Now, a bit about Original Sin on this Holy Feast Day, a Feast Day Pius XI instituted as a counter to the Protestants' Reformation Sunday. Protestants believed historically in Original Sin, and many still do, but definitely not in the way Catholicism does.
Original Sin: G.K. Chesterton wrote that Original Sin was the only Church doctrine one could prove by merely opening the daily newspaper. This recent horror in Pittsburgh is an example of opening the daily paper (or accessing the Web) and seeing Original Sin.
Jews famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) don't believe in Original Sin. Classical Protestantism embraced it, but not in the Catholic way. Protestantism insisted that Original Sin meant people were worthless rags, utter failures, or "Totally Depraved" as Jean Calvin taught it in the famous Reformed Church acronym of "T.U.L.I.P". Thus, we're all miserable rats, fiends, selfish and savage. (And all too often, many people seem to want to be precisely so horrible as all that! Hell is their choice, and God always gives you what you want.) But through an act of faith, i.e., personal and then public acceptance of Jesus as Lord, God would then "cover" their sins -- and sinful nature -- with the snow of His Son's Righteousness. We would be made "right with God" even though sinners. Luther called this Justified but a Sinner. "Simul Justus et Peccator." This is defined as "imputed righteousness." Luther said we were thus like manure piles covered with snow. (I grew up on a dairy farm and this is quite a clever metaphor.)
Most traditional Protestants still believe this, though the more Modernist or Progressive ones don't (they don't believe in sin very much at all, unless being non-Politically Correct is a sin to them). In any event, such fallen wretches can not possible make good subjects for Christ as King of the Here and Now, so Protestants teach His kingship comes at the end of the ages.
Contra this, the Orthodoxies (Catholicism, etc.) teach that Original Sin means we're not "plugged in" to God as we were when first made. We can thus go either way in life, in terms of being good people or bad, although usually we go the downward way. However, we're all far, far, far from worthless, and some can achieve profoundly all on their own (think of Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle, etc., or the local "good atheist" who does great charity work and so on). However, no matter how good (or of course, bad) an individual may be, he or she cannot be "saved", made right with God; or to put it another way, a less Protestant way: our current, fallen, nature is such that as to prevent us from ever "seeing God" in the Beatific Vision.
Our natures, our very essence, thus must be remade, and this is what the Incarnation is all about. Eastern Orthodoxies -- whether in Communion with Rome, as many of the small ones are -- or not, all stress the Incarnation aspect of Salvation. They dwell on the mystery of the Incarnate God, ruling all history and creation as He is now, today, and as revealed in the Book of Revelation. Catholicism on the other hand, because of St. Augustine, tends to contemplate Christ as Crucified, hanging on the Cross, beaten, bloody, redeeming our sins through His sacrifice. These are two sides of the same Salvation coin, of course.
That is why when you walk into a traditional Catholics church, you're sure to see a large Crucifix. But when you walk into an Eastern liturgy church, you see Christ as Pantokrator, Ruler of All, on high (usually on its central dome).
Now, both Catholicism and the Orthodoxies are "orthodox" in that they teach the full Gospel, i.e., that the Incarnation and the Crucifixion go together. The difference is one of stress. But Catholicism's stress on the Crucifixion resulted in Protestantism, which is all about "Jesus died for my sins!" Protestantism focuses on the Cross to the point they can't really appreciate the Incarnation. The Incarnation is about the change in OUR natures ultimately. Protestants deny, however, as Luther went to great pains to deny, that there is any "change of nature." We're manure piles under beautiful robes. C.S. Lewis, in his 10th Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, refutes (very politely) this central Protestant teaching.
The question is: why the Incarnation? Why did God have to become Man? What is all that about, anyway? And the answer is that by the Incarnation, God elevated our natures so that we could then participate in the Divine Nature. That is what Salvation ultimately is. "We are new creations in Christ Jesus," as St. Paul says at least once in most of his letters, one way or another, "the old nature is gone; the new is here!" And this is the idea of Jesus' comments on to Nicodemus in St John about being "born again", i.e., literally receiving a new nature, born of the water and the Spirit, which is the Catholic / Orthodox understanding of the Sacrament of Baptism, and we receive the spirit of sonship (as St. Paul put it in Romans).
To rephrase it and bring in the help of angelic friends, angels by their inherent nature shared God's nature as pure spirit, and once they chose for or against God, they were locked in -- or locked out -- of God's presence for all eternity. This is simple to understand: if you are in Eternity and you make a choice, that choice is -- surprise, surprise -- eternal. One doesn't celebrate one's millionth year in Heaven or lament one's millionth year in Hell. There are no years in Eternity. Only what Boethius called the "Bound Now". (Thus anyone trying to make the argument that a good God would not consign someone to Hell forever is ridiculous -- there's no "forever" in Heaven or Hell, only the Boundless Present.
Humans are made in the image and likeness of God, as well, not in that the Lord of Hosts looked like Adam or had a physical nature in any way, but that we have minds that can comprehend, sort, catalog, figure out, project, extrapolate, and in general, be rational. These minds are eternal, mirroring God and the angelic minds. We're thus both the highest animals and lowest (sorta) angels, in the mind/soul sense. Original Sin locked us out of full participation in God, but the Incarnation opened the door for us that way, and opened it in a new and higher level entirely, so that now, incredibly, the Lord of Hosts Himself (Christians believe) is not pure spirit any more, but the Second Person is both God and Man, two natures, one Person. And we can share in that through the Sacrament, changed in our own very natures.
So, thus, Original Sin only means that an individual, no matter how good, can not be with God as God intended until that person participates in God's long-running plan of Salvation. We're not totally depraved, though many seem to want to go that way. But we're not sinless either, in the sense we don't have the supernatural help and cleansing all the Sacraments give, especially Baptism, which removes the Original Sin issue.
One final note: The Easterners don't believe unbaptized babies go to Limbo, and certainly not Hell. The Westerners (again because of St. Augustine to some large extent) believe unbaptized children can at best go to Limbo (or the Celtic Otherworld or Native Americans' Happy Hunting Grounds, or the Elysian Fields, however you wish to see it). St. Thomas Aquinas argued for the latter against those who taught the Hell destination idea. St. Robert Bellarmine, 1542 to 1621, was about the last important theologian who taught they went to Hell, if I recall correctly. The question today is generally held in abeyance, or to coin a phrase, Limbo. I've had children who didn't make it to birth and should I be blessed with Heaven, and they're in Limbo, I'm going to go be with them. We are made for the Beatific Vision, but as their father, I'm responsible for them. There are no angel families or clans, but there are with us. And God works through us for the general Salvation, to the extreme and astounding extent He became one of us Himself.
Certainly the Lord of All Creation, the King of All, and a Father Himself, would understand, and fix it up to fulfill His glory and our destiny.
An Préachám
Sunday, October 28, 2018
Christ the King: A Catholic Essay on Christianity, Judaism, and Protestantism, and How Salvation Works, Part I
Here's a take on Original Sin and Christianity/Judaism that many of you are probably not familiar with. But today, on the Traditional and proper Feast of Christ the King, it is good to recall just how He is Lord of History and our True King -- not only of Heaven, but our Earth, our present, miserable, confused, and lost (even in so many persons in the Church itself, even Christ's Vicar!) as it seems to be.
God, the Lord of Hosts, Creator and Sustainer of all that is, is following a program He's put in place that is still running. It's the same program from Adam and Eve down to today. This is crucially important. The Lord doesn't run about changing things to fit the circumstances of the day. He's Christ the King, the Lord of History and He is in control. That's important to remember -- and believe -- after a horror such as the purely evil, vile, and obscene Pittsburgh Massacre.
So:
The first Covenant the Lord made with all Creation when He "rested" on the Seventh Day. The next Covenant He made with Adam and Eve, that through Eve's seed He would raise up a Savior who would crush the serpent's head, even though the serpent (Satan) would bit the heel of the seed -- Christians of all stripes take that to be a prophecy of the Passion and Crucifixion. The second Covenant He made with Noah, and so on. Seven Covenants in all, the last being the New Covenant (here Christians deviate from Judaism, obviously).
To be "saved" one needs to have this inheritance, to be in the inheritance of blessing, THE blessing God gave to Abraham (the red-haired "Great Father", to whom God granted this via a close series of three special Abrahamic covenants), and as was then passed down through Isaac ("Laughter") to Isaac's second son, Jacob ("Heel") whom the Lord renamed "Israel" ("He who struggles with El", or God). To be "saved", this long-running program has it, one indeed has to be of the People Israel, through whom salvation is solely available.
What Jesus, (Yeshu'a, Joshua, meaning: "Yahweh is salvation") did was to arrange for the adoption into the divine Sonship of non-Jews, into this Abrahamic Covenant. Through His Incarnation, and then Crucifixion and Resurrection, Our Lord Christ made this adoption into the Abrahamic Covenant possible through changing our nature. This is the belief of the Christian Orthodoxies (Western Orthodoxy/Roman Catholicism, the various Eastern Orthodoxies, and then the "Oriental" Orthodox -- Armenian, Coptic), all of whom have the same system of Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacraments. (Ahem, some of the Churches get along with each other better than with others, but their actual theological differences are minor compared with Protestantism.)
What they have in common is that they're the Churches of the Real Presence, i.e., that God is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine. Being baptized allows one to partake of the other Sacraments, esp that of the Holy Eucharist. It is the Most Holy Eucharist that is the New Covenant, the New Testament (and not the 27 books of the Christian Bible -- they only contain the story of the New Testament. And when we have taken the Holy Eucharist, we are changed in our nature because we receive the Incarnate God. And we not only have the Body and Blood of God in our arteries, but His Human Nature too. Jesus got His Human Nature from his Mother, as all Jews inherit the blessings Israel received from his father Isaac, through their mothers, from Sarah on down.
Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary is truly our Mother, literally, because Our Lord is Incarnate through her and via the Holy Eucharist, we take on His Nature. We're "new creations in Christ" as St. Paul says so often, and in so many ways. In other words, all Christians who are "Orthodox" and participate in the Holy Eucharist are adopted into Israel, and all thus receive the Covenant blessing and salvation inherent in that. It's the same program it has always been, in other words.
Now, traditionally, Catholicism has taught that the fourth Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant (fourth from Adam and Eve, fifth from the Seventh Day Covenant with Creation), was cancelled, or abrogated, or made defunct, and that it was replaced by the New Covenant. That would change the number of the Seven Covenants, of course, and also it is not necessary, because each Covenant is transformed by the Covenant made after it. Expanded, uplifted, transfigured. We understand Noah's Covenant in a new light via the Abrahamic Covenant, and we see the Mosaic Covenant transformed and heightened by the Davidic Covenant (that the Kingship of Israel would never pass from David's House). Just as Our Lord was Transfigured on the Mount, and for the first time, Peter, James, and John -- who thought they knew him -- beheld Him as He is, so the Mosaic Covenant was transfigured from eating a lamb without blemish or broken bones into the Lamb of God Himself.
Now, as these transformations and uplifts in Covenants occur, one does have to keep up. Think of all of Noah's descendants who weren't descended from Abraham through Sarah. Or think of all those Israelites who rejected the Davidic kings and started their own "Kingdom of Israel" in Samaria and Galilee -- the famous "Lost Tribes of Israel". All cut off from the Covenants after inheriting them directly. Similarly, those Jews who didn't come to believe in Jesus of Nazareth cut themselves off from the fulfilled Covenants. I personally think "God will sort it" in His own way, because so many Jews have been faithful to Him (as they understood it) throughout the millennia, and I think so because God is always faithful -- always -- and because the Lord God is the Reader of Hearts. He is Judge, too, the Absolute Judge, an essential part of His Divine Kingship. But the true and certain road of Salvation comes through the Church He set up, which is the New Israel, the Synagogue of God.
N.B. When looked at this way, one can immediately see the cause for conflict between Jews and Christians. Jews resented the idea that non-Jews could suddenly be incorporated into the Jewish people, while not "going all the way" with Temple Worship and Kosher laws, and so on -- not to mention all these non-Jews being, well, not descended from Abraham! Christians resented the Jews saying, "Whoa! You're not part of the ancient Covenant!" So the fight began. In contrast to the Churches of the Real Presence, Protestantism, is the "Churches of the Real Absence" (i.e., all Protestant Churches deny -- in their founding documents -- the ancient Real Presence teaching), have a very different understanding of how Salvation works, and 500 years of that have driven this teaching I've just outlined out of the popular imagination, knowledge, etc,.
An Préachán
God, the Lord of Hosts, Creator and Sustainer of all that is, is following a program He's put in place that is still running. It's the same program from Adam and Eve down to today. This is crucially important. The Lord doesn't run about changing things to fit the circumstances of the day. He's Christ the King, the Lord of History and He is in control. That's important to remember -- and believe -- after a horror such as the purely evil, vile, and obscene Pittsburgh Massacre.
So:
The first Covenant the Lord made with all Creation when He "rested" on the Seventh Day. The next Covenant He made with Adam and Eve, that through Eve's seed He would raise up a Savior who would crush the serpent's head, even though the serpent (Satan) would bit the heel of the seed -- Christians of all stripes take that to be a prophecy of the Passion and Crucifixion. The second Covenant He made with Noah, and so on. Seven Covenants in all, the last being the New Covenant (here Christians deviate from Judaism, obviously).
To be "saved" one needs to have this inheritance, to be in the inheritance of blessing, THE blessing God gave to Abraham (the red-haired "Great Father", to whom God granted this via a close series of three special Abrahamic covenants), and as was then passed down through Isaac ("Laughter") to Isaac's second son, Jacob ("Heel") whom the Lord renamed "Israel" ("He who struggles with El", or God). To be "saved", this long-running program has it, one indeed has to be of the People Israel, through whom salvation is solely available.
What Jesus, (Yeshu'a, Joshua, meaning: "Yahweh is salvation") did was to arrange for the adoption into the divine Sonship of non-Jews, into this Abrahamic Covenant. Through His Incarnation, and then Crucifixion and Resurrection, Our Lord Christ made this adoption into the Abrahamic Covenant possible through changing our nature. This is the belief of the Christian Orthodoxies (Western Orthodoxy/Roman Catholicism, the various Eastern Orthodoxies, and then the "Oriental" Orthodox -- Armenian, Coptic), all of whom have the same system of Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacraments. (Ahem, some of the Churches get along with each other better than with others, but their actual theological differences are minor compared with Protestantism.)
What they have in common is that they're the Churches of the Real Presence, i.e., that God is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine. Being baptized allows one to partake of the other Sacraments, esp that of the Holy Eucharist. It is the Most Holy Eucharist that is the New Covenant, the New Testament (and not the 27 books of the Christian Bible -- they only contain the story of the New Testament. And when we have taken the Holy Eucharist, we are changed in our nature because we receive the Incarnate God. And we not only have the Body and Blood of God in our arteries, but His Human Nature too. Jesus got His Human Nature from his Mother, as all Jews inherit the blessings Israel received from his father Isaac, through their mothers, from Sarah on down.
Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary is truly our Mother, literally, because Our Lord is Incarnate through her and via the Holy Eucharist, we take on His Nature. We're "new creations in Christ" as St. Paul says so often, and in so many ways. In other words, all Christians who are "Orthodox" and participate in the Holy Eucharist are adopted into Israel, and all thus receive the Covenant blessing and salvation inherent in that. It's the same program it has always been, in other words.
Now, traditionally, Catholicism has taught that the fourth Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant (fourth from Adam and Eve, fifth from the Seventh Day Covenant with Creation), was cancelled, or abrogated, or made defunct, and that it was replaced by the New Covenant. That would change the number of the Seven Covenants, of course, and also it is not necessary, because each Covenant is transformed by the Covenant made after it. Expanded, uplifted, transfigured. We understand Noah's Covenant in a new light via the Abrahamic Covenant, and we see the Mosaic Covenant transformed and heightened by the Davidic Covenant (that the Kingship of Israel would never pass from David's House). Just as Our Lord was Transfigured on the Mount, and for the first time, Peter, James, and John -- who thought they knew him -- beheld Him as He is, so the Mosaic Covenant was transfigured from eating a lamb without blemish or broken bones into the Lamb of God Himself.
Now, as these transformations and uplifts in Covenants occur, one does have to keep up. Think of all of Noah's descendants who weren't descended from Abraham through Sarah. Or think of all those Israelites who rejected the Davidic kings and started their own "Kingdom of Israel" in Samaria and Galilee -- the famous "Lost Tribes of Israel". All cut off from the Covenants after inheriting them directly. Similarly, those Jews who didn't come to believe in Jesus of Nazareth cut themselves off from the fulfilled Covenants. I personally think "God will sort it" in His own way, because so many Jews have been faithful to Him (as they understood it) throughout the millennia, and I think so because God is always faithful -- always -- and because the Lord God is the Reader of Hearts. He is Judge, too, the Absolute Judge, an essential part of His Divine Kingship. But the true and certain road of Salvation comes through the Church He set up, which is the New Israel, the Synagogue of God.
N.B. When looked at this way, one can immediately see the cause for conflict between Jews and Christians. Jews resented the idea that non-Jews could suddenly be incorporated into the Jewish people, while not "going all the way" with Temple Worship and Kosher laws, and so on -- not to mention all these non-Jews being, well, not descended from Abraham! Christians resented the Jews saying, "Whoa! You're not part of the ancient Covenant!" So the fight began. In contrast to the Churches of the Real Presence, Protestantism, is the "Churches of the Real Absence" (i.e., all Protestant Churches deny -- in their founding documents -- the ancient Real Presence teaching), have a very different understanding of how Salvation works, and 500 years of that have driven this teaching I've just outlined out of the popular imagination, knowledge, etc,.
An Préachán
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Pope opens synod with Wiccan staff, called a 'stang' – what else does he need to do? Don a red suit and carry a trident pitchfork?
I
mean, John Paul II kissed the Koran. Smooched the quackeries of the
Moon god. So now El Caudillo Bergoglio does the Pole one better.
Apparently this stang was given to Tío Jorge on August 11 by a group of young Italians. In the Circus Maximus, yet.
Talk about signs and portents!
On October 3, Pope Francis
opened the Synod of Bishops on the topic of "youth, faith and vocational
discernment" in Saint Peters Square in Vatican City, and instead of
holding a traditional papal ferula he was clutching what looked a lot like a
Wiccan "stang." Conservative Catholics were appalled and viewed the pope's choice of staff as evidence that
something diabolical is going on at the Vatican. Others thought it was no big
deal.
"In its simplest form,
a forked staff, Witches use the Stang in various ways including representing
the Horned One, aiding in spirit flight, and directing energy," a pagan
blogger wrote at Patheos.
Witches claim that they can draw spirits up from the
underworld through their stangs.
And you-all know just what sort of "spirits" those guys are.
An Préachán
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