I thought Pope Francis died?

 

Adam was made a living soul, kin to God and God's bright ray

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Then is the soul from God; so pagans say,

Which saw by nature's light but heavenly kind,

Naming her kin to God, and God's bright ray,

A citizen of Heav'n, to earth confin'd.

 

-- John Davies 

 

 

It is common to mark the beginning of the introspective conscience of the West in the life of Augustine of Hippo

... Augustine made the inner life legible in a way it had rarely been before. He showed that faith ... is a struggle ... The “Confessions” ... taught believers that the interior life matters — that what happens in the private conversation between a person and their conscience is not a footnote to the religious life but its very center. In some ways, this was more revolutionary than anything in scripture itself. ... Augustine made interiority a theological category. Western Christianity has not been the same since. ...

Discussed here.

And yet Augustine arguably is the product of an introspective Western wave which itself had been many centuries in the making.

One could say that the turn to the inner life in the West actually began under the prosaic circumstances of the collapse of the Athenian Empire in 404 BC. 

If Hellenic is the ideal which was lost and Hellenistic its Nachleben and personalization, there are centuries of preoccupation with the experiences of individuals under various aspects which follow after the collapse of classical Athens. These arguably add up to interiority as the rule of the subsequent West, not the exception.

The advent of disorder in the world ended up provoking a broad search for order in the soul, which ultimately worked to the greatest advantage for Christianity.

Notable evidences of this search would have to include, for example, Plutarch's biographical interest in the personal morality of his subjects, or Hellenistic philosophy's general retreat from concern with public life to the vicissitudes of the inner life, as seen in the developments of Epicureanism and Stoicism.

The latter in particular came to dominate elite conviction for centuries, from East to West in the Mediterranean, from Seneca's Letters in the mid-first century evincing his struggle of the will to Marcus Aurelius' self-critical Meditations a century later, a Stoic analogue to Augustine's Confessions later popular in the Greek East.  

The early great Christian authors are nothing if not children of this past, sometimes quite beyond their ken or control, which was surely not the case with Augustine, who was inspired from a young age by Cicero's love of wisdom. While completing his Confessions in 400 Augustine self-consciously borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus, in whom he found the idea of the immaterial soul liberating from the materialism of the Manichaeans.

Combining this abstraction with the allegorical interpretation of the Bible which he embraced from Ambrose of Milan, one could say Augustine was equipped with the spiritual tools necessary for not just his interior project, but for surviving a civilizational collapse which he saw coming in his own time.

The Gothic invasion of the Roman Empire had begun years before the Confessions, in 376, when Augustine was still a very young man of 22. But by 410 Rome had been sacked, in the wake of which he composed The City of God, in which he provided Christians with a rationalization of the catastrophe and an inner retreat from the horrible new reality, an invisible, spiritual city where God was still in control. 

Augustine is nothing if not a spokesman for the experience of everyman from every age, for the little lives of people who turn inward to protect who they are when all is falling down round about them, while some, and even now just like Strelnikov, simply choose to die on the inside before they must die on the outside:

Thomas Paine grasped that Christianity implied the suicide of God long before the God is Dead theologians of the 1960s came along

Somewhere in Texas, out of which nothing good comes

... A man is preached instead of a God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it. ...   So many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable ...

-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

Thomas Paine on the fanatical character of Paul

 

 The character of the person called Paul, according to the accounts given of him, has in it a great deal of violence and fanaticism; he had persecuted with as much heat as he preached afterwards; the stroke he had received had changed his thinking, without altering his constitution; and either as a Jew or a Christian he was the same zealot. Such men are never good moral evidences of any doctrine they preach. They are always in extremes, as well of action as of belief.

-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

Philosophers haunt rich men

I will give you wisdom.

 

  

Diogenes was asked, in a kind of scorn, What was the matter that philosophers haunted rich men, and not rich men philosophers? He answered, Because the one knew what they wanted, the other did not.

 

--  Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel

 True hope is swift, and flies with swallows wings;

Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 5 Scene 2 

New Testament scholar and Christian atheist Bart Ehrman amusingly boils down authentic Christianity to selling everything and giving it to the poor

This isn't amusing because it's wrong. 

The evidence for it is all over the place in the New Testament and early Christianity, and we talk a lot about the primacy of that evidence in this blog.

Some notable texts include Luke 14:33, Luke 12:33, and the narratives about the rich man inquiring how to have eternal life in Luke 18:18ff, Matthew 19:16ff., and Mark 10:17ff., over which so many interpreters in rich, Western civilization stumble generation after generation. 

It is amusing because Ehrman imagines that a good follower of Jesus today would sell everything and give it to the poor. He thinks of this as an ethical ideal when it was the primary example of Jesus' negation of ethics. Jesus' eschatological imperative to repent to escape imminent judgment meant abandoning all social conventions, at the heart of which is economic life.

The implications of Jesus' message for the economy of Judea were devastating, and his opponents grasped them better than any of his followers since. He was crucified because if everyone followed him tribute to Caesar would dry up (Luke 23:2) and the Jewish elites would lose their place of preferment (John 11:48). His death was beneficial for the maintenance of the status quo. Whether it was really necessary is another question, given the difficulty of following Jesus quite apart from what might have happened when his predictions failed to materialize. Hope in what he predicted ironically was kept alive by his speedy demise. 

Schweitzer long ago taught us that Jesus' eschatology theologically meant the negation of ethics. In keeping with this Jesus' imperatives take a negative form involving renunciation of the world and all its ways. The world is passing away, and threatens to take you with it.

Therefore Jesus' imperatives are not a description of the way to lead a Christian life, because there is no such thing as a Christian life. The end of the world is coming so quickly that there won't be time to lead such a life, not even time enough, for example, properly to bury one's dead, or properly bid farewell to one's family. Jesus' "ethics" are if anything negative ethics. They are instruction in how to lose one's life, the life of this world, not save it.

The imminent eschaton makes the very idea of the Christian life beside the point, same as it does the resurrection. We must remember, as Ehrman helpfully does in the podcast, that Acts 1 tells us that the resurrected Jesus hangs around with the now-styled apostles for forty days but all they can seem to think about is not the astounding wonder of this resurrected man in their midst, but whether he will "at this time restore the kingdom to Israel". The coming of the kingdom is what the historical Jesus had drilled into their heads, not the Pharisees' (and Paul's) doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

The eschatological theology of Jesus was proven wrong by history twice, once by Jesus' death and the failure of the kingdom to come, and a second time by the Jerusalem community when it mistakenly adopted the eschatological imperatives as a way of life, in particular when they had all things in common (Acts 2:44; 4:32).

Not long after the death of Jesus the Jerusalem community was plunged into such abject hunger and poverty by the famine of 44-48 AD that it had to compromise with Paul and accept his law free gospel to the Gentiles and ask him to remember their poor on his travels among them (Galatians 2:10), which inspired Paul's collection for the saints in Jerusalem (Romans 15:25f., 31). Much of earliest Christianity revolves around this collection as a remedy to the failure of so-called eschatological ethics.

You could say that the eschatology certainly failed also a third time in early Christianity, when its reinterpretation as the apocalyptic theology of the Parousia, the second coming, in Matthew 24 and in Paul, went unrealized before the death of the last of The Twelve (Mark 9:1). The kingdom did not come before they all died either, with power or otherwise, nor after the death of Paul.

All that eschatological energy then petered-out, so to speak, as the decades rolled on and Christianity reinvented itself on The Rock in compromise with the world, in compromise not so much because the Church wanted that but because reality is intractable.

 Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate. A ‘Christian Atheist’ joins Ross Douthat.

The podcast runs 1:24:23.

Do Catholics read Eusebius anymore?

 

Does God Hear the Prayers of Warmongers?

Marcus Peter, Catholic World Report

 

... The Lord of hosts is never a mascot for bloodlust. ...

 

Oh really? 

 

... Reviewing, I say, all these considerations, [Constantine] judged it to be folly indeed to join in the idle worship of those who were no gods, and, after such convincing evidence, to err from the truth; and therefore felt it incumbent on him to honor his father's God alone.

Accordingly he called on him with earnest prayer and supplications that he would reveal to him who he was, and stretch forth his right hand to help him in his present difficulties. And while he was thus praying with fervent entreaty, a most marvelous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person. But since the victorious emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history, when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation, especially since the testimony of after time has established its truth?

 

He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer By This [τούτῳ νίκα]. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle.

 

... then in his sleep the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the heavens, and commanded him to make a likeness of that sign which he had seen in the heavens, and to use it as a safeguard in all engagements with his enemies. ... 

And this representation I myself have had an opportunity of seeing.

Now it was made in the following manner. A long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it. On the top of the whole was fixed a wreath of gold and precious stones; and within this, the symbol of the Saviour's name, two letters indicating the name of Christ by means of its initial characters, the letter P being intersected by X in its centre: and these letters the emperor was in the habit of wearing on his helmet at a later period. ...

The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of all his armies. 

-- Eusebius, Life of Constantine, 1.27ff. 

J. D. Vance, poster boy for authenticity lol

 

A priest eschews AI confession for disembodying the Gospel, but misses how priests and sacraments started it all

 

The historical Jesus made forgiveness of sins a horizontal matter in a social relation of equals, and a predicate for divine forgiveness before the imminent end of the world foreclosed the opportunity.

The Christ of faith and early Catholicism turned forgiveness of sins into a vertical matter enclosed in a sacrament requiring elite intermediaries to administer it. 

But with a sacrament of confession to a priest the person actually wronged is simply bypassed and forgotten. Is there a better example of disembodying the Gospel? People who look for the origins of gnosticism and individualism should look here! 

The historical Jesus did not teach to confess one's sin to a priest, but to the person who was actually sinned against! Jesus' teaching everywhere stresses horizontal reconciliation without which there can be no vertical reconciliation.

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

 -- Matthew 5:23f. 

... And forgive us [ἄφες] our debts, as we forgive [ἀφίεμεν] our debtors. ... For if ye forgive [ἀφῆτε] men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you [ἀφήσει]: But if ye forgive [ἀφῆτε] not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive [ἀφήσει] your trespasses.

-- Matthew 6:12, 14f.

So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive [ἀφῆτε] not every one his brother their trespasses.

 -- Matthew 18:35

And when ye stand praying, forgive [ἀφίετε], if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive [ἀφῇ] you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive [ἀφίετε], neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive [ἀφησεὶ] your trespasses.

 -- Mark 11:25f.

Confess your faults one to another . . ..

 -- James 5:16 

Forgiveness [ἄφεσις] is the social imperative of eschatological time, of the fullness of time proclaimed by Jesus the eschatological prophet when the kingdom of God was "at hand".

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance [ἄφεσιν] to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty [ἐν ἀφέσει] them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

-- Luke 4:18f.  

This forgiveness is offered unconditionally, without the "ifs" and conditions for forgiveness of later tradition. And Jesus himself models that meaning of unconditional forgiveness even to the bitter end of his life.

Father forgive [ἄφες] them, for they know not what they do.

-- Luke 23:34

This is why the disciple compelled to walk one mile walks two (Matthew 5:41). This is why the disciple struck on the one cheek offers the other also (Matthew 5:39). This is why the disciple robbed of his coat gives up also his cloke (Matthew 5:40).   

But retaining sins, withholding of forgiveness, would have simply been anathema to the historical Jesus. That just represents the intrusion of business as usual, the mere continuation of profane time, whose time was up. 

  

A Disembodied Gospel

Jim Morin, The Lamp

 

... For Catholics, the ordinary way to receive forgiveness of sins is by individual sacramental confession to a priest. We believe that Christ instituted this sacrament when he said to his apostles, “whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” [John 20:23] But what is the reason which stands behind Christ’s decision to make forgiveness dependent on a direct interaction with a priest? One can give psychological motivations: confessing sins to another person promotes self-examination and sharpens awareness of sin; hearing spoken words of mercy gives experiential knowledge of forgiveness. One can also give ecclesiological reasons: reconciliation with God is simultaneously reconciliation with the Church, and besides, confessors are theologically trained to judge repentance, to resolve moral doubts, to answer spiritual questions, and so on. ...        

The irony of the essay is that this priest really does seem to grasp in his conclusion that "we need real human communion rooted in the love of the Incarnate Word". It just never occurs to him that he might be standing in the way of it, just like AI.

The Old Testament gives fanaticism God's own imprimatur

This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.

-- Joshua 1:8

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. 

-- Psalm 1:1f.  

How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!

 

 

The story about the rich man inquiring of Jesus how to have eternal life lives rent-free in the mind of today's man of West, who is the richest in the history of the world, and who turns himself into a pretzel to make the story say anything but what it actually says.

Just today: 

A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle

J.T. Young, RealClearReligion

 

... What Jesus was saying about the camel and the eye of the needle is not that riches prevent a person from entering heaven (as many who seek to twist the scriptures for secular purposes insist); it is that riches can prevent a person from seeking heaven. ... 

This is just laughable. 

In all three versions of this story from the gospels riches do not prevent the rich man from seeking at all.

In each version the rich man actively comes to Jesus to ask a question about eternal life. In Mark's the rich man actually runs to Jesus. Riches do not prevent him from seeking. 

But in all three versions of the story riches most certainly do prevent the man from following Jesus, who went away sorrowful because he was very rich and had great possessions. It's the whole point of the story. You cannot serve God and mammon.

Talk about scripture twisting.

The rich man has much to which to say goodbye in order to become a disciple. We find that very interesting. The poor man has little to which to say goodbye. But by now we just take it for granted that the Twelve also had to say goodbye and have lost sight of the fact that the cost of discipleship is the same for all, whether rich or poor:

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.

-- Luke 14:33  

This is the easy yoke of Jesus! This is why his burden is light! You come to the strait gate with nothing in your hands and nothing on your back preventing your entry. 

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

-- Matthew 11:28ff. 

 

And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?

-- Matthew 19:16

And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?

-- Mark 10:17

And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

-- Luke 18:18