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 -
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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