At last! Thanks for this terrifically helpful analysis.
The theologians who have so effectively hijacked the teaching arm of the American Church overhwelm and obfusicate by an avalanche of words.
As someone investigating the Church, I've read hundreds of pages of cathechis and Biblical introduction: nearly all of it reads like the material quoted here. A parade of respected names including Brown and Fitzmeyer wax eloquent about the happy "Biblical Renewal" spawned at Vatican II, and we are assured of a new, revitalizing era of Biblical studies. But the resulting monographs and commentaries always ring strangely hollow, and drain the Biblical text of any vitality laymen may suspect they might encounter there. Your analysis shows up why.
The entire trumpeting of Biblicism by a generation of scholars turns out to be a frigtheningly well-realized effort to pit Scripture, or rather a psuedo-critical desupernaturalizing of Scripture, against Church, of data against dogma, of skepticism against belief.
What these guys have birthed is not a Biblical theology--what a canard--but a veritable vocabulary of disbelief.
I like honest, hardboiled atheists.
This is not the one of serious and responsible theology, pb, and it never has been, not even in the most incontinent droolings of Luther. Take lessons in theological style and manners from young Apolonio, I advise.
I will not prostitute my faith but holding it up for examination to your jaundiced gaze, but I will point out that what I understand by "encounter with Christ" as I have explained in numerous places centers on such experiences as the following: (1) the presence of the Crucified to the sufferer; (2) the internum testimonium Spiritus sancti; (3) the message of the Kingdom and its galvanizing imperative of justice and piece.
I suspect that you are at your old tricks of misquotation when you use terms like "rut" between inverted commas.
I suppose it would be useless to explain to you that Encounter -- as used by Emil Brunner, or by Barth -- is not a subjectivist category. If you had grasped this, you would realize that all your critical remarks on the section on phenomenality miss their target completely!
On pluralism you have a similar confusion -- as I explained at great length in Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, the situated character of all formulations of truth does not mean that they enjoy no objective truth,
On the third point, historicity, we are not in disagreement at all.
On the fourth issue, epistemological limits, I do not speak of enfeebling dogma (I say APPARENT enfeeblement, which is not in fact enfeeblement -- as you surely understand?), but of Lindbeckian or Wittgenstein recontextualization of dogmatic language. Just as Wittgenstein says that the sentence "there exist external objects" is a misguided way of formulating something that cannot be meaningfully expressed in this way (On Certitude), so I say that the language of substance and hypostasis has to be translated into functional terms. I no more deny the truths of Nicea and Chalcedon than Wittgenstein denies the existence of external objects.
Charles Williams' remark shows simply a distaste for philosophy and theology.
My minimalist, not minimizing, account of the Trinitarian dogma is that of your patron John Henry Newman, I am happy you agree that a nuanced reading of what I say can square it with orthodoxy. That is all any theologian worth his salt could wish!
I never suggest that Scripture contradicts the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. If you think that is what I am claiming, you should read me again.
When I say that Christian truth reaches out to other religions for its fulfillment I am thinking not of Whitehead or any processists, whom I have never read in any case, but of John 1.1-18.
Myth, myth everywhere and not a drop to drink! I think my point was clear enough -- demythologization allows a renewed encounter with the living God of Holy Scripture as he can be persuasively spoken of today. The myths were excellent vehicles in their time, but we need a language of our own time.
Most of your essay just quotes me with added exclamations of the "My, my!" type. But one point on which you make a false assessment is when you say that I regard Christ and Buddha as just two alternative language for the same thing. Not true, I regard the Christ-event as something distinctive and unique and enjoying primacy in the history of salvation. But I try to understand and make credible this unique eschatological event beyond the categories that have served so well in the past and that now seem less than perfectly adequate.
You are correct that I reach out to Buddhism not in mission and conversion -- I don't consider that my vocation -- but as a seeker of truth anxious to enlarge and enrich his Christian vision. What's wrong with that?
Well, I suppose I should thank you for your three very long essays on my short one, and for registering all the aspects that may be shocking to those unfamiliar with the perilous slopes of theology. Since I make it a point of facing all questions put to theology, whether from the secular world or from Christian liberals or from historical criticism, it is hardly surprising that people who have not faced up to those problems should find my thoughts provocative. But I think more patient readers may find them quite sensible and unavoidable. In any case the issues continue to be discussed and debated and this already rather old essay of mine marks only one moment in a journey, a moment I would not wish to see frozen as if it were intended as a final or definitive utterance.
For another treatment of these issues have a look at Rowan Williams -- you can find his recent speech at the Pontifications site.
correction, This is not the one, on my first posting above, should be This is not the tone.
Interestingly, Joe recognizes that what I write is just the usual sort of thing you find in American theologians and exegetes. He thinks they drain the biblical text of vitality, but he should recall that that is what people have always said about theologians.
"I like honest, hardboiled atheists."
I'm with you, Charles. As Von Hildebrand said in his conclusion to "The Trojan Horse in the City of God", (I'm paraphrasing here) Catholics used to consider those who left the Church as being a bad bunch, but those who stay and corrupt Her structure* from the inside are much, much worse. Ah, I long for the days of heretics, like Luther, who just left the Church -- now, they're all amongst us.
*They do not corrupt the Church herself, though: sine macula et ruga she will ever be.
Did I hear a buzzing sound? Oh, it was only you Father!
One thing that troubled me in pb's account of my views was that I seemed to have quoted Bultmann to the effect that Christ is Messiah only if we believe him to be so. Just now I looked up the Bultmann text and my own quotation of it, and I see that my quotation was quite misleading. Bultmann writes that Christ is the Eschatological Event "indeed,t to put it more precisely, he becomes such -- in the encounter -- when the Word which proclaims him meets with belief: AND INDEED EVEN WHEN IT DOES NOT MEET WITH BELIEF, FOR WHOEVER DOES NOT BELIEVE IS ALREADY JUDGED (JOHN 3.1
." The part in block capitals was regrettably not quoted in my excerpt. This would have made my remark on the Bultmann quote, "it may be possible to square this with orthodoxy" more convincing.
New Catholic,
Would you have unequivocally supported the Condemnations of 1277?
pb's misinterprets my text on many points, due to hastiness. For instance he quotes "can we not think of incarnation as the transformation of this human life in all its extensions, into manifestation of God" -- the reference here is not to our everyday life but precisely to the human life of Jesus of Nazareth.
the text he misinterprets continues, *just as in the Eucharist...* -- leaving the quote there pb makes it seem that I am also seeing the eucharist as a transformation of *this human life* which he has wrongly identified with everyday life.
In fact the full quote is, "just as in the Eucharist the meal-event is 'transusbtantiated' into a communion in the paschal mystery so that its basic reality of 'substance now has no independent existence alongside what it has become'. The point of the analogy is that 'this human life' of the historical Jesus has no independent existence separable from the total mystery of the incarnation of the Word. It is strange to find pb defending the autonomy of the historical Jesus, the very thing for which he scourges the Jesus Seminar!
I think the fundamental mistake pb makes concerns my use of the terms "regrounding" and "overcoming". When I speak of regrounding Chalcedon in the biblical encounter or regrounding John 1.14 in the impact of the historical Jesus and his message of the Kingdom, Blosser thinks I mean dissolving Chalcedon and John in some vaguer, earlier subjective experience. He thinks I am no friend of the magisterium -- missing entirely the fact that my essay if a defence of Chalcedon from its biblical roots and a defence of John from a phenomenology, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, of the impact of Jesus as a word of grace and judgment addressed to us from God. I do not at all subscribe to the idea that John is peddling a "myth of God incarnate" that falsified the historical Jesus. Rather I argue that John 1.14 is the supreme New Testament vision of the meaning of the historical Jesus, a vision born of contemplative meditation on the phenomena.
Wow, Fr. O'Leary is the multinational heretic-priest.
So, Vatican Instruction=Holocaust and
Sodomites=Jews. I guess Sodomites are the new Chosen People, huh?
So, the Sodomite "Gay" "culture" is all about sodomy??? No way!
Oops! Look at what's been happening at a CATHOLIC University (from a sodomite paper called "The Advocate", see link in Bettnet):
"I came out to my friends at Bernard Middle School not long after. At first it was horrible, with students treating me like some circus freak. But eventually things settled down. I started going to a gay teen support group headed by St. Louis University called Growing American Youth. There I met “Jim,” whom I later started dating. He and a few other new friends introduced me to gay teen culture. I had lots of sex and partied late at night."
New Catholic, for Hitler Sodomites and Jews were much the same thing, actually anyone with homosexual tendencies could end up in Auschwitz with a pink triangle just as anyone with a drop of Jewish blood could end up there, with a yellow star. Homophobia, such as yours, is the antisemitism of today. The idea of rooting out homosexual tendencies in seminarians reminds me of the Apartheid regime's efforts to root out blacks who looked white. These are your bedfellows, New Catholic. Look in the mirror, and see yourself as you are: the moral equivalent of a racist and an antisemite.
"I had lots of sex and partied late at night."
Lots of young people can say the same -- the fact that you think it is the end of the world speaks volumes about yourself.
Ever here of "live and let live"?
Perhaps the reason you cannot let others live is that you have yourself not yet learned how to live?
At least that is what your amazingly bitter messages here suggest.
In any case, the Vatican document is not aimed at young people who have lots of sex but at young people who are ready to commit themselves to a life of celibacy. And it rejects them solely on the basis of their godgiven sexual orientation. In the past the Jesuits rejected candidates solely on the basis of the taint of Jewish blood in their veins -- limpieza de sangre was insisted on. Not very nice.
"Lots of young people can say the same -- the fact that you think it is the end of the world speaks volumes about yourself."
It IS the end of the world -- for those who do not repent before they die. The fact that you regularly minimise sexual sin speaks volumes about you, Father.
"I guess Sodomites are the new Chosen People, huh?"
So it would appear.
It is probably true that I minimise sexual sin -- except in the case where others are abused or exploited -- though perhaps all sexual sin involves hurt to others as well. But I do not consider the use of contraceptives a sexual sin and I would also say that gay sex is not always a sexual sin. I suspect that the bishops of the world agree with me on the former point; many of their interpretations of Humanae Vitae ushered that document into deadletterdom, just as the interpretations of the new Roman Document by Timothy Radcliffe and Bruce Williams OP and by Bp Skylstad are doing for it, despite the squeals of the Polish Cardinal who signed it and the homophobic Jesuit Anatrella commissioned by the Vatican to comment on it in L'Osservatore. The liberal "interpretation" of the document may even be a step toward a more liberal understanding of homosexual sex as such on the part of the church. The development of law and of doctrine is made up of such ironies.
I gave an answer to Al Kimel's queries on his site. Basically I do believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, so his questions pose no real difficulty. But I try to make that doctrine credible and accessible for today, by rerooting it in John 1.14 and rerooting the latter in its biblical background (and in the total experience of Christ that the disciples had for the 60 or 70 years before the Johannine vision found definitive expression).
Calling homosexual persons Sodomites is contrary to current church practice and teaching. Did you not know that?
Contrary to current teaching?
I suspect that you are at your old tricks of misquotation when you use terms like "rut" between inverted commas.
To the pure in heart, all things are pure. And to the naive, at least some things are. I wasn't even aware of that other meaning of "rut" until you pointed it out and I looked it up. Shame on you, Fr. Joe!
I suppose it would be useless to explain to you that Encounter -- as used by Emil Brunner, or by Barth -- is not a subjectivist category.
It's all in how one defines "subjectivist," Fr. Joe, and I stand by what I've written. I know these guys. I studied them in divinity school.
... the situated character of all formulations of truth does not mean that they enjoy no objective truth ...
Again, Fr. Joe, it's all in the definition, here of "objective." Even a solipsist could entertain some notion of "objectivity" without leaving the bubble of his own consciousness.
I no more deny the truths of Nicea and Chalcedon than Wittgenstein denies the existence of external objects.
But in what your describe as your exercise of "translating the language of substance and hypostasis into functional terms," you end up eviscerating the truths of Nicea and Chalcedon.
I am happy you agree that a nuanced reading of what I say can square it with orthodoxy.
I do not agree with this, and I nowhere say anything of the kind; nor do I think for a moment your Christology has anything in common with that of my patron, the soon-to-be Blessed John Henry Newman.
The myths were excellent vehicles in their time, but we need a language of our own time.
When you can speak of the Jewish Messianic consciousness and Jesus' own Messianic self-understanding, and the Johannine and Pauline Christology in terms of such a rubric, I simply rest my case.
... you make a false assessment ... when you say that I regard Christ and Buddha as just two alternative language for the same thing. Not true ...
Hang on, folks! It sounds like Fr. Joe may be saying something new here, does it not? Don't hold your breath. Look what follows:
... I regard the Christ-event as something distinctive and unique and enjoying primacy in the history of salvation.
What do you think this means, exactly? Sounds nice, don't it? Smells nice? Good vibes. Good connotations. But denotations anywhere? McLuhan used to talk about the difference between 'hot' and 'cool' communication. The one is altogether missing here. It's all jello, as Fr. Joe immediately confirms:
But I try to understand and make credible this unique eschatological event beyond the categories that have served so well in the past and that now seem less than perfectly adequate.
Now there's your hot tub religion for ya! C'mon in, the water's nice and warm, and it can mean whatever you want it to mean, as long as it's not homophobic or neocon!
You are correct that I reach out to Buddhism not in mission and conversion -- I don't consider that my vocation -- but as a seeker of truth anxious to enlarge and enrich his Christian vision. What's wrong with that?
Nothing, surely. But what is wrong with your hot tub Christology is that it wouldn't allow for the vocation of converting Buddhists as a possibility at all, though it might allow for the possibility of homophobic neocons converting to a more enlarged and enriched vision of their "Catholicism" through conversion, of sorts, to Buddhism.
Fr. Joe, I'm impressed you took the trouble to look up the Bultmann quote to try to shore up your claim that "it may be possible to square this with orthodoxy." Good show.
The key phrase you unearthed from Bultmann, that wasn't included in your original quotation was: "AND INDEED EVEN WHEN IT DOES NOT MEET WITH BELIEF, FOR WHOEVER DOES NOT BELIEVE IS ALREADY JUDGED." This, I take it, is intended to make Bultmann's views seem less subjective, since less dependent on subjective belief.
But Bultmann is an existentialist theologian, so it is worth asking what he means when he declares that Christ becomes the Eschatological Event when proclaimed in the Word, "EVEN WHEN IT DOES NOT MEET WITH BELIEF, FOR WHOEVER DOES NOT BELIEVE IS ALREADY JUDGED." What can this possibly mean? Judged? Does Bultmann believe in a Last Judgment? No, so what can me mean? Judged by what? For Bultmann, Christianity is full of "myths" -- the myth of "sin," "objective guilt," "damnation," "hell," "heaven," etc. So how much farther along does the salvaged quotation get us?
Hi All,
Father O' Leary needs to give up the ghost. He's a solipsist who has reified his peculiar theology in his own mind by reading documents with an equally peculiar non-Catholic hermeneutic. Dr. Philip Blosser's three-part exposé of this nonsense was brilliant. Future heretical "Catholics" will one day read Father O'Leary's Theo-babble and recognize that it made perfect sense in his cultural framework. But given his epistemic limitations, they'll reject him out of hand for yet another new-fangled set of heresies keeping with the zeitgeist of the times. Heresy is so boring.
James P. Caputo
But, like, thats just your opinion!
If you ever questioned why I skipped your intro class so much, see above.
I thank Fr. Joe for pointing out a text ("can we not think of incarnation as the transformation of this human life ... into manifestation of God, just as in the Eucharist ..."), which I inadvertently misinterpreted as referring to the transformation of our everyday life, when Fr. Joe meant the transformation of the human life of Jesus of Nazareth. I will make a point of correcting this interpretation in the body of my text, if I don't forget.
But I have two observations here:
First, Fr. Joe goes on to say in his next comment that the "point of [his] analogy is that 'this human life' of the historical Jesus has no independent existence separable from the total mystery of the incarnation of the Word. It is strange to find pb defending the autonomy of the historical Jesus, the very thing for which he scourges the Jesus Seminar!"
The point is precisely the reverse: that liberal existentialist theologians like Fr. Joe wish to defend to autonomy of the nouminous Christ of Faith from any possibility of historical adjudication in the realm of history. The difference is thus not where O'Leary says it is, but rather here: I oppose any dualization between phenomena and noumena, fact and value, the Jesus of History and Christ of Faith, while O'Leary and his friends can't abide their marriage.
Second, Fr. Joe writes: "pb's misinterprets my text on many points, due to hastiness." I invite Fr. Joe to inform me wherever these "many points" of misinterpretation are, for I shall be more than happy to correct any such misinterpretations should they be found. I have tried to be careful, as I usually do in my writing.
Personally, I think Fr. Joe is bored. Bored, bored, bored. The old categories aren't interesting enough for him, and they might cramp his style a bit. Chalcedon is so, like, 1988.
Of course I'm guessing here, but since we're all caught up in the demythologizing spirit, consider it my attempt to demythologize Fr. Joe. Don't thank me, I'm just not doing my job.
No, I'm being unfair. I mean, he's a Catholic priest, right? Of course he's gonna teach, you know, Catholic dogma. Oh. Wait. Dogma's out. So he'll teach Catholic... er... uh... "encounters", the idea of which gives me the creeps. A Pavlovian response.
Another Pavlovian response: whenever I see the phrase "Christ-event" to describe that Jesus guy, I keep picturing a Jewish dude in a cheerleader's costume waving around one of those big "we're number 1" fingers in front of television cameras.
Fr. Joe, you know that when Jesus was making his way through the crowds - assuming you buy those awfully biased Gospel accounts of crowds - that God himself was pinched and poked and prodded, right? You do know that, right? In the same way that when you make your way through the Tokyo crowds the terribly polite Japanese pinch and poke and prod "Fr Joe, Dissenting Catholic Priest", not an "O'Leary-Event".
[Blosser] thinks I am no friend of the magisterium ...
Indeed.
-- missing entirely the fact that my essay [is] a defence of Chalcedon ...
With defenses like this, who needs enemies?
... from its biblical roots and a defence of John from a phenomenology, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar ...
Von Balthasar is a friend of orthodoxy. You criticize von Balthasar's dissmissiveness of historical-critical exegesis, as well, I think, as his "idealized accounts of Christ's life from which historical contingency is banished" in his Johannine theologia gloriae.
... I do not at all subscribe to the idea that John is peddling a "myth of God incarnate" that falsified the historical Jesus. Rather I argue that John 1.14 is the supreme New Testament vision of the meaning of the historical Jesus, a vision born of contemplative meditation on the phenomena.
But what can this ebullient piety mean if you're willing, as you say you are, to entertain the notion that the bones of the historical Jesus may be moldering in a Palestinian grave? The meaning (Christ of Faith) of the historical Jesus, when castrated of historical reason, leaves one with etiolated imagery that, as Archibald McLeish says, "is seen but no longer means."
Barth is a subjectivist? Well, in that case I am surely in good company, since Pius XII is said to have acclaimed Barth as the greatest theologian since Aquinas!
On Bultmann's idea of judgment, the answer is probably to be found in his commentary on John. He believes the the judgment happens in our encounter with the word of Christ here and nowl, at every moment -- following the realized eschatology of John (to which the "ecclesiastical redactor" is supposed to have appended supplementary passages recalling the traditional final eschatology). Bultmann is quite Lutheran here -- I stand before God as a condemned sinner yet as justified if I embrace Christ as my savior.
liberal existentialist theologians like Fr. Joe wish to defend the autonomy of the nouminous [DO YOU MEAN numinous OR noumenal?]Christ of Faith from any possibility of historical adjudication in the realm of history.
FALSE -- the essay you are commenting on EXPLICITLY tests John 1.14 against the historical Jesus.
I oppose any dualization between phenomena and noumena, fact and value, the Jesus of History and Christ of Faith, while O'Leary and his friends can't abide their marriage.
FALSE -- the whole essay was precisely about that marriage -- you misread its very first sentence as I pointed out in response to the first part of your critique. But you blithely took no notice of my correction...
I criticize Von Balthasar quite often as his baroque theology has had a suffocating effect in recent decades, as many are now realizing. But he is still a great theologian and I learn a lot from him. It is he who gave me the idea that the entire career of Jesus is experienced as a powerful word from God and that John is drawing this conclusing in a powerful contemplative vision. Jesus and the Father are one, in nondual identification, Jesus is the Father's very Word to all of humanity.
Pius said that about Barth? Source please.
https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/.../
_1OB06FVGO.HTM
Philip may have looked at Barth a long time ago, but I have his Kirchliche Dogmatik and several volumes of the new edition on my shelf, along with a lot of books on him. He is one of my guardian angels, so beware!
If anyone can find the primary source for Pius XII's statement, I would be happy to have it. If it is an urban legend it has had a long, long life, for I first heard it as a student back in 1969 or so.
Jordan Potter jumped on Timothy Radcliffe for his "interpretation" of the Instruction, but now I see that the entire church has rushed to embrace this benign "interpretation" to the chagrin of its authors. A published document becomes the text of the church, subject to reception, and in this case the church in its wisdom and maturity has limited the damage that the Curial bureaucrats were liable to inflict.
It's very interesting to see the "church" (lower case) seen as separated from the Apostolic See, Mother and Master of all Churches. So, this is O'leary-ecclesiology: those who agree with him (as the sodomite-friendly people, most of whom are sodomites themselves) are "the church"; those who disagree with him... are probably outside his "church").
Now, back to real life and to the real Church.
From John Thavis, CNS Rome
A cover letter accompanying the Vatican's instruction on homosexuality and the priesthood said the new norms must be "faithfully observed" and taken into account in the drafting or updating of each country's seminary guidelines.
The letter also made clear that, while the text does not apply to those already ordained, priests with homosexual tendencies should not have educational roles in seminaries.
The letter from the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education went out to bishops in early November along with the nine-page instruction. The instruction was made public Nov. 29 but the cover letter was not; Catholic News Service obtained a copy of the letter.
It was signed by Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the education congregation, and by Archbishop J. Michael Miller, congregation secretary.
The Vatican instruction said the church cannot allow priestly ordination of men who are active homosexuals, who have "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" or who support the "gay culture."
The accompanying letter said it should be "clear that the aforementioned norms are to be faithfully observed by all superiors" involved in admission of candidates to the priesthood.
The instruction, the letter said, "does not call into question the validity of the ordination and the situation of priests who, in fact, have been ordained with homosexual tendencies" or of priests who have manifested homosexual tendencies after ordination.
"Like all other priests, they must remember the promise that they made on the day of their ordination, to live perfect chastity in celibacy," the letter said.
Such priests should continue in their ministry, it said, but added: "Because of the particular responsibility of those charged with the formation of future priests, they are not to be appointed as rectors or educators in seminaries."
The letter offered a brief genesis of the instruction, saying the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- headed at the time by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the present pope -- had a key role in its inception and development.
It said that in 1996 the doctrinal congregation invited the education congregation to prepare an instruction on the topic. As the work went forward, the doctrinal congregation "forwarded abundant documentation on the question," it said.
The draft texts were circulated and evaluated by the doctrinal congregation and six other Vatican departments, including those dealing with clergy, sacraments, Eastern churches, evangelization, religious orders and canon law.
On Pius XII and Barth (plus some):
http://www.ratzingerfanclub.com/...-
balthasar.html
New Cath, you are pissing against the wind. Do you not hear the mighty roar of the Catholic Church as it "receives" and "interprets" the document? This may even be a revolutionary moment, when the people of God begin to speak out of their own experience and refuse to be bullied by out-of-touch bureaucrats.
Right... As it happened right after Humanae Vitae, isn't it? Each faithful is his own judge -- which may explain why so few go to confession regularly.
By the way, I 'm going right away, because we're already less than 8 days from the Immaculata and I want to receive the plenary indulgence authorized by the Holy Father.
... for Hitler Sodomites and Jews were much the same thing ...
A popular revisionism, this. In fact, Hilter surrounded himself with a gaggle of homosexuals in his circle of Nazi officers. See Scott Lively's article, "Homoxesuality and the Nazi Party," a review of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuals and the Nazi Party (1995).
Fr. Joe says the Vatican document rejects young seminarians on the basis of their "godgiven sexual orientation." That's editorializing. Would you say everything we're born with is "Godgiven"? Get real and think Catholic.
Beckwith, you give lawyers a bad name. You know how much I enjoy you!
"Jordan Potter jumped on Timothy Radcliffe for his 'interpretation' of the Instruction, but now I see that the entire church has rushed to embrace this benign "interpretation" to the chagrin of its authors."
The entire Church? Well, I know of a few bishops who do not misinterpret the document the way Radcliffe and Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, etc., are doing. One of those bishops is the Bishop of Rome, the most important bishop of all. I, a humble and nonentity of a layman, agree with that "interpretation" (that is, I agree with what the document says and do not believe the wild twists and spins that many are trying to impose onto it). Therefore the entire Church has not adopted the misinterpretation that Radcliffe and his ilk wish to pawn off on the Church.
Oh, I wasn't referring to you, but rather the students that said such inane things (in the intro class, not the proud academics with the courage to enter old North). I fully appreciate what a Herculean task it must be to guide 50 unwilling minds through the maze Friendship.
Sorry, that anonymous comment right before beckwith's was from me.
The Bishop of Rome can respond to the reception of the Instruction, he can reject the reception. But he has not done so yet. Paul VI did not reject similar receptions of Humanae Vitae. Pius IX actually thanked the French Bishops for some similar reception of some statement of his, as I dimly recall ('twas before my time).
Hitler surrounded himself with a gaggle of homosexuals? I thought everybody knew that. Nonetheless he saw gays as objectively disordered, an entartetes Geschlecht, and had them burned in crematoria. Such contradictions are the very essence of the history of homophobia. An Anglican bishops who urged capital punishment for gays in the 17th century was one of the first to be hanged!
It is probably true that I minimise sexual sin ...
Is the Pope Catholic?
-- except in the case where others are abused or exploited -- though perhaps all sexual sin involves hurt to others as well.
Which would logically mean that you perhaps never minimize sexual sin because perhaps all sexual sin involves hurt to others as well.
But of course, we know this is absurd, becauce the Pope is Catholic and you minimize sexual sin. If we didn't have a conscience, we wouldn't go to confession at all; but if we did, we'd love going to you if we had lots of sexual sins, because you would probably tell us they weren't sins!
But I do not consider the use of contraceptives a sexual sin and I would also say that gay sex is not always a sexual sin.
Which probably means you haven't explored the ways in which contraception can hurt one's marital bond and homosexual sex can hurt homophile friendships.
I gave an answer to Al Kimel's queries on his site. Basically I do believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, so his questions pose no real difficulty. But I try to make that doctrine credible and accessible for today, by rerooting it ...
I offered some comments on Kimel's site as well, trying to show how your "rerooting" attempt does more to undermine the credibility of your profession of faith than anything else you might have said.
Pius XII is said to have acclaimed Barth as the greatest theologian since Aquinas!
Barth was the subtlest of the existentialist theologians from the classical Neo-Orthodox renaissance. Multitudes of readers mistook him for an orthodox Christian theologian. He was not. Among the earliest to smell out what was really going on, such as Cornelius Van Til -- author of Christianity and Barthianism -- were greeted with consternation and disdain when they came out with their critiques (see also Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from letters and autobiographical texts, trans. John Bowden).
The disarming thing is that Barth many times says what sounds like just the opposite of what he actually means. It takes great care to decipher his true intentions and meaning. This is particularly the case in his references to things such as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of Christ, etc.
Bultmann is quite Lutheran here -- I stand before God as a condemned sinner yet as justified if I embrace Christ as my savior.
Yes, but not only Lutheran (simul iustus et peccator -- I'm simultaneously a condemned sinner and justified saint), but also existentialist: all this business about "God" and "Christ" and "Christ" and "savior" ends up self-deconstructing in its existentialist recinsion under the rubric of "realized eschatology." It means what you want it to mean. "Christ" can mean, when speaking to a Japanese person, the "Buddha nature."
Fr. Joe, you claim that you oppose any dualization between phenomena and noumena, fact and value, Jesus of History and Christ of Faith -- and that your whole essay was about their marriage.
This is preposterous. Your position utterly depends on your being able to sequester the "eschatological Christ event" away from the scientifically accessible facts about the historical Jesus. I know how much you like the sound of talking a "holistic" line; but I don't see that it works for you.
You also claim that your "whole essay was precisely about that marriage" and that I "misread its very first sentence as I pointed out in response to the first part of your critique," but that I "blithely took no notice of my correction."
I went to check your comments under Part I again, but couldn't find anything answering to such a misreading of your opening sentence. If you can help me locate such a misreading, I shall be happy to stand corrected.
https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/.../ _1OB06FVGO.HTM
Philip may have looked at Barth a long time ago, but I have his Kirchliche Dogmatik and several volumes of the new edition on my shelf, along with a lot of books on him. He is one of my guardian angels, so beware!
The link doesn't work, and I'm hardly daunted, my friend. =)
New Catholic: Now, back to real life and to the real Church ...
O'Leary: That depends on what the meaning of "is" is ...
New Cath, you are pissing against the wind. Do you not hear the mighty roar of the Catholic Church as it "receives" and "interprets" the document?
Fr. O'Leary, my how fearless you are of demeaning yourself as a priest! On the other hand, I hate to see how often dissidents are disappointed to find out that the roar they thought was the mighty wind of the Spirit turns out to be the mere clatter they were making in their own toilets.
Hitler surrounded himself with a gaggle of homosexuals? I thought everybody knew that.
The point is that you can't simply pin the 'Nazi' label on all those you like to call "homophobes," because many Nazi's themselves were often homosexuals. Case closed.
I am not a Feuerbachian who would say that all statements about God are only subjective projection. But I do say that an element of subjective projection inevitably enters into religious language and that reading Feuerbach can make us alert to this. I suppose this is too subtle for you, Philip?
you can't simply pin the 'Nazi' label on all those you like to call "homophobes," because many Nazi's themselves were often homosexuals.
1. I do not simply pin the label.
2. Your logic is defective, as it presumes that homosexuals cannot be homophobes.
This is preposterous. Your position utterly depends on your being able to sequester the "eschatological Christ event" away from the scientifically accessible facts about the historical Jesus. I know how much you like the sound of talking a "holistic" line; but I don't see that it works for you.
NO, NO, you misunderstand me. I think the problem is that you consider things to be scientifically accessible facts that I see as narrativization of theological insights.. the miracle of Cana for example. But of course I want to keep the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith in intimate connection.
As to Bultmann, even if your take on him is correct, I would not follow him in that direction at all.
I am not a Feuerbachian who would say that all statements about God are only subjective projection. But I do say that an element of subjective projection inevitably enters into religious language and that reading Feuerbach can make us alert to this. I suppose this is too subtle for you, Philip?
Hardly, O subtle friend, but tell me: what part of your statements about God are not only subjective projection?
Your logic is defective, as it presumes that homosexuals cannot be homophobes.
The shoe is on the other foot: the logic I reproduced was not mine, but that of militant gays who try to pit Nazis against homosexuals by means of precisely such reasoning. I concur that the logic is flawed in presuming that homosexuals cannot be homophobes.
I think the problem is that you consider things to be scientifically accessible facts that I see as narrativization of theological insights.
On the contrary, the problem seems much rather to be that you consider narrativized theological insights utterly unconnectable to scientifically accessible facts. Despite your protestations to the contrary and your profession of wanting to keep the Christ of faith and Jesus of history in "intimate connection," you offer no means for achieving this and, in fact, undermine the very possibility of doing so by levitating the meaning of our "encounter with Christ" two feet above contradiction and the reach of historical fact. Tell me how that's not so.
I do not consider theological narratives to be unconnected to historical facts -- the fact of the passion, or the teachings of Jesus, or his healing ministry. But often the factual basis is elusive or on specific points non-existent. The illustration of this that I first gave is Matthew's story of the guards at the tomb. I argued that a historian looking at the resurrection narratives would have to conclude that Matthew's account in unhistorical and that there were no guards at the tomb. If you want to argue against this as a historian do so.
The encounter with Christ is not dependent for its validity on the things you claim to be scientifically established historical fact. However, if the things that most scholars consider scientifically established historical fact, such as the existence of Jesus, his teaching, his passion, were found to be false that would certainly ruin Christianity.
The Resurrection has a historical basis in the testimonies of the eye-witnesses, in particular Paul. It is proposed to faith and no knockdown scientific proof is available.
The divinity and the saving role of Christ also are not provable by historical science; they are a credible reading of the events and are proposed to faith by the apostolic witness.
Many gays who talk about Nazism make the point that it illustrates how homophobia is rooted in repressed or insecure or self-hating homosexuality.
All my statements about God have an objective core -- that God is good, creator, redeemer etc., but as such they are also colored by the subjective apparatus of perception and conception that is of my time and culture.
Blosser writes several thousand words on Fr Joe's candy store theology. Not one of those words is "sex", "gay", or "homosexual". So roll through the comments, and guess what you see?
How tired I am of this Irish vaudevillian and his teary, "Oh Danny Boy" lamentations for those young men of style and verve, who poke and prod each other's excretory mechanisms with everything from penises to fists to corn cobs, bedknobs, broomsticks, ball bats, rake handles, garden hoses, post hole diggers, and other assorted Home Depot bric a brac, and call it love.
The subject, Fr Joe, was your apostasy.
While I am far away from agreeing with most of the contents I really come to love the richness of your words Mr. roister-doister and look forward to each new one. the previous one is a keeper. "Home depot bric a brac' - what lovely poetry of words and thoughts.
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