLIC revelation. Just as truths of reason are entrusted to all mankind, truths of faith (i.e. the content of divine revelation) are entrusted to the entire Church.
What has been entrusted to the Magisterium alone is the ability to render normative interpretations. A layman can resort to theological principles to call something heretical, but the Church can actually create the theological principle that makes a thing heretical. The truth itself cannot be created, but the definition which closes debate regarding the truth in question. The authority of the Church is not that of an elite gnostic cult. An opinion is heretical – and it may be called such by anyone, even non-believers – if it contradicts a truth that has been defined by the Catholic Church. In such cases, what makes the opinion heretical is not the “calling,” but the dogma which the opinion contradicts. In the case of the Church, however, “calling an opinion heretical” actually makes it heretical, even if it was not previously heretical.
I have seen fundamentalism, but I have not seen it in this conversation. The problem, here, is that Kyle thinks (or thought) that the sacred writers misrepresented the Word of God and whereas God intended something good, they wrote something perverse. This view is heretical.
Now, if we want to claim that it would be a misinterpretation to conclude that literal sense (i.e. that which was intended by the original human author) of such passages is a divine command to commit genocide (Hb. “charam”), we will risk not heresy but idiocy. Unlike the creation narrative, which uses the figurative language and the inductive logic of archaic cultures, Deuteronomy 20 tells us explicitly: Unless you seek to annihilate these nations, you will be corrupted by them.
The literary/historical context of the statement and of the entire Book of Deuteronomy is the sin committed on the Plains of Moab in the 40th year of the Exodus. This sin – narratively recounted in Numbers 25 – is the culmination of 40 years of abject failure in resisting temptations to pagan idolatry and all that goes along with it: inter alia, human sacrifice, cannibalism, ritual incest, cult prostitution, mass mob orgies. The literal context of the charam represents “the court of last resort.” The last line of defense against the annihilation of “the people of the promise.”
The question here is not of the historical facticity of the Exodus events, but the literary context that this narrative provides: All the sins, all the plagues and punishments, the longsuffering patience of God in holding back his just wrath, the intercessory pleas of Moses. All of this colors the context of the charam as a divine command.
Therefore, to say that the literal context of such passages is not divinely commanded genocide would not be heresy, but a kind of “intellectual suicide” that is itself quite similar to real fundamentalism (i.e. a defense of faith that gives no consideration to the violence done to reason).
As to your last point, I think you misunderstand the Catholic Church’s problem with fundamentalism, which is not in its affirmation of the “literal sense” (in this fundamentalists are actually quite correct) or that it affirms the literal above the spiritual (this is an error, but not one that is particularly characteristic of fundamentalists). The characteristic error of fundamentalism is in its misrepresentation of the literal sense. “By ‘literal interpretation’ [fundamentalism] understands a naively literalist interpretation, one, that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development” (Pontifical Biblical Commission, Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, Part I, Section F).
Your failure to successfully communicate with fundamentalists is not because of your fidelity to Catholic principles, but because you fundamentally misunderstand them. If I were a fundamentalist reading your caricature of them, I would feel extremely frustrated and misunderstood.
In my experience, fundamentalists are genuinely ignorant of and open to correction with regard to the mistake they are making in misunderstanding the literal sense of Scripture. What they cannot tolerate – and rightly so – is any suggestion that the literal sense of Scripture is false or, worse, “perverse.” Make this your starting premise and you will find fundamentalists far more agreeable to what you want to tell them.
Br. Matthew -
To say that a divine command to commit genocide (Hb. charam) – which includes the command to slaughter children – is essentially absurd does violence to the historic and literary context of Sacred Scripture.
If issuing such a command was absolutely necessary in order to prevent a greater evil, it is not absurd to suggest that God could issue such a command. The real question is whether anything could represent a greater evil than slaughtering children. Scripture entertains this question and answers it: Yes, Israel losing its identity by falling into the “abominable practices” of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites represented a greater evil than Israel slaughtering the men, women, children and cattle which belonged to these nations.
Here is our case in a simple syllogism:
Major Premise: When one is faced with a choice between evils, it is morally imperative to choose the alternative that is least evil;
Minor Premise: God issuing the command to execute the physical genocide of the seven nations of Canaan was a lesser evil than the only other alternative (i.e. allowing the spiritual genocide of Israel).
Conclusion: It was morally imperative that God issued the command to execute the physical genocide of the seven nations of Canaan.
What is absurd is the suggestion that God would (or could) have allowed Israel to lose every remnant of its identity. At the end of the day, I think this conversation represents something of a revolt against God’s love for the sake of maintaining a false notion of his purity. It’s not that God could sin, of course, but the fact of the matter is that God could not enter OUR history and accomplish OUR redemption without bending down and sticking his hands into the stinking brown pile of OUR excrement. This is what this episode is really all about.
Carl,
You wrote:
“The problem, here, is that Kyle thinks (or thought) that the sacred writers misrepresented the Word of God and whereas God intended something good, they wrote something perverse. This view is heretical.”
Not. My. Position.
Jeremiah 28:7-9 “But now, listen to what I am about to state in your hearing and the hearing of all the people. From of old, the prophets who were before you and me prophesied war, woe, and pestilence against many lands and mighty kingdoms. But the prophet who prophesies peace is recognized as truly sent by the LORD only when his prophetic prediction is fulfilled.”
Kyle,
Oh good, so you believe that the sacred writers accurately understood and communicated God’s intention in passages relating to the charam? Boy, that was easier than I thought it would be!
Ronald,
The context of that text is the condemnation of Hananiah’s false prophecy that God would break the yoke of the King of Babylon. Jeremiah says, “Amen, may the Lord do so, may the Lord make the words which you have prophesied come true” (vs. 6). But then he warns him that the character of a prophet is determined by whether the Lord brings his prophecy to pass.
“The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: ‘Go tell Hananiah, “Thus says the Lord: You have broken wood bars, but I will make in their place bars of iron. for thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have put upon the neck of all these nationa an iron yoke of servitude to Nebuchadnessar king of Babylon, and they shall serve him, for I have given to him even the beasts of the field.”‘ And Jeremiah the prophet said to the prophet Hananiah, ‘Listen Hananiah, the Lord has not sent you, and you have made this people trust in a lie. Therefore thus says the Lord, ‘Behold I will remove you from the face of the earth. This very year you shall die, because you have uttered rebellion against the Lord.’ In that same year, in the seventh month, the prophet Hananiah died.”
I’m afraid that you may have completely missed the point of what Jeremiah and the Lord were saying. But I suppose somebody will now explain to me how when God says “I will remove you from the face of the earth” he didn’t really mean that he would remove him from the face of the earth. And how when God did remove him from the face of the earth, he didn’t really remove him from the face of the earth.
Carl,
Thanks for spelling out your line of reasoning. Both your major and minor premises are wrong. This would explain the absurd conclusion. I do, however, wish that you could appreciate the manifest absurdity and horror of the conclusion itself. Imagine, if you will, a group of defenseless children and infants before you. Now imagine systematically slaughtering them. Take in and appreciate the monstrousness and malice of such an act. Now- as if the thought experiment could not get worse- imagine you live in a world created by a being which requires you to commit such a horrendous evil. Such a being would not be worthy of your obedience, much less your worship. It would be better- heroic even- to endure the punishment of such a being rather than committing such an obviously repugnant act. The fact that your commitment to a certain understanding of scriptural exegesis seems to make such a blood curdling picture of God mandatory ought to make you rethink your take on exegesis.
Now, as to your premises. The first premise is a token example of proportionalism, a moral theory rejected by the Church (See Veritatis Splendor[VS] ~75-83). Rather, following St. Thomas, VS acknowledges that there are certain evils which are evil in their species or intrinsic evils. That is, that which make them the kind of act they are is precisely what makes them evil. We cannot do them and have them be, in any way, a good act. And as such, God could not command them. Genocide and infanticide are among such intrinsic evils.
Assuming the absurd- that God could command evil- your second conclusion would only follow if God were indeed faced with a situation in which He was, as it were, backed into a corner and required to order such an action for the spiritual benefit of His followers. Such, of course, is impossible. If there is such a being he is not the God of the Catholic faith.
Not as easy as you might think, Carl. Your presentation of what you thought was my position wasn’t accurate, so you haven’t yet understood my position.
Carl, I put the quote there to see what the response might be. I like your courage for hanging yourself out like you are.
God takes all of us. He is a God of peace. Human beings commit genocide and always have. That is hate and fear. There are many different ways to defeat enemies other than genocide.
The violence in human relationships causes changes in gene expression and also mutation. These changes occur in regions of the brain where our most primitive and powerful survival mechanisms operate. Individuals and nations are subject to an increased sensitivity to violence or the threat of violence and thus would tend to violence as a problem-solving method. This is a symptom of transgenerational post traumatic stress and it becomes the foundation of a social system that is built around a hypervigilant protection against the unknown possible threat.
This effect hinders the ability to develop skills that create more peaceful resolutions to human problems.
If we do not understand how the human machine operates our faith remains childlike in terms of black and white areas which require a more in depth understanding of interpersonal neurobiology.
When the sins of the father are passed to the son this is the essence of it.
Thank you for responding.
Br. Matthew,
You’ve attacked Carl’s position but not explained the passage. I think that there are really only four ways to explain it based on this long and interesting discussion.
1) God is truth so whatever God commands is moral.
2) The children of the Amalekites weren’t innocent
3) God really didn’t say it, which is a dangerous path to take as Carl and others have tried to point out.
4)Justify it through reason, that is, purity of the nation of Israel necesitated the sacrifice of the children of the Amalekites
What is your explanation of 1Samuel15?
AN,
I know, given that it is impossible for the truths of faith and reason to be at odds, that there is a rationally satisfying explanation regarding the intent of the passage. I don’t know what that explanation is. I don’t know even know that such an explanation is forthcoming anytime soon (from anybody). The theological reflection which preceded and followed the doctrinal pronouncements of Nicea, Chalcedon and Constantinople didn’t happen overnight. The language and conceptual apparatus of orthodoxy took decades and centuries to be fully fleshed out. This is how theological reflection works- it is a slow, demanding, collaborative process. However, while the road to good theological explanation can be long and hard, it is littered with the shells of countless failed arguments. Such arguments either violate some canon of faith or of valid inference- and when they are spotted they should be pointed out. Such arguments are tempting because we do not like to have unanswered questions. However, an over-hasty bad explanation can be disastrous. It opens us to the ridicule of unbelievers and can even drive away the faithful. I don’t blame you(?) or Keven or Carl for the stance you have taken. There are people who I respect who hold similar arguments. I just think it is a bad argument. Amazingly bad. Spectacularly bad. And for the life of me I cannot figure out how scruples about what is meant by the ‘literal sense’ or proper exegesis could motivate someone to countenance making God into a sociopath and moral monster. If God commanded the Israelites to commit genocide, then the Christopher Hitchens of the world are completely justified. Their mockery is totally justified if we believe in such a God. Thankfully, such a god does not exist. And the God that does exists has no part in evil. Not only is the argument logically flawed, it commits one to the most dangerous and corrosive -isms out there: nominalism, voluntarism and consequentialism (i.e. proportionalism). Give it up. Nobody’s preferences or opinions about proper exegesis is worth vitiating the Church’s doctrine of God. We need not cut off our nose to spite our face.
Should be AK, not AN.
Br. Matthew,
I’m always happy to rethink my exegesis, especially when I am asked to look up a passage from a papal encyclical. Let’s take a look at Veritatis Splendor 75:
“Some authors do not take into sufficient consideration the fact that the will is involved in the concrete choices which it makes: these choices are a condition of its moral goodness and its being ordered to the ultimate end of the person.”
In asserting that one may be faced with a choice where all alternatives are evil, I am not in any way relieving the moral agent of his ethical responsibility or saying that whatever he chooses is in any way determined without reference to his will. It is wrong, therefore, to accuse me of adhereing to this error.
“Others are inspired by a notion of freedom which prescinds from the actual conditions of its exercise, from its objective reference to the truth about the good, and from its determination through choices of concrete kinds of behavior.”
This is precisely the problem in your own thinking. You are “prescinding” (turning aside) from “the actual conditions of its exercise,” pretending that the will can operate without reference to the actual conditions facing it. You are adhering to platitudes rather than reason and in the process you are condemning the literal meaning of Scripture as “absurd.”
Veritatis Splendor doesn’t say that man will never be forced to make choices where all the alternatives are evil or that in such a situation it would be sinful to choose the least evil alternative. On the other hand, Veritatis Splendor does say, “Only in the mystery of Christ’s Redemption do we discover the ‘concrete’ possibilities of man” (no. 103). Please read that paragraph: Before Christ’s redemption, man was “dominated by lust.” If, as the pope says, “he has set our freedom free from the domination of concupiscence,” then before he did that, our freedom was enslaved. Before the Redemption brought by Christ, the possibility of commanding right behavior was not always possible even to God because man was incapable of such behavior. He therefore issued all kinds of laws aimed at limiting the damage of man’s sinfulness until “the fullness of time” when He would introduce a whole new set of alternatives. The command of genocide was precisely such a law.
Kyle,
You said and seem to have no intention of retracting the statement, “I have no qualms about calling some statements by biblical writers perverse.” This. Are. Your. Precise. Words.
In another place you expressed the condemned opinion that the Bible is capable of error as long as it didn’t bear on a truth necessary to our salvation.
If I have somehow misunderstood you by concluding from such assertion that you believe that the sacred writers could or did misrepresent the Word of God, please explain how. If you simply say “you misunderstand me,” without giving any explanation of HOW I misunderstood you, the misunderstanding (if it exists) will never be corrected.
Ronald King,
I actually pretty much agree with you, except that I think you place too much emphasis on the material (i.e. “neurobiological”) aspect of man.
In saying this, I have no intention of affirming, denying or engaging in any debate with regard to what you’ve written about “violence in human relationships cause changes in gene expression.” What you’ve written seems both possible and likely, but not as important as you seem to think. Certainly not so important that our faith will be childish “if we do not understand how the human machine operates.”
By the way, faith being “childlike” is a good thing (cf. Mt 18:3, CCC 305). If understanding the human machine prevented our faith from being childlike, we would have to spare no expense in misunderstanding the human machine. I therefore changed your word to “childish” because it seemed to reflect your intention more accurately (cf. 1 Cor 13:11; CCC 1308).
At any rate, from what you’ve written, it seems that you are overestimating our biological conditions in accounting for our behavior and underestimating the disposition of our spiritual soul and, in particular, the freedom of our will. At any rate, I submit this to you for your own consideration.
Kevin,
Well spoken, but I think 1) and 4) are essentially the same position arrived at from different angles. Also, I wouldn’t say that number 4 is really an exercise of “reason” because it requires us to accept the questionable assertion that there was no other choice than 1) genocide and 2) the spiritual perversion of Israel. We must admit that the strength of our conviction in believing that these were the only two choices only makes sense in light of our “faith” that Sacred Scripture is the inerrant Word of God, who inspired the biblical writers and “made full use of their faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written and nothing more” (CCC 106, DV 11).
In other words, using reason alone it is tenable but not certain that these were the only two alternatives. Also, God’s point in Deuteronomy 18:20 is that “purity” is not an option for Israel. It is sheerly a matter of which alternative is “least impure.”
Carl,
I’ve already explained my thinking on this matter. Others in these threads and those to whom I’ve spoken in person have understood my meaning. I stand by my precise words, and I stand by the position that they are not heretical. I have agreed with the passages from the catechism and church documents that you have quoted to me, and I find them consistent with my understanding of inerrancy and inspiration.
Carl,
Your position that God mandated the killing of innocents is in total contradiction with JPII’s teaching on the intrinsic evil of killing innocents.
Such killing is always wrong because its an evil moral object regardless of intent or circumstances (including your circumstances of supposedly saving Israel’s moral mission by slaughtering its enemies).
To say that God would ever command anyone to do an evil moral object is to make God into Satan.
That’s exactly the warped theology which has led so many of modern men to turn away from religion because they know that such religious ideology is very far from true love and genuine spirituality.
God Bless
If God commanded the Israelites to commit genocide, then the Christopher Hitchens of the world are completely justified.
This is an important point, Br. Matthew. Hitchens’ case against religion is essentially a moral argument: he argues that religion leads to terrible immorality. When religious believers argue that God ordered genocide and that such genocide was therefore morally okay, his point is illustrated.
Carl, I think you misunderstand then the frustration of Paul when he would continue to do what he did not wish to do. Your writing appears to be very linear and literal indicating a left hemisphere dominance with strong language abilities. The left prefrontal cortex is also associated with a more positive resilient reaction to stress. Thus, discussing a difference of opinion with a dominant left brain it is almost impossible to change the belief of that person because of the rigid linear focused nature of that part of the brain regardless of the validity of evidence countering her or his belielfs.
You don’t see Carl that the brain and body are the hardware of the soul and you are enslaved in your perceptions unless through the grace of God you are rewired to incorporate the intuitive, globally oriented, empathic right hemisphere into full-time participation with the left. Then you will have a house undivided and begin to see that Samuel was a victim of his hardwiring for hate of his enemy and how he twisted unintentionally what God wanted.
That is why Christ stated from the Cross to forgive us for we know not what we do.
The soul is built for love and it struggles to find love in the violence of the world. There is no wisdom in violence, there is only future violence if the soul’s hardware is not understood. The question is, do you want to understand your flesh or fantasize about your soul? The flesh is the gateway to knowing the soul. However, it can only know the soul through the truth of being open and vulnerable with self and others.
Carl,
I’m always happy to rethink my exegesis, especially when I am asked to look up a passage from a papal encyclical. Let’s take a look at Veritatis Splendor 75:
“Some authors do not take into sufficient consideration the fact that the will is involved in the concrete choices which it makes: these choices are a condition of its moral goodness and its being ordered to the ultimate end of the person.”
In asserting that one may be faced with a choice where all alternatives are evil, I am not in any way relieving the moral agent of his ethical responsibility or saying that whatever he chooses is in any way determined without reference to his will. It is wrong, therefore, to accuse me of adhereing to this error.
Notice that I argued that your first premise was an instance of proportionalism, which is only treated in the paragraph in question (~75) after “Others are inspired…”. Perhaps I should have been more specific with my reference.
“Others are inspired by a notion of freedom which prescinds from the actual conditions of its exercise, from its objective reference to the truth about the good, and from its determination through choices of concrete kinds of behavior.”
This is precisely the problem in your own thinking. You are “prescinding” (turning aside) from “the actual conditions of its exercise,” pretending that the will can operate without reference to the actual conditions facing it. You are adhering to platitudes rather than reason and in the process you are condemning the literal meaning of Scripture as “absurd.”
Your entire paragraph, beginning with “This is precisely…” is a bit of a mess. If you are trying to say my position is condemned by the principles of VS, then you are equivocating, since the said principles are a critique of certain strands of moral theology and having nothing to do with the theology or doctrine of God nor with proper exegesis. Next, your reference to the will is vague. Are you referring to God’s will? If so, God’s will is not conditioned by- and cannot be thwarted by- anything extrinsic to Himself (See: ST I.22.art. 2) Are you referring to the will of those (supposedly) ordered by God to commit an intrinsic evil? If so the argument is a straw man. Your last sentence is interesting insofar as it claims I am arguing not from reason but from platitudes while at the same time slipping in a petitio principii/straw man about my putative condemnation of the literal sense of scripture. I never condemned the literal sense of scripture- I disputed your understanding of what the literal interpretation of scripture is and what it entails.
Veritatis Splendor doesn’t say that man will never be forced to make choices where all the alternatives are evil or that in such a situation it would be sinful to choose the least evil alternative.
What you are saying is that it is permissible to commit genocide if it is one of many evil alternatives. In other words, the proposition “It is sometimes permissible to commit intrinsic evils” is true. Is that correct? If so, read further…
“The latter [proportionalism], by weighing the various values and goods being sought, focuses rather on the proportion acknowledged between the good and bad effects of that choice, with a view to the “greater good” or “lesser evil” actually possible in a particular situation.” ~75
“The weighing of the goods and evils foreseeable as the consequence of an action is not an adequate method for determining whether the choice of that concrete kind of behaviour is “according to its species”, or “in itself”, morally good or bad, licit or illicit. The foreseeable consequences are part of those circumstances of the act, which, while capable of lessening the gravity of an evil act, nonetheless cannot alter its moral species.” ~77
“Consequently, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “there are certain specific kinds of behaviour that are always wrong to choose, because choosing them involves a disorder of the will, that is, a moral evil”.127 And Saint Thomas observes that “it often happens that man acts with a good intention, but without spiritual gain, because he lacks a good will. Let us say that someone robs in order to feed the poor: in this case, even though the intention is good, the uprightness of the will is lacking. Consequently, no evil done with a good intention can be excused. ‘There are those who say: And why not do evil that good may come? Their condemnation is just’ (Rom 3:8)” ~78
See all of ~79
“Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church’s moral tradition, have been termed “intrinsically evil” (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object”.131 The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: “Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia …all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator” ~80
On the other hand, Veritatis Splendor does say, “Only in the mystery of Christ’s Redemption do we discover the ‘concrete’ possibilities of man” (no. 103). Please read that paragraph: Before Christ’s redemption, man was “dominated by lust.” If, as the pope says, “he has set our freedom free from the domination of concupiscence,” then before he did that, our freedom was enslaved. Before the Redemption brought by Christ, the possibility of commanding right behavior was not always possible even to God because man was incapable of such behavior. He therefore issued all kinds of laws aimed at limiting the damage of man’s sinfulness until “the fullness of time” when He would introduce a whole new set of alternatives. The command of genocide was precisely such a law.
Yikes. God commanded man to commit genocide in order to limit the damage of his sinfulness? Thats an odd way of going about limiting sinfulness. You also seem to be hovering dangerously close to reading a Lutheran doctrine of fallenness into the pope’s words on the domination of concupiscence. Recall the Canon V of the Council of Trent: CANON V. “If any one saith, that, since Adam’s sin, the free will of man is lost and extinguished; or, that it is a thing with only a name, yea a name without a reality, a figment, in fine, introduced into the Church by Satan; let him be anathema.” Moreover, it makes no sense to say that God couldn’t command good behavior before the redemption. Why not? God’s providence cannot be thwarted (see the reference to the ST above). Before justification God could have commanded that men be just (which he, in fact, did- recall the ten commandments) and in fact caused them to be just. That he permitted them to persist in sinfulness does not imply that he could not have done otherwise. Much less does it prove that God had to command the Israelites to do something gravely sinful in order to avoid worse sins.
Kyle,
Yeah. If a correct understanding of the assertoric sense of the passage in question is that God commanded the Israelites to commit infanticide and genocide, then Hitchens is quite right.
Kyle,
I’ve glanced at your parallel discussion over at Journeys in Alterity. Well done. I wholeheartedly join you in espousing ‘genocide/infanticide-commanding-god atheism’. No such god exists. That some people seem to be scandalized by such an espousal amazes me.
Chris Sullivan,
I’ve written this elsewhere but you evidently didn’t see it: The dogma of original sin tells us that children are not born innocent, but born guilty. No where have I said that God mandated the killing of “innocents.” He mandated the killing of Canaanites.
Just as “marital circumstances” determine the difference between adultery and authentic conjugal love – such circumstances do not merely affect culpability but are constitutive in defining the object chosen – so also a lack of better alternatives can be similarly constitutive.
Ronald King,
Didn’t you read the part where I told you that what you wrote was “possible and likely”? How have you managed to conclude from this that I don’t understand that the brain and body are the hardware of the soul? By agreeing that the brain and the body are the hardware of the soul?
Although I am not a particular fan of the conservative propagandist Dennis Prager, I do very much like his motto of “I prefer clarity to agreement.”
And I’m happy for the clarity you lend to this conversation by your admissions: “Samuel was a victim of his hardwiring for hate” (Samuel didn’t write the book of Samuel by the way, but please don’t let facts like these get in the way when you’re obviously on such a roll). You believe the biblical writer “twisted unintentionally what God wanted.”
This is not remotely Catholic.
Thank you, Br. Matthew.
Carl,
Killing all the Caananites was :-
1. Genocide.
2. Infanticide.
3. Abortion.
All of which are condemned by the Church as intrinsically evil.
Infants and unborn babies are by definition innocent.
Trying to use original sin to justify genocide is really grasping at straws.
Scripture must be interpreted in the light of Catholic doctrine, including that on intrinsic evil.
God Bless
Br. Matthew,
1. Who says that certain strands of moral theology “have nothing to do with” theology or proper exegesis? All disciplines of knowledge are deeply interconnected and in many respects presuppose one another. Let me show you how this relates to this particular conversation.
At the very least I think everyone will happily agree that God “seems” to command genocide in various passages of the Old Testament. What then is the basis for rejecting this appearance? It’s a complex brew of theology and philosophy, metaphysics and moral theology. It isn’t for any particular reasons drawn from the text itself, such as we might draw from the idiomatic connections of the Hebrew “yowm” and the interconnection of the various things created on each day to infer that the biblical writer didn’t intend to give us a materialistic account of the universe’s creation. There is absolutely nothing in the text to suggest that God did not command the genocide of seven canaanite nations. We cannot object to this interpretation on exegetical grounds, but only on the basis of the confict it produces between 1) our belief that God inspired Scirpture and 2) our concept of who God is.
This whole conversation has nothing to do with proper exegesis and everything to do with metaphysics and moral theology. “Can God command genocide?” is a philosophical question. Scripture tells us plainly that God commanded and accomplished the destruction of seven nations, women, children and cattle included.
2. Potentia absoluta vs. potentia ordinata.
You are only half right that God’s will cannot be conditioned or thwarted by anything extrinsic to himself because God has in fact willed to allow things extrinsic to himself to thwart his will. God’s will is to save your soul, Brother Matthew, but it is in your power to thwart God’s will because God has entrusted you with freedom. This is why you’re both right and wrong when you say that nothing outside of God can thwart God’s will.
3. Whether you condemn the literal sense of Scripture in denying that that God commanded genocide is precisely the subject of our disagreement. I would only point out that your insistence that God did not command genocide is based only your own philosophical presuppositions about what God can and cannot do. It is not based on any serious study of the texts in question.
4. I am NOT saying that it is permissible to commit genocide if it is “one of many” evil alternatives. I am saying that it is permissible to commit genocide if it is the least evil alternative. Please note the analogy to the decision to vote for John McCain, which I considered less evil than 1) voting for a third party, 2) not voting or 3) voting for Barack Obama. Unless I am missing something, these were the only four possibilities I faced in the 2008 presidential election.
I also assert that an alternative being the least evil among a set of all possible alternatives is morally constitutive to the object chosen and, therefore, can no longer be called “intrinsically evil.” Therefore just as voting for John McCain might be called “intrinsically evil” if a better choice existed, it cannot be called intrinsically evil when all other choices are worse.
5. I agree with everything written in VS, but do not see where it says that it is wrong to choose the least evil alternative when all remaining alternatives involve greater evils. I am not speaking of doing evil that good may come. I am not speaking of weighing the positive vs. negative consequences of the decision. I am speaking of doing what is least evil when a better alternative does not exist.
Again, read this carefully, when better alternatives do not exist, this is a defining constitutive element of the object of the human act, not merely a secondary condition that affect culpability. The fact that there is no better choice than John McCain is an entirely different kind of “condition” than what kind of family one was raised in. Taking this into account will help you see the consistency between what I am saying and what is said in VS.
6. Thank you for quoting Trent. I am not saying that man had no freedom (that it was “lost” or “extinguished”) but that his freedom was SEVERELY limited. Commanding right behavior was not “always” possible. I didn’t say it was never possible. By the way, “total depravity” is much more of a Calvinist doctrine than Lutheran.
Look, at the end of the day your problem is not with me but with Deuteronomy 20:17-18: “You shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jeubusites, as the Lord your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their gods.”
Let’s read this passage in light of the new: “God destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan and gave the Israelites their land as an inheritance” (see Acts 13:19).
Your problem is not with what I’m saying about God, but with what God has said about himself.
Carl, I am sorry for not affirming your agreement with me. I think what happened was my anger being triggered when I saw agreement and then dismissal of the importance of interpersonal neurobiology. Now I understand that before my anger was triggered the more vulnerable feeling of disappointment and sadness occurred because you agreed which instantly resulted in a feeling of happiness, thinking that we might be able to have a discussion about how the hardware does affect the soul and the identity of the soul, and then, sadness when it was dismissed as not as important as the soul and thus I was dismissed.
I know that Samuel did not write the book and I do not believe the writer unintentionally twisted what God wanted. The question is, what does our interpretation of the OT reveal about us and our belief about God? Then what does that interpretation reveal to those outside the faith about the God we proclaim to love and serve?
Carl,
My approach to this question is more philosophical than exegetical. It is because moral reason leads me to the conclusion that genocide can never be permissable that I reject any interpretation of the Bible that has God actually ordering human beings to commit genocide. That’s my position in a nutshell.
Carl,
My approach is that of Kyle. Though I would add that the approach is theological in addition to being philosophical.
1)My point about equivocation in using VS only applied if you were assuming that somehow VS spoke against my position, which I was assumed you were. It would be like taking a text on scientific methodology- for instance, a text on how to isolate variables in the lab- and using it to argue a point in theology by saying that someone hadn’t “isolated all the theological variables.” You cannot apply the text in such a vastly different way without a change in the meaning of the terms. One might make a valid point this way, but they cannot claim that the theological point was made by the paper on scientific methodology.
2. I hear this position a lot. I do not think it can be cashed out theologically. To say that our will is exempt from divine causality is to say that in choosing we draw on some source of perfection and actuality other than God. What would this source be? I know the contrary position (that God’s will, as the first cause and source of all being, perfection and actuality cannot be thwarted) brings with it hard problems of the freewill/divine agency and predestination kind, but I think the Augustinian and Thomistic traditions have come up with decent (if not ultimately satisfying) ways of dealing with these problems.
3. I’ll grant you that my objections stem from philosophical and theological presuppositions. Absolutely. I would only add that these philosophical presuppositions are good ones and these theological presuppositions are Catholic ones. Such presuppositions are necessary in approaching the text as a believer. Holy Scripture describes God as having a backside (Ex 33:23), nostrils (Ex 15:8) fighting sea-monsters in the ocean (Job 41, Ps 74:14), and having a mutable and fickle will- i.e., changing His mind and repenting from doing evil (Ex 32:12), etc. etc… Such verses tell me something important about God and his relationship to the created world, but they do not tell me such by giving me a description of how God actually is and what he actually did. To take such verses at their face value, without theological or philosophical presuppositions, is to read the Bible as an interesting piece of ancient literature and nothing more.
4. You’ve run out of room to move here. Even if an intrinsic evil is the least of many evil alternatives, you cannot licitly choose it. You must not choose any of the evils. And you cannot say that the very fact that it is the least bad option makes it no longer a intrinsic evil. Such evils are specified by their object, not by their relationship to other possible actions.
Again, read this carefully, when better alternatives do not exist, this is a defining constitutive element of the object of the human act, not merely a secondary condition that affect culpability.
Nope. As far as I can tell, your theory is completely ad hoc. You will find no basis for it in Catholic moral teaching. The object of genocide is the deliberate destruction of an entire people. It being the least evil of many bad options is not at all constitutive of the moral object.
6. Thanks for the clarification- though note that we were talking about the bondage of the will and not total depravity.
Your problem is not with what I’m saying about God, but with what God has said about himself.
I actually think it is the other way around. My problem is not what God has said about himself, but what you say this implies about God. I am willing to admit that, in Holy Scripture, God says strange things about himself (having a back, nostrils, fighting sea-monsters, etc.) The crucial word here is about. God speaks to us about himself (and his relationship to creation) in many ways: though narrative, metaphor, analogy, negation, super-eminence, etc.. Dt 17 certainly says something about God and his relationship to his people. What it is not- what it cannot be- is a description of God’s actual appropriation of, participation in or approval of monstrous evil.
Chris Sullivan,
1. Perhaps the two most important words in your post are throw away verbs: “was” and “are.” Between this “was” and “are” stands the Incarnation and the Gospel, the Cross and the Resurrection, the evangelical commission and Pentecost. “Jesus Christ has opened up new horizons that were previously closed to human reason” (GS 24). “Only in the mystery of Christ’s Redemption do we discover the concrete possibilities of man” (Veritatis Splendor 103).
In a word, it will never again be the case that coexisting among sinners will ipso facto cause God’s people to fall into “all their abominable practices” (Dt 20:18). The disciples of Christ have been given the power to teach the evangelical law to the nations rather than be taught abominable practices by the nations. This conversation is about the difference between “you have heard it said” and “but I say to you.”
What was taught by God in the Old Testament presumes an essential difference in the human condition. It is not God that has changed, but the human condition and indeed the cosmos itself: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2).
Thanks be to Jesus Christ, we will ever again be faced with the dark realities and tragic choices which God and man faced between original sin and the redemption. All of this is contained in the difference between your first assertion “killing all the Canaanites was…all of which are condemned by the Church.” Thanks be to God, the world itself has been irrevocably changed.
2. Actually “by definition” infants and uunborn babies are “guilty.” Here is the “definition” of Scripture: “Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” (Romans 5:12).
And a couple “definitions” of the Church’s infallible Magisterium (Trent, Sess. V, Decree on Original Sin):
I. If anyone does not confess that the first man Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, immediately lost his holiness and the justice in which he had been established, and that he incurred through the offense of that prevarication the wrath and indignation of God and hence the death with which God had previously threatened him, and with death captivity under his power, who thenceforth “had the empire of death” [Heb. 2:14], that is of the devil, and that through that offense of prevarication the entire Adam was transformed in body and soul for the worse, let him be anathema.
II. If anyone asserts that the transgression of Adam has harmed him alone and not his posterity, and that the sanctity and justice, received from God, which he lost, he has lost for himself alone and not for us also; or that he having been defiled by the sin of disobedience has transfused only death “and the punishments of the body into the whole human race, but not sin also, which is the death of the soul,” let him be anathema, since he contradicts the Apostle who says: “By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned” [Rom. 5:12].
3. How about interpreting Scripture in light of Catholic doctrines contained in the fourth session of the Council of Trent: “The sacred and holy ecumentical and general Synod of Trent…receives and holds in veneration with an equal affection of piety and reverence all the books both of the Old and of the New Tesstament, since one God is the authror of both…as having been dictated (Lt. “dictatas”) either by Christ’s own word of mouth, or by the Holy Spirit.”
It is not Catholic to “interpret” the text of Scripture to mean the exact opposite of what they say. Sacred Scripture says that God “commanded” (Dt 20:18) the Israelites to “save alive nothing that breathes” among the seven nations (Dt 20:16-17).
This cannot be interpreted to mean that God did not command it. And quite honestly, I think you folks are grasping at straws by trying to say that the God of Sacred Scripture didn’t really command genocide. He did. He very, very clearly did. And he not only did command it, but he even explained HIS REASONS for commanding it. You can bury your heads in the sands, but it will never change the facts of the matter.
Another way of putting this: God says something through Holy Scripture in Dt. 17, but this something cannot be that, in the distant past, there was some event x such that x was the genocide of one ancient near eastern people (the Amalekites) by another (the Israelites)and that x was commanded by God. The last proposition in this conjunction (x was commanded…) is false, making the entire conjunction false. My reason for saying it is false is not derived from the text in question but from what I believe, by my Christian faith, about God.
Your objection to my interpretation could just as easily apply to biblical verses describing God as being bodily or changing His mind. My reasons for not taking such language to imply that God actually is a body or that he possesses a mutable will are not derived from the texts themselves but from the theological truths given by my Christian faith. This is just how Christians read scripture, as opposed to reading the bible merely as a piece of literature.
Ronald King,
At the Council of Vienna (1311-1312), the Catholic Church dogmatically defined that “the intellective soul is the form of the human body in itself and essentially.” In this, it is emphasizing the affect of the soul upon the body, while leaving rather open questions of how the body may affect the soul. In other words, the Church teaches that the soul animates the body, causing it to move, speak, act and so forth, while not really saying much of anything about how the body may affect the soul.
The Church also teaches that freedom always persists in man’s soul no matter encumbered it might become by limitations and conditions. It doesn’t really say how neuro-biology may affect ‘affect’ his choices, other than to say, it cannot ‘determine’ his choices in the strict sense of ‘determine.’
My own thinking on this subject has been informed by Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner. I would say that there is a very real sense in which the soul is responsible for the formation of the body. Without delving too far into technical matters that are beyond my competance, let me express this by means of a fictitious story that has been circulated in recent years. Even though I believe the story to be utterly unhistorical, I consider it “true to life.” Maybe telling the story will give you greater respect for the poor defenseless right hemisphere, which I can assure is rather like my wife in that she only appears to be quiet and deferential when in fact she rules the roost. Indeed, perhaps you would say it was my right lobe – no not ME, it was just my LOBE – that caused my wife, on the occasion of our daughter’s sixth birthday, to commission the creation of matching green tee-shirts that said, “I’m a lunatic.” Anyway, here goes…
When Leonardo da Vinci began painting the Last Supper, he found a young man whose face radiated an other-worldly innocence to model as Christ. Several years later, after finishing the other apostles and being delayed by other projects, he began searching for someone with a twisted and callous face to model as Judas Iscariot. The man who he found in imprisoned in a Milanese dungeon turned out to be none other than the very same man who beautiful features had inspired Leonardo to use him to model as Christ but a few years previous.
Like I said, it doesn’t matter that this story is historical hogwash because it’s true to life. Whoever would have thought that sleek young stud of a man in A Streetcar Named Desire would become that fat happy tub in Don Juan DeMarco. Whatever else might be said, Marlon Brando’s decision to stuff his face with boxes of mallomars and peanut butter by the jarful certainly impacted that transition.
Now we might respond that Marlon Brando’s eating habits might be explained by looking at possible deformities in his hypothalmus. At the same time, I think we could find people with identical deformities in their hypothalmi (assuming that he had such deformities), who would not have split 52 pairs of pants during the shooting of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). There are some people who manage to deal with their condition without eating two chickens in one sitting and, in another instance, slurping down a five-gallon tub of ranch dressing.
This is the first wave of considerations. On a much deeper, even mystical level, we might ask ourselves what hidden principles are at work that brought our universe to have such things as hypothalmi and deformed hypothalmi. What hidden logic might explain the connection between a particular individual and his various biological idiosyncrisies. The Buddhist would explain it with the concept of karma. The Catholic would speak of the crosses that we must bear. The post-enlightenment secularist would boast in the idiocy of his sophistry that there is no answer and it’s all just random. How can secularists like Christopher Hitchens claim that there is no God, when they so clearly believe in their own omniscience?
At any rate, I’m not entirely convinced that Rudolf Steiner is wrong when he suggests that there is a sense in which we ourselves choose the afflictions we will endure in life in order to work something out for ourselves and for the development of our cultures that could not otherwise be worked out. At the very same time, I am quite aware of and submit myself entirely to the Church’s negative doctrines on the pre-existence of the soul.
Kyle,
Thank you. This is precisely what I meant when I wrote to Br. Matthew that “your insistence that God did not command genocide is based only on your own philsophical presuppositions about what God can and cannot do. It is not based on any serious study of the text.”
I think you would agree that the text, taken entirely in itself, gives absolutely no indication that God didn’t command genocide, but on the contrary gives every indication that God did command it. It is only your understanding of moral reason (taken with your faith in the divine inspiration of Sacred Scripture) that causes you to interpret these text to mean something other than what they seem to very clearly say. At the same time, however, you continue say that the text “is” perverse rather than just say it only “seems” perverse. Therefore, I continue to question your faith in the divine inspiration of Sacred Scripture. The moment you change that “is” into a “seems” my accusation of heresy will be as obsolete as the divine command to commit genocide ;)
Our disagreement at that point, Kyle, will only be in whether moral reason “leads to the conclusion” that you believe it leads to or whether there is something in moral reason that you have misunderstood.
Rodak -
Fair enough. Without necessarily agreeing, I have no quarrel with your opinion that a naval blockade or “just going home” were better alternatives to dropping the bomb. It’s a perfectly reasonable opinion. I am not prepared, however, to condemn as unreasonable (or worse, an “exculpatory myth”) the idea that a land invasion of Japan would have been necessary in order to prevent even greater evils by a prolonged war. I am not an expert in military science, but I do have a degree in political science and my emphasis was in that direction.
I do continue to very strongly disagree with you on the theory that dropping the bomb was done “to impress the Russians” and “to explain why they shouldn’t even think about coming down out of Mongolia to seize their coveted warm-water port and extend their influence into the Pacific basin.”
The Soviets only joined the war against Japan on August 8, two days after Hiroshima. On August 9, as Nagasaki was being destroyed, Soviets were pouring into Manchuria, overwhelming Japanese forces and making a mad dash for the warm waters of Port Arthur that lead to the Russio-Japanese war forty years previous.
Before the dropping of the bomb, the Soviets had no capacity to engage the war in Asia. It is difficult to understand the poverty of condition to which the Eastern Front had reduced the Soviets. 8.7 million were killed or missing. 14.7 million more were wounded. How can we even get our mind around these numbers? In the entire history of the United States, Confederates during the Civil War included, we’ve lost about 0.7 million soldiers.
Therefore when the bomb was dropped, the Soviets knew that they had a limited window to grab as much as they could with very little expense. They would have never poured into Manchuria had the bomb not been dropped.
Now, I am aware of evidence cited in support of the argument that the dropping of the bomb would impress the Soviets, but there is better explanation for the administration’s concensus that the bomb would be a positive force in shaping the postwar world. Rationalization. The administration was committed to its decision in such a way that they caused themselves to imagine all the moral and strategic benefits of the decision and simultaneously turned their eyes from any of the costs and drawbacks.
In other words, the belief that the dropping of the bomb would impress the Soviets was nothing more than the wishful thinking of those who had already convinced themselves of the necessity to drop the bomb. Moreover, if they had not so convinced themselves, the idea wouldn’t have occured to them as a reason to drop the bomb because the idea itself is incredibly stupid. In other words, if our object is to prevent the Soviets from gaining a warm water port, there are much, much more sensible ways of obtaining this without dropping nuclear warheads on Japan.
By the way, “rationalization” also explains how anyone could convince himself that the Truman administration bombed the Japanese in order to impress the Russians. Being committed to seeing the decision to drop the bomb as intrinsically evil, it only makes sense that we would cause ourselves to turn our eyes from any evidence or ideas that might suggest that it wasn’t intrinsically evil.
Let me possibly preempt a confusion by restating more clearly what I want to say in my 4:05 PM post. The sentence that begins with “God says something through Holy Scipture…” should rather say “God means to teach us something through what is asserted by Holy Scipture in Dt. 17…”
Br. Matthew,
1. I think there’s a similarity between your criticism of my view and what the pope condemns in VS 75 insofar as you seem to “prescind from the actual condition of [freedom's] exercise.” In other words, in rejecting the principle of “least evil alternative” as I’ve repeatedly expressed it, you are not taking sufficient account of the actual conditions of freedom’s exercise when it is faced with a closed set of evil alternatives.
2. I’m not sure I completely follow you. I would only say that in creating the tree and giving the command not to eat of its fruit (however literalistically or figuratively we choose to understand this), God gave us the power to exempt our will from divine causality. He gave us the power to thwart him by choosing to draw upon “ourselves apart from him” as the source of our activity. This in turn affects – and indeed limits – how he acts and can act toward us. In every expression of God’s will, he “sevens himself,” or in other words, he binds himself from acting in ways contrary to that expression of his will.
3. You are giving no estimation to the value of biblical hermeneutics. You are assuming that the only line of defense we have against “literalism” is our theological and philosophical presuppositions. This is entirely false. In each of the cases you mention (backside, nostrils, sea-monsters, mutable divine will), the rules of sound interpretation would prevent us from arriving at “literalist” errors without any reference to our theological or philosophical presuppositions. In the case of the charam, the rules of sound interpretation indicate that original human writer understood the charam as a divinely instituted law. There is nothing to indicate that the original human writer was speaking figuratively.
4. Not choosing any of the evils is a choice and at least potentially an intrinsically evil one. In the specific case in question, we have two choices: 1) commanding genocide and 2) allowing Israel to follow these nations in their abominable practices. There is no third choice. If God does not choose 1, he chooses 2 and vice versa. “Not choosing genocide” means “choosing to allow Israel to follow these nations in their abominable practices.” Whether you or I think there is a third choice is irrelevent because this is the dichotomy presented to us in Deuteronomy 20 in order to explain God’s command to exterminate the seven nations.
I never claimed to have “any room to move” and therefore I can’t run out of it. God commanded genocide because it was less evil that the only alternative.
5. I don’t need to find a basis for my assertion in Catholic moral teaching because Catholic moral teaching is less authoritative than the written word of God. But this is irrelevant: I challenge you to find any basis for your rejection of the principle of “least evil alternative” in Catholic moral teaching.
For what it’s worth, though, you’re wrong. CCC 2309, in laying out the conditions for a just war, presupposes the principle of “least evil alternative,” particularly in the last point: the use of arms must not produce “evils” and disorders “graver” than the evil to be eliminated. That the use of arms may produce “grave evil” (!) is acceptable as long as this evil is not “as grave” as that to be eliminated.
6. I know and ascribe to the rules of interpretation. Deuteronomy 20 is not narrative, metaphor, analogy, negation or etc. It comes to us in the language of divine law: “You shall…”
Now you are absolutely correct that “supereminance” must be taken into account in interpreting Dt 20 correctly. There is no question that judicial precepts such as this one “did not bind forever, but were annulled by the coming of Christ” (Sum. Theol. I-II, 104, 3), and, “the obligating of divine justice is indeed perpetual, but the determination of those things that are just, according to human or Divine institution, must needs be different, according to the different states of mankind” (ad 1).
In discussing the Old Law (Summa Theologica I-II, questions 98-108), specifically addressed the charam:
“A distinction was observed with regard to hostile cities. For some of them were far distant, and were not among those which had been promised to them. When they had taken these cities, they killed all the men who had fought against God’s people; whereas the women and children were spared. But in the neighboring cities which had been promised to them, all were ordered to be slain, on account of their former crimes, to punish which God sent the Israelites as executor of Divine justice: for it is written (Deuteronomy 9:5) “because they have done wickedly, they are destroyed at thy coming in.” The fruit-trees were commanded to be left untouched, for the use of the people themselves, to whom the city with its territory was destined to be subjected.”
–Sum. Theol. I-II, Q. 105, A. 3, ad. 4.
From this it is clear that St. Thomas Aquinas held that the charam was divinely commanded: “But in neighboring cities which had been promised to them, all were odered to be slain, on account of their former crimes, to punish which God sent the Israelites as executor of Divine justice.
Kyle, Rodak, Br. Matthew, your god is not the God of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Carl, What does “intellective soul” mean?
The quote you provide is Aquinas’s answer to an objection. What was the specific objection? This: “Further, men are much more akin to us than trees. But we should show greater care and love for these things that are nearest to us, according to Sirach 13:19: “Every beast loveth its like: so also every man him that is nearest to himself.” Therefore the Lord unsuitably commanded (Deuteronomy 20:13-19) that all the inhabitants of a captured hostile city were to be slain, but that the fruit-trees should not be cut down.” The unsuitability alleged by the objection was that God cared more for fruit-trees than for human beings. It is that mistaken thought that Aquinas corrects.
What you should have quoted from that section of the Summa was this: “On the contrary, Divine Wisdom declares (Proverbs 8:8): ‘All my words are just, there is nothing wicked nor perverse in them.’”
I was a Thomist for about a semester. Then I began to engage the works of Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida, and I swiftly well to the dark side. Been there ever since.
Kyle, Rodak, Br. Matthew, your god is not the God of St. Thomas Aquinas.
No, my God is not the God of ST. I-II. q. 105, a. 3, ad. 4. If the standard for someone’s God being the true God is that every proposition they ever wrote is adequate to Him, then nobody’s God is the true God.
In each of the cases you mention (backside, nostrils, sea-monsters, mutable divine will), the rules of sound interpretation would prevent us from arriving at “literalist” errors without any reference to our theological or philosophical presuppositions. In the case of the charam, the rules of sound interpretation indicate that original human writer understood the charam as a divinely instituted law. There is nothing to indicate that the original human writer was speaking figuratively.
Questionable theological and moral assumptions aside, I think this assumption is the crux of your problem. There is no such thing as a biblical hermeneutic (or any hermeneutic, for that matter) that is innocent of philosophical (or theological, in the biblical case) presuppositions.
Ronald King,
“Intellective” here distinguishes the kind of soul that is peculiar to man from the various kinds of souls that can be attributed to other kinds of beings.
Kyle,
To begin from God’s justice will cause us to approach the biblical text in an invalid way. In other words, we are going to approach the text with a fallacious circular argument.
If we do not believe in the divine inspiration of the text and human intelligence’s proneness to error, we must simply allow the text to speak for itself. Compare this content to what we otherwise construe to be true, we will agree with the text or disagree and thus reveal either an error in the text or in us.
If we believe in the divine inspiration of the text and the poverty of human intelligence, we ought to approach with the docility of allowing the text to inform and correct our thinking. In other words, we will allow the text to correct the errors in our presuppositions about divine justice, not with an attitude of corrective interpretation (i.e. “interpreting” with an eye to correcting errors in the text because its concept of divine justice does not accord with our own presuppositions). Such an approach is a confusion of faith and reason that is really irreconcilable to both reason and faith.
Obviously, our docility toward Scripture need not be fundamentalism, but rather presupposes all the rules of Catholic interpretation, including a studious application of the historical critical approach.
Kyle, I’m no more of a Thomist than you are. My approach to hermeneutics is a direct result of an epistemology that I’ve garnered from a crosshatching of, inter alia, the Vatican II dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum, the corpus of Dionysius the Areopagite and two of Owen Barfield’s seminal works (i.e. “Saving the Appearances” and “poetic diction”). Indeed, I think our Dominican Brother is probably the closest thing to a “thomist” to be found in this conversation, and it was mostly for his sake that I quoted this text, which could not be clearer in indicating that the charam was an execution of divine justice against the sins of these peoples.
I believe you have the intellectual honesty to admit that St. Thomas’ assertion is much more frightening than my own. He makes no qualification about the charam being in any way necessitated as a “least evil alternative,” but rather makes it sound like one of several “good” options available to God.
Moreover, although he does place this law under the genus of judicial precepts, and he does affirm that judicial precepts “were annulled with the coming of Christ,” he also says that “unlike ceremonial precepts…judicial precepts are not deadly. For if a sovereign were to order these judicial precepts to be observed in his kingdom, he would not sin unless perchance they were observed, or ordered to be observed, as though they derived their binding force through being institutions of the Old Law: for it would be a deadly sin to intend to observe them thus” (I-II, 104, 3). Since he gives no indication to the contrary, it would seem that St. Thomas would support a sovereign’s decision to commit genocide as long as it was conducted against a sufficiently sinful nation.
I’d be very interested to hear the explanation of a real Thomist.
Br. Matthew,
The rules of sound interpretation to which I was referring, namely those of the historical critical approach as approved by the Catholic Church since Divino Afflante Spiritu, are simply a tool. Depending on our presuppositions, the tool is certainly capable of being misused, but the tool itself is designed to enable the intellectually honest to understand the intended meaning of the original human author. In other words, by applying the same principles of interpretation, Christopher Hitchens and I – despite the unspeakable difference in our philosophical and theological presuppositions – can agree on the literal sense of a scriptural passage. He will scoff at that meaning and I will scoff at his scoffing, but the meaning itself will not be a matter of debate: The God of Sacred Scripture ordered genocide.
The more we learn the Hebrew language, anthropology, idiomatic expression, etc, the clearer that affirmation becomes. This is thus entirely different from the other cases you mention, where even the most remedial education in historical criticism will immediately disabuse of the preposterous notion that in using anthropomorphic language, the biblical writer revealed his belief that Yahveh had a physical body.
Vague references to sound rules of interpretation and your confident assurance that such rules will lead every intellectually honest person to the same conclusions are not going to do. Walk us through your process of interpreting the text. Show us what your amazing presuppositionless rules are and how they will lead us all inexorably to the same conclusion: that in the mind of an ancient writer was an intention to narrate, in the historical mode, God’s command to spill the guts of infants and children.
Br. Matthew,
Actually it’s the Catechism that makes “vague references to sound rules of interpretation.” If you want to know what it means, Dei Verbum 12 gives a brief overview, and if you want to know more than that I suggest reading “Interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” especially part 1 of that document (http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/pbcinter.htm#3).
The literary form at work in the entire book of Deuteronomy is positively commanded divine law. Together with the ceremonial aspect contained in Leviticus, Deuteronomy is the “book of the law” par excellence. It is legal discourse, expressly commanding and forbidding concrete forms of behavior: “You shall…”, “you shall not…”
According to the literary forms in use, saying that God didn’t really command Israel to slaughter these nations would be as absurd as saying that God didn’t really command Israel to circumcise its sons on the eighth day.
Can you find EVEN ONE magisterial source, one father or one doctor of the Church that EVER suggests that God did not really command the genocide of these nations?
Your interpretation contradicts both the critical methods and methods based on tradition.
Defending the ban:
Thanks for the many thoughtful posts.
Still, I think the real significance of the ban is missed. I have no illusions that our modern sensibilities are superior to the pre-Christian, certainly not to the pre-modern, pre-gaschamber, pre-purge, pre-genocidal Christian culture.
In Homer or Beowulf or even Herodotus’ histories or enlightened Athens, man was capable of horrific atrocities. But to stick closer to the times, I’ll refer to Homer. Significant details are historical enough although he clearly wove a tale about them: a city fell, Iphigenia was probably sacrificed, great warriors killed and the king who led the expedition was murdered on his return by his wife and avenged by his son. The events are actually too astounding and ironic to be made up.
Standard invasion procedure was kill all the men, kill all male children and take women as concubines. (Who knows what happened to female children?) In the Iliad, which was and is the greatest anti-war piece, it’s clear the devastation that can result from one sin, of course compounded by all the other sins of pride and greed and lust for glory that follow.
Then what of the Canaanites sin? We forget about their abomination. What so horrible crime did they commit that God forbade concubinage of the women or sparing children? The Iraelites had just fallen to idol worship at Baal of Peor. Before that, they themselves had all been punished to wander forty years for their lack of Faith that God would deliver them the land. Before that they fell at Sinai where they were to become a nation of priests and had to settle for the Levites, themselves unfit to bring other nations (like those in Canaan) into Covenant with God.
The abominable sin was the worship of Molech. They sacrificed their children, “passed through the fire,” to secure their material well-being. The neighboring Phoenicians cities of Sidon and Tyre (whence the witch-queen Jezebel) and their daughter city, Carthage, did the same. I know nothing of the Canaanites, but the Phoenicians were the world master traders of the ancient world. Even Homer makes derogatory references to these plunderers by the sea, who plundered through trade. Carthage, the plutocratic daughter city, likewise put food and lucre before their own offspring. I have long wondered whether it was their greed and usury that caused this atrocious practice. It solid evidence for Aristotle’s point that usuria is contra naturam because by it we make fertile what is by nature unfertile; Scrooge makes unfertile also what’s fertile: not only does he have no children but he’s squeezing the life from Tiny Tim too. Dante’s scalding desert is a fit place for such. Certainly, the ancient Phoenicians and Canaanites begot money instead of children, or rather put money or material well being before their own children?
DESPITE this abomination, one more accursed than any in the Old Testament, God lifted his ban on the Gibeonites (Joshua 9). Whatever the horrible images of children slaughtered that you cannot shake from your mind, the ban was not an irrefutable law even then. The Gibeonite strategy and the message they send to us is profound and beautiful. I encourage you to read and ponder it.
Another mistake is to confuse the ban with genocide. By the end of Judges the Benjaminites had become as wicked as Sodom and Gemmorah whose citizens all men, women and children were destroyed for their wicked ways. The rest of Israel decided to destroy Benjamin for this. God did not command it. Men commit genocide, God orders destruction. The differences are clear. God has the knowledge to judge and more importantly even in his harshest punishments, he shows mercy.
Finally, by the end of Judges things were so bad that one judge even killed his own daughter because of a foolish oath and in the end every man became a law unto himself. Was this because they had mixed with the neighboring child-sacrificing Canaanites and not destroyed them? Was God in the ban merely showing his mercy to the innocent Canaanite children who had little hope of life in so depraved a society?
We must remember that to kill is not to murder. Life is God’s to give and God’s to take away. It is not murder to kill what God says kill. God knows men’s hearts and knows best. God never commands any crimes. This is one neither. None but four were truly innocent. We do not take the unborn life because it is not ours to take but God’s. We all have a debt of sin which cost a life.
And I don’t mean to be so judgmental of these ancients. For the worship of Molech thrives today. Only we don’t worship the false gods openly but only in our hearts. What else is contraception and abortion?
I love the logic. “They were evil. They killed babies. You got to stop that evil. Kill them all, even the babies.”
Henry,
I think you missed something. It is God’s to give life and take it away. I guess I just try my best to understand why he might have done it in this case. It’s merely an account. He has His plans, we ours. But it is His judgement to determine the beginning and the end. To call this murder is rash.
I simply don’t see the ban as a crime. And it is distinct from genocide which is begun by men’s judgment who claim they act on God’s behalf without God’s actual sanction, just as the Israelites regretted the decision to exterminate the Benjaminites.
John
I think you missed many things. You didn’t anwer about the logic of “they are evil if they kill babies, so kill the babies for them.” The issue is not “crime.” The issue are questions of morality. Is God good and just? Will he command that which is not just? If it is God who takes life in this means, would you accept an abortionist who said they were just following God’s commands for them? Why or why not?
If it is God who takes life in this means, would you accept an abortionist who said they were just following God’s commands for them? Why or why not?
That’s silly. And you are not addressing my distinction between charam and genocide.
Again, I have answered your comment, “They are evil if they kill the babies, so kill the babies for them.” Here again you fail to address my distinction. Now, my distinctions may be incorrect, but they are worthy, I think, of addressing.
That said, I’ll have to spend more time on the thoughtful discussions on these various threads.
John,
I think between the charam and genocide you’ve given a distinction without a difference. Genocide is generally defined as “the systematic destruction in whole or in part of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.” This is EXACTLY what God commanded in Deuteronomy 20 and in a number of secondary biblical texts, such as 1 Samuel 15.
John Paul II cites Vatican II to list genocide among intrinsic evils, “acts which per se and in themselves independently of circumstances are always seriously wrong by reason of their object” (Veritatis Splendor 80).
How can God command something that is intrinsically evil? Henry, Kyle and others try to evade the problem by claiming that God didn’t really command genocide. You seem to be evading the problem by claiming that the command to perform genocide wasn’t really genocide.
All the while, a perfectly reasonable and satisfactory answer is provided in Scripture: God had to command genocide or else be unfaithful to his covenant.
DAVID NICKOL – though the following comment is a also addressed to any and every interested reader, it concerns you and engages you specifically:
It has been weeks since I have peeked in on this discussion. I left it because Kyle declared on more than one occasion that if he were to become convinced of the position I was defending on how biblical inspiration and inerrancy relate to 1st Samuel 15, he would fall away from Catholicism and be an atheist. For that reason I am still leaving that discussion alone on this blog for the most part. I have checked back in because I wanted to see if Mr. David Nickol had contributed something substantially new and worthwhile to dispute my controversial charge of material heresy against the writers of the footnotes in the New American Bible. He said he was going to give some time to it over the then-forthcoming weekend. Now I see that he had nothing new to add, no unrefuted point that he had not raised before. I did not think it was possible to be disappointed without being even remotely surprised, but that’s how I must describe my reaction. I am grateful that I was only asked for two examples! As I said, I could give many more, page after ridiculous page of them.
Here is what he said:
“It is definitely not an infallibly defined truth that Mark could not possibly have believed those he referred to as brothers and sisters of Jesus to be be true siblings.” (May 3, 2010 at 9:09 am )
It is a re-hash of his previous question from April 29 at 7:20 pm
“Am I stating your position correctly by saying that it is impermissible for a Catholic to maintain that Mark believed Jesus had true brothers and sisters…”
To which I replied at 10:28 pm:
“If Mark believed that Mary had other sons but did not assert it, that would not be a problem. But if the meaning of the word “brothers” in the passage is intended to be an assertion that other biological sons of Mary were present, then either the Church’s doctrine on Mary’s perpetual virginity would be false, or that passage in Mark would not be inerrant. There is no logical middle ground there for a faithful Catholic to take a stand.”
What a shame that the best he could do was (re-)assert a point that had already been rendered irrelevant, but could not address my actual point. As I said earlier, what bears on whether the footnote writers of the NAB were affirming one or another heresy, either the denial of biblical inerrancy (which is the doctrine that forbids us to believe that the inspired authors were in error in anything thay asserted) or the denial of the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Mother, depends not so much on what the evangelist believed, but on what he asserted. If his use of the Greek ἀδελφός was intended to assert that any other biological son of Mary was present besides our Lord Jesus, then either Mark’s Gospel is in error or the dogma of the perpetual virginity of Our Lady is a false doctrine. Insofar as the footnote writers are interpreting Mark as asserting that Mary bore other children after our Lord’s Nativity, they are certainly promoting one heresy or the other. There is no logical room for any middle ground.
As for the second point, when I proved, concerning the footnoted comment in Mark 9 (NAB) claming that our Lord mistakanly believed and taught that His parousia was imminent and would occur within the lifetime of His first century disciples, that this was a proposition condemned by Pius XII, all you could say was that the point I had raised was relevant to the question of the status of the Syllabus.
In other words, unless Pius XII was under the charism of infallibility when he condemned the errors of modernism (a matter about which I am not admitting any doubt), you are fine with the idea of calling into serios doubt propositions in a papal syllabus before calling into serious question the orthodoxy of the footnotes of the NAB. That’s your prerogative. I can only note in passing that you are implicitly admitting that the statement in the NAB footnote is irreconcilable with the statements of Pius XII in Lamentabile Sane, and that one cannot accept both as true. Well, I agree, and since the statements of Pius XII are part of an unbroken tradition of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, taught by the Fathers and promulgated in the Councils of Florence, Trent, and Vatican I (and even, when understood rightly, Dei Verbum in Vatican II), and the statement in the NAB footnote is contrary to that tradition, I choose the position of the Popes and the Councils, and you choose the opposing view as exemplified in the footnotes and chapter headings of the New American Bible and the articles in the New Jerome Bible Commentary, because they are in conformity with “the mainstream of Catholic Biblical scholarship for the last 30 years” (4/28 10:04 pm) which you rightly judge me as, in no small part, rejecting. In fact, I have serious problems with most of the “mainstream” of “bible scholarship” for well over a hundred years. I think that most of what came into fashion under the German anti-Catholic Kuturkampf of Otto von Bismarck is as seriously tainted as any pro-Nazi Holocaust-denier historical-revisionist propaganda. It’s just an earlier season’s fruit off the same evil tree. The most significant difference is not who is being scapegoated and lied about, but the fact that while the more recent set made a very terrible bloody mess for less than a decade some 60 to 70 years ago and now it is permanently condemned (and quite rightly) to a far-out fringe, the older set of lies took a seemingly permanent root in academic scriptural studies and was welcomed without due critical examination into Catholic academia from Protestantism. But the air of academic authority exuded by the latter set does not totally hide the stench of excrement it gives off, still detectable by those who know it when they smell it. Just because the older set of lies about the authority of the NEW Israel and the origin of Her scriptures still have considerable scholarly currency doesn’t mean they aren’t basically the same diabolically defecated Ess-Aytch-Eye-Tee. Satan may offer a thousand and one flavors, but sin is sin.
Kevin,
From what you’ve written, I’m not sure to precisely which NAB footnotes you are referring. I think you are referring to the footnotes corresponding to Mark 6:3 and 9:1, neither of which contains heresy. Let’s look at the assertions in question:
“On the other hand, Mark may have understood ['brother' and 'sister'] literally; see also Mt 3, 31-32; 12, 46; 13, 55-56; lk 8, 19; Jn 7, 3.5. The question of meaning would not have arisen but for the faith of the church in Mary’s perpetual virginity.”
The reason this is not heretical is because it neither asserts nor says that Mark has asserted that Mary wasn’t a perpetual virgin. Rather, it questions whether Mark KNEW Mary was a perpetual virgin. When I say “Bill is Bob’s brother” I’m not claiming to know that Bill and Bob have the same mother. I am not claiming to know that one or both were not adopted. Maybe they grew up together in a foster family. Maybe Bill’s mom died and his dad remarried before having Bob. In simply calling them brothers, I’m not claiming to know much less speak about any of these things.
If we said that Mark may have thought Jesus’ brothers were really sons of Mary, we are neither committing heresy nor accusing Mark of heresy, but simply accusing him of now knowing an article of divine revelation that hadn’t yet been defined by the Church. It would be no different than if we said that Mark may have thought Mary’s conception was like any other.
It would certainly be heretical if we took Mark’s assertion to be not merely a passive assumption but a positive assertion that Mary had other kids. Saying “Mark may have thought that Jesus’ brothers and sisters were Mary’s biological children” is entirely different from saying “Mark tells us that Mary had other biological children.”
As a matter of biblical scholarship, however, I think it is quite likely that Mark named James, Joses, Judas and Simon as Jesus’ brothers precisely because he and his audience knew these men were not sons of Mary. Mark 15:40 tells us that among the women looking on the crucifixion from distance was “Mary the mother of the younger James and of Joses.” She appears again in Mark 15:47 as “Mary the mother of Joses.” She appears again in Mark 16:1 as “Mary the mother of James.” If this was Jesus’ mother why doesn’t Mark say so? John 19:25 answers that question definitively by letting us know that she is “his Mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas.”
In other words, Mark’s own Gospel tells us that, unless Jesus’ grandparents named two daughters “Miriam,” two of his brothers (James and Joses) were second cousins. What about the other two: Simon and Judas?
A number of interesting things can be said. Simon the Zealot or Cananean appears next to Jude Thaddeus on all the apostolic lists (Mt 10:3, Mk 3:18, Lk 6:15-16, Acts 1:13) and often sandwiched at the end of these lists between Jude Thaddeus and Judas Iscariot. John takes pains to tell us that the father of Judas Iscariot is named Simon. This is particularly interesting because of the mutual association of Iscariot, Cananean and Zealot with the Sicarii: the movement of armed resistance against Roman occupation.
Luke tells us that Jude Thaddeus is the “son of James.” The author of the Epistle of Jude begins by identifying himself as “Jude, a servent of Jesus Christ and brother of James.” Given the similarly Jewish styles of this epistle with the Epistle of James and the Gospel of Matthew, I don’t think it unlikely that the author of Jude was calling himself “brother of James” in the sense of Christian fellowship and “call no man your father.”
Let’s complete the speculative soap opera: There once was a man named Alphaeus, who had a son named Levi, who became a tax collector. Alphaeus’ wife died and he remarried a girl named Mary, who bore him two sons: Simon and James. Simon was disgusted with his half-brother for selling out and left home to join the resistance. Simon had a son named Judas and, later, James also had a son named Judas. Mary remarried Clopas and bore him Joses, who was a small boy at the time of Jesus’ public ministry.
Jesus met Levi the tax collector and told him “follow me.” He did, was restored to his family and was renamed “Gift of the Lord,” or as we know him, “Matthew.” Simon the Apostle is so very obscure in the New Testament because he is none other than the father of the betrayer. We do not have the call narrative of these apostles – James, Jude, Simon and Judas – because they were always there. They were the Lord’s brothers and they were among St. Paul’s early adversaries, although, of course, Judas Iscariot was dead by then.
It’s really remarkable that Jesus left his mother in the hands of one of his fisherman converts. In doing this, he abrogated the rights and alleviated the responsibility of his kinsmen. It was as much a sign of his distrust of them as it was a sign of trust in John. It’s no wonder this event was conveniently skipped over while James, Jude, Simon and Joses were all still alive. It’s also something the Lord would not have done if Mary had another son by blood.
This also helps understand how Matthew’s gospel is both the first and last of the synoptic gospels. Written originally in Aramaic before the Council of Jerusalem, it was embarrassingly unsympathetic to the decision rendered in favor of the Gentiles. All this about gentile dogs and not one yohd passing from the law. There is no “Q,” but rather the long voyage of Matthew from Aramaic to Greek passed by way of the Council, Mark’s Gospel, Luke’s Gospel and the Destruction of Jerusalem. Matthew himself was quite old and died before or at the time of the Council of Jerusalem, which helps explain why getting his Gospel into Greek was such a long and difficult process.
I think Mark knew all of this perfectly well and names Jesus’ “brothers” quite purposefully to give us some background into the unfolding Church politics of the fifties, a decade in which the Lord’s family is proving a most distinct nuissance to Peter and Mark, who have tried to be the party of the middle ground between James the lesser and Paul. Mark is therefore quite intentional in making the Lord appear somewhat standoffish with his family.
Please regard everything here as speculative and hypothetical, of course. I have purposely avoided the clutter of hypothetical language (I think, etc) for the sake of clarity and good writing. I don’t regard any of this as certain.
The only part in which I have a high degree of confidence is in what I’ve written about Matthew and his Gospel.
Kevin,
In the last post, I dealt with the non-heretical nature of the NAB’s claim that Mark may have thought Jesus’ brothers and sisters were children of his same mother. It is not heretical because, if the NAB is correct, Mark is simply taking the matter at face value without claiming to know anything beyond it. It would be equivalent to a person seeing me with my adopted cousins and not realizing they were adopted. He might mistakenly think they are my natural and biological cousins, but in describing them as my cousins, he certainly hasn’t made any claim of knowledge as regards the intricacies of our family tree. He certainly hasn’t erred in his description. He hasn’t considered, much less denied, the possibility that my cousins were adopted.
I argue against the NAB’s assertion on the grounds that Mark himself identifies two of these “brothers” (i.e. James and Joses) as children of a “Mary” other than Jesus’ mother. Mark notes her presence during the death, burial and resurrection of the Lord, calling her not the mother of Jesus but the mother of James and Joses. Since John removes all doubt as to her identity (19:25), we may safely conclude that Mark’s decision to identify her not as Jesus’ mother but as the mother of James and Joses was informed by his knowledge that this Mary was not Jesus’ mother. I further made the case that the other two, “Judas and Simon,” are Apostles whose relation to Jesus is even further removed.
In this post, I will treat the non-heretical nature of the NAB’s claim that Jesus’ assertion that “some standing here will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come in power” (Mk 9:1) was “more likely…a reference to the immanant parousia” than “the establishment by GOd’s power of his kingdom on earth in and through the Church.”
The reason this is not heretical is because the Church has never defined – much less dogmatically so – the nature or extent of Christ’s human knowledge during his earthly ministry. Christ explicitly stated that he didn’t know the hour of his Parousia (Mark 13:32). In light of Christological dogmas defined in later centuries, the best explanation of these passages – in my opinion – is that in becoming man, the incarnate son chose to remain unconscious of all knowledge which might threaten man’s salvation.
This being said, however, Mark himself gives us a vivid account of the call and training of the Apostles to prepare them to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth. “The Gospel must first be preached to all nations” (Mk 13:10). “And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” (13:27). Even taking Mark’s Gospel in isolation, it would seem that Jesus understood his Parousia as always immanent: “Take heed, watch and pray…lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Watch” (13:32-37).
The Lord clearly taught his disciples that his coming must always be seen as immanent and, indeed, it is always immanent. The Parousia, which will definitively take place at the end of time, also takes place whenever a person hears the Gospel, experiences repentence, receives the sacraments or dies. It also takes place during crises, natural disasters and wars. This view is less rooted in subsequent Catholic doctrine than in a careful reading of the New Testament. Luke’s narrative of Stephen’s death gives a vivid confirmation of this principle (Acts 7:55-56).
Two corrections:
1) I quoted Mark 13:10 and 13:27 as evidence that, even during his earthly ministry, Jesus recognized that his definitive Parousia would take place after an extremely long period of time.
2) The last sentence of my post is out of context. I meant that sentence to be the culmination of an argument that the literal meaning of Mark 9:1 was a preparation for martyrdom. I don’t know what happened to that argument!
Please regard this as the last paragraph of my post:
Jesus explicitly said only the Father knew the hour of his coming. The NAB is therefore entirely mistaken to think it “likely” or even “possible” that he thought it was immanent. As far as Jesus was concerned, it could just as well be in a few years as a few millennia. In saying that there were some who would not taste death before seeing the kingdom of God in his power, the Lord was “more likely” referring to martyrs whose realization of the kingdom would sanctify their deaths. Luke’s narrative of Stephen’s death gives a vivid confirmation of this principle (Acts 7:55-56).
Carl,
I bow to the Master! Thank you so much for the considerable time and effort you put into your charitable fraternal correction. May our Lord bless you many times over for it!
You have convinced me that my position on the NAB footnotes was hasty, totally uncharitable and judgemental. Your defenses of the status of the footnotes I brought up against my charge of material heresy were not only convincing and more than adequate – they were superb.
My position about the overall trustworthiness of those footnotes is still not substantially changed, though I doubt you would disagree with me on that score anyway. I should also add that while I was reading through them systematically, looking for more heresies, I not only could not find any (I am halfway through the OT and now I am doubtful that I will find anything there – I might still find something in the NT, however!), but I was surprised at how helpful many of the footnotes were. This has gone a long way toward softening my hard stance against the NAB, and the bitterness I have harbored against the authors of the footnotes is beginning to fade considerably. I still say that there are glaring problems with them and that, overall, they can be spiritually dangerous for simple, non-theologically educated Catholics, and that the NAB, complete with footnotes, should not be given as a gift to children for their First Communion (that’s when I got mine), but should be reserved for scholars whose education prepares them adequately to deal with what is between those covers. Again, I would be surprised if you disagreed.
Part of what hardened me toward those footnotes was a position on defined Church teaching and a conviction of what was dogmatically and infallibly defined as de fide that was, I am sorry to have to admit, quite naive. I was under the assumption that Vatican II was infallible because it was an Ecumenical Council. I was certain that Providentissimus Deus was as binding as Humane Vitae, and that if they, as encyclicals, were not strictly infallible, they were, more or less, at least in mind, As Good As Infallible – a position that I now see as indefensible. I was treating Lamentabile Sane and Humani Generis the same way (as to the latter, you already knew that). To my mind, the distinction between infallible dogma and the declarations in those documents was a distinction without a meaningful difference.
Your speculations about Matthew, as well as your more certain convictions, are essentially the same as my own, though thought out in greater detail (Though I made the connection between Matthew as a son of Alpheus and James the son of Alpheus as a brother of Jesus (in a sense permitted for Catholics to believe), and therefore that Matthew and Jesus were kin, I did not connect Judas Iscariot to the other Judas who was related to James and Joses – but it makes a great deal of sense). That Aramaic Matthew should the mysterious Source (Q) that connects the Greek Synoptics is pretty much the Bernard Orchard version of the Griesbach Hypothesis. I am fully convinced that Orchard’s Two Gospel Hypothesis is sound, and I think it is the only one that squares with Dei Verbum. But as I am no longer convinced that Dei Verbum is infallible, I must now regard my opposition to Markan priority and Q, not as an opposition to something that was virtually material heresy, but as an opposition to a theory that I judge to be false on grounds of reason, not on grounds of faith. My opposition to the Documentary Hypothesis is now of the same character – not a faithful opposition to a heretical theory, but as intellectual dissent against a doubtful academic orthodoxy.
My position on biblical inerrancy remains the same, but I am no longer sure that those who take positions that are incompatible with my understanding of biblical inerrancy are also dissenting from Church teaching on the latter. I am no longer sure what is and what is not infallible teaching, and thus I feel no further need to call out dissent from it. It is very freeing, because, despite the impression I am sure I have left, in this topic and elsewhere in this and other blogs, I do not enjoy discerning error in people’s positions on the faith. I only did it when I felt compelled by my conscience to do so. No doubt such occasions will not come up as often now that I see a distinction between my position on biblical inerrancy and the official, defined Church dogma. I don’t have to take issue with differences with the former as differences with the latter, and that is how I prefer it. I am much happier minding my own business.
I will keep looking for the heresies in the NAB NT. But I am no longer sure I will find any.
One more thing – I thought that when our Lord said that there would be some there who would not taste death before seeing the Kingdom of God come in power He was talking about the Transfigurationm which takes place immediately after that statement in all three synoptics. It seems obvious to me, on reflection, that this event, following immediately after He made that promise, should be connected to it. What else was the Transfiguration for? It was a foretaste of glory. After all, He did not say that there would be some who would enter that Kingdom in their lifetime, only that they would see it. They did.
Kevin,
The problem with the NAB footnotes is that they presuppose something that ought not be presupposed, namely an adequate knowledge of all the Church’s teaching, especially on the subject of Scripture.
The NAB footnotes are intellectually tenuous and extremely dated as far as biblical scholarship is concerned. They might still be marginally useful to a sound, well-catechized Catholic who has very little knowledge of Scripture. Other than that, they’re value is pretty much historical: They provide wonderful insight into the muck-headedness of 1970s American Catholicism. They’re actually kind of funny. These people were holding their noses high and strutting around pretending to be such experts on Scripture. For all their degrees and professional qualifications, they were like eighth graders lording it over the seventh graders. Human beings are sometimes very silly creatures.
I am a bit nervous about what you write about the authority of PD, LS and HG. These documents while not being strictly infallible have a very, very high degree of authority. They do not always state matters equally well, nor are all their statements immune to criticism, but these documents do not err.
Let me give you a brief example that is very relevant to all of our current discussions. Leo XIII says, “But [the expositor] must not on [account of his duty to follow in the footsteps of the Fathers] consider that it is forbidden, when just cause exists, to push inquiry and exposition beyond what the Fathers have done; provided he carefully observes the rule so wisely laid down by St. Augustine-not to depart from the literal and obvious sense (Lt. obvio sensu), except only where reason makes it untenable or necessity requires.”
This text could easily be taken to mean that the literal sense is always obvious and that, in some circumstances, one can reject the literal sense. The problem is not that Leo has committed an error, but that he is using the term “literal sense” very ambiguously.
Pope Pius XII puts the matter much more clearly when he writes, “What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious (Lt. saepenumero non ita in aperto est) in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use” (Divino Afflante Spiritu).
As you can see, “apparent” would be a better translation than “obvious” in Divino Afflante Spiritu. I stronly suspect that the translator was deliberately (and disingenuously) trying to emphasize how this encyclical seeks to “correct” Providentissimus Deus.
It’s true that DAS “corrects” PD but in the sense of counter-balancing rather than contradicting.
Leo’s statement is not at all erroneous and indeed becomes perfectly sensible if we replace “literal sense” with what we today call the “literalist sense” (i.e. the meaning that seems most obvious to us today, regardless of whether it was the intended meaning of the ancient writer). One is never allowed to depart from the literal sense, but one is sometimes allowed, if motivated by good reasons, to depart from the literalist sense.
Relying largely on principles defined in Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, The 1993 PBC document puts the matter even more clearly than Pius XII:
“It is not only legitimate, it is also absolutely necessary to seek to define the precise meaning of texts as produced by their authors—what is called the “literal” meaning. St. Thomas Aquinas had already affirmed the fundamental importance of this sense (S. Th. I, q. 1,a. 10, ad 1). The literal sense is not to be confused with the “literalist” sense to which fundamentalists are attached. It is not sufficient to translate a text word for word in order to obtain its literal sense. One must understand the text according to the literary conventions of the time . . . The literal sense of Scripture is that which has been expressed directly by the inspired human authors. Since it is the fruit of inspiration, this sense is also intended by God, as principal author. One arrives at this sense by means of a careful analysis of the text, within its literary and historical context.”
The problem with this text is that it has lost a sense of the limited value of the literalist sense. In other words, it doesn’t go far enough in acknowledging that the “literalist sense” is generally correct and should only be departed from for weighty reasons.
None of these four documents contain error but, unlike dogma, their formulas are reformable. The PBC document is by far the least authoritative, but it is also the best and most accurate in terms of what it teaches. In other words, unlike dissenting to an encyclical or conciliar document, dissenting to the PBC wouldn’t make you immoral or guilty of a canonical delict. It makes you an idiot.
Kevin,
On Matthew: I don’t think he was a kinsman of Jesus. Whereas James was the son of Alphaeus and “his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas,” Levi/Matthew was probably the son of Alphaeus from a previous wife. Matthew was probably as old or older than “the other Mary,” who was probably barely more than a girl when she married a much older Alphaeus. James is kinsman of Jesus not through Alphaeus but through the other Mary.
I am confident that “Simon, the brother of Jesus” is “Simon the Zealot” is “Simon, the father of Judas Iscariot,” but I am not at all confident that he is the son of Alphaeus or of the other Mary. Simon’s son Judas was almost certainly much older than Mary and Clopas’ son Joses.
According to my theory, Mary gave birth to Simon when she was maybe 13-15 years old. James was born maybe 5 years later. Alphaeus dies. Simon gets married and fathers Judas in his late teens or early twenties. Mary marries Clopas and gives birth to Joses in her late 30s or early 40s. Therefore, during the public ministry of Jesus, I suspect that Levi-Matthew and the other Mary were about 65, Simon was about 50, James and the Blessed Mother were about 45, Judas and Jesus were about 30, and the other Judas (i.e. Thaddeus) was about 20, a little older than John the Apostle.
The weakest point of my argument is that Simon, the brother of Jesus, is the other Mary’s eldest son. It is just as likely perhaps moreso that he was brother of Jesus from another unmentioned family member. In any case it is impossible that “Simon and Judas” might be Jesus’ direct siblings when “James and Joses” – sons of the other Mary – are mentioned first in the list of brothers.
I also think that Judas Iscariot is the Judas mentioned as “brother of Jesus” because, even though both Judas’ are one generation removed from Jesus, Judas Iscariot would have been roughly the same age as Jesus. I suspect that, growing up, Judas Iscariot and Jesus were the closest thing either one had to a real brother. I would guess that they saw each other a couple times a year – whenever the Nazarenes made the trip down to Jerusalem – and were quite good friends. Indeed, as Judas (and for that matter the other apostles who were Jesus’ kinsman) saw Jesus give greater preference to his converts (Peter, James, John, Philip, Nathanael/Bartholomew), I imagine that he felt a special resentment toward Jesus.
On that note, I remember feeling a terrible resentful of a childhood friend who left me in the dust as he became more popular. He did not become the Savior of mankind, but has become a marginally successful comedian. If you’re interested, search “Mike O’Connell” on youtube. I’ll warn you: He’ll make you laugh but you’re going to feel like you need a shower afterward.
The age scheme I just provided doesn’t work. According to my theory, Joses was a little too young to be an Apostle. He’d be maybe 12-14, which puts his mother at around 55, which would put Simon around 40 and Judas Iscariot around 20 and the other Judas even younger than John the Apostle. It just doesn’t work.
It’s all very hypothetical, of course, but I retract the speculation that Simon is the son of the other Mary. It seems more likely that he was related to Jesus by another person.
On the Transfiguration: I certainly agree Mark 9:1 is a reference to the Transfiguration but not quite as you think. In other words, I think the Transfiguration mutually illustrates the realization of Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and Prophets (Elijah) that motivates the Martyrs to “taste death.”
“Seeing that the kingdom of God has come in power” is not so much about an extraordinary mystical vision, such as Stephen’s, or a miraculous supernatural event such as was seen by Peter, James and John. Rather, it is about the realization of the centurion: “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39).
It’s about the logic of martyrdom: Seeing that the kingdom of God has come gives the power to witness, pour out one’s blood and taste death. We need to remember how to get back into the space in between the Gospels and the Epistles. This is a wonderful example of it.
“We heard this voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word made more sure. You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in the dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:18-19).
It’s all about how faith makes us eyewitnesses of Christ’s glory to such an extent that we must proclaim this faith to others, even if it costs us our lives.
So our Lord was saying that some of the disciples would not taste death before they were martyred?
No, he is saying that some of the disciples will be martyred (“taste death”) BECAUSE they “see the kingdom of God come with power.” Their faith and conversion will be so powerful in making them witnesses to Christ that they will suffer anything rather than deny their allegiance.
This is why Christ said some of his disciples will “taste” death. Martyrs don’t really die, but – like Christ – they merely taste it.