Category: Theology

A reader writes:

Dear Mr. Akin,

You recently wrote,

"If it were easier to be saved as a non-Catholic than as a Catholic then God would have perversely commanded people to enter a suboptimal situation; one would then maximize one’s chances of salvation be entering a state that is out of conformity with God’s known will, which is crazy."

This implicates a question I have been concerned about for some time: if a baptized person dies before committing any actual sins, then he is assured of salvation, correct?  But this seems to lead to the disturbing and obviously wrong conclusion that, in terms of assuring their salvation, it would be optimal to murder newborn infants immediately after baptizing them.

To state this in terms of your quote above, "one would then maximize one’s child’s chances of salvation by committing an act that is out of conformity with God’s known will."  Which is crazy, but also seems to be true!  So why isn’t this situation analogous to the one you were talking about?

We know that God wills a number of things:

1. He wills our salvation.
2. He wills that we have reason.
3. He wills that we have free will.
4. He wills that we have good in this life as well as the next.
5. He wills that we have greater glory in the next life based on the good we have done in this one.
6. He wills that the human race continue.
7. He wills that his Church spread the gospel to the unevangelized for their salvation.
8. He wills that we not be murdered.

When trying to figure out the answer to the "Why not murder newly baptized babies?" question, one must keep the different goals in mind. It is true that God wills our salvation, but that is not the only thing that he wills. If it were his only will for us then the thing to do would be to take the most expeditious route to heaven, in which Christianity would become a kind of suicide cult. But this is not the only thing God wills for us, and Christianity is not a suicide cult.

Notice what would happen if the murder-after-infant-baptism policy were adopted:

• Goal #1 would be facilitated for the babies in question.
• Goal #2 would be thwarted because the children would not be allowed to grow up to exercise the reason that God made integral to their nature.
• Goal #3 would be thwarted because the children would not be allowed to grow up to exercise the freedom that God made integral to their nature.
• Goal #4 would be thwarted because they would have their earthly lives taken away from them.
• Goal #5 would be thwarted because babies would not have the chance to grow up and do good.
• Goal #6 would be thwarted because the human race would die out in one generation if this policy were enacted by everyone (though that would not be the case, because . . . ).
• Goal #7 would be thwarted because the Church would go extinct before it could carry out its mission of evangelization.
• Goal #8 would be thwarted for obvious reasons.

Also, the few remaining adult Christians would end up locked away in prison or put to death themselves, because no successful society can tolerate mass murder and suicide cults in its midst. There are laws against these things for a reason, and that reason points us in the direction of why God doesn’t want us to commit these abominations.

The fact that God has more than one goal that he wishes to achieve with us means that he allows them to exist in tension with each other. He doesn’t just will our salvation. He wills our salvation AND these other things.

The biggest tension among the goals is that between #1 and #3, and that’s where the biggest mystery lies. God could just fix all our wills on good and put us in heaven, but he apparently wants the saved to freely choose their fate rather than having it thrust upon them.

That’s true of us adults, and it’s true of infants.

This is accomplished, in the case of infant baptism, by allowing the child to grow up and exercise the free will that God made integral to their nature.

He’s willing to allow baptism to infants to provide for their spiritual development as Christians on their way to the mature use of reason and free will, and he’s willing to allow it as a guarantor of their salvation in the case that they don’t make it to the age of reason, but he is pursuing more than one goal with respect to babies, and all his goals for them must be kept in mind.

Starting a Church to lower people’s chances of salvation, though? That’s just plain crazy. (And contrary to goal #7.)

The USCCB has been released that the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church will be released in English on March 31st–just over seven weeks from now.

Sweet!

This is gonna be good!

According to Catholic News Agency,

The new Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a 200-page synthesis of the 1992 catechism, will be available starting March 31 from the publishing office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The compendium consists of 598 questions and answers, a format similar to the very popular Baltimore Catechism, which was a standard text in many Catholic parishes and schools, from 1885 to the 1960s.

The compendium is structured in four parts, like the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The text has some direct quotes from the catechism used as sidebars, but the questions and answers are original text.

In addition to the questions and answers, the compendium also includes two appendices. The first is a list of Catholic prayers. The second appendix contains “Formulas of Catholic Doctrine,” including the Ten Commandments, Beatitudes, theological and cardinal virtues, and spiritual and corporal works of mercy. Fourteen masterpieces of Christian art are also reproduced in the text.

GET THE STORY.

For those who can’t wait till then, I’d note that the Compendium is already online . . . but in Italian.

HERE’S THE LINK.

A reader writes:

My wife has been having some problems lately with her fear of going to hell.  She has explained to me that she thinks she is going to hell because she doesn’t do any good deeds, and when she remembers some good deeds, she makes her self believe that it wasn’t with the proper intent.  She has been driving herself crazy with this lately.  Is there anything that I can say to her or anything I can do to calm her fears?

The first thing to recognize is that your wife is going through a period of scrupulosity, which is a disordered fear that one is sinning or in danger of going to hell. This is not uncommon. Many people go through periods of this at least once in their lives. Sometimes it is due to a need for a bit of extra theological education. When that is the case then once the person gets the additional education the problem begins to abate. In other cases the problem is related to additional causes (one common contributing cause being Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, though this is not simply the same thing as scrupulosity). In these cases the problem may be longer lasting but is still treatable.

Let’s assume that your wife’s case is one of the short-term ones that is produced by a need for a bit of extra theological info. If so, it should be easily to address. If it is longer lasting, I suggest that you get in touch with an organization like Scrupulous Anonymous, though I wouldn’t recommend that right now. (It could make the situation more difficult by raising additional BASELESS fears that OTHER PEOPLE worry about that would need to be addressed. Go to them if the problem persists for a significant time after addressing her immediate concerns.)

To address the issue that your wife has raised regarding good works, there are certain things she needs to understand. Feel free to have her read this (assuming she won’t get mad).

The first thing that she needs to understand is that the thing that gets us to heaven is our receiving and remaining in God’s grace. We receive God’s grace when we turn to him and accept his offer of grace, particularly through the sacraments. When your wife makes a good confession, she thus receives God’s grace and is put in a state of grace.

That’s the first half of the equation.

The second half is remaining in a state of grace. The only way to not do this is to commit a mortal sin. Unless you commit a mortal sin, you remain in God’s grace.

Good works, therefore, are not of themselves necessary to remain in a state of grace. They may help you stay in a state of grace by building good habits that steer you away from sin, but a lack of good works IS  NOT A MORTAL SIN. If you are a baptized baby and you die before you are capable of doing good works, you don’t have any, but that doesn’t keep you out of heaven. Similarly, if you’re an adult convert and you get baptized and then run over by a bus so that you don’t have a chance to do good works, you don’t get kept out of heaven.

The key to going to heaven is our reception of and remaining in God’s grace. It’s his grace that gets us to heaven.

Good works are a natural outgrowth of his grace working in our hearts, and he rewards us for cooperating with his grace in doing good works, but the thing that would keep us out of heaven is mortal sin, not having an insufficient number of good works.

She should therefore put this worry out of her mind.

That, OF ITSELF, takes care of her parallel worry about doing good works with the right intention.

She ALSO does not need to worry about that because of a simple fact: Humans have mixed intentions. This is something Pope Benedict has written about in the past, before his election, and it’s an obvious fact of human experience. The fact that we have mixed motives does not prevent us from pleasing God by the good works we do.

It doesn’t matter if you’re doing a good work for multiple reasons. As long as ONE REASON is that you want to please God then–to the extent that that was a motive–your act is supernaturally good and will receive a supernatural reward.

In other words: As long as a desire to please God is in there somewhere–amid all your many mixed motives–then the act still has something in it that does please God.

Now here’s a new twist: Humans also have virtual intentions. A virtual intention is an intention that you aren’t thinking about at the moment.

Let’s take an example: Suppose that you and your wife have a son and that one day your son’s life is engandered by a raging river. Your wife is there and can save him by snatching him out of the river. She plunges into the river and grabs him out, saving his life.

Why did she do this?

Certainly, at least in part, because she loves him and didn’t want him to die. That undoubtedly a prominent motive of hers, which probably dwarfs other motives that she might have.

But now ask this: Was she even thinking about her love for your son at the moment she rescues him?

Probably not.

I’d wager that the word "love" didn’t even cross her mind. She didn’t take time to think "I love my son; therefore I want to rescue him." She was too busy actually rescuing him!

This shows that her love for her son–which is probably the DOMINANT motive in the rescue–was something that wasn’t articulated in her mind at the moment of her act. In other words, it was a virtual motive rather than an explicit motive.

We have virtual intentions like this all the time. In fact, one of the most common in the lives of Christians is the intent to do things to please God.

Almost all Christians–and all who take their faith seriously and strive to live as God wants–have at least a virtual intent to do good things to please God. We may not be thinking about God at the moment we do a particular good act, just like your wife didn’t think about love when she was rescuing her son in the example, but it’s still in there, motivating us to do good.

Your wife undoubtedly already has this motive, but just to reassure herself, she should sit down and say to herself: "Y’know. I want to please God. I want to direct all the good acts I do in the future to please him."

If she does that then–unless she explicitly changes her mind and decides (firmly) that she doesn’t want to please God–then she still has it as a virtual intention. (And even if she did have such a thought flit across her mind, all she’d need to do is re-initialize her intent to please God by a new act of the will.)

And that’s enough.

Our works are pleasing to God–at least in some manner–as long as we have at least a VIRTUAL intention of pleasing him when we do them–an intention that every serious Christian has.

So that’s one more reason your wife doesn’t need to worry about this.

Hope this helps!

20

A reader writes:

1.  Thank you very much for your blog.  I have learned so much from you.  Your commitment to the blog must require huge amounts of time – thank you, thank you, thank you.

My pleasure. Glad to be of service.

2.  My daughter has become involved with the Baptist church in Oklahoma City.  She has no computer and thus no e-mail.  I send her material that I develop on various subjects pertaining to the differences between Catholicism and Batptistism (?!).  Sometimes you have wonderful stuff and I would like to print it out and mail it to her.  OK with you?

Yeah, sure. No prob. That’s standard practice. Everybody assumes that folks will be printing off their stuff.

3.  Sometime if you have nothing else to write about and are so inclined, please explain why we never use please in our prayers – seems rude to me!

It does to me, too–when I stop to think about it–but there actually is a reason for this.

"Please" is what’s known as a particle of entreaty–that is, a short word that never changes its form and that is used to make requests (or commands) sound more polite.

If I’m not mistaken, "please" is ultimately derived from an earlier expression in English like "Be thou pleased" or somesuch.

But as a result, it’s an artifact of English. Not all languages have equivalents of please, or–if they do–they don’t use them as much.

Contemporary Aramaic, for example, does not have an equivalent of "please." Nor does Latin from what I can tell.

Hebrew did. It’s got the particle na, which shows up at the end of hosanna. That na on the end is a particle of entreaty to make the request for God to save us sound more polite.

But our English prayers don’t tend to be based on Hebrew prayers using na. They’re much more frequently based on prayers (in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Greek, and especially in Latin) that don’t use particles of entreaty, and so that don’t get translated with "please" in them.

To people who speak languages without particles of entreaty–or which use them infrequently–it doesn’t sound rude to make a request without saying "please," but I know–it can drive us English speakers nuts, especially those who are well-mannered.

Several readers have e-mailed links to stories in the British press concerning the doctrine of limbo.

These articles reveal that Ruth "I’m Too Dangerously Unqualified To Keep My Job" Gledhill is not the only religion reporter from Great Britain who is too dangerously unqualified to keep her job.

A piece in The Guardian, for example, is titled "Babies to be freed from limbo"–as if the Church had the power to free babies from limbo and was preparing to do a mass baby-freeing.

Another piece in The Scotsman is headlined "Pope to abandon idea of unbaptized babies forever in limbo"–as if this were something the pope was teaching but has decided to chuck.

Both articles are chock full of errors. (Have fun spotting them & chronicling them in the combox if you want.)

Here’s the real story:

• Unlike purgatory, the existence of limbo is not a defined doctrine of the Catholic faith. Though it has been mentioned in important documents (e.g., the Catechism of Pius X), it has always had the status of a theological speculation.
• The speculation was an effort to explain what would happen to babies and others who depart this world without baptism (providing the sanctifying grace needed to be united with God in the afterlife) and also without personal sin (thus meaning it would be unjust for them to suffer in the afterlife). A variety of different understandings of limbo were proposed, including some versions in which those present there would have great natural happiness but not the supernatural happiness of seeing God.
• There were also other speculations about what might happen to such children, incluidng the ideas that God might give them enlightenment at the moment of death, enabling them to choose for or against God, and that God might count someone else’s desire for their baptism (e.g., the Church’s desire) as a kind of proxy baptism of desire so that they could go to heaven.
• The basis for limbo was significantly undercut at the Second Vatican Council, which taught that God offers everyone the possibility of salvation, even if is in a mysterious way that we can’t perceive (GS 22). If that’s true and if it includes unbaptized babies then there would be no need for limbo since they would either accept the offer of salvation or reject if (if they are capable of rejecting it).
• The doctrine of limbo thus is not mentioned in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which simply says that we can entrust unbaptized babies to the mercy of God.
• A few years ago, John Paul II asked the International Theological Commission to look into the question of limbo, and that is what’s happening now. The ITC has been having a meeting where they’re discussing this.
• The ITC is an advisory body that does not (typically) exercise Magisterial authority, therefore what it says is not official Church teaching. What B16 might choose to do with whatever they come up with is anybody’s guess.
• The commission has not announced that it will recommend repudiating the doctrine of limbo. It might or might not do that. Typically they’d want to nuance the whole question in a big way. They also might hold open the door for people to still believe this speculation if they want, though endorsing other speculations as well. Or they might wish to reject it more directly. We’ll just have to wait and see.

HERE’S A STORY THAT GETS MORE OF THE FACTS RIGHT.

A kindly reader e-mailed me a link to

THIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE IN CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

It’s an interview with Ben Witherington about a new book he has out critiquing various schools of Evangelical theology, such as Calvinism, Wesleyanism, Dispensationalism, and Pentecostalism.

The central point of the book is that these theological schools tend to go wrong exegetically when it comes to the things that are most distinctive of them. For example,

• Calvinism is at its exegetical worst when arguing for things like perseverance of the saints
• Wesleyanism is at its worst when arguing for arguing that sanctification is a second definite work of grace.
• Dispensationalism is at its worst when arguing for a pre-tribulational rapture.
• Pentecostalism is at its worst when arguing that all Christians need to speak in tongues and that spirit baptism is a second definite work of grace.

Ben is dealing with a phenomenon that struck me back when I was an Evangelical: The various Evangelical schools of thought are vulnerable exegetically because they attempt to over-systematize Scripture. They treat it as if statements in Scripture were axioms of systematic theology that just need to be strung together in the right order to produce an overall systematic theology.

But that’s not what Scripture is. Not remotely. And if you try to handle the text in that manner you will inevitably force your own system onto the text of Scripture instead of deriving your system from Scripture.

A fundamental problem I found toward the end of my time as an Evangelical was that the different Evangelical theologies just didn’t "stick close enough" to the text exegetically. They were always trying to systematize aspects of it that reflected a much messier reality.

Ben deserves a lot of credit for pointing this out. It’s a gutsy move. I love the part of the interview where this comes up:

[N]ow that you have gone public in this book
with a critique of the key teachings of Calvinist, dispensational,
Arminian, and Pentecostal theologies, do you plan to have any friends
left?

I’m obviously a naive person. I’m going to give some lectures in
Abilene next week on "Dispensing with Dispensationalism." This is going
into dispensational territory, as you know. If you hear of my
martyrdom, write a nice obituary.

I’ve corresponded with Ben before (back during the St. James ossuary business), and he was a real nice guy. I may contact him and express my appreciation for the theme of his new book (which I plan on getting) and wish him luck.

I wouldn’t want such a contact to come across in a triumphalistic sense, though I can imagine the topic coming up of how well Catholicism squares with Scripture exegetically. One might ask: Doesn’t Catholicism have its own system that departs from Scripture in the same way that the different Evangelical theologies do?

It certainly has a system that goes beyond Scripture in that it also appeals to Tradition for the data with which it does theology. This is not a problem for Catholics in the way it is for Protestants, though. If you have the idea of sola scriptura as one of your founding theological principles and you don’t give Tradition a normative role then you’ve got to derive your system from Scripture alone.

That’s when you run into problems, because there are many questions that Christians need answers to (e.g., "Who is it okay to baptize and just how do you administer baptism?") that aren’t answered in Scripture. Scripture thus points beyond itself to Tradition for these answers. In fact, Scripture itself is simply the written component of Tradition.

Without the extra-scriptural complement of Tradition, Scripture does not contain enough data to provide confident answers to all the questions that need confident answering (such as the ones mentioned above), and so one attempting to operate from the perspective of sola scriptura will inevitably have to propose some kind of system that can’t be fully grounded in Scripture in order to answer those questions.

But if you reject the premise of sola scriptura and allow Tradition to fill in the missing pieces, you end up with enough data to build systematic theology–even if the result is a system that must, by definition, go beyond Scripture in the data it treats as normative.

There also are places where elements from Tradition exist in exegetical tension with elements in Scripture (i.e., where the two don’t at first blush seem to square), but then this phenomenon exists within Scripture itself, as witnessed by the numerous passages that are proposed as "biblical contraditions" and such. Just as it is the job of the exegete to show possible harmonizations of these alleged discrepancies between different passages of Scripture, it is the job of theologians and exegetes to show possible harmonizations of alleged discrepancies between Scripture and Tradition.

Tradition (including Scripture as its written component) is just a bigger dataset, but the same kinds of issues arise. The difference is that Tradition is a large enough dataset to provide for the needs of systematic theology whereas Scripture apart from Tradition is not.

As an Evangelical, Ben might not agree to all that, but his new book suggests that he’s thinking along the right lines, and the interview itself shows that he’s got significant insight into the nature of the problem.

GET THE STORY.

A reader writes:

As a perspective convert to the faith Purgatory is a doctrine that has been giving me a lot of trouble. I struggle with the visions the saints had of purgatory. They are different and do not all agree.

There is a big difference between St. Mary Magadeline de Pazzi’s graphic vision of various tortures in purgatory to St. Catherine of Genoa’s vision in which she says, "the ‘fire’ of purgatory is God’s love ‘burning’ the soul so that, at last, the soul is wholly aflame. It is the pain of wanting to be made totally worthy of One who is seen as infinitely lovable, the pain of desire for union that is now absolutely assured, but not yet fully tasted”. She says that fire burns away sin’s rust which is on the souls not tortures like molten lead, pressers, sharp swords, and ice.

Are the various tortures graphic metaphors to warn us of the damage of sin and the holiness of God or should we take them literal?

That is the way they are commonly understood these days, not as things we would literally encounter in purgatory but–to the extent such images have validity–as symbolic expressions that try to convey what the experience is like.

I don’t see how you can go from a vision telling us how the purifying fires of purgatory reflect God’s love to a visions with demons, fearsome animals, and graphic torments.

This is why I throw in the caveat about "to the extent such images have validity." The images that you are talking about (demons, fearsome animals, graphic torments) are not part of Church teaching. They are things that some visionaries have reported in private revelations but, given the way private revelation works, there is an admixture of the visionary’s own consciousness and cultural background and it can be difficult to untangle what the motions of divine grace the seer was experiencing signify and to what extent they were colored by the visionary’s own consciousness.

This is a special problem when dealing with visions of the afterlife, because the afterlife is so fundamentally different from our embodied experience. There is a much higher risk of "filling in the details" with this-worldly things that are not meant to be understood literally. (Just as angels don’t literally look like men, though that’s how they often appear in Scripture.)

The Church has generally warned people off of some of the more graphic and detailed speculations about purgatory because they are not part of the faith. The Council of Trent (which was occurring at the same time as St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi was having her visions) specifically warned bishops to be vigilant against people getting too concerned with such matters. The Decree on Purgatory states:

The more difficult and subtle questions [regarding purgatory], however, and those that do not make for
    edification and from which there is for the most part no increase in piety, are to be
    excluded from popular instructions to uneducated people. Likewise, things that are
    uncertain or that have the appearance of falsehood they shall not permit to be made known
    publicly and discussed. But those things that tend to a certain kind of curiosity or
    superstition, or that savor of filthy lucre, they shall prohibit as scandals and
    stumbling-blocks to the faithful [SOURCE].

I should also mention something else: St. Catherine of Genoa’s understanding of purgatory also is not Church teaching. It’s permitted speculation, but not something the Church teaches. It is, however, closer to the way the Church today tends to conceptualize purgatory. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, for example, stresses the difference between purgatory and the sufferings of the damned. Some older writers spoke as if purgatory were the same as hell except that it was temporary instead of eternal. The Catechism goes out of its way to reject that idea:

1030
All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed
assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification,
so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

1031
The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which
is entirely different from the punishment of the damned [SOURCE].

 

So even though Catherine of Genoa’s understanding isn’t Church teaching (i.e., the fire of love stuff), it is much more in line with the way the Magisterium is talking about purgatory these days than the former graphic tortures stuff.

When it comes down to it, what is Church teaching is rather modest and might be summarized briefly in a few propositions, such as: (1) There is a purification that occurs after death for the saved who are in need of purification before entering heaven, (2) the faithful on earth can assist those experiencing this purification by their prayers, through Masses, etc., (3) at least some people do not need this purification before heaven, and (4) the purification involves at least some kind of suffering. (Propositions 3 and 4 are more open to question, though, that propositions 1 and 2.)

I know that there is great suffering in purgatory but what is the best theological view on purgatory ecspecially all the theological thought throughout the last century.  Such as Cardinal Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict) view on purgatory.

I can’t tell you what the best view is, but I can tell you what the Church teaches (see the link to the Catechism above as well as THIS ONE). I can also tell you that Cardinal Ratzinger’s view is much more along the lines of St. Catherine of Genoa’s understanding. In his textbook Eschatology, he conceived of purgatory as an existential encounter with Christ that transforms one. He spoke in these terms:

"Purgatory is not some kind of supra-worldly
concentration camp where one is forced to undergo punishments in a more
or less arbitrary fashion. Rather it is the inwardly necessary process
of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable
of God [i.e. capable of full unity with Christ and God] and thus
capable of unity with the whole communion of saints… Encounter with the
Lord is this transformation.  It is the fire that burns away our dross and re-forms us to be vessels of eternal joy."

Hope this helps!

A reader writes:

Hi, Jimmy,

How much of a person could you replace with prosthetics before they cease to be human?

Okay, first a caution. I hope that you are asking this question for purely theoretical reasons and are not planning on acting on the answer. Doing so is likely to result in unpleasant consequences like imprisonment and damnation.

Arms and legs? Digestive tract? Lungs? Heart? A percentage of the brain?

Yeah, all of those can go and still leave a person human. The key one is the brain, which is the indispensible one. Clearly people can lose parts of their brains and remain human, but if you totally get rid of the brain then you ain’t got a human anymore. A brain in a vat would qualify as a human (albeit a severely disfigured human), but an adult body with its brain cut out would not. How much of the brain one could lose and still have a human well . . . there’s not a single identifiable chunk that you could take out–probably you could take out a lot of different chunks–but if you took out so many that as a whole the disembodied brain experiences systemic failure and irretrivably dies then you’ve taken away so much that what remains ain’t a human. It’s a brain corpse.

(NOTE: See previous remarks on "brain death" for the complexity of this question.)

 

Supposing that you could replace a living body with 100% artificial organs (leaving aside problems of consciousness) – would it continue to be a person but cease to be human?

I’m not sure what you mean here: Do you mean replacing the entire body with synthetic organs INCLUDING the brain or EXCLUDING the brain?

If the former then the resulting brain-in-a-synthetic-body is still a person and a human (although a severely prosthetized human).

If you mean the latter then the question becomes: What do you mean by "synthetic organs"?

If you mean ordinary human organs with a human genetic code that you’ve grown synthetically (e.g., from a stem cell shoggoth) then you could grow an entire person synthetically, which would be either a clone or a designer clone. Such individuals would be both persons and humans.

You might mean something else by "synthetic organs," though. For example, you might mean mechanical organs (like a mechanical heart) or organs that are made of inorganic material or even organic material as long as they don’t have a human genetic code.

If that’s what you mean by synthetic organs then if you totally replace the body, including the critical parts of the brain needed to keep it a live and functioning whole, then what you have is not a human any more. It’s an android or a synthezoid, but not a human being.

Would it be a person, though?

Maybe.

You don’t have to be a human being to be a person, as illustrated by angels and the three Persons of the Trinity. If the resulting entity had a rational intellect then it would be a person.

The problem would be telling a genuine rational intellect from a false one, though. Computers may some day be sufficiently advanced that they can pass the Turing Test and intellectually pass for human beings. Should that ever happen, though, I’m with Justice Katherine Pulaski that they still ain’t persons and have no rights. They’re not really thinking–exercising an intellect–they’re just following very complex programming.

Sorry, no "Android Rights" for Mr. Data!

It could be, though this is a practical impossibility, that someone could design a non-human life form (possibly even based on inorganic molecules) that would have a rational intellect. Such a being would be a person.

 

Would thus replacing your body be considered suicide?

If you replace the whole thing, including the brain, yep. That’s killing you. It doesn’t matter if you transfer your memories to a new medium. The death of the old medium is the death of YOU, and that’s suicide.

If you’re just talking about replacing everything except the brain, then no. That’s not killing you and so is not suicide. It is, however, immoral to do that without a very good reason (and some might argue that it would be immoral even though, though it wouldn’t be suicide).

 

How would such a person relate to the church? The sacraments? They’d lack a human nature …

How non-human physical persons would relate to the Church is a theologically open question. I suspect that if they asked for the sacraments on their own then they would be given them, at least conditionally.

How your brain in a synthetic body would relate to the Church is a more clear matter. You would be able to receive the sacraments, but since some sacraments depend on physical contact (e.g., baptism, confirmation), you’d have to let your brain be touched as part of the process. I highly recommend using sterilized water and oil in a sterilized environment for that due to the risk of viral or bacteriological infection.

Would their salvation depend on their status before becoming a machine? Would nothing they do after transformation effect their chances of getting to heaven?

If what you’ve got continues to be you (the brain in a synthetic body model) then you can continue to act as a moral agent and affect your salvation.

On the other hand, if it continues to be you but there’s an accident of some kind so that you can’t function properly mentally (e.g., your brain accidentally gets cooked in the process of transferring it to the new body) then your situation is like that of anybody who goes into a coma during a medical procedure. If you went into it with unrepented mortal sin on your soul, you’re doomed. If you went in with attrition for your sins and receive the anointing of the sick then you’re saved. If you went into it with contrition for your sins or no mortal sins then you’re all set.

If what you’ve got is a synthetic but nonetheless real person then he is capable of acting as a moral agent and affecting his salvation.

Similar considerations apply for a synthetic person who is mentally impaired (as when you went into the coma in the previous example).

If what you’ve got is an imitation person that does not have a real intellect (e.g., a Mr. Data) then he is a non-person and thus has no salvation to gain or lose, regardless of how good an impression of a human being he’s able to pull off.

This applies even if the android (or whatever) thinks that it’s you because your memories have been loaded into it.

 

A reader writes:

In light of the recent events (Katrina, Rita, etc.) some folks are attaching prophetic significance to daily events pointing toward a culmination, and encouraging people to store up 6 months worth of food, among other things.   Some of this was given out (verbally) at our prayer meeting. 

I told the people to use a lot of caution and discernment for such a message.  I privately corresponded with the person who gave the message and told her I had some major problems with it, including making definitive statements about God chastising New Orleans and the US. 

My wife is from a country affected by the tsunami and they lost 15 to 20 K children in the tsunami.  Who was God chastising for that?  I just don’t think we can make specific judgments about these things.  This person is also making connections between withdrawal from Gaza and hurricanes/natural disasters (I believe some of that may be coming from 700 Club and others).

I told the person that if they really believed these warnings and instructions were from the Lord the they should be shared with a priest/bishop in union with the Magisterium of Rome.  If that priest/bishop concluded that this was "from the Lord", then perhaps ( and only perhaps) some credibility could be lent to them.

Do you have any thoughts on this?   We went back and forth with this person by email about five or six times and still she keeps defending the storing of food, etc.  My wife was wondering how in the world most of the poor nations would be able to store up anything, particularly when they generally don’t know where there next meall is coming from.

Since I’m not familiar with the messages, I don’t know if they were meant for folks in other countries or just for the U.S. (i.e., is this supposed to be a worldwide disaster that necessitates the food storing or just one that hits the U.S.) I’d also think that the advice would be "Store it if you can," but in parts of the world where folks can’t, that’s obviously not an option.

That being said, it sounds to me as if you have a pretty good take on the situation. Skepticism here is warranted, and any kind of warning this dire ought to be run past the bishop before people are told to do something as dramatic as storing up six months worth of food for their families.

Not that it’s a bad idea to have that much food in reserve. You never know what may happen in this day and age, and it’s not at all unreasonable to have some food an water available as emergency supplies. Virtually everybody could be hit with a disaster of some kind–natural or artificial–in which they might need supplies until disaster relief can get established.

As regular blog readers know, my grandmother is living in such a situation RIGHT NOW due to Hurricane Rita, and I could join her at any time since the San Andreas Fault can have "The Big One" at a moment’s notice.

No matter where you live, something like that is a possibility (even if it’s just fallout being blown over from from terrorists detonating a nuke in a city a couple of states away).

I therefore consider it advisable for folks to have a certain amount of emergency food and water on hand–at least a few days to a couple of weeks worth–as well as other disaster survival equipment (medicines–particularly prescription medicines you need to take–flashlights, radios, matches, maps, weapons, batteries, iPods, etc.).

Six months, though, is a LONG TIME, and it would require something REALLY AMAZINGLY HUGE to disrupt the economy so severely that anybody would need six months of food. I mean, we’re likely talking about someting on the order of a civilizational reboot at that point (it can’t take FEMA that long to get supplies into the area following a lesser disaster; you only need six months of food if you expect government aid to not be there for six months, and it’s hard to see how that could happen in the current media and political environment without a civilizational reboot in progress). The only things that springs to mind that would be that severe would be something like an asteroid strike or a nearby star going supernova or a doomsday bug or something.

So it sends a really scary message to be telling folks that they need six months of food, and anything that alarming–and EXPENSIVE for a family–ought to be run past Church authorities. That’s not just so people won’t be put to needless worry, it’s also so that if there really WERE a huge disaster coming, folks could be warned.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the bishop will rule the right way, but one needs to turn to the authorities  that Christ has given his Church.

Furthermore, skepticism regarding any message so dire is the appropriate strategy. The accuracy rate of people with dire messages like this is remarkably LOW, and that has to take that into account when evaluating new cases of folks with dire warnings–particularly if they have no track record of accurate predictions or other evidence that their messages are anything other than the product of their imaginations.

Hope that helps!

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Mr. Akin,

In your opinion is it contrary to Catholic faith to hold a "cessationist" position on tongues?

As phrased, the answer to the question is no.

I should explain, a couple of things, though.

First, cessationism is a position that is common in many conservative Protestant circles that holds that the various miraculous gifts mentioned by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 have ceased to be given. In particular, this view holds that the gift of tongues has ceased to be given.

There are several different flavors of cessationism, WHICH YOU CAN READ ABOUT HERE.

From what I can tell, the cessationist viewpoint may have grown in Protestant circles as a reaction to the historic reports of miracles in Catholic circles (AS IN THESE QUOTES FROM THE CHURCH FATHERS). Since these miracles were regarded as evidence for the truth of the Catholic faith, Protestant apologetics sought to undercut them by claiming that God no longer did miracles–or at least miracles of this sort–and so all reported miracles were false, either being hoaxes, legends, or products of diabolical activity.

The problem with cessationism, even from a Protestant viewpoint, is that it is very hard to square with Scripture. There is no clear teaching anywhere in the New Testament that God will cease giving the different miraculous gifts prior to the Second Coming. Various verses are offered by cessationists to argue their case, the best of them being 1 Corinthians 13:8. Here it is in context:

8: Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as
for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
9: For our  knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
10: but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. 
11:
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I
reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
12:
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in
part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully
understood.

The statement that prophecies will pass away and that tongues will cease is taken as evidence for the cessationist view.

The problem is that this passage contains time cues that make this interpretation implausible. Verse 10 refers to the imperfect (e.g., our partial knowledge, partial prophecies, etc.) passing away "when the perfect comes"–i.e., when we have perfect knowledge of God. This would seem to be something that does not apply in this life. We won’t have perfect knowledge of God until (a) we die or (b) the Second Coming happens.

Cessationists sometimes respond by arguing that we do have perfect knowledge of God–relative to our state in this life–in that the New Testament has been completed and so we have a complete scriptural knowledge of God.

Catholics might be quick to point out the problems with the doctrine of sola scriptura at this juncture, but this does not remove the cessationist’s argument. It merely pushes it back a step. While Catholics would not necessarily look on Scripture as providing a complete (perfect) knowledge of God in keeping with the state of this life (though some might hold to the material sufficiency of Scripture), Catholics would hold that the revelation Christian faith is closed and has been since the death of the last apostle (CCC 66-67). In other words, the deposit of faith is closed, and in that sense we do have complete knowledge of God according to the state of this life.

But this is not the only time cue that the passage contains. In verse 12 it refers to the time when perfection comes as when we will see "face to face" and "understand fully, even as [we] have been fully understood." These references point much more strongly to a direct encounter with God than a mediate one through his written (or unwritten) word. The references to faces and to our already being "fully understood" are indicative of a personal subject that we will see face to face and that already in Paul’s day (before the closing of the New Testament and the deposit of faith!) understood people fully. This strongly indicates that the subject is God (or God in Christ) and thus points to our personal encounters with God–at death or the Second Coming–as the time when the miraculous gifts will be done away with.

There are other passages that cessationists cite, but 1 Corinthians 13:8 tends to be cited the most (in my experience).

When I was a Protestant, I reviewed this subject in rather considerable detail (by which I mean that I studied my brains out on it) and concluded that the texts offered in favor of cessationism don’t prove what advocates of the position would like them to. Indeed, 1 Corinthians 13:8-12 is actually a good text for arguing against cessationism.

Despite this, one could hold that the gift of tongues has ceased without being in violation of Catholic faith.

To understand this, one need to distinguish between two different forms of faith: divine faith and Catholic faith.
Divine faith is faith in whatever God has revealed. Catholic faith is faith in whatever the Church has infallibly proposed to be divinely revealed.

Now, 1 Corinthians 13:8-12 could be interpreted as containing a divine revelation that tongues will not cease until the Second Coming. However, the Church has not infallibly defined that tongues will not cease until the Second Coming, therefore it is not contrary to Catholic faith to hold that they have. A Catholic does have the theological liberty to hold this position.

That being said, taking a categorical cessationist position goes against the grain of Catholic teaching. Throughout the ages there have been reports of various miraculous gifts, including tongues, and the Church has an open but cautious attitude toward these, in keeping with St. Paul’s injunctions:

So, my brethren, earnestly  desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues (1 Cor. 14:39)

and

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

While a complete cessationist view on tongues would rub against the grain of Catholic theology, a more moderate position would be much more in line with traditional Catholic thought. For example, if one were to maintain that, in our age, the authentic gift of tongues is a rare phenomenon then that would be consonant with the historic Catholic view.

It also would go along with what we know of parallel gifts in biblical times, for in the Old Testament there wre a number of periods in which the gift of prophecy was seldom given or even not given. God gave it at certain times and not others. One might hold a similar view of tongues–that God grants it in certain periods of Church history but not others.

That would leave open the question of whether we are presently living in a period in which he is granting it in a more common manner than has been the case in most periods of Church history.

Hope this helps!