Well, Mr. Pope, sir, the ladies aren't going to shut up about that Mary co-redeemer of the world stuff lol

 

Mary Helped Jesus Save the World

Monica Miller, Crisis 

 

Monica Miller must have had this essay in her desk drawer ready to go, just waiting for this moment to arrive. She begins right out of the gate reminding the pope, an Augustinian, that none other than St. Augustine had said

Two parents have generated us for death; two parents have generated us for life. 

The observation is as true as the comparison is false. Adam and Eve were husband and wife. Mary and the Holy Ghost were not.

Yes, St. Augustine's mother was also named Monica.

Later in her essay our Monica reminds the pope that Mary instigated her son's mission at the Wedding at Cana, dontchaknow.

She is the New Eve, the true and effective helpmate of the New Adam. 

Apart from how this is creepy connubial Christ talk, our Monica apparently sees herself in a similar light, trying to move her son the pope along in the right direction.

But kinda more like the old Eve than St. Monica, to be perfectly frank, our Monica finds her "hath God said" opening:

The [pope's] Note doesn’t say that the Co-redemptrix title for Mary is heretical but, rather, “inappropriate” and is discouraging its use for the reasons indicated. It is important to note that the document certainly acknowledges that Mary is “the first and foremost collaborator in the work of Redemption and grace.”

Doesn't say?

This is absolutely comic.

But wait! There's more:

My purpose here is to clarify and highlight that while, thus far, the Vatican has rejected the Marian title “Co-redemptrix,” nonetheless, Mary was and is God’s chief co-worker in the salvific mission of her Son.       

Thus far?

Monica is nothing if not hopeful about the future for Mary, Co-Redemptrix. And subversive:

And while the Church, for now, will not honor Mary formally under the title of Co-redemptrix, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the faithful cannot, in our private devotions, honor her in this way. 

For now?

You see what I mean. 

But our Monica rightly has every reason to be hopeful, because she understands the logic of her position, a logic which was born when the early followers of Jesus decided that their crucified master wasn't dead but was a resurrected god.

Once you introduce that first novelty, however, you have to explain where this god came from, hence the virgin birth idea, which is totally absent from Mark's Gospel, and under attack in John's. From there the novelties just multiplied.

It took a long time for that logic to do its work to elevate Jesus' mother, although our Monica highlights it already acting upon the imaginations of early Christian luminaries like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and others.

We did not get, formally, the Immaculate Conception of Mary until 1854, and the Assumption of Mary until 1950. These are modern age developments! Papal infallibility dates to 1870, Daily Reception of Holy Communion to 1905.

Mary The Co-Redeemer in 2052 anyone?

The Reformation tried, not entirely successfully, to rescue the church from this line of thinking through its rediscovery of Paul, whose thinking was nowhere Marian but Christ-centered.

The first Adam, completely counter trend, was the only man not born of woman until the last Adam. Of course Paul was not thinking this through when he said that Jesus was "born of a woman" in Galatians 4:4.

Well how did Jesus escape original sin then?

We are not told, only that as Paul's theology developed Paul plainly said that Jesus "knew no sin" (II Corinthians 5:21), and was made of different stuff:

Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.

-- Romans 5:14

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. ...

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. ...

The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.

-- I Corinthians 15: 22, 45, 47.

The answer of Matthew 1:18, 20 and Luke 1:35 is that that different stuff was "of the Holy Ghost". And that pretty much explains how the fourth and fifth centuries came to be spent, not on Marian concerns, but Christological.

The Marianists major in the minors. 

Yeah, the filioque is such a novelty, it took 'em centuries to think of it lol

 

 Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

-- John 20:21ff.

Mary the mother of Jesus attempted a family intervention

 

A plot for His assassination was secretly on foot. And at this juncture the incident of my text, which we owe to Mark alone of the Evangelists, occurs. Christ’s friends, apparently the members of His own family--sad to say, as would appear from the context, including His mother--came with a kindly design to rescue their misguided kinsman from danger, and laying hands upon Him, to carry Him off to some safe restraint in Nazareth, where He might indulge His delusions without doing any harm to Himself. They wish to excuse His eccentricities on the ground that He is not quite responsible--scarcely Himself; and so to blunt the point of the more hostile explanation of the Pharisees that He is in league with Beelzebub.

Conceive of that! The Incarnate Wisdom shielded by friends from the accusation that He is a demoniac by the apology that He is a lunatic! . . . 

There is nothing that commonplace men hate like anything fresh and original. 

-- Alexander Maclaren (1826-1910), Exposition on Mark 3:21

Frequent or daily reception of the Eucharist is a complete novelty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As with priestly celibacy from 1139, the Immaculate Conception of Mary from 1854, papal infallibility from 1870, the Assumption of Mary from 1950, frequent reception of the Eucharist is a complete novelty.

Lutheran practice among conservative German-Americans in the United States in the early 20th Century was quarterly, and you had to register in advance AND meet with the pastor beforehand as if going to confession.  

The Roman Catholic Decree on Frequent & Daily Reception of Holy Communion dates merely from 1905.

It was designed to address a recent perceived historical development of religious decline, not some defect or missing element of revealed religion. The Eucharist was being ginned up to gin up flagging faith. And perhaps the decree's most ridiculous claim is that "Give us this day our daily bread" from the Lord's Prayer refers to daily reception of the Eucharist, when everything we know about early Christian practice is that the Eucharist was celebrated when Christians gathered together, at most on the first day of the week, not "often" but "as oft", i.e. "when":

Moreover, we are bidden in the Lord's Prayer to ask for "our daily bread" by which words, the holy Fathers of the Church all but unanimously teach, must be understood not so much that material bread which is the support of the body as the Eucharistic bread which ought to be our daily food. 

What's more, the Catholic conception from 1905 is completely upside down. The point of the Eucharist isn't that it is "pleasing to God", as if human beings do something, but rather that God does something. In the Eucharist, God serves up salvation, as in "Divine Service" or Gottesdienst.

Needless to say, none of this bears any relation to the historical Jesus, who to begin with never imagined a church would come into being, let alone where sacraments would be offered. The history of the church is a farce wherein the players have majored in the minors, or shall we say, in mere trifles and extra-curricular activities which are completely beside the point and often amount to nothing but superstition and idolatry.

. . . so that this practice, so salutary and so pleasing to God, not only might suffer no decrease among the faithful, but rather that it increase and everywhere be promoted, especially in these days when religion and the Catholic faith are attacked on all sides, and the true love of God and piety are so frequently lacking. ...

6. But since it is plain that by the frequent or daily reception of the Holy Eucharist union with Christ is strengthened, the spiritual life more abundantly sustained, the soul more richly endowed with virtues, and the pledge of everlasting happiness more securely bestowed on the recipient, therefore, parish priests, confessors and preachers, according to the approved teaching of the Roman Catechism should exhort the faithful frequently and with great zeal to this devout and salutary practice.

The Effrontery of "E"

I lose my patience, and I own it too,

Where works are censur'd, not as bad, but new;

While, if our elders break all reason's laws,

Those fools demand not pardon, but applause.

-- Alexander Pope

You Got a Friend?

It will probably come as a surprise to many readers that the late-1946 film "It's a Wonderful Life" wasn't terribly successful in its debut. The movie placed 26th in revenues for 1947. One reviewer called attention to its unreality and "sentimentality," which is underscored in the closing when the angel Clarence, who finally gets his wings, tells George that "no man is a failure who has friends." Audiences fresh off the horrors of war weren't exactly overwhelmed. It took a generation to garner its critical acclaim and to reach its popularity as a Christmas staple, which its creator Frank Capra said in 1984 was sort of like seeing your kid grow up to be president. Obviously something had changed in America. The baby boomers had to take over before the film could really succeed.

In the intervening period the trend has continued in different forms with the buddy movie, a wildly successful television comedy called "Friends," and the meteoric rise of a friends craze on social networks such as Facebook, among others. The thirst for that sentimental something is strong among the boomers, but it gets harder to get a buzz on no matter how much they drink, and the morning after remains lonely, and is getting lonelier. Consider the conclusion of a 2004 study that the average number of confidants per citizen had dropped in America from three to two since 1985, and fully a quarter of the population reported having no friends to confide in at all.

There has been a similar trend toward the sentimental within the church of the boomers, where theology has taken on a distinctly more familiar tone, emphasizing a personal relationship with God and drinking deeply from the well of ideas found in the Gospel of John. There one meets such notions as being "born again" and "knowing" God, and its Jesus talks about friendship in ideal terms: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." These Christians appropriate these ideas and think God is deeply, passionately interested in everything about them and has an individual plan for each and every life, as if Salvation History culminating in the Incarnation was kind of beside the point. What matters in their minds is finding your own divinely appointed purpose in life. It is narcissism writ large.

These developments help explain the penetration of pentecostalism into mainstream Christianity in the 1970's, and the subsequent exodus from mainline Protestantism into conservative "evangelicalism" after that. But the novelty has definitely worn off. Maybe the boomers are finally ready to grow up. While the country today is still overwhelmingly Protestant, self-identification with it has now dropped below 50% and the numbers of the unaffiliated and the sectarian are on the rise. For growing numbers of people it would not be wrong to say that familiarity has bred contempt. More and more books are appearing which recount the de-conversion experiences of people from Bart Ehrman at Princeton University to William Lobdell, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-And Found Unexpected Peace.

In the same way the World War II generation was so different temperamentally from its children, it is interesting how the Synoptic tradition, which contains little if any positive teaching on friendship, differs dramatically in substance and in tone from the Fourth Gospel. For example, the Gospel of Matthew warns that "A man's foes shall be they of his own household." Its command to "love your enemies" practically makes friendship irrelevant by annihilating the category itself, which, as we have said before, is characteristic of the religious impulse. For the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, this abolition of the antonyms occurs at the eschaton, which for him has already dawned: "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." Wherever this thorough-going eschatological message of Jesus predominates in the record, conventional social constructions are overthrown. "For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother," in contrast to his actual family which was in the street looking for him in the house where he was teaching. "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."

Cultivating strong friendships is about the last thing on Jesus' mind in part because there simply won't be time for them. The end of all things approaches so fast that one must abandon all traditional roles immediately and follow Jesus. The normal niceties of interaction no longer apply. At one point we see how even his closest associate is rebuked for a misplaced intention to protect him. Jesus may indeed call many to follow him, but few are actually chosen. And even those whom we would call his mates were always kept at a certain distance despite various purported confidences shared, and the record shows that these followers consistently misunderstood him, failed him, and at length even betrayed him. If with Cicero a friend should be as a second self, Jesus didn't just die alone, he lived that way.

Which makes the emergence of the ideal of divine friendship in the Fourth Gospel quite startling: "Henceforth I call you not servants . . . but I have called you friends." Here we meet with a response of interpretation to the failure of the imminent end of the world to materialize. But instead of adopting the later development which we see already at work in the apocalyptic narratives in the Synoptic Gospels where hope of terrestrial transformation is postponed to an indeterminate time in the future, the Fourth Gospel eschews talk of the "second coming." Instead it conceives of the promised kingdom in a new way, located in a celestial venue where Jesus has gone "to prepare a place for you." His kingdom will not come with the Son of Man appearing with the clouds of heaven, but rather "My kingdom is not of this world." This is how the original ideology is neatly transferred by the Fourth Gospel to the unseen world, where it can cause little offence.

The Fourth Gospel's response to the Synoptic tradition also is on display in the way it co-opts the eschaton. One way it does this is through its notion of the coming of the Spirit: "the Father shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth." Another is through the love teaching of Jesus, which no longer emphasizes love of enemies but rather brotherly love within the Christian community: "Love one another, as I have loved you. If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." Christians will continue to co-exist with other human beings who are still going to hate them and be their enemies. But Christians are to look at it this way: "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

It is interesting how for the Christian community imagined by the Fourth Gospel it is not the Lord's Supper but the washing of one another's feet which Jesus establishes for its social cohesion. "I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you," he says of this custom, instead of "This do in remembrance of me" which he says of the Lord's Supper in the Gospel of Luke. The reason for this is precisely because the Lord's Supper is still understood by the author to be potently invested with the original eschatological significance, which is why there can be no place for an account of its institution in his gospel. It is an issue best left unaddressed, and better yet replaced, in view of the changed circumstances.

When it comes to choosing between variant readings in the manuscripts it is often the case that we choose the more difficult reading because its existence is harder to explain. The same holds true of interpretation. The Fourth Gospel in the main is comparatively more easily explained as derivative of the contents of the Synoptic Tradition. The latter puts us closer to the Jesus of history, but he is a sterner, more urgent, and less friendly figure.