A reader once wrote to me to ask:

"I have a quick question, and I apologize if it’s awfully trite, but I haven’t been able to find a satisfactory answer after (admittedly,
not-so-exhaustive) searching.  Here it is:
 
From the standpoint of the Catholic Church: does everything happen for a reason?
 
If it does, it smacks a bit of predestination; if it doesn’t, does that mean that God is out of control or doesn’t care? Say a flower grows on a mountaintop and it dies, and no human ever saw a trace of it or knew it existed; how much of that is an effect of an ecosystem going through its natural cycles, and how much is God putting a flower on a mountaintop?"

St. Thomas Aquinas answers the claim that God does not govern all things this way:

"On the contrary, Augustine says (De Civ. Dei v, 11): 'Not only heaven and earth, not only man and angel, even the bowels of the lowest animal, even the wing of the bird, the flower of the plant, the leaf of the tree, hath God endowed with every fitting detail of their nature.' Therefore all things are subject to His government.
 
I answer that, For the same reason is God the ruler of things as He is their cause, because the same gives existence as gives perfection; and this belongs to government. Now God is the cause not indeed only of some particular kind of being, but of the whole universal being, as proved above (44, 1,2). Wherefore, as there can be nothing which is not created by God, so there can be nothing which is not subject to His government. This can also be proved from the nature of the end of government. For a man’s government extends over all those things which come under the end of his government. Now the end of the Divine government is the Divine goodness; as we have shown (2). Wherefore, as there can be nothing that is not ordered to the Divine goodness as its end, as is clear from what we have said above (44, 4; 65, 2), so it is impossible for anything to escape from the Divine government.
 
Foolish therefore was the opinion of those who said that the corruptible lower world, or individual things, or that even human affairs, were not subject to the Divine government. These are represented as saying, 'God hath abandoned the earth' (Ezekiel 9:9)."

However, I’m not really sure that my reader is asking the question that St. Thomas is answering. I suppose part of my hesitancy depends on what my reader means by “for a reason”.  If he means, “Does everything that happens occur because God permits it and incorporates it into his ongoing act of creation and redemption?” then yes: everything happens for a reason.  God is not surprised by events as though he is not omniscient.  Nor is God at a loss at what to do about a created order that got away from his control when he was distracted.  The created order has never gotten away from God’s governance and he has always been in control.

At the same time, however, God has always allowed a certain sort of autonomy to his creatures (and not merely creatures with free will).  Critters do what they were created to do by God, but they do it in a way that is proper to their nature.  Moreover, Creation is not a one-off event that happened with the Big Bang and then was left to bounce around like billiard balls ever since.  God is the very present author of Creation right here and now.  If God wanted to get rid of Creation he would not have to do anything: he would have to stop doing something.  Indeed, even what we call “chance” is something which falls within God’s governance that leaves room for the freedom of his creatures.  So, for instance, a prophet speaking under inspiration tells Ahab that if he goes into battle, he is going to die—and the prophecy is fulfilled by an archer who draws his bow and fires “at random”, killing Ahab as prophesied (1 Kings 22:34).

This has big implications for things like the tussle between creationists and materialists who both imagine the evolution somehow disproves that God could be behind the creation of various species.  Similarly, it impinges on Einstein’s old discomfort with ideas like quantum indeterminacy and his famous remark that “God does not play dice.”  It would appear that, given the biblical data, what we call “chance” (which is a word for what we, not God, are unsure about) is one of the tools God uses in the unfolding drama of Creation and Redemption.

However, if my reader is asking “Does God positively will sin and evil and make people damn themselves so that some larger purpose of His can be accomplished?", then the answer is no.  God does not will sin—ever, though he permits it and turns it to our good (if we let Him.) When we sin we truly do something nonsensical and without reason.  We assert our nothingness and push ourselves away from God who is the Logos who holds all things in being and in good order.  Sin is the attempt to act without reason (though, to be sure, we always provide ourselves with excuses that appear reasonable).  If God the Logos did not incorporate our nonsensical acts into His creative and redemptive plan, they would spin out of control and carry us into nothingness.  But, thanks be to God, he is Lord of all and nothing escapes his Providence, so even our unreasoning acts of sin are turned by Him to the glory of His Name (though, if we remain impenitent, it will do us no good and we could send ourselves to Hell thereby).
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Unsplash)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. For the last several weeks, Mark Shea unpacked how Catholics authentically read the Bible. He began with a general introduction, then he outlined three specific guidelines. Next he launched into the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholics interpret the Bible, focusing on the allegorical sense and the moral sense. Today, he wraps up the series with the anagogical sense.

Bound up with the biblical understanding of God from the get-go is the conviction (one almost wants to call it the foregone conclusion) that God knows the future.

This isn’t always necessarily the case with those delightful works of pagan imagination called “the gods”. In some pagan myths, one gets the impression that the gods are as clueless about the various twists and turns of the story as the human actors and are struggling to keep up just as much as we mortals are.

But in Scripture, though God is acting and reacting to the choices made by His creatures, it is not so much stated as taken for granted that God also knows everything, including the future. The “testing” of people like Abraham that periodically occurs is done, not because God is wondering how the lab rats will respond to the stress test, but in order to purify and/or show the creature what he is made of. Similarly, though God periodically “changes His mind” in response to some impassioned intercession from Moses or Jonah, the sense is always that this is a case of the prophet chasing God till God catches him. Down deep, we know the author believes God is sovereign and in charge of the whole story.

And so, early on, God is constantly telling the future through His prophets with no sense from the author that this needs an explanation. Rather, as revelation proceeds, the prophets simply become more and more emphatic that God knows (and determines) the end from the beginning. And He often does so in a way that blithely breezes past questions which we plodding humans are still squabbling about. For instance, our entire culture is (still!) consumed with the tedious debate about design vs. chance. In 1 Kings 22 we learn that God has ordained that Ahab be killed in battle as punishment for his wickedness. Yet the whole thing turns on God’s knowledge that Ahab is so full of himself he will march straight into folly with both eyes open. And the crowning irony is that the archer who slays Ahab is described as having drawn his bow “at random”. So was the death of Ahab due to divine design, human choice or random chance? The answer appears to be “yes”.

Given this great ease with mystery, it’s not a surprise that Scripture is open to the fact of prophecy, including good old-fashioned “predict the future” kind. An all-knowing God who doesn’t know the end from the beginning seems to have hardly been worth considering for ancient Jews. Indeed, it has taken modernity great intellectual pains to train itself into believing in the God of Process Theology, who is eating popcorn on the cosmic sofa and wondering as much as you or me how it’s all going to end. The God of the Bible, in contrast, is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, Who was and Who is and Who is to come.

Because of this, the Jews basically invented (and then handed to Christians) a conception of time that was as unique in antiquity as it is taken for granted today: that is, the notion that time is a line and not a circle. It was common in pagan antiquity to think, as the characters in Peter Pan and Battlestar Galactica think: “All this has happened before and it will all happen again.” Pagan antiquity learned well the lesson of the crops and seasons: that time had a cyclical quality. But it took supernatural revelation for the Jews to conceive of history as going somewhere and having, therefore, a beginning, middle, and end. Yes, there are the circling “times and seasons” as the Jews understood. But the great wheel of history was not just spinning in a void, idiotically repeating itself. Instead, for the ancient Jew, history did not so much repeat as rhyme. Certain themes come up again and again in the Old Testament: creation, fall, redemption, fidelity (and infidelity) to the covenant, birth, death, resurrection and so forth. But the whole magillah is going somewhere. The wheel is rolling down a road and hurtling toward That Day—the great and terrible Day of the Lord when Final Judgment shall dawn and the whole universe is laid bare and renewed.

Because of this conception of history and of God’s sovereign guidance of it toward That Day, it should not be very surprising that the fourth sense of Scripture—the anagogical sense—pertains to our destiny. If the purpose of Scripture is to reveal God, then it only stands to reason that part of what is revealed will be the matter of Where We Are Going. And since the Christian revelation tells us that Christ is not only Where We Are Going but The Way to Get There, it therefore naturally follows that the Church will mine Scripture for imagery about our destiny in Him.

Jesus Himself is the principal reason for this because He is the source of the insistence that our obedience or disobedience to Him will have immense and eternal consequences. A word, a cup of water, a seemingly minor thing done or not done can spell the difference between everlasting ecstasy or unending horror, loss, and pain. To be sure, the Old Testament prophets announce huge and dreadful themes of choice and destiny for Israel (“Multitudes! Multitudes in the Valley of Decision!”). But the Old Testament has only a dim idea of the contours of the afterlife. Early Old Testament literature seems only to have a notion of the grave as a dim pit filled with shadows. As late as Ecclesiastes, we still find Old Testament writers who basically have no notion of eternal life. It is not till late in the Old Testament period that something like a faith in the resurrection begins to be clearly articulated. And it is not until Christ reveals it that we are clearly informed that the stake for which we are playing—have always been playing—is nothing less than Heaven or Hell.

And so the early Church looks back at the Old Testament texts and sees them with new eyes. Earthly things take on an eternal significance in the stark light of the gospel. John, looking at Jerusalem, realizes that it signifies not simply a Jebusite citadel that David was lucky enough to conquer, but the eternal Zion, the New Jerusalem, the Bride come down out of Heaven, the homeland we’ve all been seeking ever since Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees 2,000 years before and went in search of the true God and His promise. Marriage stops being just Ralph and Alice and the bills and kids and is revealed as a token of the Cosmic Marriage of Christ and the Bride—a tiny foretaste of Heaven. The universe turns upside down and God is no longer a projection on the big screen of the universe called “Zeus” or “Odin”. Instead, your dad with his bad breath, funny stories from the army, fishing hat, and cubicle job becomes a dim reflection of the Father “from whom all fatherhood on earth takes its name” (Ephesians 3:15). The story of Israel becomes littered with signs and hints from the God who has led Israel a merry chase through the centuries to the moment where He took human flesh and conquered death itself, thereby opening the stunning possibility that we can share in that conquest and quite literally live forever in a whole new creation.

Because of the Risen Christ, the New Testament writers and their disciples come to regard every detail of the Old Testament as fraught with possibilities since they now know it was all leading up to Him. Signs and portents of our destiny peep out everywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. The heroes of old we thought were dead are all around us in the cloud of witnesses. The Tabernacle bears testimony to our entry into the true Tabernacle which is Heaven. The accursed valley of Hinnom (where Manasseh sacrificed children to Moloch) becomes, not merely a nasty piece of real estate, but a sign of the destiny awaiting all those who freely refuse the life of God: Gehenna. Hell. Where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched.

The curious thing about the anagogical sense of Scripture is the “now and not yet” quality of it. When Lazarus dies, Jesus reassures Martha that her brother will rise. Martha dutifully and faithfully parrots the common Jewish piety of her time: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Christians today often say something similar about Heaven and all that stuff in a certain tone of voice, but then return to “reality” with a sort of jerk and resume the worries about peak oil, the economy, and all the other “real” stuff that is hermetically sealed off from religious stuff like the resurrection.

Jesus barges into history and rudely announces to Martha that the Last Day is standing in her parlor and the Apocalypse is right here, talking to her. Because that is what “I am the Resurrection and the Life” means. He is where history is going. He’s the Omega. And to back it up, He raises Lazarus from the grave in a temporary resuscitation and then goes off to conquer death with a glorious resurrection that the New Testament writers will spend their lives trying (and failing) to describe in words.

So the New Testament will instead ransack the Old for images of it, because their Risen Lord has assured them that He is hidden there and that everything they have read all these years was actually about Him. He is the Sabbath of God in the ancient story of Creation. He is the Second Adam and His Bride the New Eve. The baptism He offers is what the Flood was all about and the Church is the real Ark. He is the Promised Land Abraham sought, the true Melchizedek offering the real sacrifice of bread and wine, the Lamb Moses sacrificed, the Heavenly Manna, our Captain Joshua Who conquers the Canaanites who are the Seven Deadly Sins. He is the true Son of David building the true Temple that is His body so that we can go to the Heavenly Zion and worship Him without fear. The Song of Songs is His wedding ode. He is the One the prophets await (even if they didn’t know it) to judge the world and separate the sheep from the goats according to their works.

So when we read the Old Testament, we aren’t just seeing things when we see foreshadows of our heavenly reward in the tales of humility exalted, virtue rewarded, wickedness punished, and pride cast down and weakness strengthened by mercy. In these little pictures, from Abraham’s offering of Isaac, to Jacob’s purgatorial transformation from lying jerk to humble man, to the fall of Saul and the rise of David, to the thousand other tales the Old Testament has to tell, we are given images that throw shadows and reflections that reach all the way to eternity. Crowns become tokens of heaven, thorns of purgatory, ignominious death a dark warning of the Second Death awaiting the impenitent.

In the end, it’s where we are going that ultimately matters.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Class Connection)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. He began with a general introduction, then he outlined three specific guidelines. Last week he launched into the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholics interpret the Bible by focusing on the allegorical sense. Today, he'll cover the moral and next week conclude with the anagogical.

Discussing the moral sense of Scripture should seem easy. After all, we’re talking "The Good Book" here. Even when many Americans abandoned Christianity as supernatural revelation from God, they for the past couple generations still tended to treat the Bible as a solid moral code with some lingering respectability. Martin Luther King, Jr. could still appeal to it and not get hooted off the stage as recently as 40 years ago.

But the cultural consensus about the goodness of the Good Book is rapidly decaying and, for many people, it is no longer taken for granted that “the moral sense of scripture” is even a good thing. But whether they approach the Bible as the Good Book or the Bad Book, there’s one thing most of our fellow post-moderns can agree on it: it is primarily a Rule Book.

That’s just one of the many ways in which contemporary culture demonstrates its misunderstanding of Scripture. For it is not too far off the mark to say that Christ came into the world specially to destroy the notion that salvation is predicated on following the Rules and Morality.

So if the Bible is not all about law and morality, why the Ten Commandments and all the rules and regs? The basic answer of the Tradition is that laws and morality are sort of like x-rays. They are part of the healing process, but they do not heal anything. The laws and morality side of the Bible are the x-ray equipment of the Divine Physician. The law says stuff like “Don’t covet. Be generous.” and then, when you act like the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, covetous old sinner you are, you find you are breaking the law. But that’s all the law can do: tell you what’s wrong with you. It’s can’t get you an inch nearer to healing the problem with your soul once you’ve looked at the x-rays. Only Christ can do that—which is why the Bible is actually all about him, not about rules and regulations.

This does not, of course, mean Catholics say “Whee! New Testament, New Covenant! No rules! Go nuts!” It means that for us Christ is the reality while the laws, rules, and regulations of the Old Testament were, so to speak, just the shadow pointing to him. The lesson of the Old Testament, in a hundred ways, is that purity matters. And the Old Testament gets this across by making no specially strong distinctions between the “ick” created by our revulsion to sin and the “ick” created by our revulsion at eating foods that gross us out. The moral is not “God hates bacon”. The moral is “God hates sin the way you, O Israel, hate the thought of eating pork.” Eventually, once the central lesson has been learned about the sin business, Christ will make clear that we are not defiled by anything that enters the belly, but only by the evil that comes out of the heart. His solution is not “Down with rules!” but rather to give us the power to obey God and keep the law. So faith in Christ does not “free” us from obeying God, just as love does not “free” us from binding ourselves to our spouse. Rather, faith “establishes” the law of God by making us both desire to do it and able to do it.

That’s why the New Testament still commands us to do various things (starting with keeping the Ten Commandments). The point is not that the Ten Commandments will save you, but rather that saved people live as God wants them to live so that they can experience the fulness of the life of the Trinity. Living out the commands to love God and love neighbor, they will find themselves keeping the whole of the law and the prophets.

Because of this, the Church has always looked to Scripture to convey a “moral sense”: that is to communicate ways in which an authentic follower of Jesus Christ should live. This includes not merely the standard didactic moral teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition (“Love your enemies, pay your taxes, don’t gossip, avoid impurity” etc.), but also various ways in which Christ is again “hidden” in the Old Testament.

What this presumes is that Christ teaches by means of icon as well as word. The reason the Church believes this is because Christ does, in fact, give us an example of iconographic teaching when he strips, ties a towel around his waist, and proceeds to wash the feet of the disciples on Maundy Thursday. He offers us a picture rather than a preachment and tells us to do likewise. The Church, following this clue, does what we all do when reading a familiar tale and starts seeing moral lessons elsewhere. For instance, she (like every first grader on planet earth) sees a moral lesson about courage in the face of overwhelming odds in the tale of David and Goliath. Reading the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, we see a moral image of the faith required by a disciple of Christ when we too are surrounded by lions of fear, despair, doubt, and discouragement. When we look at the Temple, Paul tells us that we are looking at an image of our own body and that we must not defile it. He gets that connection from his Master, who likewise said of his body, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

Scripture is more or less a bonanza of this sort of imagery and, again, we can ransack it at will just so long as the moral teachings we see illustrated there do not contradict what the Church teaches about, you know, morals.

Which, of course, raises a question since morals in both Scripture and in the history of the Church develop. Psalm 137 pronounces a blessing on anybody who would smash a Babylonian babies brains out on a rock. Christ? Not so much. Slavery used to be sort of reluctantly okay for Christians (cf. Philemon). Now? No.

Of course, a postmodern who is simply mining Scripture for “contradictions” will often dismiss the whole thing as rubbish. However, those in our culture who still retain something like an historical imagination will consider the possibility that precisely the problem facing the Christian description of revelation is that it involved eternity breaking into time and the Perfect revealing himself to the radically imperfect. Among other things, this means that our grasp of what God is saying to us could well take all of human history and beyond to fully see what is going on. So it would seem to me quite on the cards that when God reveals himself to a bunch of Bronze Age savages, he will likely be understood in Bronze Age savage terms involving such matters as herem—the ancient Semitic practice of slaying everybody and everything in a village as, ironically, a pious act (“See Lord! I’m keeping nothing for myself!”). One need not, I think, believe that God desires such things to see that he could use such cultural flotsam in a long-term effort (a successful one, by the way) to move Israel away from such barbarism and ultimately to the revelation of Christ, who offers Himself as a sort of burnt offering to save us from our sinful barbarism.

Because of all this, I don’t think we can embrace any of three simple solutions to the moral complexity of Scripture. That is, we cannot simply: 1) deny the inspired character of those texts of Scripture we happen to find distasteful or troubling; 2) explain away the literal sense of Scripture by allowing some symbolic reading of it to predominate; or 3) simply affirm wholesale all Old Testament morality from hamstringing horses to stoning rebellious adolescents to butchering Canaanite babies as “the will of God.” Rather, we must be very cautious in searching through Scripture for its moral sense because the morality taught by Scripture is not a static thing.

Consider a human embryo. At one point it has a tail. But the adult human doesn’t. Is it really accurate to say humans are creatures with tails? No, even though at one stage in the womb we were. The same principle applies here. Revelation progressed like a developing embryo from the Old Testament to the New. God permitted divorce under the Mosaic Covenant, for instance. Yet Jesus would later make clear that this was a permission, not “God’s will” (Mark 10:5). Similarly, God condescended to the practice of the culture to which He first revealed Himself when He “stooped down” and submitted Himself to the practice of “cutting a covenant” with Abraham by passing between the severed halves of the animal carcasses (Genesis 15). But though God blessed forms of sacrifice and covenant which were perfectly acceptable in Abraham’s day, His ultimate goal was always to lead us to the final and full sacrifice and covenant offered by Christ. In the same way, there were moral, ethical, and philosophical insights in Abraham’s day which were good as far as they went, but they have since been fulfilled and completed by the final and full revelation offered by Christ

Consider also the Jewish understanding of the afterlife. Ecclesiastes tells us that “life is vanity” and speaks in a despairing tone about the futility of earthly existence. That is because Ecclesiastes is unaware of the resurrection of the Body which was not fully revealed until later. The author is right as far as he goes. Earthly life is futile. He simply doesn’t (and can’t) go far enough without further revelation.

Bottom line: Much Old Testament morality and theology regarding war, marriage, the afterlife, justice, and so forth is true as far as it goes, but often the author has not yet gone far enough because the Holy Spirit has not yet revealed it. In the Old Testament, the Chosen People were not yet the recipients of full revelation. That full revelation was Jesus Christ, who definitively clarified all that went before and fulfilled what was not complete. This is the idea of the development of doctrine. We understand this idea completely when we contemplate our own children. There are things we permit of (and punishments we inflict on) three year olds that are appropriate for their stage of development which would be absurd to permit of (or inflict on) a 20-year-old.

In short, in revealing himself “in time and on earth” God is obliged to work through and with a people with faults, idiosyncrasies, blind spots, and errors resulting from their being as fallen as the rest of the human race. Yet he is obliged to do so, not in order to ratify the Fall, but in order to mend it. This meant, as all teachers know, making allowances for the weaknesses of the student till the student matured further. It meant facing the fact that the world into which Israel marched out of Egypt was a real world, not an ideal one, and that facing that world (a world where idolatry, wars of extermination, child sacrifice, polygamy, and other such complicating features were the norm for all participants) would mean a long, hard road to building a civilization and an even longer road to the day when the human race was ready to hear the (at the time) unimaginable truth of Christ.

Thus, to complain that God did not immediately introduce the full moral and ethical teaching of Christ into the diet of Israel is like complaining that a parent does not immediately force feed a baby sirloin steak and a bottle of wine. It is like finding fault with a kindergarten teacher for neglecting to introduce the kidlets to the inner mysteries of integral calculus, algebra, and quantum physics. As Christ taught of divorce, so it may be said of many of the moral imperfections permitted in the Old Testament: “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment” (Mark 10:5). It was not that God changed from the Old Testament to the New. It was that we had to grow up enough to bear the full truth about him and his demands on us. Our eyes have to get used to the Light.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: St. George's)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. He began with a general introduction, then he outlined three specific guidelines. Today he'll begin covering the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholics interpret the Bible—allegorical, moral, and anagogical.

We noted last week that one of the principal problems of trying to treat Scripture as a purely human book is that, though God can supernaturalize nature, we cannot naturalize the supernatural. God can assume a human nature and join it to His divinity. But we cannot take a supernatural thing and reduce it to mere nature without doing it violence. We cannot reduce Jesus to a mere man, nor man to a mere animal, nor the Bible to a mere book without making incongruous claims.

Proof of this abounds. If we will not receive Scripture on its terms as the word of God, we wind up with a book that is not even human, but merely a patchwork of “sources” stitched together into something unreadable and inhuman. Similarly, natural explanations for the various miracles in Scripture must suppose that all early Christians were preternatural fools. For example, somebody theorizes that Jesus walked on ice sheets, not water, yet he doesn't wonder how professional fishermen who knew the lake like the back of their hand could not figure out that it was that cold (nor why Peter, who also walked on water, didn’t figure it out). Someone else claims that the Resurrection myth is due to ignorant women going to the wrong tomb, but nobody bothers to ask why the people who buried Jesus (or the authorities who persecuted the Church) didn’t just go to the right tomb and produce the corpse. Finally, somebody else argues that Jesus never existed, yet nobody asks why these hundreds of people ran around the first-century world dying for the testimony that they knew Him personally and why thousands and thousands more, including a lot of martyrs, never thought to question that?

I propose, therefore, taking Scripture on its terms: as the word of God. If we do this, Scripture not only makes sense as a divine book, but as a human one. Jesus no longer has to be accounted for by some Latest Real Jesus explanation. He can be the same old Jesus: the Son of God that the actual data always pointed to.

Now one of these early Christians—a gentleman named Augustine of Hippo—tells us something curious about the Bible. He says that the New Testament is hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is only fully revealed in the New. This strikes most moderns as a comment about the bizarre working of Augustine’s psychology, not as a comment about the Bible. That’s because when most of us read the Old Testament with all its battles, strange tales, thundering threats, lyrical poetry, and weird instructions for separating the fat from the kidneys of a goat, we don’t immediately see Jesus of Nazareth as particularly being on the minds of the authors. We tend to assume that Augustine is one of those Dark Ages monks who had too much time on his hands and so began to treat the Old Testament as a sort of Rorschach blot in which he imagined he saw Jesus lurking in the Old Testament the way Percival Lowell thought he saw canals on Mars.

“Now,” we moderns say confidently, “we know better.”

But, of course, by “now” we mean “in an age more biblically and historically illiterate than almost any other."

That should be our first clue that Augustine might be seeing something we are missing. The second clue comes when we look at the biblical text and find Jesus saying:

"'These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.' Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, 'Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.'" (Luke 24:44-47)

In short, Augustine and those Dark Age monks got the notion that the Old Testament was about Jesus—from Jesus. He’s the one who put it into the heads of his followers that everything written in the Old Testament was about Him.

Not that they immediately believed that. It turns out they were human beings and not cartoons of preternatural gullibility. So they initially found the suggestion that everything in their most sacred books was about Him to be as plausible as you would think it if I told you that I am the True Meaning of the Torah. In fact, so slow were they to believe this that even when they stood in the very mouth of the empty tomb, gawking at Jesus’ grave clothes, they still “did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9). So, far from being credulous fools who believed anything, they were rather slow on the uptake—so slow, that Bible studies personally led by the Risen Christ were kind of a bust due to the thickness of the disciples’ skulls (cf. Luke 24:13-32).

So what did the trick? Well in the Catholic view, the Resurrection helped, but Scripture itself points to something else as the decisive factor: the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit, the disciples tended to regard every obvious clue God threw their way via the Scripture in much the same way that your dog sniffs your finger when you are trying to point to something. That’s because the true meaning of the Old Testament is, says St. Paul, “veiled” and the cleverest scholar is powerless to understand what it’s all really about without divine help. As Paul puts it:

"Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of the fading splendor. But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed." (2 Cor 3:12-16)

Note how Paul practices what he preaches here. His point—just like Jesus’—is that there is a literal sense to the Old Testament, but also a more-than-literal sense that points us to Christ. This is what the Church calls the “allegorical sense” of Scripture.

The literal sense of the story of Moses’ veiled face is recounted in Exodus 34:29-35, which tells how Moses wore a veil over his radiant face after speaking with God at Sinai. Paul takes the literal sense of this story for granted—and then insists, just as Jesus does, that there is more to this story than meets the eye: that it, in fact, points to the spiritual blindness caused by a hardened heart apart from the Spirit.

This way of reading Scripture for second meanings is all over the place in the New Testament for a very good reason: it is all over the place in the teaching of Christ. Jesus habitually takes images from the Old Testament and applies them to Himself. According to Jesus, the real meaning of the Bronze Serpent, Jacob’s Ladder, the Manna in the Wilderness, the Passover, Hanukkah, the Feast of Booths, and a host of other Old Testament images, stories, and allusions is none other than—Him! It’s like He thinks He’s God or something!

Now the Catholic explanation for this is fairly straightforward: He is God. So it follows that the Word of God is His word and those images, stories and allusions aren’t there by accident, but because the divine Author is at least as competent a craftsman as Hemingway, Tolkien, or Shakespeare. He makes use of foreshadowing so that the richness of what He has to say will be available to us in its fulness. The Lamb that Moses is commanded to sacrifice by God at the first Passover is intended by God to foreshadow the Lamb of God Who will be sacrificed on Calvary at the Last Passover. The Tree of Life lost by the First Adam is not merely a coincidental reminder of the Tree of Life upon which the Last Adam hung. It’s not just a lucky break that Isaiah wrote about the Messiah as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, or that the manna in the wilderness is reminiscent of the Eucharist. The New Testament really is hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is really looking forward to the New, because that’s what the Author of Scripture intended.

Now some may object that if you open this Pandora’s Box of the allegorical sense of Scripture, there is no way to shut it. People will turn it into a giant Rorshach Blot.

Recall the instructions we discussed last week at Strange Notions:

1. Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”;
 
2. Read the Scripture within “the living tradition of the whole Church”; and,
 
3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith.

These instructions continue to hold for Catholics. If an allegorical reading is used in Scripture, (as, for instance, when the sacred author allegorizes the meaning of the Old Testament Tabernacle in Hebrews 9) you can rely on it since the Author knows what He’s doing.

Likewise, if the Church connects the allegorical dots in the liturgy, or if a bunch of the early Church Fathers are all seeing the same connections (“Hey! The Ark of the Covenant is a foreshadow of Mary!”), then you are on safe ground.

But you can even find fruitful connections that aren’t in the Fathers or the liturgy too. The only thing the Church asks is “Don’t make allegorical connections that contradict the Church’s teaching on faith and morals.” So, for instance, pulling a Charles Manson and interpreting the Bible to mean you should murder a bunch of people in Southern California and start a race war is right out.

The point is this: reading for both the literal and the spiritual sense of Scripture is still the normative way the Church reads her Bible.

With that in mind, let’s talk next week about the moral sense of Scripture.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Jim Somerville)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. Last week he offered a general introduction, today he outlines three specific guidelines, and next week he'll begin covering the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholic interpret the Bible—allegorical, moral, and analogical.

For some folks, including not a few Catholics, it takes a lot to dispel the myth of the hyper-controlling Church that only permits Bible study after the insertion of the Vatican Orbital Mind Control Laser Platform chip in the frontal lobe of the brain. Indeed, it may come as a shock to such folks to discover that the Church offers Catholics only three guidelines when pointing toward reading Scripture for its literal sense. Dei Verbum tells us:
 

1. Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”;
 
2. Read the Scripture within “the living tradition of the whole Church”; and,
 
3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith.

 
That’s it. That’s all the Church offers. What do these guidelines mean? In part, as we saw last week, they mean that when you read the Bible, you need to pay attention to what sort of literature you are reading. But other things come in as well.

The Bible is a sort of organism, like a goldfish. Many moderns don’t think of it that way, insisting instead that it's just a collection of human writings from widely divergent sources that got stitched together pretty roughly and is therefore “full of contradictions”. Many Bible students, both Catholic and atheist, concern themselves almost entirely with looking for the “contradictions” and shabby seamwork. This can sometimes get pretty silly, as when A.N. Wilson discerns a fraudulent claim that Jesus was a “carpenter” since “no carpenter in real life came anywhere near to having a plank sticking out of his eye".

From the perspective of sane biblical study, this entire approach (technically known by Catholic theologians as the “hermeneutic of suspicion”) is sort of like looking at a goldfish and seeing only a circulatory system, an excretory system, a pair of gills, a pair of eyes, some randomly distributed fins, a bunch of scales, a nervous system, and various connective tissues, all of which just happen to be crammed into a goldfish-shaped space—and then spending all your time looking for “junk DNA” in the goldfish cells while steadfastly ignoring the swimming, living fish.

In fact, the remarkable thing about Scripture is the organic unity of growth one sees in it. Seen from the Catholic perspective, it looks pretty much like what it is: the written record of a Tradition that is growing just like the mustard seed and revealing the gradual revelation of God to man, culminating with the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Yes, you can see the stitching at times, as when Genesis combines two accounts of creation. (But so what? That’s only a problem if you believe the Bible is a purely divine book, not a book written and edited by humans.) So, to be sure, the human authors of Scripture display change over time. But it is the sort of change one expects in a growing thing, not a mutating thing. Ideas found in seed form early on (such as “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”) break out in huge leafy branches later on (such as the conviction found in the prophets and the books of the Maccabees that God will defeat death and even raise the dead at the end of time).

We discover, as we read, that the Bible is an immense conversation across the ages. For Catholics, the Old Testament longs for and looks forward to the New and the New is only comprehensible in light of the Old. In short, there really is a unity to the whole of Scripture. So all of us, regardless of our religious worldview, do well to read it with that in mind. Each verse is related to the verses before it, each paragraph is related to the paragraphs before and after, and each book, especially in the New Testament, is not really comprehensible if you don’t know the other texts to which the author is alluding. So a return to the understanding of Scripture as a single organism, and not merely as a collection of loosely connected cells or systems, is the first order of business for effectively reading the Bible.

The next order of business is realizing that a living goldfish won’t live long outside the water. If you want to get to know the goldfish of Scripture better, the paradox is that you cannot do so by removing it from the Sacred Tradition of the Church, which is the water in which Scripture swims. The absolute worst way to read the Bible is to just go off with it by yourself and ask, “What does this text mean to me?” Catholics approach the text by finding out, as best we can, how the author and his readers would have understood it.

We know to do this with other books, but something goes awry when it comes to the Bible. Many people believe that the Tradition—that is, the fruit of millions of lives of prayer and sanctity, not to mention scholarship of a very high order and even, in some cases, personal familiarity with the apostles themselves—is absolutely worthless if it contradicts one's strongly felt intuition about what the Bible really means.

This faulty approach is primarily a fault of the will, not the intellect. It affects Catholics and atheists alike, and the solution requires humility and a basic reorientation away from self and toward God's revelation through his Church (not just a vague admission that, now and then, the Church gets it right by agreeing with my view of the Bible.) Such a reorientation is vital because without it, the biblical reader inevitably winds up depriving the Scriptural goldfish of the water of Tradition which it requires in order to live.

But let's move on. To keep the water of Tradition from being spilled, the Church tells us to “be attentive to the analogy of faith”. This cryptic remark means, basically, “hold on to the defined teaching of the Church”. The “analogy of faith” is the goldfish bowl that holds the water of Tradition. Without it you’ve got water all over the floor and, soon, a dead goldfish.

So what’s the “analogy of faith”? Well, an analogy is a thing that’s like something else. So a photo of my wife is an analog of my wife. It looks just like her, but it’s not her. The Church proposes various analogies of the Faith to us, such as the Creeds or the dogmas of the Church, to give us a sense of what is and is not part of apostolic Tradition.

A dogma is not the forbiddance of thought (as is commonly supposed) but the conclusion of thought: it’s what you get when you are done thinking something through. Periodically, questions arise in theology as they do in every field. When they do, the Church thinks the problem through and, when the occasion requires it and the Spirit wills it, the Church defines its teaching. The first time this happens is recorded in the book of Acts. The Church is confronted with the question, “Do Gentiles need to keep the ceremonial laws of Moses?”. The Church arrives at the momentous conclusion that Christians are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, not by circumcision, keeping kosher, and so forth. They promulgate this decision in the shocking words, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us...” meaning that the dogma promulgated by the apostles and the elders is the authentic guideline for understanding the meaning of the Tradition with respect to this question.

Where do they get off talking this way? Well, to be fair, they formed the impression because of what they heard from Jesus Christ, who told them “He who listens to you listens to me” (Luke 10:16). So it’s pretty much in the DNA of the Church. It appears Jesus had enough foresight to know that the Church would need a permanent teaching office to navigate the waters of history, just as the American forefathers knew the country would require Congress, judges, and a President to interpret the Constitution through time.

So that's a brief introduction to the three guidelines Catholics use when properly interpreting Scripture. Next week we'll begin exploring the three spiritual senses, or lenses, through which Catholics read the Bible.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Go2Grace)

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we're beginning a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. Today he offers a general introduction, next week he'll outline three specific guidelines, and the following week he'll begin covering the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholic interpret the Bible—allegorical, moral, and anagogical.

 
Some atheists, like Bill Maher, creator of the documentary "Religulous", imagine that people who take the Bible seriously must read it literalistically. However, there is a difference between literalistic interpretation—which is the habit of all Fundamentalists—and the literal sense of Scripture. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the literal sense this way:

"The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: 'All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal'." (CCC, 116)

Getting at the literal sense of Scripture involves not mindlessly chanting, “God said it; I believe it; that settles it” in the same way a Muslim shouts “Allahu akbar!” but reading like an adult and distinguishing between the various literary forms by which Scripture reveals to us Jesus Christ. It involves, in short, learning to discern what the author was actually trying to assert, the way he was trying to assert it, and what is incidental to that assertion.

So when an Old Testament writer tells me that the land of Canaan was “flowing with milk and honey” it does not mean that he believed a chemical analysis of the river Jordan would reveal a mixture of bovine glandular secretions and bee vomit. But neither does it mean he meant nothing. Rather it means (obviously) that he knew the land of Canaan to be what it was: an agriculturally rich area where Israel could settle down and be very happy raising farms, flocks, and kidlets.

Fair enough. But, of course, Scripture says quite a lot of other things that involve real claims of the supernatural (or appear to). What do we make of them?

The first thing we have to do is wipe any sneers off our faces. Guys of the Maher school of biblical criticism imagine they are being hard-headed thinkers when they reflexively reject the possibility of the miraculous. One of their favorite slogans is “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.” The problem is: that’s not true. Skepticism is, in fact, the sterility of the intellect, just as credulity is. Take either skepticism or credulity too far and you wind up thinking nonsense (as when Maher extends his skepticism to reject, not just the unseen reality of God, but the unseen reality of disease-causing germs or a faith healing devotee chalks up every head cold to a demon). Or worse, you wind up not thinking at all, as when H.G. Wells’ skepticism in his essay "Scepticism of the Instrument” leads him to doubt whether he can know anything—or the hyper-credulous person believes it when somebody says a 900 foot tall Jesus appeared to Oral Roberts, demanding cash.

Atheists should know that reflexive skepticism and reflexive credulity are both enemies of the Catholic intellectual tradition, which counsels instead both reason and faith. Catholics believe that the devil sends both dogmatic skepticism and brainless credulity into the world as a pair so that, fearing one, we might flee to the other and be ensnared. Maheresque skeptics, living in the delusional fear that millions of Christians credulously believe the Virgin appears regularly on a grilled cheese sandwiches, runs to the opposite extreme of refusing to acknowledge the miraculous even if it walks up and hits them in the face. Oh sure, they may talk a good game about their desire for “scientific proof”, as Émile Zola did when he said he just wanted to see a cut finger dipped in Lourdes water and healed. But when confronted with a miracle (as Zola was by the miraculous healing of a tubercular woman whose half-destroyed face was healed after a bath at Lourdes) the dogmatic skeptic simply declares, as Zola did, “Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle.” This is not reason. This is unreason: a dogmatic faith that miracles cannot happen which precedes and excludes any possible testimony to the miraculous, including the testimony of one’s own two eyes.

The sane approach to the question of the supernatural is therefore to embrace a reasonable openness to the possibility of the supernatural combined with a sensible willingness to use the sense God gave a goose. In short, it’s the same approach we use for determining all other matters of historical fact: are the witnesses really trying to tell us a miracle occurred in actual human history and are they reliable witnesses? Not all biblical documents are über-clear about these questions, but as a general rule, it’s not all that hard to tell them apart.

So, for instance, Jerome—the greatest biblical scholar of antiquity—tells us that the creation story is written “after the manner of a popular poet” or, as we say today, in mythic language. This is a shock to the Mahers of the world, who just knew from listening to other like-minded Mahers of the world that ancient Christians all took every syllable of Genesis literalistically.

On the other hand, Jerome does not poeticize when the biblical author obviously intends to be offering reportage of eyewitness accounts that are extremely close to the event. So when John tells us that Mary Magdalene saw the Risen Christ and Thomas stood with his finger poised over the wound in the hands, feet and side of the His Glorified Body, Jerome knows perfectly well John means to say, “The man I saw crucified on Good Friday is the same man I saw alive and well three days later. He is God in glorified human flesh!”

Jerome knows that John is not saying, “Jesus was eaten by wild dogs and his carcass is now scattered across the Judean wilderness, but I am sublimating my guilt by concocting a messianic myth compounded of Israelite myth, rumors of Osiris, and the delusional gestalt of me and my half-crazed friends.” Jerome, like Paul, knows that if Christ is not raised as the apostles say, then the whole thing is a load of skubala and the apostles are a bunch of lying dirtbags (1 Cor. 15:12-19). In short, Jerome knows the difference between mythic language and an eyewitness account. He can make the distinction and give each text the sort of assent it asks of him.

Now, the only question is, “How do you tell the difference between accounts of the miraculous and mere fictional tales?”

To get some tools for sorting that out there are, as the Second Vatican Council taught in Dei Verbum, three things we must take special care to do when approaching Scripture:

1. Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”;

2. Read the Scripture within “the living tradition of the whole Church”; and,

3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith.

Next week, we’ll look at how to flesh those guidelines out.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Evangelicals for Social Action)

In the course of a discussion on my personal blog about the existence of God and of the miraculous, an unbelieving reader (who strikes me as open to reasonable discussion) wrote me to say:

"All I’m saying is that people everywhere demonstrate a powerful desire to believe that there is intervention in the material universe from outside the material universe."

Except that’s not true.  Lots of people also demonstrate a powerful desire to believe there is no intervention in the material universe.  Even many people who believe in some sort of God do this, because they are deists.

The notion that the existence of God provides nothing but unalloyed consolation—and does not also give reason to have deep fear—entirely overlooks the doctrine of judgment in this life and of hell in the next.  It’s just as easy and plausible to say that atheism is the wish fulfillment fantasy.  It’s also just as useless in getting at the question of whether God exists.  Instead of cheap psychoanalysis of philosophical opponents, I think the smarter approach is to look at the philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

"The problem is, even with that open mind, one still has to continue living a life based on some assumptions about the nature of the universe. Do you stake everything on the possibility it was a god, or do you not? The gaps have to be filled with something."

Actually, here’s the funny thing.  Although Catholic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas (and I) certainly accept the reality of miracles, Thomas doesn’t argue for the existence of God from the gaps.  He doesn’t say, “Here’s some exception to the course of nature (like the Resurrection) or some natural process I can’t explain, therefore God.”  He doesn’t argue for the existence of God from the exceptions to the rules.  Instead, he argues from the Rules.  In short, Thomas doesn’t say, “I don’t know how lightning works, so God.”  He says, “Why are there rules?  Why is there anything?  How is it that reality is intelligible at all?”

Notably, Paul does the same thing.  He doesn't say, "I can't explain the Resurrection, so there must be a God."  He argues for the existence of God just as Thomas does, from the ordinary course of nature, not from the extraordinary exceptions of miracles or inexplicable natural phenomena.  Just like Thomas and the Church, Paul doesn't appeal to amazing esoteric events vouchsafed to the few who see Lazarus raised, but to the many who saw him born.  It is daily bread and the underlying laws of time, space, matter and energy that hold it in being—not multiplied loaves and fishes—that Paul says cannot explain itself.  And it is our refusal to consider that which Paul regards as blameworthy, not for mystics who close their eyes to the Miracles of the Sun, but for ordinary people close their eyes to the implications of broad daylight:

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made." (Romans 1:18-20)

The temptation of our age is to say, “Sure.  We can’t answer those questions yet.  But with sufficient advances in science we will someday.”

But no conceivable advance in science will ever answer the questions, “Why are there rules?  Why is there anything?  How is it that reality is intelligible at all?” Those questions are, by their very nature, not “scientific” questions.  Science (as moderns mean it) is the measurement of the metric properties of time, space, matter and energy.  All such science presupposes a metaphysic that is essentially theistic.  That is, it begins with the assumption that the universe has rules intelligible to our minds. You can no more “scientifically” get behind those rules to their source than you can prove that there is no such thing as proof.

But, of course, when you start talking a universe that is fundamentally ordered by rules and of our mysterious power to intellect (read between the lines) of those rules, you inexorably start talking as though the universe is the creation of Mind.  Thomas says, “Yes, because it and we are the product of Mind.”  If you don’t make that presupposition, you can’t do science at all since there is no reason—there can be no reason—to suppose that the universe and your mind correspond to Reason.

Some people think they can get around that by positing a multiverse in which our universe is part of some larger universe that give it its rules and being.  But, of course, that just pushes the question back: Why is there a multiverse? Why is there anything?  And why is the Everything we see contingent and dependent on something else?  How do beings that are always totally contingent (dependent on something else) come into existence?

Sooner or later that points us back to something that is not merely a being but is Being itself: something that simply Is. All created contingent beings participate in and are sustained by the God who is Being.  As Mike Flynn has pointed out, if such self-existent Being could talk, it would say, "I AM."  And by a strange coincidence, that is exactly how the God of some seriously philosophically-unsophisticated semitic Bronze Age shepherds introduced himself to them in Exodus 3.

Now, such a God can, if he chooses, operate outside the normal laws of nature he has created.  And the evidence does, indeed, suggest that he has done so at times.  But Thomas does not look to such evidence to demonstrate God’s existence.  On the contrary, Thomas takes a remarkably evolutionary view of creation:

"Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship."

—Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268

In that, he is following Augustine who also sees creation, not as a series of deus ex machina interferences in nature from a God who tinkers, but as a continuous unfolding of properties invested in nature from the start:

"It is therefore causally that Scripture has said that earth brought forth the crops and trees, in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth.  In the earth from the beginning, in what I might call the roots of time, God created what was to be in times to come."  [Emph. added]

On the literal meanings of Genesis, Book V Ch. 4:11

So there are really two questions here.  The first—Does God exist?—can be and has been answered by natural reason and does not require special revelation or faith.  Aristotle was able to work it out and lots of others have done so apart from the Christian revelation.

The question of whether that God does miracles is separate and requires faith and openness to revelation.  Like all points of supernatural revelation, it cannot be proven, but all arguments against it can be disproven.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: USML)

Recently, there has been a bit of discussion about the possibility of teaching “Introduction to the Bible” courses to a generation of students illiterate about the most foundational document in Western Civilization. Not surprisingly, discussion has tended to polarize into two groups: those who insist on the “wall of separation” between Church and State, and those who insist on getting “back to the Bible” if we hope to save what little remains of civilization in a schoolyard dominated by drugs, guns, and teen pregnancy.

I believe both positions are wrong-headed, but for very different reasons.

“Wall” advocates tend to regard any mention of the Bible in the schoolroom as an act of “establishment of religion” by the State. Therefore, courses on the Bible are synonymous with attempting to “convert” children. When confronted with well-meaning people who mumble something about the need to understand the Bible, Wall advocates often employ an “all or nothing” strategy to stop discussion. “Why just the Bible?” they say. “Why not study the Q'uran too? Why not also the various holy books of Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Scientology, Deism, Pantheism, Wicca, and all the other pagan religions of European origin, as well as all of the hundreds of African, Australian and American tribal religions? Or, why not just keep all religious material out of the school system of a pluralistic society?”

On the surface, this “drinking from a fire hose” method of pluralistic intimidation seems cogent. But it only works by assuming that the real purpose of studying the Bible in the classroom is to proselytize. This is not so. The normal reason an “Introduction to the Bible” class is proposed is because, whether Wall advocates like it or not, it is the Bible, not Jainism or African animism, which undergirds both American and Western Civilization. If you do not understand the Bible, you cannot possibly understand most of what has been thought about and done (for good or ill) in Western culture for the past 2,000 years. And notably, the Pluralistic Intimidation card is not played anywhere but here. Nobody says, for instance, that we must either study every single political theory, writer, trend, and notion (as well as every obscure tribal arrangement, tin horn dictator, and obscure national government from every time and place in human history) or else concede that classes which concentrate on major Western political theories are hopelessly biased and have no place in a pluralistic society. Only the mention of the Bible provokes such absurd arguments.

Which, of course, must mean I advocate teaching the Bible in public schools, no?

No. Here's why.

I oppose studying the Bible in public schools since doing so is like taking an ember out of the fire and trying to see what makes it glow. Soon, you have only a dead coal. If I want to learn about the Bible, I think it is far more sensible to ask somebody who not only knows the technicalities of authorship, date, context, etc. but who actually believes its message, than to ask a paid educator with no fundamental sympathy for it. Likewise, if I wished to understand the Q'uran, I would ask a Muslim, not a technician. The wrong-headed attempt to reduce a religion to an academic subject rather than take it first as what it claims to be—a Way—is hopelessly inadequate to comprehending what the Bible or any sacred text is about.

This is not, in any way, to disparage biblical studies as, for instance, they are carried out in universities and seminaries. These are, in fact, invaluable. But I think, especially at the high school level, that it is important to receive a sacred text as an expression of a community and to develop some sympathy for that community before one begins the act of dissecting that text. The Bible is not a mere “document” to Christians and Jews. It is something more like a beating heart in the body of their community. To take the Bible out of the context of the community that produced it and place it in the hands of a secular culture which seeks only to dissect it is exactly like taking a living heart out of a living person in order to study the heart and the person better. What you instantly have is a dead heart and a dead person. For this reason, I think a secular “intro to the Bible” class would be more a way of inoculating students to the Bible than “introducing” them to it. If kids need an introduction to the Bible (and they do), let them get it at Church.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Are You a Christian?)

One of the questions that comes up from time to time in the blogosphere is the problem of moral progress. It happens in a number of ways. For instance, a favorite trope of the atheist fundamentalist is the “Ha! You call Thomas More a saint? He burnt heretics at the stake!” shout of triumph. (Of course, atheist fundamentalists don’t like to think too hard about the achievements of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot, and seem uncommonly hurried in their attempts to identify their atheist regimes as specimens of “religion” in the single most implausible piece of prestidigitation in their rhetorical arsenal.) Meanwhile, some Catholics, having a deep suspicion of modernity, and eager to defend the Home Team, will attempt to mount defenses of Thomas More in which it does come out sounding like they think burning people at the stake isn’t so bad and that, because we live in the Age of Abortion, we’d really be better off, morally speaking, if we just returned to 16th-century morality. In short, there seems to be a rather easy assumption among some Catholics that human morals have done nothing but degrade.

This attitude can inform all sorts of discussions. For instance, I have talked to people who seriously asserted that the words of the good thief about “receiving our just punishment” (Luke 23:41) shut the book on the question of whether the death penalty is an evil that God permits or a positive good he wills. For them, this proves that in the Good Old Days, God loved the death penalty. What they never ever discuss is whether this means we should reinstitute crucifixion as a “just” form of capital punishment today.

And that pretty much shows you that, in our heart of hearts, we all know that there really is such a thing as moral progress. We know that (abortion culture aside for a moment) it really is better to live in a world where it is not regarded as a form of public entertainment to nail a man naked to a cross and watch him gasp out his last breaths for a couple of days, covered in his own excrement, caked in his own blood, and surrounded by buzzing flies and jeering spectators. We know that covering a man with honey and staking him to an anthill is cruel and unusual punishment. We know that flogging somebody 90 times is a sign that Iran is a backward culture (though our Catholic ancestors did it). And, quite frankly, we know that though Thomas More is a saint with many virtues to emulate, burning heretics at the stake is not one of them.

In short, we intuitively grasp (most of us, anyway) that it’s not the case that history is just a steady slope of Progress from savagery or a steady decline into post-Christian barbarity. Different ages—including our own age—have different places where they see some things clearly and don’t see other things. Antiquity could see clearly that some things were an offense against God that our age cannot see. Conversely, antiquity perfected such forms of cruelty as crucifixion or burning at the stake. We live in an age that cannot see the sinfulness of, say, fornication or blasphemy, but does grasp that disembowelling and drawing and quartering is evil and not public entertainment.

The Church, which conserves and develops the Tradition, disregards the “improvements” about fornication and blasphemy, while preserving real insights into the good which our ancestors grasped (namely that chastity and the worship of God were good). Conversely, the Church also perceives real improvements in contemporary culture, such as our rejection of slavery or of roasting people alive on griddles as a form of capital punishment. The world, being foolish, simply declares that whatever we happen to be doing right now is obviously superior, even if it’s ripping a baby apart in its mother’s womb. This is what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”: the irrational conviction that the present age is the final and permanent platform from which to look down on all previous ages, coupled with marvelously naive subscription to the Darwin Mythos that we are the summit of all Progress.

When you point out the insanity of that, the world refers you to what everybody was doing and thinking 500 years ago, says Catholics were stoopid for not vaulting over the characteristic blindnesses of the era in which they lived, and pats itself on the back because dumb medieval Catholics or Bronze Age Jews had not figured out how to rid themselves of a universal institution like slavery, or not overcome the violence in their culture perfectly, or not invented the transistor or the Hubble telescope. It’s a curiously magical view of human advancement for a subculture that prides itself on rationalistic realism. Essentially, the complaint is that people a long time ago were not Us.

In contrast, the Church climbs the ladder of human progress with sympathy for the fact that human beings are weak and fallible, but with gratitude that God’s grace really does perfect nature. She sifts and weighs according to the signs of the times, and when a real advance is made (such as the rejection of horsewhipping or crucifixion as means of punishment), she affirms that and real moral progress is made. It does not follow that the progress is perfect. A culture (such as ours) that rejects genital mutilation of women can still embrace the murder of children. But it does mean that, over time, the Church’s understanding of her own moral teaching can deepen and, in turn, enrich our culture.

It also, by the way, means that Catholics can appreciate what is good about our treasury of saints while not embracing their mistakes. Saints are saints, not perfect. We don’t have to make the arrogant atheist’s blunder of holding St. Thomas More to 21st-century standards of justice. But neither do we need to sprinkle holy water on the ashes of the people he burnt and say that he did the right thing. In short, a Catholic can have sympathy with the fact that our ancestors, like us, struggled with the limitations of sin and defend them according to the standards of their time, while the arrogant modernist always arraigns everybody for the crime of not being himself. But at the same time, Catholics don’t have to engage in the ridiculous attempt to say that the standards of the past were perfect. In short, we can give an account for why Thomas More is a saint while also affirming that burning heretics alive on the Washington Mall today is a bad idea. This is but one of the many gifts that comes to us through a living magisterium that both conserves and develops the Tradition.
 
 
Originally posted at the National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Reynold's Blog)