Sentire Cum Ecclesia

This is just a short post to announce a milestone on a much longer journey: I’ve finshed volume two of N.T. Wright’s “Christian Origins and the Question of God” (“Jesus and the Victory of God”). It was the task I set myself at the beginning of my holidays, and now I can return to work tomorrow with at least one achievement ticked off my list.

Tomorrow I begin a course at ACU with Rabbi Fred Morgan (known to me for some time through my interfaith work) and Fr Francis Moloney called “Jews and Christians reading the Bible”. The reading I have just completed will be a good compliment to that.

Now for the next task, the point at which I first heard of Wright and wanted to start reading before I chose to read the first two volumes in this series (and was side tracked onto his Pauline works in relation to my teaching for Anima and the Pauline Year): volume three, his big book on the Resurrection of the Son of God!

Searching for other material this morning, I came across this book review of Pope Benedict’s “Jesus of Nazareth: Volume 2” by N.T. Wright: The Pope’s Life of Jesus in the Times Literary Supplement. It is actually a review of three books (including Maurice Casey’s book by the same title and Bruce Fisk’s amusingly named “Hitchhikers Guide to Jesus”), but the most space is given to Pope Benedict’s work.

What we have, rather, in general and in the writings surveyed here, is a bewildering range of viewpoints, which with only a slight stretch could be described as pre-modern, modern and postmodern: in this case, a German, an Englishman and a North American. As Barack Obama said of a different trio (recent guest speakers in Westminster Hall), this is either a very high bar or the beginning of a very funny joke. Curiously, the Pope features in both trios.

His comments are very interesting – especially in regard to the relationship between history and faith and between the Gospel and politics. It shows up at least the differences in approach to the Gospels between Wright and Ratzinger. At the same time, one can sense a good deal of admiration in Wright’s review of “Jesus of Nazareth”, despite his reservations.

In his concluding remarks he says:

Despite their radical differences, these three books share one positive feature and one disturbing one. First, all stress (against one recent strand of opinion) that Jesus and his followers were steeped in the Jewish Scriptures, and understood what they were doing in relation to the intricate web of meaning thereby available. Second, however, in no case do we really face the central question of the gospels: what did Jesus mean by “God’s Kingdom”, and was he or wasn’t he successful in launching it?

This is very interesting, because, apropo our discussion, what Jesus said and meant about the Kingdom is very much pertinent to what he meant when he came “proclaiming the Gospel”.

Okay, I know some of you will groan at this point (Kate especially). I hate it too when people keep on banging on about their favourite theologian, as if he has the answer to everything. N.T. Wright (known as “Tom Wright” in his popular works) doesn’t have the answer to everything. BUT he is the silver bullet to one particular kind of werewolf: the New Testament historical scholar. The catch here is… N.T. Wright IS an historical scholar of the New Testament. What we have in the (now-retired) Anglican Bishop of Durham is not only an Anglican Bishop of Durham who believes in the Resurrection, but one who believes it is historically verifiable (for a given value of history).

I was first drawn to Wright when I read about his book “The Resurrection of the Son of God”. “I’ve got to read that,” I thought – and then discovered that it is actually volume three of a six volume set “Christian Origins and the Question of God”, three of which have been written and three of which are in production (according to this page, his “big book on Paul” is due out this year). Four years later, and I have read just about everything he has written on St Paul, but am only about two thirds of the way through the second book of the CO&QD series (my aim for my holidays is to finish it).

Now, why should YOU read Wright? In an article being re-run from 2006 by Dr Ian Elmer on Catholica, the “Jesus Seminar” is held up as an example of rigorous historical New Testament scholarship. I’m not quite sure where Dr Elmer sits on this, but the “historical” methodology of the Jesus Seminar is regarded with a good deal of suspicion by other NT scholars.

And this is why you should read Wright. Because he knows perfectly well the “five criteria for judging the historical truth or worth of individual pieces of information (sayings, stories, or events) found in the Gospels”, and rigorously applies them in his own work – more rigourously than the Jesus Seminar does, I might say. Those five criteria are:

1) Embarrassment.
2) Discontinuity or dissimilarity.
3) Multiple Attestations.
4) Coherence or Consistency.
5) Rejection and Execution of Jesus (something that might explain why Jesus died).

N.T. Wright deals with every bit of information available to him in the Quest for the Historical Jesus (part of the “Third Quest”, as he terms it) according to these rules. He applies them with an honesty which outshines the Jesus Seminar bods by miles. But his conclusions are (mirabile dictu!) the polar opposite of those very bods. It seems that there are “historians” and there are historians.

Dr Elmer writes that:

Christianity is a historical religion that takes seriously the belief that God acts in history. It is important for us even today to seek to travel back in time via the historical enterprise to uncover the very foundations of our faith that reside in the Historical Jesus.

And “Amen” to that, I say. But lets put all the cards on the table, and see who the real historians are. If you feel that the Jesus Seminar bods are pulling the historical rug out from beneath your feet, you NEED to read N.T. Wright. If you pay any attention to what “scholars” say (and, granted, not everyone does), then his scholarship will assure you that you are no dope, no idiot, no naive fool for believing that the Orthodox Christian Faith about Jesus of Nazareth is not a “fabrication of the early Church”, but the historical truth about who he really was. The “very foundations of our faith” which “reside in the Historical Jesus” are none other than those foundations which confess the Historical Jesus to be the Christ of faith. (Nb. and if this sounds familiar, it should: it is precisely what is argued by our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph Ratzinger, in his series of books on Jesus of Nazareth.)

For all that, the road is not easy. There is good reason why it has taken me several years to complete two volumes of Wright’s work. It is very easy to make facile claims about historical facts. It takes a lot more work to discredit such claims and to build up, in response, a credible alternative historical picture. Wright meticulously examines the historical evidence we have concerning Jesus, and, like a New Testament Sherlock Holmes, reconstructs a picture according to the dictum that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

Along the way – if you DO read Wright – you will have some of your perspectives on Jesus challenged. To approach the “Jesus of History” is a fearful task, if for no other reason than that it is precisely in the Jesus of History that God chose to reveal himself.

“He’s not a little weird, it’s that he’s really weird. And some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird, um, that I think that some Republicans are gonna be off-put. Um, not everybody is going to, going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the, the, the stillborn ah, ah, child, ah, um, whose body they took home to, to kind of sleep with it, introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.” [source]

And for the full version of that story, see here.

Pastor Mark, on his blog, has responded to my recent posts on “the Gospel”. As is my wont, I am replying here on my blog for the benefit of all my readers.

His “first reaction” is “sadness” for me and for the rest of you benighted souls who also belong to the “Roman Catholic Church”. Well, I can live without the pity, as I expect most of you can too. But he does agree that the question “What is the Gospel?” is the “most basic and urgent of questions”, particularly for those who seek to proclaim it.

He writes:

The Gospel is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes it (Rom 1:16) and David is profoundly correct in stating that unless the Gospel is clearly defined it cannot be proclaimed. I would add that without such proclamation sinners are not being saved, no matter how many of them fill the pews at each Mass (indeed, I can’t tell you how many ex-Roman Catholics, my dear wife included, who I have heard say ‘I never heard the Gospel in the x number of years I spent in the Roman church’).

What Mark’s wife and his other “ex-Roman” friends call “the Gospel” which they “never heard” in the Catholic Church is a very specific definition of “the Gospel”, one which is attractive because (to use my former categories) it answers a real “felt bondage” to personal sin. In this regard, I have nothing but admiration for the Lutheran doctrine: it treats sin as a real phenomena, and recognises that many (if not most, or even all – certainly more than would normally admit it) people struggle under the burden of bondage to particular and deeply troubling sin, experienced as real guilt (and not to be dismissed as simply a “sense of guilt”). I would suspect that there is not one of us reading this now who could not identify such bondage in our lives. The hearing of a message which results in a real liberation from this “felt-bondage” is surely going to be a real experience of “Good News”, no less so than for the blind to regain their sight or the lame to regain the ability to walk.

So in what I say from here on in, let me say this: the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone is a very powerful statement of the Gospel, and one which should not be blithely dismissed.

Mark kindly gives us a formulation of this definition of the Gospel for us to work with (there are indeed many other variations of the Protestant “Gospel”, some less Lutheran than this one, but this will do for our purposes):

The Gospel [the Good News] is the proclamation that the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, has taken upon Himself and borne the curse of the Law and has expiated and paid for all our sins by his suffering and death on the Cross. Through faith in him we enter into favour with God, our sins are forgiven and we are delivered from death and all the just punishments our sins deserved, and are eternally saved.

One might note the absence of the word “alone” after “through faith in him” above – but I am sure that Pastor Mark would want to add it. It is not very much different from the statement to be found in the 15th paragraph of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification:

Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.

As a statement of the meaning of “justification”, I actually have very little argument with what Pastor Mark gives us as a definition of “the Gospel”. In fact the first statement in the Catechism under the section “Justification” says as much (and, by the inclusion of baptism, just a bit more):

1987. The grace of the Holy Spirit has the power to justify us, that is, to cleanse us from our sins and to communicate to us “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ” and through Baptism.

But as Mark himself says “more could be said on the subject of the Gospel”, and it is for this reason that I am ultimately less than satisfied with a definition of “the Gospel” as such which is reduced simply to “the doctrine of justification”. This is for several reasons.

The first is that when Jesus said “Repent and believe the Gospel”, I don’t think he was saying: “Believe the doctrine of justification”. It is not by faith in the doctrine of justification that the salvation which the Gospel proclaims is received. To give Pastor Mark his credit, his definition does not say this. Rather, as his definition rightly says, it is by “faith in the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ”. The doctrine of justification is, I believe, an application of the Gospel, rather than the Gospel itself. It is an application which St Paul made in his specific context of bringing the Gospel (which was originally proclaimed in a Jewish setting) into a context that was overwhelmingly Gentile. In that Gentile context – as in our own day – there is something quite specific which we must ask: who is this “Christ” in which we are to have faith? What does it mean to say that Jesus is “the Christ”? Of course, it means “Messiah”; but that title only has meaning in the specific context of the specific story of Israel (the history of her relationship with her God) and of Israel’s specific hope as a nation for the future. It was in the context of this history and this hope that Jesus called his listeners to “believe the Gospel”.

The second thing follows from this: limiting “the Gospel” to a statement based on the Pauline epistles (specifically the letters to the Romans and the Galatians) does not do full justice to the use of the term in the rest of the New Testament. (I will leave aside for a moment whether the Lutheran tradition has actually fully or accurately grasped what St Paul was talking about in these letters – I think not.) Is this the way the term is used in the Gospels and in the rest of the New Testament? Oddly enough, there are only a couple cases of its use in the New Testament that are not Pauline or from the works of the Evangelists (including Acts). One of these is in 1 Peter 4:17 which speaks of “obeying the Gospel of God” (compare to Romans 10:16 and 2 Thess 1:8). How does Pastor Mark’s definition of the Gospel explain such a use? How does one “obey” the Good News that one’s sins are forgiven?

But more seriously, I don’t think it does justice to the Gospels themselves. In Luke 9:6, for example, we are told that Jesus “went through the villages, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere” (ESV). Are we to believe that the message he proclaimed was something like this (based on Mark’s definition):

I am taking upon myself and bearing the curse of the Law and will expiate and pay for all your sins when I suffer and die on a cross. Through faith in me you will enter into favour with God, your sins will be forgiven and you will be delivered from death and all the just punishments your sins deserve, and will be eternally saved.

I am not saying that Jesus himself did not intend something very much like this to be the result of his ministry and work (in fact, for a given value of all the statements above, I believe that he certainly was conscious of just such a vocation), but I do question whether this is what he actually said when he “preached the Good News”. He certainly wasn’t proclaiming a Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. To claim that he did so would be anachronistic.

Thirdly, one of the difficulties I have with the usual Protestant definition of “the Gospel” is that it does not have within it a natural place for the Church. The Church is extraneous to the Gospel, an afterthought, an add-on (this can be seen even in Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, in the explanation of the third article of the Creed, where he first describes what the action of Holy Spirit in my own heart, and then says that this is what the Spirit does, in an analogous way, for “the whole Christian Church on earth”). The Protestant version of “the Gospel” is “Good News” for my personal “felt-bondage” – it does not explain why it was necessary for Jesus to inaugurate a community of disciples in which the Good News finds its true embodiment.

Finally, one of the reasons why I personally no longer hold to the definition of the Gospel as I came to know it in the Lutheran Church is because it doesn’t make sense of a lot of Jesus’ own preaching. Lutherans find many passages in the Gospels extraordinarily difficult to preach according their doctrine, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Judgement in Matthew 25. In part this is because of their Law/Gospel paradigm. These passages do not say anything much about how my personal sins are freely forgiven through faith in Christ, but rather appear to preach a new ethic (a new “Law”, even if it is a “Law of love”) for the new community he is constituting. I think the Law/Gospel opposition is behind Pastor Mark’s use of the phrase “the curse of the Law” in his definition. “The Gospel” is perceived to be the antithesis of “the Law” (for a given definition of both) and its antidote. Thus I find his definition of “the Gospel” to be limiting, and this is born out by what he says at the end of his post:

[I]n my estimation that is exactly how Rome has fallen into error – with what it has illegitimately added to the divinely revealed Gospel – a damnable tendency I like to call ‘the Roman and’: faith and works, Jesus and Mary and the saints, God’s will and man’s, and so on…

If Catholic theology is a “both/and” theology, Lutheran theology is an “either/or”. The Catholic “both/and” is admittedly a bit more “fuzzy” than the Lutheran “either/or”, and, I would say, as a consequence, richer. Nevertheless, in Lutheran theology, by means of the sharp limitations and exclusions of the “either/or” approach, they have achieved a definition of “the Gospel” which has a clear shape and sharp point . Can Catholic theology achieve the same clarity and pointedness, without losing the richness of the full use of the term “the Gospel” in Scripture and Tradition?

Kate has posted a reply on her blog to my post on the Gospel. I tried to respond on her blog, but blogspot limits the length of comments, so I am putting up my reply here.

Kate wrote:

I’m not sure that I’ve entirely understood the nuances of what he is saying, but if I’ve interpreted his post correctly he seems to be reflecting the contemporary ambivalence about a focus on individual salvation (viz going to heaven), and advocating instead a focus on transforming ourselves and this world here and now.

No, this wasn’t the point of my post at all, Kate. Either I have been very poor at communicating my thoughts (which is quite probable – you are not the only reader who has failed to grasp my point), or there must be some difficulty on your end. I have been rather tempted to see the whole discussion according to the analogy of the Copernican revolution, but I think a fairer analogy would taken from popular thought on the Middle Ages. Brought up on the Edward Gibbon view of the decline of civilization with the fall of Rome, the idea of the Middle Ages as “the Dark Ages” is a very hard one to shift from popular mythology, no matter how much hard work one does on the historical facts.

What I am trying to suggest is that, for the sake of the revitalisation of the Church’s evangelising mission – the “New Evangelisation” in other words – we will benefit from a thorough-going investigation into the depth of meaning in the word “Gospel”. This investigation would take in the whole breadth of the use of the word in Christian tradition, but it must necessarily start with a right understanding of the use of the word in Scripture itself. This is not some “protestant left over” of my Lutheran days. Becoming a Catholic has actually freed me from the strictures of the limited view of “the Gospel” I had as a protestant. It is, rather, the simple methodological fact that a study of historical origins in the disciplines of both language and theology shines a great light upon the root meaning of both words and doctrines.

To use another analogy: in writing a biography of a person of great significance, the study of that persons childhood and family background will give us insight into that person’s later character and into the reasons why he acted in this way rather than that way. It will not, of course, tell us everything about the mature career of the person, and formative events and influences along the way must be taken into account as well, but a book which dealt only with the mature man, and not with the origins and formative years, might well misconstrue important aspects of the person’s life and work.

In actual fact, I was originally motivated to the whole question of “what is the Gospel?”, not by theologies which saw it in terms of “individual salvation viz. going to heaven”, but in terms of “love one another as I have loved you”. It was spurred on by the debate in the Melbourne Town Hall about whether “the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”, in which the primary aspect of the Church’s mission was held up as “doing good” or “social justice”. Social justice is an important part of the Church’s mission, but I am sure you will agree with me that it is not the be all and end all of the Church’s mission.

Yet I was also aware that the success of the “Social Gospel” picture has something to do with the fact that it answers many modern western Christians’ true eschatological hopes, if I may put it that way. When Jesus first proclaimed the Gospel, and when Paul et al. took it to the Gentiles, it was a message that made sense and had a strong appeal, because it gave a credible answer to a question that they were asking. My concern is that if we, on the other hand, preach a gospel focused on “going to heaven when you die”, we might in fact be preaching an answer to a question that no-one is asking. This, it seems to me, is part of the reason why the appeal of the Gospel is so weak in today’s Western context.

So I am not really asking the old “liberal” vs “conservative” question. In a way, I see both alternatives readings of “the Gospel” to suffer from the problem of the biography that ignores the question of origins. My real question is: by studying the historical origins of “the Gospel” – not discounting the future “career” of this term – can we grasp a new and revitalised way of proclaiming the Gospel for today, one in which the Gospel has defined shape and a sharp point on the end? It is my contention that if we do, we will find an understanding of the Gospel that is neither the “Social Gospel” nor the “Go to heaven when we die” Gospel, but something far richer, and, frankly, more exciting. In other words, true “Good News”!

+ + + + +

Update: In the combox below, Kate asked a question and I wrote a reply which should be, I think, a part of this post, although it is a terribly long post to start with…]

Kate says:
January 7, 2012 at 12:27 pm (Edit)
I’ve put the substance of this comment on my own blog as well, but are you saying then, that we need to construct something that is meangingful to people now which implies that the Gospel is not ‘just’ about salvation, but not just a social Gospel either? So what precisely is it that you are advocating? Sorry, more words is not really clarifying it for me!

Okay, and here we are at the heart of the matter.

I am certainly not saying that the Gospel is about anything other than “salvation”. Everything in the Scriptures and in Tradition make it quite clear that the Gospel, the Good News, is good news about liberation from a terrible bondage that is being personally and corporately experienced. That is precisely why it is “Good News”, and, wherever it is preached, it is received gladly by those who hear it. The question is: salvation from what? Liberation from what?

As a side example, take what is classically known as “Liberation Theology”. It was remarkably successful precisely because it refigured “the Gospel” in terms that were directly applicable to the people of South America and other oppressive states. Like Luther’s theology of justification, it spoke to the felt needs of the people AND was expressed in the shape of “the Gospel” as they had known it. The question was – with Liberation Theology as with Luther’s doctrine of Justification – was it the authentic Gospel, the “authentic good news”? Did it address the true bondage at the source of the “felt” bondage?

So, a double whammy in this question: When we preach the Gospel, does it:

a) connect with the “felt bondage” from which hearer yearns for liberation?
b) maintain the “true bondage” from which the hearer actually needs liberation?

Two Scriptural elements here in this reflection.

The first is the fact that Jesus performed signs to denote his authority to declare the “Good News” of the coming of God’s Kingdom: exorcism and healings. When John the Baptist sent messengers to Jesus (Matthew 11) to ask him if he was “the one who is to come”, Jesus sent back the message: “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.” This reflects well the reading from Isaiah which Jesus read in the Synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4). It also shows that for all these, there was a specific “felt bondage” from which Jesus was giving “salvation”: for the blind, sight; for the deaf, hearing; for the lame, walking; etc. This was Good News because it was personal liberation, personal salvation, from a true “felt bondage”.

Secondly, as the story about the healing of the paralytic man (Mark 2) shows, Jesus perceived that a greater “true bondage” which was being experienced by Israel as a whole, corporately, namely, the bondage to the Strong Man (against whom Jesus was the Stronger Man, cf. Mark 3:27). That “strong man” was Satan, and the sign that Satan’s bondage (experienced personally as sickness or demon possession, but experienced corporately in the dire straits of Israel as a whole in the 1st Century) was being defeated in the victory that Jesus was accomplishing. This was the true “good news”, and the “forgiveness of sins” (done precisely by Jesus on his own authority) was the true sign of the this true liberation.

So, my question is this: How do we proclaim the Gospel – which is the “Good News” that Jesus is liberating/saving us from bondage to the true usurper, Satan – to our world today in a way that it will be heard?

1) There has to be a connection with the “felt bondage” that touches people’s real lives. What are those bondages? How does the Gospel which the Church proclaims address these?
2) How does the Church show, by freeing people from this bondage, the much deeper “true bondage” from which they and our world as a whole, desparately need “salvation”, deliverance, liberation?

The problem with Liberation Theology was that it addressed the “felt bondage”, but left the Gospel there. It was so “this world” (to pick up your earlier reference to Jesus’ dialogue with Pilate) that it forgot the greater, cosmic bondage (the word used in Greek by Jesus for “world” is “kosmos”) in which the whole world is imprisoned and from which the whole world needs “salvation”. I propose that the “Social Justice Gospel” suffers from the same problem. It is popular, because it is easily understood and enthusiastically embraced: it matches the “felt bondages” of people in their personal lives in this world. Luther’s “doctrine of justification by faith” was popular for much the same reason, despite the spiritual and theological way in which it was phrased and absolutely contrary to his original hopes (there is some evidence that he himself was disappointed by this at the end of his life’s work). It addressed many of his contemporaries (in particular, political leaders like kings and princes, and peasants – cf. the 1525 Peasants Rebellion) “felt bondage” under the institution of the Church. It offered them liberation from the Church’s authority, and was therefore heard as “Good News”.

All along, the real oppressor of humankind is Satan, the Strong Man, and his cronies, sin and death. Those who have “eyes to see”, as Jesus would say, can see this, but those are few. We look at our society, and all the solutions that journalists of both the Right and the Left propose, and we see what they cannot see: that the real bondage from which we need “salvation” are the powers of Satan.

It seems to me that the solution is not a more energetic preaching of the “Good News” as the offer of a blissful afterlife. True salvation – true liberation (as Joseph Ratzinger wrote many times before becoming Pope and many times since) – from the powers of evil will only be found in, as you put it, the decision to serve God first and last. In Jesus Christ, his whole person and his paschal mystery, God has opened the doorway into a new existence, “the Kingdom of God”, in which not only the “true bondage” but also the “felt bondages” will be finally overcome. The best description of this in the New Testament is in Revelation 21. The In the New Jerusalem (which incidentally, comes DOWN from heaven to earth, not the other way around) “God will dwell with his people…and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away”.

Thus the final “salvation” will address both the “felt” and “true bondage” of God’s people. This is the kind of “salvation” we need to be proclaiming as “Good News” if it is to be heard today with the same power that it has been heard in former years. This, I would argue, should be the aim of the “New Evangelisation”.

One thing I like about reading N.T. Wright’s scholarly works, is that he often has amusing (and quite pointed) remarks. I annotate my books, and the special squiggle in the margin for these points is a smily face! :-)

In a passage in “Jesus and the Victory of God” (p.392), he is discussing the theories of some NT scholars that the construc of the 1st Century Pharisees in the Gospels is an “invention of the early church”, the implication being that the Pharisees of Jesus’ time were not some kind of “official thought police” spying on “ordinary citizens” to see whether or not they broke the Law. He gives the following analogy:

Contemporary analogies [with the Pharisees] are fraught with danger. But there exist certain persons in modern western societies who are elected to no office, hold no government position, carry no authority from the police or the judiciary, and yet to appoint themselves to be the guardians of public morality. From this official unofficial position they assume the right to scrutinise and criticise every movement of the royal, the religious, and the politically active – all of who gnash their teeth but remain powerless. I refer, of course, to journalists. Far be it from me to attack all members of such a noble profession with criticisms appropriate only to some; and yet it cannot go unremarked that some journalists not infrequently bind heavy moral burdens, hard to bear, and lay in on the backs of those whose activities they report, while they themselves do not attempt to lift such burdens with their little finger. This is not a mere digression. It reminds us of two important points. (a) One does not have to be a member of an official thought police in order to have considerable influence within a culture. (b) The self appointed guardians of public behaviour might not cross the street to inspect the private behaviour of an unknown individual. But they will happily go to the other side of the world, and hide in places far less congenial than Galileean corn fields, in order to take one surreptitious photograph of a princess wearing somewhat less and than she would normally put on for the cameras.

One can’t help but smile knowingly at his analogy. But I also wondered at the characterisation of many Catholic bloggers (and those who write to Vatican curial offices) as “temple police”. There is the danger that we can be like the journalists in Wright’s analogy: criticising but not lifting a finger to do anything about the situation. I would like to think not. I would like to think that what many Catholic bloggers do when they highlight the failings of the Church is a constructive exercise aimed precisely at “lifting burdens” and that, far from just writing, we are actively engaged in improving matters.

Also, we need to ask about the function of such criticism. Is it just because, like the Pharisees and like (some) modern day journalists we are aiming at some kind of pure moralism or society in which everything is just as we want it? I would hope not. I would like to think that our aim is not legalistic, but a desire to allow the full beauty of the Church to be seen and the authentic call of the Church to be heard. Food for thought anyway.

It is well known that one of the major issues in seeking full, visible Christian unity is the date of the celebration of Easter. It has ever been thus – Nicea, Whitby, etc. – and made more difficult by the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. But it occurs to me, that we (that is, some Catholic Bishops Conferences) have created an extra problem by the transferance of major feasts of our Lord to the nearest Sunday, most notably Epiphany, Ascension and Corpus Christi.

So today, I celebrate Epiphany with my Lutheran family, while in my calendar it is plain old “Christmas time (after January 2) Friday”. I would not even like to try to explain to my family the tortuous means by which Sunday becomes Epiphany, so that the Baptism of our Lord becomes Monday.

I know why we do this, of course. These transferred Solemnities are all holy days of obligation. When they fall on weekdays, many Catholics would find themselves faced with a degree of difficulty in getting to mass. But the Solemnity of the Assumption is a holy day of obligation too, and we don’t translate that, even though, unlike Christmas, it is a normal working day in Australia. Other holy days included in the Canons – “Holy Mary the Mother of God, her Immaculate Conception, her Assumption, Saint Joseph, Saint Peter and Saint Paul the Apostles, and All Saints” – have simply been dropped from the list of holy days of obligation in Australia. I guess the alternative – a rather shocking one – would be to remove Epiphany, Ascension and Corpus Christi from the list in the same way – but these are feasts of the Lord himself, and it would be a rather shameful thing to do.

So we find ourselves pastorally between a rock and a hard place. But maybe – like the Church in England in reference to the much lesser issue of meatless Fridays – we should just bite the bullet and restore the Calendar to its rightful place. We should say: this is our Calendar. It is a part of our Catholic identity. We will keep it as it is and celebrate it accordingly. What Jew, what Greek, what (for that matter) Anglican would do what we have done to their calendar? And would it not be a first step in unity with our separated brethren to celebrate these days on the same day that they (and many other Catholics throughout the world) do?

PS. Can anyone tell me if – for those parishes situated in regions where the dates of the feasts are translated – the Extraordinary Form and Anglican Ordinate parishes follow suit?

PPS. And admittedly, the Lutherans often do celebrate major weekday feasts on “nearest Sundays”, but it is “ad hoc” according to particular need, and it is rather more a matter of transferring the propers of the Mass for that feast to Sunday, rather than altering the calendar itself.)

In a recent post on her blog, Kate Edwards gives us more of her analysis of the Australian Church. One thing that stuck out for me (quite incidental to her over all post) was this paragraph:

Thus, my starting point for this series is the conversion of Australia: the ‘new evangelization’ if you will. It is meant to promote reflection on what graces we need in this coming Year of Grace to achieve internal reconciliation and promote the Church’s mission of getting people to heaven.

It was that last phrase that struck me, and caused me to ponder: IS the mission of the church “to get people to heaven”?

For a given meaning of “getting to heaven” (or the more usual phrase “going to heaven”), I know what she means and don’t actually disagree with her. But I do wonder if envisaging the mission of the Church in this particular way is this really the best way to foster the work of evangelisation.

I have asked before (and will keep asking) the question “What is the Gospel?” because I firmly believe that unless we grasp what the Gospel – the Good News – actually is, we will not be able to proclaim it. An important study in this regard is what the Gospel meant when Jesus announced it in 1st Century, pre-70AD, Israel. Equally important (and this is not exactly the same thing) is what St Paul meant by it in the same period when he was proclaiming it to the Gentiles. We would need to study the four Evangelists also, whether pre- or post-70AD and whether for Jewish or Gentile audiences.

But at this point I would just like to note that we do not find anywhere in the New Testament the suggestion that the Good News Jesus preached was about how to “get people to heaven”. That idea is later – much later, I would argue. Various historical changes in language and context led to “getting to heaven” to be the dominant image used for the “Good News” which the Church proclaimed. It was not the original idea behind the proclamation or the mission entrusted to the Apostles.

(Please don’t get me wrong here – I am not saying we should do away with the idea of “going to heaven” when we die, but I do think that we should understand that this is a development of the original form of the proclamation of the Good News which has not, in many or all respects, preserved the full content of that original proclamation.)

I will take it as a given that the Scriptures (either Old or New) do not talk about “getting people to heaven” as the climax and fulfillment and the aim of Gospel. (You might want to argue that point with me, but here I am on another tangent beyond that one). It occurred to me last night while falling asleep to investigate the Catechism of the Catholic Church on this matter. Now, I have already expressed elsewhere my surprise that the Catechism is rather sparse on the actual definition of the Gospel. Given that, I want to ask: Does the Catechism say anything about “getting people to heaven” or “going to heaven”?

I found one clear reference to this idea, and it is from a secondary source: the life of St Rose of Lima:

§618 …Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven [St. Rose of Lima: cf. P. Hansen, Vita mirabilis(Louvain, 1668)].

I did find the original of this work by Hansen on the internet, but it was in facsimile and (lacking a precise citation for the quotation) I could not find the original Latin phrase. But I hazard a guess that here the Catechism is actually borrowing words directly from the Vita mirabilis; that is, the idea of “getting to heaven” is not here original to the compilers of the Catechism, but to St Rose herself. And I would expect nothing else. In the context, it makes perfect sense. But while Jesus most certainly did proclaim his sacrificial death on the cross as the way of salvation, the way to life, the way into the Kingdom of God etc. (eg. Mark 8:34-35) – all of which may have an equivalent meaning for those who use the phrase “get to heaven” – he certainly didn’t ever use that phrase to announce the Good News.

In the main, the phrase “to heaven” or “into heaven” (ie. words describing someone’s entry into heaven itself) is used in the Catechism to refer to either the Ascension of Jesus or the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

We do get another phrase which might be more helpful to Kate’s intention, and that is “in heaven”. Now, usually even this refers to the Father who is “in heaven”, and sometimes to elements of the created order which are “in heaven” (as opposed to “on earth” or “under the earth”). The one other significant usage is for the departed saints, who are said, repeatedly, to be “in heaven”. A clear example of this is the discussion in §956 and following, and the quotation from Benedict XII (from Benedictus Deus, 1336AD) where he insists upon the doctrine of that the souls of the departed faithful (when they have been perfectly purified) are “in heaven”.

So let me say once more: I am not denying that Jesus or the Blessed Virgin “went to heaven”, nor that the souls of the saints are “in heaven”. But I am asking whether in fact the Gospel we are called to announced is that Jesus was born, suffered, died and rose again in order to “get us to heaven”.

The one passage in St Paul that seems to many to speak of “going to heaven” is this one from 2 Corinthians 5:

1 For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3 if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5 He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. (ESV)

I stand with those exegetes who see this as a reference to the “resurrection body” which God has prepared for us and is keeping for us “in the heavens” to clothe us with on the Day of Resurrection. This is made clear in the new translation of the first Preface for the Dead in the new missal.

The old translation read:

Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended.
When the body of our earthly dwelling lies in death
we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven.

That seemed to me to be a denial of the resurrection of the body – this body dies, but our souls go to live in heaven. The new translation makes clear that this is not the idea at all:

Indeed for your faithful, Lord, life is changed, not ended,
and, when this earthly dwelling turns to dust [ie. when this mortal body decays]
an eternal dwelling [ie. an immortal body] is made ready for them in heaven.

Not that we will receive the new body when we “get to heaven when we die”, but that the new body which we will receive at the Day of Resurrection is even now being kept for us for that Day. (Benedict XII was quite clear that our souls will be in heaven before the resurrection, but only Our Lord and Our Lady – and perhaps Elijah and a couple of others – let’s not quibble – have bodies in heaven now).

There are two passages in the Catechism that help us to deal with the authentic meaning (what has become) the “traditional” language of “going to heaven”.

In §2795 we read:

The symbol of the heavens refers us back to the mystery of the covenant we are living when we pray to our Father. He is in heaven, his dwelling place; the Father’s house is our homeland. Sin has exiled us from the land of the covenant [cf. Gen 3], but conversion of heart enables us to return to the Father, to heaven [Jer 3:19-4:1a; Lk 15:18, 21]. In Christ, then, heaven and earth are reconciled [cf. Isa 45:8; Ps 85:12], for the Son alone “descended from heaven” and causes us to ascend there with him, by his Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension [Jn 3:13; 12:32; 14:2-3; 16:28; 20:17; Eph 4:9-10; Heb 1:3; 2:13].

Now that looks pretty close to the idea of “getting to heaven” that Kate is using. But I would say (and this isn’t a minor quibble), this passage is telling us that our “traditional” language of “getting to heaven” is in fact a metaphor for “returning to the Father” and “ascending to be with Christ”.

There is another simple line in the Catechism which says it so much more simply

§1025 To live in heaven is “to be with Christ.”

To “get to heaven” = “to be with Christ/the Father”. And there is plenty of New Testament material that speaks about the latter and in precisely those terms. In fact, this is the content of the meaning of “entering the Kingdom of God” also: to enter the Kingdom of God is to be with him as our King, to be restored by forgiveness as a member of his covenant people.

The use of language in which the Kingdom of God is announced as coming near (arriving) in the person of Jesus of Nazareth – opens up the way to the original language of Jesus and the scriptures:

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1, ESV)

There is, of course, a lot more study to be done into the true meaning of “Gospel” and the mission of the Church. One would want to spend several life-times, for instance, studying the use of this language in the early Fathers. I will end at this point, however, with a quotation from St Ambrose cited in the Catechism at §1025:

For life is to be with Christ; where Christ is, there is life, there is the kingdom [St. Ambrose, In Luc., 10, 121: PL 15, 1834A].

Inspired by our expat friend in Canada, I thought I would take a look at my WordPress.com stats (using the Jetpack plugin) for my blog for the last 12 months to see which posts received the highest views. Here are the top twenty below (the highest, is, of course, the home page coming in at a healthy 45,000):

What it shows is that the highest views were on those topics which are global, and which would come up with one were to do a google search on those topics. Of those which were more particular to SCE itself, two topics stand out, the post on “Does the Catholic faith require the father to be the breadwinner of the family” and (which scored even higher on a combined number of views) the posts on “the perpetual virginity of Mary”. I think in both these areas the usefulness of a blog such as this has been demonstrated. These are issues (admittedly, quite particular) which were in need of further discussion and exploration and the pooling of ideas and knowledge.

Thank you to all who contributed to these and the many other discussions “on the blog” in 2011. I hope that 2012 will be a profitable year for all of us at the Commentary Table. Pass the port please!