Recommendations in Early Christian Writing

A reader writes and says:

I am not a Catholic, but a Presbyterian. For some reason I'm very drawn to Catholic blogs, though I have no desire to become a Catholic (sorry). At any rate, I've been shoring up on my theological reading. I started with some CS Lewis, but then I felt I really needed a BACKGROUND. So I bought St Augustine's Confessions. It has been wonderful!

I know there is a wealth of early Christian literature, but I feel somewhat overwhelmed and unsure of what order to go in. I'd like to build upon what Augustine taught me. I'm also open to reading lit crit of these same authors. Of course Aquinas and Merton are on my "to read" list, but I don't want to skip around and become confused or overwhelmed.

In short: what do you recommend I read next?

While I can perhaps claim to have read a little more early Christian writing than the average bear (sadly, much of the bear population is still illiterate) I don't feel that I'm by any means an expert, and I suspect that some of our readers would be able to answer this question rather better than I could, so I asked her permission to answer the question partially in a post, and then open things up for readers.

My first thought is that Augustine's Confessions are are incredibly good place to start such a task. For my money, it's nearly unmatched in combining readability with some fairly deep theological and philosophical thinking. This makes suggesting follow-ons particularly difficult. Additionally, I'd warn that a lot of early Christian writing is not, at least to my experience, super-readable. I think I'd originally had the idea that early Christian writing would be fairly basic, and that you'd see a gradual increase in complexity up until the high middle ages when (according to stereotype) the Scholastics were calculating the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. This is now, however, how it works out. Christianity spread as Roman and Hellenistic civilizations were fusing in a cosmopolitan Mediterranean world, and the early Christians very quickly (well before Augustine) started looking at theological questions through the most advanced philosophical and scientific understandings of their day. Given that some of these are not only complex, but fairly alien to our modern way of thinking, this can make for some tough going, at least for a non-specialist like me.

A good place to start might be right at the beginning. There's a slim Penguin Classics book entitled Early Christian Writings which collects the Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, the Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch, the Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians and the Didache. These works are very, very early -- basically contemporary with the books on the New Testament -- but unlike some of the "other gospel" things that float around they were widely read and respected by orthodox Christians.

Only slightly later is St. Irenaeus (who lived from around 130 to 202 AD). His famous work is a defense of the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ against the Gnostic heresy titled Against the Heresies. There's a fairly readable, edited version of this put out by Ignatius in which Irenaeus' work is cut down a bit and organized thematically, published under the title Scandal of the Incarnation. (I found this fairly readable as a college sophomore. I haven't read the full version, so I don't know how it is by comparison.)

About 50 years later than Irenaeus is Origen -- who is an interesting guy but not terribly readable. Most of the Origen that I read utterly mystified me, but I did have a strong affection for his Commentary on the Song of Songs (a book length work) which is fascinating both as a window on the incredibly detailed way in which the ancients approach the scriptures -- very different from modern literary analysis, but not for lack of complexity -- and simply because you can see a great mind doing backflips for the sheer intellectual joy of it.

Only slightly before Augustine would be St. Athanasius, one of the great Fathers of the Church, and a leader of the Council of Nicea. One of his great works, which is fairly readable, is his On the Incarnation (this edition is fairly readable and features an introduction by C. S. Lewis.)

Rome was sacked during Augustine's lifetime, and you start to see some big changes in the tenor of Christian intellectual life, molded in part by the increasing changes in society. Working through Late Antiquity and into the Medieval period, I'd suggest the following as fairly readable and emblematic:

The Desert Fathers by Helen Waddell provides a lot of stories about the early monastics in one easily accessible package.

The Rule of St. Benedict by St. Benedict is probably something of a must read both as a work of spirituality and because it is so influential on later Christian monastic history.

The Life of St. Benedict written by St. Gregory the Great gives a good feel for the practice and spirituality of the period.

Moving forward a good long ways (from the sixth century to the twelfth) you would probably want to read The Little Flowers of St. Francis (a collection of incidents and sayings of St. Francis written down by one of his friars) and St. Bonaventure's Life of St. Francis. These are both quite short and readable, and while not by any means deeply theological in the way that an Augustine or a Athanasius is, they give an intense feel for a type of spirituality which St. Francis embodied and which has remained with Christianity in various forms ever since.

You say Aquinas is already on your list, and working chronologically this is where he'd fit in. Maybe one of our readers could suggest a particularly good framing text. If you are reading parts of the Summa, I would particularly recommend questions 2 and 44 as dealing with "big questions" in an interesting way that gives you a good feel for how Aquinas works.

This is something I know I am into far more than most people, but I can't help putting in a good word for reading Dante's Divine Comedy, perhaps the greatest work of theological poetry ever written. Shake off any English-class idea that it's just a dour poem about how people Dante didn't like were being tortured, and as you read it try to focus on Dante's personal journey as he first recognizes the nature of sin in Inferno, then learns to replace it with virtue in Purgatorio, and finally comes to appreciate the types of perfection in Paradiso. It can help to read this together with C. S. Lewis' Discarded Image, which is about the medieval cosmological and philosophical world view. The notes written by Dorothy Sayers for her translation of Dante are also great in this regard, but unfortunately his poetry doesn't really hold up all that well. Bulky though it can be, reading her commentary along with some more successfully poetic translation can work well.

I get spottier as I get more modern, and it probably starts to depend a lot whether you're looking more for Christian practice and spirituality or more academically oriented theology.

Some possible choices I would recommend (without much explanation, as I'm running out of time) would be:

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis
Introduction to the Devout Life by Francis de Sales
Apologia pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

The International Religious Climate, from the ground

Jennifer Fulwiler at Conversion Diary has put together a fascinating post, in which international readers respond to the following questions:

1. Where do you live? (Or, if you’re not currently living there, what part of the world is it that you’re familiar with?)
2. What is church attendance like in your area? Are there many churches? Do they seem to have active memberships?
3. At a typical social event, how appropriate would it be if a person were to explicitly acknowledge in casual conversation that he or she is a believing Christian? For example, if someone at a party made a passing comment like, “We’ve been praying about that” or “I was reading the Bible the other day, and…”, would that seem normal or odd?
4. What belief system do the politicians in your area claim to practice? For example, here in Texas almost all politicians at least claim to have some kind of belief in God, regardless of what they may think in private — to openly admit to being an atheist would be political suicide in most parts of the state. Is this the case in your area?
5. How many families do you know who have more than two children? If a family with four children moved to your area, would their family size seem unusual? What about a family with six children?
6. What seems to be the dominant belief system of the people in your area?
   
7. Do you notice any trends? Do people seem to be becoming more or less religious?

As usual, Jennifer has started an interesting discussion, and the comments are necessary reading.

Who Killed Christ

When Pilate saw that he was not succeeding at all, but that a riot was breaking out instead, he took water and washed his hands in the sight of the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood. Look to it yourselves."

And the whole people said in reply, "His blood be upon us and upon our children."

Then he released Barabbas to them, but after he had Jesus scourged, he handed him over to be crucified.
Matthew 27:24-27

These short lines have, through the fallen nature of humanity, caused their fair share of trouble over the centuries. The gospel message, through primarily one of hope and redemption, contains one dark undertone: Christ died for our sins. The one truly perfect being suffered horrifically because of our too clear imperfection.

It is in our nature to shy away from that which is unpleasant, and so it is perhaps no surprise that throughout history some Christians have attempted to assuage their own consciences by pointing the finger of blame at an obvious target: the Jews.

The fact, clearly stated in the gospel accounts, that it was the Jews who turned Christ over to be killed, and that Jews in Europe lived as a people set apart from the rest of the population, made them a good target against which to shift any blame one might feel for Christ's suffering. Or perhaps the gospel account simply provided a good excuse for the all too universal desire to cultures to treat minorities badly.

Either way, there is unquestionably a history in Christianity of the thousand years or more of Christians at times treating Jews badly and using the above statement of accountability as an excuse.

In recent times, rightly seeking to avoid any anti-Semitism, some have found a new scapegoat for the crucifixion: the Roman authorities. According to this narrative, which seems popular both with those who like to think of themselves as wise enough to know what is really going on between the lines of scripture and those who consider themselves particularly adept at critiquing civil authority from a religious perspective, the real motive force behind Christ's execution was the civil authorities. Christ preached a message of radical liberation, and this threatened the political and economic status quo, so the Roman authorities killed him. However, by the time the Gospel writers sat down to write their accounts, they found it expedient to gloss over the fault of the Roman authorities and lay blame on the Jews -- thus making nice with the Romans and scapegoating a people already on the outs with the empire.

Since I had run across this latter view several times this year, but on articles in the press and in online conversations, I had it in mind as I was re-reading the Passion narratives during Holy Week this year. That one can find no basis for it in the Gospels themselves is, of course, accounted for by the theory itself, yet it struck me with renewed force that this approach to the question, "Who killed Christ?" is really no different in its failures that the anti-Semitic one.

In both cases, the answer is effectively stated as: the other. The Jews. The oppressive authorities. Anyone but me.

The real answer to the question, "Who killed Christ?" is: We did.

As the Gospel accounts tell us, a mob of Jews gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover were stirred up by the Temple elders to call for Jesus' death, until the Roman authorities gave in to avoid a riot. Yet the meaning of this is not to be found in identifying some particular ethnic group or power structure to blame. Rather, we must think about who the Jews were, God's chosen people. The people who called out, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" were the only people in the world to whom God's law and prophesies had been revealed.

As Christians we believe that we now possess the fullness of God's revelation. We are God's people. Pius XI wrote, "Spiritually we are all Semites." And it should serve as a reminder to us of how right belief is no guarantee against pride or evil action. The leaders who called for the crucifixion were, like us, people who were the keepers of God's revelation on earth.

Please Apostacize Over Something Big

Over the last few weeks, I've run into a couple of online personalities who have declared themselves to be apostacizing over the Church's teaching on "pelvic issues" such as homosexuality and birth control. This has always bothered me a bit, but it took me a while to sort out exactly why.

As Christians and Catholics we believe some rather incredible things. We believe that the universe in all its beauty and vastness and order was created by God. We also believe that God created us in His image, making us rational creatures with immortal souls. We believe that we sinned and separated ourselves from God, and that to heal this rift between us and our maker, God became man and walked among us. We believe that God allowed himself to suffer and die a humiliating death on the cross, that He rose after three days to show us how he held power over sin and death, and that He gave a Church, guided by the Holy Spirit which preserves His teachings on Earth and provides us with the sacraments which nourish us with God's grace. We believe that we are called to live according to Christ's teachings and that by the act of uniting our wills with God we can be unit with him for eternity in heaven.

We claim to believe all these things, and we have before us the example of many holy men and women who have given their lives, either in service or in suffering and martyrdom, for the faith. By accepting these claims and beliefs, we unite ourselves with something beautiful and incredible, we claim membership in a Church that claims to have been founded by God and to be guided and preserved from error by Him. We pledge ourselves to hold these truths even unto death. And we are united through the Church with priest and religious who have given up the natural human cycle of family and reproduction in order to devote themselves entirely to God's work, to the next world.

If someone has truly accepted all these unlikely and radical beliefs, if someone is truly prepared to live the faith and if necessary die for the faith, does it make any sense at all to renounce it over its teachings about sexual morality?

If we have really believed all of these rather incredible things about God and His creation of the universe and incarnation and suffering and death and resurrection and founding of the Church, shouldn't we be prepared to sacrifice much more than our sexual ambitions for that belief?

The sad fact is, all too often we believe rather cheaply. What does it cost us to say or feel, "Oh yeah, I believe that." And yet if we really think about what a major act believing something such as the Catholic Faith is, we should consider believing in the Faith in the first place to be the great decision. And if we are ready to be serious about the idea that the Catholic Church teaches the truth, than living out that truth should seem a rather little thing compared to the grandeur of what we are asserting to be true.

Newsflash: Prophecies of Christ Might Shake Christian Faith

In an article which sounds like it could have been written by the parody site: Lost Gospel of Zaccheus, the New York Times writes about a stone tablet from the first century BC, which contains a text which is advertised (like just about anything dating from that period seems to be) as having the potential to shake Christianity to its foundations:

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time....

“Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,” Mr. Boyarin said.

Now don't get me wrong, this sounds like a fascinating find. What the stone contains is a fragmentary apocalyptic prophecy from the first century BC, which draws on the model of late Old Testament prophecies such as Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai. Some of the scholars involved have dubbed it "Gabriel's Revelation". The difficulty is, the text is fragmentary in a couple of key places. However, it appears to describe the Angel Gabriel providing a revelation either to or about a messiah who suffers for the people of Israel. One scholar has argued that, based on his interpretation of some hard to discern words, it may hint at this messiah dying and rising after three days:

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says “Sar hasarin,” or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of “a prince of princes,” Mr. Knohl contends that the stone’s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

“This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”

The thing is, I'm not really clear why this is considered big news, unless you start out by ascribing to the theory that all references in the New Testament to Christ's death and resurrection were added in long after their original composition. In other words, unless you figure Christianity is hogwash to start with.

As it stands, Christians interpret a number of passages in the Old Testament as prophesying Christ's suffering, death and resurrection, so it's hardly going to surprise a Christian audience if you find evidence that Jews in the hundred years before Christ believed that a messiah would eventually suffer, die and rise after three days.

Very, very interesting stuff (both religiously and as a matter of history), but I'm not clear why it's supposed to shake anybody.

Slowly Reading Spe Salvi

I've been slowly working through the pope's new encyclical, Spe Salvi. Slowly is the only way anything has been happening around here lately, outside of work and church commitments. One of the early sections particularly struck me, though I'm sure this is something I've written about here before:

Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were “without God” and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus (How quickly we fall back from nothing to nothing): 1 so says an epitaph of that period. (Spe salvi, para 2)

The gentiles to whom Paul brought the Christian message were not irreligious. However, they were used to a dichotomy between religion and philosophical moral systems (such as Stoicism, neo-Platonism and Epicurianism). The gods of the ancients were not holy (though piety towards them was often seen as a virtue) and many of their actions could be seen as violating what was generally considered to be moral law. The gods could be powerful friends or very, very dangerous enemies. They embodied natural qualities and forces which dwarfed human concerns, and seemed to be permanent parts of the world's landscape. But they were generally not the most admirable creatures, and you were almost certainly better off if the gods never noticed you. (How many mythic heroes ended up by "living happily ever after"?) One of Plato's earliest and most accessible dialogues in Euthyphro, in which Socrates argues with a pius young man that The Good must be something higher than the gods.

In this sense, Christianity represented a rather radical departure from the other religious traditions of the time. When Paul told the Greeks that the had worshipped God all the time at the altar of the unknown god, one might play upon his words and point out that the kind of God he told them of had been unknown up until that time.

We've very much lost the sense of the enormity of this in our day and age. People are so certain that they know what The Good is these days that athiests criticize God for not being good enough. Most neo-pagans seem not to realize that the old gods were more often feared than loved. The Christian message, even when rejected, is implicitly used as the backdrop for its rejection and for alternatives to it in this day and age.

A Common Word: Islam and the Limits of Dialogue

Christopher Blosser writes about A Common Word, an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI on the part of 130+ Islamic scholars from all branches of Islam, calling for deeper and more open dialogue between Islam and Christianity. (He provides a follow-up post with more Christian reactions to the letter here.)
The origins of this apparently lie in the pope's Regensburg address, in which he talked about the intimate connection between faith and reason, and used traditional Islamic teaching as a counterpoint to that example. According to a John Allen column (quoted by Blosser in his post) the scholars who started the initiative felt that the Vatican was only willing to deal with Islam at a diplomatic level, not a theoligical one:

Hossein charged that the Vatican has rebuffed attempts to engage Muslims in theological conversation, instead concentrating on the diplomatic level.

“Muslims thought of choosing a small team of 4-5 people, leading Islamic thinkers, to be able to have a dialogue on the deepest theological issues with the Vatican, including the pope himself,” in the wake of controversies over Regensburg, Hossein said. “At least, that’s the condition I put down. Nothing came of that, there was no response from the Vatican.”

Esposito said he too was aware of a high-level attempt to open a new channel of dialogue with the Vatican by Muslim leaders after Regensburg that was rebuffed.

“Most of the response that has come from the Vatican, after the Islamic protest and all of these things, has been diplomatic, not theological,” Hossein said.

The Common Word letter attempts to underline common religious beliefs which could serve as the basis for ongoing dialogue:

The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbour. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity. The following are only a few examples:

Of God’s Unity, God says in the Holy Qur’an: Say: He is God, the One! / God, the Self-Sufficient Besought of all! (Al-Ikhlas, 112:1-2). Of the necessity of love for God, God says in the Holy Qur’an: So invoke the Name of thy Lord and devote thyself to Him with a complete devotion (Al-Muzzammil, 73:8). Of the necessity of love for the neighbour, the Prophet Muhammad r said: “None of you has faith until you love for your neighbour what you love for yourself.”

In the New Testament, Jesus Christ u said: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. / And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. / And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31)
...
Thus in obedience to the Holy Qur’an, we as Muslims invite Christians to come together with us on the basis of what is common to us, which is also what is most essential to our faith and practice: the Two Commandments of love.

The letter goes on to quote extensively from the Qur'an and from the Torah and the New Testament to underline the common elements of monotheism and love of neighbor in the three religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The site also includes a number of responses from Christian and Jewish leaders.

Certainly, this is an encouraging thing to see coming out of a large number of Islamic scholars. From what I understand, theological and juridical consensus in Islam is often achieved by the number of scholars who endorse a particular interpretation of the Qur'an -- and so seeing 130+ scholars from throughout the Islamic world endorse something like this is an encouraging sign, though I'm not in a position to know how the signatories rate within various national and theological groups in the Muslim world.

But aside from the undoubted point that a call for peace (especially if it results in more peaceful co-existence where Christians live under an Islamic majority) is much more encouraging than the reverse -- what should we as Christians make of this?

While I respect the sincerity of the signatories of A Common Word, and agree that the three great monotheistic religions do share in common principles of love of God and love of neighbor, I'm not clear how much of the deeper dialogue which they wish the Vatican were more open to is actually possible. For once we have discussed the love of God and love of neighbor, where exactly could we go from there? The one-ness of God, it would seem, and yet here we immediately run into one of the great historic differences between our faiths. Islam does not admit as possible that God should be three in one. And while explaining the Trinity in such terms as to be understandable to a Muslim audience would be a worthy occupation, if a consensus on this were achieved my understanding is that this would consist (for the Muslims) of rejecting traditional Islam. You cannot, so far as I can understand, both accept the trinity and be a good Muslim.

Which brings us to the central problem of religious dialogue: What exactly is the goal? Clearly in such areas as dialogue with the Orthodox Churches, the goal is a reunion of the great historic branches of Christianity. But in holding interfaith dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims there is clearly no possibility of reunion short of conversion. And while I'm very much in favor of our non-Christian brothers converting, I doubt that that is the goal of the Common Word signatories.

Thinking about this, it occurs to me that in historical terms it is much easier for the children to hold out desire for dialogue than for the parents to appreciate it. Thus, as Christians we may affirm that the Jews hold true to God's original covenant, and remain in a sense His chosen people, even while believing that in Christ the old covenant found its fulfillment. In that sense, Christians can see a fair amount of point in holding dialogue with Jews because we hold their beliefs to be true within a certain context, though not the fullness of truth.

However, from a Jewish perspective, Christianity is a corruption of the truth that was already full. If Christ was not the promised savior, than there's really not much to be said from the Jewish side, so far as I can tell, other than: "Please don't persecute us, and when you're ready to give up this savior-already-came nonsense, we're happy to talk."

The same problem, it seems, arises when Muslims want to hold dialogue with Christians. Perhaps open-minded Muslims are ready to grant that Christianity is mostly true so far as it goes (though can we maybe gloss over a few major dogmas like the Trinity, the Eucharist, etc.?) and in that sense are open for deeper theological dialogue. But from a Christian point of view the entire revelation of Mohammad is a human invention/delusion at best, and at worse something rather more sinister.

At that point, no wonder the Vatican seems more eager to pursue things on a diplomatic than a theological footing. At the level of achieving greater peace between Christians and Muslims, there's much to be achieved. At the level of theological dialogue...

Well, I think there are probably good things to be achieved there, but they would need to be achieved through a very non-goal-oriented approach. That, I think, has been the problem with many recent attempts at inter-religious dialogue. Too often these things seem focused on "let us agree on something we can sign together" rather than "let us attempt to find a way in which our beliefs can be presented to each other through a theological/philosophical language that both of us can understand". There would, I think, be a value in achieving some sort of common theological language that would allow Muslim theologians to understand what Christians mean by things like the Trinity, the Eucharist, etc. Then, at least, we could be clear on it is that each other are talking about. But I'm not clear if that's the sort of dialogue that people are looking for.

Let Us Pray

Every so often, you run into a post that you keep wanting to comment on, and yet keep hesitating. Such a case I find myself in with regard to Scott Carson's two recent posts on prayer of petition. (The first post talks about prayer of petition in a more general sense, the second talks about it in regards to an objection to his first post based on the Pater Noster.)

From the first post:

As long as I've been a believing Christian, I've been troubled by a certain attitude towards prayer in general and towards the miraculous/mysterious in particular that is illustrated in these petitions. Before I converted, I knew folks who would drive around a parking lot praying to find a good parking space, folks who would pray for "miraculous" cures for some specific case of "incurable" cancer, folks who would pray for their favorite team to win a sporting event, folks who would pray for world peace. Some of these petitions seem to be rather evidently better than others as petitions go, at least if we are to judge such things on the basis of their more universal appeal and benefit to the common good, but in a certain sense they are all the same: they all ask God to do something for us that we would like to have done right away and that we cannot accomplish on our own. To the extent that some of them seem beyond the reach of natural processes, such as the healing of what looks to be an incurable cancer, to have such prayers "answered" in a certain way would seem "miraculous", and given that God's omnipotence is beyond our understanding, such "answers" to prayer would also seem "mysterious".

This attitude towards prayer, that is, prayer as a means to obtaining something tangible in this way, is obviously a very naive notion, but it is fairly widespread. I don't think there's anything that can be done about this attitude, but I think it is mistaken. It seems fairly clear to me that God does not, as they say, "work that way". Folks who adopt this attitude towards prayer, however, get a little riled up if you suggest such a thing....

My own view is that the purpose of prayer is not to bring about a satisfaction of material desire in the first place. Its purpose is to satisfy a different sort of desire, namely, the desire for closeness to God. It seems to me that the happiness one experiences, when one obtains satisfaction of material desire, is in itself merely an image of the much greater happiness that we experience when we have friendship with God, just as the pain that we experience in this life is an image of the pain that is sin, i.e., separation from God. All sickness, disease, and death have fully naturalistic explanations, of course, but that does not mean that in the greater ontology that goes beyond mere materialism they are not also signs of something else. The Christian must always be on the lookout for the deeper meaning that is shot through all of material reality, because the Christian is not a materialist: he does not believe that material reality is all that there is, even though it is all that we have access to via the senses.... So the Christian cannot view prayer as a mere means of rearranging the material furniture of his earthly existence, since that furniture is nothing but a sign of something else and is, in itself, utterly meaningless. If I pray for anything at all, whether it is a parking place or a cure for cancer, what I ought really to be praying for is friendship with God. If I have cancer, I may well be dying. Both the cancer and the process of dying are fully materialistic processes, when viewed from one perspective; but viewed from the Christian perspective they are also signs of sinfulness. Not of some specific, unconfessed sin that I bear on my conscience, mind you, but of the general separation that exists between man and God as a consequence of the Fall. Thanks to Christ, that separation has been healed, but strictly by the grace of God, not in virtue of anything that we have done that deserves a treat or a reward from God in the form of a material answer to a prayer for material comfort.

Instead, God answers prayer by drawing us closer to him. In this sense, I would say, not that God answers every prayer but the answer is sometimes 'no', but I would say rather that God answers every prayer and the answer is always 'yes', even though we may sometimes fail to see the answer, because, like the woman at the well, we don't always know what we're asking for. If I continue to die of cancer, in spite of prayers that I be saved, it is not because God "has other plans" for me. He is, in fact, answering my prayer by loving me and the faith that I display in him by uttering the prayer in the first place.

I find myself a bit divided in reading this. Being the sort of Christian that I am, this is very much the sort of way I tend to think about prayer. Certainly, I think that this explanation of "unanswered" prayers is more sound than any other that I run into. And yet, I'm not sure that I can actually agree that God doesn't "work that way".

I've generally found it hard to pray for miracles, for the simple reason that I find it very hard to expect them. And yet we have many cases of miraculous answers to prayer which the Church does find "worthy of belief". One is certainly not required to believe in such things, and yet the Church clearly holds the material fulfillment of prayer to be something that can and does happen.

That, of course, leaves us with difficult questions -- questions that annoy me because they do not seem to submit well to rational analysis. Why should some people be healed in a seemingly miraculous fashion and others not? I don't know, and I'm not sure that there's any point in trying to come up with an explanation. (The explanations I've heard, as Dr. Carson points out, are not good.)

Certainly, there are attitudes towards prayer of petition that bother me, or seem rather silly, and there are some specific prayers that have always just struck me as odd, perhaps because I think too much. My grandmother used to add after any other prayer, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we love you, save souls." This formulation always bothered me, because it seemed to imply that if we didn't love them, they might not be inclined to save souls, and because if the will is truly free to accept or reject God, I'm not sure how someone else intervenes and saves ones.

Perhaps God deals with different people at different levels. Those of us who seek for reason certainly find it, perhaps those who seek for miracles, and actually believe them likely, are the ones who get them.

Apologetics: Tahriif

Abu Daoud writes about the Islamic teaching about the tahriif of the Bible, the Arabic word means "corruption" and the teaching is that Jesus and the Old Testament prophets received an exact word-for-word revelation just like Mohammad, but Christians and Jews later corrupsted the writings of these prophets. This is used to explain any contradictions (of which there are of course many) between the Koran and the Bible, which according the Koran is indeed the word of God.

Abu Daoud produces three arguments against the tahriif; the first two will sound familiar from other Christian apologetics, but the third seems to spring from a bit more of a Middle Eastern mindset, and thus is interesting, but a little alien.

Islamic Apologetics: Original Sin

Abu Daoud of Islam and Christianity shares a specimen of Islamic apologetics from a Muslim website:

Q. Jesus sacrificed himself to save mankind and deliver us from the sin, why did not Muhammad do so?

A. You did not study history enough and you did not know unfortunately what happened to Jesus, peace be upon him. Jesus, peace be upon him, did not sacrifice his life for our sins. And if it were to be true, Jesus would have been sent by God as the first child of Adam to save our sins. We human beings are born without sin, pure. Again, Jesus, peace be upon him, was not crucified. Go back and find who the one crucified was. If you don’t know, we will tell you. Jesus in as much as God brought was a hypocrite whose name was Juda, became his look like and then people crucified him thinking he was Jesus.

Abu Daoud explains, "I include this sort of thing on the blog not to frustrate non-Muslims, but to show them what Islamic thinking looks like. This sort of idea is what you face every day when you live with Muslims and you share the Gospel with them."

Love Conquers All

Jen has a thoughtful post that asks whether it's a problem that Christians in America aren't renowned for their austerity. Here's an expansion of the comment I posted there.

In Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict, in examining the Beatitudes, meditates on the verse "Blessed are the poor". That's from Luke; Matthew's account says "Blessed are the poor in spirit". Benedict reflects on the tradition of poverty in the scriptures:

The poverty of which this tradition speaks is never a purely material phenomenon. Purely material poverty does not bring salvation, though of course those who are disadvantaged in this world may count on God's goodness in a particular way. But the heart of those who have nothing can be hardened, poisoned, evil -- interiorly full of greed for material things, forgetful of God, covetous of external possessions.

On the other hand, the poverty spoken of here is not a purely spiritual attitude either. Admittedly, not everyone is called to the radicalism with which so many true Christians -- from Anthony, father of monasticism, to Francis of Assisi, down to the exemplary poor of our era -- have lived and continue to live their poverty as a model for us. But, in order to be the community of Jesus' poor, the Church has constant need of the great ascetics. She needs the communities that follow them, living out poverty and simplicity so as to display to us the truth of the Beatitudes. She needs them to wake everyone up to the fact that possession is all about service, to contrast the culture of affluence with the culture of inner freedom, and thereby to create the conditions for social justice as well.

Benedict emphasizes the humility of the "poor ones of God":

These are people who do not flaunt their achievements before God. They do not stride into God's presence as if they were partners able to engage with him on an equal footing; they do not lay claim to a reward for what they have done. These are people who know that their poverty also has an interior dimension; they are lovers who simply want to let God bestow his gifts upon them and thereby to live in inner harmony with God's nature and word.

Being "poor in spirit" transcends the material to be a spiritual asceticism -- which does often find its expression in a material simplicity. Still, the hallmark of Christianity is not poverty or asceticism or austerity. At the Last Supper, after dismissing Judas (the disciple who rebuked the penitent woman for wasting perfume on Jesus instead of selling it and giving the money to the poor), Jesus gives a poignant last charge: "My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. You will look for me, and as I told the Jews, 'Where I go you cannot come,' so now I say it to you. I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (Jn. 13:33-35).

Note the construction: "This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Love is the prerequisite: all Christian life stems from that love.

Historico-Critico-Whatsit

The other day, a link on an unrelated topic drew me over to the Commonweal website. I should know better, shouldn't I?

There I came across their review of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth. Two selections:

I myself have used the Transfiguration more than once to illustrate the limits of historical criticism. For though historical critics, by an overwhelming majority, regard the episode as an unhistorical invention, it is clearly, in literary and theological terms alike, one of the high points of the life of Christ as told in the first three Gospels. Moreover, its un-historicity notwithstanding, the Transfiguration is the occasion for a brilliantly effective narrative assertion-not just that Jesus is the new Moses but also that suffering and divinity are not, or are no longer, mutually exclusive. For Ratzinger, to be sure, the episode is important for all these reasons. But he parts company with the critical majority in treating even this floridly mythological episode as a historical event no more problematical for open-minded historians than Jesus’ birth in Palestine. Any construction of it that would deny that it really happened, we are forced to infer, would be, in Ratzinger’s eyes, a disastrous descent into Gnosticism.
...
But it is one thing to reread the Bible in a way that makes God or God incarnate once again its central literary character and subject. It is another to claim that unless God’s actions as reported in the Bible-his Incarnation, for one; the Transfiguration of his incarnate person, for another-are historical, they are theologically meaningless. To do that is to make biblical interpretation a subject suitable only for those who approach history without any developed (“ready-made”) philosophy and who are prepared, in addition, to break with science and modernity (the “so-called modern or scientific worldview”). Few, even among the many who freely grant a connection between history and theology, will want to meet these conditions.

A couple things struck me about this.

First, is the author's complaint against the "claim that unless God’s actions as reported in the Bible... are historical, they are theologically meaningless". I suppose it all depends what you mean by "theologically", but if one takes theology to consist of the rational study of God, it seems odd to take something of known human construction and use it as an input for reasoning about God. Given that the author refers to the transfiguration as "floridly mythological" I assume that he contends that the incident was invented by the gospel authors in order to make some larger point about the place of Christ in salvation and in the universe. Clearly it's possible for an author to express some truth(sometimes more more evocatively than through a straight, non-fiction discourse) through a fictional narrative. However, when one makes this claim about a key event in the Bible, one is left to wonder: If this is not an event but something the author tried to evoke via a fictional scene, how did the author know it was true in the first place?

It's not controversial to say that there are parts of the Bible that are in literary genres other than historical narrative. Even among the Gospels, I could imagine some authorial changes that would not interfere with the questions of truth and inspiration. Thus, if some of the parables are in fact conglomerations of the exact ones that Jesus told, or if the settings of certain events are moved (whether words were spoken on a hill, on a plain or in a boat, etc.) I don't think we'd necessarily run into a problem.

But the sheer scale of what's being said with the Transfiguration seems to preclude it's being in any significant sense different than what happened. Something like the annunciation, the transfiguration or to the resurrection strikes me as too surprising to be some sort of evocative fable. If you are an author consciously trying to make a point through fiction, you wouldn't do it through that kind of device.

Second, I was struck by the complaint: "To do that is to make biblical interpretation a subject suitable only for those who approach history without any developed... philosophy and who are prepared, in addition, to break with science and modernity...."

Well, in a sense, yes. If your "developed philosophy" consists of a belief that the incarnation didn't happen, then you're going to run into a lot of problems in regards to biblical interpretation. Of course, if that's your philosophy, I'm unclear why you're messing about with the bible in the first place. I mean, I've skimmed the Koran and some Hindu texts, but I don't sit around devoting lots of time to interpreting them, because I believe the religions they stem from are in great part false.

Also, we see here the "science and modernity" complaint against Christianity. This stems from a basic mis-understanding of what "science" is good at. The purpose of science is to, as efficiently as possible, predict the probable. The scientific mode of inquiry applies to physical, repeatable systems and circumstances. Thus, if the New Testament narratives are true, science would have very little to say about them. The NT does not insist that the incarnation and resurrection were examples of common and systematic events, rather it insists that they were extraordinary. Science is definately able to say "It is not in the nature of the human body to rise after three days" but it has nothing to say on the topic of "Did God choose to become man, suffer, die and rise of the dead?"


It was only as I was at the end of all this that I looked at who had written the review: Jack Miles of "God: A Biography" fame. Now, I haven't read the book, and it's been a while since I was reading the flap about its original publication, but doesn't it seem a rather direct slap in the face for an allegedly Catholic publication to have someone of Miles' type review a book about Christ by the pope?

Biblican Scholarship vs. Classical Scholarship

One of our priests has been conducting a series of bible studies on the various gospels, which sometimes spills over into sermons and other discussions. I don't know if this is an example of the excessive credulity towards "experts" which a certain type (or lack) of education produces, but he has a certain habit of latching onto anything he reads by "modern biblical scholars" as the latest thing, and then running with it, seemingly without thinking at all about whether or not this might be incompatible with Catholic doctrine. (Father's doctrine is actually quite solid, so this usually just results in a strangely disjoined feeling where he on the one hand relates scholarship suggesting that the authors of the gospels changes or added numerous things in order to make points of their own, while at the same time holding to all the events and doctrines which the disputed episodes convey.)

Anyway, via this exposure to popular biblical scholarship, it's struck me that there's a very different approach that a certain strain of modern biblical scholarship takes to textual evaluation than what I seem to recall from my (admittedly only undergraduate level) time reading classics scholarship.

Biblical scholarship often seems very focused on the idea of stripping away additions and figuring out the original narrative. This makes a certain amount of sense when dealing with a situation where you're trying to discover the facts about a historical occurance based upon the accounts available, but often modern biblical scholars seem to take the approach of assuming that the actual events related by the gospels were primarily or strictly non-miraculous, and thus working from the assumption that references to miracles and to more specific theology must be later additions. One gets the general impression that the original account of each gospel (if, by the scholar's lights, there can even be said to be such a thing) is so distantly burried as to be virtually unknowable.

By contract, most of the notes I was used to seeing in the apparatus criticus were generally fairly matter-of-fact and had to do with relatively minor differences, corruptions and deletions suggested by examination of different manuscripts. Perhaps it's simply that no one imagines that anyone cared enough about changing Horace's Odes or Vergil's Eclogues to have made massive changes in the manuscript tradition, but there was seldom any suggestion that there were many changes after the initial writing of the work, other than accidental ones or subtractive editing.

My impression (perhaps wrong) is that there is not actually more than the usual amount of variation in the surviving manuscript traditions of the gospels, and that there were rather more manuscripts floating around for the gospels than there were for many of the great classical works -- which you would think would provide ample opportunity for variation to show up if it did in fact exist.

All of which leaves me wondering, is there some reason to be running around supposing all these prior narratives and additions and modifications in the gospel narratives, other than general suspicion (on the part of those who are not orthodox Christians) of their contents? Beyond skepticism of the events conveyed, is there a reason to think that Luke's gospel is that much different from what Luke wrote than our extant copies of Heroditus or Thucydites or Virgil are from what those respective authors wrote?

Holding These Truths

I had a chance to read over the third installment of the Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson debate over the question "Is Christianity good for the world." The intellectual car wreck atmosphere continues -- with Hitchens giving the impression that he's only half reading Wilson's much longer pieces and then dashing off a reply in 30 minutes based on whatever happens to come into his head first.

One thing that struck me, and which I've seen before in "atheism is just as ethical as theism" type arguments, is the absolute faith that basic modern Western/Judeo-Christian ethical and political standards can be effortlessly derived from "common experience" such that there is no need to seek divine law in order to reach objective moral standards.

I seem to recall in some online debate a while back putting forward the statement "all men were created equal" as an ethical and political standard which can be derived from Christianity ("there is no male or female, no Jew or Gentile in Christ") but cannot be "empirically" established -- since if one goes about things by means of empirical evidence it very quickly becomes obvious that all people are not created equal. It is no mere accident of the times, I think, that despite the fact that Plato and Aristotle had arrived at the idea that all humanity were the same in substance, it never occurred to them that they should be treated as political equals.

"Oh, that's easy," I was told. "You don't need to empirically prove that all humans are equal, because history quickly proves that society functions best if all human are treated as if they were equal. A society can't be sufficiently optimized if the best minds aren't given freedom, and the societal costs of successfully identifying the best minds is higher than simply giving everyone equal opportunity."

Which is all very cute and pat, unless one stops to consider whether history does indeed prove this. Example: When I was at the argumentative but unformed age of thirteen, I once got myself into a debate over politics and asserted: "An absolute autocracy such as Tsarist Russia, the Persian Empire or Ancient Egypt forces intelligent people outside the ruling class into rebellion, thus creating instability, while a democracy such as ancient Athens harnessed the energies of all the best mines and allowed an unprecedented flowering of culture."

Well, it did allow a great flowering of culture, but as my intellectual opponent immediately pointed out to me, Athens heyday (from Solon to the end of the Peloponnesian War) lasted only around 200 years, while Egypt lasted (in comparative stability) for over 2500 years from the unification of the upper and lower kingdoms until the conquest by Alexander.

If one really does want to get "empirical" and talk about what history "proves", it proves that a stable society is best achieved by a society with low but reliable technology and an absolute belief in a god-king.

It helps to read the opposition...

Thanks to John Farrell also for pointing me towards an ongoing online debate between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson over the question "Is Christianity good for the world?" (Part two is here.)

Hitchens is, when his absolute hatred for all things religious doesn't totally cloud his mind, a very smart guy. However, that particular ailment is well in evidence in this case. Take this particular piece of reading comprehension work:

To these obvious points, I add that the "Golden Rule" is much older than any monotheism, and that no human society would have been possible or even thinkable without elementary solidarity (which also allows for self-interest) between its members. Though it is not strictly relevant to the ethical dimension, I would further say that neither the fable of Moses nor the wildly discrepant Gospel accounts of Jesus of Nazareth may claim the virtue of being historically true. I am aware that many Christians also doubt the literal truth of the tales but this seems to me to be a problem for them rather than a difficulty for me. Even if I accepted that Jesus—like almost every other prophet on record—was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected. There are too many resurrections in the New Testament for me to put my trust in any one of them, let alone to employ them as a basis for something as integral to me as my morality.

One is tempted to echo the two word review of Spinal Tap's "Shark Sandwich" album, but instead allow me to indulge in the "write in haste, be fisked at leisure" trope.

I would further say that neither the fable of Moses nor the wildly discrepant Gospel accounts of Jesus of Nazareth may claim the virtue of being historically true
And he establishes that the Gospels are on an equal historical footing with Exodus... how? Standard scholarship puts the authorship of Exodus several hundred years after its events, which clearly is not the case with the Gospels -- and that's just for starters.

Even if I accepted that Jesus—like almost every other prophet on record—was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings.
Care to name three such "prophets on record" out of the Judeo-Christian tradition Hitch? After that attempt, name three generally. Compare and contract the proximity of the accounts of their lives to that of the Gospels and the life of Christ.

The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected. There are too many resurrections in the New Testament for me to put my trust in any one of them, let alone to employ them as a basis for something as integral to me as my morality.
How many of those resurrections in the New Testament occurred without the explicit involvement of Christ? How many of those raised from the dead were referred to as the "Son of God" or were claimed to have "triumphed over death"? Discuss several ways in which these differences in treatment of the events within the narrative might suggest that both authors and audience believed there was a significant difference between these two sets of events.

One might hope that Hitchens' thought processes tighted up later in the piece, but they don't. Nor does he do any better in dealing with listening to his debate opponent. After Wilson delivers a thorough take-down of Hitchens' arguments in the second half of the first exchange, Hitchens incongruously declares victory at the beginning of the second exchange.

I knew I wouldn't find myself agreeing with Hitchens, but honestly, this was downright embarrassing.