Shameless Popery: Did St. Ambrose Believe in the Real Presence?

Shameless Popery: Did St. Ambrose Believe in the Real Presence?: On Thursday, I also noted that St. Augustine's mentor, St. Ambrose, wrote in the late 380s that the Eucharist “ is the true Flesh of Christ ...

Response to Lighthouse Baptist Church (Newark, DE) Street Evangelists, Part 10 of 24

This is the tenth part of a 24-part series of responses to a street evangelist I met from Lighthouse Baptist Church (Newark, DE). Please click here to see the first post, which contains a set of links by topic to all the posts in the series.

10.  We (true Christians) only disagree on unessentials.  This response doesn’t really solve the problem.  First of all, who has the authority to decide exactly what the “essential” doctrines are?  Is “eternal security” an essential doctrine, because if so, the vast majority of Protestant Bible-only Christians do not believe it.

You see, the list of unessential doctrines must itself be an essential doctrine that every true Christian agrees on, or else the whole house of cards collapses.

Further, when we are dealing with Truth, and Jesus is the Truth, how can anyone say that some Truth is unessential or unimportant?

Further still, where does the Bible say that some division over doctrinal or moral issues is perfectly acceptable?  Surely, there are places in Scripture that recommend Christian's being sensitive to one another in non-essential areas, but no where does the Bible say that a moral question can be answered positively by some and negatively by others.  Rather, St. Paul commands that we be like-minded and in perfect unity in the one faith.  To suggest that some category of “unessential” doctrines on which we have divine revelation exists in which it is okay for Christians to disagree about seems contrary to the minds of Paul and Jesus.  As I pointed out in our conversation, Jesus prayed in John 17 for our oneness to model that of the Holy Trinity, and there are no minor doctrinal differences between the Father and Son!

Closer examination shows that these “minor doctrinal differences” are the very things that are ripping the entire Body of Christ to shreds, causing scandal to the world.  Remember: Jesus prayed that our oneness would “show the world that I was sent by the Father.”  If we are visibly disunified, then we as Christians have failed to follow Jesus’s plan for evangelization…the very plan that he offered his passion to achieve!  I can’t think of a single doctrine that at least some Christian organization believes the opposite about…all based on the Bible alone.  The fact is, the “minor differences” are not actually minor.  They involve major issues such as the nature of baptism, the recipients of baptism, the nature of sin, the doctrine of justification, the question of eternal security, and much more.  None of these are minor; they cut right to the core of Christian theology, as you well know.

And finally, we must remember that doctrines are not like bullet points on a list.  Rather, they are like musical lines in a great symphony of truth.  Change one line, and the entire relationship of all the musical voices shifts.  Change one line, and the entire tapestry of truth is fundamentally altered.  Change one truth, and you have a different symphony.

On what basis, then, did Jesus ever think, praying His high priestly prayer in the upper room, that Christians would ever be able to fulfill His prayer for unity?

The answer: He founded a Church to teach authoritatively in His name (Matt. 16:16-19, 18:17-18).  That Church, almost from the very beginning, has called herself by the name, “The Catholic Church.”

At various times throughout history, some people have broken away from the church to teach doctrines contrary to her.  Praise be to God that a tidal wave of Christians (Anglicans, Baptist, Lutherans, etc….even an entire Protestant congregation in Detroit not too long ago) are returning so that the Body of Christ can be perfectly unified once again.

Musical Iconography

It is somewhat ironic (yet in equal measure understandable) that music was one of the few religious "icons" not thrown out by iconoclasts.  Perhaps this is because it does not offer a physical target at which icon-busters can throw stones.  Perhaps music's seeming intangibility simply protected it from the impulse to throw physical reminders of religious truths out the window.

For this, we can be thankful.

Yet, studying and teaching music as I do, I have to remind my students that music actually is quite physical in its matter.  For starters, sound produces a change in the matter that connects the instrument to the ear of the listener.  Sound is literally communicated through space using packets (waves) of dense and non-dense air that hit the ear hundreds of times each second.  These sound waves physically hit our ears much like waves at the beach hit the shore.  In response to these waves, our mind perceives sounds, and our minds do what human minds do automatically: they try to make meaning of these sounds, understanding them to form harmonies, melodies, and so forth.  These sounds can remind remind us of spiritual realities just like the light waves that bounce off physical icons and strike our eyes and minds can.  Further still, we become musical and physical icons as we interact with music by producing it ourselves.  We fill our lungs fill with air as we sing, and our collective physical participation in the music making becomes an icon of our unity as the Body of Christ.  We feel the vibrations of the pew, as it (and the rest of the sanctuary) trembles with the vibrations of music praising our Divine King.

Perhaps even the most rigid iconoclasts lose themselves in awe at the aesthetic grandeur of Renaissance polyphony or the magnificence of a Lutheran Chorale Prelude...or even the humble simplicity of a hymn sung prayerfully on a bright Sunday morning.

One of the many things I love about being Catholic is that we embrace not only icons that lift the soul through sound sensations, but also icons that lift our souls through our eyes and noses as well.  We become icons in adoration of God as we feel and place ourselves in postures of adoration, standing to hear God's Word and kneeling before God's presence.  And Jesus himself, who communes with us through his Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, invites us to receive Him into our bodies and souls.  Though we taste and see bread and wine (the accidents that remain after transubstantiation), we figuratively taste and see the goodness of the Lord through our participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice that takes away our sins and helps us to become saints by His free gift of grace.

Considering the almost universal embrace of beautiful, soul-inspiring music across Christendom, I remain baffled why more Christian communities don't embrace similarly moving icons in other aesthetic domains.  At the same time, I remain ever hopeful that music can point us back to our senses--all of them--as an important means of engaging the whole human person in the worship of our God.

Response to Lighthouse Baptist Church (Newark, DE) Street Evangelists, Part 9 of 24

This is the eighth part of a 24-part series of responses to a street evangelist I met from Lighthouse Baptist Church (Newark, DE). Please click here to see the first post, which contains a set of links by topic to all the posts in the series.

9.  Finding the truth by “studying it out.” The problem with finding Biblical truth by just “studying it out” is that thousands upon thousands of Christians who genuinely love Jesus and want to know His truth using the Bible alone and who study the original languages and generally study Scripture for countless hours…all come to different conclusions.

The second problem with this model is that it renders most Christians throughout history incapable of finding the truth of God (if, in fact, the only or best way to do this is through Scripture study).  Why?  Well, until the invention of the printing press, no regular Christian owned a Bible, and very few could read it anyway.  Even today, many people lack the intellectual capacity to make subtle textual connections across books, solve difficult theological problems that arise from Scripture, learn the ancient languages of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic to be able to read the Bible in its original language (very little was written in Aramaic, but this is the language Jesus most often used when speaking, and some important words must be understood as being spoken in this language), and to study the ancient culture that was the primary audience for Scripture, so that they can read the Bible with the assumptions of author/audience in mind.  So, if Jesus had intended us to learn the truth by “studying it out” he was thereby excluding the vast majority of Christians who ever lived throughout the centuries.

A third problem is that the idea of “studying it out” presumes that when you sit down with your Bible, you do so in a kind of vacuum apart from any and all influences that could sway your reading one way or another.  The fact is, no one reads the Bible apart from the countless influences—the “lenses”—that effect our reading of Scripture.  For instance, even though Mary as the New Testament Ark is plain as day to me as a Catholic from the Bible, most Protestants have never seen the Bible verses that support this because they do not realize they should look for them!  Jesus tells us: “he who seeks, finds.”  But the reverse is also true: if you do not seek, you will not find.  That being said I GREATLY appreciate that you are a genuine seeker of Biblical truth in general.  I really mean that, and I can tell you that I find your faith, and that of your pastor and churchgoers, quite inspiring.  BUT, the point of the seeker comment also applies to specific doctrines.  If one does not look for something specific in that vast ocean of Scripture, they will most likely not find it.

A fourth problem is that there are some doctrines and moral teachings that, up to a certain point, ALL Bible-only Protestants, including Baptists, found in the Bible.  Take for instance the Bible’s prohibition on contraception.  Did you know that all Christians and Christian pastors until 1930 taught that contraception was a grave sin before the Lord?  They did so based on the Bible, and they did so in great unity.  Not a single document can be found anywhere before 1930 where a Protestant minister went on record saying the contraception was an acceptable behavior for a Christian.  But when the Anglican Church (at their Second Lambeth Conference) began allowing contraception in a few limited cases, a crack in the dam of solid Christian teaching formed.  By today, every Christian denomination has caved in on this issue and has changed their moral teaching to say that contraception is acceptable before God.  (That is just one example of a significant change in doctrinal/moral teachings by Baptists.)  Now, if you were to ask a Protestant what the Bible says about contraception, most would probably answer “nothing,” not even realizing that it would have been inconceivable less than 100 years ago for a Christian to consider using contraception in good conscience.  My friend, do moral teachings of God ever change?  Is what is wrong in the first, second, third, fourth….fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries suddenly right when a sexual revolution tells Christians that sexual activity should be free (and without babies), and contraception is the necessary requirement to make it so?

Problems #5-8 with the doctrine of the Bible alone (the unspoken underpinning of the suggestion to "study it out") is that it is unscriptural, unhistorical, unthinkable, and unworkable.

(a) Sola Scriptura as unscriptural: No where does the Bible say that the Bible ALONE has final authority.  The word “alone” is important.  Most all Christians (including Catholics) agree the Bible is inspired and has authority.  The difference is the word “alone”…and it is not found in Scripture.  Thus, Sola Scriptura is self-refuting.  Scripture also speaks of authoritative Traditions and an authoritative Church.

(b) Sola Scriptura is unhistorical: Sola Scriptura was not a doctrine that was believed by any Christians until Martin Luther used the doctrine to deny the other two sources of authority mentioned above.  Within two decades of launching the Reformation, Luther wrote to Calvin lamenting the result of his new doctrine, saying that every Christian is using the Bible alone to come up with different and crazy new doctrines.  Luther saw very quickly that when you rip the family book out of the family for which it was written and out of the family traditions that preserve its interpretive context, then you have a book whose meaning is quite literally up for grabs.  And that is just what has happened outside of the Catholic Church, with the divisions into 30,000+ competing denominations.

(c) Sola Scriptura is unthinkable: As I mentioned above, no one approaches the Bible alone.  We all carry interpretive baggage—our interpretive traditions—when we read Scripture.  The question is: are those traditions the Sacred Tradition passed down from the apostles that preserve the entire body of apostolic teaching (including what books are truly apostolic and which are not!)…or are they traditions of men?

(d) Sola Scriptura is unworkable:  As convert Scott Hahn has suggested, just imagine if the writers of the constitution simply mailed a copy to every citizen and said, “may the spirit of George Washington inspire you to interpret this doctrine correctly.”  What would we have?  Absolute chaos and anarchy.  Likewise, when millions of Christians all read the Bible alone, we also get interpretive chaos and anarchy within the Church.  In other words, lets say you are a Baptist and you want to have an abortion and your pastor tries to convince you otherwise, now you can just find another church that argues from the Bible (wrongly, I think, but we can’t assume insincerely) that abortion is okay.  And if you can’t find that church, you can become a pastor and found your own church that teaches exactly what you believe the Bible to mean.  Sola Scriptura has produced the ecclesial anarchy that we find today.  Even within the Baptist movement, you find “free will Baptists,” “Independent Baptists,” “Fundamental Baptists,” “Evangelical Baptists,” “Southern Baptists,” and the list goes on.  These groups share significant differences over the nature of sin, redemption, and the relationship between local congregations and the larger body of believers…all important areas of difference, if you ask me.  And that is just within the Baptist faith alone.

Rather, the Bible teaches that we are to follow the Traditions whether they were passed on in written or oral form, and both of these streams of truth are protected by the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago to act as a faithful mailman for the complete Word of God (not just the written portion of it).  That Church has never changed one of her doctrinal or moral teachings…no matter what the sexual revolution says.

Now, in response, good Baptists would most likely say that they don’t need to follow a church, because the Holy Spirit leads them into truth.

A couple quick responses:

(a) When Jesus promises the Holy Spirit guiding the church into the truth in the Gospels, he is invariably talking to the apostles, on whom he has given the authority to preach in His name.  This is not to say that the Holy Spirit doesn’t guide Christians, but when it comes to the unity of the Body, Jesus has ordained that certain men have authority to define doctrine, morals, and even liturgical practices so that the Body of Christ can remain unified throughout time and space.  In other word, Jesus never promises to lead all Christians individually so that they don’t need the authority of the Church.  Just think: why would Jesus spend so long talking about Church authority and never mention that for the vast majority of Christian history, there would be no such thing as an authoritative church?

(b) The other problem with this idea is simply the question: how do you know you are following the Holy Spirit and not any one of that array of influences: sermons (since you were a kid), radio programs, books, tapes, Jack Chick tracts, Bible footnotes, etc.?

And…if you are trying to convince me that your interpretation is right and mine wrong, how can I know that you are being led by the Holy Spirit, and not the Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Free-will Baptists, etc.?

At stake here is: how does the Head (Jesus) lead the Body?  How has this been understood historically?  How might Jesus have thought to lead his Body in a way such that every person on earth could know which Church really served as the “pillar and ground of truth” (1 Tim. 3:15)?  If the Church is Jesus’s Church, then how does a new Christian today know which Church to listen to for the fullness of Christ Himself, who is the Truth?

Pope Benedict XVI on the Mission of the Church

I found these paragraphs from our Holy Father's final message to a group of German lay Catholics to be quite inspiring.  You can read the rest at Whispers in the Loggia.

The Church’s mission has its origins in the mystery of the triune God, in the mystery of his creative love. Love is not just somehow within God, he himself is love by nature. And divine love does not want to exist in isolation, it wants to pour itself out. It has come down to men in a particular way through the incarnation and self-offering of God’s Son. He stepped outside the framework of his divinity, he took flesh and became man; and indeed his purpose was not merely to confirm the world in its worldliness and to be its companion, leaving it completely unchanged. The Christ event includes the inconceivable fact of what the Church Fathers call a commercium, an exchange between God and man, in which the two parties – albeit in quite different ways – both give and take, bestow and receive. The Christian faith recognizes that God has given man a freedom in which he can truly be a partner to God, and can enter into exchange with him. At the same time it is clear to man that this exchange is only possible thanks to God’s magnanimity in accepting the beggar’s poverty as wealth, so as to make the divine gift acceptable, given that man has nothing of comparable worth to offer in return.

The Church likewise owes her whole being to this unequal exchange. She has nothing of her own to offer to him who founded her. She finds her meaning exclusively in being a tool of salvation, in filling the world with God’s word and in transforming the world by bringing it into loving unity with God. The Church is fully immersed in the Redeemer’s outreach to men. She herself is always on the move, she constantly has to place herself at the service of the mission that she has received from the Lord. The Church must always open up afresh to the cares of the world and give herself over to them, in order to make present and continue the holy exchange that began with the Incarnation.

To be a member of the Church is to participate in the Incarnation by being a member of Christ's mystical body.  How beautiful and awesome is the invitation we receive to be Christ's hands and feet and voice as He ministers to and through us!

Response to Russell Moore on Pat Robertson and Divorce

Over at Moore to the Point, Dr. Russell Moore has a terrific blog post about Pat Robertson's recent suggestion that a husband or wife could legitimately divorce an Alzheimer's-afflicted spouse and get remarried, on the premise that having Alzheimer's was a "kind of death."


I completely agree with Moore's assessment of Robertson's remark (which seemed to be made somewhat off-the-cuff, though is still dead wrong).


What I found particularly interesting, however, was the discussion that bubbled to the surface in the combox.  As you can imagine, because many non-Catholic Christians do allow for divorce and remarriage in at least some circumstances, some commentators were forced to use more nuanced language when describing the category of exceptions into which Alzheimer's (to them) does not belong.  (Of course, the problem with a house built on sand--people's private interpretations--is that there is no guarantee that more Christians in the future won't put Alzheimer's into the exception category.)  In a nutshell, these commentators tried to prove that Alzheimer's was not an exception by rehearsing the standard definition of the exceptions that Protestants do allow (based on a certain reading of Matthew 19:9).  


From my Catholic perspective, which allows for no exceptions at all, the possibility of at least some exceptions is really a game changer--one with serious implications for what/how/why marriage is and is not.  In other words, it is a much easier argument to say that marriage is a bond created by God, and nothing man can do can put that bond asunder.  Only death can do a husband and wife part.  If marriage is truly forever, it can only be so based on God's real action on the lives of the spouses.  They do not make themselves one; God does, and "what God has joined together..."


We can no more put marriage asunder by our sins than by any other action we can commit.


And, it is worth noting that the historic understanding of marriage and Jesus's prohibition of divorce and remarriage in any circumstance stretches back to the earliest Christians in the first centuries of the Church.


Those who admit exceptions, then, offer a radically different understanding of marriage: marriage, their position implies, IS something that can be rent asunder.  Divorce from one's spouse IS possible.  Man CAN choose to put their marriage asunder.  God's divine action CAN be undone by man's decree.


Now, it is possible that two people presumed to be married were did not actually enter into sacramental marriage the day they made their vows.  Shot gun weddings, for instance, do not effect a sacramental marriage.  And the Church, in an act of love and mercy, does offer to consider the evidence that a marriage never took place in the first place.  (Sadly, this process has been abused in some corners of the Church, and I pray for those people who have not taken the process seriously and have annulled perfectly valid marriages.)  Still, it is possible for someone who has never truly been married to obtain a civil divorce and later enter into a true sacramental marriage.  This could not be considered "remarriage," since that person had never before been married.


Moore's blog post, and the comments that follow, are worth the read.  Here, for your convenience, were my two comments:


>>>>>

Dear Dr. Moore,

I just found your blog for the first time today, and I couldn’t agree with you more about your assessment of Robertson’s latest statement.

I wonder, though, how culpable we are as Robertson’s Christian brothers and sisters. As crazy as Robertson’s statement was, the fact is, Christians still divorce all the time for a wide variety of reasons. Some then remarry, yet are still accepted by their congregations (either current, or perhaps new). It is hard for me to imagine that any preacher would make the blunder that Robertson made if Christians took our Lord’s prohibition of divorce and remarriage more seriously…by not getting divorced and remarried. With that in mind, I ask the Lord for mercy not only on Robertson but on the entire body of believers who claim Christ as their Lord, yet find ways of rationalizing behaviors that He clearly condemns. And though I have never divorced, I wonder how my own sins scandalize other believers and non-believers alike.

On the issue of the supposed “exception” that Jesus seems to make, it is worth noting this immorality clause only occurs in one gospel. If you were a Roman Christian reading Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’s language would not have allowed for exceptions to the no divorce and remarriage rule. Jimmy Akin has a terrific commentary on Matthew 19:9 here: http://bit.ly/nEBsGE.

Come, Holy Spirit, and reunite your faithful Church around our Head, Jesus Christ, so that the errors of those who teach apart from her can be clearly and unequivocally understood as such!

God bless,
Daniel

>>>>>

Sorry…I just realized that one sentence didn’t communicate what I intended:

I believe that congregations should accept people living in a state of sin…but not accept their sins. I think it is problematic when congregations think that they can just ignore a person’s public sin while accepting the person. I am not a pastor, and I can’t begin to imagine the pastoral difficulties associated with this issue. On that note, I am thankful that my church (the Catholic Church) has such clear, yet loving and pastoral, guidelines for persons who have divorced and remarried. The Catholic Church is clear in that no person who has truly been married can ever validly be remarried, since they are married to their first spouse until death do them part. No sin can put a marriage asunder, since God is the creator of that marriage bond.  

I do think that this is the truth that has been lost across so much of Christendom, and it is a faithful return to God that can open our hearts to repentance, healing, and forgiveness…but only if those who are remarried are willing to turn away from their sin. I know this is a hard truth for many to accept, but with God, all things are possible, and nothing is better than following God’s will! His mercy and grace are always sufficient, and we prove that to be true most particularly when we as His children let go of the sinful aspects of our lives that we can’t even imagine living without!

God bless,

Daniel

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Response to Lighthouse Baptist Church (Newark, DE) Street Evangelists, Part 8 of 24

This is the eighth part of a 24-part series of responses to a street evangelist I met from Lighthouse Baptist Church (Newark, DE). Please click here to see the first post, which contains a set of links by topic to all the posts in the series.

8.  Why read the Early Church Fathers when we have the Bible?  This is a GREAT question.  First, we never read the Early Church Fathers in place of the Bible.  The Bible is the only written, inspired Word of God.  (The Word of God is really Jesus, and everything he is, did, and taught, not all of which is contained in the Bible.  In other words, there is also unwritten Word of God, primarily in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the Word Himself, whose Holy Spirit, the third person of the Most Holy Trinity, keeps alive the full teachings of Christ in His Mystical Body, the Church.)

Rather, the Early Church Fathers serve as a witness to what early Christianity was like.  And as faithful witnesses do, they report in their writings their beliefs and practices.  Thus, they have a historical authority, even though they have no Scriptural authority.  Just because their writings aren’t Scripture doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from them what it meant to be a Christian in the year 100 or 150 A.D.

The question is really about interpretation.  When we read the Bible, we always do so using lenses.  If I wear pink lenses, the world appears pink.  If I wear green lenses, the world appears green.  When I am interpreting the Bible, the same thing holds true.  We all interpret the Bible using some type of filter.  The question we need to start asking is: how do I know my interpretive filter is correct?

One way to begin answering that question is to begin thinking historically: how long have people been reading the Bible through my Baptist lenses?  How did the people in the first two centuries of Christianity understand the Bible?  What lenses did they use?  How does the Bible appear when I try their lenses on?

Remember, the Bible is the Bible is the Bible.  We all read the same words on the page, albeit with (usually minor) differences of translation.  But we come to different interpretations because we each have a different lens through which we look.

How do we get those lenses?  From a variety of sources: Bible studies, Bible footnotes, sermons, billboards, radio programs, books, magazines, conversations, experiences, etc.   None of us read the Bible on an island.  Not one.

The question then becomes: if one is willing to learn how to read the Bible from all of these other (fallible, uninspired, man-made) sources, why would one not want to add to that list the early church fathers, when these people studied with the apostles and their immediate successors?

So, to answer the question, why read the early church fathers, I would answer: so that you can read the Bible through the lenses of those who were there at the beginning…those who sat at the feet of the apostles and gave their lives to defend what they had been taught.

After all, who would you trust in a game of telephone, the first person to receive the message, or the last?

As Baptist convert Stephen Ray likes to say: "the waters of Christian doctrine are always cooler and cleaner at the source."

And that source, as a little research will prove, was Catholic.