Category: Theology

What Every OCD Sufferer Should Know About Vows and Promises

Our Lady Undoer of KnotsHave you ever felt a sudden compulsion to promise or vow something to God, even though it seemed irrational?

If so, you’re not alone.

Sudden, rash impulses are part of the human experience (due to original sin), and for some people, impulses of this kind are a frequent thing.

Recently I received an email from a gentleman who was concerned about promises and vows he felt driven to make by obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

He was concerned that he was making, or might be making, sudden, irrational promises that would bind him under pain of sin, including mortal sin.

I’ll keep his email to me private, but I wanted to share my response so that it can be of assistance to others.

 

The Basic Response

First, here’s what I sent the gentleman in reply to the query:

Dear [Name Withheld],

Thank you for writing. The problem you are experiencing is one that many people who suffer from OCD have.

The good news is that promises/vows/oaths that are the result of a pathological thought process (which OCD is) are not binding.

Ignore them.

When the impulse comes to make such a promise, do your best to put the issue aside and not worry about it.

If you compulsively make a promise anyway (or think/feel that you have), recognize that it is not binding on you.

You will please God more if you resist the pathology of OCD by ignoring such promises (and, to the extent possible, ignoring the impulse to make them).

Setting aside such thoughts is a sign of health, and working towards a healthy thought process is what pleases God.

I hope this helps, and God bless you!

Jimmy Akin

That’s the basic advice I would give anyone dealing with this kind of concern, but there is more we can say, which may also be of help.

 

The Limits of Promises

One of the things people sometimes forget is that promises have limits and unspoken conditions.

Suppose that you promise your spouse you’ll pick up some ice cream on the way home from work so your family can have it for dessert that night.

But after work you are kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to drive the kidnapper to another state.

By the time you get shed of the kidnapper, it’s way past dinnertime, and you arrive home an exhausted wreck.

No sane spouse would expect you to have fulfilled your promise to pick up ice cream under these conditions.

There is an unstated condition when you make such a promise that you will keep it if it is reasonable to do so.

If something happens so that it becomes unreasonable (or even impossible) to keep the promise then you have no obligation to do so.

This offers hope to people who are suffering from OCD because it allows them to introduce reasonability as a check on any promises they may have made or fear that they have made.

They can ask themselves, “Is it reasonable for me to keep this promise?” and if the answer is no then they do not need to.

And the answer will be “it is not reasonable” more often than you might think . . .

 

Promises and Compulsion

Let’s go back to our kidnapper example. Suppose that the kidnapper was of the opposite sex and, while you were being forced to drive to another state, the kidnapper pointed a gun at your head and said, “Promise you’ll marry me.”

“But I’m already married,” you say.

“Doesn’t matter,” the kidnapper replies. “Promise to divorce your spouse and marry me instead—or I’ll kill you.”

To save your life, you make the promise.

But you are absolutely not bound to keep it. It was made under duress.

There is thus another limit on promises: To be binding, they have to be made freely, not under compulsion.

This is where obsessive-compulsive disorder comes in: There may not be a kidnapper physically holding a gun to your head, but there is something going on in your head—the OCD—that is creating a compulsion.

Promises that you feel compelled to make as a result of the condition thus do not count, and God does not expect you to keep them.

One way of seeing this is to change the situation a bit: Suppose that, instead of feeling compelled to make promises to God, your OCD made you feel compelled to make promises to your spouse.

No sane spouse of an OCD sufferer would expect such promises to be kept.

Instead, as soon as the OCD started manifesting itself in this way, a reasonable and loving spouse would say, “Honey, I know your OCD is trying to attack you by making you feel you need to make all these promises to me, but don’t worry. You don’t have to keep them. I release you from them all. Put them out of your mind and focus on having a healthy thought process.”

Well, guess what: God is not less reasonable or less loving than a spouse. He’s more reasonable and more loving.

Therefore, God does not expect you to keep promises made under the effects of OCD. He wants you to ignore them and to focus on thinking in as healthy a way as you can.

 

Promises to Sin

Sometimes people with OCD feel a compulsion to make promises to do something sinful. These also are not binding. Quite the opposite!

Suppose that, on your interstate flight, the kidnapper pointed a gun at your head and said, “Promise that you’ll help me rob a bank.”

To save your life, you do so, but then the kidnapper somehow loses the gun.

“You’re still going to help me knock over that bank, right?” the kidnapper says. “You promised!”

It doesn’t matter, though. You have no obligation to help the kidnapper rob the bank. In fact, you better not—especially now that the threat to your life is gone—because it’s illegal.

That illegality is key. Under civil law, no contract between parties is valid if it involves promises to do something illegal.

Even if two businessmen enter into a contract in good faith, believing that what they are promising to each other is perfectly legal, the contract will be null and void as soon as it is discovered that the terms entail an illegal act.

The same thing is true in the moral sphere: Promises to do something immoral are automatically null and void.

If your OCD is manifesting so that you feel compelled to make promises involving something sinful, that’s just all the more reason to set them aside and ignore them!

 

Vows and Oaths

I should say a word about vows and oaths, which are solemn forms of promises.

I don’t want to encourage scrupulosity by going into the details here of what makes a vow or an oath, but some OCD sufferers might think that just because they have the word “vow” or “oath” in their head instead of “promise” that it’s somehow more binding.

Not when OCD is involved.

Obviously, basic morality is still a fundamental requirement of vows and oaths. Just like you can’t bind yourself with a promise to do something sinful, you can’t bind yourself with a vow or an oath to do something sinful, either.

Adding solemnity to the promise doesn’t change the basic requirement that it be moral.

Also, precisely because of the greater solemnity of vows and oaths, they even more emphatically require freedom.

If freedom is required to give even basic promises, it’s even more clearly required to be able to make a more solemn promise.

Therefore, if your OCD is driving you to make vows or oaths, the compulsive aspect of the behavior prevents them from having the necessary freedom to be binding.

As before, the thing to do is to put them aside and ignore them.

You need to focus on developing healthy habits of thought, and that means ignoring compulsive promises of any kind.

God wants you to be happy and healthy, and ignoring such promises—and other manifestations of OCD—is what will please him.

Praying Across Time

timeIn the Back to the Future movies, Doc Brown chides Marty McFly for not thinking fourth-dimensionally.

He means that Marty—like most of us—is letting his options be limited too much by the here and now.

Marty’s not taking into account the possibilities that open up if we’re not stuck in that one moment of time we call the present.

Something similar happens in theology . . .

 

God and Time

We cannot grasp the full reality of who and what God is. He is infinite, and our minds are only finite.

As a result, we often depict God as if he were a human being—just as a way of helping us understand him.

That’s why Scripture talks about him having a strong right arm (a symbol of his omnipotence) and eyes that survey the whole earth (a symbol of his omniscience).

But in reality, apart from the Incarnation, he doesn’t have body parts.

One of the ways we picture God is as an old man—“the Ancient of Days,” to use Daniel’s phrase. We also picture him as an immortal Being who will live on and on into the endless future.

This envisions God as if he is bound by time the same way we are, and it has implications for how we relate to him.

If God is bound to time like us, always stuck in the present as that moment rolls ever forward into the future, then it would make no sense to pray for certain things.

Suppose that someone has died. In the here and now, that person’s eternal fate is sealed, for “it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

If God is bound by time the way we are, it would make no sense to pray for the person to be saved in the moment he died. He either was or wasn’t.

But things are not so simple.

 

God and Eternity

In reality, God is not bound by time. He is completely outside of time. All of history is simultaneously present to him like a giant mural.

From his eternal perspective outside of time, God simultaneously knows everything that exists, whether in the past, the present, or the future.

He is also capable of interacting with history at any point. This is illustrated by the fact that he not only created the universe in the beginning, he also—from his eternal perspective—sustains it at every moment of its existence.

The consequences of these facts are significant: If God is aware of everything in history then he knows it if on April 15 I am praying for a man who died on April 12.

Further, if he is capable of interacting with every point in history, he can give his grace to that man—as he is dying on April 12—in light of the request I make on April 15.

It thus can make sense for me to pray for the salvation of someone who is already dead.

Usually, our prayers concern the future, but they can also concern the present, and as this illustration shows, they can even concern the past.

We are thus capable of praying across the fullness of time—for things past, present, and future.

 

C.S. Lewis and Padre Pio

The idea of praying across time in this way is not something unique to me.

C.S. Lewis famously discussed it in his book Miracles (see Appendix B: “On ‘Special Providences’”).

A while back, a friend asked if I could name any Catholic figures who had discussed the idea, and off the top of my head, I couldn’t, though I was sure there were.

Recently, I came across a reference to such a figure: Padre Pio is reported to have made such prayers. Susanne Tassone writes:

A doctor who was very close to Padre Pio received a letter from a woman whose daughter was near death. The mother implored the future saint for his priestly prayers and blessings. The doctor was unable to get this letter to Padre Pio until several days after he had received it. After reading the letter to Padre Pio, this physician asked how should he answer it. Pio responded, “Fiat.”

The doctor knew that some time had passed since he had received the letter, and that the girl was at death’s door. He was perplexed by Padre Pio’s assurance that all was done, that the request for prayer would work. The Capuchin priest continued, “Maybe you don’t know that I can pray even now for the happy death of my great-grandfather.” “But he has been dead for many, many years,” replied the doctor. “I know that too,” said Padre Pio. “Let me explain by giving you an example.

“You and I both die, and, through the good fortune and the goodness and mercy of the Lord, we are obliged to stay in purgatory for 100 years. During these years nobody prays for us or has a Mass offered for the release of our souls. The 100 years pass, and somebody thinks of Padre Pio and the good doctor and has Masses offered. For Our Lord, the past does not exist; the future does not exist. Everything is an eternal present. Those prayers had already been taken into account so that even now I can pray for the happy death of my great-grandfather! . . . ”

The little girl in need of prayer, by the way, was healed (Praying with the Saints for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, 71-72).

I’m sure that the concept of praying for past events has been discussed by various Catholic authors, and perhaps someone can point to additional examples, but the logic behind such prayers is sound.

In fact, it would be sound even if God were not outside of time.

 

The Core of the Issue

All that is needed for requests concerning the past to be efficacious are two things:

  1. Knowledge of what a future request will be, and
  2. Possession of this knowledge when it is needed to affect matters.

A being does not have to be outside of time to have these two things. It is quite possible for us to have them in the here and now.

Suppose that every Tuesday when you get home from work, your spouse asks you to order a pizza for dinner. It’s now a Tuesday, so you know (for practical purposes) that when you get home your spouse will ask you to do this. You have foreknowledge of the request.

But suppose that this particular Tuesday there is some reason you won’t be able to order the pizza once you get home. You therefore order it in advance and schedule it to arrive at dinnertime.

When you get home, your spouse makes the request, and you’re able to announce, “Already taken care of!”

In this case, you had both of the things you needed: Knowledge of the future request and possession of this knowledge in time to affect matters.

Of course, one could quibble about whether one really had “knowledge” of the request, since humans don’t have infallible certitude regarding what their spouses will ask in the future.

But this objection would not apply to God, who does have infallible certitude regarding the requests that will be made to him. His omniscience guarantees that.

Thus even if God were not outside of time—if he were stuck to the present the way we are—then he would still be able to affect matters based on his omniscient knowledge of what people will ask him in the future.

Unlike Marty McFly, God has no problem thinking fourth-dimensionally.

 

The Practice of Praying Across Time

The possibility of praying about things in the past raises the question of when it is appropriate to do so.

I would answer this question by dividing things in the past into three categories:

  1. Things we know happened
  2. Things we’re uncertain about
  3. Things we know didn’t happen

 

Things That Didn’t Happen

The most straightforward answer concerns the last category—things we know didn’t happen.

It is not appropriate to pray for these things.

The reason is that we know it was God’s will to allow our history to unfold in a way that didn’t include them. To pray for something we know didn’t happen would be to pray contrary to God’s known will.

For example, we know that the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. We know that God allowed that to happen as part of his providence, and it would be contrary to God’s known will to pray for the Twin Towers never to have fallen.

It would be equally improper to pray for things we know won’t happen in the future, because they are also contrary to God’s known will.

Thus God periodically told Jeremiah not to pray for the welfare of the people because he was determined to bring judgment on them (Jer. 7:16, 11:14, 14:11).

In the same way, it would be in appropriate for us to pray contrary to things we know will happen in the future (e.g., that the end of the world not happen).

 

Things That Did Happen

The answer for the first category—things we know did happen—is more complex.

Suppose you are considering praying—all these years later—that at least some people survive the 9/11 attacks.

Well, we know that some people did survive the attacks, so we know that it was God’s will to allow this to happen.

Praying that some survive thus is not praying contrary to God’s will. In fact, it’s praying in accordance with his known will.

It could even be that God allowed some of the people who survived the 9/11 attacks to do so because you are praying for them now.

I thus can’t say there’s anything wrong with praying for things that you know to have happened.

I do, however, have a note of caution: God has designed us as time-bound creatures to be principally oriented toward the future, not the past.

There is a sense in which, like St. Paul, we need to be “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13).

Spending too much time thinking about the past can lead us to neglect the attention we need to give to future concerns.

I can’t rule out that some might grow closer to God by praying for something they know God allowed to happen in the past, but it’s easy to see how this kind of prayer could become a spiritual distraction from more urgent concerns.

 

Things We’re Uncertain About

The case where praying concerning past events is most appropriate is the middle one—things we aren’t certain about.

Suppose it is 9/11 and you’ve just watched the Twin Towers go down on television.

You know someone who worked in one of the towers, and that person either died in the collapse or he got away, but you don’t know which.

Because you don’t know, it’s appropriate for you to say, “God, please let him have escaped!”

In this case, you don’t know whether it was or wasn’t God’s will, so you’re neither praying against God’s known will nor praying for something you already know happened.

That’s the situation we’re in with most of our prayers: We don’t know whether God will grant them or not, but he encourages us “always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1).

This principle has a special application to the dying.

We can’t objectively tell whether a person is in a state of grace at the point of death, so this knowledge is by its nature inaccessible to us.

It thus makes sense, whenever someone has died, to ask God to have given the person the graces he needed for salvation at the moment of death.

In view of the stakes involved—eternal life and eternal death—I regularly make this prayer when I hear of someone dying, and especially if it is a friend or loved one.

Care to join me?

Genesis and Justification: Misreading a Famous Text

abraham_and_stars_1xThere’s a famous passage in Genesis that often comes up in discussions of salvation. It says Abraham “believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6).

Protestant pastors frequently preach on this passage, and they frequently get it wrong.

Really wrong.

Here’s why . . .

 

Why It Comes Up

This passage frequently comes up in preaching about salvation because it’s used that way in the New Testament.

Paul quotes it in two places (Rom. 4:3-25, Gal. 3:6), and James quotes it once (Jas. 2:23).

This makes sense, because the Genesis passage connects faith and righteousness.

It was thus logical for the New Testament authors to use the passage in discussions of how we become justified (righteous) through faith in Christ.

It’s also logical for us today to also use the passage—whether we’re Protestant or Catholic.

But we need to use it the right way.

Unfortunately, that’s not always done.

 

The Wrong Way to Use It

Protestant preachers frequently use Genesis 15:6 (and Paul’s quotations of it) to argue for the classical Protestant understanding of justification. That model goes something like this:

  1. We are all sinners and therefore unrighteous before God.
  2. In our sinful state, we can’t become righteous before God by good works.
  3. However, if we place our faith in God, he will forgive our sins and reckon us righteous even though we are not.
  4. This reckoning is something that happens as a once-for-all event in the Christian life known as “justification.”

Points 1 and 2 are true, and points 3 and 4—though flawed—contain elements of truth.

The problem that concerns us here is that Protestant preachers tend to assume Genesis 15:6 maps onto the classical Protestant model in a straightforward way.

At first glance, this isn’t unreasonable, for Paul uses the verse to support justification by faith rather than works.

But the matter isn’t as straightforward as people assume.

 

A One-to-One Mapping

If Genesis 15:6 mapped directly onto the classical Protestant model of justification, the following would result:

  1. Abraham was a sinner and therefore unrighteous before God.
  2. In his sinful state, Abraham could not become righteous before God by good works.
  3. But Abraham came to have faith in God in Genesis 15:6, so he forgave Abraham’s sins and reckoned him righteous even though he was not.
  4. This reckoning was a once-for-all event in Abraham’s life, his justification before God.

But when you read Genesis 15, this is not what is happening.

Not. At. All.

 

Read the Context

To understand what’s happening, you need to start by reading the events that led up to it. Those are found in Genesis 14.

Basically, a war started between two groups of kings, one of whom was the king of the wicked city Sodom. During the war, Abraham’s kinsman Lot—who had been living in Sodom—was taken captive.

When Abraham heard about this, he mustered a group of more than three hundred fighting men from his own household and defeated the opposing kings. He thus rescued Lot, the other captives, and their goods.

Afterward, in thanksgiving for his victory in battle, Abraham went to Melchizedek—a priest of God most high—and gave him a tenth of all the spoils.

Then the king of Sodom offered Abraham a reward, telling him, “Give me the persons, but take the goods for yourself” (Gen. 14:21).

Abraham refused this reward, saying that he’d sworn an oath not to take anything from the king of Sodom.

God then comes to Abraham in a vision and says, “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great” (Gen. 15:1).

Abraham asks how this will be, for he has no children, and his current heir would be Eliezer of Damascus, a slave born in his household.

God tells him, “That man shall not be your heir; your own son shall be your heir.” Then he takes Abraham outside and has him look at the stars, telling him, “So shall your descendants be” (Gen. 15:4-5).

At this point we read: “And he believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

 

An Initial Question

We should note there is an ambiguity in Genesis 15:6—it says that “he reckoned it to him” as righteousness.

This can be read two ways: (1) God reckoned Abraham righteous or (2) Abraham reckoned God righteous.

The latter has been supported by some interpreters, including Jewish ones, and it makes sense in context: Abraham believed that God would give him a multitude of descendants, and he regarded this this as a sign of God’s righteous goodness.

However, this is not the way the New Testament takes the verse. On all three occasions where it’s quoted, the authors understand God as reckoning Abraham as righteous.

For Christians, that guarantees that this is a proper way of looking at the text (even if it is not necessarily the only way of looking at it, since Scripture operates on more than one level).

 

A Very Different Picture

If we understand God reckoning Abraham righteous, how well does the passage match the classical Protestant view of justification?

Not well at all.

Notice how different the whole approach of the text is. Abraham is not being presented as a sinner who can’t redeem himself by good works but who then comes to have faith in God and who is then forgiven his sins and declared righteous (even though he is not) in a once-for-all, life-changing event.

Quite the opposite is true! Abraham is already a follower of God, someone who already has faith in him, and the context stresses Abraham’s good works and righteousness:

  • He defeated the evil kings.
  • He rescued Lot and the other captives.
  • He went to a priest of God and gives thanks for the victory.
  • He refused any reward from the wicked king of Sodom.
  • And so God himself promised to give Abraham a reward instead.

The fact God is rewarding Abraham for what he has done shows this isn’t a case of a sinner coming to God and repenting so he can obtain forgiveness. It’s God rewarding a follower for faithful service.

That means Abraham isn’t acquiring righteousness here for the first time. He is already righteous, as his actions have shown.

Then Abraham believes the incredible promise that he will have a multitude of descendants, despite his age (cf. Rom. 4:19, Heb. 11:12), and God reckons that act of belief as a new act of righteousness on Abraham’s part.

Some translations bring this aspect out better than others. The New American Bible does a particularly good job. It says that the Lord: “attributed it to him as an act of righteousness.”

Notice, by the way, that Abraham’s act of faith also wasn’t generic in nature. Abraham already believed in and trusted God in a general way. Here he is believing something very specific: that God will give him a multitude of descendants—a point Paul recognizes when he uses the verse (Rom. 4:17-22).

And notice the righteousness isn’t a counterfactual, purely legal thing: Believing God when he tells you he will do something is a righteous act. Abraham did something actually righteous here.

All of this means that we need to be careful when we apply this verse to discussions of justification.

It is relevant to the subject. Thus Paul makes the point that Abraham wasn’t circumcised at the time this happened (Rom. 4:9-12), so God can view someone as righteous even though he’s not circumcised and thus doesn’t have works of the Jewish Law (Rom. 3:28-30).

But it’s a mistake to map the passage onto the classical Protestant view of justification.

God’s Elect in 1 Clement

divine electionCalvinist theology places a great deal of emphasis on the concept of God’s elect.

The term “elect” is taken from the Greek word eklektos, which means “chosen.”

In Calvinist thought, the elect are those that have been chosen by God to be saved on the last day. The Westminster Confession of Faith states, “God hath appointed the elect unto glory” (3:6).

This sense of the term is not unique to Calvinism. It is also the way the term has traditionally been used in Catholic theology, from which Calvinism inherited it.

However, it is important to be careful about the way terms have come to be used in theology, because language changes over time, and sometimes the meaning a term has in later texts does not correspond to the one it has in earlier ones.

A classic example of this is “heresy.” Originally, the Greek term hairesis just meant “opinion” or “sect” (i.e., the group of people who hold a particular opinion), but today it means something very different.

What about “elect”? Can we count on early texts using it in the sense later theologies have?

 

Multiple Senses of “Elect”

It’s easy to show from the Bible that the term isn’t always used in the later, theological sense. When Jesus is described in John 1:34 as the “Chosen One” (eklektos) of God, it does not mean that God has chosen Jesus to be saved on the final day.

Similarly, there are various passages in the Old Testament where God’s people Israel is described as his “chosen” (Heb., bakhir; LXX, eklektos; e.g., 1 Chr. 16:13, Ps. 105:6, Is. 65:9).

However, if we set these aside and look at early Christian texts that speak of a group of people in God’s new dispensation as “the elect,” what do we find?

A striking example of where the term is not used in the later theological sense is found in 1 Clement, and it is worth looking at the way this document uses it.

 

Introducing 1 Clement

1 Clement is a letter written from Rome to Corinth in the first century. It is often dated to around A.D. 96, but it is more plausibly dated to the first half of A.D. 70.

Although written in a corporate manner (1 Clem. 65:2 describes it as “The letter of the Romans to the Corinthians”), its eloquence reveals that it is the product of a single author (not a committee), as was virtually universal for letters at this time.

The extensive knowledge of the Old Testament that its author clearly possesses suggests that he was of Jewish extraction.

Various early Christian sources identify the author as Clement, a bishop of Rome, and there is no good reason to doubt this identification.

It is significant for our purposes is that this Clement was a disciple of both Peter and Paul.

He may be the same Clement mentioned in Philippians 4:3, and 1 Clement describes Peter and Paul as men of “our generation” (5:1-7). Both Peter and Paul are known to have spent significant amounts of time at Rome, and both were martyred there—likely just a handful of years before the letter was written.

Although 1 Clement is not part of the New Testament, the fact it was written so early and by a disciple of Peter and Paul make its discussion of the elect significant, and it may shed light on the way this term is used in New Testament texts.

So how is the concept is handled in 1 Clement?

 

Election in 1 Clement

The first mention of the elect in 1 Clement occurs in its opening passage. Responding to a crisis that has occurred in the church of Corinth—whereby the leaders of that church had been unjustly expelled from office—the author notes that this “unholy rebellion” is “both foreign and strange to the elect of God” (1:1).

From this we may infer that God’s elect are to be characterized by holiness and due order in church affairs.

Clement next comments on how the Corinthians have made great efforts to seek the salvation of others. He writes:

It was your struggle,  both day and night, on behalf of the whole fellowship of believers,  to save the total number of his elect with mercy and conscientiousness (2:4).

This passage uses the term “elect” in a way distinctly different from its later theological use.

Here “the total number of his [God’s] elect” is identified with “the whole fellowship of believers”—a usage reminiscent of the Old Testament passages that speak of the people of Israel collectively as God’s chosen.

We thus need to be alert to the idea that Clement simply envisions the Christian community in the same way: Christians as a whole are God’s new elect or chosen people.

This understanding is strengthened by the fact he here says that the Corinthians have struggled to ensure that “the total number of his elect” be saved, for it suggests that the total number of the elect might not be saved.

This makes better sense if the elect are conceived of as Christians in general rather than those who will be saved on the last day. The former (people who have professed faith in Jesus Christ and been baptized) are not guaranteed salvation, but those who will be saved on the last day—by definition—are.

The natural sense of the passage is thus that the Corinthians have made great efforts to ensure the salvation of all believers, though this salvation is not guaranteed. (Indeed, Clement later warns those who fomented the Corinthian rebellion that they need to repent or they will be “driven out from his [Christ’s] hope,” literal translation; 57:2).

As we will see, this corporate understanding of the elect is consistent with all of the other references Clement makes to the elect.

Clement notes that, to Peter and Paul “a great multitude of the elect was gathered” (6:1).

He also refers to us approaching the Father, “who made us his own chosen [eklogēs] portion” (29:1)—an idea strongly reminiscent of and undoubtedly based on Israel as God’s portion, which he chose (cf. Deut. 7:6, 14:2, 32:9).

It is important to note that here Clement conceives of Roman and Corinthian Christians as a whole—not just certain individuals among them—as being God’s chosen.

Later he quotes from Psalm 118:25-26, writing:

“With the innocent one you [God] will be innocent and with the elect you will be elect and with the perverse you will deal perversely.” 

Therefore let us cling to the innocent and the righteous, as these are the elect of God (46:3-4).

Here he identifies the elect as “the innocent and the righteous”—terms that can characterize Christians in general.

In the same chapter, he writes:

Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, for it says, “Woe to that person, it would be better for him if he had not been born than to cause one of my elect to sin. It would have been better for him to be tied to a millstone and to sink into the sea than to turn away one of my elect” (Matt. 26:24 with Luke 17:1-2). Your schism has turned many away . . . ! (46:7-9).

Here Clement envisions it being possible for the elect to sin and to “turn away”—something he says the Corinthian schism has accomplished.

Clement later writes that “All of the elect of God were made perfect in love. Apart from love, nothing is pleasing to God” (49:5), indicating that the elect are to be characterized by love.

Quoting Psalm 32:1-2 (or perhaps Rom. 4:7-9), he writes:

“Blessed are those whose trespasses are forgiven and whose sins are covered up; blessed is the one the sin of whom the Lord does not take into account, and in his mouth there is no deceit.” 

This blessing was given to those who have been chosen [eklelegmenous] by God through Jesus Christ our Lord (50:6-7).

Thus the elect have been given the blessing of forgiveness.

Clement identifies the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as “both the faith and the hope of the elect” (58:2)—meaning they believe and hope in the Persons of the Trinity.

He says that the Roman church will make “earnest prayer and supplication, that the number of those who are counted among his elect throughout the whole world, the Creator of everything may guard unharmed through his beloved child Jesus Christ” (59:2). The elect thus need to be guarded from harm.

In the same chapter, Clement addresses God directly, noting that he “multiplies the nations upon earth and chose [ekleksamenon] from all of them those who love you through Jesus Christ your beloved child” (59:3).

Here the elect are again identified with “those who love you [God] through Jesus Christ”—i.e., the worldwide Christian community.

The above are the only places where 1 Clement refers to “the elect” or uses the corresponding terms for choosing to refer to a group of people in the Christian age.

He also uses these terms to refer to specific chosen individuals, such as Aaron (43:4-5), David (52:2), and Jesus (64:1), as do various passages in the Old Testament. However, these do not pertain to the subject we are examining.

What, then, can be said about 1 Clement’s understanding of the elect?

 

Synthesis

It appears that 1 Clement’s understanding of “the elect” is based on Old Testament passages (e.g., Deut. 7:6, 14:2, 32:9, 1 Chr. 16:13, Ps. 105:6, Is. 65:9) that conceive of Israel as God’s elect or chosen people.

Clement thus refers to members of the Roman and Corinthian churches as a whole (not just certain individuals) as the subject of God’s election, saying that he “made us his own chosen portion” (29:1).

Today, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “the faith and the hope of the elect” (58:2), and from among the nations, God “chose . . . those who love you through Jesus Christ your beloved child” (59:3). The elect are thus identified with the worldwide Christian community.

Therefore, “the total number of his elect” is identified with “the whole fellowship of believers” (2:4).

In Rome in particular, “a great multitude of the elect was gathered” around Peter and Paul (6:1).

The elect have been given the blessing of forgiveness. (50:6-7), and thus can be described as “the innocent and the righteous” (46:3-4), for “all of the elect of God were made perfect in love” (49:5). Consequently, they are to be characterized by holiness and due order in church affairs (1:1).

However, it is possible for members of the elect to sin and to “turn away”—something the Corinthian schism has caused to happen (46:7-9).

It is not guaranteed that “the total number of his elect” will be saved, and the Corinthians themselves have struggled to ensure their salvation (2:4). The Roman church likewise prays that God “may guard [them] unharmed through his beloved child Jesus Christ” (59:2).

 

Conclusion

We thus see that Clement—a disciple of Peter and Paul—conceives of “the elect” simply as the Christian people as a whole, not specifically as that group which will be saved on the last day.

His use of the term thus differs from the use it has in later Catholic and Calvinist theologies.

Given the fact his understanding of election closely corresponds to the Old Testament’s treatment of Israel as God’s elect people—not to mention his early date and the fact he was a disciple of Peter and Paul—this may well shed light on the way the term is used in the New Testament.

However, that is a subject for another time.

The 95 Theses: 8 Things to Know and Share

Luther as Professor, 1529 (oil on panel) by Cranach, Lucas, the Elder (1472-1553); Schlossmuseum, Weimar, Germany; (add.info.: Luther als Professor; Martin Luther (1483-1546);); German, out of copyright

In 1517, Martin Luther drafted a document known as The 95 Theses, and its publication is used to date the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

The recent 500th anniversary of that event focused a good bit of attention on the 95 Theses.

Here are 8 things to know and share . . .

 

1) What are The 95 Theses?

The 95 Theses are a set of propositions that Martin Luther proposed for academic debate. As the name indicates, there are 95 of them.

Despite the fact they played a key role in starting the Protestant Reformation, they do not deal with either of the main Protestant distinctives. They do not mention either justification by faith alone or doing theology by Scripture alone.

Instead, they deal principally with indulgences, purgatory, and the pope’s role with respect to the two.

 

2) Did Luther nail them to a church door?

Despite constant statements to the contrary, the answer appears to be no, he didn’t.

 

3) Are they all bad?

No, they’re not. It can come as a surprise to both Protestants and Catholics, but some of them agree with Catholic teaching.

Here are the first three of Luther’s theses, along with parallel statements from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Thesis 1: When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

    • CCC 1431: Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed.

Thesis 2: This word [i.e., Christ’s call to repent in Mark 4:17] cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.

    • CCC 1427: Jesus calls to conversion. This call is an essential part of the proclamation of the kingdom: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” [Mark 4:17]. In the Church’s preaching this call is addressed first to those who do not yet know Christ and his Gospel. Also, Baptism is the principal place for the first and) fundamental conversion.

Thesis 3: Yet it [i.e., the call to repent in Mark 4:17] does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortification of the flesh.

    • CCC 1430: Jesus’ call to conversion and penance, like that of the prophets before him, does not aim first at outward works, “sackcloth and ashes,” fasting and mortification, but at the conversion of the heart, interior conversion. Without this, such penances remain sterile and false; however, interior conversion urges expression in visible signs, gestures, and works of penance.

 

4) How did the Church respond to The 95 Theses?

In 1520, Pope Leo X published a bull known as Exsurge Domine (Latin, “Arise, Lord”) in which he rejected 41 propositions taken from the writings of Martin Luther up to that time.

However, only a few of the rejected propositions came from The 95 Theses. Most were based on things Luther said in other writings.

 

5) Which of The 95 Theses did Exsurge Domine reject?

The rejected propositions in Exsurge Domine are formulated from things Luther said, but they are not verbatim quotations.

Three of the rejected propositions—numbers 4, 17, and 38—are drawn from The 95 Theses. In each case, the rejected proposition is based on two of Luther’s original theses.

Here are the rejected propositions along with the corresponding theses:

Proposition 4. To one on the point of death, imperfect charity necessarily brings with it great fear, which in itself alone is enough to produce the punishment of purgatory and impedes entrance into the kingdom.

Thesis 14. Imperfect piety or love on the part of the dying person necessarily brings with it great fear; and the smaller the love, the greater the fear.

Thesis 15. This fear or horror is sufficient in itself, to say nothing of other things, to constitute the penalty of purgatory, since it is very near the horror of despair.

Proposition 17. The treasures of the Church from which the pope gives indulgences are not the merits of Christ and of the saints.

Thesis 56. The treasures of the church, out of which the pope distributes indulgences, are not sufficiently discussed or known among the people of Christ.

Thesis 58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the saints, for, even without the pope, the latter always work grace for the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell for the outer man.

Proposition 38. The souls in purgatory are not sure of their salvation, at least (not) all; nor is it proved by any arguments or by the Scriptures that they are beyond the state of meriting or of increasing in charity.

Thesis 19. Nor does it seem proved that souls in purgatory, at least not all of them, are certain and assured of their own salvation, even if we ourselves may be entirely certain of it.

Thesis 18. Furthermore, it does not seem proved, either by reason or Scripture, that souls in purgatory are outside the state of merit, that is, unable to grow in love.

Note that Proposition 17 only deals with the substance of Thesis 58. The part of Thesis 56 that it picks up (“The treasures of the Church from which the pope gives indulgences”) is just to supply the antecedent for the pronoun “they” in Thesis 58. The remainder of Thesis 56 is not commented upon.

Therefore, Exsurge Domine rejected things it saw expressed in theses 14, 15, 18, 19, and 58.

 

6) What did Exsurge Domine say about the rejected propositions?

The bull closes with the following censure:

All and each of the above-mentioned articles or errors [i.e., all 41 of them], as set before you, we condemn, disapprove, and entirely reject as respectively heretical or (aut) scandalous or (aut) false or (aut) offensive to pious ears or (vel) seductive of simple minds and (et) in opposition to Catholic truth.

This kind of condemnation is sometimes referred to as an condemnation in globo (Latin, “as a whole”). They are rejected as a batch, but without indicating which censure applies to which proposition.

The condemnation has to be read with care because in Latin, aut indicates an exclusive “or” (i.e., this or that, but not both) while vel indicates an inclusive “or” (i.e., this or that, but possibly both).

Thus Exsurge Domine indicates that some of the 41 rejected propositions are heretical, some are scandalous, some are false, some are offensive to pious ears—but they are not all four.

The use of aut between these censures tells you that a given proposition may fall into one of these four categories.

The only time an inclusive “or” is used is before the fifth and sixth categories: Some propositions may be “seductive of simple minds and (et) in opposition to Catholic truth.” Here vel is used because things that are heretical (etc.) can also be seductive of simple minds (the fifth category) and obviously would be opposed to Catholic truth (the sixth category).

 

7) What does that mean for The 95 Theses?

It means that Exsurge Domine rejected things expressed in Theses 14, 15, 18, 19, and 58, and it thus warned Catholics away from these theses. However, it does not tell us what the problem was in particular cases. It could have been any of the following:

  • The thesis is heretical
  • The thesis is scandalous
  • The thesis is false
  • The thesis is offensive to pious ears
  • The thesis is seductive of simple minds
  • The thesis is opposed to Catholic truth

The difference between these is significant:

  1. If something is heretical then it is both false and contrary to a divinely revealed dogma
  2. If it is scandalous then it can lead people into sin
  3. If it is false then it is not true, though it may not be opposed to a dogma
  4. If it is offensive to pious ears then it is badly and offensively phrased
  5. If it is seductive of simple minds then it can mislead ordinary people
  6. If it is opposed to Catholic truth then it could be opposed in one of the five ways named above.

It is important to note that if the problem is (1) or (3) then the Thesis is necessarily false.

However, if the problem is (2), (4), or (5) then the Thesis is not necessarily false—it could be technically true but phrased offensively, phrased in a misleading way, or phrased in a way that could lead people to sin.

Because Exsurge Domine doesn’t assign particular censures to particular propositions, it doesn’t tell us what the status of the theses in question are. It warns us away from them but leaves it up to theologians to classify the particular problem with a thesis.

 

8) Does the fact that Exsurge Domine only rejects things said in five of the theses mean that the other 90 are okay?

No. This does not give the rest of The 95 Theses a clean bill of health. They can also be problematic, they just weren’t among those dealt with in Exsurge Domine.

It would be interesting to go through The 95 Theses and analyze of the degree to which each of them fits or doesn’t fit with Catholic thought, but that would be a lengthy effort that would go far beyond what can be accomplished in a blog post.

If Enough People Reject Church Teaching, Does That Make It Wrong?

Dissent_magazine_US_logoIt’s no secret that, today, a lot of people disagree with the Church’s teaching on various points.

That’s no surprise. The Church, like Christ, has always been “a sign that is spoken against” (Luke 2:34).

What’s more surprising—and scandalous—is that in our age many professing Catholics reject Church teaching, even teachings regarded as infallible.

The most famous example is the Church’s teaching on contraception. Opinion polls have revealed widespread dissent from this teaching, even among Catholics.

Sometimes those seeking to justify this dissent argue that the Church’s teaching on contraception has not been “received” by the faithful, and therefore is not authoritative. (More recently, Fr. James Martin, SJ has proposed a similar argument concerning homosexual behavior.)

What are they talking about?

 

Reception and the Sense of the Faithful

After reviewing how the Holy Spirit assists the Church when it infallibly defines a teaching, the fathers of the Second Vatican council stated:

To these definitions the assent of the Church can never be wanting, on account of the activity of that same Holy Spirit, by which the whole flock of Christ is preserved and progresses in unity of faith (Lumen Gentium 25).

The Council teaches that the Holy Spirit preserves the flock of Christ in the unity of faith. And so, when the Magisterium infallibly defines a teaching, the Holy Spirit guides the faithful to accept—or “receive”—that teaching.

This process of reception reflects what theologians have called the “sense of the faithful” (sensus fidelium) or the “sense of faith” (sensus fidei).

According to Vatican II:

The whole body of the faithful . . . cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of faith (sensus fidei) on the part of the whole people, when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals (Lumen Gentium 12; CCC 92).

The Holy Spirit thus gives the Church—including the ordinary faithful—a supernatural sense of what constitutes the true faith, and when the Magisterium infallibly defines a point of faith, the Holy Spirit guides the Church’s members to accept or receive this teaching.

 

Clarifying the Sense of the Faithful

In the debate over contraception that followed Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, dissenters argued that so many Catholics rejected its teaching that the process of reception had not occurred and thus that the teaching was not accurate or authoritative.

They even used quotations from Vatican II—like the ones we have just seen—to argue their point.

This led defenders of the Church’s teaching to try to clarify the proper role of the sense of the faithful.

One point they made was that the process of reception is just that: a process. You can’t look at the immediate reaction to a teaching as a definitive guide. You have to give the Holy Spirit time to do his work in guiding the faithful.

Over time, a number of documents appeared that treated the subject of reception and the sense of the faithful.

One of the most thorough was produced by the International Theological Commission.

The ITC is not itself an organ of the Magisterium. Instead, it is an advisory body run by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Its documents are submitted to the pope and the CDF, and they are only published “on condition that there is not any difficulty on the part of the Apostolic See” (Statutes 12; cf. 11).

The ITC’s published documents—like its 2014 Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church, which was authorized for publication by Cardinal Muller—are thus considered theologically orthodox.

 

The ITC on Reception

The ITC notes that, despite the generally smooth reception of magisterial teachings:

There are occasions, however, when the reception of magisterial teaching by the faithful meets with difficulty and resistance, and appropriate action on both sides is required in such situations.

The faithful must reflect on the teaching that has been given, making every effort to understand and accept it. Resistance, as a matter of principle, to the teaching of the magisterium is incompatible with the authentic sensus fidei.

The magisterium must likewise reflect on the teaching that has been given and consider whether it needs clarification or reformulation in order to communicate more effectively the essential message (n. 80).

 

Conditions for the Sense of the Faithful

The ITC pointed out that just because a person is a Catholic doesn’t mean he is authentically displaying a true sense of faith. The fact Catholics disagree on various points guarantees that they can’t all be right, and it’s obvious that some Catholics are more faithful than others.

Through his work in our lives, God offers all the baptized guidance in discerning truth from falsehood, but we still have free will, and so we must cooperate with his work for this guidance to bear fruit.

The commission thus identified a set of criteria that an individual needs to authentically participate in the sense of faith:

a) Participation in the life of the Church
b) Listening to the word of God
c) Openness to reason
d) Adherence to the magisterium
e) Holiness—humility, freedom, and joy
f) Seeking the edification of the Church

All of these are common sense.

  • If a person was baptized Catholic but subsequently has never darkened a church’s door, he is so disconnected from his faith that he can’t be said to display a supernatural sense of faith.
  • The Faith is contained in the word of God, and so a willingness to listen to Scripture and Tradition is needed.
  • A person who is unreasonable, who is determined to hold his opinions regardless of the arguments brought forward, is not displaying the discernment needed to distinguish truth from falsehood.
  • Christ gave us a Magisterium, and a person who fundamentally refuses to listen to that Magisterium is not authentically faithful.
  • Holiness is a key goal of God’s work in our lives, and a person who doesn’t seek and display holiness is not cooperating with that work.
  • Finally, God guides individuals to build up or edify their fellow Christians, and someone fundamentally oriented toward creating division and disedification is not cooperating with him.

 

Opinion Polls and the Sense of the Faithful

In many parts of the world, America included, most Catholics don’t even go to Mass on a regular basis. They thus don’t seem to have the level of involvement in their faith needed to meet even the first criterion laid out by the ITC.

When you consider how many Catholics display the qualities listed above, it is clear that public opinion polls cannot be relied upon as a guide to the sense of the faithful. Thus the ITC comments that one can’t identify the sense of faith with public opinion:

i) First of all, the sensus fidei is obviously related to faith, and faith is a gift not necessarily possessed by all people, so the sensus fideican certainly not be likened to public opinion in society at large.

Then also, while Christian faith is, of course, the primary factor uniting members of the Church, many different influences combine to shape the views of Christians living in the modern world.

As the above discussion of dispositions implicitly shows, the sensus fidei cannot simply be identified, therefore, with public or majority opinion in the Church, either. Faith, not opinion, is the necessary focus of attention.

Opinion is often just an expression, frequently changeable and transient, of the mood or desires of a certain group or culture, whereas faith is the echo of the one Gospel which is valid for all places and times.

ii) In the history of the people of God, it has often been not the majority but rather a minority which has truly lived and witnessed to the faith. The Old Testament knew the ‘holy remnant’ of believers, sometimes very few in number, over against the kings and priests and most of the Israelites. . . .

In many countries today, Christians are under strong pressure from other religions or secular ideologies to neglect the truth of faith and weaken the boundaries of ecclesial community. It is therefore particularly important to discern and listen to the voices of the “little ones who believe” (Mk 9:42) (n. 118).

Therefore, one needs to think twice before one takes the latest opinion poll—whether about contraception or anything else—as a sign that a particular Church teaching has not been received by the faithful.

Obviously, many who dissent from Church teaching are regular churchgoers, and they may meet multiple criteria identified by the ITC. However, the fundamental point remains that the true sense of faith is displayed by those who are authentically faithful and not simply those who are baptized.

How Could Catholics and Protestants Commemorate the Reformation–Together?

reformationIn recent years both Catholics and Protestants have been puzzled by occasional mentions in the press that the two groups would be jointly commemorating of the upcoming five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

What on earth?

Why would Catholics commemorate such an event?

Let’s talk about that.

 

“And So, It Begins . . .”

According to legend, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenburg, Germany.

Despite the legend, we don’t have solid evidence that he actually did this, but it is true that in 1517 Luther published a set of 95 propositions he proposed for academic debate.

Surprisingly, the 95 Theses do not refer to or sola scriptura or sola fide—doctrines that later came to define the Protestant movement. In fact, the concept of justification isn’t even mentioned in them.

Instead, they deal with indulgences, purgatory, and various Church teachings and practices connected with them.

With time, however, the debate widened to include additional subjects, and within a few years a whole host of doctrines were under dispute.

Attempts were made for several decades to reconcile the parties involved, but with time the divisions hardened, and the Protestant-Catholic split has been with us ever since.

 

Anniversaries of the Reformation

Whether or not Luther did anything on October 31, 1517, that date became standard for marking the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

Even today, some Protestant churches celebrate “Reformation Day” as an alternative to Halloween.

And even in groups that don’t have a problem with Halloween, there are periodic celebrations of the anniversary of the Reformation.

The centennial anniversaries—1617, 1717, 1817, and 1917—had particularly notable celebrations in the Protestant community.

Now we’ve arrived at the five hundredth anniversary—2017—and this has posed new challenges, for both Protestants and Catholics.

 

Mutual Animosity

In the past, it seemed obvious how the two communities should mark hundredth anniversaries of the Reformation.

For Protestants, it was obvious that they should have a big party—a celebration of Luther and his colleagues as (small “s”) saviors of Christendom, who rescued the Christian Faith from popish corruption and heresy. The Reformation was a glorious triumph, and that needed to be celebrated.

For Catholics, the reverse was true: The Reformation was a horrible tragedy, and it should in no way be celebrated. There should be no Catholic marking of the occasion, except as the anniversary of one of the darkest days in history, with the memory of Luther—the arch-heretic—thoroughly execrated.

Given the mutual animosity between the two groups, these ways of looking at the event were a given.

 

A Change in Attitude

The twentieth century saw a change in attitude between the two groups.

While there are still strongly anti-Catholic Protestants and strongly anti-Protestant Catholics, the two communities have, as a whole, developed much warmer relations.

A variety of factors have contributed to this warming.

In the 1500s, religion was closely tied to the local government. The principle cuius regio, eius religio (Latin, “Whose region, his religion”) meant that the religion of the local ruler would be the religion of the state.

Consequently, subscribing to a different faith could be seen as a politically subversive act, and feelings of nationalism got tangled up with religious sensibilities.

As society has become more secular, though, those tensions have eased among Christians.

Indeed, growing secularism has led Protestants and Catholics to band together. Here in the United States, Roe v. Wade led to unprecedented cooperation between the two on the subject of abortion, and more recent developments have seen the two sides uniting in mutual defense of religious freedom.

We’re also living in an age of increased social mobility and communication. People no longer spend their whole lives within ten miles of the tiny agricultural village where they were born, and they can communicate with anyone in the world via the Internet.

These factors have all led Protestants and Catholics to get to know each other better, to build bridges, and to form alliances.

Socially, we are not the enemies that we once were. Now, we’re usually allies.

 

“That They May Be One”

Accompanying these changes, both groups have also meditated more profoundly on Our Lord’s requirement that Christians must work to overcome differences and strive for unity.

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus spoke—repeatedly—about the need for Christian unity.

Among other points, he said that it would be by Christians’ love for one another that the world would know they are his disciples.

For Christians to be locked in conflict and mutual hostility therefore creates a barrier to the spread of the Gospel, and this came to weigh more heavily on Christian leaders as the gospel began losing ground to secularism.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Christian leaders became more and more convinced that we needed to find a way around the old hostilities and to begin rebuilding the unity we had lost.

This put the approaching five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in a new light.

 

Jesus on Christian Unity

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).

“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love” (John 15:10).

“And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11).

“I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word,  that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.  The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me” (John 17:20-23).

 

“What Unites Us”

As Christians began to move closer together, they began a mutual re-examination and re-appraisal.

A starting point for this was the willingness to acknowledge the good in each other’s communities: Protestants acknowledged that Catholics were not all bad, and Catholics did the same for Protestants.

This applied not only to personal morals but also to our respective theologies.

In the years of conflict that followed the Reformation, attention focused on our theological differences, but we share a great deal of theology—belief that there is only one, true God, that Jesus Christ is his Son, that God is a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Concerning Jesus, we believe in his Virgin Birth, his atoning death on the Cross, his bodily resurrection and ascension, and his Second Coming.

We believe in the general resurrection and the final judgment, in heaven and hell, in sin and salvation, in the holy Scriptures as the inspired word of God, and in numerous additional truths.

In words commonly attributed to St. John XXIII: “What unites us is much greater than what divides us.”

 

Purification of Memory

Preparing for the Jubilee Year 2000, St. John Paul II called for a “purification of memory.” This, he explained, “calls everyone to make an act of courage and humility in recognizing the wrongs done by those who have borne or bear the name of Christian” (Incarnationis Mysterium 11).

The jubilee year may have been a particularly appropriate occasion for this, but such a re-examination, in general terms, was already well underway.

The mutual Catholic-Protestant re-assessment meant not only seeing the positive aspects of the other party, it also meant acknowledging the flaws of our own side.

For Protestants, this meant a frank examination of Luther and his colleagues with the understanding that they could and did make mistakes.

For Catholics, it meant a look back at the time leading up to the Reformation, and the Reformation itself, with an awareness of our own forebears’ mistakes.

There were things in the Church needed of reform. That’s why we held a Counter-Reformation.

The Council of Trent did not meet simply to condemn things Protestants were saying. It has numerous decrees dealing with reforming various aspects of the Catholic Church. And there was a vast amount of reform work done in Catholic circles in the century following the council.

Both groups also have troubled histories in the years since the Reformation began. Pope Benedict XVI noted:

“Looking back over the past, to the divisions which in the course of the centuries have rent the Body of Christ, one continually has the impression that, at critical moments when divisions were coming about, not enough was done by the Church’s leaders to maintain or regain reconciliation and unity. One has the impression that omissions on the part of the Church have had their share of blame for the fact that these divisions were able to harden” (Letter, July 7, 2007).

And once the divisions between Protestants and Catholics did harden, we had the European Wars of Religion, mutual martyrdoms, and ongoing mutual persecution and hostility.

 

From Heretics to Separated Brethren

For centuries, Catholics and Protestants routinely described each other as heretics. Yet today this language has largely been dropped.

Why is this?

There is no official definition of the term “heresy” in Protestant circles. It is taken to mean some kind of highly unacceptable theological view, though there is no agreed-upon standard of what counts as a heresy.

Consequently, the growing acceptance of Catholics as fellow Christians, along with warmer social relations, has led most in the Protestant community to retire the term for Catholics.

In the Catholic Church, the Second Vatican Council set a new and more positive tone by referring to Protestants not as heretics but as “separated brethren.” The basis of this term is found in the fact that they are brothers in Christ by virtue of their baptism, but they are separated since they are not in communion with the Catholic Church.

While this description is accurate, is there any reason—other than politeness—to think that the term “heretic” should be avoided?

Unlike in the Protestant community, the term “heresy” has an official definition in the Catholic Church.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: “Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same” (CCC 2089).

The phrase “some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith” refers to a doctrine that has been infallibly defined by the Church as divinely revealed—i.e., a dogma.

While Protestants have been baptized and do deny or doubt various Catholic dogmas, they typically do not do so out of bad faith (Latin, mala fide) and therefore do not meet the requirement of obstinately denying or doubting a dogma.

The requirement of bad faith obstinacy for heresy has been part of the Church’s understanding for a long time (cf. Code of Canon Law [1917] 1325 §2).

Thus the Second Vatican Council remarked: “The children who are born into these communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection” (Unitatis Redintegratio 3).

Consequently, the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity indicated that people who were born Protestant did not need to make a formal abjuration of heresy upon becoming Catholic (Ecumenical Directory [1967] 19-20).

Thus Protestants are not typically referred to as heretics because they are not presumed to have committed the canonical crime of heresy.

 

From Celebration to Commemoration

As the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation approached, some in the Protestant community began to ask how it should be marked.

In light of the mutual re-assessments that had taken place, where both parties acknowledged each others good points and their own flaws, the previous kind of celebrations no longer seemed credible.

It would no longer do to one-sidedly portray Luther and his colleagues as glorious heroes against dark-hearted and devilish Catholic villains.

Further, one thing both groups could agree on is that something tragic happened at the time of the Reformation: It was a great rending of Christendom that did not correspond to Christ’s desire for Christian unity and that, if mortal men had acted correctly, would not have happened.

Protestants and Catholic might hold differing views about who was at fault—and many would say there was plenty of fault on both sides—but both could recognize an enormous tragedy as having occurred.

So if the kind of “rah-rah” cheerleading style of celebration wasn’t what was called for, what should the first centennial of the Reformation in the ecumenical age look like?

And who should be involved?

Some in the Protestant community made a striking proposal: It should include Catholics.

The Reformation affected all of western Christendom, and now that Catholics and Protestants again regarded each other as brothers, a way needed to be found that the two communities could mark the occasion together.

This meant holding not a celebration of the Reformation but a commemoration.

 

Remembering Together

To commemorate an event means to remember it together (from the Latin, cum = “together” and memorare = “to remember”).

Catholics could not properly celebrate the Reformation—which involved a grave wound to Christian unity—but they could remember and honestly assess the event with their Protestant brethren.

And so both Protestant and Catholic churchmen approached their leaders and asked if it was possible to find a way for the two communities to jointly remember—not celebrate—the event.

In the Lutheran community, that meant getting the approval of the Lutheran World Federation. And in the Catholic community, it meant the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity developing proposals that would ultimately have to be approved by the pope.

 

What’s a Pope to Do?

Some might think that any kind of joint commemoration of the Reformation is a bad idea, but put yourself in the position of the pope and ask what the alternative is.

Maintaining frosty silence?

Meeting requests for a joint commemoration with firm denials?

Answering press queries by saying, “The Reformation was a horrible tragedy and Martin Luther was an arch-heretic and a historical villain of enormous proportions?”

The fundamental question that confronts every pontiff is how to ensure the good of the Christian community, for Christ made Peter the chief shepherd of his Church, and that means his successors have the chief responsibility for promoting the unity among Christians that he willed.

That means that, when approaching the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, the pope will not be looking to reinforce old divisions but to find a way to encourage Christian unity.

Thus, though joint commemoration is a delicate prospect that undoubtedly involves some discomfort, the fundamental orientation of a pope would be to look for a way to bring something positive out of the occasion.

And it’s easy to see what some of the desired elements for such a commemoration would be:

  • That it not be a triumphant celebration of the Reformation
  • That it involve our joint profession of the Christian Faith
  • That it invoke our common Christian patrimony
  • That it involve prayer for forgiveness of the wrongs committed by both groups
  • And that it ask the Lord for future growth in the Christian unity he wills

Not surprisingly, these were exactly the factors Benedict XVI named in speaking of the forthcoming event.

 

Benedict XVI on the Joint Commemoration

On January 24, 2011, Pope Benedict gave an address to delegates of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany in which he spoke of the 2017 joint commemoration. He said:

Today ecumenical dialogue can no longer be separated from the reality and the faith life of our Churches without harming them.

Thus, let us turn our gaze together to the year 2017, which recalls the posting of Martin Luther’s theses on Indulgences 500 years ago.

On that occasion, Lutherans and Catholics will have the opportunity to celebrate throughout the world a common ecumenical commemoration, to strive for fundamental questions at the global level, not—as you yourself have just said—in the form of a triumphant celebration, but as a common profession of our faith in the Triune God, in common obedience to Our Lord and to his Word.

We must give an important place to common prayer and to interior prayer addressed to our Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of mutual wrongs and for culpability relative to the divisions.

Part of this purification of conscience is the mutual exchange appraising the 1,500 years that preceded the Reformation, and which we therefore have in common.

For this reason we wish to implore together, constantly, the help of God and the assistance of the Holy Spirit in order to take further steps towards the longed-for unity and not to be satisfied with the results we have achieved so far.

 

Arrival of the Anniversary

In preparation for the anniversary, there have already been a number of concrete forms of commemoration.

Thus on October 31, 2016—the beginning of the anniversary year—Pope Francis participated in an ecumenical prayer service in Sweden with representatives of the Lutheran World Federation.

On that occasion, he said: “As Catholics and Lutherans, we have undertaken a common journey of reconciliation. Now, in the context of the commemoration of the Reformation of 1517, we have a new opportunity to accept a common path, one that has taken shape over the past fifty years in the ecumenical dialogue between the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church.

“Nor can we be resigned to the division and distance that our separation has created between us. We have the opportunity to mend a critical moment of our history by moving beyond the controversies and disagreements that have often prevented us from understanding one another.”

Additional commemorations are scheduled at events throughout 2017, and especially on October 31.

Most of these will be of brief duration, and they will largely echo themes that have already been explored.

The most substantial common statement on the anniversary, however, is a preparatory document that appeared in 2013.

Then, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation issued a document titled From Conflict to Communion: The Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017.

It is available on the Vatican’s web site, and it is the most informative joint reflection on the anniversary of the Reformation, the history that ensued, and where Catholics and Lutherans stand today.

Pray for Terminally Ill Baby Charlie Gard

charlie_gard

Charlie Gard is an eleven-month old baby in England. He has a rare genetic disorder known as mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome.

According to press accounts, Charlie is terminally ill at this point. His parents have raised more than $1 million to try an experimental treatment to help him, but hospital officials—backed by British and European courts—have forbidden his parents to take him from the London hospital where he currently is.

Officials have also forbidden his parents to take him home to die.

According to the British tabloid newspaper, The Sun:

Charlie’s mum and dad say he is a “prisoner” in hospital and Great Ormond Street [hospital]’s treatment has been “inhuman”.

You can read more about the treatment controversy surrounding Charlie here.

 

Why are officials denying the wishes of Charlie’s parents?

According to their public statements, they believe that Charlie’s condition is too grave and that the proposed medical treatments are not in his interest (meaning, they would be too burdensome, too likely to be ineffective, or both).

Consequently, rather than undertake the treatments desired by his parents, hospital authorities state that it would be in Charlie’s best interests to allow him to die.

They therefore propose discontinuing the things keeping him alive.

 

What does Catholic moral theology hold about situations like this?

The Church does not have a teaching addressing Charlie’s specific condition, but it has articulated principles that address situations like this in general.

The usual obligation to use medical procedures to extend life does not apply when the treatments would be “heroic” or disproportional to the good to be achieved.

In other words, if the treatments would be too burdensome, too unlikely to succeed, or both, they are not obligatory.

Experimental treatments like the one proposed for Charlie typically are riskier than approved treatments—commonly involving both a higher burden on the patient (e.g., more side-effects) and lower chances of success.

Because of this, such experimental treatments generally are not morally obligatory.

 

If the treatment is not morally obligatory, what’s the controversy about?

Ordinarily, a patient would speak for himself regarding whether he wishes to receive such treatments.

However, in this case the patient is a baby and cannot do so. Therefore, the parents—by natural law—are the logical ones to make the decision.

Only if the parents are incapable of making a rational decision would it be warranted for others to step in and make the decision in their place.

Note the test required for intervention by others: It isn’t that the parents must make the correct decision. People can have a legitimate diversity of opinions on which medical procedures are warranted in a case. That’s why patients are often encouraged to seek “second opinions” from physicians.

The standard that must be met is that the parents aren’t capable of making a decision that is within the pale of reason. They must be making a patently irrational one before others should intervene.

In this case, the treatment proposed for Charlie has worked for others, indicating a rational hope it would work for him.

Consequently, the attempt by the hospital officials and the relevant courts to impose their will on Charlie, against his parents’ explicit wishes, appears a monstrous and inhuman overreach.

The refusal to let the parents take baby Charlie home to die (as if palliative care couldn’t be given in a home environment!) only twists the knife.

The way the situation has played out, it looks like an Orwellian, faceless bureaucracy is determined to kill this child against the reasonable will of the parents.

That bodes ill for all of us, given the statist and anti-life trends on the loose in Western culture.

 

What has the Catholic Church in the UK said about this situation?

Archbishop Peter Smith issued a statement which you can read here.

He expressed sympathy with the parents and reviewed some relevant moral principles.

Toward the end of his statement, Archbishop Smith said:

We do, sometimes, however, have to recognise the limitations of what can be done, while always acting humanely in the service of the sick person until the time of natural death occurs.

The statement as a whole was carefully balanced, but this sentence could come across as discouraging the parents’ efforts to save Charlie’s life.

A much more problematic statement was issued in the name of the Pontifical Academy of Life in Rome.

 

What did the Pontifical Academy of Life say about Charlie’s situation?

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the academy, issued a statement which you can read here.

This statement also expressed sympathy for the parents. However, it went on to say:

The proper question to be raised in this and in any other unfortunately similar case is this: what are the best interests of the patient?

We must do what advances the health of the patient, but we must also accept the limits of medicine and, as stated in paragraph 65 of the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae, avoid aggressive medical procedures that are disproportionate to any expected results or excessively burdensome to the patient or the family.

Archbishop Paglia has mischaracterized what Evangelium Vitae says. It does not say that we should “avoid” such medical procedures. It says that refusing them is not the same thing as euthanasia. It says “one can in conscience refuse” such treatments, but not that one should or must do so.

Evangelium Vitae leaves open the question of what treatments can be used in an effort to preserve life. If a patient—or those who speak for him—feel it is appropriate to use aggressive or experimental treatments, that is not precluded by Evangelium Vitae 65.

Even more unfortunately, Archbishop Paglia continued:

Likewise, the wishes of parents must heard and respected, but they too must be helped to understand the unique difficulty of their situation and not be left to face their painful decisions alone.

Although this could be taken as a statement of abstract principle, in this context it comes across as a paternalistic statement regarding Charlie’s parents and how they “must be helped to understand the unique difficulty of their situation”—as if an archbishop in Rome were more familiar with it than the parents who are having to live the situation!

The statement was therefore widely criticized. It came across as out-of-touch, pastorally insensitive, and precisely the kind of thing that would drive hurting parents away from the Church.

Fortunately, Pope Francis walked it back.

 

What did Pope Francis say?

According to Crux:

Wading directly into a charged moral and political debate in the UK, and also appearing to recalibrate an earlier statement from the head of his own Pontifical Academy for Life, Pope Francis on Sunday expressed hope that the desire of 10-month-old Charlie Gard’s parents “to accompany and care for their own child to the end” will be respected.

“The Holy Father follows with affection and commotion the situation of Charlie Gard, and expresses his own closeness to his parents,” reads a statement issued by Greg Burke, the pope’s spokesperson.

“He prays for them, wishing that their desire to accompany and care for their own child to the end will be respected.”

Pope Francis also Tweeted:

To defend human life, above all when it is wounded by illness, is a duty of love that God entrusts to all.

Following this, the pediatric hospital Bambino Jesu (“Child Jesus”) in Rome—which also treats the popes—offered to treat Charlie.

American President Donald Trump also offered to facilitate treatment in America, saying:

If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends in the U.K. and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so.

Thus far British officials have sent mixed signals regarding whether the parents will be allowed to take Charlie from the hospital where he is currently being held.

Let’s all pray for this horrific situation.

Catechism of the Catholic Church Index

I use the online version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church at the Vatican web site all the time, so I decided to make an upgraded version of their index page (here). The improvements on this version include:

  1. The links now open pages in new tabs.
  2. I’ve added links to the Latin version, to make it easier to check the original.
  3. I’ve added the passage numbers in parentheses after each link, to make it easier to look up passages by their number.

Feel free to bookmark this page. A short link for it is JimmyAkin.com/catechism

 

Did Jesus say the Second Coming would happen in the first century?

second comingIn this episode of Catholic Answers Live (April 20, 2017, 2nd hour), Jimmy answers the following questions:

2:22 Did Jesus falsely prophesy that he would return before the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70?

13:39 Did some of the disciples initially think Jesus was a ghost after his resurrection?

17:50 What is “hermeneutics”? How to respond to the “All have sinned” passage in Romans with respect to the Immaculate Conception of Mary?

28:50 How should we evaluate Buddhism in relation to the Christian Faith?

38:50 How to deal with a problematic family situation that may even be dangerous?

47:23 Did the Council of Nicaea invent the divinity of Christ? Did it arbitrarily select books of the Bible? What was Constantine’s role in it? Was he a sincere Christian? How to know the truth about all this?

53:39 Catholic Answers MORE begins

In this episode of Catholic Answers More (April 20, 2017), Cy and Jimmy discuss:

* Beards!
* The origin of “Rindercella”
* Spoonerisms and other eech sperrors
* Hee-Haw comedian Archie Campbell
* Why the Church accepted 1 and 2 Maccabees into the canon but not 3 and 4 Maccabees
* Easter foods
* Why eggs are associated with Easter

Special appearance by Nick Chamberlain!

Archie Campbell does “Rindercella”: https://youtu.be/1FcUc2Tk0GQ

Click this link to watch the Catholic Answers Live show on YouTube.