LOL Gerald O'Collins, Society of Jesus, 1971, speaking up for the Cosmic Christ without the slightest hint of self-awareness

 First, Jesus must not be turned into a contemporary. He is rightly viewed within the historical framework of the first century. To describe Him as a revolutionary leader, a truly secular man or the first hippie may be emotionally satisfying, but for the most part these stereotypes are intellectually worthless. Albert Schweitzer’s warnings against creating Jesus in accordance with one’s own character still stand. ...

We meet God in the cosmic Christ who encounters us now, as well as in the strangeness of a first-century Galilean whose preaching resulted in His crucifixion.

-- America: The Jesuit Review, March 6, 1971 and August 26, 2024 

Gerald O'Collins was a systematic theologian, not a philologist, who passed away August 22, 2024 after a long and distinguished Catholic academic career at Pontifical Gregorian University, 1973-2006.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of the cosmic Christ was the fellow Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose offenses against Catholic doctrine were repeatedly warned against but never proscribed. Several Catholic intellectuals sought to rehabilitate his reputation after his death in 1955, not the least of whom was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.

O'Collins was a child of this time.

The theological idea of the cosmic Christ certainly has its germ in the Pauline Colossian epistle and later in Irenaeus, but can hardly be said to be a Synoptic idea. O'Collins wanted these to have equal weight:

Both the Synoptic account of the preacher from Nazareth and Paul’s reflections on his Lord’s death and resurrection belong within the canon of scripture.

Yet it was Paul himself who eschewed the historical Jesus:

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer.

-- II Corinthians 5:16 

 

Rod Dreher on the naive progressivism of Joseph Ratzinger, the now deceased Pope Benedict XVI

 Here: 

In other words, his progressivism consisted of wanting to make Catholic orthodoxy comprehensible to the modern world -- not in wanting to overturn those orthodoxies! The book goes on to talk about his shock in the years immediately following the Council to see how people within the Church used "the spirit of Vatican II" as a pretext to dismantle Catholicism. Ratzinger, a good-hearted soul who expected the best from others, had been terribly naive. 

It wasn't just Ratzinger, however.

The same phenomenon occurred in Protestantism, and in politics.

President Ronald Reagan, for example, had campaigned in the 1970s on libertarian economic orthodoxies, in particular on cutting ordinary income tax rates because he believed people were better judges of what to do with their money than was government. He won in landslides.

But as Ratzinger never anticipated how nefarious forces in the church would use their freedom to indulge sinful human nature, Reagan never anticipated how rich people and corporations would use their tax savings windfalls to invest abroad instead of in the United States, shipping millions of formerly good middle class jobs abroad to cheaper labor markets, hollowing out the country and growing thereby even more fabulously rich in the process.

Underestimating sinful human nature has been the story of our times.

 

 

 

 

Little Lord Lesus

It was embarrassing enough when Pope Benedict resigned before the assembled cardinals in Latin and no one understood him. Was "Francis" in the crowd?

Now a papal medal with a favorite line of the new pope misspells "Jesus" in Latin, as reported here:

"They went on sale on Tuesday but it was not long before it was noticed that the word Jesus, stamped around the edge of each medallion, had been spelt wrongly, with an L in place of the J."

Even more embarrassing is that this gotcha gets it wrong also, not realizing there is no "J" in Latin. The Vulgate spells it with an "I", so for example Jesus becomes "Iesus" as in "et lacrimatus est Iesus" (John 11:35). So did I.

Until I saw in the comments section that philology and textual criticism aren't quite dead yet out there after all, as one Seth Murray explains how the error must have occurred:

The Latin capital "I" was taken for an "l" in the lower case as in "lover", and re-capitalized "L" unthinkingly at the mint.

Francis' papal motto, incidentally, comes from the venerable Bede:

The motto of Pope Francis is taken from a passage from the venerable Bede, Homily 21 (CCL 122, 149-151), on the Feast of Matthew, which reads: Vidit ergo Jesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi, ‘Sequere me’. [Jesus therefore sees the tax collector, and since he sees by having mercy and by choosing, he says to him, ‘follow me’.]

The Battle of the Acolytes of Intellect

Hey! How you doin'?

"Benedict XVI ranks by my reckoning as the best mind on the planet."

-- David Goldman, alias Spengler of Asia Times, seen here

I'm wonderful.

"[T]his is a guy whose IQ is off the charts — I mean you cannot say that he is anything but a very serious and capable leader and — you know — You and I have talked about this for years … [Obama's] probably the smartest guy ever to become President."

-- Historian Michael Beschloss, transcription here

Benedict in Erfurt: Is That An Objective Genitive, or a Subjective?

Seen here:

 “It was the error of the Reformation that for the most part we could only see what divided us.”

Why wasn't it, why isn't it, the error of the Papacy? As if division were the most mortal of sins. "For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you" (1 Cor.11:19).

Ask you, what provocation I have had?

The strong antipathy of good to bad.

When truth, or virtue, an affront endures,

Th' affront is mine, my friend,

and should be yours.

-- Alexander Pope


(I love quoting Pope to the Pope).