Nostri Patri?

So, I must admit, I failed my expectations for the weekend. Fortunately, however, I *might* be done with my thesis, so all is not lost. I am going to try, though, to finish the 3 posts I promised. So this is post number 2.
In my last post, I suggested that there is a lot in theology that is untenable. If it does not help people pastorally or ethically, and preferably in both ways, then it is rather useless for religion. This does not mean we should just do away with anything we think is extra, as many parts of religion (for example, vestments, hymns, incense and liturgies, etc) have powerful effects on people pastorally. We do have to consider, however, whether this is the case for any given issue. For example, after Vatican II, most religious sisters were no longer required to wear habits, and now most in the Western world do not. However, in Asian and African countries, many sisters still wear habits, as it is understood and perceived differently in these cultures.
To continue along this line of thinking, however, I want to bring into question the entirety of the Patristics period. I have known many professors and students alike who hold strongly to the early Fathers. After all, it seems, these men established the ground rules for theology. In fact, during the Reformation, John Calvin and Martin Luther largely drew from Augustine's thought rather than the more comprehensive Thomas Aquinas or any other Medieval theologian.
Don't get me wrong here. I don't doubt the impact that the early Church Fathers had. If nothing else, I can appreciate how much they contributed to Christian understandings of, well, just about everything. However, this is what makes me quite nervous. The names of Jerome, Augustine, Athanasius, Gregory of Nissa, Gregory Naziansus, John Chrysostom, Origen and others are almost untouchable. We can't call anything they say into question or we seem like bad Christians. But I am right now calling this into question. Allow me to explain why.
In the first place, they introduced into Christianity a lot of Hellenistic thought, particularly of a Platonic nature. This is not necessarily bad, but it led to a lot of confusion and intellectual acrobatics. The Semitic tradition of Palestine did not require a Platonic understanding of the world to work. The Platonic view of God tends to be utterly transcendent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and profoundly other. The Biblical view of God tends to be much more personal and relational. The entire Bible can be read as a story of the developing relationship of this God YHWH and the people he creates and develops a loving relationship with. It is a profound love story that has given countless millions hope in this life when none other was there. Contrast this with the Platonic God who is so utterly other that, as St Thomas says, we can only say anything is like God by analogy and not by any degree of reality. This creates the great problem of trying to resolve the apparent contradictions of the Bible, a book written by Jews in the Palestine region, with a Greek understanding of the Ultimate. The two are not compatible because they were never meant to be. The Biblical understanding of God was not oriented at informing Greek philosophers just as Plato (despite what Origen thinks) was not trying to introduce Semitic Monotheism into Greek culture.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think we can understand Christianity better using other subjects of knowledge. I appreciate theologians who incorporate psychology, sociology, evolution and other sciences into their theology, and I owe a lot to St Thomas' combination of Aristotelian ethics with Christianity. However, the Patristics took it all a step further. Rather than using Plato's philosophy as a tool for theology, they tried to force an unhappy marriage between the two. Thus, we get the Christological controversy.
I cannot stand the Christological debates of the third through fifth centuries in the least. These were the great debates where the best minds in the theological world tried to define God. Out of these debates we get the Trinitarian "formula" and the conception of two natures within the person of Jesus. Words like "hypostatis," "prosopon," "physis," "natura," "ousious," "sarx," and "anima" were thrown around like candy at a parade. If none of those words meant anything to you, don't worry. Often times people were condemned for getting these ideas wrong, or putting them in the wrong order. If you want to be a good, orthodox Christian, you have to say that Jesus is 1 ousious with the Father, the Trinity is 3 prosopa but 1 natura, Jesus has 2 physeis but is 1 prosopon, and Jesus has a fully human sarx, anima, and logos which is combined but not mixed with his divine natura and logos. If you missed one of these apparently vitally important notions, congratulations, you're condemned for the next 1600 years as a heretic.
I have four big reasons for why I don't like the Christological controversy. 1) It's extremely arrogant. It seems rather stupid to condemn others for not believing God to be exactly constituted the way that you think God is, even though the Platonic view (which gives us the lovely vocabulary list above) insists that God is wholly other and everything is related to God purely by analogy. Furthermore, none of these terms makes any real sense, either for human beings or for God. At some point, it all becomes a competition to see how complex of a Christology you can derive before you have to admit that God is mysterious. It's not enough to say Jesus is God but the Father is God and how that works is a divine mystery. Rather, we are forced to say Jesus has a human body, human mind and human soul that is somehow unmixed with God but also has a fully divine nature and the way they're combined is the mystery. 2) It's all unbiblical. At no point does the Father say, "I am one in ousious with the Son" nor does Jesus ever say, "My divine logos is willing, but my human logos is weak." Yes, there is some contradiction in the Bible. But as Kierkegaard and Tillich point out, part of being a Christian is accepting what seems absurd. We don't have to come up with an overly complicated formula to completely understand it. 3) These terms are utterly confusing. Not everyone could agree on their meanings when the formulae were established and they left that to other theologians to figure out. If this seems minor, let me reiterate: Men were condemned because they did not use the right Greek term for substance or soul but the men who won did not know exactly why they won. And yet we still consider this orthodox? 4) These ideas can no longer be held with our modern understandings of the universe. We no longer assume a soul-body dualism that allows us to maintain sarx vs anima anymore and so teasing out all of these distinctions is not only useless but a waste of time today. We have a more nuanced anthropology of humanity and (I hope) a better understanding of God and if we talk about God's "substance" today, we should expect to be ridiculed.
Of course, there are also many other reasons why I think we should be reluctant to give the Fathers any real credibility today. Augustine was clearly a misogynist who often changed his mind to argue against different people and used dirty politics when he lost (such as when he originally lost against Pelagius). Origen reportedly castrated himself and wanted to be martyred but his mother hid his clothes so he was afraid to run outside naked in front of the Roman soldiers (Oedipal much?). Jerome was also a misanthrope who went to live in a cave to get away from all people. Nobody during the Patristics period was pure, and yet, we maintain their views as if there are no problems. If any of their writings were published today, they would immediately be criticized for being misogynistic, anti-semites who employ logical fallacies and rhetorical showmanship in order to win over their audiences. And yet, this is what we consider true doctrine.
Now, once again, I do not mean to say we need to get rid of everything the early Fathers said. I do think, however, that we need to realize that the burden of proof now lies on them, rather than modern critics. If we excuse away their odious attitudes as relics of an age past, we must also excuse away their doctrine as relics of an age past. Rather than accepting all they say, except for the parts that are clearly not useable, I think we should rather only accept those things from them which are useable. It is time we move beyond the ignorant views of a bygone era and begin to view Christianity as something more positive.

To die from a broken heart.

"Deus caritas est" we are informed in Masses on Sunday. Furthermore, back in the 80s and 90s people would proudly hold signs at sporting events that, rather than coming up with clever acronyms for ESPN, would have simply John 3:16 written on them. "God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son. That whosoever should believe on Him, should not perish but have everlasting life."
What a powerful message that is. I sometimes wonder how it was that God the Son was able to endure all that He did. For our sins He was nailed to the cross. For our iniquities he was wounded. By the very hands of a man whom Jesus forgave, his side was pierced by a spear. To the two robbers, men rightfully convicted of their crimes, Jesus told them to "be of good cheer," for they would "be at [His] right hand in paradise [that] day." He asked for forgiveness for the very men who had crucified Him. Barth tells us that Jesus' death reconciled all men, that the Jews, who had been God's promised people, were now joint heirs with the Gentiles in the Kingdom of God. Von Balthasar tells us that in His death His true empathy and love is shown as He took upon himself the greatest of all human suffering, willingly.
But I wonder what God thinks when He sees one of His people fall? I wonder if God can experience a broken heart? Did the Father ache to see the Son crucified in Golgotha? Did the Fall cause the Father to weep? Was the flood just rain water, or was it God weeping for the state of humanity?
I realize in exploring this question, I am openly granting to God a very human-like demeanor. And why shouldn't I? Are we not made in God's image? Athanasius even attests that we are made in God's likeness. Therefore, when we feel sorrow and heartbreak, is that not a sample of the kind of heartbreak that God must feel? I feel that this is the case.
Victor Hugo so poetically writes "There will be more joy in heaven over the tears of one repentant sinner than the white robes of a hundred good men." The power in this sentence is overwhelming. What good is the Christian if he can only get the attention of the 99 sheep? The 99 already will do good. The 99 are fine by themselves. It is not for the righteous that we should seek blessings, but for those who are lost.
We live in a loveless little world where hatred, greed, and envy abound. Let us reach out with open hearts and loving embraces to those who are in most need of a loving word, or a kind hand. If God is love, and we worship the very same God, than love should be our motto and our main virtue. We must show the world the true Christian spirit by our good will. A favorite hymn of mine states in the refrain, "And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes they'll know we are Christians by our love."

A sacrifice to be made

I hope to not offend too many people with the nature of this post. I've been thinking back on a lot of Christian apologists/theologians and their reasoning why Christianity makes sense.
In all reality, there does need to be some kind of explanation, because Christians have to answer to the question why we worship some guy who the Romans crucified two thousand years ago.
So the explanation usually goes that Jesus had to die in order to sanctify humanity once again. St Augustine said that humanity was stained with the sin of Adam, or original sin, and thus every one needed saving, no matter how good they are. This leads to the Christian emphasis on baptism and more especially the Catholic defense for infant baptism. Karl Barth re-emphasized Augustine's words and said that Christ was almost like a second Adam, but that His sacrifice by far overshadows Adam's sin. Athanasius said that Jesus had to die in order to reconcile us with God, and St Anselm said that a God-man needed to pay the price for our sins. Hans Urs von Balthasar said that Christ had to endure all things that humans endured in order to have lived a truly human life, including death.
All these men, I think, were right. It is true that humanity needs saving. However, I will respectuflly disagree with Barth and Augustine and state that there is a lot more than the fall of Adam that needs reconciling.
I think of where man is now, and where man has been before. We consider animals to be sinless, but this is because animals are innocent and stupid. We humans have gained great stores of knowledge, but what have we done with it? We possess the ability to destroy all life on the planet several times over. We have long histories of bloody wars, some lasting many, many years (the forty years' war and the hundred years' war, for example). We take away people's freedom and put them to work as slaves, or in internment camps, or traffick them, or put them to work in sweatshops. We take revenge for our perceived wrongs. We take more than we need, limiting how much others can have. We elevate ourselves above other people or debase ourselves below them. We steal, cheat, lie and take no heed for the damage we do.
And that's only what we do to each other. We also have many sins against nature. As the most intelligent of all species on the planet, we alone have the ability to help maintain the natural balance of the earth. But instead we build polluting factories. We kill off native species and introduce foreign ones. We spray pesticides and herbicides into fields, killing off naturally occuring life and poisoning the ground water. We deplete forests, ore reserves, oil fields. We drain wet lands to build mini malls. We clear out rain forests for cattle grazing. We take and take from the earth and never think to give back. Man is the only animal that can prevent ecological disaster, yet it seems that all we do right now is cause it.
So, while the weight of Adam's sin might be a heavy burden for Christ to bear, I think it is nothing compared to the many thousand times since then that we have damned ourselves as a species.
This, then, is why I am a Christian. I think with the damage we have done and the sins we have committed, it would take nothing short of a miracle, and no one else but God alone to pardon them all. If there's any hope for the human race, I think it came about two thousand years ago in the backwater regions of the Roman Empire.
And as a Christian, I think the command to help build the Kingdom is a very real command. And this command does not simply mean proselyting to the non-Christians, but living in a way that shows that we are willing to live without the sins that we have for so long embraced.

A product of our times?

Being as faithfully religious as I am, the question of the legitimacy of other faiths has occurred to me quite frequently. In fact, Alexa and I often discuss the ecumenical nature of faith, and the exact reason why I find Catholicism to be validated against this principle (Vatican II).
However, I would be remiss if I pondered these questions without asking the question: Are my beliefs truly as valid as I think that they are, or am I merely a product of Christianity's two thousand years of history and theology?
As it stands, that question is a very legitimate question, seeing as Christianity does only have two thousand years behind it and religion in general has been traced back at least five thousand years (and by the Old Testament standards, six thousand). If my beliefs about God become man only go back to the early Christians and theologians such as Athanasius, Origen, Jerome, Augustine and others, then what am I to say about those who lived before?
Not only that, but some of the most popular religions in the world predate Christianity by quite a long time. Buddhism has five hundred years on Christianity, while Hinduism has at least six hundred. Judaism can be traced at least another thousand years before Christ. Where does that leave those people? If we might state that the proof of Christianity's validity is in its longevity than what do we say about these faiths? Or what about Islam which is only six hundred years younger than Christianity?
Questions such as these give some people a reason to doubt their faith. Others claim that God did simply not reveal himself to these people. Some see other faiths as stumbling blocks and scandals in the way of Christianity (specifically those who read the Apocalypse of John literally).
However, I find my faith validated in various other places. As a bit of a Classics scholar, the Romans and Greeks fascinate me. Of course both of these nations worshiped a plethora of gods, and neither one of their religions have survived the test of time. But what seems peculiar to me is not their faith, but those who were not of their faiths.
One of my favorite philosophers of all time, Socrates, was accused of being an atheist. However, peculiarly, in nearly every dialogue I've ever read of his, he mentions deity, or Providence or some kind of reference to a God. Furthermore, in his Apology, Socrates talks at length about the spirit that always spoke to him. From a Christian perspective, a lot of Socrates' philosophy seems to mirror Christian thought (which is not surprising considering many of the Christian theologians and philosophers were trained in the Greek style). So I find some encouragement in Socrates' Christian-like thinking.
Furthermore, it seems to me that faiths such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam started more or less as national faiths. Hinduism, Islam and Judaism all filled in religious vacuums in the cultures where they started. Buddhism came around in a Hindu setting, but it migrated East to more accepting climes. Christianity blossomed in the Jewish region of the Roman Empire. Christianity had to fight against two strong religions, and yet still grew, even when it became outlawed in the empire, and Christians were killed for sport.
So it is that I have faith in the Christian faith. By this I mean not only that I have faith in the guiding principles of Christianity and in the Divinity of Christ Jesus, but also in the faith itself. I believe that Christians can relearn to love. I believe that Christians can relearn to accept others who are different and reach out to those marginalized by society. I believe that Christians can help the poor, protest war, and stand as real witnesses of the love that God gave us. We preach Christ crucified. A doctrine whereby we profess that God's mercy and love were so great that he forgave us all our follies. As Christians and followers of this God, it is our duty to show that Christianity's strength lies not in the power of its followers, but in their love.

Scandalus

What is it about Christians that makes a lot of the rest of the world despise us? Surely there is the conservative Christians that make a lot of people cringe. And our reservation and prudence also make us a bit peculiar. But what of our message itself?
"We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles" wrote Paul (1 Corinth 1:23). And really, how silly is it, from the outside, to say that God became man?
From one perspective, we look Greek. Our God is now encased in human flesh, much the way Hercules was. All the Olympic gods existed in a physical sense in this world. They all had bodies. They took on many forms.
"But," we might argue, "our god paid the price for sin and was exalted." This sounds like Odin, the "Allfather" of the Norsemen who hung on a tree for three days in order to give to mankind the sacred runes. After the three days, he regained his spot as head of the gods.
This is where we take on a monotheistic view of God. Not only did our god take on all of our sins, but he is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, a notion that escapes the Romans, Greeks and Vikings. Truly, St. Augustine says that all things are held by our god, and our god is in all things.
So here our God seems more like the God of the Jews, who created the heaven and the earth and has the ability to manipulate time and space itself according to His wishes.
This is why it is a stumbling block. At first glance it looks nonsensical. The outsider gets lost in the trinitarian language of the Council of Nicaea and the message of Word become Flesh.
Here is where Athanasius seems to help out. To Athanasius, and in fact to St. Anselm as well, Christ is God's way of restoring humanity. We have fallen; fallen of our choosing. Because of this transgression against God, we, who are unholy and imperfect, cannot hope to dwell with God, who is holy and perfect. This is not in God's plan, so God comes to restore humanity.
Now, here is where it gets tricky. Man cannot redeem himself, for how can one restore what he never had attained. However, it was necessary for man to make restoration, since it was man who sinned. So God comes down in the person of Jesus, takes on our sins and dies. This process restores us to God.
Even with the explanation of our faith, it still seems incredible. It is a fantastic-sounding story that necessitates our faith. Even with the philosophical arguments for God, Christ's existence is not obvious.
So I say, since our message is one that is offensive enough, our call is to not be offensive. We are to go out with humility, meekness, mercy, temperance and all the commands that Christ laid upon us. St Francis of Assisi once wisely said, "Preach Christ crucified always, if necessary, use words." It is more important that our actions preach our message than our shouts. For, all of our words can be proven wrong by our actions, but our actions are never proven wrong by our words.

Augustine contra Darwin

In a 1996 talk entitled "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," Pope John Paul II announced to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that evolution does not contradict Christianity. In this talk, the point of human kind's separateness and likeness to God is emphasized.
Of course, innate in this line of thinking is an idea that humankind, though not necessarily coming from two beings in the Garden of Eden whose names were "Adam" and "Eve," is the idea that we descended from some origin divinely set apart by God.
This contradicts a lot of evolutionary theory that depicts the mutations that caused evolution to be random and the selection of traits to be natural. In this case, God has fore-ordained which traits would be passed down to the human species that would make us in His likeness and image.
Now, this kind of thinking does not sit very well with traditional Biblical thinking. Pope John Paul II emphasized that the evolution theories don't depict well the innate spiritual qualities of man nor do they talk about our being the end of God's creation.
So we begin to see where the two don't function very well together. With an Augustinian view of natural sin, how can this correspond in a human history that has no root in the Garden? If we descended from Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals, how is it that we are the only creations created in God's image and likeness?
Furthermore, we begin to see problems like what John Paull II mentions. How do Athanasius' and Anselm's views on the Word made Flesh correspond to a human kind that does not derive its humanity from God? How can Christ take on our sins and become one of us if all we are is a process of random mutations?
I offer no solutions to this problem. I do offer this, however: in the Muslim Empire from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, science was never seen to contradict faith. If one thought they were in opposition, then it was clear to that person that either his scientific discovery was off, or his faith was not correct. In this case, it is clear that this applies to us. If God is the God of nature and the cosmos, than no scientific law or truth can contradict what God has made so. Thus, if evolution is the way that scientists say it is, then this does not disprove God, only what we think of God.

Ex nihilo ad Omnium

Please excuse my Latin.
I was reminded earlier today of a key difference in Mormon theology and Catholic theology. That difference is the doctrine of "creation ex nihilo" or "creation out of nothing." What it basically means is that God created the entire universe from nothing.
Mormons believe that God "fashioned" the universe. He was more of a cosmic carpenter or watchmaker. Along with this doctrine comes the notion of divination and a procession of Gods (not to be confused with gods). For Mormons, there's a pseudo-doctrinal idea that God became God in such a way that mankind may also become God. This leads to a question of whether or not God had a God, and that God had a God.
However, St. Thomas Aquinas assures us that it is impossible for there to be an unending procession of necessary things (viz the Third Way). A necessary thing for Aquinas is something which is not "contingent," that is, generated and corrupted. God is neither generated nor corrupted. God is. "I am that I AM" He proclaims in Exodus to Moses. He is Aquinas' "first mover," that which cannot be moved by His own creations.
But what of creation then? Well, Genesis tells us that God "created" all things. Christians believe that God created all that is. The Big Bang theory suggests that everything that is exploded from nothingness. Is this the same? Perhaps it is. Nothing in the Big Bang theory suggests that there was no cause of the explosion. Perhaps God said, "let there be everything."
Then we come to the tricky business of creation of mankind. Evolutionary theory suggests that man evolved from an ape-like ancestor. Pope John Paul II allows for this, provided that humankind shares one original set of parents, an Adam and Eve, if you will.
But what about all the diversity in the world? We cannot hold to the assumption that in 6 thousand years (according to the Bible), the human race went from being 2 people of similar traits to all the different ethnicities to be found throughout the world. Furthermore, the Bible was not written in real time. The Torah was written about 1000 BC. At this point, everything written therein is orally handed down. So the question of the authenticity of the accounts comes into question (a topic which I hope to further discuss in later posts).
So, with this new information brought to light, what are we to think of humanity? Anselm, Athanasius, and almost every other theologian asserts that humankind was made in God's image and likeness. This is where I think our true question must be answered: If man is in God's image, how can we know this, and what does this say about evolution?