Category: Are the CTCers Paying Attention?

Rome's Advantage over Amsterdam

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

As much as Jason and the Callers may think of their crossing the Tiber as the fix to Protestantism’s anarchy, another set of converts finds Rome congenial precisely because it has more resources for transforming culture. This is where the idea that neo-Calvinism is making the world safe for Roman Catholicism has some plausibility. After all, Calvinism only fixes so much. It may get you to 1550 Geneva or 1618 Amsterdam. But what about the problems that Protestantism introduced to Europe by upending Christendom in the West. If you give someone a taste for a Christian society, can they ever be satisfied with the kind of disquiet that Protestantism introduced?

That question explains why Hilaire Belloc thought Protestantism was a heresy and Rome the answer to the West’s problems:

1. It was not a particular movement but a general one, i.e., it did not propound a particular heresy which could be debated and exploded, condemned by the authority of the Church, as had hitherto been every other heresy or heretical movement. Nor did it, after the various heretical propositions had been condemned, set up (as had Mohammedanism or the Albigensian movement) a separate religion over against the old orthodoxy. Rather did it create a certain separate which we still call “Protestantism.” It produced indeed a crop of heresies, but not one heresy_and its characteristic was that all its heresies attained and prolonged a common savour: that which we call “Protestantism” today.

2. Though the immediate fruits of the Reformation decayed, as had those of many other heresies in the past, yet the disruption it had produced remained and the main principle_reaction against a united spiritual authority_so continued in vigour as both to break up our European civilization in the West and to launch at last a general doubt, spreading more and more widely. None of the older heresies did that, for they were each definite. Each had proposed to supplant or to rival the existing Catholic Church; but the Reformation movement proposed rather to dissolve the Catholic Church_and we know what measure success has been attained by that effort! . . .

But let it be noted that this breakdown of the older anti-Catholic thing, the Protestant culture, shows no sign of being followed by an hegemony of the Catholic culture. There is no sign as yet of a reaction towards the domination of Catholic ideas_the full restoration of the Faith by which Europe and all our civilization can alone be saved.

It nearly always happens that when you get rid of one evil you find yourself faced with another hitherto unsuspected; and so it is now with the breakdown of the Protestant hegemony. We are entering a new phase, “The Modern Phase,” as I have called it, in which very different problems face the Eternal Church and a very different enemy will challenge her existence and the salvation of the world which depends upon her.

R.J. Snell, a recent convert, echoes Belloc on Rome’s cultural potentialities while sounding very different from Jason and the Callers on dogma and papal infallibility:

. . . Lumen Fidei is making no claim of empty pietism but rather an acutely prescient observation when stating that “once the flame of faith dies out, all other lights begin to dim,” for the light of faith provides an illuminating source of “every aspect of human existence,” and thus is integral and non-reductive in its knowledge. Such a light, the encyclical continues, given our sinful state, “cannot come from ourselves but … must come from God.” Further, this light does not merely sweep us out of our troubles and into some serene realm of transcendence, but transforms us by God’s love, giving us “fresh vision, new eyes to see”—faith allows us, again, and also here and now, to begin the recovery of thought, memory, imagination, and freedom.

The faith is about far more than social recovery and advance, for in the end faith gives us an encounter and union with the living God, but faith never provides less than the possibility of social recovery. While God gives us Himself, and this is ultimate, it was not below Christ to heal the lame, teach the unknowing, and work as a carpenter; just as Christ engages us in our natural and temporal concerns, so too does faith, this Humanism of the Cross, bring new vision and light to the spiritual impoverishment surrounding us. . . .

The Church exists not for itself but for others. We exist for evangelization, for the health and welfare of souls. But persons are not souls only, they are, in the words of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, a unity of soul and body so profound that “neither the spiritualism that despises the body not the materials that considers the spirit a mere manifestation of the material do justice … to the unity of the human being.” As such, we exist for others as complete and integral persons—for an integral humanism.

But just as 2kers question neo-Calvinists on cultural transformation, so they ask Rome’s apologists whether the point of Christ’s death was to save Western Civilization. Of course, apologists might think that question too blunt, and that the relationship between Christ and culture requires nuance. It may, but the kind of sensibility that led Christ to say that his kingdom was not of this world or Paul to say that the unseen things are really the permanent things, not philosophy or the arts, were also responsible for figures like Thomas Aquinas writing that:

Some truths about God exceed all the ability of the human reason. Such is the truth that God is trinune. But there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach. Such are that God exists, that He is one, and the like.

In other words, not everyone is cut out for a liberal arts education with a major in one of the humanities and you don’t need a B.A. to be a Christian to trust the triune God. Plumbers and farmers understand more truth, if they trust Christ, than the smartest of philosophers. That is, at least, one way of reading Aquinas on faith and reason.

This gap between Christ and culture is also behind the fourth stanza of Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress”:

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him Who with us sideth:
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

In the world of otherworldly Christianity, a believer goes straight to the head of the class, and gets to by-pass Philosophy 101 and Intro to the Classics, simply by faith (or baptism as Rome understands it).

And yet, neo-Calvinists, who have the memo on the eternal and the temporal, have yet to reflect on it. That may owe to Abraham Kuyper’s own refusal to unhitch Christ and culture and his concomitant demand for integralism:

Hence, as a central phenomenon in the development of humanity, Calvinism is not only entitled to an honorable position by the side of Paganistic, Islamistic and Romanistic forms, since like these it represents a peculiar principle dominating the whole of life, but it also meets every required condition for the advancement of human development to a higher stage. And yet this would remain a bare possibility without any corresponding reality, if history did not testify that Calvinism has actually caused the stream of human life to flow in another channel, and has ennobled the social life of the nations. . .

. . . only by Calvinism the psalm of liberty found its way from the troubled conscience to the lips; that Calvinism has captured and guaranteed to us our constitutional civil rights; and that simultaneously with this there went out from Western Europe that mighty movement which promoted the revival of science and art, opened new avenues to commerce and trade, beautified domestic and social life, exalted the middle classes to positions of honor, caused philanthropy to abound, and more than all this, elevated, purified, and ennobled moral life by puritanic seriousness ; and then judge for yourselves whether it will do to banish any longer this God-given Calvinism to the archives of history, and whether it is so much of a dream to conceive that Calvinism has yet a blessing to bring and a bright hope to unveil for the future. (Lectures on Calvinism, 38-40)

At the end of the nineteenth century, Calvinism’s fortunes may have looked a lot brighter than Rome’s did. The Roman Church was under a virtual lock down from the Vatican amid encyclicals against Americanism and Modernism and church dogma about papal supremacy and infallibility. But that is no longer the case. Not only can Rome boast five U.S. Supreme Court justices, but the texts of Western civilization chalk up more Roman Catholic believers than Protestant saints (and they ARE saints). In another hundred years, the tables may turn again. But Protestantism will never be able to claim that it shaped the West as much as an older version of Western Christianity did.

So if Protestants want to compete in the Christian olympics, perhaps they should forget the events of Great Books and Christian political theology and put their talent and resources into soteriology, worship, and church government. Even if they don’t bring home the gold, they can take comfort from knowing the streets of paradise are paved with it.

Matters about which a Reformed church Does Not Worry

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

This:

During the John Paul and Benedict years, one byproduct of the emphasis on Catholic identity under those popes was the emergence of a caste of self-appointed guardians of loyalty who ran around “outing” bishops, parishes, schools, hospitals and so on that they felt were insufficiently Catholic. Critics derisively dubbed them the “orthodoxy police,” concluding that in at least some cases, this was mean-spirited and reflected an untoward lust for judgment.

One wonders if we’re witnessing the emergence under Francis of an equal-and-opposite form of the same impulse, which we might term the “enlightenment police” — people taking it upon themselves to pronounce whether someone is sufficiently humble, collaborative, forward-thinking, etc., to claim consistency with the direction being set by the new pope.

For a certain kind of liberal Catholic, the temptation to engage in such finger-pointing is probably especially strong. These are folks who felt the sting of charges of not “thinking with the church” for the last 35 years and who delight in the sense that the shoe is now on the other foot.

One good rule of thumb, however, is that the best person to judge whether a given figure or group is consistent with Francis’ vision is, well, Francis. His most ardent supporters might do well to resist the tug of setting themselves up as his Mutaween (the religious police in some Islamic societies), especially given that the spiritual cornerstone of his papacy is the importance of mercy.

On the other side of the equation, there are several constituencies in the church feeling angst over aspects of the new pope’s direction, including:

Some pro-life Catholics, who worry that his inclination to dial down the volume on abortion, gay marriage and contraception risks unilateral disarmament in the culture wars;

Doctrinal purists, who think his shoot-from-the-hip style courts confusion on church teaching;

Liturgical traditionalists, who don’t see him fostering the same reverence for the church’s worship they associate with Benedict XVI;

Political conservatives, who fear that his emphasis on the social Gospel could shade off into an uncritical embrace of the agenda of the secular left;
Church personnel, especially in the Vatican, who are weary of hearing the new boss take potshots at them because they don’t see themselves as careerists or lepers infected with the trappings of a royal court.

For these folks, “playing church” occasionally may mean directly criticizing the pope. More often, however, it takes the form of accusing the media, in tandem with certain voices inside the church, of misrepresenting his message. One can already spot a new rhetorical trope, patrolling the borders between the “real Francis” and the “mythical Francis” of the popular imagination.

Or this:

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, says his Twitter message paying homage to hard-partying rocker Lou Reed was meant to praise his music, not his drug-influenced lifestyle.

Ravasi, an Italian cardinal and the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, reacted to Reed’s death Monday with a tweet made up of some of the lyrics from “Perfect Day,” Reed’s 1972 cult classic. Given Reed’s provocative lifestyle, the tweet shocked many Vatican watchers.

But Ravasi made it clear — with a tweet six hours later — that he did not condone drug references in the song, or Reed’s lifestyle. That tweet warned, “Don’t fool yourselves,” before closing with another quote from the song (translated into Italian): “You’re going to reap just what you sow.”

Ravasi and Reed were nearly the same age, born seven months apart in 1942.

Ravasi, who was considered a leading candidate to become pope in the March conclave that selected Pope Francis, is no stranger to pop music-related controversy. In January, he expressed admiration for the music of another controversial rocker: Amy Winehouse, who died 18 months earlier from alcohol poisoning.

Then again, Rome and liberal (read mainline) Reformed churches bear a resemblance that Jason and the Callers never seem to notice.

What Do Pope Francis and Russell Moore Have in Common?

Published on by D. G. Hart60 Comments

With all the discussion of the piece on Russell Moore, few have seemed to notice the parallels between Moore, the newly installed director of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Pope Francis, compared to Richard Land, his predecessor at the Commission, and Benedict XVI. Moore and Francis, at least as journalists portray them, are backing away from the strictness and scolding of their predecessors, Land and Benedict. Granted, as Keith Miller observes, the problem could simply be with the journalists. They have a narrative and they are sticking to it — the old guy was mean, the new guy is nice.

Even so, journalists are not stupid and the parallels are striking. Consider the following with Francis and Benedict in mind:

“When Richard Land spoke to most issues, he was certain that Southern Baptists were behind him and he was their mouthpiece,” Mr. Mohler says. “Russ will need a deft touch to make sure that Southern Baptists stay behind him.” [me – okay, U.S. Roman Catholics have never lined up behind the Vatican, but please keep reading]

Mr. Moore is in no way a liberal. He equates abortion with the evils of slavery, considers homosexuality a sin, and insists the Southern Baptist Convention will never support gay marriage. At the same time, he emphasizes reconciliation and draws a traditional doctrinal distinction between the sinner and the sin. . . .

Mr. Moore would like the Southern Baptists to be able to hold on to people such as Sarah Parr. The 31-year-old social worker grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist family in southern Virginia. She graduated from Liberty University, founded in 1971 by the Falwell family. But she says she found herself increasingly less at home in the church, and left it altogether in her 20s.

She now attends a nondenominational church that meets in an old theater on Washington’s Capitol Hill. Politically, she describes herself “as a moderate at best, if I’m anything. But I don’t find myself in either party.”

When Mr. Moore took over in June as the Southern Baptists’ top public-policy advocate, he startled some in the church by declaring as dead and gone the entire concept of the Bible Belt as a potent mix of Jesus and American boosterism. “Good riddance,” he told thousands of the faithful at the group’s annual convention in Houston in June. “Let’s not seek to resuscitate it.”

In an essay for the conservative Christian magazine “First Things,” titled “Why Evangelicals Retreat,” he dinged the movement for “triumphalism and hucksterism” and lampooned a time when its leaders dispatched voter guides for the Christian position on “a line-item veto, the Balanced Budget Amendment, and the proper funding levels for the Department of Education.”

Mr. Moore says there is no doctrinal daylight between him and his church, and he insists he isn’t seeking to return the Southern Baptists to a past in which it shunned politics entirely.

He travels almost weekly from his home in Nashville to Washington to meet with members of the Obama administration and with congressional leaders. He has allied with the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups to make the case that overhauling the U.S. immigration system is a Christian goal. He is pushing the Pentagon to give religious chaplains in the military freer rein to preach, and has helped build a new coalition to fight a federal requirement that insurers provide contraception coverage.

His approach, however, is strikingly different from that of his predecessor Mr. Land, who for a quarter century served as the leading voice of the Southern Baptists. Like many evangelical leaders of his generation, Mr. Land, a Princeton-educated Texan, openly aligned himself with the Republican Party and popped up frequently in the Oval Office during the George W. Bush years.

Long before their divergent approaches on the gay-marriage issue, Messrs. Moore and Land split over the huge rally held by conservative talk-radio host Glenn Beck in front of the Lincoln Memorial in August 2010. Mr. Land attended the rally as Mr. Beck’s guest, and later compared Mr. Beck to Billy Graham, calling him “a person in spiritual motion.”

Mr. Moore, in an essay posted after the rally, said the event illustrated how far astray many conservative Christians had wandered in pursuit of “populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads.”

In an interview, Mr. Land said the Southern Baptist leadership is divided into those who think the culture war is lost; those who are weary and want it over; and those who think they are losing the war but feel victory is still possible. He declined to say where he puts Mr. Moore, but said he counts himself among the latter. “We are like where Britain was in 1940, under heavy attack but still not defeated,” he said.

Asked to respond, Mr. Beck in a written statement applauded Mr. Land and said, “In times like these, we need to find common ground.”

At the very least, readers might reasonably conclude that Francis and Moore are saying they each need to reconsider their predecessor’s approach to the culture wars.

But one important difference does exist. While Francis, whose pay grade is to interpret the church’s teaching, relies on a bevy of interpreters to make sense of his quips to the press, Russell Moore does actually interpret what he means.

The recent profile in the Wall Street Journal highlighted a generational change in terms of the way evangelicals approach cultural and political engagement: toward a gospel-centered approach that doesn’t back down on issues of importance, but sees our ultimate mission as one that applies the blood of Christ to the questions of the day.

The headline, as is often the case with headlines, is awfully misleading. I am not calling, at all, for a “pullback” from politics or engagement.

If anything, I’m calling for more engagement in the worlds of politics, culture, art, labor and so on. It’s just that this is a different sort of engagement. It’s not a matter of pullback, but of priority.

What I’m calling for in our approach to political engagement is what we’re already doing in one area: the pro-life movement. Evangelicals in the abortion debate have demonstrated convictional kindness in a holistic ethic of caring both for vulnerable unborn children and for the women who are damaged by abortion. The pro-life movement has engaged in a multi-pronged strategy that addresses, simultaneously, the need for laws to outlaw abortion, care for women in crisis pregnancies, adoption and foster care for children who need families, ministry to women (and men) who’ve been scarred by abortion, cultivating a culture that persuades others about why we ought to value human life, and the proclamation of the gospel to those whose consciences bear the guilt of abortion. . . .

We teach our people that their vote for President of the United States is crucially important. They’ll be held accountable at Judgment for whomever they hand the Romans 13 sword to. But we teach them that their vote on the membership of their churches is even more important. A church that loses the gospel is a losing church, no matter how many political victories it wins. A church that is right on public convictions but wrong on the gospel is a powerless church, no matter how powerful it seems.

That does sound like the old Christian Right, an elevation of matters temporal to the level of things eternal — voting having redemptive consequences. Even so, whether Moore did this simply to silence critics, or to avoid showing disrespect to Richard Land, at least he did respond. Francis still hasn’t. (Didn’t see that one coming, did you.)

And They Thought the PCA Was Divided

Published on by D. G. Hart244 Comments

You are not going to find much on the contemporary Roman Catholic Church in Jason and the Callers’ rifling through the early church fathers. Maybe for good reason since Pope Francis has apparently opened the old fault lines of Vatican II within the U.S. hierarchy (at least):

The election of Pope Francis in March heralded a season of surprises for the Catholic church, but perhaps none so unexpected — and unsettling for conservatives — as the re-emergence of the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin as a model for the American Catholic future.

While there is no indication that Francis knows the writings of Bernardin, who died in 1996, many say the pope’s remarks repeatedly evoke Bernardin’s signature teachings on the “consistent ethic of life” — the view that church doctrine champions the poor and vulnerable from womb to tomb — and on finding “common ground” to heal divisions in the church.

Ironically, the re-emergence of Bernardin — a man who was admired by a young Chicago organizer named Barack Obama — is exposing the very rifts he sought to bridge, especially among conservatives who thought his broad view of Catholicism was buried with him in Mount Carmel Cemetery outside Chicago.

Francis, for example, repeatedly stresses economic justice and care for the poor as priorities for Catholics, and he warned that the church has become “obsessed” with a few issues, such as abortion, contraception and homosexuality, and needs a “new balance.”

The new pope has also sought to steer the hierarchy away from conservative politics and toward a broad-based view of Catholicism “that is not just top-down but also horizontal” — focused on dialogue in the church and with the wider world.

“Please do not let up, as you fill our cups with hope as well as knowledge.”

“The point that (Bernardin’s) consistent ethic makes is exactly the same point that Pope Francis is making — let’s look at the whole picture and not just focus almost exclusively on three or so issues,” said Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe, N.M., who had been close friends with Bernardin since the 1970s.

“I certainly think that if Cardinal Bernardin were alive he would be very pleased with what Pope Francis is saying and doing,” echoed Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza, retired archbishop of Galveston-Houston, whose 1998-2001 term as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was seen as one of the last in the mold of Bernardin. . . .

Several other bishops, church officials and observers agreed. But if those assessments are manna to Catholics hungry for a new direction in the church, they are anathema to conservatives who believe Bernardin epitomized everything that was wrong with the U.S. church before Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI pushed the hierarchy to the right.

“The Bernardin Era is over and the Bernardin Machine is no more,” the conservative writer George Weigel wrote in the journal First Things in a 2011 essay that trumpeted the end of a time “in which a liberal consensus dominated both the internal life of the Church and the Church’s address to public policy.”

The fact that Weigel and others would still be driving a stake through the heart of Bernardin’s legacy — as Peter Steinfels put it in a rejoinder in Commonweal magazine — 15 years after his death is a testimony to the stature Bernardin once had, and the angst he can still inspire.

In fact, a generation ago, Bernardin was viewed as the quintessential American churchman — a longtime president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and then its resident wise man, coaxing the hierarchy into approving landmark documents on war and poverty that shaped the public debate on faith in America.

Yet the “John Paul II bishops” who came to power in the 1980s and beyond saw Bernardin’s style and views as too accommodating and too reluctant to mount the barricades on behalf of a more assertive Catholic identity marked by a few hallmark issues rather than a spectrum of teachings.

So just when Jason and the Callers thought they had escaped the unsatisfying clutches of Protestantism, they entered a communion riven by the same kind of divisions that characterized the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. One side wants the church to continue to adapt to the modern world (as Vatican II taught) and the other, like neo-conservatives mugged by the reality of liberal change, wants to put the brakes on adaptation by stressing fundamental markers of Christian identity. Both sides are a long way from early church fathers in which Jason and the Callers have buried their heads.

A Communion In Search of a Call

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Perhaps Jason and the Callers should devote more time to their new fellow believers:

Archbishop Müller’s concise and clear re-statement of the theological foundations of Christian marriage offers a vision of permanent, fruitful and faithful love between a husband and wife, who are a sign for all of human history of the creative fire of Trinitarian love. It also offers a vision of Christ’s unstinting care for his Church — and thus a preparation for eternal life with God.

“Sacramental marriage is a testimony to the power of grace, which changes man and prepares the whole Church for the holy city, the new Jerusalem — the Church, which is prepared, ‘as a bride adorned for her husband,’” observed Archbishop Müller, gently but firmly. “By adapting to the spirit of the age, a weary prophet seeks his own salvation, but not the salvation of the world in Jesus Christ.”

However, his elucidation of Church teaching was accompanied by a frank acknowledgement that many cradle Catholics who participate in a Church wedding know little of sacramental theology and have been formed instead by modern notions of marital love as a human contract that necessarily requires an escape hatch.

The CDF prefect suggested that this state of affairs increases the likelihood that marriages blessed by the Church may not be valid, and that reality might influence judgments made by Church marriage tribunals.

Could the reason for this ignorance be a catechism that is too long? Or could it be that sacramentalism gets in the way of didacticism? Either way, Jason and the Callers have their work cut out for them.

Vatican Sporting Scene

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

While Jason is knee-deep in Eucharist studies and Bryan is trying to wrap his mind around Vatican II, officials in Rome are engaged in various competitions. First, a story about cricket as the new evangelism:

The Holy See has plans to finally beat the Church of England at its own game: not in a theological debate, but on the cricket field. The Vatican has a new cricket club that aims to encourage dialogue between cultures, as well as growing virtue among the athletes, both on and off the field.

“The idea was if we start a cricket club, cricket being so popular in the whole of the East, especially in the Indian subcontinent, we could start a dialogue through cricket,” said Father Theodore Mascarenas.
Father Mascarenas is a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture, overseeing the departments for Asia, Africa and Ushuaia (capital city of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina). He is also the new chairman for the Vatican cricket team, called St. Peter’s Cricket Club.

St. Peter’s Cricket Club currently has several different objectives. The first is to organize a tournament among the various colleges in Rome, which, according to a survey done earlier this year, will be able to count on roughly 300 players and supporters from the city.

Eventually, the club hopes to challenge the Church of England to a match and aims in the future to play teams from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist educational institutions in order to fortify relationships and dialogue with various cultural communities.

Of course, no one would really see much of a contest in theological debates with the Anglicans. What is of interest is the emerging debate between Pope Francis and Archbishop Gerhard Muller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:

Given that Pope Francis has himself spoken of the need to take a new look at the situation of divorced and remarried, and has convened a Synod of Bishops for 2014 to discuss this and other issues, it’s legitimate to wonder where the church is really headed: substantial change or another dead-end debate.

The archbishop makes several important points:

— He underlines that, in his view, this is not simply a pastoral question but a doctrinal issue that involves the church’s theological understanding of the sacrament of marriage. He states categorically that the Orthodox practice of allowing second or third marriages under certain circumstances “cannot be reconciled with God’s will” – which is interesting, considering that Pope Francis himself has referred to the Orthodox practice without explicitly repudiating or endorsing it.

— Muller pointedly rejects the argument that the individual conscience can be the final arbiter on whether a divorced and civilly remarried Catholic can receive Communion. Again, there seems to be a contrast in tone with Pope Francis’ own recent remarks on the duty to follow one’s conscience.

— In what appears to be a remarkably direct response to Pope Francis’ call for “mercy” as the framework for dealing with divorced and remarried Catholics, Archbishop Muller says that “an objectively false appeal to mercy also runs the risk of trivializing the image of God, by implying that God cannot do other than forgive.”

Do Jason and the Callers have an opinion about any of this? Would any of this matter to their projection of Rome as savior from error? Perhaps they are playing a different game.

If Everything is Holy

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

A piece of reflection on Pope Francis’ recent consecration of Russia (does such scope of office make the evangelical takeover of NYC look like chopped liver or what?) that might give neo-Calvinists and Jason and the Callers pause. It’s a two-fer:

This Sunday our Holy Father Pope Francis will consecrate the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Of course, there are no plans to mention Russia specifically, and the bishops of the world have not been asked to participate. It looks as if our current pontiff will be continuing in the trajectory set by previous pontiffs of performing generic world consecrations that do not fulfill Our Lady’s request at Fatima. . .

And what is the point of a consecration of “the world”? To consecrate something means to set it apart, dedicated to the service of God. Now, “the world” is really everything. How can you set apart everything? What is it being set apart from? Perhaps I am being a little simplistic here, and I will willingly receive correction on this point, but to consecrate the whole world seems like playing a game where everybody wins. And if everybody wins, then nobody does; if everything is consecrated, is anything consecrated? And if the entire planet is to be consecrated, why the necessity of repeating this consecration again and again over the past sixty years? Each subsequent consecration suggests and imperfection in the previous one; unless we take the position that consecrations periodically need to be renewed.

Comprehensive and cosmic Christianity does give the feeling of t-ball or youth soccer. All exercise but no contest and thus inconsequential.

Can Jason and the Callers Gain Francis' Blessing?

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

Probably. All they need to do is do what these Roman Catholics did.

Then again, they might be feeling ambivalent, the way these Roman Catholics are, those whom John Allen identifies as having “the older son” problem:

Some Vatican personnel who have tried to do their best over the years in service to the successor of Peter and who may feel a bit demoralized hearing the pope describe their work environment as infested with careerism, “Vatican-centrism,” and the “leprosy” of a royal court.

Some pro-life Catholics who feel like they’ve carried water for the church on controversial and sometimes unpopular issues such as abortion and gay marriage and who now get the sense the pope regards some of their efforts as misplaced or over the top.

Some evangelical Catholics, both clergy and laity, who’ve tried to reassert a strong sense of Catholic identity against forces they believe want to play it down, who now feel the pope may be pulling the rug out from under them. Some leaders in the reborn genre of Catholic apologetics, for instance, weren’t thrilled recently to hear Francis call proselytism “solemn nonsense.”

Then again, Jason and the Callers might be too young in the faith to qualify as older sons.

Postscript: Meanwhile, Jason has become an Arminian since joining the Roman Catholic Church:

So when it comes to salvation and the five points, the paradigm shift from penal substitution to pleasing sacrifice played a big role. Once that shift occurs, limited atonement becomes sort of meaningless. With total depravity, I think a Catholic can affirm the substance of the idea while maintaining man’s free will. Unconditional election isn’t a problem, although Catholics are free to disagree. Irresistible grace can be affirmed, with some qualifications, but perseverance of the saints is untrue from a Catholic POV (since all who are baptized are regenerated, but not all the regenerated are elect to salvation).

But never forget, it’s all about paradigms.

Where Is the Bishop of Rome When You Need Him?

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Stellman thinks the Westminster Divines differed from the early church fathers on the Eucharist. He relies on J.N.D. Kelly to make his point and lists quotations from various early church fathers.

But since Stellman is a high papalist, what difference does it make if Augustine or Ambrose or Ignatius held a certain view of the sacrament? The task of the pope is to interpret infallibly the Christian faith. All other interpreters are fallible, right?

So which is it?

Jason may think this is just more Hart-kvetching, but he really should get his argument straight about Protestantism’s defects. Are we suspect because we don’t line up with the church fathers? Or are we deficient because we are not in submission to the pope?

He also needs to think through the exact relationship between the early church fathers and the papacy. J.N.D. Kelly is not at all clear that the early church was as on board with high papalism as Jason and the Callers are.

The crucial question . . . is whether or not this undoubted primacy of honour was held to exist by divine right and so to involve an over-riding jurisdiction. So far as the East is concerned, the answer must be, by and large, in the negative. While showing it immense deference and setting great store by its pronouncements, the Eastern churches never treated Rome as the constitutional centre and head of the Church, must less as an infallible oracle of faith and morals, and on occasion had not the least compunctions about resisting its express will. (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 407)

Stellman belongs to the party of reason and we to the one of skepticism. So reason up. If you follow the church fathers on the Eucharist, why not on the See of Rome?

New Evangelism Indeed

Published on by D. G. Hart56 Comments

Another interview with Pope Francis is circulating the interweb. I don’t imagine Jason and the Callers will be pleased. But I’m sure they will do their best to rescue the pope from error.

A few excerpts (the interviewer’s comments are in bold):

It’s a joke, I tell him. My friends think it is you want to convert me.
He smiles again and replies: “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.”

Your Holiness, is there is a single vision of the Good? And who decides what it is?
“Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.”

Your Holiness, you wrote that in your letter to me. The conscience is autonomous, you said, and everyone must obey his conscience. I think that’s one of the most courageous steps taken by a Pope.
“And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.”

Is the Church doing that?
“Yes, that is the purpose of our mission: to identify the material and immaterial needs of the people and try to meet them as we can. Do you know what agape is?”

Yes, I know.
“It is love of others, as our Lord preached. It is not proselytizing, it is love. Love for one’s neighbor, that leavening that serves the common good.”

Love your neighbor as yourself.
“Exactly so.”

Jesus in his preaching said that agape, love for others, is the only way to love God. Correct me if I’m wrong.
“You’re not wrong. The Son of God became incarnate in the souls of men to instill the feeling of brotherhood. All are brothers and all children of God. Abba, as he called the Father. I will show you the way, he said. Follow me and you will find the Father and you will all be his children and he will take delight in you. Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.” . . .

Do you feel touched by grace?
“No one can know that. Grace is not part of consciousness, it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason. Even you, without knowing it, could be touched by grace.”

Without faith? A non-believer?
“Grace regards the soul.”

I do not believe in the soul.
“You do not believe in it but you have one.”

Your Holiness, you said that you have no intention of trying to convert me and I do not think you would succeed.
“We cannot know that, but I don’t have any such intention.”

And St. Francis?
“He’s great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all he loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of that agape we talked about earlier.”

I don’t think this is what George Weigel had in mind for the new evangelization.

Update: once again, Francis has made statements that require folks without the appropriate pay grade to tell us what the pope really meant. Here is Jimmy Akin explaining what the chief explainer was supposed to have explained:

8) So what did Pope Francis mean by his comments on proselytization?

He and Scalfari were joking about converting each other in the interview, and Pope Francis assured Scalfari that he wasn’t going to strong-arm him to convert to Christianity right in the interview.
He said that employing such strong-arm tactics is “solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other.”

Later he contrasted proselytization with the way Jesus preached the Gospel, which was based on love.
Finally, he emphasized: “I believe I have already said that our goal is not to proselytize but to listen to needs, desires and disappointments, despair, hope.”

In other words, the Pope believes that evangelization should not involve trying to strong-arm people (proselytization) but that the Gospel should be preached with love and involve a dialogue in which Christians listening to unbelievers and their concerns and help them move toward Christ through a positive demonstration of word and action.

I do not know why St. Patrick sprinkling water on the Irish would be considered strong-arming. In the ex opere operato world of Roman Catholic sacramentalism, baptizing unconverted persons was the surest way to convert them. Baptismal efficacy was one of the reasons why Trent made provisions for non-priests, even Jews and infidels, to perform baptisms on unconverted persons near death. If salvation comes through the waters of baptism, and if the Roman Catholic Church operated according to that logic for almost a millennium, I am not sure why Pope Francis or his interpreters are looking for new ways to evangelize. It looks to this Old Lifer like Vatican II is baaaaack.