Faith v. Superstition


Catechism of the Catholic Church

Superstition
2111 Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.

More Bartisms -

Ehrman responds to Father Robert Barron:

If The Very Reverend Robert Barron does find my book threatening, it is either because he has not read it closely enough or because he holds to fundamentalist views that have somehow or other managed to work their way into the hearts and minds of the Catholic clergy.   Or both.

Typical Bart Erhman - anyone who disagrees with him must be a fundamentalist. From my review of "Did Jesus Exist?":

Bart Ehrman has two goals in "Did Jesus Exist?" The first is responding to and rebutting the claim of "mythicists" that a person named Jesus who was the basis of the Christian movement never existed, i.e., that "Jesus" was a fictional character invented out of bits and pieces of the world's folklore. The second goal is to respond to the mythicist argument while still maintaining his prior positions that the contemporary view of Jesus held by "very conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians" (p. 72) aka "fundamentalist Christians" (p. 74) aka "well funded conservative Christians" (p. 142)aka "fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals (p. 231) - I made a game of noting the various times Ehrman "poisoned the well" and "strawmanned" opponents who were not "critical scholars" by labeling them with some variant of "conservative" - has no basis in the history of the "real" Jesus.

Also, Ehrman has never strayed very far from his fundamentalist anti-Catholic roots.

Also, what is with the repetition of "The Very Reverend" title?

I've often thought that Ehrman waives his hand at fundamentalist stereotypes of Catholicism in order to "Catholic-bait."  I wrote this in my review:

On the whole, Ehrman's characterizations concerning the "Catholic" position on the perpetual virginity of Mary are intellectually disturbing. Ehrman ought to have a more informed position inasmuch as he has taught the sub-Apostolic Father, including the Proto-Evangelium of James, for the Teaching Company. It's hard to tell with Ehrman whether his claim is just "Catholic-baiting." He may be so used to teaching to "conservative evangelicals" for whom associating anything with Catholicism makes it by definition weird and suspect that his default mode for persuasion is to make such an association with positions he wants to undermine. Alternatively, it may be as I've said, his fundamentalist assumptions still working their ways through his thought.

There is a fundie in the discussion, but it's not Father Barron.

Bart Ehrman - Super Scholar

Is Bart for real? Can he not read? Or is this just his normal disingenuous style?

He writes:

OK, so I’m a bit testy. But what really has sent me over the edge is his claim that my view is simply a re-hashing of Hugh Schonfield’s Passover Plot. Is he SERIOUS? Maybe he forgot what the thesis of the Passover Plot is. Or maybe he doesn’t care, but simply wants to tarnish me by association with an absurd thesis that someone else advanced, which in fact has nothing to do with mine//

But here's Baron's comment:

When I was a teenager, I read British Biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield’s Passover Plot, which lays out the same narrative, and just a few months ago, I read Reza Aslan’s Zealot, which pursues a very similar line, and I’m sure next Christmas or Easter I will read still another iteration of the theory. //

Barron was comparing Aslan to Schonfeld as an example of how anti-Christian arguments get recycled.

He was not comparing Ehrman to Schonfeld.

This is pretty typical, actually, of Ehrman's scholarship.

Father Barron on Bishop Schorri's Sermon in Favor...

... of Demonic Possession.

But the Bishop moved, instead, in an astonishing direction, finding an example of the lamentable exclusivity she is talking about in the behavior of the Apostle Paul himself. In the 16th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, we find the story of Paul's first visit to the Greek town of Philippi. We are told that one day, while on his way to prayer, Paul was accosted by a slave girl "who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling" (Acts. 16:16). This demon-possessed child followed Paul and his companions up and down for several days, shouting, "These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation." Having finally had enough of her, Paul turned to the young woman and addressed the wicked spirit within her, "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her" (Acts. 16:18). And the demon, we are told, came out of her instantly.

Up until last month in Curaçao, the entire Christian interpretive tradition read that passage as an account of deliverance, as the story of the liberation of a young woman who had been enslaved both to dark spiritual powers and to the nefarious human beings who had exploited her.

But Bishop Jefferts Schori reads it as a tale of patriarchal oppression and intolerance. She preaches, "But Paul is annoyed, perhaps, for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can't abide something he won't see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it." The Bishop correctly points out that the girl was saying true things about Paul and his friends, but demons say true things all the time in the New Testament. Think of the dark spirits who consistently confess that Jesus is the Holy One of God. That a Christian bishop would characterize the demonic possession of a young girl as something "beautiful and holy" simply beggars belief.

And:

What is at the root of this deeply wrong-headed homily is a conflation of early 21st century values of inclusion and toleration with the great Biblical value of love. To love is to will the good of the other as other. As such, love can involve -- indeed, must involve -- a deep intolerance toward wickedness and a clear willingness to exclude certain forms of life, behavior, and thought. When inclusivity and toleration emerge as the supreme goods -- as they have in much of our society today -- then love devolves into something vague, sentimental and finally dangerous.

How dangerous? Well, we might begin to see the devil himself as beautiful and holy.

How long, however, before Bishop Schori points out that at least the Devil isn't part of "patriarchal oppression and intolerance"?

Love, Grace and Damnation.

Father Barron on Les Miserables:

Father Barron on "Falling in Love with the Transcendent Third."

Everything goes better with Aristotle.

Father Baron on the "Sebelius and Dowd Heresies."

Concerning Dowd's statement that "This is America. We don't hunt heresies here. We welcome them," Father Baron writes:

The problem here is a fundamental confusion between inclusiveness in regard to people and inclusiveness in regard to ideas. The church is indeed all-embracing in the measure that it wants to gather all people to itself. The Bernini colonnade that reaches out like welcoming arms in front of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is meant to carry precisely this symbolic valence. But the Church has never had such an attitude toward all ideologies and points of view. It has recognized, from the beginning, that certain doctrines are repugnant to its own essential nature, or contradictory to the revelation upon which the Church is constructed. This is precisely why, for the past two millennia, theologians, bishops, Popes, and councils have consistently and strenuously battled heresies concerning central Catholic dogmas. They have understood that the adoption of these errors would fatally compromise the integrity of the Church.

Truth be told, any community must, if it is to survive, have a similar "intolerance." The Abraham Lincoln Society would legitimately oppose the proposal that its members ignore Lincoln and concentrate on the study of Winston Churchill; the USGA would find repugnant the suggestion that Pebble Beach be turned into a collection of baseball diamonds; and the United States of America indeed aggressively excludes those committed to the eradication of fundamental American principles.

The Catholic Church is not a Voltairean debating society; it is a community that stands for some very definite things, which implies, necessarily, that it sets its back against very definite things. A church that simply "welcomed" heresies would, overnight, cease to be itself.

And:

We find another very common error in Secretary Sebelius's address to Georgetown. Deftly side-stepping the issue that has generated such controversy, the HHS demand that Catholic institutions provide insurance for procedures that Catholic morality finds objectionable. Sebelius cited John F. Kennedy's memorable 1960 address to Protestant ministers in Houston. Kennedy dreamed of an American "in which no religious body seeks to impose its will, either directly or indirectly, on the general populace." Over and again, from every quarter, one hears this call echoed today. But when you really think about it, you realize that it is so much nonsense.

What is so easily forgotten is that any law, any political movement, indeed any persuasive speech involves, in one way or another, the imposition of someone's will. In the mid-nineteenth century, William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown were certainly endeavoring to impose their wills regarding the abolition of slavery on the rest of the country. In 1862, with the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln was most assuredly attempting to impose his will on many of his recalcitrant countrymen.

Publicly protesting Jim Crow laws, marching through the streets of Selma and Montgomery, speaking in the cadences of Isaiah and Amos on the steps of Lincoln's Memorial in Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King was certainly trying to impose his vision on an America that was by no means entirely ready for it. Indeed, just a year after the "I Have a Dream Speech," King was delighted with the passage of strict civil rights legislation, which gave teeth to the proposals that he had long been making.

Now in all the examples that I've given, explicit legal moves were motivated by solidly religious conviction. If you doubt me in regard to Lincoln, I would recommend a careful re-reading of his Second Inaugural Address.

Of course, Dowd and Sebelius are aggressive hypocrites. What they are really saying is that people we don't agree with have no right to their opinions or to seek to have their views adopted by the political system in the same way that WE do. As I've demonstrated repeatedly in this blog, liberals are innately intolerant and, therefore, zealously involved in the project of "heresy-hunting."

Father Barron on Andrew Sullivan's "safe Jesus."

"But God raised him." The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the clearest affirmation possible that God is more powerful than the corrupt and violent authorities that govern the world -- which is precisely why the tyrants have always been terrified of it. When the first Christians held up the cross, the greatest expression of state-sponsored terrorism, they were purposely taunting the leaders of their time: "You think that frightens us?"

The opening line of the Gospel of Mark is a direct challenge to Rome: "beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (Mk 1:1). "Good news" (euangelion in Mark's Greek) was a term used to describe an imperial victory. The first Christian evangelist is saying, not so subtly, that the real good news hasn't a thing to do with Caesar.
Rather, it has to do with someone whom Caesar killed and whom God raised from the dead. And just to rub it in, he refers to this resurrected Lord as the "Son of God." Ever since the time of Augustus, "Son of God" was a title claimed by the Roman emperor. Not so, says Mark. The authentic Son of God is the one who is more powerful than Caesar.

Again and again, Sullivan says that he wants a Jesus who is "apolitical." Quite right -- and that's just why the cultural and political leaders of the contemporary West will be perfectly at home with his proposal. A defanged, privatized, spiritual teacher poses little threat to the status quo.

But the Son of God, crucified under Pontius Pilate and risen from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, is a permanent and very dangerous threat. That's why I will confess that I smiled a bit at Andrew Sullivan as I read his article. Like the young Thomas Jefferson, I'm sure he thinks he's being very edgy and provocative. Au contraire, in point of fact.

Source.

The Hunger Games, Scapegoating and Human Society, and "running on the fumes" of Chrisian morality.

Here there be spoilers (but not such as would ruin your enjoyment in watching the movie.)

Father Baron on "The Hunger Games."

Via NRO.

All of these examples of human sacrifice — both fictional and non-fictional — swirled through my head as I watched the much-anticipated film The Hunger Games, based on the wildly popular series of novels. As in Jackson’s story, a lottery results in the choice of sacrificial victims from each “district” of a post-apocalyptic North American nation state. These youngsters — they must be teenagers — are then taken to the capital city and, like the Aztecs’ prisoners, they are pampered, made-up, and treated as celebrities for an extended period. Next, they are compelled to engage in mortal combat, so that, of the 24 participants, only one will survive. Like the Roman crowds of old, the people of the nation watch this process unfold and find it deeply entertaining, while the leadership manipulates the games (and the people’s feelings) for their own political ends. Finally, two of the participants in the Hunger Games (they changed the rules a bit) play the role of Theseus and manage to survive their ordeal and thus call into question the games themselves.

The really interesting question is this: Why has this motif of the sacrificial victim played such a large role in the human imagination for so long? Why do we keep acting out this scenario, both in reality and in our literature? The contemporary literary theorist Rene Girard has speculated that practically every human community is grounded in what he calls “the scapegoating mechanism.” This is the process by which we discharge our societal tensions onto a victim whom we have decided, collectively, to punish. In this, we effectively (at least for a time) manage to bring some peace and stability to our always volatile communities — which goes a long way toward explaining why the scapegoat dynamic is so popular with governments and why it is usually given a quasi-religious sanction.

If you doubt Girard on this score, I would invite you to take a good, long look at what Hitler accomplished through his scapegoating of Jews — and at what most of us accomplish through gossip and back-stabbing. As a wag once put it: “wherever two or three are gathered, look for victims.”

Girard discovered something else, which, despite his Catholic up-bringing, took him quite by surprise. He found that Christianity was the one religion, philosophy, or ideology that both unmasked this scapegoat mechanism and showed a way out. For at the heart of Christian revelation is God’s utter identification, not with the perpetrators of violence, but with the scapegoated victim. The crucified Jesus is hence the undermining of the dynamic that has undergirded most civilizations and that continues to beguile the human imagination to this day. If we find stories like The Lottery and The Hunger Games disturbing, it is due to our at least implicitly Christian formation. Human sacrifice flourished in the midst of some of the most sophisticated and intellectually advanced civilizations in history. It is demonstrably the case, and not just a matter of speculation, that what brought it to an end in both the Roman and Aztec contexts was nothing other than the influence of Christianity, the religion centered on a crucified Lord.

Secularist Totalitarianism.

Father Baron points to "two forms of Liberalism" - the traditional liberalism and the secularist totalitarian liberalism.

I've had some Facebook discussions which confirm the totalitarian temptation of modern leftists who think that all religious people are "superstitious" and not really entitled to either have democratic results in their favor honored or to protection from totalitarian democracy on the grounds of conscience. In fact, one of the most amazing things about modern liberalism is that it no longer seems to understand what "freedom of conscience" means, and, yet, not so long ago, these were the people inveighing against loyalty oaths on that very ground.

Tribute to Father Barron...

...from Michael Potemra at NRO.

I just watched this remarkable tribute to Christopher Hitchens by Fr. Robert Barron, and it confirms to me yet again that Kathryn Lopez is 100 percent correct about Father Barron: He is the most impressive Catholic apologist of our time. Too many Catholic apologists — and the exact same goes for Protestant apologists, and atheist apologists, and what-have-you apologists; it’s the occupational hazard in that line of work — come across as smug tribalists sneering at the lesser people not fortunate enough to be within their circle. Watch this video of Father Barron on Creative Minority Report and you will see why he is so good at apologetics: He is clearly someone who is catholic in the true lower-case-c sense, and infused with love for a (in this instance, one particular) fellow man. I had my problems with Christopher Hitchens — who didn’t? — and Barron mentions some of these issues in the video. But he puts those disagreements in a very realistic context, in what I think is an attempt to see our brother Christopher with God’s eyes. That is what we are called to do even with our outright enemies, never mind people who might say an unkind word about (or to) us now and again. Now there’s a resolution for the New Year: Try to be as charitable with people who disagree with me as Father Barron is in his comments on Hitchens. (One hell of a challenge; but then, so, of course, is Christianity. In fact, it’s the same challenge.) If any e-mailer or comboxer views this as an invitation to put my resolution to the test, let me say, preemptively, to that person: Have a blessed and happy New Year!

Father Barron on New Years Resolutions.

Father Barron on the Message of Advent.

Father Barron on Christology.



Father Barron is terrific. I'm not sure, however,  that he is accurately describing the heresies he discusses. For example, the  "Jesus is only human" heresy would be Ebionitism (or maybe Adoptionism.") Nestorianism would be Jesus is human and divine but separately so, as if Jesus was "possessed" by a divine being.

I love the Irenaeus quote, "The glory of God is man fully alive".  How very different from the Calvinist idea that God is glorified by the predestined damnation of souls. As "Hyper-Calvinist" James White once observed:

So the question I have to ask of many who stand behind pulpits today is this: is your preaching so wimpy it would never trouble a religious hypocrite, and never result in such a person fleeing its proclamation so as to run to man's religions for refuge? Do you pull back on those elements of God's truth that are the most offensive to the natural man because you do not wish to see that disdainful look, that annoyed shaking of the head? Do you really distrust the ministry of the Spirit to make the Word of Christ to come alive in the hearts and minds of Christ's sheep, so that you do not need to worry about those who find offense at His truth? Or have you embraced the spirit of the age which places man's fragile emotions upon the seat of prominence, and have bought into the idea that to be "loving" means to never give offense to anyone (well, except for God--it is fine to offend Him by thinking yourself so wise you can edit out what shouldn't be in the gospel in our day)? Would your teaching and proclamation allow a religious hypocrite to remain safely and comfortably ensconced in the congregation for years on end, never offended, never convicted? Finally, if such a hypocrite does leave and make a show of embracing heresy just to spite you, do you sting with embarrassment, or rejoice that God's Word continues to work in the hearts of men and women, some to His glory in their salvation, and some to His glory in their damnation? Think about it.

Ooh-Rah!!! *Thumps Chest." Manly men talk about rejoicing in the idea that God's glory is found in the damnation of souls predestined to Hell!

Particularly if they "make a show" of embracing heresy "just to spite you"!?!?!?

Really? What's the reason for the rejoicing? That souls are predestined to salvation? That God's power is sovereign? Or that people who "make a show" of spiting James White - or, to be fair, anyone who rejoices in the simple fact that some folks are sent to endless torment - gets his deepest earthly desire, i.e., to see his enemies laid low?

How different this perspective is from St. Thomas Aquinas's answer to the question of whether the saints will rejoice in the suffering of the damned. Contrary to what shallow New Atheists would have you believe, Aquinas did not say that the saints would rejoice that the damned were suffering simply because there were damned and they were suffering. To the contrary, St. Thomas Aquinas explained, with a nuance missing among a people who lack the power of concentrating on anything longer than the information contained on a movie poster:

A thing may be a matter of rejoicing in two ways. First directly, when one rejoices in a thing as such: and thus the saints will not rejoice in the punishment of the wicked. Secondly, indirectly, by reason namely of something annexed to it: and in this way the saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy. And thus the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed: while the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly.

And:

Reply to Objection 2. Although God rejoices not in punishments as such, He rejoices in them as being ordered by His justice.

God does not "rejoice in his punishments." He rejoices in his justice. His glory, however, is in "man fully alive."

Here is something on the Irenaeus quote and its source:

It is not only in the doctrine of recapitulation by the grace of Christ that Saint Irenaeus wanted to situate the true value of man, which was denied by the Gnostics. He was careful to note the intrinsic dignity of man, let us even say the relative autonomy of the creature capable of freely orienting himself. Certain contemporaries of ours thirty years ago were gladly spreading about the ambiguous formula: "The glory of God is man fully alive".

In fact, this formula was truncated and ended up making the Bishop of Lyon say the contrary of that which he had taught. Man's life is for him the glory of God provided that man remains in contact with his Creator. Shortly after the Council, some theologians and some historians such as Père do Lubac had already protested against this false interpretation. The Holy Father did just as much with the tact which distinguishes him. In his address at Lyon (n. 2), he recalled the authentic and complete text of Saint Irenaeus: "The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. If the revelation of God through creation already brings life to all living beings on the earth, how much more will the manifestation of the Father by the Word bring life to those who see God" (AH IV, 20, 7).

As Father Barron suggests, the heart of the difference may well lie in the Catholic willingness to embrace a "both/and" answer at Chalcedon.

Doctrine Matters...

...because love is a theological virtue.

Father Barron explains -

Father Barron on McGrath's "Christianity's Dangerous Idea."

Father Barron critiques Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve."

Greenblatt wants to tell a riveting story by posing his "good guy" against a "bad guy," which is, for him, the Catholic Church, but to do this he has to promote a strawman that the Catholic Church was all about asceticism and blind faith.



By the way, I liked Greenblatt's "Will in the World," although I noticed that a lot of his more "gosh wow" insights were based on a lot of "cantilevered speculation" and therefore should be taken with a moderate-sized grain of salt.

Via Aggie Catholics.

Father Barron on St. Thomas Aquinas.

Choices create habits; habits create character; character creates destiny.

Father Barron against the modern Gnostics - what we do with our bodies shapes our spirit.