Since @ThomasdelVasto has made a couple "main-Motte" religious posts I thought I'd join in the fun.
I'm a Protestant with strong Reformed leanings. My wife, on the other hand, has just converted to Catholicism. This has led me to explore aspects of Catholic teaching, though necessarily at a surface level given the rich history. Aquinas alone would take months if not years to digest. I expected to disagree on Mary (perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, assumption) and the Pope (infallibility); and I still do (though I was surprised how recently these have become "dogma": I would have found it much easier to be a Catholic in 1800 than today). I am pleasantly surprised at how much weight they place on Scripture, Christ, and Assurance: there are far more shared hymns than I had anticipated, as as an example.
What follows is some of the reflections I had to this surface exploration. I would be thrilled to be corrected or critiqued by any of the Motte's Catholics, if nothing else to better understand my wife's flavor of the Christian faith. Many of these are reactions to "Catholicism" by Bishop Robert Barron, which my wife kindly bought to introduce me to the titular topic. While I presume he is orthodox Catholic, his interpretations may not be universally accepted by Catholics. If I challenge particular arguments from Barron, it should not be interpreted as an argument against Catholicism unless Barron is arguing for Church Dogma. His "Catholicism" is also meant as an introduction and for popular consumption, and his actual beliefs may have more nuance.
As part of this journey (which is certainly not over yet!), I also read (the dense and repetitive) "Divine Will and Human Choice" by Richard Muller and "Christus Victor" by Gustaf Aulén. These, too, have varying degrees of rigor. Muller and Aulén were both Protestants.
God’s freedom
While Reformed theology would affirm that God predestines both those who are saved and those who are damned, Catholics balk at this concept; arguing that this implies a God who would cause sin. God cannot will that which is against his nature. Catholics would appeal to God’s provision and common grace that allows humans consciences to (partially and weakly) discern good and evil. Yet we cannot perfectly discern this apart from divine revelation (scripture). And scripture states multiple times in the Exodus narrative that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Aquinas (as if often the case) provides the most rigorous Catholic argument I’ve heard for this hardening. God through an act of his will withdrew what grace was granted to Pharaoh. Absent God’s grace Pharaoh drew more into his sin. While Aquinas argued this case for the individual case of Pharaoh, it seems consistent to assume that were God to withdraw his common grace more broadly that all would fall into a state where our consciences are no longer capable of even partial discernment of good and evil. This is also consistent with God giving humans over to their lusts in Romans 1.
So far, this interpretation is consistent with scripture, though I am discomfited by the constraints this threatens to place on God: constraints that come perilously close to being primarily informed by our own interpretation or perspective of scripture and sin. God works and wills, including in sin.
Barron, if I read him correctly, goes a step further. He puts the "problem of sin" as one of the best arguments against God. I’ve never understood this as a problem for Christians. It is a deep problem for atheists, who have to explain or excuse their visceral (though often mis-aligned) desire for justice despite no objective basis for these judgments. Christians have no such need to explain or excuse: of course we are all deeply desirous for justice since we have (again, weakly and with great room for error) a sense of what transcendent goodness could be. A consistent perspective on the problem of evil would be that God defines good, and if we don’t understand his actions to be "good" that is a fault (a mis-calibration) of our fallen nature. The fact that Barron does not take this tack hints that he believes humanity’s desire for a "good" God is compatible with humanity’s definition of "good". This runs the grave risk of putting ourselves as a "judge" or external arbiter of God’s behavior.
Barron continues to put a soft face on hard truths. Later in the book, Barron says "God sends no one to hell, people freely choose to go there". This sharply contradicts scripture. Jesus talks about casting sinners into the outer darkness. Peter says the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. John’s Revelation describes those who receive a mark on their forehead drinking the wrath of God, mixed in the cup of his anger, and tormented with fire and brimstone. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Again, God is not passive: he works and wills.
How does God work and will (1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God. Does God create the potentials as he actualizes them? Thus no "possibles" exist for God, simply "actuals"? This also could be seen as a constraint on God and limit his radical freedom. Both these potential concepts of God’s will and freedom (of which I’m sure there are hundreds of alternative concepts) seem to be operating at a level above how Barron conceptualizes God’s freedom. Put crassly, Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator.
God’s atoning work
The freedom God enjoys in his omnipotence has implications for a theological understanding of Atonement. The "big two" theories of Atonement, Satisfaction and Substitution, emphasize the sacrificial nature of the cross. This sacrificial interpretation retains God’s complete sovereignty with Christ’s death being an act of perichoretic propitiation. The incarnation and death was necessary because of God. It was not necessary because of anything external to God.
Catholics consider Substitution theory, which is the most common concept of Atonement in Reformed circles, to be heresy. Belief in the other concepts of Atonement are allowed. In the Satisfaction theory, which my understanding is that most if not all Catholics affirm, Jesus is our great high priest and a perfect offering, but does not receive the judgement of God. Christ died for our sins, but not in our place.
"Christus Victor" makes the historical case for Ransom theory. In principal, this theory could bring Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox together: the church Fathers at least strongly hinted at Ransom theory being the primary lens through which they interpret the cross, and the church universally recognizes the importance of the church Fathers. Aulén makes the case that Luther was also an adherent to Ransom theory. Yet this theory risks making God subservient to morality or law, proposing that Jesus was paid to Satan in exchange for humanity (2). Uncharitably, this theory makes God beholden to the "laws" of commerce, even transaction with a brigand.
However, I do find Ransom theory to have its merits. In heavily Reformed theology Satan is almost considered an afterthought. Satan plays no necessary role in the arc of human redemption and salvation. Ransom theory, on the other hand, puts Satan in a prominent place: he is either the kidnapper of human souls or is the (legitimate, in some sense) owner of human souls. The exchange of Christ for humanity and the subsequent torture and murder of Christ was simultaneously Satan’s crowning achievement and his destruction. This interpretation echos Jesus’ parable of the landowner who sent servants to collect from the tenants only to have them beaten or killed. The frustrated landowner finally sent his own son, but the tenants murdered him hoping to take his inheritance. At the conclusion of the parable, the chief priests react that the landowner will bring the tenants to a “wretched end”. Christ’s death and resurrection was the ultimate victory over Sin, Death, and the Devil, bringing this triumvirate to a “wretched end”. Indeed, this victory can be interpreted as more complete than Satisfaction or Substitution theories: it not only removes the penalty of sin, but defeats the sin itself.
Conclusion?
I plan to read and think more on this topic. Next on my list is "Deification through the Cross" by Khaled Anatolios. Any other book recommendations are welcome. I'm particularly interested in Catholic perspectives Atonement that go deeper than Barron's book.
(1) As I read "The Divine Will and Human Choice" I had to continuously bite my tongue. My mathematical training was screaming "But Kolmogorov!". Yet Kolmogorov is but a model, and Muller was trying to describe reality. Muller, though, had merely words to try to describe reality and I kept mentally begging for a more rigorous algebraic representation to more clearly and concisely communicate. Of course, the algebraic representation is itself a model, but so are words: anyone who uses ChatGPT or Claude is implicitly recognizing that words are not reality but just a map or model of reality.
(2) In CS Lewis' The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan (representing Christ) is beholden to the "deep magic".
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Notes -
I know that there are papists who've argued for elements of penal substitution in the atonement. I know Ybarra recently released a book on the subject. No need, of course, to treat many of these theories as exclusive and incompatible.
I haven't read that particular work of Muller, what was he saying the whole time? I generally hear very positive things about him.
I can't say I'm terribly active on this site at the moment, but feel free to DM about religious topics and so on.
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I'm a bit late to the party, but having just gotten around to reading this post, this stood out to me. Personally I feel like saying "God cannot make a square triangle" does not diminish God's omnipotence at all, nor does it entail some sort of Logic that exists independent of God to which God is beholden. A "square triangle" is simply not a thing in any sense whatsoever, so saying "God cannot make a square triangle" does not entail saying there is a thing God cannot do. Any triangular object can be made into a square object by God, but then by definition it ceases to be triangular. If the words "triangle" and "square" refer to something real, "square triangle" cannot refer to something real. To be clear, I'm not suggesting "triangle" and "square" refer to uncreated things that exist independent of God, I'm simply suggesting that they are real things and that this necessarily suggests "square triangle" is nonsensical sequence of symbols. Saying "God cannot make a square triangle" is identical to saying "God cannot make a weiuytrni". I suppose if somebody would ask me "Can God make a square triangle?" I would reply by saying that question is incoherent rather than saying "no". But if somebody asks me "Can God make something that is logically impossible?" I will definitely answer "no", because I believe logical impossibilities are incoherent nonsense.
To the best of my understanding, my view is simply metaphysical realism and the vast majority of Roman Catholics (very much including Barron), Eastern Orthodox and confessional Protestants are all metaphysical realists and this is not an area of contention between these traditions. Some Catholic apologists have claimed Luther was a metaphysical nominalist because he was taught in university by nominalists, but Luther doesn't write a lot about philosophy and he writes very negatively about the scholasticism he knows from his own education. And besides that, once we get a more fleshed out Lutheran and Reformed tradition in the period of Protestant Orthodoxy, both Lutheran and Reformed theologians are pretty much universally metaphysical realists as far as I know.
Francisco Suarez, though a papist, was very influential in every tradition in that era (e.g. I'm told that the 17th century Reformed Aberdeen divine Robert Baron usually follows him), and my understanding was that Suarez was a nominalist.
Hmm I confess that while I've heard about Suarez being an important thinker at the time, I'm not super familiar with him. I wasn't aware he had significant influence in the Reformed world. I know for instance Gisbertus Voetius, who is one of the most influential theologians in the 17th century in the Netherlands, explicitly defended Aristotelian philosophy against Cartesian philosophy, including also specifically on metaphysics arguing against the extreme nominalism of Cartesian philosophy. But yeah maybe I need to moderate my claim then to saying that the majority of orthodox reformed theologians were realists instead of calling it "pretty much universal". Thanks for providing a counter example to my claim!
In any case, Suarez himself was a Roman-Catholic so at least with regards to differences between Roman-Catholicism and the Reformed tradition I think it is fair to say that metaphysics is not an area of conflict between confessional Protestantism and Roman-Catholicism.
All good! This is a topic that I really can't say that I have developed opinions on myself.
To my knowledge, the main area of metaphysics where there was a consistent confessional divide was over whether transubstantiation is coherent.
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Oh come on, this is the sort of intentional ignorance that's tantamount to epistemic dishonesty. The secular explanation for why you have an innate repulsion to criminals (without bikeshedding too much over how crime is defined) is because criminals are parasites, and societies that don't combat parasites will die and be replaced with those that do. In a purely syntactic sense, one can say "Thieves are good" and "Farmers are good" and the difference between these two is arbitrary: but as soon as you connect the meanings of these words to the real world, it's clear that a society made of farmers without thieves will do just fine, while a society made of thieves without farmers will die.
Now, you can still say "That's all well and good, but I still like the divine explanation" and that's fair. But most Christians don't do that. They just plug their ears, refuse to read any serious secular philosophy, then proceed to endlessly repeat things like "I don't see how atheists can explain why people dislike bad things. Obviously this is evidence that there's a God that they're just rejecting." No, it isn't.
Why is the world constructed in a way that lets it select moral behavior in this way?
Any sufficiently serious examination of this question ends up having to either deny Moral Realism or ground itself by identifying morality with the world through some mechanism. God is the name for multiple combined concepts, but chiefly this identification of the moral direction of Nature with a moral absolute.
In this sense, the whole debate between your brand of atheist and OP's brand of theist is just one big semantic misunderstanding between people who are ultimately using the same map, but with different labels.
A true denial of this sentiment would require something like nihilism or other antirealisms.
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There could be an atheistic/evolutionary explanation for why we have disgust at certain outcomes or behaviors. But I don't think the atheist could self-consistently apply moral weight or language to that disgust. Yet we still see (many) atheists use the language of justice and morality and often reveal a belief in it through their behavior.
To his point, you don’t need a divine presence to get moral behavior out of people.
Even in the reform tradition they’ve long since abandoned the notion that you have to “believe in God,” to be moral, but rather you need an objective transcendent standard that moves beyond simple human conventions to remain anchored, and not find yourself lost in a sea of sociocultural relativism.
The basic reason people don’t go around with a sense of freedom to rape and pillage is because they don’t desire to face the consequences and reprisal those actions inevitably inherit. Even I don’t obey law enforcement about of “respect for an orderly society,” although that is there. The immediate reason I don’t do it is because I don’t want my life upended and have no desire to wind up in jail, and possibly end up dead because of it.
That’s really all it is. Even most religious believers aren’t actively thinking about God when thinking about picking up a penny that isn’t there’s off the sidewalk, or stealing something off a store shelf, or randomly punching someone they don’t like when they’re back is turned to them, or anything else.
There is a chasm between "get people to act in ways that benefit society (and themselves)" and "there is a transcendental/objective morality". The first is certainly explainable through natural means. My point is that many atheists speak and act as if we live in a universe with the second. I can think of three explanations for this behavior:
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I have to disagree here. Secular philosophy has been discussing justice and morality for centuries before Christianity even existed. That's like... literally what Plato and Aristotle were writing about. The notion that contemporary naturalists are hijacking morality from the Christians is simply false. If anything, it's the Christians that hijacked Greek philosophy and rebranded it under Jewish monotheism.
Anyway, the major ingredient that modern naturalist theory has that the classical theorists were missing is germ theory. An understanding of the omnipresence of pathogens, their transmission, and the human behaviours that mitigate their transmission is a Newton-tier "lights-on" shift for understanding morality. For example, using only the vocabulary of justice and fairness, it's quite difficult to argue that something like homosexuality is bad. Yet a lot of cultures have a pretty strong natural repulsion to it. Why? Well, germ theory clears this up! It has nothing to do with fairness: it has to do with pathogen containment.
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I think the bolded part is a far too strong a claim. I am fairly confident that a plurality, no, the majority of secular atheists can't present any coherent presentation of their beliefs, and the philosophically aligned who can will find something to disagree about "the secular explanation" you present above.
Like, whole assumption about any innate naturalistic ethics seems bogus to me. I am relatively sure many "alternative" anarchist-aligned leftists have very little innate repulsion to "criminals", especially when compared to repulsion they feel towards wrong-politics coded authority figures. As far as I can see, the ethics in secular circles have drifted fully anchorless like fashion trend for several decades.
I think you misunderstand my argument. This is not an argument explaining the morals of atheists: this is a naturalist argument explaining morals generally common among humankind, the majority of whom are not atheist. For example, Christians take some parts of the Bible much more seriously than others: the parts that say you're supposed to respect marriage are taken seriously. But the part that says you're supposed to just give away your stuff if someone tries to take it from you? Well, that part is *big theological treatise on why the text doesn't mean what it plainly says*. My contention is the mechanics of natural selection explain this: the people who give away all their stuff whenever anyone tries to take it die, and the beliefs that caused that behavior die with them: thus, those people are replaced with people who were capable of dreaming up an explanation of why that passage didn't mean what it said. Monogamy, on the other hand, is an effective mating paradigm that not only shows abundant success in Christianity, but across all major religions, and even across many other species! Thus, the passages about sexual purity are taken at face value: because the people who take those parts at face value succeed and reproduce, while the people who wrote big treatises saying "marriage is actually a metaphor for some uchronian age and you can ignore it and have whatever crazy sex you want" die (and this was doubly true before we understood germ theory and lacked any mitigation of sexually-transmitted pathogens).
This brings me to a paradox in Darwinism, which, incidentally, is also explained by Darwinisim: Darwinists are really bad Darwinists! I don't mean scholastically--I mean their fertility rate is terrible. Now, one can say, "See, this is proof that God is real!" But hang on -- the blessing of fertility is seen by religious radicals of all established religions, even though they all flatly contradict each other. So I don't think this is a good argument that God is real. Rather, it's a good argument that traditional belief patterns are well-adapted to reproduction precisely because, well, the people who believed that stuff reproduced.
Darwinism is too new of a system to have had any adaptation or sustainable culture built around it yet. Obviously there are the 491 genders leftist sort, but I don't mean to discuss them -- Darwin would not consider them serious students of his work, even though nominally they assent to Believing Science (TM). What I mean is Darwinists can say "Ah, well, getting married and having a big family like the Mormons is actually pretty great, by Darwinian standards!", but saying those words and even believing them to be true doesn't give you the capacity to make that happen. It's difficult to do this without a culture that has the social infrastructure in place for high fertility.
This is why apostasy is such a big deal for every major religion. If you have a religious family, they'll probably be upset if you don't follow the faith. They interpret this feeling as God being real, but there is a perfectly cromulent secular explanation: if your child leaves the fertile culture, there's a good chance the genetic line will die out within a generation! In fact, this is a powerful explanation because it explains why all religions feel this way, despite the fact that obviously they all contradict each other and thus cannot all be true. It's not a matter of an autistic sense of empirical truth, it's an emotional terror of your bloodline being in danger, even if not consciously recognised as such.
I get what you’re saying here but it’s quite an overstatement. Religious people tend to give far more away and are much more charitable on average than non-religious people.
Charity for the poor is honourable and I think well of Christians for engaging in it (and yes, they do so more effectively than secularists). But no, being kind to those less fortunate is simply not what the latter part of Matthew 5 is referring to. The examples are very clearly people with access to political power abusing that power for their own ends, not struggling people in poverty requesting legitimate aid.
This is not the only case like this. Paul clearly says in Romans you're not supposed to rebel against the government, and the government he was talking about was the Roman government, which was vastly less justified and more oppressive than the British government was of the American colonists. Yet, somehow, the Christian colonists found it effortless to disregard that part of the Bible and wage war against the British for taxing their stamps and tea, and Christians to this day in America celebrate it as a glorious and righteous act, not as a sinful act that flagrantly violated the mandate in Romans.
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There's crime against the outsider, which is merely warfare, and then there's crime against the ingroup. From what I have seen most leftists are firmly against the latter.
To the extent people don't agree with the Caesar's definition of criminal, it is the failure of the Caesar to unite his subjects into a coherent ingroup.
The distinction between crime and conquest is that criminals are part of the social order that they’re violating. Criminals benefit from the system (roads/emergency services/military defence/etc), but are breaking the social contract that grants access to those services. Conquerors, in contrast, are not dependent on the social order they’re conquering: they’re replacing a weaker order with a stronger one.
Whether this is "good" or not is debatable, but suffice it to say that predators and parasites are distinct in biology, with the former almost universally considered beautiful across human cultures, and the latter universally considered disgusting and repulsive.
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As a recently confirmed Catholic who was baptized Methodist, I appreciate this thread for the questions it raises and all your thoughtful responses.
Thank you.
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Why did your wife convert?
I don't think there was a single reason. She felt led towards it. The closer she got to Catholicism the closer she felt to God.
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I'd like to note that while these have only recently been formally codified, veneration of Mary, belief in perpetual virginity, sinlessness, and her assumption into Heaven has existed for ages - these are all present in Orthodox Christianity which split off a thousand years ago, and veneration of Mary present in Oriental Orthodoxy which split off long before that. Vatican I actually put a hard limit on Papal Infallibility by officially defining it, before then Catholics were generally more Papist.
Making a formal dogmatic declaration is significant. I heard someone speculate that the timing existed to preserve veneration of Mary against a Protestant world that was increasingly dismissive of her. Meaning, without these formal dogmatic declarations, Protestants might have converted into Catholicism without gaining respect for her, bringing in their own "the mother of our Lord is just a woman," attitudes and eventually reducing Catholic devotion to her.
There are no external constraints on God. I think you are assuming here that Logic and God are different essences, and God's being is constrained by Logic. But instead, Logic is God's unchanging will. Logic is what it is because of God's Being being what it is.
But like, could God be something else? Could God want something else? What would that entail? Assuming God already wants what is best, Him changing His mind would mean he's picking a lesser good. God's freedom does not look like our freedom. God is the supreme good, He has perfect freedom to pick the best good at all times without external constraints imposed on Him.
I don't know if this video from +Barron helps show him clarify his position: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1zMf_8hkCdc?si=_47urSM6NRvgHOXX
That said, I would like to pause and say that +Barron is presenting a very common Catholic philosophy but this isn't the only way of looking at things. Franciscan Voluntarism is probably a more familiar way of looking at it and it is equally Catholic. This also might be an interesting little web-book for you: https://www.absoluteprimacyofchrist.org/introduction/
The biggest thing I would like to impart, even if all else I say is nonsense, is that there are many valid theological opinions a Catholic can hold. The Church is able to define limits to what can be believed, and usually does in response to controversy. But until the Church says "This is outside the bounds of our teachings," there is room for a large diversity of thought. Bishop Barron has a very specific way of talking about God - through Thomism and a mix of more recent philosophers. But that's not the only way a Catholic can talk about God.
RE: Atonement - I think it's really a mystery. I really liked Cur Deus Homo which felt very logical, but even that is just one facet of many. The problem we face is that God really could have just snapped His fingers and forgave everything. Jesus' sacrifice is for us, to cure some deficiency in us. It was the best possible way to do it because of our weakness in a way that perhaps we really cannot grasp.
Indeed, what I would have been like would I have become Catholic in the 1800s :).
Pretty sure I said the exact opposite (and in agreement with you)?
"Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator."
I think I couldn't tell where you and Barron differ then? Because what I said is something +Barron would also say. +Barron would not put Logic above God but rather views Logic as subsisting in His essence. Logic is what it is because God is who/what He is.
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Yeah, a lot of doctrine got codified especially due to the Reformation, which the Orthodox did not have to fight over definitions in the same way. They had already had the fight over Iconoclasm, and nobody was going around denying the virginity of the Theotokos (at least not that I know of, I'm sure there must be fascinating Orthodox heretics that we in the West don't know).
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The hardest thing for me on Catholicism or more broadly Christianity in general is what the great awakening un-earthed. Racial Disparities as proof of structural issues makes a lot more sense in a Catholic worldview than explaining away disparities as a result of genetics. From a theological perspective what’s a good argument that human races have much different rates of grave sin? You can deal with sin at the individual level thru a need for free-will, but to say God created some humans that like to sin more feels very bad.
Of the major reasons I guess that is one of the very appealing things about Judaism. You can feel ok with rationalizing those issues as they are not the chosen people.
I don't know how you can determine if other races are actually committing a disproportionate amount of mortal sins, in the sense that do they actually know what they are doing is gravely wrong and do it anyways with their will? You cannot really examine any one else's conscience but your own.
Catholicism has a "For those whom much is given, much is expected" attitude. If there is a group of people who really do have a greater understanding of right and wrong and a greater self-control, then they will be judged by that. And if there is a group that is opposite, they will be judged by that.
Why does God create such variety? Those who are in Heaven do not all possess equal glory. When St. Therese of Lisieux puzzled on how this could be and yet all be perfectly happy in Heaven, her sister gave her two cups, a small and a large. Each were filled to the brim with water. The sister asked, "Which is more full?" The answer of course is neither. In another section of her diary, St. Therese mentioned how the saints were like a bouquet, the whole is more beautiful because the big flowers are mixed in with small flowers.
Certainly within race ability to do morality differs to. Augustine etc I would reason has greater ability than myself. And differing ability to morally reason would defeat the idea expressed below that individuals can morally reason and instead should just be papists and trust their bettors.
But reality increasingly seems to be pointing me in a direction that some races are pit bulls and have very little ability to morally reasoning on their own. So either my perception of the world is wrong or there is an important theological question without an answer. Europeans between 1492 did not live in a world that had to deal with this question.
And a Catholic would answer, if that was the case, such people would be the Baby's Breath of God's bouquet. They are not immediately damned, but will be judged according to their abilities and if they pass they will be the least in Heaven - but still in Heaven and more glorious than the greatest among us now.
Then how do you build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth if it is filled with pit bulls? You can put me in jail and punish me as deserving as a morally aware individual. But punishing pit bulls for being pit bulls feels mean? Obviously libertarians deal with this question too - it’s why the libertarian to fascists pipeline exists. And probably why Catholics have fascists tendencies. The Puritan city on hill with self-functioning people seems unrealistic in a world of pit bulls.
Isn't there some research suggesting that, specifically, Christian influence on
is part of what led to European civilization operating at such a highly functional level?
Backing up just a bit:
The biggest disparity in grave sins when dividing by immutable characteristics, it seems to me, is in gender, not race, so the question of the moral impact of immutable traits is not some new problem for Christianity, I don't think. Ditto for really pretty much any other religion or ethics system. It just seems particularly vexing because of contemporary social mores.
Can you elaborate on this?
Sure. The theory is pretty simple: executing the wantonly violent and prohibiting incest is good for society and culture (and likely eugenic).
I would need to do more research on the execution of violent criminals, but my VERY superficial impression is that Catholic Europe did, fairly frequently, use execution as a way of dealing with violent criminals. This would, logically, curtail violence in a way that, say, weregild might not. To the degree that there's any genetic component to violence, executing impulsive, violent criminals could be expected to be eugenic. As I understand it, there's a theory that in the distant past, humans "self-domesticated" - which plausibly was at least in part the result of consistently executing aggressive members of the community. A civilization that takes seriously Genesis 9:6 ("Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man") is likely to continue this process.
The impact of banning kinship marriages arguably led to individualism triumphing to some degree over tribalism culturally, but cousin marriages are also bad genetically, so banning them likely had an impact on all of Western civilization, at least culturally but probably genetically as well.
I am not, personally, a "genes are everything" kind of guy, I think culture is very important and I think genetics and culture play into each other. But it seems pretty clear to me that rigorously applying Judeo-Christian culture over civilizational timespans is likely to deal with what Opt-out terms the "pit-bull" problem (not the term I would use). You can pick up some of the Icelandic sagas and then compare the behavior therein with the culture of Iceland today to get an idea of how quickly culture can shift away from violence. (Arguably some cultures have shifted dangerously far from violence, but that's another rabbit hole).
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On this point I would say the Church is theologically correct not executing people for stealing a loaf of bed. Even murderers are tough to get to execution theologically. It was probably more the state that was doing this.
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After the Resurrection of the Dead, we will no longer have weakened wills, darkened minds, and rebellious bodies. Frankly, they are just not going to act the way you fear. You will discover to your surprise that there is a goodness inherent in their nature that was marred by original sin. That these weaknesses were caused by original sin and God will remove these impediments.
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I'm not going to go in to bat for any specific theory of the Atonement, which for me is mostly a matter of theological... well, not indifference, precisely, but I would say acceptable diversity. As long as a person agrees that Jesus died for our sins and to redeem and save humanity, I think it is acceptable for Christians to disagree about precisely how. By comparison this is also how I think about the Eucharist; provided we agree that Christ is really, truly present in bread and wine, I think there is a level of acceptable uncertainty and speculation around exactly how.
However, I suppose I should to say a few words in defence of Protestantism. This is always a tricky challenge because Protestantism is by far the most diverse of the three big streams of Christianity (four, arguably, if you count Oriental Orthodoxy as an additional stream to Eastern Orthodoxy), and I will not go in to bat for everything that every zany sect teaches. In particular I am not a Calvinist and therefore see no particular reason to defend capital-R Reformed doctrine.
What I would say, I suppose, is that as a devout Protestant who has several times considered becoming Catholic and always stepped back from the brink, one of the major issues for me is to do with ecclesial authority.
That is, the Catholic Church demands, as the price of entry, a full submission of the intellect. Protestantism is founded on, among other things, the conviction that it is possible for the teaching authority of the church to go astray and therefore for the individual conscience, albeit one well-formed by scripture, tradition, and the life of worship, to validly critique the church. Catholicism denies this and therefore requires a convert to consciously pledge to believe doctrines that he or she may not even be aware of. For that matter it requires a pledge to believe doctrines that may change in the future.
This has been a bridge too far for me - however great my attraction to Catholic worship, that submission is not something I am able to offer. It seems to me to be a kind of idolatry of political or institutional authority. At least if a Protestant wants to convince me of something, that Protestant must try to convince me that it is actually true, by appealing to scripture, tradition, reason, and experience (and it is here that tradition has an authority, albeit one subject to scripture). The Protestant does not say, "this is the teaching of the church and that is the end of the matter". This seems the better approach to me.
Yeah. I mean, I could get into a big slap-fight here over the ways "individual conscience" has led to some very strange wanderings* but basically yeah, and that's why papal infallibility: it's not a guarantee that we'll never go wrong or that individual popes will not be terrible, it's the minimum basic 'heresy will not be made official teaching'.
*It's much too easy to poke fun at Henry VIII, for example, and how amazingly coincidental it turned out that what God wanted was exactly also what Henry wanted. I think he did have genuine scruples and quibbles, but he seems to have blithely ignored contradicting himself when it came to getting what he wanted:
So this Biblical verse applies to me and my situation, but that Biblical verse is only for Law and now we are under Grace. Convenient, as I said.
Well, I suppose the obvious Protestant response there is twofold.
Firstly, theoretically, it is not at all clear how the institution of the papacy is meant to guarantee that. Just in functional terms, it does not seem to follow. How does papal infallibility ensure that heresy will never be made teaching? To sustain this claim the Catholics usually need to bring in some bigger claim about divine intervention, whereby God will not allow the occupant of Peter's seat to infallibly teach heresy, but that is using a less plausible claim to support a more plausible one!
Secondly, historically, it is very far from clear that the papacy has done that. For a start, the safeguard you describe has not in fact been used like that - papal infallibility is actually a very recent idea, going back to the late 19th century at the earliest, and there are only two undisputed cases of its use (ironically, both of which I think are probably false). The doctrine has not been used as a safeguard on the essentials of the faith, historically, but rather papal infallibility in actual practice has functioned primarily to advance otherwise-controversial doctrines. If anything I think it is a tool used to justify innovation, rather than a guard on the tradition. Moreover, the Protestant position is that the Catholic Church has taught various errors. We don't need to get into the weeds on the specific ones, but suffice to say if we go back to the Reformation we will find lots of places where Protestants hold that the Catholic Church is substantively wrong on an issue pertaining to faith and morals. Those issues would need to be engaged on the merits.
If I were arguing against myself here the case I would make would be that the overall machinery of the papacy, as it were, is part of a system necessary to preserve fidelity to the gospel, and that it is absurd of me to profess my own fidelity to the gospel while being critical of its vehicle, all the more so because I myself admit an attraction to Catholic worship. The external evidence of this is, well, look around, the Catholic Church remains institutionally willing to defy power and go against political winds, even as every other church bends or breaks. I think that's partly true (certainly the Catholic Church has been more resistant to that pressure that either mainline Protestants or evangelicals, both of which have severe problems with being colonised by a political/ideological tribe), but also partly an instance of presentism, glossing over the long and corrupt history of the papacy and looking only at the present moment.
I would disagree here. Papal infallibility was limited and circumscribed at Vatican I. The definition of infallible doctrine (the Pope, speaking as the leader of the people of God, declaring a doctrine relating to faith or morals, for the promulgation of all the faithful) retroactively helps Catholics understand prior Church documents and identify which items inside contain infallible statements.
Here are some examples of papal ex cathedra declarations before Vatican I:
--Pope Boniface II, Per filium nostrum, 531 AD
--Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, 1864
https://www.academia.edu/36244015/St_Robert_Bellarmine_on_the_Infallibility_of_General_Councils_of_the_Church is a good paper on the topic if you like.
None of those examples look like clear claims to infallibility, to me. They invoke the authority of the see of Rome, but it was hardly in dispute that the papacy claims authority of some kind. Papal infallibility is a much more specific claim about the nature and extent of that authority.
I didn't say they were claims to infallibility, I said they are examples of infallible statements we see in the past, given the definitions of Vatican I.
Oh, fair. Sorry for misreading you.
I'm not sure what significance that is? You can declare statements infallible post facto, but the doctrine of papal infallibility is nonetheless an innovation, surely? Or do you disagree with my assertion that Munificentissimus Deus and Ineffabilis Deus are the only two uncontested instances of papal infallibility? (The latter of which also predates Vatican I, actually.)
My understanding was that because there isn't a clear label, theologians can and often do debate whether exactly which statements come under papal infallibility and which do not.
Yes, I disagree that those are the only two uncontested instances of papal infallibility. There's about 200 or so.
The doctrine of papal infallibility is not an innovation. The four definitions put out by Vatican 1 were present in the early Church, see https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858047945971&view=1up&seq=1 for an argument for this.
200 uncontested instances? What would you point to?
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Going straight to the section on papal infallibility, from page 53 onwards, this seems... straightforwardly false, to me? It's not true that the pope was understood to have universal jurisdiction, and his argument that universal jurisdiction coupled with the infallibility of the church as a whole body implies the infallibility of the pope seems like a non sequitur. To say that God will not allow the church as a whole body to permanently fall into grievous error does not imply that any particular individual in the church, not even the individual ex hypothesi at its head, cannot fall into error. It certainly does not imply that any such head is authorised to unilaterally promulgate new doctrine.
On the contrary, ancient sources that speak highly of the popes often do so on the basis of the pope's defense of doctrines known to be true some other way - this is what Vincent of Lérins argues, for instance. Vincent affirms some kind of infallibility of the church but without affirming a similar status for the pope. Pope Stephen is praised for his adherence to the tradition of the ancients, which is the relevant authority.
Fortescue cites many examples of ancient authors respecting the pope in some way, which is unproblematic as far as it goes, but then makes the unmerited assumption that all of these statements in the aggregate, none of which individually imply papal infallibility, do collectively imply it. Isn't that absurd?
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That's interesting to me, in light of your earlier mention of the Eucharist. Which branch of protestantism believes (or which branches, plural, believe) that Jesus is truly present in communion? The Protestant churches I've been a part of (non-denominational churches in Wisconsin) just believed it to be a symbolic remembrance that was honored because it was commanded of us, not that it was a sacrament in which Jesus was truly present. But as you said, Protestants are very diverse so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised to find that some branches of the Protestant church believe in the real presence.
As far as I'm aware, it's more "abide by" than "believe in". If you don't agree with (let's say) the church doctrine that extramarital sex is wrong, I believe that's ok as long as you are willing to try to live by the teaching under the basis that the church has the authority, duly delegated by Jesus ("whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven", etc), to definitively interpret Scripture. I realize I'm splitting the hair kind of fine there, but the difference seems meaningful to me at least. There are doctrines I think that the church is flat out wrong in their reasoning about (in vitro fertilization, for example), but to the best of my knowledge that's acceptable as long as I'm willing to abide by the teaching and do my best to wrestle with the arguments with an open mind.
However, one thing which is definitely not true, is that people are required to accept a doctrine which might change in the future. Not everything the church teaches is dogma (priestly celibacy is the usual go-to example of something which might change because it's a discipline, not a dogma), but dogma is held to be divinely inspired and not subject to change. If it did (say, if the pope issued an ex cathedra teaching that abortion was morally acceptable), then I would expect people to leave the church in droves because it would turn out to have been untrue that God was preventing the church from committing error.
Lutherans, for a start. I thought the Marburg colloquy was famous and the instance of one of the first big splits among Protestants. Calvin believed that Christ was truly present in the Eucharist, albeit in a spiritual or mystical sense - he did not think the bread and wine literally became the body of Christ, but he did think that Christ was genuinely there and that the believer was united to him. John Wesley also believed in the real presence, though he largely refrained from trying to elaborate on how that presence functioned. The Articles of Religion of the Church of England state that the Eucharist is not merely a sign, but is genuinely a partaking in the Body and Blood of Christ; it firmly rejects transubstantiation, but nonetheless says that Christ is truly received "after an heavenly and spiritual manner". In practice among Anglicans you find both people with a 'high', almost Catholic, theology of the Eucharist, and those with a 'low', almost Zwinglian, theology.
Still, by my count that makes the Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, and Anglican traditions as all believing that Christ is truly present during communion. I think that makes up most of the world's Protestants. None of them affirm transubstantiation, but transubstantiation, though the Catholic perspective, is but one theory about how Christ is present in the Eucharist.
The Zwinglian view, often called 'memorialism', where Christ is not truly present but the bread and wine are just a symbolic commemoration of the Last Supper, is to my knowledge common among Baptists, and... pretty much only them. However, because the Baptist movement is large and influential in the United States, and has probably shaped most Americans' view of evangelical Protestantism, it seems to be often accepted over there.
Let me give you a concrete example. One difficult point for me was the Assumption of Mary, which is (supposedly) infallibly defined to be true in Munificentissimus Deus. Pius XII's words seem pretty clear: "...if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith".
As far as I can tell, with particular thanks to Stephen Shoemaker's excellent book on early Assumption traditions, this is extremely doubtful historically. The earliest records of any Assumption tradition date from the fifth century - to assert that it's historical you need to posit the existence of some sort of underground tradition in the Near East that preserved this truth long enough for it to emerge into the Byzantine world centuries later, but which church leaders and theologians were somehow ignorant of. Moreover, as you can see in MD, Pius' actual justification for the Assumption is not historical but rather theological - we can reason that this must have happened because it is symbolically fitting, or because it fits with certain presuppositions about death and original sin (which then makes the Assumption rest on the Immaculate Conception, another doctrine that is both infallibly defined and in my estimation highly doubtful).
Can I be a Catholic if I believe that the Assumption of Mary probably didn't happen? It seems unlikely. Pius does not say "as long as you do your level best to understand and receive this doctrine, it's fine". He says that if you willfully call it into doubt, which I certainly do, you have fallen away from the Catholic faith.
Lastly, I note that in the rite of initiation for adults baptised in another Christian tradition (see RCIA study edition) p. 280, the person to be received into the Catholic makes a profession of faith including the Nicene Creed (which I confidently affirm in its entirety) and then the following: "I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God".
Perhaps I am being overly autistic, but I will not say those words unless they are true. And they are not.
Well, it sounds like you have read up and found out that there isn't a clear written tradition before the fifth century that the Assumption happened. But there likewise isn't a clear written tradition that makes it clear the Assumption didn't happen. If Mary showed up later on in a vision and consistently told people, "I am assumed into Heaven" like she did to St. Brigid, it might be true but not known until later.
Mary's final resting place is left mysterious, just like the Ark of the Covenant. What happened to her? It is notable that there are relics galore of so many saints but none of Mary. People have all these stories passed on about this thigh bone belonging to that apostle, and nothing for Mary. And that silence says something. It doesn't get straight to the Assumption, but it does highlight that there is something worth mediating on here.
Those arguments may be effective to someone who is already Roman Catholic, but they’re unlikely to be persuasive to a Protestant. Your first argument is simply an argument from silence, which is typically recognized as one of the weakest forms of historical argument even by those who deploy it. You’ve bolstered the argument somewhat by citing the visions of St. Brigid and others, but most Protestants are at minimum highly skeptical of such visions, and even those who do grant them some weight would admit that the visions of a 14th century mystic aren’t the most reliable guide to historical events of the first century.
As for your second argument, it is again an argument from silence, but this time in a stronger form. If we have well-attested ancient relics of the apostles, Jesus’s grandparents, early martyrs, etc., but none of Mary, that would seem to be significant. Unfortunately for that argument, most of the relics we do possess can only be traced back to the Middle Ages, and in many cases, their provenance is suspect at best. The body of St. James, last seen c. AD 40, was found in a forest in northern Spain almost 800 years later. James the Less has two bodies—one in Jerusalem and one in Rome. Jude’s body is likewise either in Iran or Rome, depending whom you believe. The most famous relics of the seven-headed St. Anne, meanwhile, were found by Charlemagne and company in France, after having not been seen for some 750 years.
These sorts of provenance issues are a major reason Protestants rejected veneration of relics 500 years ago. John Calvin wrote an entire book on the subject, giving many examples of multi-armed, multi-headed saints.
In that context, given that many of the relics and traditions regarding the saints’ remains only date to the Middle Ages (a time when belief in the assumption of Mary was becoming extremely popular), it isn’t that surprising that her remains were never miraculously rediscovered and made objects of veneration.
I'm not arguing to convince anyone about the Assumption of Mary, so of course my "arguments" are weak.
I'm exploring the logic of what Olive said - The Church Teaches X, I don't find evidence of X before the fifth century, therefore I cannot believe in X and therefore I cannot believe in the Church.
I don't think that this is logical, because something can be not taught for a period of time and still remain true. Our earliest records of Alexander the Great start in the 1st century BC, centuries after his death, but belief in Alexander is still pretty common and uncontroversial.
If you have another reason to believe the Church can issue dogmatic teachings, then it's not a contradiction to have a period of silence. There's just a piece of supporting evidence we'd like to have but which is missing.
No one converts to Catholicism because they find the arguments for the Assumption of Mary just that convincing. They are converted on other grounds and then eventually accept the Church's authority to teach this.
I think the real sticking point for lots of Protestants is that that is considered a dealbreaker. The issue is less that it might be true and more that they would be forbidden from arguing that it is.
I say this while being aware that Protestants also often have weird dealbreakers, but the Catholic church has periodically forbidden viewpoints that were held throughout church history. For instance, my understanding is that Nicaea 2 anathematizes iconoclasts, which would excommunicate Catholic saints like Justin Martyr (who wrote that Christians did not crown their images, which is one form of icon veneration.)
This is compounded by the fact that while Protestants can be picky about who they let into their congregation, most Protestants* do not claim that their denomination is the only path to salvation and explicitly would say the opposite.
This doesn't mean Protestants are correct, but the intellectual world for Protestants is much more open and doesn't bind you to as many positions that were historically, at best, points of contention within the church. (For instance being Catholic might not be very appealing if you have doubts about the current understanding of the Papacy, which the Catholic church itself agrees was one that developed over centuries and was never held by large portions of the church.) Although obviously in practice plenty of Catholics believe in all sorts of non-Catholic doctrines and disbelieve all sorts of Catholic ones, it's much easier for a scrupulous Protestant to, say, believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary than it is for a scrupulous Catholic to question it.
*to include those who would profess to be Special Non-Protestants Actually, such as Baptists and Anglicans
Anathematizisation is not Excommunication. You have to go to the specific document that is anathematizing, but every one I've seen is a big list saying at the end, "Some of these are heresy, some of these are impious, some of these might cause scandal. I'm not going to say which is which, just don't do them."
The Church does not "claim that [our] denomination is the only path to salvation." We say that outside the Church there is no salvation, that all who are saved will be saved through the Church Jesus established, including many people who are surprised to discover that this Church was the Catholic Church all along.
Yes it is!
This is a very agreeable sentiment, and one in line with more modern (if rather ambiguous) Catholic...
vibesstatements from e.g. Vatican II, but doesn't Florence explicitly say that "schismatics" are damned unless they join the church, even if they are martyred for Christ?Regardless, the fact remains that the Catholic church closed the door to debate on a lot of topics, and as far as I can tell, can't really re-open those debates without severely undermining its claims to an unbroken and correct tradition.
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Oh, certainly, and I wouldn't have a problem with the church suggesting this idea, or offering it as a theory on the basis of certain theological presuppositions, or a gap in the historical record. This is what the Church of England calls a 'pious opinion' - something permissible to believe, but not obligatory. Most of the Marian dogmas are, in the Anglican context, pious opinions. So you may believe in Mary's perpetual virginity, her immaculate conception, or her assumption into heaven, and you may even believe that it is meritorious to do so, but you may not require belief in these dogmas of any person, nor say that belief in them is necessary for salvation.
I'm quite fond of Article VI for that reason - "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation". Now there is some room for controversy around the question of what may be proved thereby (e.g. I think the Trinity can be proven scripturally, but some disagree with me), but I think it is commendable to limit the scope of doctrine in this way. The church cannot keep piling dogma upon dogma, but must always return to the essentials.
There are some places where I think the Catholic Church wisely take this approach. One example would be private revelations. I find it a little odd how much the rationalist blogosphere got obsessed with the Miracle of Fatima, as, quite apart from the 'miracle' itself being in my opinion unconvincing and relatively uninteresting, the Catholic Church does not even hold it up as obligatory! A pious, orthodox Catholic is free to either believe in or to deny the Miracle of Fatima as seems good to him. The church declares the miracle 'worthy of belief' but that is merely permission to believe, not a requirement to do so.
If dogmas like the Assumption were in the pious opinion/worthy of belief category, rather than the binding, obligatory category, then I might not feel that they are so heavy a yoke. I might still have issues with the Catholic Church's insistence that it has the right to declare dogmas in this way, but at least the dogma itself would be removed from contention.
I think it really comes down to the Papacy. Mary is a fun battling ground, but there's nothing about her that is the crux of the issue. I believe in principle that the Pope could promulgate a truth that might have hints in scripture but not be made manifestly obvious through scripture. You do not.
Well, I would say rather that the papacy does not have the authority to demand adherence to a doctrine as a condition of communion with the church. Only the whole church assembled can do that.
I think that in taking this position, and asserting the superiority of an ecumenical council over a pope, or over any section of bishops, I am actually taking a position more consistent with that of the Church Fathers and the early church than the Catholics. I'm sure that our Orthodox posters would take the same position. Technically I would go further than that in that I admit the possibility of a legitimate ecumenical council erring, and thus assert the need for the church to correct itself by way of constant return to scripture, but ecclesia semper reformanda est is, I hope, hardly a controversial principle.
There are cases of ecumenical councils erring and Pope's preventing the error. The biggest one happened during the rise of Arianism:
If it were up to a majoritarian vote, we would not teach that Jesus was "God from God, Begotten not made." Council of Rimini in 359 had over 400 bishops in attendance. This council produced and agreed to the Arian formulas that, "the Son is like the Father according to the Scriptures" and "the Son is not a creature like other creatures." (but still a creature) Pope Liberius recognized this as an attempt from Arians to lead to statements that Jesus is not God Begotten and rejected the council. Many who signed the council documents then repudiated it. In view of the lack of approbation by the Holy See, it had no universal authority. We see Papal Authority win out over Concilliar Authority.
Didn't this council (which was minority Arian) specifically and explicitly affirm the Nicene Creed and the Dated Creed only had any hold because the Emperor held them in Constantinople after the council was ready to adjourn?
Whatever beneficent role Pope Liberius played here, it does not seem like he was checking a genuine majoritarianism on the part of the bishops, unless I misunderstand something.
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And there are cases of the contrary, as seen in the case of Vigilius at the 2nd council of Constantinople. (Funny you should mention Liberius. I've seen him cited as an example of an erring pope, in that I believe there's some reason to think he signed onto some Arian formulas. But I'd need to look further into that.)
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I am wary of reasoning from any individual case to a general principle. I don't think the Council of Rimini qualifies as a true ecumenical council, but I did say myself that I think a legitimate ecumenical council can err, so even were that the case it would not matter. An example of a council erring and a pope being correct does not challenge me whatsoever. I think that both councils and popes are capable of error.
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Fair enough. I actually didn't know that about RCIA (I was baptized as an infant so even though my parents left the Catholic Church, the church considers me to have been Catholic the whole time), which means I never got asked to make such a profession. I certainly agree with you that you shouldn't make statements which are not true.
My experience is that adult converts usually hold themselves to a higher standard than people raised in a tradition, perhaps in part because their place in that tradition feels more provisional? I don't have statistics to hand, but the zeal of the convert is common enough to be cliché, and I would be unsurprised if Catholic converts take doctrine more seriously, or if Jewish converts keep kosher more rigorously than others, or adult converts to Islam are more consistent with prayer.
I even notice this with secular identities to an extent. I never took a citizenship oath or pledge of allegiance of any kind, and I feel a comfortable ownership of my citizenship. If someone asked me to take the Australian citizenship pledge, I would be offended and would tell them to piss off. If I were told that taking the pledge was a condition of my continued citizenship, I would have to do some soul-searching about whether or not I can honestly take it. What does it to mean to "pledge my loyalty to Australia"? What are these "democratic beliefs I share"? Can we spell those out? And yet we ask new citizens to all make this oath.
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I think the best way to understand modern Catholic atonement theology is by reference to "Paschal mystery theology", which has a lot in common with Christus Victor and Eastern soteriology. This is the overarching way Catholic teaching looks at the Cross since V2, and it has some criticisms among traditionalists, but it does, I believe, tie Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox views of the Cross together in a compelling way, as something mystical which is both transformative on the global level and applicable in an individual way.
Universalism and Theodicy
I am not a universalist, and I in general dislike the way in which Balthasar's "hopeful universalism" often becomes a way to justify not evangelizing. But at the same time I do believe God's dispositional will is for the salvation of all men (not the fallen angels or the devil, who are irretrievably damned), although his permissive will allows people to choose the alternative. It is important in Catholic theology that God permits rather than desires damnation, and I believe this is true to the way Scripture describes the will of God both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. God does judge and send people to Hell or to Heaven, but he does so based on the choices and nature of the person as configured to Christ by grace or not, which is described in Catholicism as infused rather than imputed righteousness. Catholic judgment is "forensic" in the sense of a finding-of-fact, not a finding-of-law.
I'm somewhere between a Thomist and a Molinist on the Predestination question, and Catholicism is famously and officially agnostic on the question. I don't hold as a firm belief that humans have effectively libertarian free-will as regards the universe, and the most motte-brained version of my view is closer to "God ran the simulation and figured out who would freely choose salvation under libertarian free will, and then created the world in such a way that those who would freely choose salvation under libertarian free will would be predestined to salvation even if the world does not possess libertarian free will". I come from a line of Holiness/Wesleyan-influenced preachers, so I think there's a time and a place for fire and brimstone, and I agree with Aquinas, and not Barron, that one of the important elements of the eschaton is the punishment of the unrepentant wicked.
Obviously this leaves open the hole of how and why, precisely, evil and damnation are permitted if God does not desire them, and that's obviously where we open the Pandora's box of theodicy. For my part, I lean towards a narrative theodicy; God is in a sense writing a story, and the story is better if evil exists and good overcomes it, and it's better for the good if villains exist so that the good can be distinguished (very Thomistic of me), and it's better for the just rewards of the good if it's not a consolation prize given to everyone, and it's better if that's based on what they might choose in total freedom than if it's based on a decree. A game of skill is more rewarding than a game of chance.
I don't think any theodicy is philosophically compelling, but I think that's because a story is more compelling to the human person than philosophy. There's a reason the great teachings of Jesus are all stories and parables. Taken from that viewpoint, the stories of the Bible actually have a greater significance than the merely instructive -- the stories of God's triumph and the triumph of the righteous contained therein are actually the project of the existence of the world. Balthasar has a bit of this, in Theo-Drama.
There's also the tendency in more liberal or modernist theology to talk about "maybe suffering is a way to get close to God because God inherently suffers," which I think is really dumb for all the ways classical theists think it's dumb, but I believe orthodox theopaschism -- not patripassionism, where the Father somehow suffers, which is a straight heresy, but theopaschism in which the unity of the natures of Christ in one person is considered vitally important, where we can say things like "God suffered in the flesh," and "God died on the Cross" -- is indispensable in answering the problem of evil. I believe that one of the most important fruits of the Cross is that suffering is transformed by Christ's passion from a separation from God due to sin to a means of Christlikeness, not merely in terms of endurance training (which St. Paul compares it to), but in terms of actually sharing experiences and metaphysical/mystical closeness to Christ himself.
I believe unorthodox theopaschism, especially in modern times, came into existence because orthodoxy neglected orthodox theopaschism, and left open a hole that heterodoxy stepped into.
And that brings us to the Cross.
Substitution
I will also note that substitution theory, taken strictly, is considered heretical by Catholicism, but more metaphorical, spiritual, or allegorical interpretations of substitution are taken seriously in the Church Fathers and in modern Catholic teaching. The idea that the wages of sin is death, yet God in his mercy set aside the curse of death and sent his son, instead, to die voluntarily, has a heroic element to it, and this has never escaped the attention of theology.
I compare it less to the Son being tormented by the Father's justice and more by the Son acting like a POW who offers himself to die in place of others. The key element of penal substitution that I think is heretical is the emphasis on a division in the Trinity, that the Son was "being damned by the father," which is a phrase I've heard Reformed pastors preach, when instead the substitution of the Son is about an act of the Trinity in unity contending against the state that was inherent to man's fallen nature, where sinfulness leads to death and separation from God.
GK Chesterton has his own alarming phrase that "On the Cross, God became an atheist," not as a statement about the actual beliefs of the crucified Christ, but in the sense that Jesus voluntarily took up the cross, which took him to the place of death and as far away from God as man could go, so that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." The point is not "the Father punished the Son by sending him to death," but "the Son, in unity of will with the Father, went unto death to bring grace and truth, chasing down the 1 of the 99 by going to the limit of human experience."
This also means that you can say things like, "Christ's dying on the Cross brought God's goodness to those who are tormented or dying," as an act of solidarity with people who are cast off and rejected, but also a way to bring divinity and grace to people who are far from God. It has a mystical quality to it, that God actually himself, in his flesh, went into the domain of all those things (and even into Sheol), which means that God is no longer absent there. I've compared it before to placing a flag in enemy territory; the Cross is the flag, and one of the ancient Roman Eucharistic prayers describes it as "the boundary post" that sets the limit of death and the devil, claiming the territory for God by erecting a fence.
A Ransom for Many
I actually love this angle on the atonement, although I love most of them.
I understand that Reformed theology (also Luther?) often believes that Michael the Archangel is Christ, but Catholics emphatically do not; he's the guardian angel of Israel and now the Church. So when Catholics read in Revelation that Michael defeats the devil, they see that the final defeat of Satan takes place not by the direct involvement of Christ, but by a subordinate, even a great one. Even the final banishment of Satan to the lake of fire in Rev. 20 is often seen as something Michael does, leading to the long history of Catholic art depicting Michael stamping on the head of Satan.
I often think of this as the great humiliation of Satan. His only encounters with Christ are when he had taken flesh, was weak, fasting, in the desert, and when he is nailed to the Cross with his hands nailed behind his back, and he wins both times. The pride of the devil is he believes he could rival God, and is greater than human beings, but God defeats him in human flesh and restrained in human torment, and he allows a created angel to apprehend and damn him. In other words -- "you are not my equal, and even at my lowest I am incomparably greater than you. Know your place." The foolishness of God is greater than men's wisdom.
There's also the "two screens" effect of this: Satan believes the crucifixion of Christ is his great moment that reveals how grand his ability to contend against God is, and presumably he revels in it. But the view of everyone else is stunned horror, a person being tortured until death. His great moment is not just his destruction, but it's the revelation of the vacuity of his moral authority. He tempted man in the garden with the knowledge of good and evil, but he reveals in this moment that his knowledge of good and evil was catastrophically insufficient, and in fact he believes that evil is good. Any argument to be made that his goal is to free man must contend with the fact that his "crowning achievement," as you put it, was the torture and death of a man.
This also connects to the larger vision in the Church Fathers that Gethsemane and the Cross are the garden and the tree that undo what occurred in the original garden and with the original tree; instead of Satan tempting man with the knowledge of good and evil that properly belongs to the divinity, but which ultimately separates them from God, God instead tempts Satan with the weakness of man's flesh, which ultimately undoes him with the divinity of the God-man. Gregory of Nyssa has a great passage on this, which connects to my larger theme:
To be clear, these are my own views, not necessarily the official Catholic position on things. But they're informed by the Catholic and to an extent Orthodox approach, with my own characteristic views interlaced.
EDIT: Edited significantly to add content, and section markers because of how long it got.
I haven't finished the rest of your comment yet, but wanted to weigh in on this issue.
I have long believed that many of our issues understanding God come from an inability to conceive of Him as outside of time. Rather than God 'running a simulation', it's my contention that He can simultaneously see a person prior to, during, and after they choose salvation, because He is not limited by an arrow of time running in one direction. That in no way negates that person's free choice, any more than a football player's free choices during a game are not negated if I'm watching a replay and already know the result.
I confess it's difficult to explain with our human language, which relies on shared concepts of time. Indeed, I think that's why there's so much contention over the word 'predestined'.
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Thank you for your thoughtful response, it gives me more to think about.
I agree that the History in general (and the Biblical narrative in particular) is part of a cosmic drama. I think Reformed types can often get lost in the "logic" of religion rather than appreciating the beauty of the story. If Jesus was "Calvinist" (in method if not theology) he wouldn't have spent much time on parables! God sharing in suffering humanity is part of this beautiful story, though as you mention there is a tendency among liberal theologians to make this "identification" the means of atonement (God understands us, and thus forgives us...a very narrow view of God's omnipotence and a very low view of sin).
As an aside, I've never heard any Protestant of any denomination say that Michael is Christ; it is certainly not the understanding that I grew up with. However, I did grow up in an environment where Satan rarely mentioned, and if he was it was almost in embarrassment. He played his part in the temptation of Adam and the mirror in the temptation of Jesus (and pre-millennial, pre-trib, dispensationalist types believed that Satan would be unleashed in the end times), but otherwise holds little place in the story.
I'm pretty sure there are some Reformed authors who affirm it, can't say that I've really thought about it myself.
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This is something I actually agree far more with the Reform tradition about. Maybe I’m too intellectually demanding as it’s the primary instrument that drives my thought process about nearly everything but to me the story itself matters little by comparison. It’s why I can’t read conversion stories or personal testimonies and find myself convinced by any of them.
I’m not discounting the importance of the experiential transformation but I’ve never had that, the way people describe it. I don’t deny reality of those experiences but if you haven’t had it yourself, you haven’t had it. I encountered someone once who tried to argue that this “lack” of spirituality was a birth defect and thought it was an interesting argument; but it was difficult for him to formalize.
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Jesus affirms the accuracy of human moral intuition. His parables compare the reasoning of God to the reasoning of man. His sayings are based on a sensible person’s intuition. For instance:
What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the pasture and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders, comes home, and calls together his friends and neighbors to tell them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep!’
Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him
And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? As you go with your accuser before the magistrate, make an effort to settle with him on the way, lest he drag you to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer put you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.
As does Paul, eg:
The problem of evil is a thorn in the side of modern Christianity. A benevolent God would never allow something like childhood brain cancer; there are obviously better ways to test the sons of men than to inflict a random child with maximum pain before they have the cognitive capacity to understand what’s going on. Such a thing is evil, and if we say “it is God’s will”, it corrupts our image of God as perfectly loving. And we will be throwing all of the morally sensible and sensitive people out of the churches if we are adamant about this. In my view, the best answer is that God does not have the power to heal certain evils in the world, which are simply destined to happen because “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” The benevolent God does all He can for the victims of Satan in this world, but until the Second Coming there are some things that are inevitable. Perhaps this is because God, though all-powerful, gave mankind some of His omnipotence, which they disobediently misused to create a powerful evil. And something like this is suggested in the Wisdom of Solomon:
I believe this is correct because it is conducive to the greatest wellbeing. This is most comforting to the people who need the most comfort: Satan selects some of the best souls for torment, and these souls will one day be infinitely compensated, and at death already rest in the Bosom of the Lord. This is palliative to both the sufferer and the loved one. The alternative explanation is only palliative to a person who is, I don’t know, unthinking and insensitive or just uniquely submissive to authority. It will lead a person to either discount what happens in the world together or hate God.
I am also partial to my explanation because it elevates evil to a near-Godlike power, which… it is. Why else would Christ be waging a war in the heavenly realms unless it was? Why would his death be needed unless it was? Why else would He call it the ruler of the world? And I think our era needs to see evil as an insanely powerful ruler over the world — this is also conducive to wellbeing.
As is obvious from what I’ve written, I am way outside of Christian orthodoxy, but I think Christian orthodoxy is way outside of what Christ wants, which is the wellbeing of our neighbor, who works too hard to labor our theological treatises in a failed attempt to understand the spirit of God through reason. The earliest form of Christianity was spirit-based, or vibe-based. Spirit + a well-developed intuition. The endless speculation and articulating just empties the Cross of its power.
What do you make of the argument that this is exactly backwards? Take, for instance, John Psmith on Believe:
Jesus uses familiar images in his parables, yes, but the thrust of most of his parables is to cut against the logic of the world. Sometimes they are intuitive, but usually in ways that indict the moral intuitions of the listener. This is explicit in one of your citations: "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children". Whatever is perceived by human moral intuitions is at best a glimmer of righteousness; in our evil and fallenness we can perceive only a dim, shimmering outline of the righteousness of God. We often have to reason from analogy because goodness is so foreign to our experience; thus with the parable of unjust judge, for instance.
Jesus tells people that they will be richer if they give their wealth away, he illustrates this miraculously by producing more bread and fish than his own disciples gave away, and he gives obviously unintuitive, contradictory messages like "the last will be first" and "whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, and whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it". Whatever constitutes common sense according to the world, it is frequently either irrelevant or actually opposed to Jesus' teachings.
This is someone whose perhaps most famous command is to love your enemies, and that plainly is not human moral intuition, to the extent that other, more practical religions, call it out as absurdity and recommend a more sensible course of action. This is the Islamic critique; love your friends, do justice to your enemies, which is indeed a much more commonsensical position.
I do not assert that Jesus' moral teachings are the inverse of common sense or human moral intuition - that would be just as rote as assuming that they go together. I assert only that they do not reliably coincide with human moral intuition. This is consistent with the doctrine of the Fall - there was an originally good human nature that we can still perceive to an extent, but that nature is marred by sin and therefore we have a tendency to go astray. The teachings of Jesus, therefore, call us back to something that we have lost. It is, in a sense, absolutely true to say that human moral intuition is good, but we do not have access to true human moral intuition, but rather a corrupted facsimile thereof.
Thus independent human moral investigation can be good to an extent, producing something like the Lewisian Tao, but this is a limited endeavour, and Jesus clarifies and corrects. The Christian tradition has therefore sometimes distinguished between the classical virtues (fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice), which are recognisable to all men on secular terms and the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), with the latter being contrary to the way of the world, and necessary to crown and redeem the former.
I think Psmith misses some context in the metaphors. Leaving the 99 sheep to find the lost is reasonable because the 99 have herd instinct. It’s not likely that the 99 will wander individually and get lost, as that’s not typical sheep behavior. It is possible that a wolf comes to snatch one, or someone comes to steal one, but that’s not an hourly concern. We shouldn’t interpret the shepherd as leaving for multiple days to find the sheep, because a shepherd of 100 sheep would be counting his flock at least twice a day. So we’re talking about leaving the herd intact and perhaps posing a little danger to them all, in order to try rescuing a lost a sheep by retracing steps over the past few hours. The lost sheep will certainly die; the flock is probably not in danger although maybe there’s a 5% chance a wolf comes to kill one. This stuff would be well-known in an agricultural country, but nowadays we’re never around sheep.
The decision of the vineyard owner is not something Jesus claims is normative (it’s not a “which of you wouldn’t…” style metaphor), but you can reasonably intuit that the vineyard owner felt mercy on those who were waiting to work all day:
It is in the vineyard owner’s right to pay his workers what he thinks is good to pay, and that could involve compassion on those who can’t find work. This would be like Elon Musk paying a programmer full days of work even though he’s stuck at an airport due to a delay. Does Musk need to? No, but he can decide it’s right to do that.
Sure, but he does justify it with reminding us of our intuition. He doesn’t just say, “do it because I am telling you to and my ways are unknowable”. He says:
This is ~3 calls to our intuition to justify why we should “love our enemies”: because God shows His favor even to the evil and we want to be His sons; because we need to be exceptional as sons of God; because we want the greater reward. Jesus tells us new things, but in talking about these new things he uses plain reasonable intuition.
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Have you ever read any Gnostic Christian texts? You're approaching some of their ideas and I think they did have neat answers to the problem of evil. Certainly better than any existing denomination in me opinion.
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"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
"Naked I came from my mother’s womb, And naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord."
I don't consider the human desire for justice to be wrong in and of itself, but it certainly has been fouled and corrupted. Our intuitions may be emotionally "correct" without the object of that emotion being "correct". Eros is not sinful, but Eros outside of Man and Woman united before God is.
I appreciate your conception of Evil as being a true/near-equal antagonist (though I don't agree with it). I do think (as hopefully can be seen from my other comments) that we need to take Evil/Satan/Sin more seriously.
Up to a point, I agree. "Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies".
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Hey glad to see more Motte folks joining in. I have to say for myself I'm much more "vibes-based" so to speak than hardcore theology focused, but it's definitely a rich area for folks converting to Catholicism. Overall I'd say when it comes to salvation at least, I'm a (hopeful) universalist, or in other words I'd like to believe that in the fullness of Eternity, God will draw all souls back to Himself. David Bentley Hart writes powerfully on this subject, and Orthodox theology more generally, if you're ever curious to check some of that out.
Also, I feel obligated to say you might want to check out Orthodoxy as well, especially if Papal infallibility bothers you. ;)
Khaled Anatolios is, I believe, Orthodox :). There is much to like about Orthodoxy. I like how slow it is to move (if at all!) and I like the national flavor of the Orthodox churches, which I think is a much better practical model than the Roman model. However, while both Catholicism and Protestantism have rich histories of missionary work in obedience to the Great Commission, I feel like the Orthodox church has become insular and introspective rather than evangelistic.
To an extent I think that's historical happenstance. For better or worse, the two biggest streams of Orthodoxy, Russian and Greek Orthodoxy, have spent the last few centuries frequently facing persecution, or existing in the midst of hostile societies. Russian Orthodox in the USSR and Greek Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire developed practices of resistance and to an extent became insular, unable to preach, but focused on maintaining and passing down the faith among themselves. In Western countries these churches exist almost entirely among migrant, ethnic communities, and I think have not yet re-learned the habit of evangelisation.
There's nothing inherent to Orthodoxy that forbids effective evangelisation, and in the past Orthodoxy has spread across the Near East and Central Asia with great speed, but it is not something that Eastern Orthodoxy in its present form is well-optimised for. By contrast, both Catholicism and Protestantism spread with European colonial empires, and then the latter also with American popular culture, and developed extremely effective systems of evangelisation. The Catholics tended to do it through top-down orders and missions, like the Jesuits, Dominicans, or Franciscans, usually brought by the Spanish or Portuguese; Protestants weren't as big on orders but did still accompany colonial governments, thus all the Anglicans in Africa and South Asia, and then in the 20th century got very good at doing decentralised individual evangelisation, as with the big Pentecostal boom in South America. The Orthodox never did this.
Something I would remind the Orthodox of, looking at that process, is that the way you evangelise and do mission will feed back into and change the rest of your church. It cannot be an adjunct, an extra activity on top of an otherwise static base. Modes of evangelisation have changed Catholicism and Protestantism in turn. You are what - and how - you preach.
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Hallelujah, and congratulations into your inquest.
I never liked Bishop Barron specifically for his stance on traditionalism. I wouldn’t knock him too hard since he’s obviously a Catholic but he’s also done much to damage the cause of evangelism in my book.
In my own case I’m a Catholic who’s trying to return as much as he can to a more devout and traditional commitment to things. I’ve never bought into a lot of the intellectual arguments for Christianity generally, a lot of it relies on science illiteracy and is stuck in the medieval era; even the deductive proofs Aquinas. To Aquinas basic point, he says that change is real, it requires some underlying substrate (which is to say something that makes change possible), therefore that cause has to be God.
Ironically, science has already given a better framework of understanding for this with the concept of space-time. Everything we think is true is really just a convoluted, geometric kluge within space-time. Photons, electrons, gluons, quarks, everything. A lot of cosmological explanations we already have can predict exactly all the particles in the standard model of physics as well as their fundamental features and constants.
There are lots of kinds of physical laws and they all have different causes. So why is there gravity for instance and why does gravity obey the laws that it does? This has to do with the fact that there are mass particles which exchange gravitons; which reduces fundamentally to the existence of elementary particles and the space in which they operate and the properties of these two when put together produces the laws which are an inevitable consequence of that. So then where do the particles come from? This is where chaotic inflation and quantum vacuum theory are postulated as theories for where these things came from. But there are also problems with the existing Standard Model. The SM predicts there was an initial singularity at 10^-43 seconds of the initial expansion of the universe because the laws of physics fail there, but singularities don’t happen in physics. This is a myth we mostly learn in advanced physics courses. Quantum mechanics makes it impossible. A singularity requires gravity to operate on all scales but once you go beneath the Planck scale, gravity doesn’t operate anymore; so if you’re smaller than a graviton, even gravity can’t pull you in any direction.
One of the most popular ones right now and we haven’t been able to prove it yet or even test it is Superstring theory. ST argues that everything is reducible to space-time. So if you twist up space-time a certain way you get an electron, and all that an electron is, is really just a knot within space-time. So that then reduces all physical laws to just geometry. This is where there is currently a lot of good prospects within the field of physics. Some of these laws have already been explained, others are still being worked on, but the trends are pretty clear where we’re going to end up with those.
Arguments from intentional states don’t work because cognitive science knows quite well what intentionality is and how it exists (even in computer programs) and it isn’t a mystery. AI couldn’t be programmed today if we had no ability to link propositional content to the outside world. Teleological fine-tuning doesn’t work because it’s only in a godless universe that fine-tuning becomes a requirement, as God has no need of them. He wouldn’t even need physical constants let alone a need to tune them. I could continue to go down the list of arguments, but I continue to treat my Catholicism as an article of faith I’m highly attached to but can’t convince myself intellectually of the truth of it. If anything I hope it’s true. If it isn’t, I lose nothing, if it is, I gain everything; if nothing else, it’s a good ideal to live toward.
On the contrary, "And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable."
I'm also reminded of Shatov in Dostoevsky's Demons:
"I believe in Russia. ... I believe in her orthodoxy. ... I believe in the body of Christ. ... ".
"And in God? In God?"
"I … I will believe in God!"
Oh Paul was completely correct. And if there is nothing behind it, he’s right; and fundamentally it won’t matter.
Been awhile since I’ve read Dostoevsky but I do want to read Brother’s Karamazov again.
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Reformed theology is going to have a very different emphasis on predestination. I know the Reformed love to quote St. Augustine, but he was ours first 😁 I don't really have any good recommendations on rigorous theology since basically a lot of Catholics just don't that deep into our faith with knowledge of the exact dogmas and distinctions (alas, I am tempted to say).
You would probably have better luck looking for particular encyclicals since that is where the main papal teaching goes on. A list of books by Pope Benedict XVI might be a starting point as well. There are the ecumenical initiatives as well, though off the top of my head the major one I think of is with the Lutherans on Justification.
From my personal view, the really, really big topic would be the Eucharist and not wiffling about God's absolute sovereignty or foreknowledge or omniscience or are we damned from all eternity or does free will have a place. But that's my big interest, and others might well have sticking points on different doctrines.
I think those outside Reformed theology put more emphasis on Reformed theology's supposed preoccupation with predestination than Calvinist's do :) (Many such cases).
I have extended family that go beyond "mere" five-point Calvinism and say that there is no point in evangelism due to predestination...and even they rarely bring it up. They certainly act in this world as if they had agency!
Thank you, I'll take a look at these.
I have noticed some soft-pedalling, where the emphasis is on the positive predestination - 'you don't know who the elect are, so preach the Gospel to everyone!' - rather than the "the reprobate are damned and if they think they have a saving faith they only deceive themselves".
But you do get the hard-liners and enough fights between I Am DOCTOR so-and-so Reformed scholar/minister, READER OF SCRIPTURAL GREEK and Catholic (convert) apologists to turn me off getting involved very much in the finer points.
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