Sunday, June 21, 2009

Another Site for Inquiring Minds

Check out Fisheaters.com. Especially useful for non-Catholics who are inquiring into the Church would be this page. I would invite any non-Catholic reader to first take the "challenge."

Sign of the Cross - Sign of Unity

This past week I returned home to help my wife's parents move. During the packing, we discovered a box of reading materials that I gave to my wife while we were dating and before she decided to become a "fulfilled Baptist" by joining the Catholic Church.

I read with pleasure a short tract that I gave to my wife on the sign of the cross. (The sign of the cross is made by all Catholics and Orthodox Christians as well as a few Protestants; it consists of tracing the cross on the head and torso of an individual.) The tract beautifully described the history of the sign of the cross--which dates back to the first centuries of Christianity--its meaning, and its role for believers today. Much of the information contained in the tract can be found at these websites: New Advent, This Rock (1990), and Fisheaters. Rather than repeat the work that has already been done, I would simply refer my readers to these articles. UPDATE (08/01/2009): I recently was informed about two book length discussion of the sign of the cross: The Sign of the Cross: The Gesture, the Mystery, the History, by Andreas Andreopoulos (Paraclete Press, 2006) and The Sign of the Cross: Recovering the Power of the Ancient Prayer, by Bert Ghezzi (Loyola Press, 2006). Excerpts from Ghezzi's book can be read on Google books here. See also this recent article in Christianity Today. UPDATE (08/23/2009): Here is another link, from which I take the following quote from our Holy Father:

Making the sign of the cross -- as we will do during the blessng -- means saying a visible and public "yes" to the One who died and rose for us, to God who in the humility and weakness of His love is the Almightly, stronger than all the power and intelligence of the world.

-Pope Benedict XVI
Angelus
September 11, 2005


David Currie describes in his book Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic that the only people in the first century to bring the Gospel to Africa were either some of the apostles and/or the African eunuch described in the Book of Acts. After the early missionaries, no other missionaries went to Africa for centuries. When the next group of missionaries finally arrived, the discovered that although the Africans had lost some elements of the faith, they had maintained the frequent making of the sign of the cross. This historical fact points to the apostolic origins of the sign of the cross.

The early church fathers attest that miraculous healings frequently occurred when the sign was traced over someone who was sick.

Considering all of these materials, the following question came to mind:

Why don't most Protestants make the sign of the Cross?

I have never heard a good answer to this question. The answer sometimes given is that the practice is nowhere to be found in the Bible, yet this is hardly a convincing answer, since non-Catholics practice many things not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. Further, we are talking about the sign of the CROSS. Protestants trace the cross on their Bibles, their clothing, their churches, their pews, and in dozens of other places. Why do they not trace it on themselves?

I think the underlying reason is also the one I hear expressed most often, though usually not directly: "because that is something that Catholics do."

If the Cross is uniquely Catholic, then let me be nothing else! But, in fact, the cross is not uniquely Catholic. Or better yet, all Christians who claim the cross are in fact particularly Catholic in this one area. Indeed the sign of the cross is one of the most powerful symbols of unity among Christians who remain divided in so many other ways.

Given that the cross is such a critical common ground between Catholics and non-Catholics, I invite all non-Catholic Christians to make the sign of the cross in their personal and communal prayer along with their Catholic brethren. What a wonderful sign of unity and solidarity this powerful sign would be.

Most importantly, what a powerful witness the sign of the cross is in a world that constantly attacks souls and minds through visual images. Imagine if all Catholics and non-Catholics made the sign of the cross at restaurants before partaking of a meal--what a way to silently preach the heart of the gospel to everyone around! And what a way to express to our dying culture the unity that we do share!

One final thought: we sign our names all the time, don't we? We sign them on contracts, on bank checks, on forms, on our homework. Our signature is attached to almost every important action and transaction that occurs on the plane of our day-to-day affairs. Yet, our family names are not our most important ones. Our baptismal name is the most important name that any human can receive. And just as there is only one baptism, there is only one baptismal name that we each receive. We are each baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Trinity is quite literally our true family name.

Does it not follow then that we should sign our spiritual family name on ourselves AT LEAST as often as we sign our family name on paperwork that is of so little spiritual consequence? Do we hesitate to sign our true spiritual name, yet scribble our family name all over without a second thought?

Let us never fail to trace the sign of our salvation, the anchor of our hope, and our shield against all temptations on ourselves as often as we think of it. Let us join St. Paul in preaching Christ--and Him crucified! Only through Christ is Man saved, and only through the Cross did Christ redeem all men.

Let us pray in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen!

Saturday, June 20, 2009

A Common Trend to Protestant and Postmodern Hermeneutics

Catholics and Protestants generally agree that the modernist denial of objective truth and the postmodern methods of securing radical forms of relativism are not born of a Christian worldview.

Yet, the interpretive premises that give rise to much postmodern thought are to a large degree the same as those assumed in the interpretive practice (if not in theory) of many Protestants.

Consider that for postmodern literary criticism (especially that produced by the inheritors of post-structuralist thought), a text has no specific meaning tied to its author's intention. The author, as Roland Barthes once put it, is dead. A text's meaning is simply what any particular reader constructs it to be. Texts can potentially have countless possible meanings, since meanings are ultimately constructed by the reader who occupies a unique social space, values, assumptions, and ideologies. Meaning is ultimately relativized.

Similarly, non-Catholic readers of the Bible, who read the Bible apart from the authoritative Sacred Tradition, have arrived in practice at tens of thousands of different interpretations of its meaning. While some texts have multiple layers of meanings and others have a variety of acceptable interpretations, the different interpretations found between Protestants extend into the realm of pure contradictions. For example, some Protestants believe the Bible promotes a Sunday Sabbath while others contend that the Bible clearly condemns anyone who does not maintain a Saturday Sabbath. There are contradictions within Protestantism about virtually every doctrinal and moral issue one can think of. Behind all of these contradictions is often an unspoken acceptance of the fact that the Bible's meaning is pretty much just what we make of it. While many people pray that the Holy Spirit guides them, no one can have any assurance that they are following the Holy Spirit and not their own spirit, the spirit of their pastor or congregation, the spirit of the Bible commentary, or perhaps even an unholy spirit.

While postmodern, poststructuralist assumptions may do little harm when it comes to texts whose authors truly are dead, Christians make a grave mistake when they transport these assumptions to the study of the Sacred Text, whose author is very much alive, and whose authority is very real. While he still walked this earth, Jesus established a Church in whom he invested all His authority. In this Church, Jesus deposited the fullness of the faith, the complete Word of God, which was passed down orally and by letter. After His resurrection from the dead, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to remind the apostles of all that Jesus had spoken, and John points out that all the books in the world could not contain all that Jesus said and did. The Holy Spirit today maintains the meaning of the Sacred Scriptures through the institution of Christ's Church, the Roman Catholic Church.

As Peter Kreeft points out in his talk Moral Theology and Homosexuality, the Church can not change one iota of the message Christ left with her to transmit to the world. The Church, Kreeft describes, is like a mailman who is charged with faithfully delivering the mail from the King to you and to me. Anyone who attempts to change just one iota of the message has committed no small error. In fact, such a person changes him or herself from the mailman to the author. Even more damage is done when you and I receive a message that we think is from the King that is really just from ourselves.

Only one Church on this planet has never once opened the envelope of doctrinal and moral teachings and changed the message. This Church also claims the LEAST authority of any Christian church on the planet, for its response is always: "no author but the King!"

In the Old Testament, we read of a people who try by their own power to build a tower to reach God. Seeing this, God confuses their language, twisting their tongues so than no one can understand another. Similarly, Man's search for God seems inevitably to end up in a plentiful confusion of interpretations and practices.

The true religion does not result from Man's search for God but rather God's search for Man. God provides us a way home to himself, and on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit of God seemed to reverse the tendency inaugurated at the tower of Babel. The Holy Spirit enabled listeners of different tongues to hear the Gospel message preached by Peter and the Apostles.

Many Christians today who love Jesus are still in fact searching for Him. These Christians are looking for the Truth, who is ultimately Christ Himself. Given the sad division of Christians whose ancestors left the Catholic Church into so many denominations, it has become impossible for them to know whether the message the receive has been faithfully delivered or has been tampered with by a human author. Yet, we long for the Truth, because we long for Jesus.

May we thank God that Christ's promise that the gates of Hades would not prevail against His church assures us that there remains a faithful messenger. Christ once told his apostles that "he who hears you, hears me." At the end of John's Gospel, Jesus breathes on the apostles saying that as the Father sent Him, so He sends them. He then gives them the authority to bind and loose sins, making them ministers of reconciliation as St. Paul elsewhere describes them. In the Gospel of Matthew, we see Jesus giving the apostles the power of binding and loosing, and to Peter in particular, the keys of the kingdom, that ancient symbol of highest authority.

May we thank God that Christ is faithful to His promise. May we, in turn, be faithful to the fullness of the message delivered by Christ's messenger, the Roman Catholic Church.

If Christians today can begin to recognize that Christian hermeneutics ("hermeneutics" simply refers to the art or science of interpretation) ought to look radically different from postmodern hermeneutics, we may begin to realize that the burden of interpreting the Scriptures privately does not fall on each individual Christian's shoulders. As Peter writes in his second letter, "no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." (2 Peter 1:20-21).

The author of the Bible is alive, not dead. But the author of the Bible does not guide each Christian individually when it comes to matters of universal truth. Rather, the Truth was given once and for all to the Saints and has been faithfully preserved through the Catholic Church since its establishment two thousand years ago.

I pray that my non-Catholic brothers and sisters take another look at the Babel of Protestant denominations and the glorious catholicity (in time and space) of believers united around their bishops, most especially the successors of Peter. Now is the time to come home!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Does God Exist?

Thanks to Patrick Madrid for posting a link to this fantastic video, which addresses the most important of questions.