Sin and Survival

In reading a short article on the web about bears rubbing against trees (it’s marking by both males and females and not scratching a different itch), I saw a comment about females marking partly to protect their young: a male bear will sometimes kill a female’s young to bring a mother back into heat and mate with her.

Behavior of that sort is truly ‘sometimes’ even for bears which are typically one of the less social of social mammals — especially the males and most especially the big males who need lots of food and wander over large territories. Still, I’ve read articles by wildlife biologists who have observed males socializing with cubs while the mother looks on without objecting.

Yet, brutal behavior remains a factor, behavior that I would call immoral even for non-human social mammals. This leads towards a very difficult problem, one not handled well by any view of evolution that I’m aware of:

Some of our less desirable instincts and tendencies were necessary for the survival and reproductive success of our ancestors. A male who left more young left more young even if he did it by occasionally killing the young of another male.

This is a real problem for mainstream Christian interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve and, in general, for mainstream Christian understandings of human nature. Put a bit simplistically:

If our ancestors had been sinless, they wouldn’t have survived, or at least wouldn’t have left as many descendants as their nastier neighbors.

Most modern Christians claim to accept some version of evolutionary theory and accept that we share common ancestor with the chimpanzee, a creature capable of as much nastiness as a man. Presumably, that ancestor was as nasty as his two major descendants. At what point in the evolution of humanity would we expect a ‘sinless’ Adam and Eve to have arisen? From nasty animal to sinless ancestors of all men to fallen man? Not plausible.

A real problem for those who think our ancestors were some sort of sinless Platonic archetypes who fell into a state of sin by their own (culpable) fault. In fact, the evidence is growing that we were born into a world, a phase of Creation, which is a battleground between order and disorder. We are creatures born as true citizens of this world.

Is this viewpoint in conflict with the story of Adam and Eve, with the Bible as a whole? As most Christians understand that story and that book, yes. However, my reading of the story of Adam and Eve would lead me to believe it wasn’t a story of a fall into a state of sin but rather a story of an awakening of man into an awareness of his state. Try reading those chapters in the book of Genesis and the following chapters giving the ‘genealogy’ of human technology — the founding of cities and crafts and so forth. Read those verses and keep your mind open. Do you really find anything supporting those many sermons and homilies and books of theology about the fall of Adam and Eve? Or was it a moral awakening which occurred in conjunction with a sudden awareness of at least divinity if not of the true God?

What We Can All Learn from Mennonite Political Teachings

I’ve learned what I know of Mennonite beliefs from the books of John Howard Yoder, specifically The Christian Witness to the State, The Politics of Jesus, and When War is Unjust. The last book is actually his effort to explicate Catholic just-war theory in as rational a form as possible and I’ll deal with that in another entry.

For now, I wish to emphasize a criticism that Professor Yoder first directed at some of his fellow Mennonites: their political views have been corrupted (my term) by a flavor of modern liberalism and don’t correspond with the views traditionally taught by Mennonites. Those traditional Mennonite views are very similar to those taught by Quakers in the early generations of that faith though modern-day Quakers seem to me to be also corrupted by that same flavor of modern liberalism. The traditional Mennonite view, at least according to Yoder’s analysis starts with this truth which any Christian should believe:

A Christian’s primary public duty is to witness to the Lord Jesus Christ and to His Good News and this is tied to his moral duty to follow Christ’s teaching in his own behaviors, private and public.

As stated, I think most Christians would hesitate to deny this view. Unfortunately, this is where the hard work of begins and many avoid the work of determining what it is they’ve been taught in their tradition, whether it’s correct, and what it means for them personally. American Catholics and Protestants tend, in my opinion, to work to secure safety and comfort and social respectability before devoting some energies to hopeless efforts to reconcile anti-Christian behaviors with subjective Christian beliefs. Professor Yoder wouldn’t be likely to use the term ‘public duty’, choosing instead to get right to the core of public duty: political duty. Thus it is that he points out correctly and clearly that a Christian is a witness to the state. But, as he understands it, this is an overly simple view. As a convert to the Catholic Church, I would suggest that we first need to learn how to witness to our family-members and neighbors, our fellow-parishioners and even our clergymen. He may have missed this need just because he grew up in a community bound by both faith and family-ties whereas most Catholic and Protestant Americans have been willing to leave behind faith and family to the extent necessary to prosper in the modern fascist economy and polity. I confess I have failed to properly witness even those I love without confusing or antagonizing some of them. Sometimes I simply have not the courage to stand before the tide. Then again, we have to choose our battles and pray the Holy Spirit will let us know when the time has come.

Easter Vigil: March 22, 2008

[As is my custom, I use the RSV rather than the translation used in the missal used for the Roman Catholic Mass in the U.S.]

The Easter Vigil Mass is celebrated after sunset on Saturday of Holy Week. It begins with a lighting of a fire which is used in turn to light the Easter candle. The Easter candle is carried to the altar at the front of the church in a solemn procession during which the Exsultet is sung, beginning with the verse:

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God’s throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

After the Easter candle is set in a place of honor, the mass moves on to the Liturgy of the Word, the reading and hearing of appropriate chapters or verses from Sacred Scripture. There are seven Old Testament readings followed by a reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and then Matthew’s account of the Resurrection.

The first Old Testament reading, [Genesis 1:1-2:2], is the account considered by some to be a description of God’s Creation of this world. There’s a reason why this reading is important on this night. The Lord of Creation has been resurrected. If we don’t know what Creation is, we can’t know what that means. If we don’t know what Creation is, we certainly won’t be able to have a rational idea of Heaven. And, in this modern world, where we know the empty reaches of space from documentaries and sci-fi movies, we don’t know where we might find Heaven, the world where Christ waits for those who belong to Him.

Let’s see if a meditative journey can help us to find the world of the resurrected as our Christian ancestors once found it in the heavens that we now know as outer space. Then we’ll have rational terms for discussions and descriptions of Heaven as those earlier Christians did.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. [Genesis 1:1-2]

Stanley Jaki, a Benedictine priest and scholar with wide-ranging knowledge and credentials, has shown in Genesis 1 Through the Ages [Thomas More Press, 1992] that the word translated as ‘created’ in the above verses actually means ‘cleave’ in the sense of separate. For most purposes, we can mentally translate the word ‘create’ in the book of Genesis as ‘shape’ or maybe ‘organize’.

We Christians believe God did create from nothing all that is not Him, but we can’t see or describe that event, even in our imaginations. Science tells us the same though some individual scientists would like to find an equation to describe a creation event — logically impossible since mathematics doesn’t describe existence as such. The so-called Big Bang is not a creation event but rather a transition from some prior state of being.

God shaped this world out of some very strange stuff which He had created as the basic stuff of all Creation. That basic stuff lies on the other side of the Big Bang, though maybe far on the other side. Many other phases might lie in between the rawest levels of Creation and our universe. If God shaped this world out of that stuff, we can have faith that He can shape Heaven — the world of the resurrected out of that same stuff.

In the beginning, God shaped this world from the basic stuff of Creation. God had created the basic stuff of Creation from nothing. God has also shaped a world in which Christ and those who belong to Christ will live with Him for time without end. We know this world of the resurrected exists because the risen Christ has visited this mortal world and given marvelous signs of His perfected body, a body St. Paul called a ‘spiritual body’ in 1 Corinthians 15, a wonderful discussion of these issues. Those who belong with Christ, those who will live with Him for time without end, will have spiritual bodies, much like that of the resurrected Christ. It’s perhaps even more fitting to say that our resurrected bodies will be us in the most complete sense.

Christ is the Lord of Creation. So long as we have faith in Christ and in His God, we can be confident that Christ’s promises will be kept. But we need a vision of the world in which those promises will be kept, else those promises will become no more than feel-good illusions to us and our children. We can gain such a vision if we have the courage and faith to mediate upon Holy Scripture in light of what we modern human beings know about this universe, this phase of Creation.

Monday of Holy Week: March 17, 2008

In the Gospel reading for daily Mass [John 12:1-11], we hear of the anointing of the feet of Jesus by Mary the sister of Lazarus whom Jesus had raised from the dead. And then we hear:

When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he [Jesus] was there, they came, not only on account of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. [John 12:9]

Some may have personally seen the miracle itself, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and others may have missed it, but the great crowd came to see the result of that spectacular miracle.

And many would travel the relatively short distance to Jerusalem to welcome Christ riding on a donkey, throwing palms in front of Him and acclaiming Him as the Son of David, the Messiah.

And few indeed would remain with the Lord Jesus Christ on His journey to the Place of the Skull where He was nailed to a cross. We might wonder if there is a a relationship between this abandonment and the fascination with spectacular miracles.

When we seek spectacles, we’re trying to look at God and His actions as if we somehow existed apart from Him. We should instead be seeking a true union with God through Christ so that we move with God in His Creation rather than trying to find Him as if He were a beautiful sunset to stare at. We should be wishing to think with God and not to think about God, to pray with Christ and not to pray to Christ, to speak with God in all our words and not to speak sometimes to our neighbor and sometimes to God. Those who achieve such a union with God will be going about the work that God has set for them. They will be living in God and He in them. They won’t need to go see Lazarus being raised from the grave or to see the risen Lazarus walking about.

Was Jesus Insulting Us?

Now they had forgotten to bring bread; and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And [Jesus] cautioned them, saying, “Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” And they discussed it with one another, saying, “We have no bread.” And being aware of it, Jesus said to them, “Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand…” [Mark 8:14-19]

To the modern mind, it makes little sense to tie together hardness of heart (the spirit, so to speak) with perceptual and intellectual incompetence, perhaps willful intellectual incompetence. Certainly, Jesus wasn’t making an attack upon those with congenital problems in these areas, those born blind or those born with severe mental disabilities.

The Lord was ever striving to raise His disciples to a higher level of life, of awareness, so that they could perceive the world and their Lord more clearly and think more clearly about what God has done in Creation. But they always sank down to a more passive state than Jesus wished for them, a more passive state than will be possible in the world of the resurrected. We’re just like those disciples.

The disciples were dense because they were not paying proper attention. We’re no different than they were. We would just as soon be entertained and not be bothered by most aspects of reality unless our safety or comfort is threatened. Even when we’re under threat, we’d as soon delay our response until it’s truly forced from us.

After all, life can be tough and it was more so for our ancestors. Even during ages of prosperity, healthy men and women would be worn down by the physical labor and the occasional shortages of food and the medical and dental problems. Like most living creatures on earth, human beings have learned to relax whenever life allows. We’ve gained enough control of our lives, through machinery and social organization, that we have gained the power to dull ourselves with a constant flow of pleasures supplied by others, to sit and wait for something entertaining to happen before we pay attention.

Don’t be frantic and always busy. Relax and enjoy yourself in the proper measure, but be alert and be always pondering in your heart what God is doing in His world, maybe right in front of you.

Do You Believe in St. John the Baptist?

Under the modern circumstances, it’s not so hard to believe in Christ. And many who don’t practice Christianity probably do. After all, He took all our sins upon His shoulders and opened the gates of Heaven to all. Well, maybe you can’t go in if you’re a serial rapist or Hitler, but He’s a generous Savior indeed opening those pearly gates to nearly all.

John the Baptist is a bit rougher character. He was so impolite as to denounce some of his fellow human beings as “vipers.” He seems to have often spoken harsh words even when preaching salvation from a loving God. He was not a respectable sort for a society of genial and gentled men. A more honest reading of the Bible might give us hints that Jesus wasn’t so gentle as we imagine, but certainly the Lord wasn’t so brutal in His behavior as was John the Baptist.

We haven’t learned how to view John the Baptist through rose-colored glasses as readily as we view our tender, modernized Christ and thus I ask:

Do you believe in St. John the Baptist? Do you believe that God can fire up a man and call him to a life of hardship and prophecy for which he’ll be despised? Do you believe that God has a right to do something like that to a human being, even to you?

Do you believe that the Almighty has a right to demand that you accept a terrible death in the jaws of lions or in the flames of bonfires rather than renounce your belief in God? If you don’t, it would be very hard to believe in John the Baptist, that is, to believe he was truly called by God.

If you truly believed in John the Baptist, you would be forced to suspect that maybe the gentle Christ and His kindly Father might really be willing to demand much of us and to damn us if we didn’t deliver.

If John the Baptist were to return, would you listen to him or would you start looking for Herod to return so he could behead this annoying S.O.B. once again?

Priests, Ministers, Monkeys, and Truth

If I were to speak of my main goal in my work at this website and my other website, Acts of Being, I would say this:

I’m trying to build a vocabulary and stock of concepts that would allow Christians to speak truthfully to the greatest extent allowed by our current stock of knowledge (early in the 21st century).

Recently, I heard a homily by a new priest. While wishing to remain respectful of a man with some very good qualities, I have to say I was horrified at the way he dealt with a situation. He was speaking of a young girl who came to him and announced sadly, “Somebody told me we’re descended from monkeys and that means we’re no good,” or words to that effect. His response, as far as I understood his incoherence at that point, was to tell her she wasn’t descended from monkeys.

I could have been listening to a fundamentalist preacher who’d stepped out of the pages of a Flannery O’Connor novel. That’s not all bad. One of the points she was making in her novels was: those fundamentalist preachers had remembered some truths (such as the all-encompassing demands of faith) which had been forgotten by more liberal clergymen as well as by the skeptics of our age. Admitting that, I’d say that a Catholic priest should be educated well enough to realize that we are descended from monkeys (and also to know that St. Augustine admitted the possibility of a descent from some non-human species back in The City of God, 1400 years before the birth of Darwin). It’s the duty of a faithful clergyman, Protestant or Catholic, to deal truthfully and openly with the world as God made it and to be able to understand that world and the Biblical messages as part of the same story.

Mind and Not Spirit

In a recent entry on this blog, Thoughts and Actions in Human Morality, I spoke about my decision to write serious books, self-deluded into the belief that agents and editors and publishers were looking for challenging novels. This decision has led to many years of low-income or no-income at all. I’m probably committed to my current path given my age and the economic situation in the United States, but the issue isn’t settled in my imagination. I had this to say about my efforts to resolve myself to my decision:

In my heart of hearts — my spirit, I’m unconvinced of the truth of my own teachings in this matter, but my mind is convinced and my body moves forward by habits formed in deliberate disregard of the immediate consequences. My softer parts, overly self-conscious and overly aware of my self, are being dragged along.

As I was writing this, I remembered a description I’d read of the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas (and I believe his friend St. Bonaventure) to restore respect for the mind in Christianity. As I recall, some of the radicals of that period (circa 1230) were claiming a Christian preacher didn’t need a well-formed mind; he needed only to be filled with the spirit.

What is this spirit? Enthusiastic it is, so far as I can judge. Conscious of itself for sure and perhaps conscious of God but likely conscious only of some humanly sensed divinity rather than the God who revealed Himself to His prophets and priests and kings. This spirit also pays little attention to human literature or to bodies of scientific learning.

Christianity, more than any other religion, is founded upon reason because the world is being continually shaped to the purposes of the same God who had created the world’s underlying stuff from nothing. The Almighty is telling a story which makes sense both in terms of physical events and moral purpose. Our duty, as the people of God, is to shape our minds to that story God is telling. We must try to understand not only the narrative but also the underlying stuff of our bodies and our food and the sun which warms us.

Wrestling with God

I’ve not been well over the past couple months or so, not well in spiritual and emotional terms though I also wore myself out physically by taking on too many hours of volunteer work and that at a time when I had been productive in studying and writing and starting to get back to larger-scale projects — writing books. And then I have had various computer problems over the past month which have impacted my calling to study and write. These are the reasons I haven’t been posting so frequently for the past few months, though I’d been trying to cut down on my shorter writings that I might return to working on some full-length book projects.

In the overall scheme of things, I didn’t suffer much at all though being keyed up for serious intellectual work is similar to being keyed up to swim or run at a high level of exertion. If someone is running 20 miles or more per week and has to stop because of a minor injury or schedule conflicts, he’s going to go through phases of agitation and depression. The situation was similar for me: I was keyed up for hours of study and writing each day. And, then, I found my days largely filled and I was too tired to do difficult mental work.

My suffering was trivial compared to the sufferings of someone dying of a painful disease or a parent who’s buried a child. It wasn’t even so intense as my sufferings during early stages of my conversion. But, this relatively shallow sort of suffering has distracted me from the lines of thought I’d been working on. I’m a bit scattered in my thoughts and somehow started to think about the strange tale of Jacob wrestling with God — see Genesis 32:22-32 of the RSV for a straight-faced account of a very strange tale.

Jacob wrestled with men and with God and was said to have beat them all, mortal men and the Almighty.

From Sin to Rights

In the state of nature, where man discovers himself as an individual, he discovers that he is something prior to being a citizen or a Christian, something more fundamental than either. Before his submission to either political or religious law, the individual is a whole, since he has in him the sufficient source of all his actions, de facto as well as de jure. Every man is a whole sufficient unto himself prior to the existence of the law. [The City of Man, Pierre Manent, Translated by Marc A. LePain, Forward by Jean Bethke Elshtain, Princeton University Press, 1998, page 34]

In the context of that quote, Manent was expressing the ideas of modern political philosophers and most certainly not his own ideas. More specifically, Manent is speaking of the “state of nature” as defined by modern political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and also assumed by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence.

How is it that we got into this situation where the descendants of Christian peoples, Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant, came to believe that they’re individuals of this sort, pre-existing their relationship to a greater human community, political or religious, pre-existing even their relationship to God? How can we believe ourselves to be free-standing in this way, even autonomous agents, when we are taught by the Bible and by Christian tradition that our salvation comes when we are one (in Christ) as Christ and His Father (and Their Spirit) are one? [See John 17:11.] How is it that our efforts to guide and direct our own conversions and those of other human beings seem to accord too well to this assumption that there we’re individuals who choose to center our lives on God, or not, in the same way that we choose a toothpaste?

God Himself is communal. He is not a solitary God, not even the solitary God of Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian who spoke of a solitary God who needed man to have a conversation partner. Father and Son and Holy Spirit have plenty to say to each other and don’t need us. Why did God create and then shape this world? Why did God create man? While we’re told that He loved us before we were even conceived, I think we need to be a bit more humble and not assume that God created us primarily for our own sakes and then to speak as if the Almighty watched helplessly as Adam and Eve fell from grace forcing Him to send His Son to suffer for us. We’re characters in a story being told by God, a story in which the main event is the self-sacrifice of the Son, a self-sacrifice which act of love and submission to His Father. When we consider the absolute centrality of God and of the relationships between Father and Son and Holy Spirit, it would seem we’re driven to the conclusion that we’re the accidental beneficiaries of a drama of love played out primarily between God the Father and God the Son. Moreover, we have to recognize that the all-powerful God is telling the story He planned to tell and not a story which has been changed by acts of Adam and Eve. We have to learn how to read the Bible in light of our basic beliefs about the all-powerful God.

Because of our tendency to read the Bible in strange ways which are in conflict with those basic beliefs about God, because of our decreasing levels of reading and thinking skills as the West continues its 500 year decay, modern Christians have no coherent view of even our physical universe let alone a greater view of Creation in all its phases and in its basic foundational elements. (See From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun for a frighteningly plausible history of the decay of the West in terms of that decay in literacy and see my other blog Acts of Being for discussions of my efforts to produce a coherent Christian view of Creation.)