Whence the empty suit

 

 

  There can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is his clothes.

-- William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, Act 2 Scene 5 

Pope Francis clearly believes in a little bit of depravity in each person, just not in total human depravity lol

 

Norah O'Donnell: When you look at the world what gives you hope?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good. 

More. 

Your average American Catholic, however, has faith in a caricature of Jesus of their own making, as gooey and sentimental as any Protestant's, as Samantha Stephenson demonstrates here. Their common Jesus never called anyone to repent, never said few would be saved, never warned of impending wrath.

Between the errors of total depravity and fundamental human goodness lies the correct view, mixed human nature. Like the scholastics of a by-gone era, however, the pope splits hairs in the wrong direction from this, landing on the side of human nature being more of a good mixture than the not totally bad mixture emphasized by Paul:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin.  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

-- Romans 7:14ff.

For his part Martin Luther, against the Reformed proponents of total depravity, affirmed that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, at the same time just and sinner, because of Christ.

The view was also Shakespeare's:

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

The mingled paint of living, good and ill together

 

 

'Tis in life as 'tis in painting,

Much may be right, yet much be wanting.

-- Matthew Prior

"Methodist": Another Way To Spell "Pest"

I'll never forget the reaction of an earnest Methodist when I began what was to be but a brief sojourn among the Methodists some years ago: "You mean you like us?"

In the end I didn't, but not because of the history of Methodism's political advocacy per se, with which I was already intimately familiar. What I found wanting was the theological basis for it: grace so predominating as a doctrinal force that it excludes almost all talk of sin and judgment, a monstrous form of Christianity similar to others in America which end up emphasizing just one feature of themselves in an exaggerated fashion. The latest version of this phenomenon abandons the concept of hell. As we used to say in Greek class, orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is another man's doxy.

If theocracies are wrong because in the end they conclude that human beings are essentially evil and need to be ruled, liberal democracies are wrong because they believe that people are essentially good and can be trusted to their own devices. The basis for American style limited government, by contrast, is a moral conclusion derived from long experience on English soil which believes that men are first and foremost always at war in themselves.

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues."

-- William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, 4.3.84

From William Murchison, here:

From the Methodist standpoint, as it evolved in the late 20th century, the Lord was calling his people to adopt pretty much the social and political programs of the Democratic Party. ...

A poll at the church’s 1996 General Conference found that 60 percent of clergy delegates took the liberal side on social and political questions. The laity lagged only slightly behind, with 51 percent making the same affirmation. ...

Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians - that is how it goes in the old mainline denominations. Leaders tug leftward; the path to the right leads often enough straight out the church door - to bodies with conservative commitments, or just to religious inertia. ...

Americans saw readily enough, as the dark night of Prohibition descended, that the Methodists and their allies had quit preaching and gone to meddling. Something deeper was wanted - an engagement with the high and serious purposes of God, first in creating man and woman, then in saving them.