Points of Authority

For Christians:

1. For all Christians, it is God in Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as the ultimate author of life, which demands higher obedience than any other authority by God's very nature.
2. It is right and just that human beings should have an authority to which they answer, beginning with the above; intuitively, humility demands at least the potential recognition of an authority higher than oneself.

For Catholics:

3. The law of the Church is made for the betterment and salvific benefit of mankind.
4. Re: 3, The specific laws of the Church are to be made for man and the benefit of mankind.
5. The laws of the Church should be made simple when possible and soundly reasoned in accordance with Revelation, so as not to unduly burden the clergy or laity. (A good deal of Scriptural intuition lies behind this, I think.)
6. The Canon Law consitutes a higher authority (where there be conflict) than the laws of man; thus for instance, to make an obvious example, if some country's law mandated that non-Christians receive consecrated hosts, the Catholic priests there would be obligated to disobey said law. (This is a good example for all Christians, not merely Catholics, because the majority of Christians would agree it is ambiguous at best to distribute communion, however symbolically conceived, to non-Christians.)
7. If one is committed to the Catholic Church it is fruitful and good, not merely obligatory, to follow the Church's law even if it does not appear to that one's understanding to live up to the standard of simplicity outlined in (5).
8. It is acceptable to turn away from early authorities in the service of the Kingdom of Heaven; e.g. to refuse to follow an unjust law which conflicts with one's Christian calling in direct command or in indirect obedience, for instance to natural law or some portion of Canon Law, even if followed in accordance with (7).
9. One unjust law does not render all the laws, rules and regulations set down by an earthly authority null and void.
10. There may be some earthly authorities which are rendered null and void by sufficient amounts of oppression and unjust legislation.
11. We should, in accordance with (1) and (2), take care that when we seek to be free of earthly authorities we do it in accordance with humility and truth, not because we seek more power or control for ourselves.

I'm honestly going a bit off the cuff here, kind of throwing some ideas out and seeing what sticks. I don't think much is controversial here, at least not to Christians, but some thoughts:

I think perhaps (1) and (2) should be switched in keeping with the sort of evolutionary (though not logically argued) nature of this sequence of points. I'm not sure how the fruitful part of (7) happens. I'm curious about (8) and what exactly would meet the conditions of (9). This list is probably off in at least one or two places and by no means Catechetical (the day someone starts reading this blog as a catechism is the day the Church has run out of good ideas.) I imagine for Christians in non-Catholic traditions that some parallel thoughts could be drawn to denominational laws, though I'm not sure the laws themselves would carry the same weight theologically.

And yes, that title was a Linkin Park reference.

Sacred Laws in a Secular World

While I'm on a roll tonight, I figured I would bring up another sore point that has been on my mind recently. I think that most Christians have this view of law and society that doesn't really work. A very notable case to me is the idea of pornography being legal.
This was brought up to me by a friend--he said that he was in church, and the pastor said he wished that pornography was illegal. My friend does not use pornography, but he told me that he is glad pornography is not illegal because it reflects the citizens having rights to free speech.
Where does a Christian realistically draw the line between trying to make laws that fit their desired moral structure and trying to make laws that really represent the opinion and the desires of the populace? It's easy to argue that fornication is not the best idea ever. However, is it right to stop members of society from fornicating if they don't prescribe to the same world view as I do?
Let's move into two larger issues here. Abortion is a huge topic today. Most Christians I know would agree with me: I hate it. It diminishes the value of birth, the value of the human construction, the sacred protection of a baby within the womb, and a lot of other things. But as we know, not enough people in this country have a problem with it for us to make it illegal. I have a huge issue with abortion because it also involves murder, so that makes this particular topic a little bit more straightforward for me.
Here's the second larger issue: gay marriage. I don't think it's right, but I am also, for the sake of society, willing to accept the possibility of it becoming legal. I have a couple of gay friends, and I love them--but I would never wish that they would get married. I feel that strongly about it. However, if I were in the position to pass law regarding it, I would probably end up making it legal because that is what represents the desires of the populace best.
It seems like as Christians, we have a couple of hard things to remember when it comes to our country. First off, it's not my country, nor is it your country, nor is it the gay couple's country, nor is it anyone else's country. It is, collectively, OUR country. That means that our own impressions of morality and ethics (which, through the Word, are often correct) cannot be forced upon members of society just because we think it's better for them. That sort of law only creates division, hatred, and more lawbreakers.
In addition, it means that if we want to actually do something about the country we share, we can't simply go around trying to get laws passed. It's worthless. You have to change the minds of the people using love and truth, hand-in-hand. It's a lot less simple, but it's the only way I could see going about it.

Christian Ethics vs. Marijuana

This post is prompted by some recent experiences I've had around marijuana. I whole-heartedly believe that the body is the temple of God and that it needs to be taken care of and respected. I also believe whole-heartedly in the enjoyment of alcohol. And on a third note, I believe whole-heartedly in the call to be sober. So, then, we know how alcohol falls into this place: don't have too much, but enjoy yourself. Too much is throwing up, losing your train of thought, headaches, all that jazz. Where does weed fall into this category?
I have heard some people argue that "there is no way to smoke weed and stay in moderation," but I have found that statement to be entirely untrue. So it is possible to stay within that parameter. In addition, it is possible to ingest the plant without any health risks associated (except maybe for the high-fructose corn syrup that the brownies are made of). So we are able to stay within the parameter of keeping your body healthy. Why is this such a hot topic?
I am not writing this post to provide a solution, but only to bring up the question. I think that for myself, abstention from marijuana makes sense because there are commands in the Word to obey your civil authorities. But what if I'm in Amsterdam? I have a feeling that if I were to go and peruse weed in Amsterdam, Christian friends would not be happy--even though it isn't illegal, isn't necessarily unhealthy depending on how you do it, and I wasn't necessarily high out of my mind. So what gives? Why is this different than alcohol? Thoughts are appreciated.

I Could Never be a Catholic Bishop

Ever wanted to be able to sit around calling yourself a member of the church--like, hypothetically, the Roman Catholic Church--in a way that increases your credit as a member of that church? But to do it while saying a bunch of things that immediately mark you out as someone who is--hypothetically, let's say you're a pro-abortion-rights Catholic--well, to say the least, not in line with said church, or its reason? Hello, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

I'm going to focus on a few gems:

"As Catholics, are we so laser focused on the issue of abortion that we are willing to join tea partiers and the like to bring down the health care form bill? And at the enormous expense of millions of Americans who suffer every day because they can't afford to get checkups, because they must choose bankruptcy in order to save the life of their loved one?" [in the next paragraph, she responds, "Not this Catholic."

In my forays into Catholic ethics, conversational and more formal, there's one thing I've learned about Townsend's church that she (and most of her family) seems bent on forgetting: You don't do evil so that good may result. In fact, the only time you even have a case for doing anything even resembling evil, is when the alternative is evil; you certainly can't justify doing or promoting an equal or greater evil that way. Townsend also claims:

"[I am] someone who was raised by a family absolutely committed to public service and to making sure that our nation provides health care to the least among us...[w]here is [the bishops'] passion for the families who need health care?" (Italics mine.) 

Ding ding ding! Guess what? The right to live and have health care and everything else is founded on the right to survive. And the bishops haven't compromised it one bit in my book; in fact, they seem to be one of the few groups in America that truly respects the implication that "Life implies Survival." For those of you playing at home, that means "~Survival implies ~Life." The weakest in this case doesn't mean people who are already alive. The Bishops also said, a few years back, that the moral measure of any society is how the weakest are faring. Who are the weakest? I'd suppose it might start with people who aren't capable of defending themselves.

Townsend's claim is made, we are told, on the basis of stuff like what the bill already provides for, and what the Nelson amendment would do.She knows normal people can't verify that evidence without learning a lot of legalese, and even if they could, knowing our lawmakers, the bill might change tomorrow to make their learning moot. She says "[t]he current Senate health care bill expressly prohibits federal funding of abortion", and says that if the Nelson amendment passed, "[e]ven if a woman used her own money to pay the premium for her health care plan in the exchange, she would not be able to access a plan that covered abortion care"). On that last point, apparently, health experts agree with her, but I'm still skeptical, because that caveat "in the exchange" seems to indicate that the plan might still be subsidizing the big A.

No doubt the prevalence of abortion in our country is tied with social sin; issues of morality are hardly ever without a social aspect. But doing evil that good may result is not good.

And as to the title of this post. I could never be an RCC bishop in America, because then I'd have to deal with idiots criticizing my every move, most of them on grounds that don't properly understand the traditions to which they so proudly claim to belong. If you think this post sounds like it was written by a grouchy person, imagine if he was trying to lead a flock that consistently follows the Kennedy mentality of "dissent first, understand later," calling him out repeatedly as being less Catholic (and, by intended implication less Christian) than they. I'm way too authoritarian in nature to be a bishop of anything, especially in the American RCC. I'd have a heart attack on day two of that job.

Divorce and Remarriage: Questions about Cultures

This is the second half of the responses to the questions Matthew posted in response to the post about divorce and remarriage. The first half focused more on questions about the Scriptures, morality/authority, and culture in general.

What in the life and words of Jesus my resound with modern understandings of the marriage/partnership model we live with and in today? What was the concept of divorce/marriage/remarriage Jesus was speaking about at the time? What's the same? What's different?

Life/words of Jesus: Not too much, that I can see, except the basic idea that marriage is something two people enter into for some reason or another that, ideally at least, lasts a lifetime.

How does our culture define marriage? I'm going to bastardize an analogy from a family member.

Once a family member tried to get me to think about movies that I watched by asking me if I would eat a brownie that was promised to be ultra-sweet, with the caveat that the brownie contained (presumably cooked) a small portion of dog's-crap. Our culture's definition of marriage is a dog's-crap brownie. We put in all this crap about finding our fulfillment in another human being in a contractual fashion, according to the Holy Gospel of the Heart, without much solid reference to the more Christian notion of marriage in which two persons give themselves (or are at any rate, given) fully to one another, spirit, mind and body for the purposes of unity and procreation (or at the least, let us say in deference to certain conservative Protestant views, unity and assistance in continuation of the species.) This in turn allows us to break off marriages when we no longer find 'fulfillment' in them. The culture packages all of this in the outward chocolatey goodness of personal happiness and emotional joy, when on the inside the view is, primarily, fully dog's crap.

I honestly don't think that the definitions of marriage we've been offered are fully compatible with the biblical and historically Christian ideas about what marriage should be. Forget whether it's a contract for economic purposes. There's plenty of room for the notion of marriage being an indissoluble bond even when the two partners are entering willingly into it. There's plenty of room for talking about the obligation of marriages to contribute somehow to the continuation of the species, directly or indirectly (as by adoption.) Culture's redefinition of something doesn't change what that thing, at its core, ought to be. And if as Christians we are convinced (and I am, though I'm not going to make a snap judgment that you must be) that culture is off the mark of Christian morality, it is not that we must redefine how our ethic applies to the culture. It is that we must work to correct the misinterpretation of the concept in our culture. And I think this is precisely what must be done in marriage. We must not make concessions to our culture's dog's-crap-brownie conception of marriage.

However, the questions of spousal abuse and addiction are certainly more substantial ones that weren't so much discussed in Jesus' time, and since those things are clearly not compatible with Christian moral codes I think it's worth considering whether they ought to have entered into the discussions about divorce and remarriage. But it seems like the only explicit exceptions given have really been for when one is divorced by a pagan, or when one divorces an adulterer. It doesn't seem like anything else really invalidates the marriage. Of course numerous churches have talked about what can be grounds for separation, and I think this is definitely a good step to take (I know for instance that in the Catholic Church, in cases where one spouse abuses the other, or abuses the children, that even if divorce proper is not treated as a solution, separation is, and I believe I read in the Catechism somewhere that even civil divorce is permissible if there's no other way to accomplish this separation in such circumstances. But I'm not sure I'm quite there on a case for divorce and remarriage in cases of abuse, harsh as it may seem. Many people throughout church history, including not a few Church Fathers, have been much more muddled on divorce, remarriage and the abuse issue than I'm presenting myself as here, which is part of the reason that I should assure you I'm still a good deal confused on the issue. If only God had so graced Christendom as to provide universal interpretations of Scripture in the church historical!

Just a lot of questions. Not a lot of questions. I think our methodologies may just be a bit different.

I think they are too, but maybe not as different as we thought initially.

Scripture, Morality, and Definition

This is a partial response to my friend Matthew on some questions he posted on the post on divorce and remarriage. The questions ran the gamut and the second half of them focus more on cultural context of then vs. now, so I split the responses into two posts.

Does all the reality of morality have to be defined in terms of scripture?

I believe that the Christian worldview is, ultimately, that the 'biblical vision' (to steal, and probably misuse, a phrase from Dr. Dempsey) for morality is the one that must be kept in mind when we are constructing our ethical systems. So, things like the general structure of the Christian ethic as a code that includes many 'do not' and 'do' statements, which is (when love is perfected) properly absorbed in Love of God and Love of neighbor, need to be kept in mind when constructing ethical systems as Christians. In that sense I would say yes. But does this mean we have to be able to point to a Scripture passage for everything we expressly permit or forbid? Of course not; there are too many things in this modern culture that aren't even mentioned in the Scripture, a good many of which ought to be encouraged, and not a few of which ought to be expressly forbidden.

It seems to me that the concepts in discussion are working from a time and place with a simpler understanding of the world. I don't know of Church slash churches responses to this dilemma.

I don't really think it's a dilemma. I think it's an issue of determining what was said in context of that culture, and determining how the message translates for us today.

All I can say is that some things weren't in discussion at the time.

Right.

peripheral question: What flows out from your understanding of Jesus and his teachings that might illuminate an answer unspecified had the question been proposed?

My basic supposition here is that the Early Church's memory of Jesus, most solidified in the Gospels, is not on any point going to seriously misrepresent him. This means it won't misrepresent his life (e.g., it won't say He performed miracles if he didn't) or what He said (e.g. it won't seriously distort his moral teachings, even if certain Gospels emphasize different teachings or sayings for the sake of their audience.)

Are we talking at mixed purposes to the text? As can be seen from Paul's discussions of marriage and the "better not to marry" exposition, the concept of marriage in Classical Levant was quite different from our own. Perhaps, a modern interpretation of marriage transcends the business venture/procreation model established at the time of Christ. In which case the whole moral structure needs to be reevaluated from a new point of view. I'm not suggesting anything post-Biblical... Far from it!... I'm suggesting that Scripture may only be addressing explicitly the issues and concepts then-contemporary. Scripture does however provide many backbones for moral development by extension from the text.

I definitely agree that as definitions change from the culture the Scripture was written for to the culture we have today, we may have to re-evaluate how things apply. However, in my mind, this is dependent on whether the definitions we've been given for things in our current culture are even compatible with a historical and biblical Christian morality.

Difficulties on the Matter of Gay Marriage

It's a very difficult issue to decide upon. But ultimately what I had to do was go in and paint Christianity with the most Biblically liberalizing brush that I possibly could muster. And I really did. And I came up with two conclusions. One delighted me, insofar as it spoke to my sensibilities. The other was about as I expected, and unfortunately is unlikely to satisfy anyone on the other side of the fence from me.

There may be room, in a limited and highly chaste fashion, for gay/lesbian relationships. Certainly we cannot say that gays/lesbians should not befriend other gays and lesbians; this would be unreasonable. And I think even a friendship which carried some element of romance might be acceptable. It is to say the least not expressly forbidden in the Scriptures. But it would have to be highly chaste and without the near occasion to sin, because, well...Again, if we really want to be Biblically Christian, and we really want to give due credence to Tradition even in the historical sense...There is not room for homosexual sexual activity in the Christian Tradition. It is not there, and it is not there in a way which is mandated, and patently non-negotiable.

Does this sadden me? Yes. It does! It feels like homosexual relationships could very easily match every other part of even the most conservative Christian definitions of what love is, except that they be homosexual. Why then should consummation of these relationships be denied to them? Why should these people be deprived of being able to truly give themselves, mind, body, soul and spirit, to each other? The simplest, and hardest, and truest answer is that we honestly do not have a full answer. We submit because of God's truth as revealed in the Scriptures, in Tradition, in natural law. We don't necessarily submit because we like it.

Now of course it does comfort me—and it does comfort me—to know that if we take these things consistently, it's not as if the bedroom is suddenly a playground just for couples who are married and straight, but forbidden to couples who don't meet these qualifications. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth. In the most consistent Christian traditions there are restrictions on everyone—it seems quite obvious to these traditions that when St. Paul said “everything is permissible,” he didn't mean it for the marriage bed. I suspect that when Christianity falls away from this sterner reasoning—which puts restrictions on us straight people, too—when we fall away from this sterner and more consistent reasoning, we fall away not only into a greater permissiveness, but also onto a shakier foundation for what we say on sexuality. It is possible that the greater the dichotomy becomes between what we permit for married couples and what we deny to unmarried couples, the less our basis lies in Scripture and Tradition (take this to be Catholic, or simply the history of Christianity), and the more we begin to seek shakier and shakier motivations for what we are saying. It may be that conservative, sola-Scriptura Protestantism, if it gets too far from the natural law tradition on human sexuality, runs the risk of becoming truly bigoted against homosexuals rather than morally opposed to homosexuality itself. So maybe this is some of what we sense, when we protest—“but if two people love each other...?”

But ultimately that is not the point. That is not the logic being put forth, really, by the tradition. Ultimately we are asking the question of what the way is that things were meant to be in terms of sexuality. This is a question that has profound significance for all persons—celibate, married, gay, straight, male, female, etc. Scripture and Tradition do seem to hold the answer for those of us who call ourselves Christians. I'm not claiming we have to like it. I am claiming that if we claim Christianity, it is a part of what we are choosing to believe. We do not have to understand it. We do not have to like it. But our sexual ethic is a part of our Tradition, and we are not free to excise it any more than a human body is free to bite off its own right arm, one painful piece at a time.