Month: January 2007

Moon To Explode And Fall Out Of Sky!

Explodingmoon
IT’S TRUE!

I mean . . . it’s not scheduled to do that tomorrow or anything, but one day.

Yes, our moon–"Luna" as some people want to call it (though anyone who’s ever lived there just calls it "the Moon")–it’s going to blow up and rain down out of the sky.

You know what they say, "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. They’re always a boom tomorrow"–only the tomorrow in question is a ways down the road, long after all of us should have pushed up all the daisies that we’re going to.

Here’s the idea:

[T]he Moon is being pushed away from Earth by 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) per year and our planet’s rotation is slowing.

If left unabated the Moon would continue in its retreat until it would take bout 47 days to orbit the Earth. Both Earth and Moon would then keep the same faces permanently turned toward one another as Earth’s spin would also have slowed to one rotation every 47 days.

[But billions of years from now . . . ]

The Sun’s mutation into a red giant provides a huge stumbling block to the Moon’s getaway and is likely to ensure the Moon ends its days the way it began; as a ring of Earth-girdling debris.

‘The density and temperature both increase rapidly near the apparent surface (photosphere) of the future giant Sun,’ Willson explained. As the Earth and Moon near this blistering hot region, the drag caused by the Sun’s extended atmosphere will cause the Moon’s orbit to decay. The Moon will swing ever closer to Earth until it reaches a point 11,470 miles (18,470 kilometers) above our planet, a point termed the Roche limit.

‘Reaching the Roche limit means that the gravity holding it [the Moon] together is weaker than the tidal forces acting to pull it apart,’ Willson said.

The Moon will be torn to pieces and every crater, mountain, valley, footprint and flag will be scattered to form a spectacular 23,000-mile-diameter (37,000-kilometer)  Saturn-like ring of debris above Earth’s equator. The new rings will be short-lived. Theory dictates they’ll eventually rain down onto Earth’s surface.

GET THE (EXPLOSIVE!) STORY.

Prayer, Conversion, & Free Will

A reader writes:

I’ve been struggling with a question regarding prayer for some time now, and I’m not having much luck finding an answer. The qestion is this: what exactly are we praying for when we pray for someone else’s conversion & salvation – i.e., what exactly are we asking God to do?

The difficulty I’m having with this question stems from the following:

a) God will give sufficient grace to each person to enable him to get to heaven; and
b) God will not infringe on man’s free will and force him to accept the graces He offers.

Given the foregoing, it would seem (to me) to be illogical to pray for someone else’s conversion and salvation. Yet, we see St. Paul praying for the salvation of others in Rom 10:1.

Any help you can give me (or source to which you can point me) on this would be very much appreciated.

Several different resolutions to the dilemma you pose suggest themselves:

1) The Efficacious Grace solution:

According to the Thomistic point of view, while God gives sufficient grace to all for salvation, for a person to actually turn to God and be saved the person must be given a special kind of grace that is by its nature efficacious. Those who get this efficacious grace are saved, those who don’t, aren’t. The bestowal of efficacious grace is entirely a matter of God’s choice, and it accomplishes its goal of bringing a person to salvation without violating his free will.

A Thomistic solution to the dilemma thus might say that what we are doing in praying for someone’s salvation what we are asking God to do is to give that person efficacious grace–thus going beyond the sufficient grace he gives to all while (on the Thomistic understanding) not violating his free will.

Whether this solution works is dependent on whether it is possible to give someone a grace that intrinsically (by its nature) brings a person to salvation without violating free will. Non-Thomsits commonly dispute that this is possible.

2) The Middle Knowledge solution

Middle knowledge is a somewhat tricky concept (MORE HERE), but the basic idea is that God knows the truth of things that are not determined either by necessity or his own agency. Thus he knows what our free will decisions will be in all situations, including those we haven’t been put in. (The latter is a class known technically as free will counterfactuals).

If it’s true that God knows what we will freely choose to do in all possible situations then it would be possible for him to put us in the situation where we freely choose to act on the sufficient grace he has given us and thus achieve salvation.

On this account, what he would be doing in asking God to save someone would be asking him to put that person in a situation in which he knows that the person will freely choose to respond to sufficient grace.

There are at least two possible difficulties for this view. First, in order to engineer the situation in which person X freely chooses to respond to the offer of salvation, God might have to override the free will of other people–either on matters connected with salvation or with respect to neutral matters (e.g., causing me to choose to share the gospel with the person or causing me to choose to stay at a bus station long enough to meet the person and choose to share the gospel with him).

Or maybe he wouldn’t. He might be able to manipulate non-volitional nature such that he sets up a cascade of free will decisions among different people leading a particular individual to choose salvation, not violating the free will of anyone in the cascade. Since we don’t have a God’s-eye view of reality, we don’t know whether this would be a real difficulty for God or not.

Second, whether God has middle knowledge is disputed, the chief part of the dispute being whether this kind of knowledge is possible in situations that are not actual.

Note that middle knowledge solutions are commonly appealed to by Molinists, though they are not exclusive to Molinists.

3) The Easier Influence solution

On this theory we would be asking God to give a person more than just sufficient grace but less than the efficacious grace envisioned by Thomists.

While receiving sufficient grace means that a person receives enough grace to embrace salvation, it does not mean that it will be easy for him to do so. One could thus ask God to give him additional graces that influence him by making it easier for him to embrace salvation yet not override his free will.

For example, he might encounter an evangelist capable of giving an extra-clear and winning presentation of the gospel or he might be in a particularly good mood when he hears it or he might be shielded from evil influences while he’s considering the question of whether to embrace the offer of salvation.

It seems to me that, whatever else is the case, God ought to be able to do at least this solution, and thus we have at least one way of making sense of what we’re asking God to do when praying for the salvation of others.

4) The Redundant Prayers solution

It is, of course, possible to pray for things that God is going to do with or without our prayers. Thus I could pray for God to give a particular person sufficient grace to embrace salvation, even though (as an informed, theologically orthodox Catholic) I already know that he’s planning to do that.

This solution is certainly possible, but it raises the question of whether it’s a good use of our time to pray for things God is determined to do independent of our prayers and why God would set the example for us in Scripture of praying for the salvation of others. Why would he want us to pray redundantly?

5) The Extra Chance solution

It is Church teaching that God gives sufficient grace to a person at some point during his life, but it is not Church teaching that he does this on more than one occasion. We don’t know whether a person has sufficient grace for salvation at every point in his life or only at some points. (It is common teaching that the baptized who are in mortal sin always will always be given sufficient grace to repent before the end of their lives, but that teaching does not apply to the unbaptized.)

If somone has already had–and missed–whatever receptions of sufficient grace God would otherwise give him then praying for the person’s salvation might be construed as asking God to give him sufficient grace once more or even many more times–in other words, giving him extra chances.

6) The Whatever Possible solution

The above solutions represent theoretical answers to the question of what one might mean when asking God to grant salvation to someone. This solution is different: It represents something I suspect is more like what most people actually do mean in asking this.

Most people don’t have in mind the theoretical answers provided in the preceding solutions. They haven thought through the mechanics of how God giving salvation works in that kind of detail, they just want the person they’re praying for to be saved. So in praying for the person they would like God to do whatever is possible to help that person to be saved.

On this understanding, you don’t have to know which options are possible. There just has to be something that’s possible, and I suspect that at least some of the above explanations fall into that category (and probably others that my tiny human intellect isn’t even capable of comprehending). We can thus leave up to God what, in particular, is possible and just humbly request that he do it.

That’s how I tend to think of it when I pray for others.

Prophecy

A reader writes:

I was hoping you could discuss St. Paul’s teaching on the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12-14.  In particular, I’m wondering about the emphasis St. Paul places on prophecy.  He tells the Corinthians to be especially eager for prophesying, indicating its superiority over the gift of tongues.  In chapter 14 verse 31, he says that all can prophesy, though they should do it one at a time.  He warns against pride (Ch 14 v 36) and disorder (v 40).

Now I am wondering what he means by prophesying in this case; are we to assume that all the men (women are excluded in verse 34-35) are receiving messages from the Lord, to be spoken to the community, one at a time? 

No. When Paul says you can all prophecy, he’s restricted his universe of discourse to those people who are able to prophecy. He’s giving an assurance that those who have the prophetic gift will all be able to just it, but they must do so in an orderly manner. He is not saying that all have the prophetic gift, as is clear from his rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 12:29, which in context has the implied answer "No, not all are prophets." This is also implied by the fact that he encourages the Corinthians to desire this gift.

Also, women are not excluded from prophesying. They are excluded from teaching in church, but they can prohesy, as illustrated by his reference a few chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians 11:5 to women praying or prophesying with their heads covered.

And why is it that women are to stay silent? 

They didn’t have to be absolutely silent. They could pray or prophesy in Church. They couldn’t then teach or interrogate teachers (hence the reference to them asking their husbands at home if they want to know something). The reason for this had to do to a considerable extent with the culture of the early Christian community and was to a considerable extent of disciplinary rather than doctrinal force. It does, however, have a doctrinal nucleus that is reflected in the fact that the Magisterium is capable of being composed only by men (who have been ordained to the episcopacy). Today women can teach in religious settings (though they cannot give the homily) but they cannot teach magisterially.

I have gone to charismatic prayer meetings in the past, where indeed some people had messages from the Lord.  However, I always had doubts as to whether they were genuine prophecies or not.  How do you tell?

In general terms, if the messages contain predictions that come true then this is a sign that they are genuine; if they contain statements of a theological nature that are false then it is a sign that they are not genuine. In general, the same kinds of criteria that apply to discerning private revelations would apply here.

The spiritual gifts, in particular the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy, were obviously of some importance at least from within the context of the Corinthian community at the time St. Paul was writing, since he devotes a good chunk of his first letter to the Corinthians to them.  In the Church today, they don’t really seem that important, except from within the charismatic movement.  I’ve often wondered why that is.  Any thoughts?

The development of Christian history revealed that the miraculous spiritual gifts began to appear more rarely than they appeared in the first century. This is consistent with the history of the Old Testament, in which prophecies seemed more common in some periods than in others. While God has never completely stopped giving private revelation, it seems that the initial intensity with which it was given at the beginning of Church history was something to help the early Church get off the ground. Afterwards, as the Church became firmly established, the granting of miraculous gifts and private revelations became less common, though it has never completely ceased.

In the second half of the 20th century, the Catholic Charismatic movement developed, and many more reports of this type of activity began to be made. The Church thus far has not attempted to make a systematic determination of how many of these reports are genuine, and it is likely to do so given the overwhelming number of them. Instead, it has allowed Catholics (in general) to make their own assessments of how common these phenomena are at present. I would characterize the Church’s attitude in this matter as cautious but open, which incidentally reflects St. Paul’s instructions:

Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good (1 Thess. 5:19-21).

Secret Agent Super Pope

CNS reports:

Pope John Paul II made more than 100 clandestine trips to ski or hike in the Italian mountains and was rarely recognized by others on the slopes, his former secretary said.

Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz described the secret outings in a book of memoirs, "A Life With Karol," which was being published in late January. An excerpt appeared Jan. 23 in the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero.

The cardinal, who was Pope John Paul’s personal secretary for 38 years, wrote that the pope, an avid skier and hiker in his youth, often felt pent up inside the Vatican.

In the winter of 1981, the pope, his secretary and two of his Polish aides decided to make a "getaway" to the mountains from the papal villa in Castel Gandolfo.

They packed into a car owned by one of the priests, in order not to raise suspicions, and when they passed the Swiss Guard post one prelate opened wide a newspaper to hide the pontiff in the back seat.

Then they drove to the central Italian ski town of Ovindoli without an escort, winding through mountain towns and carefully respecting the speed limits.

Once they arrived, they chose a deserted slope and the pope was able to ski all day long. On the way back, the pope smiled and said, "We did it!" It was the first of many such escapes, the papal secretary said.

MORE.

I’ll be looking forward to getting Cardinal Dziwisz’s book when it comes out in English!

MORE HERE, ALSO.

Infancy Narrative Questions

A reader writes:

My husband and I were trying to figure out what happened to the gifts the Magi gave to Jesus. Was the gold kept as well as the other gifts. Also why did the wise men just leave and not stay to continue to worship Jesus. The Shepherds also knew Jesus was the Messiah. Why didn’t they stay and honor him and become his first apostles.

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are unknown due to our disturbing lack of time machines, but we can speculate. So here goes:

1) Presumably the gold was initially kept by the Holy Family but then was later spent (perhaps during their sojourn in Egypt). The frankincense and myrrh could have also been sold, or they may have been burned, since they were used for incense.

2) It’s not clear that the Magi understood fully what Jesus was (i.e., that he was God). The worship they paid him might not be the worship of the divine but the "worship" (reverence) due to a king or other figures in authority (which is why the British sometimes refer to high officials as "Your Worship"–not implying that the officials are God but that they are to be reverenced because of their office; the word "worship" has become exclusively used to refer to divine worship only recently). The Magi thus may have understood there visit simply as a visit to an important king, who wouldn’t even take his throne for years. Hence, they went home.

3) Same thing with the shepherds. Even understanding that Jesus is the Messiah, they wouldn’t have known that he was God or that he would have disciples. They would likely have thought of him as the future king who would kick the Romans out of Israel–but that wouldn’t happen for years, and so they, too, went home.

Those are my thoughts, any way. Shy of getting a time machine, I don’t know how to check them out. If you happen to run across a Delorean with a flux capacitor accessory installed, though, let me know.

More Help For Mike

 

Mike in Michigan has posted another video (above), updating us on his investigations into the Catholic faith.

He also asks a question about the Immaculate Conception. This was something that I had to research and think about when I was becoming Catholic as well, and I certainly understand the concern for someone from a Protestant background.

He also adds a little bit in the combox down yonder in which he indicates that he understands that Romans 3:23 (the "all have sinned" passage) doesn’t mean absolutely all or it would include Jesus, which it obviously doesn’t. This is quite correct, and I’ve often pointed out that later on in Romans Paul refers to a time when Esau (not our Esau) and Jacob were still int he womb and had not yet done anything good or bad, indicating that unborn children are also an exception to the "all have sinned" principle.

The question then is not whether there are exceptions but whether Mary counts as an exception and why.

For Catholics there are two sources by which the faith is passed down to us from the apostles: Scripture and Tradition. The Magisterium (the Church’s teaching authority), while it is not itself a source of the faith, is able to make rulings on what the content of Scripture and Tradition are. That’s how we got the canon of Scripture for example: The Magisterium identified certain works as genuine Scripture. It is also capable of determining which Traditions are authentic and which are not.

When it comes to the Immaculate Conception, this doctrine is not taught explicitly in Scripture. It is thus like the Trinity, which is not taught explicitly , either. You have to go around to a variety of different verses in order to build up the evidence that shows that God is a Trinity. It’s not stated directly. The Immaculate Conception is also like the Trinity in that it took a while for the concepts and vocabulary needed to express the doctrine to develop. You can’t talk about the Trinity if the word "Trinity" hasn’t been coined yet, and you can’t talk about the Immaculate Conception–Mary’s freedom from all stain of original sin–if the term "original sin" has not yet been coined.

It thus took a while for Christian theology to develop the concepts and vocabulary needed to articulate the idea of Mary’s unique holiness.

That holiness is something that Christians have always had an insight of–as the writings of the Church Fathers show–but it took a while to figure out the precise nature and extent of this unique gift.

There are indications of it in Scripture itself, the clearest echo of the doctrine being in the Annunciation in Luke 1, where the Angel Gabriel refers to Mary with the Greek word "kecharitomene," which is commonly translated "full of grace," but more literally would be "one who has been graced." This word draws on aspects of Greek grammar that indicate that Mary has, in the past, received God’s grace and that this has continuing effects at the present time.

The question is: How far back in the past was she graced and what are the specific effects? As Christians reflected on this and on the writings of the Church Fathers, it was discerned that–because of her unique role in the history of salvation–Mary was graced at the first moment of her existence (her conception) with the effect that she was prevented from contracting any stain of original sin.

Part of the conceptual background for this was the realization of Mary’s role as the New or Second Eve, something that the Church Fathers are explicit about very early. It was discerned that, just as God started humanity with a first Adam and Eve, he started redeemed humanity with a New Adam and a New Eve. Thus St. Paul refers to Jesus’ role as the New Adam, and the Church Fathers identify Mary as the New Eve. Thus, just as Eve cooperated with Adam in bringing sin to the world (by giving him the forbidden fruit), Mary cooperated with Jesus in bringing salvation to the world (by serving as his mother).

Similarly, just as both the first Adam and Eve were sinless from their conceptions, the new Adam and Eve were sinless from their conceptions. The difference is that while the first pair fell from grace, the second remained faithful.

A basis for the Immaculate Conception can thus be discerned in Mary’s role as the New Eve.

YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT THAT HERE.

It seems to me that another basis for the Immaculate Conception can be seen in the fact that Mary is the Prototypical Christian. She is the first to say yes to Jesus, which she agrees to become his mother, and this makes her a model of all Christians. In keeping with this, God chose to make her an image of Christian destiny by giving her the gifts that one day all faithful Christians will receive. Specifically, he grave her the gift of being immaculate and he assumed her to be with hi Son. This mirrors the fact that faithful Christians will one day be rendered just as immaculate–just as free of sin and its stain–as Mary, and they will also be caught up to be with Christ (only at the end of the world, not at an earlier point as in Rapture teaching). By giving Mary–the Prototypical Christian–these gifts early, God made her an icon of the destiny of the Christian.

Thus the Catechism refers to Mary as "the most excellent fruit of redemption" (CCC 508) because the gifts of Christ’s redemption were given to her in an extraordinary way.

There is also a basis in the fact that she is simply Christ’s mother. It seems to me that God would be likely to pick one of two kinds of women to be his mother: an extraordinarily holy one or an extraordinarily unholy one. For example, if Christ had chosen to be born of a prostitute, it could make the point that God can reach fallen humanity even in the worst of its condition. However, we know that he didn’t choose to do that, which points us to the other option: an extraordinarily holy woman.

There are no limits to God’s ability to grant holiness to someone, and thus if he chooses to make someone extraordinarily holy, he has the power to make the person totally holy. That would be the kind of mother that would be fitting for the Son of God, and thus that’s the kind of mother that God chose to make Mary.

These themes rumble through the Tradition that is found in the writings of the early Church Fathers and later theologians, and eventually the matter was brought to the point that the Magisterium of the Church infallibly defined that this–like the Trinity–is, indeed, an authentic Tradition from the apostles, even if the apostles wouldn’t have used the vocabulary we use today to express the insight.

MORE HERE.

AND HERE.

AND HERE.

Hope this helps!

About Today’s Posts

I know that today’s posts were brief and didn’t have the analysis or commentary that I usually provide, and I thought I’d offer an explanation.

There are some days when, for a variety of reasons, I’m not able to do a usual day’s blogging. Last night it was because I had to preside over a 3-hour board meeting of my square dance club (you’d be amazed how much business a club’s board needs to discuss!), and it took up my usual blog time.

I thought about putting up a Blog Day Off post, but I don’t like leaving regular visitors with nothing new to read or discuss if I can avoid it, so I decided to do an "Instapundit Day." I figured, Instapundit can get away with running one of the biggest blogs there is (FAR bigger than mine) by providing brief entries, so–even though it’s not what JA.O readers are used to–perhaps I can avoid some Blog Days Off (at least some of them) by doing brief entries like those I used today.

I hope the experiment was successful (or at least preferable to the alternative) and provided some interesting food for thought and discussion.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

A reader writes:

I swung by the post office the other day with a few of the kids in the car, including one age 12.  While we were pulling in, she bought up an urban legend she’d read, about people getting roach eggs embedded in their tongues from licking postage stamps.

“But, Mom,” she said, “Why on earth would anyone ever lick a stamp???”

Do you feel old?

I first recognized the disconnect between me and "the younger folks" when I was in my mid 20s and was teaching a Bible study for teenagers, and I needed an example of a really, truly, obviously crazy person and cited Charles Manson.

None of them knew who he was.

When did you realize it? (If you have.)