Rob Bradshaw has recently made available the following articles by John Webster:

• John Webster, ‘The Legacy of Barth and Bultmann’, Evangel 1:1 (1983): 8-11.
• John Webster, ‘Karl Rahner’s Theology of Grace’, Evangel 1:2 (1983): 9-11.
• John Webster, ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Paschal Mystery’, Evangel 1:4 (1983): 6-8.
• John Webster, ‘Eberhard Jungel: The Humanity of God and the Humanity of Man’, Evangel 2:2 (1984): 4-6.
• John Webster, ‘Edward Schillebeeckx: God is always absolutely new’, Evangel 2:4 (1984): 5-8.

From the Word of the Day

I am not ashamed of the Gospel.  It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.

(Romans 1, 16)   

 How should we live this Word

 According to Paul, the Gospel cannot be compared to other religions or visions of life and of the world.  Rather, it questions them all!  The Gospel of which Paul is not ashamed is Christ Himself, Christ crucified and risen.  This is the power of God which becomes salvation for those who believe.  The ‘totally Other’, the God who lives in inaccessible light, the infinitely holy One, the Creator, revealed Himself in Jesus.  His omnipotence is omnipotence for salvation.  To believe is to live this certainty.  By the Spirit’s power,we respond to God’s faithfulness who, through Jesus, freed us from the greatest slavery, sin.

 Through a living faith, we are justified, made good, in harmony with God, with ourselves, with everyone, and with everything.  We become saints.  There is only foolishness outside of the Gospel.  Those who do not believe that the inaccessible God has made Himself present and close in Jesus Christ become vain in their reasoning.  St. Paul says that ‘they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man…They exchanged the truth of God for a lie…and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator’.  How true this reality is today!  We run the risk of drowning in this social-cultural tendency of the super person, of an atheistic and agnostic mentality.

 Today as I pause for silent contemplation, I will find a tranquil and silent spot.  I will descend from my mind to my heart where God dwells.  He is the Creator.  I am His creature.  God’s omnipotence is the omnipotence of love! 

 The word of God is living and effective, able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.

 The voice of Karl Rahner, Theologian

 Incomprehensible God, adventure of Love!  We thought that miserable humans were only a primitive model, a badly made super person that was yet to come.  It is too hard for us to tolerate ourselves as we are.  We are not wrong because it is difficult to support humans who continually make mistakes and go from one extreme to another.  And yet He came into His creature, into humans.  He insinuated Himself in all the limitations of this creature.

“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or she/he will be nothing at all.”  – Karl Rahner

The Jesuit Center at Wernersville is hosting a  weekend study on this topic by Keith Egan in Novemeber.

  These are reading selections from an article Cardinal Dulles wrote in First Things back in 2003. There were references to some controversies at the time which I have removed as they seemed too topical for my wants, but I’ve kept the overall survey aspect of the Church’s teachings on hell – it is an invaluable resource and timeless overview of the topic. Whether it be commenting on the New Testament or Paul or dealing with contemporary theologians writings on the topic, Cardinal Dulles presents his materials and interpretations with consummate skill. Reading him in this way always causes me continued pain at his absence, wondering what we have been missing.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Jesus and Hell
As we know from the Gospels, Jesus spoke many times about hell. Throughout his preaching, he holds forth two and only two final possibilities for human existence: the one being everlasting happiness in the presence of God, the other everlasting torment in the absence of God. He describes the fate of the damned under a great variety of metaphors: everlasting fire, outer darkness, tormenting thirst, a gnawing worm, and weeping and gnashing of teeth.

In the parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus indicates that some will be condemned. The Son of man says to the goats: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). In the Gospel of John, which says comparatively little about hell, Jesus is quoted as saying: “The hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear [the Father’s] voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28-29).

The apostles, understandably concerned, asked: “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” Without directly answering their question Jesus replied: “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and not be able” (Luke 13:23-24). In the parallel passage from Matthew, Jesus says: “Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14). In a parable immediately following this exchange, Jesus speaks of those who try to come to the marriage feast, but are told: “Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity. There you will weep and gnash your teeth” (Luke 13:27-28). In another parable, that of the wedding guest who is cast out for not wearing the proper attire, Jesus declares: “Many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). Taken in their obvious meaning, passages such as these give the impression that there is a hell, and that many go there; more, in fact, than are saved.

Other New Testament References
The New Testament does not tell us in so many words that any particular person is in hell. But several statements about Judas can hardly be interpreted otherwise. Jesus says that he has kept all those whom the Father has given him except the son of perdition (John 17:12). At another point Jesus calls Judas a devil (John 6:70), and yet again says of him: “It would be better for that man if he had never been born” (Matthew 26:24; Mark 14:21). If Judas were among the saved, these statements could hardly be true. Many saints and doctors of the Church, including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, have taken it as a revealed truth that Judas was reprobated. Some of the Fathers place the name of Nero in the same select company, but they do not give long lists of names, as Dante would do.

References to punishment after death in the remainder of the New Testament simply confirm the teaching of the Gospels. In the Book of Acts Paul says that those ordained to eternal life have believed his preaching, whereas those who disbelieved it have judged themselves unworthy of eternal life (Acts 13:46-48). Peter’s First Letter puts the question: “If the righteous man is scarcely to be saved, where will the impious and sinner appear?” (1 Peter 4:18). The Book of Revelation teaches that there is a fiery pit where Satan and those who follow him will be tormented forever. It states at one point: “As for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8).

St. Paul and Hell
The testimony of Paul is complex. In his First Letter to the Thessalonians he speaks of the coming divine judgment, in which Jesus will inflict vengeance “upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10). In his epistle to the Romans Paul says that the impenitent Jews are storing up wrath for themselves on the day of judgment (Romans 2:5). In writing to the Corinthians he distinguishes between those who are being saved by the gospel and those who are perishing because of their failure to accept it (1 Corinthians 1:18). In a variety of texts he gives lists of sins that will exclude people from the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19-21; Ephesians 5:3-6). And he tells the Philippians: “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).

Some passages in the letters of Paul lend themselves to a more optimistic interpretation, but they can hardly be used to prove that salvation is universal. In Romans 8:19-21 Paul predicts that “creation itself will be set free from its bondage of decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God,” but the text seems to refer to the world of nature; it does not say that all human beings will achieve the glorious liberty in question. In 1 Corinthians 15:28 Paul speaks of all things being ultimately subjected to Christ, but he does not imply that subjection means salvation. He presumably means that the demonic powers will ultimately be defeated. In Philippians 2:9-10 he predicts that eventually every knee will bow to Christ and every tongue confess him. But this need not mean a confession that proceeds from love. In the Gospels the devils proclaim that Jesus is the Holy One of God, but they are not saved by recognizing the fact.

Equally unavailing, in my opinion, are appeals to passages that say that God’s plan is to reconcile all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10; Colossians 1:19-20). Although this is surely God’s intent, He does not override the freedom that enables men and women to resist His holy will. The same may be said of the statement that God “desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Paul is apparently seeking to stimulate the apostolic zeal of missionaries who will bring the saving truth of Christ to all who do not yet believe. The absolute necessity of faith for salvation is a constant theme in the writings of Paul. I see no reason, then, for ranking Paul among the universalists.

The Teaching of the Church
The constant teaching of the Catholic Church supports the idea that there are two classes: the saved and the damned. Three general councils of the Church (Lyons I, 1245; Lyons II, 1274; and Florence, 1439) and Pope Benedict XII’s bull Benedictus Deus (1336) have taught that everyone who dies in a state of mortal sin goes immediately to suffer the eternal punishments of hell. This belief has perdured without question in the Catholic Church to this day, and is repeated almost verbatim in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC §1022, 1035). Several local councils in the Middle Ages, without apparently intending to define the point, state in passing that some have actually died in a state of sin and been punished by eternal damnation.

The Early Church Fathers
The relative numbers of the elect and the damned are not treated in any Church documents, but have been a subject of discussion among theologians. Among the Greek Fathers, Irenaeus, Basil, and Cyril of Jerusalem are typical in interpreting passages such as Matthew 22:14 as meaning that the majority will be consigned to hell. St. John Chrysostom, an outstanding doctor of the Eastern tradition, was particularly pessimistic: “Among thousands of people there are not a hundred who will arrive at their salvation, and I am not even certain of that number, so much perversity is there among the young and so much negligence among the old.”

St. Augustine and St. Thomas
Augustine may be taken as representative of the Western Fathers. In his controversy with the Donatist Cresconius, Augustine draws upon Matthew and the Book of Revelation to prove that the number of the elect is large, but he grants that their number is exceeded by that of the lost. In Book 21 of his City of God he rebuts first the idea that all human beings are saved, then that all the baptized are saved, then that all baptized Catholics are saved, and finally that all baptized Catholics who persevere in the faith are saved. He seems to limit salvation to baptized believers who refrain from serious sin or who, after sinning, repent and are reconciled with God.

The great Scholastics of the Middle Ages are not more sanguine. Thomas Aquinas, who may stand as the leading representative, teaches clearly in the Summa Theologiae that God reprobates some persons. A little later he declares that only God knows the number of the elect. But Thomas gives reasons for thinking that their number is relatively small. Since our human nature is fallen, and since eternal blessedness is a gift far beyond the powers and merits of every created nature, it is to be expected that most human beings fall short of achieving that goal.

The Population of Hell
The leading theologians of the baroque period follow suit. Francisco Suarez, in his treatise on predestination, puts the question squarely: How many are saved? Relying on the Gospel of Matthew, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, and Pope St. Gregory, he proposes the following estimation. If the question is asked about all men living between the creation and the end of the world, the number of the reprobate certainly exceeds that of the elect. This is to be expected because God was not rightly known before the coming of Christ, and even since that time many remain in darkness. If the term “Christian” is taken to include heretics, schismatics, and baptized apostates, it would still appear that most are damned. But if the question is put about those who die in the Catholic Church, Suarez submits his opinion that the majority are saved, since many die before they can sin mortally, and many others are fortified by the sacraments.

Suarez is relatively optimistic in comparison with other Catholic theologians of his day. Peter Canisius and Robert Bellarmine, for example, were convinced that most of the human race is lost.

Several studies published by Catholics early in the twentieth century concluded that there was a virtual consensus among the Fathers of the Church and the Catholic theologians of later ages to the effect that the majority of humankind go to eternal punishment in hell. Even if this consensus be granted, however, it is not binding, because the theologians did not claim that their opinion was revealed, or that to take the opposite view was heretical. Nor is the opinion that most people attain salvation contradicted by authoritative Church teaching.

Mention should here be made of a minority opinion among some of the Greek Fathers. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa sometimes speak as though in the end all will be saved. Origen, the most prominent representative of this view, is generally reported as teaching that at the end of time, the damned, now repentant and purified, will take part in the universal restoration of all things (apokatastasis). Three centuries after Origen’s death his views on this and several other topics were condemned by a local council of Constantinople convened by the Emperor Justinian in a.d. 563. Even in his lifetime, however, Origen claimed that his adversaries had misunderstood or misrepresented him. A number of distinguished scholars down through the centuries have defended his orthodoxy on the fate of the damned. The doctrine of the eternity of hell has been firmly in place at least since the seventh century, and is not subject to debate in the Catholic Church.

A Modern Break With Tradition: Maritain and Rahner
About the middle of the twentieth century, there seems to be a break in the tradition. Since then a number of influential theologians have favored the view that all human beings may or do eventually attain salvation. Some examples may be illustrative.

In a “reverie” circulated among friends but not published until after his death, the philosopher Jacques Maritain included what he called a “conjectural essay” on eschatology, in which he contemplates the possibility that the damned, although eternally in hell, may be able at some point to escape from pain. In response to the prayers of the saints, he imagines, God may miraculously convert their wills, so that from hating Him they come to love Him. After being pardoned, they will then be delivered from the pain of sense and placed in a kind of limbo. They will still be technically in hell, since they will lack the beatific vision, but they will enjoy a kind of natural felicity, like that of infants who die without baptism. At the end, he speculates, even Satan will be converted, and the fiery inferno, while it continues to exist, will have no spirits to afflict. This, as Maritain acknowledged, is a bold conjecture, since it has no support in Scripture or tradition, and contradicts the usual understanding of texts such as the parable of the Last Judgment scene of Matthew. But the theory has the advantage of showing how the Blood of Christ might obtain mercy for all spiritual creatures, even those eternally in hell.

Karl Rahner, another representative of the more liberal trend, holds for the possibility that no one ever goes to hell. We have no clear revelation, he says, to the effect that some are actually lost. The discourses of Jesus on the subject appear to be admonitory rather than predictive. Their aim is to persuade his hearers to pursue the better and safer path by alerting them to the danger of eternal perdition. While allowing for the real possibility of eternal damnation, says Rahner, we must simultaneously maintain “the truth of the omnipotence of the universal salvific will of God, the redemption of all by Christ, the duty of men to hope for salvation.” Rahner therefore believes that universal salvation is a possibility.

Hans Urs von Balthasar
The most sophisticated theological argument against the conviction that some human beings in fact go to hell has been proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” He rejects the ideas that hell will be emptied at the end of time and that the damned souls and demons will be reconciled with God. He also avoids asserting as a fact that everyone will be saved. But he does say that we have a right and even a duty to hope for the salvation of all, because it is not impossible that even the worst sinners may be moved by God’s grace to repent before they die. He concedes, however, that the opposite is also possible. Since we are able to resist the grace of God, none of us is safe. We must therefore leave the question speculatively open, thinking primarily of the danger in which we ourselves stand.

At one point in his book Balthasar incorporates a long quotation from Edith Stein, now Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who defends a position very like Balthasar’s. Since God’s all-merciful love, she says, descends upon everyone, it is probable that this love produces transforming effects in their lives. To the extent that people open themselves to that love, they enter into the realm of redemption. On this ground Stein finds it possible to hope that God’s omnipotent love finds ways of, so to speak, outwitting human resistance. Balthasar says that he agrees with Stein.

This position of Balthasar seems to me to be orthodox. It does not contradict any ecumenical councils or definitions of the faith. It can be reconciled with everything in Scripture, at least if the statements of Jesus on hell are taken as minatory rather than predictive. Balthasar’s position, moreover, does not undermine a healthy fear of being lost. But the position is at least adventurous. It runs against the obvious interpretation of the words of Jesus in the New Testament and against the dominant theological opinion down through the centuries, which maintains that some, and in fact very many, are lost.

The conviction of earlier theologians that relatively few are saved rests, I suspect, partly on the assumption that faith in Christ, baptism, and adherence to the Church are necessary conditions for salvation. The first two of these conditions are clearly set forth in the New Testament, and the third has been taught by many saints, councils, popes, and theologians. But these conditions can be interpreted more broadly than one might suspect. In recent centuries it has become common to speak of implicit faith, baptism “by desire,” and membership in the “soul” of the Church, or membership in voto (“by desire”). Vatican II declares that all people, even those who have never heard of Christ, receive enough grace to make their salvation possible….

It is unfair and incorrect to accuse either Balthasar or Richard John Neuhaus (who wrote an article supporting  Balthasar in 2002) of teaching that no one goes to hell. They grant that it is probable that some or even many do go there, but they assert, on the ground that God is capable of bringing any sinner to repentance, that we have a right to hope and pray that all will be saved. The fact that something is highly improbable need not prevent us from hoping and praying that it will happen. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “In hope, the Church prays for ‘all men to be saved’ (1 Timothy 2:4)” (CCC §1821). At another point the Catechism declares: “The Church prays that no one should be lost” (CCC §1058).

Pius IX And John Paul II
The Church continues to insist that explicit faith, reception of the sacraments, and obedience to the Church are the ordinary means to salvation. Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864) accordingly condemned the proposition: “We should at least have good hopes for the eternal salvation of those who are in no way in the true Church of Christ.” Pius XII in his encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ (Mystici Corporis, 1943) taught that even those who are united to the Church by bonds of implicit desire-a state that can by no means be taken for granted-still lack many precious means that are available in the Church and therefore “cannot be sure of their salvation.” Vatican II said that anyone who knows that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ and refuses to enter her cannot be saved. If we accept these teachings, we will find it unlikely that everyone fulfills the conditions for salvation.

Pope John Paul II in his Crossing the Threshold of Hope mentions the theory of Balthasar. After putting the question whether a loving God can allow any human being to be condemned to eternal torment, he replies: “And yet the words of Christ are unequivocal. In Matthew’s Gospel he speaks clearly of those who will go to eternal punishment (cf. Matthew 25:46).” As justification for this assessment the Pope puts the rhetorical question: Can God, who is ultimate justice, tolerate terrible crimes and let them go unpunished? Final punishment would seem to be necessary to reestablish the moral equilibrium in the complex history of humanity.

In a General Audience talk of July 28, 1999, the Pope seems to have shifted his position, adopting in effect that of Balthasar. According to the English version of the text he said:

Christian faith teaches that in taking the risk of saying “yes” or “no,” which marks the (human) creature’s freedom, some have already said no. They are the spiritual creatures that rebelled against God’s love and are called demons (cf. Fourth Lateran Council). What happened to them is a warning to us: it is a continuous call to avoid the tragedy which leads to sin and to conform our life to that of Jesus who lived his life with a “yes” to God.

Eternal damnation remains a possibility, but we are not granted, without special divine revelation, the knowledge of whether or which human beings are effectively involved in it. The thought of hell-and even less the improper use of biblical images-must not create anxiety or despair, but is a necessary and healthy reminder of freedom within the proclamation that the risen Jesus has conquered Satan, giving us the Spirit of God who makes us cry “Abba, Father!” (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6)

The last sentence refers to the hope of Christians for their own salvation and cannot be used to support any theory of universal salvation. But the preceding sentence indicates at least an openness to the opinion that we may hope for the salvation of all.

A Shift in Catholic Theology?
One might ask at this point whether there has been any shift in Catholic theology on the matter. The answer appears to be Yes, although the shift is not as dramatic as some imagine. The earlier pessimism was based on the unwarranted assumption that explicit Christian faith is absolutely necessary for salvation. This assumption has been corrected, particularly at Vatican II. There has also been a healthy reaction against the type of preaching that revels in depicting the sufferings of the damned in the most lurid possible light. An example would be the fictional sermon on hell that James Joyce recounts in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This kind of preaching fosters an image of God as an unloving and cruel tyrant, and in some cases leads to a complete denial of hell or even to atheism.

Today a kind of thoughtless optimism is the more prevalent error. Quite apart from what theologians teach, popular piety has become saccharine. Unable to grasp the rationale for eternal punishment, many Christians take it almost for granted that everyone, or practically everyone, must be saved. The Mass for the Dead has turned into a Mass of the Resurrection, which sometimes seems to celebrate not so much the resurrection of the Lord as the salvation of the deceased, without any reference to sin and punishment. More education is needed to convince people that they ought to fear God who, as Jesus taught, can punish soul and body together in hell (cf. Matthew 10:28).

The Demography Of Hell
The search for numbers in the demography of hell is futile. God in His wisdom has seen fit not to disclose any statistics. Several sayings of Jesus in the Gospels give the impression that the majority are lost. Paul, without denying the likelihood that some sinners will die without sufficient repentance, teaches that the grace of Christ is more powerful than sin: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). Passages such as these permit us to hope that very many, if not all, will be saved.

All told, it is good that God has left us without exact information. If we knew that virtually everybody would be damned, we would be tempted to despair. If we knew that all, or nearly all, are saved, we might become presumptuous. If we knew that some fixed percent, say fifty, would be saved, we would be caught in an unholy rivalry. We would rejoice in every sign that others were among the lost, since our own chances of election would thereby be increased. Such a competitive spirit would hardly be compatible with the gospel.

We are forbidden to seek our own salvation in a selfish and egotistical way. We are keepers of our brothers and sisters. The more we work for their salvation, the more of God’s favor we can expect for ourselves. Those of us who believe and make use of the means that God has provided for the forgiveness of sins and the reform of life have no reason to fear. We can be sure that Christ, who died on the Cross for us, will not fail to give us the grace we need. We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, and that if we persevere in that love, nothing whatever can separate us from Christ (cf. Romans 8:28-39). That is all the assurance we can have, and it should be enough.

I invited students to think with me last week about the nature of the confession “I believe” and the relationship this might hold to the ecumenical creeds and confessions of the Church. 

Students read selections of New Testament proto-creeds and excerpts from Origen, Karl Rahner, Georges Florovsky, and John Webster. It all made for vigorous discussion about the various ways we can conceive the purpose and role of confessions in the church’s ongoing life. Consider the following two excerpts, one from Rahner and the other from Webster, and let me know what you think: What is the ongoing role of the creeds in the life of the church – if there is one?

Rahner first:   

[T]he effective mission of the church in the face of modern disbelief likewise requires a testimony to the Christian message in which this message really becomes intelligible for people today … This message has to be able to express the essentials briefly for busy people today, and to express it again and again … [H]owever much [the Apostles Creed] will always be a permanent and binding norm of faith, nevertheless it cannot simply perform the function of a basic summary of faith today in an adequate way because it does not appeal directly enough to our contemporary intellectual and spiritual situation (Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, p. 449. Emphasis mine).

Set this next to Webster’s and you immediately see stark differences:

What is said about the nature and functions of creeds and confessions must be rooted in talk about the Triune God in the economy of salvation, tracing these human texts back to their source in teh church’s participation in the drama of God’s saving self-communication in Christ through the Spirit’s power … It is simply to say that the history of the creeds is part of the history of the church – part, that is, of that sphere of human life invaded and annexed by God and characterized by astonished and chastened hearing of the Word and by grateful and afflicted witness (“Confession and Confessions” in Nicene Christianity [Brazos, 2001], p. 120).

With whom do you feel more resonance, why? Or, what are the gains and losses of casting the history of the creeds into the divine economy of salvation as Webster does – while creating a foundation to argue for the ongoing significance of the creeds in the Church’s life, does this line of reasoning have drawbacks?

I read this paragraph which I record  below and thought it was informative. It is from  Marika, the host of Theologies blog. In attempting to explain Rahner, she notes:

“ What does it mean that the Word of God became human? Isn’t God unchangeing? What we have to say is that God, who is unchangeable in Godself, can become changeable in something else. The divine freedom means that God can become not-God, finite, Other-than-God. In emptying Godself and giving Godself away, God can make the other his own reality. Everything that God makes has, as a result of God’s self-giving love, the potential to become an expression of God and God’s love. All theology, says Rahner, is therefore anthropology, and all anthropology is Christology. To know what it is to be human is to know Christ, and to know Christ is to know God.”

Good observation!

The Isenheim Altar

One of the things I find in reading forum discussions is a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of freedom, particularly as it applies to the human being from the standpoint of God and the Bible. So I revisited a thin volume, The Christian View of Humanity by John Sachs, which I had read on Christian anthropology for one of my classes. Here is a reading selection on that idea of freedom:

“For the Bible, God’s sovereignty and human freedom go hand in hand. Human freedom, as a sharing in God’s dominion, is grounded in God’s own sovereignty, before which it is, therefore, ultimately responsible. God, not the human creature, is alone Lord of heaven and earth.

The mystery of creation is that there can be anything which is different from the infinite, boundless God. Christian faith understands the existence of the created world as the utterly free and gracious action of God. But according to biblical faith, God’s Word does not call creation into some kind of merely factual existence, but to being-with-God. To be means to live with God, to participate in some way in God’s life. When the Priestly writer tells us that God found all that God had made to be good, he is not referring to a moral quality or transcendental characteristic. He is speaking about the desire and delight that God has in relationship with creation. The smile of a mother holding her baby at the breast (Isaiah 49:15) images God’s delight in her creation: “It is good that you are here.”

This means something quite astounding, something which we don’t often take seriously. We are really free to be, free to be ourselves, different from God. The real freedom of the world is what God most intensely desires and is its greatest good. For, only in freedom can there be a real relationship of love in which each of the lovers takes delight in the mystery of the other. The Covenant and the history of its fulfillment bring this to expression. This is a matter of the heart, of personal relationship. The Lord freed the people from slavery in Egypt and called them to abandon the false gods in whom there is no life. “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33). The sovereignty of the Lord over the cosmos is of secondary interest to Israel. What is of utmost importance is the fact that God has created a people and, like a husband speaking tenderly to his wife, has betrothed it to himself in faithfulness and steadfast love (Hosea 2). creation and Covenant find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ, whose own person reveals what loving union between God and humanity really means, and in his Spirit, who is God’s love poured out into our hearts (Romans 5:5). “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17).

Freedom is from God and for God. On its deepest level, it is the capacity and responsibility to be in loving relationship with God. It is the gift of love, the capacity for love and it finds its only true fulfillment in love.

Action, Desire and Choice
According to the Scriptures, in creating the world out of love in order to be its lover, God made a partner not a puppet. Meaningful talk about freedom is rooted in the experience of ourselves as real agents. If we were not capable of real action, if we were completely determined in our activity by forces over which we have no control, then it would not make sense to speak of freedom. What we do matters. If our actions were of no real consequence for ourselves and for the world, it would make no sense to speak of freedom.

We experience ourselves as agents; our action is characterized by intentionality and self-conscious choice. This is one of the key things which distinguishes us from the other creatures. Of course, not everything that we do, or all of the things happening while we act, are intentional. At this very moment, my cardiovascular system is working away. Since I am in good health, I am completely unaware of it most of the time. But as a result of it and many other processes I am able to write this book. That is a matter of intention and choice. It is action in the strict sense of the term. And it is an experience of freedom.

Intentional agency is the basic experience of freedom. It cannot be demonstrated or disproved by neutral observation. On its simplest level, it presupposes real options and the ability to choose from among them what it is I decide to do. Of course, none of us has an unlimited range of options. We exist in a particular context and are determined to some extent by a whole matrix of relationships within it. For example, our genetic make-up is a given, as is the particular place and period of history in which we are born and live. From earliest childhood, we are all shaped in profound ways by familial and cultural forces about which we have no choice and over which we can exercise little control. They greatly influence the development of character and personality and evidently predispose us to certain kinds of interests and patterns of behavior. But our genetic, historical and cultural heredity does not determine in advance precisely what each of us will do in a given situation. Within such parameters there is a wide range in which I can determine what I want to do and how I desire to live.

Our ordinary experience of freedom is in making such choices. Of course, some choices matter more than others. Students like the freedom to choose which of several questions they will answer on a final exam. All of us like the freedom to decide what clothes we are going to wear and what we are going to eat for lunch. But after student days have passed, exams do not seem so important. And decisions about food and clothing (so the birds of the air and the lilies of the field are meant to remind us) ought not to be the most important choices we make. Such things usually have little impact on the world or on ourselves as persons. The freedom to choose one’s religion, country, home, profession, friends, and partner is considerably more basic to human life and dignity. The choices we make in these matters have a substantial and lasting impact.

The most important exercise of freedom, the most important choice we make in life, however, does not have to do merely with a particular thing or course of action. It has to do with our very selves. Freedom is the capacity to choose who I am going to become as a person. Life is not only a gift, it is a task as well. We are not merely objects thrown into existence, determined by others and outside influences. We are also subjects, responsible agents, persons who are challenged to say something, to do something, to become someone. At times, it can seem so overwhelming that we try to run away from it, either asking others to tell us what we should do or become or simply resigning to a fatalistic determinism. Freedom may be scary and unsettling at times, but we do have real choices to make about our lives. We cannot avoid them.

According to thinkers as diverse as Maurice Blondel, Karl Rahner, John MacMurray, and Eric Erikson, we are constituting our very selves through such choices. The values I choose to live by, how I deal with those aspects of myself and the world which I can’t change, the profession I choose to dedicate most of my time and energy to, how I choose to treat my family and respond to the needs of those around me — all have a profoundly formative influence, both upon myself and upon others. The “real me” is not a predetermined statistic of heredity. Each of us is becoming a certain person in a process of self-actualization which takes place in the concrete choices he or she makes throughout life. Moreover, experience teaches that human action has an enduring, cumulative effect. The capacity for good and evil, for loving and hating grows in action. Our freedom itself is always on the line. Through our actions we are always becoming more or less human, more or less free to be in the life-giving relationships of love with others and with God for which we were created.

You are what you do? In a certain sense, yes. Of course, not everything we do is conscious and intentional. Not everything we consciously choose to do involves our deepest self and even if it does, there is always the possibility of a change of heart, for better or for worse. Consequently, no person can be reduced to a single action he or she performs, or even to the sum of all past actions. Nonetheless, many theologians correctly point out that in the important choices of life, taken together as a whole, each of us makes what might be called a fundamental option which forms the deepest core of our personal identity. It expresses our basic attitude toward self, others and God and informs subsequent particular decisions we make. Thus, it is clear that for real human growth in freedom, attention to the basic direction and underlying attitude which is taking shape in my life is much more important than any particular choice or action in itself. For precisely in my free responses, I am deciding to be in a particular way and, therefore, to become a certain person. We see, therefore, that beyond the level of choice among options, human freedom is the capacity and responsibility for self-determination.

While freedom certainly entails the ability to change one’s mind or to have a real change of heart, its goal is not infinite options or endless revision. As a matter of fact, change just for the sake of change is often a sign of immaturity or great unfreedom. In many respects, we are freest when, no longer torn in different directions by a multitude of possibilities, we can at last surrender to one of them whole-heartedly. We have moved from a superficial level of freedom as the ability to change constantly to the depth dimension of freedom as the ability to “get it all together,” to reach some kind of personal wholeness and integral identity which lasts. Freedom is really the capacity finally to commit oneself, to “become somebody,” not to be somebody different every day. As the great catholic theologian Karl Rahner put it, “freedom is the capacity to dispose finally of oneself, to make oneself once and for all.” This is the central project of our adult lives.

At any given moment in life, we stand between a past already determined by the choices we have made and an undetermined future of different possibilities. The very existence of options and the importance of choosing make us aware of deeper questions:

What do I really want? What am I hoping to accomplish? Who do I wish finally to become? These are the questions of desire and they are fundamental to our understanding of freedom. Desire is the affective side of freedom. Freedom is the capacity to desire.

What is it that we most deeply desire? I suppose the most basic answer is “life.” Life is found only in relationships with others. To be alone is to die. Our basic desire for life and fulfillment is what leads us outside of ourselves. Freedom is the capacity for such self-transcendence, the power to reach out beyond ourselves. We desire to know about other things and persons and to be in life-giving relationships of love with them. If we pay attention to these experiences, we can see that our desire is open-ended, unbounded. It never comes to rest. Learning and loving always seem to leave us restless, hungry for more. Our desire for life is unrestricted; no single object or person completely satisfies it. Moreover, our experiences of life and love, as deep and life-giving as they might be, are all fragile, often damaged, sometimes destroyed by human failures and ultimately threatened by death itself. Throughout our lives, the desire which drives us in our interaction with other people and things is looking for life and love which is full and lasting. This is what Augustine meant when he said that our hearts will never come to rest until they rest in God. What we most deeply desire is God. God alone is life and love in unsurpassable fullness.

But can the infinite God really be the fulfillment of human beings, who as finite creatures remain radically different from God? Is the divine life a real goal and end which can be reached, or does God remain a silent, ever-receding and unattainable horizon? Christian faith proclaims that in Jesus Christ, God has drawn near, become human. The infinite capacity of human “nature” is revealed definitively and irrevocably in the humanity of Jesus, far beyond all notions of intimacy and partnership which we found in the stories of Genesis. Created human freedom is ultimately a real capacity for God. Its unrestricted openness is truly an image of and capacity for God’s infinity; its never-ending desire made for eternal life and love. If we are really capable of being one with God, then nothing else but loving union with God will make us whole and entire. Only God can be the “object” of a complete, unconditional, final, and finally fulfilling choice.

This is what human freedom is finally for. This is where human freedom comes to its fulfillment. But how do we “choose” God, how do we enter more fully into God’s love? God does not appear on the scene as one distinct “object” among many others to be chosen and loved. God’s presence is mediated. The fundamental and abiding medium of our real relationship with God is this world, God’s beloved creation. The only mode we have of experiencing God, of relating with God, of accepting God in love or turning from God in selfishness, is in terms of this world and our action in it. In all that we do, we are at least implicitly taking a stand with respect to God and God’s offer of life.

Edith Stein, a Carmelite philosopher who was gassed by the Nazis, once said that those who search for the truth are looking for God whether they know it or not. Modifying this slightly we could say that whenever we really love this world or any part of it, truly and honestly for what it really is; whenever we respect it, hope for it, care for it; whenever we attend to the needs of the least of our brothers and sisters — we are meeting and loving God, whether we realize it or not. This seems to be the message of Matthew 25, especially as we ponder the surprise expressed by the just, who did the loving, human, everyday things, without experiencing them explicitly in a religious way. This is why Karl Rahner and Piet Schoonenberg stress that the love of God and the love of neighbor are really one. Only love can make us truly free and bring us the wholeness we call salvation.

In Jesus Christ, and in the Kingdom which he preached, Christians may see the freedom to which they are called. None of the apostles preached this more passionately than Paul, who exhorted the Galatians to hold fast to the freedom which was theirs in Christ, a freedom which builds community and enables loving, creative service (5:13). He makes it clear that true freedom is not merely freedom from; it is a freedom for. It is not merely the autonomy of the Enlightenment. It goes far beyond the “rights” of the individual in modern society. It is a freedom for others, a freedom for service, a freedom for love. It is the freedom to be with and for the others, the freedom which is the heart of true community.

This is what God wills; this is all God desires. It sums up the Law. In everything else God has truly made us free. Can we really believe that Christ has set us free for freedom (Galatians 5:1), with no other “hidden agenda,” no new set of rules and regulations. God wishes us the real freedom to become lovers and so enter into the fullness of life. I do not think it matters much to God how exactly each of us desires to do that. Augustine put it beautifully: “Love and do what you wish.”

It is clear that our freedom is itself something which needs to be set free. In some manner, each of us suffers from the imprisoning effects of sin in the world. All of us are to some extent caught up in ourselves, unable to reach out freely to others. It is hard to love, especially when it requires sacrifice and promises no romantic payoff. Disordered affections or addictions often frustrate or prevent loving relationships. It is not always easy to get in touch with the deepest desires of our hearts, to know what I really want to do or become. In this context, it is easy to understand why the NT almost always speaks about freedom as a grace of God, the gift of the Spirit which overcomes the selfishness and slavery of sin. We shall consider this in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

In the end, therefore, freedom does not refer so much to the rights of private, individual human beings, as it does to the foundation of a living communion of love. Freedom is the capacity and responsibility for human community and divine communion.“

Apparently, the idea of the vicarious or substitutionary atonement is inconvenient to Catholic sacramentalist doctrines, including the idea that Christ’s first sacrifice was not enough and that He must be sacrificed over and over and over again. Protestants who have a tendency to defend Catholics because they profess to be Christians and belief in certain vital doctrines and because many of them are very fervent, faithful and dedicated to their beliefs (and also Protestants who follow in the ecumenical path blazed by such figures as John Wesley and Billy Graham) at some point need to confront the issue of what Roman Catholics actually believe. It is more than just the fact that they worship dead people (Mary and “saints”) and angels (and don’t give me this “they don’t worship them, it is merely veneration lie, Biblical Christianity has always held that the object of prayer is also the object of worship, plus only God alone is worthy of worship AND veneration, no creature is worthy of being venerated) although the idolatry certainly is bad enough. It is also their position on core doctrines concerning Jesus Christ. Is it any wonder that so many leading evangelicals like the aforementioned Graham and prominent theologian Clark Pinnock went from promoting and supporting ecumenical (or to be honest INTERFAITH as Roman Catholicism is a separate and distinct religion from Christianity) ties with Roman Catholics to promoting “many paths to heaven” religious pluralism, or “inclusivism.” Incidentally, according to Wikipedia people who support “inclusivism” include:

Supporters of inclusivism include C. S. Lewis, John Wesley, Clark Pinnock, Karl Rahner, John E. Sanders, Terrance L. Tiessen (Reformed) and Robert Brush (contributor to the Arminian Magazine). While Billy Graham faithfully preached “salvation by faith in Christ alone” throughout his 60 year ministry as an evangelist, he has recently made controversial comments that border on inclusivism (but he does not like to refer to it by the term, because he is concerned that many people mean universalism when they refer to inclusivism). This doctrine is held by Roman Catholics and Seventh-day Adventists.

All the more reason why Christians should not defile themselves with things concerning Rome (or for that matter with Eastern Orthodox or other flavors of “Catholicism”).

From Theories of the Atonement

Doctrine of the Atonement Catholic Information

The word atonement, which is almost the only theological term of English origin, has a curious history. The verb “atone”, from the adverbial phrase “at one” (M.E. at oon), at first meant to reconcile, or make “at one”; from this it came to denote the action by which such reconciliation was effected, e.g. satisfaction for all offense or an injury. Hence, in Catholic theology, the Atonement is the Satisfaction of Christ, whereby God and the world are reconciled or made to be at one. “For God indeed was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). The Catholic doctrine on this subject is set forth in the sixth Session of the Council of Trent, chapter ii. Having shown the insufficiency of Nature, and of Mosaic Law the Council continues:

Whence it came to pass, that the Heavenly Father, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort (2 Corinthians 1, 3), when that blessed fullness of the time was come (Galatians 4:4) sent unto men Jesus Christ, His own Son who had been, both before the Law and during the time of the Law, to many of the holy fathers announced and promised, that He might both redeem the Jews, who were under the Law and that the Gentiles who followed not after justice might attain to justice and that all men might receive the adoption of sons. Him God had proposed as a propitiator, through faith in His blood (Romans 3:25), for our sins, and not for our sins only, but also for those of the whole world (I John ii, 2).

More than twelve centuries before this, the same dogma was proclaimed in the words of the Nicene Creed, “who for us men and for our salvation, came down, took flesh, was made man; and suffered. “And all that is thus taught in the decrees of the councils may be read in the pages of the New Testament. For instance, in the words of Our Lord, “even as the Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a redemption for many” (Matthew 20:28); or of St. Paul, “Because in him, it hath well pleased the Father that all fulness should dwell; and through him to reconcile all things unto himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on earth, and the things that are in heaven.” (Colossians 1:19-20). The great doctrine thus laid down in the beginning was further unfolded and brought out into clearer light by the work of the Fathers and theologians. And it may be noted that in this instance the development is chiefly due to Catholic speculation on the mystery, and not, as in the case of other doctrines, to controversy with heretics. At first we have the central fact made known in the Apostolic preaching, that mankind was fallen and was raised up and redeemed from sin by the blood of Christ. But it remained for the pious speculation of Fathers and theologians to enter into the meaning of this great truth, to inquire into the state of fallen man, and to ask how Christ accomplished His work of Redemption. By whatever names or figures it may be described, that work is the reversal of the Fall, the blotting out of sin, the deliverance from bondage, the reconciliation of mankind with God. And it is brought to pass by the Incarnation, by the life, the sufferings, and the death of the Divine Redeemer. All this may be summed up in the word Atonement. This, is so to say, the starting point. And herein all are indeed at one. But, when it was attempted to give a more precise account of the nature of the Redemption and the manner of its accomplishment, theological speculation took different courses, some of which were suggested by the various names and figures under which this ineffable mystery is adumbrated in Holy Scripture. Without pretending to give a full history of the discussions, we may briefly indicate some of the main lines on which the doctrine was developed, and touch on the more important theories put forward in explanation of the Atonement.

(a) In any view, the Atonement is founded on the Divine Incarnation. By this great mystery, the Eternal Word took to Himself the nature of man and, being both God and man, became the Mediator between God and men. From this, we have one of the first and most profound forms of theological speculation on the Atonement, the theory which is sometimes described as Mystical Redemption. Instead of seeking a solution in legal figures, some of the great Greek Fathers were content to dwell on the fundamental fact of the Divine Incarnation. By the union of the Eternal Word with the nature of man all mankind was lifted up and, so to say, deified. “He was made man”, says St. Athanasius, “that we might be made gods” (De Incarnatione Verbi, 54). “His flesh was saved, and made free the first of all, being made the body of the Word, then we, being concorporeal therewith, are saved by the same (Orat., II, Contra Arianos, lxi). And again, “For the presence of the Saviour in the flesh was the price of death and the saving of the whole creation (Ep. ad Adelphium, vi). In like manner St. Gregory of Nazianzus proves the integrity of the Sacred Humanity by the argument, “That which was not assumed is not healed; but that which is united to God is saved” (to gar aproslepton, atherapeuton ho de henotai to theu, touto kai sozetai). This speculation of the Greek Fathers undoubtedly contains a profound truth which is sometimes forgotten by later authors who are more intent on framing juridical theories of ransom and satisfaction. But it is obvious that this account of the matter is imperfect, and leaves much to be explained. It must be remembered, moreover, that the Fathers themselves do not put this forward as a full explanation. For while many of their utterances might seem to imply that the Redemption was actually accomplished by the union of a Divine Person with the human nature, it is clear from other passages that they do not lose sight of the atoning sacrifice. The Incarnation is, indeed, the source and the foundation of the Atonement, and these profound thinkers have, so to say, grasped the cause and its effects as one vast whole. Hence they look on to the result before staying to consider the means by which it was accomplished.

(b) But something more on this matter had already been taught in the preaching of the Apostles and in the pages of the New Testament. The restoration of fallen man was the work of the Incarnate Word. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). But the peace of that reconciliation was accomplished by the death of the Divine Redeemer, “making peace through the blood of His cross” (Colossians 1:20). This redemption by death is another mystery, and some of the Fathers in the first ages are led to speculate on its meaning, and to construct a theory in explanation. Here the words and figures used in Holy Scripture help to guide the current of theological thought. Sin is represented as a state of bondage or servitude, and fallen man is delivered by being redeemed, or bought with a price. “For you are bought with a great price” (1 Corinthians 6:20). “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to take the book, and to open the seals thereof; because thou wast slain, and hast redeemed to God, in thy blood” (Revelation 5:9). Looked at in this light, the Atonement appears as the deliverance from captivity by the payment of a ransom. This view is already developed in the second century. “The mighty Word and true Man reasonably redeeming us by His blood, gave Himself a ransom for those who had been brought into bondage. And since the Apostasy unjustly ruled over us, and, whereas we belonged by nature to God Almighty, alienated us against nature and made us his own disciples, the Word of God, being mighty in all things, and failing not in His justice, dealt justly even with the Apostasy itself, buying back from it the things which were His own” (Irenaeus Aversus Haereses V, i). And St. Augustine says in well-known words: “Men were held captive under the devil and served the demons, but they were redeemed from captivity. For they could sell themselves. The Redeemer came, and gave the price; He poured forth his blood and bought the whole world. Do you ask what He bought? See what He gave, and find what He bought. The blood of Christ is the price. How much is it worth? What but the whole world? What but all nations?” (Enarratio in Psalm xcv, n. 5).

It cannot be questioned that this theory also contains a true principle. For it is founded on the express words of Scripture, and is supported by many of the greatest of the early Fathers and later theologians. But unfortunately, at first, and for a long period of theological history, this truth was somewhat obscured by a strange confusion, which would seem to have arisen from the natural tendency to take a figure too literally, and to apply it in details which were not contemplated by those who first made use of it. It must not be forgotten that the account of our deliverance from sin is set forth in figures. Conquest, captivity, and ransom are familiar facts of human history. Man, having yielded to the temptations of Satan, was like to one overcome in battle. Sin, again, is fitly likened to a state of slavery. And when man was set free by the shedding of Christ’s precious Blood, this deliverance would naturally recall (even if it had not been so described in Scripture) the redemption of a captive by the payment of a ransom.

But however useful and illuminating in their proper place, figures of this kind are perilous in the hands of those who press them too far, and forget that they are figures. This is what happened here. When a captive is ransomed the price is naturally paid to the conqueror by whom he is held in bondage. Hence, if this figure were taken and interpreted literally in all its details, it would seem that the price of man’s ransom must be paid to Satan. The notion is certainly startling, if not revolting. Even if brave reasons pointed in this direction, we might well shrink from drawing the concluslon. And this is in fact so far from being the case that it seems hard to find any rational explanation of such a payment, or any right on which it could be founded. Yet, strange to say, the bold flight of theological speculation was not checked by these misgivings. In the above-cited passage of St. Irenæus, we read that the Word of God “dealt justly even with the Apostasy itself [i.e. Satan], buying back from it the things which were His own.” This curious notion, apparently first mooted by St. Irenæus, was taken up by Origen in the next century, and for about a thousand years it played a conspicuous part in the history of theology. In the hands of some of the later Fathers and medieval writers, it takes various forms, and some of its more repulsive features are softened or modified. But the strange notion of some right, or claim, on the part of Satan is still present. A protest was raised by St. Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century, as might be expected from that most accurate of the patristic theologians. But it was not till St. Anselm and Abelard had met it with unanswerable arguments that its power was finally broken. It makes a belated appearance in the pages of Peter Lombard. (c) But it is not only in connection with the theory of ransom that we meet with this notion of “rights” on the part of Satan. Some of the Fathers set the matter in a different aspect. Fallen man, it was said, was justly under the dominion of the devil, in punishment for sin. But when Satan brought suffering and death on the sinless Saviour, he abused his power and exceeded his right, so that he was now justly deprived of his dominion over the captives. This explanation is found especially in the sermons of St. Leo and the “Morals” of St. Gregory the Great. Closely allied to this explanation is the singular “mouse-trap” metaphor of St. Augustine. In this daring figure of speech, the Cross is regarded as the trap in which the bait is set and the enemy is caught. “The Redeemer came and the deceiver was overcome. What did our Redeemer do to our Captor? In payment for us He set the trap, His Cross, with His blood for bait. He [Satan] could indeed shed that blood; but he deserved not to drink it. By shedding the blood of One who was not his debtor, he was forced to release his debtors” (Serm. cxxx, part 2).

(d) These ideas retained their force well into the Middle Ages. But the appearance of St. Anselm’s “Cur Deus Homo?” made a new epoch in the theology of the Atonement. It may be said, indeed, that this book marks an epoch in theological literature and doctrinal development. There are not many works, even among those of the greatest teachers, that can compare in this respect with the treatise of St. Anselm. And, with few exceptions, the books that have done as much to influence and guide the growth of theology are the outcome of some great struggle with heresy; while others, again, only summarize the theological learning of the age. But this little book is at once purely pacific and eminently original. Nor could any dogmatic treatise well be more simple and unpretending than this luminous dialogue between the great archbishop and his disciple Boso. There is no parade of learning, and but little in the way of appeal to authorities. The disciple asks and the master answers; and both alike face the great problem before them fearlessly, but at the same time with all due reverence and modesty. Anselm says at the outset that he will not so much show his disciple the truth he needs, as seek it along with him; and that when he says anything that is not confirmed by higher authority, it must be taken as tentative, and provisional. He adds that, though he may in some measure meet the question, one who is wiser could do it better; and that, whatever man may know or say on this subject, there will always remain deeper reasons that are beyond him. In the same spirit he concludes the whole treatise by submitting it to reasonable correction at the hands of others.

It may be safely said that this is precisely what has come to pass. For the theory put forward by Anselm has been modified by the work of later theologians, and confirmed by the testimony of truth. In contrast to some of the other views already noticed, this theory is remarkably clear and symmetrical. And it is certainly more agreeable to reason than the “mouse-trap” metaphor, or the notion of purchase money paid to Satan. Anselm’s answer to the question is simply the need of satisfaction of sin. No sin, as he views the matter, can be forgiven without satisfaction. A debt to Divine justice has been incurred; and that debt must needs be paid. But man could not make this satisfaction for himself; the debt is something far greater than he can pay; and, moreover, all the service that he can offer to God is already due on other titles. The suggestion that some innocent man, or angel, might possibly pay the debt incurred by sinners is rejected, on the ground that in any case this would put the sinner under obligation to his deliverer, and he would thus become the servant of a mere creature. The only way in which the satisfaction could be made, and men could be set free from sin, was by the coming of a Redeemer who is both God and man. His death makes full satisfaction to the Divine Justice, for it is something greater than all the sins of all mankind. Many side questions are incidentally treated in the dialogue between Anselm and Boso. But this is the substance of the answer given to the great question, “Cur Deus Homo?”. Some modern writers have suggested that this notion of deliverance by means of satisfaction may have a German origin. For in old Teutonic laws a criminal might pay the wergild instead of undergoing punishment. But this custom was not peculiar or to the Germans, as we may see from the Celtic eirig, and, as Riviere has pointed out, there is no need to have recourse to this explanation. For the notion of satisfaction for sin was already present in the whole system of ecclesiastical penance, though it had been left for Anselm to use it in illustration of the doctrine of the Atonement. It may be added that the same idea underlies the old Jewish “sin-offerings” as well as the similar rites that are found in many ancient religions. It is specially prominent in the rites and prayers used on the Day of Atonement. And this, it may be added, is now the ordinary acceptance of the word; to “atone” is to give satisfaction, or make amends, for an offense or an injury.

(e) Whatever may be the reason, it is clear that this doctrine was attracting special attention in the age of St. Anselm. His own work bears witness that it was undertaken at the urgent request of others who wished to have some new light on this mystery. To some extent, the solution offered by Anselm seems to have satisfied these desires, though, in the course of further discussion, an important part of his theory, the absolute necessity of Redemption and of satisfaction for sin, was discarded by later theologians, and found few defenders. But meanwhile, within a few years of the appearance of the “Cur Deus Homo?” another theory on the subject had been advanced by Abelard. In common with St. Anselm, Abelard utterly rejected the old and then still prevailing, notion that the devil had some sort of right over fallen man, who could only be justly delivered by means of a ransom paid to his captor. Against this he very rightly urges, with Anselm, that Satan was clearly guilty of injustice in the matter and could have no right to anything but punishment. But, on the other hand, Abelard was unable to accept Anselm’s view that an equivalent satisfaction for sin was necessary, and that this debt could only be paid by the death of the Divine Redeemer. He insists that God could have pardoned us without requiring satisfaction. And, in his view, the reason for the Incarnation and the death of Christ was the pure love of God. By no other means could men be so effectually turned from sin and moved to love God. Abelard’s teaching on this point, as on others, was vehemently attacked by St. Bernard. But it should be borne in mind that some of the arguments urged in condemnation of Abelard would affect the position of St. Anselm also, not to speak of later Catholic theology.

In St. Bernard’s eyes it seemed that Abelard, in denying the rights of Satan, denied the “Sacrament of Redemption” and regarded the teaching and example of Christ as the sole benefit of the Incarnation. “But”, as Mr. Oxenham observes,

he had not said so, and he distinctly asserts in his “Apology” that “the Son of God was incarnate to deliver us from the bondage of sin and yoke of the Devil and to open to us by His death the gate of eternal life.” And St. Bernard himself, in this very Epistle, distinctly denies any absolute necessity for the method of redemption chosen, and suggests a reason for it not so very unlike Abelard’s. “Perhaps that method is the best, whereby in a land of forgetfulness and sloth we might be more powerfully as vividly reminded of our fall, through the so great and so manifold sufferings of Him who repaired it.” Elsewhere when not speaking controversially, he says still more plainly: “Could not the Creator have restored His work without that difficulty? He could, but He preferred to do it at his own cost, lest any further occasion should be given for that worst and most odious vice of ingratitude in man” (Bern., Serm. xi, in Cant.). What is this but to say, with Abelard that “He chose the Incarnation as the most effectual method for eliciting His creature’s love?” (The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 85, 86).

(f) Although the high authority of St. Bernard was thus against them, the views of St. Anselm and Abelard, the two men who in different ways were the fathers of Scholasticism, shaped the course of later medieval theology. The strange notion of the rights of Satan, against which they had both protested, now disappears from the pages of our theologians. For the rest, the view which ultimately prevailed may be regarded as a combination of the opinions of Anselm and Abelard. In spite of the objections urged by the latter writer, Anselm’s doctrine of Satisfaction was adopted as the basis. But St. Thomas and the other medieval masters agree with Abelard in rejecting the notion that this full Satisfaction for sin was absolutely necessary. At the most, they are willing to admit a hypothetical or conditional necessity for the Redemption by the death of Christ. The restoration of fallen man was a work of God’s free mercy and benevolence. And, even on the hypothesis that the loss was to be repaired, this might have been brought about in many and various ways. The sin might have been remitted freely, without any satisfaction at all, or some lesser satisfaction, however imperfect in itself, might have been accepted as sufficient. But on the hypothesis that God as chosen to restore mankind, and at the same time, to require full satisfaction as a condition of pardon and deliverance, nothing less than the Atonement made by one who was God as well as man could suffice as satisfaction for the offense against the Divine Majesty. And in this case Anselm’s argument will hold good. Mankind cannot be restored unless God becomes man to save them.

In reference to many points of detail the Schoolmen, here as elsewhere, adopted divergent views. One of the chief questions at issue was the intrinsic adequacy of the satisfaction offered by Christ. On this point the majority, with St. Thomas at their head, maintained that, by reason of the infinite dignity of the Divine Person, the least action or suffering of Christ had an infinite value, so that in itself it would suffice as an adequate satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Scotus and his school, on the other hand, disputed this intrinsic infinitude, and ascribed the all-sufficiency of the satisfaction to the Divine acceptation. As this acceptation was grounded on the infinite dignity of the Divine Person, the difference was not so great as might appear at first sight. But, on this point at any rate the simpler teaching of St. Thomas is more generally accepted by later theologians. Apart from this question, the divergent views of the two schools on the primary motive of the Incarnation naturally have some effect on the Thomist and Scotist theology of the Atonement. On looking back at the various theories noticed so far, it will be seen that they are not, for the most part, mutually exclusive, but may be combined and harmonized. It may be said, indeed, that they all help to bring out different aspects of that great doctrine which cannot find adequate expression in any human theory. And in point of fact it will generally be found that the chief Fathers and Schoolmen, though they may at times lay more stress on some favourite theory of their own, do not lose sight of the other explanations.

Thus the Greek Fathers, who delight in speculating on the Mystical Redemption by the Incarnation, do not omit to speak also of our salvation by the shedding of blood. Origen, who lays most stress on the deliverance by payment of a ransom, does not forget to dwell on the need of a sacrifice for sin. St. Anselm again, in his “Meditations”, supplements the teaching set forth in his “Cur Deus Homo?” Abelard, who might seem to make the Atonement consist in nothing more than the constraining example of Divine Love has spoken also of our salvation by the Sacrifice of the Cross, in passages to which his critics do not attach sufficient importance. And, as we have seen his great opponent, St. Bernard, teaches all that is really true and valuable in the theory which he condemned. Most, if not all, of these theories had perils of their own, if they were isolated and exaggerated. But in the Catholic Church there was ever a safeguard against these dangers of distortion. As Mr. Oxenham says very finely,

The perpetual priesthood of Christ in heaven, which occupies a prominent place in nearly all the writings we have examined, is even more emphatically insisted upon by Origen. And this deserves to be remembered, because it is a part of the doctrine which has been almost or altogether dropped out of many Protestant expositions of the Atonement, whereas those most inclining among Catholics to a merely juridical view of the subject have never been able to forget the present and living reality of a sacrifice constantly kept before their eyes, as it were, in the worship which reflects on earth the unfailing liturgy of heaven. (p. 38)

The reality of these dangers and the importance of this safeguard may be seen in the history of this doctrine since the age of Reformation. As we have seen, its earlier development owed comparatively little to the stress of controversy with the heretics. And the revolution of the sixteenth century was no exception to the rule. For the atonement was not one of the subjects directly disputed between the Reformers and their Catholic opponents. But from its close connection with the cardinal question of Justification, this doctrine assumed a very special prominence and importance in Protestant theology and practical preaching. Mark Pattison tells us in his “Memoirs” that he came to Oxford with his “home Puritan religion almost narrowed to two points, fear of God’s wrath and faith in the doctrine of the Atonement”. And his case was possibly no exception among Protestant religionists. In their general conception on the atonement the Reformers and their followers happily preserved the Catholic doctrine, at least in its main lines. And in their explanation of the merit of Christ’s sufferings and death we may see the influence of St. Thomas and the other great Schoolmen. But, as might be expected from the isolation of the doctrine and the loss of other portions of Catholic teaching, the truth thus preserved was sometimes insensibly obscured or distorted. It will be enough to note here the presence of two mistaken tendencies.

The first is indicated in the above words of Pattison in which the Atonement is specially connected with the thought of the wrath of God. It is true of course that sin incurs the anger of the Just Judge, and that this is averted when the debt due to Divine Justice is paid by satisfaction. But it must not be thought that God is only moved to mercy and reconciled to us as a result of this satisfaction. This false conception of the Reconciliation is expressly rejected by St. Augustine (In Joannem, Tract. cx, section 6). God’s merciful love is the cause, not the result of that satisfaction.

The second mistake is the tendency to treat the Passion of Christ as being literally a case of vicarious punishment. This is at best a distorted view of the truth that His Atoning Sacrifice took the place of our punishment, and that He took upon Himself the sufferings and death that were due to our sins.

This view of the Atonement naturally provoked a reaction. Thus the Socinians were led to reject the notion of vicarious suffering and satisfaction as inconsistent with God’s justice and mercy. And in their eyes the work of Christ consisted simply in His teaching by word and example. Similar objections to the juridical conception of the Atonement led to like results in the later system of Swedenborg. More recently Albrecht Ritschl, who has paid special attention to this subject, has formulated a new theory on somewhat similar lines. His conception of the Atonement is moral and spiritual, rather than juridical and his system is distinguished by the fact that he lays stress on the relation of Christ to the whole Christian community. We cannot stay to examine these new systems in detail. But it may be observed that the truth which they contain is already found in the Catholic theology of the Atonement. That great doctrine has been faintly set forth in figures taken from man’s laws and customs. It is represented as the payment of a price, or a ransom, or as the offering of satisfaction for a debt. But we can never rest in these material figures as though they were literal and adequate. As both Abelard and Bernard remind us, the Atonement is the work of love. It is essentially a sacrifice, the one supreme sacrifice of which the rest were but types and figures. And, as St. Augustine teaches us, the outward rite of Sacrifice is the sacrament, or sacred sign, of the invisible sacrifice of the heart. It was by this inward sacrifice of obedience unto death, by this perfect love with which He laid down his life for His friends, that Christ paid the debt to justice, and taught us by His example, and drew all things to Himself; it was by this that He wrought our Atonement and Reconciliation with God, “making peace through the blood of His Cross”.

Publication information Written by W.H. Kent. Transcribed by Joseph P. Thomas. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume II. Published 1907. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

Do check out the latest discussion at Reformed Form.

Dietro l’opposizione intra-ecclesiale all’insegnamento di B-XVI c’è il pensiero di un altro influente gesuita

Il nome di Karl Rahner è un passaggio obbligato per chi voglia entrare nel cuore del dibattito intraecclesiale dei nostri giorni. Come perito conciliare del cardinale Franz König il gesuita tedesco svolse, dietro le quinte, un ruolo cruciale nel Vaticano II, fino a essere definito dall’allora decano della Gregoriana, Juan Alfaro, “il massimo ispiratore del Concilio”. Di certo ha dominato il postconcilio come conferenziere di grido e scrittore dalla alluvionale produzione, pronto a intervenire disinvoltamente su tutti i problemi del momento: i suoi titoli sono oltre quattromila, le sue opere, tradotte e diffuse in tutto il mondo, continuano a esercitare una larga influenza sul mondo cattolico contemporaneo.

Sembra giunta però l’ora di “uscire da Rahner”, come implicitamente auspicato da Benedetto XVI nell’ormai storico discorso alla Curia Romana del 22 dicembre 2005, sulle “ermeneutiche” del Concilio Vaticano II. Lo “spirito del Concilio” a cui si richiamano gli ermeneuti della “discontinuità” ha infatti la sua fonte nel Geist in Welt di Rahner, quello “Spirito nel mondo” che è il titolo del suo primo importante libro, pubblicato nel 1939. Se in questo volume Rahner delinea la sua concezione filosofica della conoscenza, nel successivo, “Uditori della parola” (Hörer des Wortes), pubblicato nel 1941, espone la sua visione propriamente teologica. Le tesi di questi due libri e dei successivi, già lucidamente criticate dal padre Cornelio Fabro (“La svolta antropologica di Karl Rahner”, 1974), sono ora oggetto di un importante volume, a cura di padre Serafino M. Lanzetta, che raccoglie gli atti del convegno tenutosi a Firenze nel novembre 2007, con la partecipazione di eccellenti studiosi, provenienti da diverse parti del mondo: Ignacio Andereggen, Alessandro Apollonio, Giovanni Cavalcoli, Peter M. Fehlner, Joaquín Ferrer Arellano, Brunero Gherardini, Manfred Hauke, Antonio Livi, H. Christian Schmidbaur, Paolo M. Siano, (“Karl Rahner. Un’analisi critica. Le figure, le opere e la recensione. Teologia di Karl Rahner, 1904-1984”. Cantagalli).

Oggetto della scienza teologica, per Rahner, non è Dio, di cui non può essere dimostrata l’esistenza, ma l’uomo, che costituisce l’unica esperienza di cui abbiamo l’immediata certezza. Non si può dunque parlare di Dio al di fuori del processo conoscitivo dell’uomo. Dio, più precisamente, esiste “autocomunicandosi” all’uomo che lo interpella. Rahner afferma che nessuna risposta va al di là dell’orizzonte che la domanda ha già precedentemente delimitato. L’orizzonte di Dio è misurato dall’uomo che, delimitando nella sua domanda la risposta divina, diviene la misura stessa della Rivelazione di Dio. Rahner non dice che l’uomo è necessario a Dio perché Dio possa esistere, ma poiché senza l’uomo Dio non può essere conosciuto, la conoscenza umana diviene la chiave di quella che egli definisce la “svolta antropologica” della teologia. Rahner si richiama spesso a san Tommaso d’Aquino, ma di fatto riduce la metafisica ad antropologia e la antropologia a gnoseologia ed ermeneutica.
La “teologia trascendentale” di Rahner appare, in questa prospettiva, come uno spregiudicato tentativo di liberarsi della tradizionale metafisica tomista, in nome dello stesso san Tommaso. Ciò naturalmente può avvenire solo a condizione di falsificare il pensiero dell’Aquinate. Fabro non esita a definire Rahner “deformator thomisticus radicalis”, a tutti i livelli: dei testi, dei contesti e dei principi. L’esito è un “trasbordo” dal realismo metafisico di Tommaso all’immanentismo di Kant, di Hegel e soprattutto di Heidegger, acclamato dal gesuita tedesco come il suo “unico maestro”.

Rahner accetta il punto di partenza cartesiano dell’io come auto-coscienza. L’uomo, spogliato della sua corporeità, è innanzitutto coscienza, puro spirito, immerso nel mondo. Come per Cartesio e per Hegel, anche per Rahner è il conoscere che fonda l’essere, ma la conoscenza ha il suo fondamento nella libertà, perché “nella misura in cui un essere diventa libero, nella medesima misura esso è conoscente”. La coscienza coincide con la volontà dell’uomo e la volontà dell’uomo è l’attuarsi dell’Io. L’Io a sua volta non è sottomesso a nulla che lo possa condizionare, perché il suo fondamento sta proprio nella sua incondizionatezza e dunque nell’assenza di ogni oggettiva limitazione esterna.
La conseguenza della riduzione dell’uomo ad auto-coscienza è la dissoluzione della morale. La libertà prevale sulla conoscenza perché, come afferma Heidegger, dietro il cogito cartesiano irrompe la libertà. L’uomo è coscienza che si auto-conosce e libertà che si auto-realizza. Per Rahner, come per il suo maestro, l’uomo conosce e vive il vero facendosi libero. Il valore morale dell’azione non ha una radice oggettiva, ma è fondato sulla libertà del soggetto.

Forzando il n. 16 della “Lumen Gentium”, in cui si parla della possibilità di salvezza di coloro che “non sono giunti a una conoscenza esplicita di Dio”, Rahner afferma che la salvezza non è un problema, perché è assicurata a tutti, senza limiti di spazio, di tempo e di cultura. La chiesa è una comunità vasta come il mondo, che include i “cristiani anonimi”, i quali, benché possano dirsi non-cattolici, o addirittura atei, hanno la fede implicita. Chiunque infatti “accetta la propria umanità, costui, pur non sapendolo, dice di sì a Cristo, perché in lui ha accettato l’uomo”. Tutti, dunque, anche gli atei, in quanto atei, si salvano se seguono la propria coscienza. Qualsiasi uomo, quando conosce se stesso, anche nel male che compie, se si accetta come tale, allora è auto-redento ed ha fede. E quanto più conosce e accetta la propria “esperienza trascendentale” tanto più ha fede. Questo, osserva giustamente il padre Andereggen, significa che ha più fede un individuo che si sia psicanalizzato freudianamente durante dieci anni, piuttosto che un religioso che preghi (p. 35).
Il cardinale Franz König, uomo di punta del progressismo conciliare, fu il grande “sdoganatore” di Rahner, in odore di eresia fino agli anni Sessanta.

Tra i numerosi e illustri discepoli del gesuita, bisogna ricordare l’ex presidente della Conferenza episcopale tedesca Karl Lehmann e, in Italia, il cardinale Carlo Maria Martini. Le ultime interviste-confessioni di Martini, con Georg Sporschill (“Conversazioni notturne a Gerusalemme”, Mondadori) e con don Luigi Verzé (“Siamo tutti nella stessa barca”, Edizioni San Raffaele), sono di impronta rahneriana, per l’universalismo salvifico e la “morale debole”. Martini, come Rahner, ritiene che la missione della chiesa sia aprire le porte della salvezza a tutti, compresi coloro che si discostano dalla fede e dalla morale cattolica. Lo stesso Martini, istituì a Milano una “cattedra dei non credenti”, per ascoltare il loro contributo alla salvezza del mondo. Il successore di san Carlo Borromeo, rinunciava così al compito di portare Cristo a chi non crede, per affidare ad atei dichiarati come Umberto Eco la missione di “evangelizzare” i fedeli della diocesi ambrosiana.

Non è eccessivo affermare che Rahner è il padre del relativismo teologico contemporaneo. A confermarlo è la sua più intima confidente, Luise Rinser, che l’11 maggio 1965 gli scriveva: “Sai qual è la maggior difficoltà che mi viene da parte tua? Che sei un relativista. Da quando ho imparato a pensare come te non oso affermare nulla con sicurezza” (“Gratwanderung”, Kösel). Qualche anno dopo la stessa Rinser avrebbe solidarizzato con i terroristi Andreas Baader e Gudrun Ensslin. Rahner, da parte sua, il 16 marzo 1984, poco prima di morire, scrisse una lettera in difesa della teologia della liberazione che chiamava i cattolici alle armi in America Latina.

La lettura del libro curato dal padre Lanzetta conferma nell’idea che Karl Rahner, per lo spregiudicato uso delle sue indubbie capacità intellettuali, fu soprattutto un grande avventuriero della teologia. Il giovane Ratzinger subì il fascino della sua personalità, ma intravide presto le conseguenze devastanti del suo pensiero e, sotto un certo aspetto, dedicò tutta la sua successiva opera intellettuale a confutarne le tesi. Oggi il nome di Rahner rappresenta la bandiera teologica di chi si oppone al pensiero antirelativista di Benedetto XVI-Ratzinger. L’analisi critica merita di essere portata fino in fondo.

di Roberto De Mattei

http://www.ilfoglio.it/soloqui/2643

I should like to speak to you about my prayer, O Lord.  And though it often seems to me that you pay little heed to what I try to say to you in my prayers, please listen to me now very carefully.

O Lord God, I don’t wonder that my prayers fall so short of you – even I myself often fail to pay the least attention to what I’m praying about.  So often I consder my prayer as just a job I have to do, a duty to be performed.  I ‘get it out of the way’ and then relax, glad to have it behind me.  When I pray, I’m at my duty, instead of being with you.

Yes, that’s my prayer.  I admit it.  And yet, my God, I find it hard to be so sorry for praying so poorly.  How can a man hope to speak with you?  You are so distant and so mysterious.  When I pray, its as if my words have disappeared down some deep, dark well from which no echo ever comes back to reassure me that they have struck the ground of your heart.

Is my life really no more than a single short aspiration, and all my prayers just different formulations of it in human words?  Is the eternal possession of you your eternal answer to it?  Is your silence when I pray really a discourse filled with infinite promise, unimaginably more meaningful than any audible word you could speak to the limited understanding of my narrow heart – a word that would itself have become as small and poor as I am?  I suppose that’s the way it is, Lord…If my life is supposed to be one single prayer, and my praying is to be a part of this life carried on in your presence, then I must have the power to present my life, my very self to you.

Karl Rahner said two really cool things.

Actually Rahner said tons of really cool things…and many that were so incomprehensible to me that of course I just assumed they were brilliant.

But two things, quite related, stand out to me as being particularly memorable.

First cool thing?  Karl said that the seach for God is asymptotic.  ASYMPTOTIC! 

Goose bumps, I know. 

Asymptotic?  Your palms should be sweating as you remember back to your pre-calculus days.  You can see it can’t you?  That old familiar function f(x) = 1/x  (cue evil laugh).  You know, the one that gets really, really close to the x axis and the y axis yet never touches either of them?  It turns out that old f(x) = 1/x is, well, asymptotic – hooray!!!!!

And asymptotic means  that the value of the function keeps getting closer and closer to another value but never quite reaches it.  And Karl Rahner was money enough to say that the search for God was, like the function 1/x, asymptotic.

And what Rahner meant with this wonderful image is something that is so true.  The closer we get to God - the more answers we seem to have- the more we learn – the better our spiritual life – the more clear it becomes to us that we have so very far to go. 

Or put another way.  When we totally suck, the distance from us to God seems like 10 feet (10 very difficult feet mind you).  If only I did 1, 2, and 3 I would be very close to God we think.  And then we clean up our lives and we do 1,2, and 3.  And very often, as we become closer to God, as we become better and more humble…we realize, “Yikes, God is really more like 20 feet away.” 

It is during these times that the Saints so often experienced their dark night of souls where even though they experienced an intimacy with God that escapes you and me, they did not recognize it themselves.  No, just like an asymptote, as they searched for and actually became more close to God, they only became more aware of how very far away they still were.

Then Karl took off his Mathematician’s cap, picked up his conductor’s wand, and said his other very memorable thing….something really beautiful. 

Rahner said that in the torment of the insufficiencey of everything attainable, we eventually realized that, here in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. 

Wow

All symphonies remain unfinished.

We experienced it first as children as we waited for Christmas.  If, like me, you were focused more on presents than on Jesus, then you probably had the same experience. 

Receive the Christmas present bible, the Sears Catalog.  Find the perfect gift.  Ask for this perfect toy what seemed like a thousand days before Christmas.  Wait a lifetime.  The day finally comes.  The thrill of seeing that gift under the tree is euphoric, incredible, unbelievable.

And then you play with your toy…for about two days, maybe three.  And then you move on.

And it happens every year. 

Or what about the achievers?  You work your tail off to get incredible grades.  Or you win a sporting competition.  Or you make partner in your law firm.  Or you achieve this or that.  The point is, its never, never lasting.  Never truly fulfilling.

In fact, at some point, it becomes  a little depressing.  Because since the 4.0 or the 1st place or the perfect job or the nice car or the kitchen remodel did not make you perfectly content….the only option seems to be to chase for more.

Or maybe, as Rahner points out, there is another option.  To realize that here in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.

The problem is that wired right into the DNA of our creation is a craving for that which is eternal, God.  And we experience the “torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable”  when we live a life of trying to satisfy our thirst for the eternal with a buffet of finite things and accomplishments.

The symphony of our lives can only be completed in the arms of Jesus, in heaven.

And the sooner we realize this, the happier all of us will be.

So, the “search for God is asymptotic” and “here in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished”.    Two seriously cool and memorable things said by the great Karl Rahner.  Let’s take what I think would be Rahner’s own advice to us. 

 Let us humbly submit ourselves, our wants, desires, and needs to Jesus….and let us be content to know that we will never, ever get to the bottom of God.   Our lives on earth are really short.   We do what we can but never forget that our destiny is Jesus.  It is God who will complete  our symphonies.  It is our job to let him.

Christopher Neiswonger and Doug Eaton on this weeks www.apologetics.com radio show.

Unitarianism, Universalism, and Inclusivism Against the Kingdom of God (Audio)

There are moods in theology just as there are in culture. The pressure from the dominant culture upon the church is to find a way, any way, to re-interpret the scriptures so as to make soteriology (The doctrines of salvation) less exclusive.

John Hick created the new standards for religious pluralism by arguing for the move away from a needlessly “christ-centered” theology to a more moderate “god-centered” theology. There has been a move in Evangelical Christianity to follow suit.

Karl Rahner posited something a little less ambitious, arguing that though Christianity (of the Roman Catholic denomination) is the true religion sincerity and good works within the context of other religions is sufficient for God’s purposes soteriologically speaking. While Protestant orthodoxy has always taught “justification by grace alone through faith alone apart from the merit of works”, the new theology, especially as adopted by the Emergent church movement and Christian Liberalism seems to favor a ‘Justification by works alone, apart from faith’. Assent to certain beliefs or intellectual content is thought to be merely incidental.

Unitarianism (not simply the variety that denies the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity) is willing to argue for the veracity of all religions which makes it equally comfortable with any of them or none of them.

The most offensive teaching of traditional Christian Theology, to those in these revisionist movements, seems to be the doctrine of endless punishment, or more properly, the doctrine that God would ever punish anyone at all. The accusation is that there is some kind of inherent personality defect in any god that might have the capacity for Justice, or anger over sin, or “punishment”.

Of course nothing is being said here that has not been said before about Christian thought or religion in general. Religious syncretism was the norm in the first and second centuries AD. But none of this has ever been mistaken for Christian thought. The Scriptures being the source and center of Christian faith and practice, this kind of thinking has always been understood to be irreconcilable with an orthodox Christianity. Not only has it been condemned again and again by the historical church but the Christian laity have had an easy enough time seeing something very different in the words Jesus and the Apostles. There seems to be very little that would lead anyone to find universalism in the scriptures in any obvious way. This is why so many find them so offensive.

At the end of the day, we read the scriptures the same way we read any other book. We use the text to interpret the text. It builds theme upon theme; idea upon idea. These alternatives to traditional orthodox Christianity seem lacking in both the weight of the necessary internal evidence to support their claims and in coherence as a worldview supposedly Christian.

Neiswonger

http://www.apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=353:unitarianism-universalism-inclusivism-against-the-kingdom-of-god&catid=43:kkla-995-fm-los-angeles&Itemid=74

Fr. Robert Barron is a powerful advocate for a Christianity rooted in spiritual praxis, not abstraction. He laments that Christian spirituality – as originally expressed in liturgy, practice, and apprenticeship – has been attenuated and transformed into a beige, bland approximation of its former self. It has become little more than a faint echo of its enveloping secular culture or another set of private convictions. In his book “The Strangest Way” Fr. Barron traces beginning of this long dreary process to the subjectivity, rationalism, and suspiciousness born of Cartesian philosophy in the so-called “Age of Enlightenment”. This cultural mindset was in turn taken up by Christian apologists like Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Rahner who reduced Christianity to something best understood as an interior, subjective experience.

In René Descartes highly influential “Discourse on Method”, he laid out the program that has formed the current culture that has in turn shaped most of us: “Surveying the history of philosophical and religious thought, Descartes despairs of finding any coherency, consistency, or certitude, Whereas mathematics has remained impressively stable over the centuries, metaphysics and philosophy are a jumble of conflicting opinions, varying starting points, elemental disagreements. The greatest minds — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas — are at odds with each other and, worse yet, there seems no common ground on the basis of which to adjudicate their disputes. Classical philosophy, in short, is like an old seaside city, full of winding streets, dead-ends, collapsing buildings, and blind alleys — an ugly and dangerous place. Would it not be a desideratum, Descartes reasons, simply to tear down the old town, find a firmer construction site, and start afresh, this time under the guidance of one architect with a grand, unifying plan?”

Barron continues: “The wrecking-ball Descartes chooses is the powerful one of systematic doubt: if a proposition or conviction can be doubted, it should be doubted. So avid is Descartes to discover philosophical terra firma that he swings this ball wildly, knocking over every idea, principle, experience, and assumption — save one. He finds that the one thing he cannot doubt is that he is doubting; the one thing the wrecking ball cannot knock over is itself This intuition is expressed in what is certainly the most famous one-liner in the history of philosophy: cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. In this luminously “clear and distinct” idea, utterly incapable of being doubted or thought away, Descartes has found his starting point, his foundation. Not in nature, not in the tradition, not in conversation, but in the private interiority of his consciousness, he has discovered the rock upon which he can confidently build his new modern city of thought.

And the unified plan for the construction is a purely rational, mathematical method consisting of four steps:

1. begin with clear and distinct ideas,
2. break problems down into their component parts,
3. move from one step to another in a chain of reasoning only when logic compels such a move, and
4. rigorously check your work,

Beginning with the cogito and following the methode, the Cartesian philosopher will design a safe, clean, orderly, and rationally satisfying system; the philosopher will build a “modern” philosophical city, happily unlike the untidy and confusing town of classical thought.”

Now this Cartesian approach – which Fr. Barron sees as being subjectivist, rationalist and suspicious in nature — had an enormous influence, not only on the shaping of the modern physical sciences and the scientific method, but also on the emergence of a typically modern understanding of religion. When Immanuel Kant, at the end of the eighteenth century, sought to delineate a religion “within the limits of reason alone,” he appealed to the luminous inner conviction of a moral imperative. All of religion — liturgy, ritual, biblical narrative, dogmas, creeds — can and should be reduced to this subjective sense from which we must follow our ethical duty.

And when Friedrich Schleiermacher, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, endeavored to defend Christianity against its “cultured despisers,” he did so on the basis of faith being reducible to a mystical intuition of being. In short, both Schleiermacher and Kant made a typically Cartesian appeal to a clear and distinct subjective starting point for an understanding of the religious. If you can’t beat ‘em, goes the familiar nostrum, join ‘em. An echo of Kant and Schleiermacher writings is found in two of the most influential twentieth-century theologians, Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner. For Tillich, Christianity is grounded in a sense of being “ultimately concerned” with the unconditioned power of being itself  And for Rahner, faith rests on the individual’s experience of standing in the presence of the absolute mystery, which conditions and lures all particular acts of knowing and willing. Hence interior, subjective experience is the religious terra firma, the rock upon which the whole structure is built.

Barron again: “In the popular Christianity of the last thirty years, this subjectivist bias has been plainly evident. In catechetics, theological reflection, liturgy, and parish ministry, a great stress has been placed on “experience,” one’s inner sense of the presence and activity of God, “Recall a time when you felt close to God” or “remember a moment when you were sure of God’s forgiveness” have been standard starting points for religious instruction and formation. Biblical texts, doctrines, liturgical formulas have tended to be read in light of private experiences, as though the experiences constituted the criterion of faith, the final court of appeal.”

And along with all of this has come an almost gleeful questioning of received traditions and authorities. Kant’s early essay “What Is Enlightenment?” expresses the Cartesian idea not as wrecking ball on the dangerous old city but, using a metaphor of coming of age, Kant tells European intellectuals that they had been behaving like children. Kant announces to them that the moment of their majority has arrived: they can celebrate “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” It is time for European thinkers to move out of the comfortable but infantilizing confines of their intellectual kindergarten and, in his famous phrase, “dare to know.” 

Adolf von Harnack gave powerful expression to this Kantian imperative. Harnack scrapped the old traditions and presented Christianity as a simple moral system and Christ, not as the Son of God, but as a humble ethical teacher. Liturgy, the dogmatic tradition, rituals, metaphysics — all of it was seen as peripheral to, even ultimately obscuring of these core Christian facts. We can see here a dumbing down of Christian thought. In Paul Tillich’s early work in dogmatic theology, many traditional Christian ideas have been found unintelligible. Tillich sought to redefine them in terms of our psychological experience. Thus God becomes “that which unconditionally concerns us” and the Incarnation is “the appearance of the new being under the conditions of estrangement.”

Barron: “In many ways, the work of Josef Jungmann is paradigmatic here. This extremely influential thinker held that almost all of the liturgical developments since the time of Charlemagne amounted to so much clutter, obscuring the pristine beauty of the church’s house of prayer. Accordingly, he recommended (and his recommendation was widely heeded) a cleansing return to the simplicity of the patristic liturgy and ritual. It is instructive that Jungmann employed the very Cartesian metaphor of the cluttered house in need of purification and not, say, John Henry Newman’s image of the developing plant requiring occasional pruning.

Once again, tradition was construed rather one-sidedly as obscuring rather than as illuminating. One would not have to look far to see this suspicion of tradition in the recent life of the church, For many years in Catholic circles an appeal to the broad tradition was seen as retrograde, dangerously “preconciliar.” In popular articles, workshops, and homilies, the “new” theology was presented in sharp contrast to a usually caricatured “classical” version, this despite the fact that the great theological Fathers of the Council — de Lubac, Danielou, Rahner — remained profoundly respectful of the tradition. There has seemed to reign in contemporary Christianity a sort of hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to traditional ecclesial practices and theological forms, a tendency to see them as a front for plays of power or systems of domination.”

Recall that the foundation for Descartes’s project is the cogito, the self-authenticating thinking subject, guided by the mathematical method. Now precisely because all sense experience can be doubted, and because the body belongs to the realm of sense, this indubitable ego can have no necessary connection to the body. The source and ground of the characteristically modern philosophy therefore is literally disembodied. Just as the Cartesian mind is removed from the environing tradition, so is it removed from muscle, bone, movement, and blood. A spirituality derived from liturgy, practice, and discipleship becomes an interior, subjective experience.

 Barron: “One can spot this body-spirit dualism in so much of modern philosophy. Thus Kant radically separates sensuousness from understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason and, in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he drives a wedge between anthropology (empirical, culturally determined) and the categorical imperative (purely rational, universal, disembodied) ~ And in Hegel, we find a sharp distinction between religion on the one hand and true philosophy on the other, religion tainted by imagination and particularity and philosophy beautifully abstract and rational.

This splitting of body and mind has shaped contemporary theology precisely in the measure that certain theologians have done their work apart from the discipline and practice of the believing community. Paul Tillich, for example, composed a massive three -volume systematic theology, while admitting that he rarely attended church service. Purely academic theologians — alone with their books, immersed in the intellectual tradition of Christianity, but not practicing their faith in any measurable way — are thinking in the disembodied Cartesian mode. When Hans Urs von Balthasar calls for a “kneeling theology” rather than a “sitting theology,” he is assuming that intellectuals will theologize more accurately about Christianity when their minds are formed in the concrete (and very bodily) discipline of prayer and worship.

And this Cartesian body/mind dualism is especially apparent in the texture of ordinary Christian life. In the last thirty years (especially in Catholicism), the bodily gestures and practices of the faith, the roots of spiritual praxis — rosaries, benedictions, processions, the performance of the works of mercy, devotions to the saints, novenas, pilgrimages, kneeling for prayer, the wearing of distinctive clothes — were largely set aside and not replaced. From the height of a typically Cartesian rationalism, such things were decried as superstitious, primitive, unworthy of properly enlightened Christians.”

My page of desultory reading selections from one of his books “And Now I See” is here