Reason....to Believe

Holy Week is mostly a time of faith. Because of that, some people think it's a season antithetical to reason.  So, as we do the Holy Week and Easter thing, maybe we should ask the question: "Just because I can believe in this religion, should I?  I mean, is it intellectually responsible of me to do so?"  Really, what I'm asking is, do we just have to take this Jesus/Christianity/Resurrection thing on faith only, or does it jive with reason too?  Are my only options to reject rationality or to reject Christianity?  


I can't make anybody assent to anything.  Frankly, I don't want to.  I really do have serious respect for people who have actually looked down the double-barrels of faith and reason and can walk away saying honestly they don't buy my religion.  I know I can't quite appreciate how hard of a decision that is: changing your worldview, knowing your Grandma will be confused by it and your parents will rant, and the certainty that Jesus-freaks will bug the crap out of you.  Seriously, I appreciate the honesty and courage.  I'm not here to proselytize to them.  
So this post is really about: 
A) reminding believers that they've got good reasons to believe, 
B) showing non-believers that we're not nuttier-than-squirrel-poo for believing this stuff, and 
C) telling Christians who say "you just have to believe it" to please go hang out with the Santa-believers elsewhere; you're making us look bad.  
Aristotle, Newton, Franklin, and Einstein are all great scientists who give pretty solid arguments for still believing there's some sort of "Uncaused Cause" behind the universe, so I'm not going to look at atheist vs. theist questions.  I just want to see whether a theist, deist, or soft agnostic could responsibly believe in Jesus as God.  These three categories cover most humans, including Gandhi, Madonna, Voltaire, and supposedly anybody in a foxhole.  


You've probably heard most of the objections before.  The 19th century "history of religions" school of thought is still prevalent.  You may know its three basic tenants: 1) all religions are basically bunk, 2) all religions are basically the same, and 3) all religions basically evolved out of each other.  This school added a framework to the earlier objections of guys named Spinoza and Reimarus, and the results are what you've already heard:
A) All of this is so old, so unreliable, so shrouded by centuries of superstition and myth, it's pointless.  All the people of that time were unenlightened and credulous.
B) Jesus, if he existed, was just a wise rabbi.  His message was distorted by Paul, who "made Jesus into God", and invented Christianity.
C) Our only real sources are the Christians' own writings, and they could have radically misrepresented Jesus and his first followers.
D) Maybe the real Jesus' story was unpopular with the early Church leaders, so they suppressed those other accounts, like the Gnostic gospels.  
E) The apostles just made up the story of the resurrection, either to further the cause of Jesus after his death or because they felt he had spiritually resurrected (gone to heaven) and they had now been forgiven by God because he died for them.
F) Whatever the original documents said, they've been recopied, translated, and distorted so many times we can't really know what the first Christians wrote down anyway.


So, I'm going to try to blow up three hundred years of rationalism and revisionism in four arguments within two blog posts.  
My Four Steps to a reasonable, responsible Christian foundation are:
1) Review the outside sources: the Roman and Jewish writings of the first two centuries.  These will give reliable testimony that Jesus existed, started a peculiar group, and detail enough of their beliefs to recognize it as Christianity.
2) Consider if the inside sources (the gospels) are reliable to tell the story, specifically the details in Steps 3 and 4.
3) Recognize that Jesus' claim to divinity eliminates options, namely, the possibility that he's just a "wise sage of ethics like Buddha, Zoroaster, or a Hindu sadhu".  Jesus forces you to accept him or denounce him.
4) Wrestle with the evidence for the Resurrection.  This is most often neglected because people think it's only a question of "I just have to believe!"  Yeah, it does require faith, but the leap is shorter than both secularists and fundamentalists think.

1. Outside Evidence

A. Roman Sources
We have four Roman writers (Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and Lucian of Samosata) writing about Christ and Christians between 110 and 120 A.D., at a distance of forty-five to ninety years from the events of which they write.  For some, that distance seems a problem, but let's realize that the most accurate books on WWII and Patton and Hitler were not written in the 1950s, they've been written in the last ten to twenty years.  There is a "sweet spot" of historical analysis: close enough to access witnesses, far enough to have gained critical distance.  Suetonius and Tacitus are actually reporting what happened in 49 and 64 A.D. respectively, but they do it with a calm aspect of historians a half century removed.  From these four unbiased, secular sources we can safely say: Christians were a thoroughly established group in Rome itself by the late 40s; their founder, "Christus", was a Jewish religious lawgiver or philosopher who was crucified as a criminal by Pilate in the reign of Tiberius, but the "pernicious superstition" immediately broke out again with his followers worshipping him as a god, claiming to all be brothers now, and swearing oaths to do no wicked deeds.  


B. Jewish Sources 

The two key sources for this are Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud.  I know that some scholars think the Jesus sections of Josephus are later interpolations, but I think they actually read more like a sophisticated Greco-Roman skeptic (which Josephus was) than an excited believer's forgeries.  Nevertheless, I'll focus on the Talmud, as a safer source. Compiled between 70-200 A.D., the "Yeshu" section gives more data to help us triangulate our knowledge of Jesus ("Yeshu").  Interestingly, it directly addresses his birth: there were scandalous accusations about the conditions of his conception and birth, including that the carpenter was not the father of Miriam's baby.  Most importantly, it records that Jesus became widely known for his amazing works (which were perceived as sorcery) and for "leading Israel astray", and while he should have been stoned for his blasphemy, he was "hanged on the eve of Passover".  These are mirror images of what the gospels claim—same story, different faith-angle.


St. Paul fits in here too.  The claim since Reimarus (late 1700s) has been that Paul hijacked the story of the dead Jesus and made him the Christ of his new religion.  Paul is definitely the earliest Christian writer; he begins before the first Greek gospels are promulgated.  The claim is: Jesus was a good, wise young rabbi, killed tragically; Paul divinized him; the gospel writers then took Paul's theological Christ and wrapped it into sayings of the historical Jesus.  But the Jewish sources thoroughly agree with Paul, just for opposite reasons.  If Paul "made up Christianity", then he and the Jews made up identical stories about what Jesus said and did at the exact same time, for two exactly opposite purposes: Paul, to inspire belief; the Jews, to discredit the blaspheming magic worker.  Whichever one is right, Paul was doing this within fifteen years of the Crucifixion, in front of people who heard Jesus speak—both Jesus' followers and enemies.  And no one argued that Jesus didn't say what Paul claimed or the Jews accused him to have said.   The only argument was whether Paul or the Jews were proved right.  


Think of the sources this way: The Romans writers are like drawing a circle and saying: "Your Jesus must be somewhere in this circle. Here's the basic time, place, and consequences of your dude."  The Jews are like lines running vertically and horizontally edge to edge within that circle, giving it greater stability, because now any Christian claim is going to have to account for the data they they also recorded in those first decades.  Finally, Paul is like big dots of detail, sometimes landing right on a Jewish accountability line, sometimes adding new data to the story.  Nothing is like a fleshed-out narrative yet, but that's what we're setting a framework for.  The narrative is Step 2.

2. Are The Gospels Reliable?

I don't mean: "Did miracles really take place?"  The questions of who Jesus is and what he could do are more proper to Steps 3 and 4.  If they are affirmed, then everything in the gospels could be believed, natural or supernatural.  The two things I mean here are: 
A) Are the gospels in out Bibles today faithful transmissions of those original gospels?
B) Did the original gospel accounts faithfully record what Jesus said and did on the natural level?


We don't possess the "autographs" of the gospels, meaning, we don't have the parchments or scrolls that Matthew, John, and Paul personally wrote on.  But then again, we don't have any first century document's autograph.  Let's put this in context: the oldest copy of the next most ancient complete manuscript we have is for The Iliad, and it's from the 10th century.  The Iliad has 647 known hand copies; the New Testament has 5,633.  The oldest scrap of part of The Iliad is from fifteen hundred years after it was probably first written down (500 A.D.); the oldest NT scrap is from John 18:31-38, from about 110 A.D., some twenty years after it was written, and found some 300+ miles from its likely source city.

What about accuracy after all these copyings?  Our 5,000 plus copies yield 200,000 "variants", but most of these are misspellings, doubled-up or inverted words.  Of the 20,000 lines of the NT, only 40 lines are seriously "up in the air" according to textual critics, and none touch on any significant doctrine.  Consider: You have no idea what the Gettysburg Address really said.  There is significantly more textual variance in the five official copies and the newspaper accounts of Lincoln's nine sentences (just 150 years ago and in the age of printing presses) than in the Letter to the Romans, which is the longest existing letter from the ancient world, and which has been transmitted across two thousand years.  

So, did the gospel writers tell Jesus' story accurately?  Nobody thinks that Matthew or Mark was written earlier than the 45, most think the first three were done before 64, and no one thinks John wrote any later than 100.  So, all the gospels were written in living memory of their events (50-70 years).  This means people can call you out if you misrepresent the historical events that they witnessed.  But neither Jesus' early followers nor his enemies are recorded anywhere as disagreeing with how the gospels (or Paul) represented Jesus.  No, Jesus' former followers plainly were not protesting, "Stop making him a blasphemer!", and the rabbinical Jews proudly were saying, "Yup, that's what he said, and that's why we turned him over to Pilate."

3. What Kind Of Guy Might Jesus Be?

I think we've reasonably put Objections A, C, D, and F to rest, and I've been setting up Obj. B for the sake of blowing it out of the water here.  Obj. E is the final determiner in my mind: if it's legit, it legitimizes all other data in gospels, and if it's not, then all the rest is bunk anyway.  That'll be the topic in Step 4, which I'll cover tomorrow on Easter.


If the gospels are accurate accounts of what Jesus said, and no contemporary of his objected to their portrayals of him, then we must deal with the fact that Jesus regularly claimed divinity and divine prerogatives for himself.  Mark supposedly has the "lowest Christology" of the gospels, but even in his second chapter we hear Jesus say: "Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven’, or to say, ‘Get up, and pick up your pallet and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins"—he said to the paralytic, "I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home."  This is the specific moment the Jewish leaders turned against him.  All four gospels record these claims as the exact reason he was to be put to death.  The Jews —as was expected of them in Leviticus and is recorded in the Babylonian Talmud— wanted to stone him, but the Romans alone could execute in Palestine in 30 A.D., and they used crucifixion.  The fact that Stephen was stoned to death lines up exactly with an interregnum in the Roman governorship, which allowed the Jews to act unilateral against the blasphemer.  Heck, in John 8, the Jews nearly stone Jesus anyway because he claimed "Before Abraham was, I AM", and only Yahweh every called himself "I AM" (see Ex. 3:14).  


All this matters immensely because the constant refrain of the revisionists and rationalists is that "Jesus was just a good, charismatic, moral teacher.  He probably died tragically and then they divinized him and made him the religion, not his ethical message."  We hear this constantly.  "All religions are basically the same, right?  Just differences of details or circumstances."  Or "Look, I like Jesus, but I'm not sure he's God.  Didn't some Buddhists kind of divinize him after death too?  That's the same, right?"  


The problem is it wasn't his followers who made the claims, it was he.  All religions are not the same; my religion has a dude trying to push himself off as the Living God, and you seem to think that's a lot like Socrates, Confucius, or Buddha.  You think Jesus can just be a good guy.  No.  Sorry.  Either Jesus is the best thing that ever came down from heaven or he's the worst demon to come up from hell.  You decide.  This is your dilemma.  Or as C.S. Lewis calls it, your trilemma—a three-horned test.  If he claims divine prerogatives, he's either a Liar, or a Lunatic, or the Lord. No exceptions.  The one thing he cannot be is just a nice guy, a good ethical teacher.  


You and I aren't God, but we don't claim it, so no big deal.  If God was here but didn't claim divinity, that'd be weird, but hey, God can play humble if He wants.  But that is manifestly not what happened in Galilee and Judea from 28-30 A.D.  A country carpenter got a big following and told everybody, "The Father and I are one.  He who has seen me, has seen the Father."  If you say that, and you aren't the Lord, the God of Hosts, Adonai, the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause, Yahweh Elohim....well, then you're a big fat liar.  And lying kind of disqualifies you from being an ethical sage.  Realize, too, that little lies make you disreputable, big lies make you a scoundrel, and great lies make you a blasphemer.  The greater the claim, the greater the crime.  Granted, Jesus could've just been crazy—hence the Lunatic option.  But I think we all feel that Jesus doesn't give off the persona of a lunatic, psycho, or narcissist.  And whether he did or didn't, we still shouldn't listen to what he says.  His would still be a horrible religion to join.  


"Liar, Lunatic, Lord" is huge.  It puts the challenge to modern man as Jesus himself did in his life.  He is the "sign of contradiction", the line of which you must be on one side or the other; you cannot straddle this fence.  If you're okay saying Jesus is a great fraud or evil genius or a blithering sociopath, then please, man-up and do so.  People for three hundred plus years have feared to be honest and do this, and that's why they want a "nice, normal Jesus" and an "evil, plotting Paul".  But Steps 1 and 2 eliminated that.  The claim is his, the claim is public, the claim is yours to wrestle.  I, for one, am done wrestling.  I made my choice, and it's more reasonable that the other two choices.  


Your move.

Lewis, Tolkien, and Kathleen Sebelius—A Homily

This was my homily this past Sunday.  Due to the limits of time and brain power, the spoken word is never what the written word (before or after) would presume, but here are both.  The written is more complete.  Both contain Bishop Bruskewitz's pastoral letter in its entirety too.


Click here to listen or download the 3.8MB audio

Lewis, Tolkien, and Kathleen Sebelius—A Homily

             Many of you are familiar with The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, or are at least familiar with the first book and movie of that series called The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  It’s not merely a children’s series.  It gives adults too the Christian faith in a way they can hear it more easily.  Many people are familiar with the first book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; very few people are familiar with the last book of the series—either because it’s not a movie yet or because they give up at about Book 5 or something.  But the final book of the series has some brilliant stuff in it.  The last book is in fact called The Last Battle.  It’s called that because it’s final battle at the end of Narnia.  It’s the Narnian apocalypse.  And so you picture some great, glorious, giant battle.  No.  It’s actually a rather small battle and it’s against a (seemingly) insignificant enemy.  The first time you read it it’s almost a letdown.  You say, “Ooo, that’s it? Really?”  That’s because we think of great, deciding moments in our lives as being big, plain old, obvious battles.  In terms of Christianity, we think of “battles” as being like the Roman Persecutions—martyrs laying down their lives for their faith, or of how Christians every year from 600-1600 A.D. feared the forces of Islam would come sweeping upon them, taking away their faith, or in the years of the Protestant Revolt—especially in Germany and in England/Scotland/Ireland, where people fought constantly to keep their faith from being taken away.  But every generation’s battle is different.  It comes in different ways.

            The real pain in The Last Battle was its enemy.  Someone had taken image of Aslan—the great lion, the Christ-figure in the stories—and made a counterfeit of him to do evil.  People began to believe that Aslan was demanding evils of them, but they followed.  When the good guys—the king and his young friends—showed everyone that it was a counterfeit, it wasn’t like they abandoned the fake and came back to following the real Aslan.  Instead they said: “See, it’s all a bunch of stories.  It’s all lies.  Myths, legends, fairy tales.  No more stories, no more gods.  We’re in it for ourselves now.  We’re done.  Thank you very much.”  And out of that grows Indifference.  And with Indifference comes Unwillingness.  Indifference says, “Does it really matter?  It’s all a bunch of hokey anyway.  What difference does it make?”  And with Unwillingness comes the feeling, “Why should do anything?  Why should I get involved?  I’m taking care of me.  I’m for myself.”  Lewis understood that in the modern world, it wouldn’t be great battles; it’d be Indifference and Unwillingness.

            With that in mind, I want to talk about the great battle that comes upon us, now, here in our own day.  It will not be great and obvious, or be filled with clear persecutions, most likely.  The real enemies will not be like the Nazis or the Soviets that marched down the streets of John Paul II’s hometown in the 1930s and ‘40s.  That’s not what it’s going to look like.  The real enemy is an Indifference to Truth and an Unwillingness to Act.  Some of you are already aware of the storm that is brewing—and that has in fact begun to strike at us.  It is the storm gathering between the National Health Care initiative and the Catholic Church.  It has gotten exceptionally little media coverage.  You can find it about page six of the last few days’ newspapers.  That should tell us something.  Today, I’m going to read a letter from the Bishop on this, but I want to give some background on it first.  I’ll try to read it with enough fitting gusto; it’s quite different than the average Christmas blessings letter from the Bishop.

             

            When the National Health Care Act was passed, immediately the question was asked of how this was going to affect Catholic hospitals and especially Catholic institutions and workplaces.  We know that the law requires everyone to receive health insurance, and it must be provided by their employer.  The question was raised as to whether Catholic employers would be expected to provide things under insurance that a Catholic conscience should consider immoral—things like: direct abortion, pharmaceuticals that are abortifacent (meaning they cause an abortion, like “Plan B” and “the morning after pill”), and all forms of contraception and sterilization.  Would these have to be covered by Catholics’ insurance?

            Last August, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that all these would be expected to be covered by the insurance companies and paid for by the employers.  What’s more, it declared that for these services they were not allowed to ask a co-pay.  Meaning: no patient would ever spend a single cent on any of these elective services that treat fertility—a normal, proper function of the human body—as a disease: something to be turned off, removed, or destroyed.  Ironically—and this is the giveaway of their agenda—women suffering from infertility, which is a true medical disorder, get no special coverage.  It is not paid for by the new insurance plan.  In other words: if you’ve got a real medical problem, it’s: “Honey, you’re on your own.”  But if you want to shut down a properly-functioning system, if you want to mutilate tissues and organs and disrupt their proper ends, it’s: “Oh yeah, that’s paid in full.”  And this can only be paid for—since there’s no co-pay—by raising the premiums on the employer, so the employer ends up paying all of the cost of these moral evils.  As Archbishop Timothy Dolan says: “Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience.”

             So back in August when this was announced, the Church asked for an exemption.  And the HHS said they would consider it.  Last week, Friday, January 20^th, President Obama personally called to tell Archbishop Dolan, the archbishop of New York and President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, that there would be no exemption for the Catholic Church and all its institutions.  That same day, Secretary for Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, announced that the Church would be given one year to comply—supposedly a generous gift to give us time to figure out how to shift things internally.  As Archbishop Dolan remarked: “In effect, the President is saying we have one year to figure out how to violate our consciences.”  Now, note the date: January 20.  What happens on January 20^th, next year particularly?  That is inauguration day, and the day the Congress is sworn in.  In other words, no one you could elect for Congress this year could there in time to stop the law from taking place.  Hmm…ponder that.  [This is factually incorrect.  The Administration is actually giving until August 2013 to comply.  I failed to fact-check what “one year” really meant.]

            Basically, it all comes down to the concept of freedom of conscience—the right to respect and follow one’s own conscience, and the freedom that flows from that.  No exception was made for the Catholic conscience, though exceptions were and are made for other religious groups.  Just not us.  To quote Archbishop Dolan again: “The Amish do not carry health insurance. The government respects their principles. Christian Scientists want to heal by prayer alone, and the new health-care reform law respects that. Quakers and others object to killing even in wartime, and the government respects that principle for conscientious objectors.”  Quakers came to America largely for this freedom to avoid fighting anyone, even against unjust aggressors, even if it meant saving their own lives.  We, as Catholics, aren’t even asking for that.  We’re asking for the right to not have to kill innocent and non-aggressive defenseless human beings, and yet we get no help, no protection for our consciences.  In other words: All consciences are protected except those that happen to think that human life has value from the moment its DNA begins to intertwine in a human zygote.

            Now, some would point out that many people—many Catholics even—see no problem with things like contraception.  Some sources report that possibly even up to 95% of Catholics think that contraception is ok at least in some cases.  Many approve at least the occasional use of chemical, hormonal contraceptives like “The Pill”, Depo-Provera, Nuva-Ring, etc.  Agreed.  Many Catholics don’t see a problem in it.  Some Catholic insurance groups have already agreed to pay.  Maybe many of you sitting here today think the same thing.  Fine.  I will answer that topic, but that’s a homily for another day.  Even if that’s the case, it’s at least the Church’s universal teaching that these things are morally wrong, even for those not of our Faith.  And if contraception and sterilization may be hotly debated even among Catholics, we have even stronger things to say about abortion and abortifacients.  Abortifacients are chemicals—like “the morning after pill”, like “Plan B”—that will keep the tiny, fertilized egg, which is now growing and dividing and developing—we would say, a living human which has its own unique 46 chromosomes—keep it from being able to implant in the uterine wall and so it passes out and is indirectly aborted.  We say: that’s the loss of a human life by a human choice—that’s what humanity refers to as “murder”.  

            This is the world—the battle—in which we now sit.  I’m now going to read the Bishop’s letter and then finish with the reasons I still have great hope in spite of this situation.

To the Clergy, Religious, and Faithful Laity of the Diocese of Lincoln:

Beloved in Christ,

The Catholic Bishops of the United States, led by Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, are joining together to call the attention of all Catholics in our country to a serious attack upon our faith, upon our consciences, and upon our cherished freedom of religion. I am happy to join my voice and efforts to these Successors of the Apostles and to protest most strongly against a mandate, not even a duly passed law, issued by the Obama Administration that requires all Catholics in the United States to violate their consciences and support abortion, abortion-causing drugs, contraception and sterilization.

As you know, the buying of health insurance by every citizen of the USA is now compulsory by federal law. The same law gives to the Cabinet Secretary of Health and Human Services the authority over all health insurance. The present Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, a bitter fallen-away Catholic, now requires that all insurance, even when issued privately, must carry coverage for evil and grave sin. This means that all of our Catholic schools, hospitals, social service agencies, and the like will be forced to participate in evil. The Catholic Church has pleaded with President Obama to rescind this edict, but all pleas have been met with scorn and have fallen on deaf ears. This mandate is accompanied by new attacks by the federal government on Catholic Relief Services and on the Bishops' work in immigration and refugee settlement services.

Secretary Sebelius, in an act of mockery, said that those who might quality for a conscientious exemption (almost no one), have one year to comply, but during that year they must "refer" people to the insurance that covers wicked deeds. We cannot and will not comply with this unjust decree. Like the martyrs of old, we must be prepared to accept suffering which could include heavy fines and imprisonment. Our American religious liberty is in grave jeopardy.

All Catholic are asked to pray and do penance that this matter may be resolved. All should contact their elected representatives to protest this outrage and to insist on the passage of the "Respect for Conscience" act which is now before Congress.

With my blessing and prayers for all of you and your loved ones, I am

Sincerely yours in Christ Jesus,

The Most Reverend Fabian W. Bruskewitz

Bishop of Lincoln

Now, here’s why I’m not worried.  I’m not worried for a lot of reasons.  First, because there is that bill for the Protection of Conscience, specifically crafted to combat this injustice before us.  Hopefully our current Congressmen will step up and do the right thing.  Second, I think this move by the Administration is kind of crazy.  In the last month the Supreme Court has struck down moves by the government to interfere in religious freedom in terms of hiring and firing.  The Court ruled 9-0 that that runs contrary to the Constitution, and is not possible for the executive branch. 

More importantly, I think this could be a great moment of grace for our country.  This is going to open up a discussion of things that have lain dormant for the last 50 years.  Beyond the questions of abortion and even abortifacients, the question of contraception has been basically ignored, with the exception of maybe the Lincoln Diocese and maybe some other Midwestern states.  Believe me, I’ve lived in other states: it’s noting like it is here.  Mostly people have never heard there is a debate.   My parents ate 65 years old; they were in college in 1968 when the great debate began.  Most people born even 10 years after them don’t really know what it is.  The don’t realize how just a handful of dissenting Catholics had the influence to lead the majority away from the Church’s teaching, to the point that—for most—it’s not even a question anymore.  If you don’t know who the name “Charlie Curran” refers to—a priest at Catholic University in 1968 who began the dissent—if that doesn’t ring a bell, it proves the controversy has been forgotten by the world.  Maybe it’s time to reignite this conversation. 

Next, I’m not worried because we’re going to do the right thing.  The Catholic Church is going to stand by its moral obligations no matter what; we’re not going to bend.  If, in the past, we’ve been too sluggish to act, we’ve wanted to play nice, we’ve tried to go along—I think the gloves are off now.  I think we see our generation’s battle and we see we’re quite truly going to have to fight for our own religious freedom. 

Along with that: we’re not alone.  Many other religious groups are joining us, even those that directly disagree with our teaching on some of these things.  But they recognize this is about contraception or even abortion, it’s about freedom.  And they see that what is given to the Quakers and the Amish and the Christian Scientists should be given to us as well.  In the words often attributed to Voltaire (no friend of the Catholic Church): “I completely disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Beyond these points, I think the more they attack us, the more obvious to onlookers their malice will become.  Frankly, I’m amazed this is happening in an election year.  It seems poor political prudence to pick this fight at the very moment that people are paying attention on a heightened level.  I think this is going to backfire.  As Aragorn says of Sauron: “the hasty stroke goes oft astray.” 

            Finally, more importantly than any of these human, practical, temporal things that I take hope in, the number one I find hope in is that these armies and enemies don’t matter.  As King Henry V says in Shakespeare’s play: “We are in God’s hands, brother, not in theirs.”  I—in the end, then—am not worried in the slightest.  In John’s gospel, at the Last Supper, Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world.”  That is where we truly sit.

            We’re going to be fine if we do our part.  Call your congressman.  Get involved.  Pay attention.  The simple thing we must do, the fight have before us, is to avoid Indifference to Truth and Unwillingness to Act.  As a final thought, I want to share the thoughts of another childrens’ author.  A Catholic.  The man who brought C.S. Lewis into Christianity and into story-telling.  In fact, he is the man to whom Lewis’ (perhaps) most famous book is dedicated.  J.R.R. Tolkien, in his The Lord of the Rings writes this, when young Frodo comes to recognize his dark and dangerous path:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

This is our time.  This is our battle.  This is our challenge.  We must respond.

Shakespeare, The Golden Compass, and a guy named A.C. Bradley

So, a fortunate series of events turned my HS religion class today into a discussion of the brilliance of Hamlet.  It sent me tonight to the hundred-year-old classic of Shakespearean analysis by (dead white male) A.C. Bradley, called Shakespearean Tragedy.  If you like literature, but haven't read this former "given" of college English reading, you should open a tab for amazon.com or Project Gutenberg right now.  


The insight that struck me when I first read the book three years ago, and did again strongly tonight, comes from Bradley's first lecture.  He talks about how, unlike Greek tragedy, the cause of the tragedy in Shakespeare isn't Fate.  It's not God(s) either.  It's the particular flaw that lives in the hero amidst all his native strengths, and it's always a moral flaw.  Now, Bradley is not a Christian moralist.  But he's a human, and therefore he's a ready-made moralist nonetheless.  He says: the main evil action --the evil that leads to everyone's destruction-- isn't usually the hero's evil.  It belongs to uncle-king Claudius, to Iago, to Goneril, Regan & Edmund, to the Houses of Capulet & Montague.  But the tragic hero's flaw will get him caught up in and ruined by the working out of the battle of evil.  Shakespeare's brilliance is that 1) Yes, evil will eventually lose; the bad guys will be destroyed by their evil, but 2) a whole lot of good --including the hero's own life-- will be destroyed when the truth will out.  It'll cost you your wife, daughter, title, land, and apparently every member of the Danish court.


Don't misunderstand this --and this is key-- Bradley doesn't think Shakespeare has any kind of karma, providence, fate, or kismet.  The Bard is not interested in poetic justice.  Nor does Bradley think he is trying to answer the Problem of Evil.  No, it's just that Shakespeare knows that evil is not self-sustaining.  It will collapse, and when it does, it will take out those whose choices put themselves in the way of it, even if they themselves are the very ones bringing down the evil antagonist (like Hamlet, Othello, Lear).  The perfect image he gives for this eventuality is that of the world retching out the evil.  He speaks of a necessity of nature to fix the problems of great injustice.  He speaks of the play's movement as a "convulsive reaction" and says that "in its efforts to overcome and expel [the main evil] [the world] is agonized with pain, and driven to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil, but priceless good."  It's true: all the bad guys do die horribly in King Lear, but then, so does the flawed Lear, and the utterly flawless Cordelia too.  


Which brings me to my modern literature showpieces.  I have no need for my literature to be Christian.  If Lewis makes it Christian explicitly, and Tolkien does it accidentally: fine.  But I need my literature --poets, novels, short stories, movies-- to be human.  To be real.  To follow the rules of this plane and cosmos and metaphysical dispensation.  J.K. Rowling, Euripides, and A.E. Housman are great literature, even without a purposeful Christian viewpoint, because they get us right.  I hate that I can see large chunks of myself is both Hamlet and Iago, but I love that William Shakespeare "sets me up a glass where I may see my inmost part."  I've learned that I've got a weird mix of Neville and Draco in me too.  In the necessarily tragic storytelling of the "epic" fictions which I've discussed before, we see again and again Bradley's Shakespeare-learned lesson.  If you want the eventual defeat of Sauron, the White Witch, the Volturi, and Voldemort, you're going to have to risk losing Boromir, Denethor, Edmund/Aslan, Irina, and countless loved ones of Harry Potter, all because of someone's tragic flaw.  As Alfred says in The Dark Knight: "You have inspired good, but you spat in the faces of Gotham's criminals. Didn't you think there might be some casualties? Things were always gonna get worse before they got better."  Wrongs get righted, but the losses are...well, umm, tragic.  This is good storytelling: following the contours of human nature.


This doesn't just happen in terms of death.  It's shown in how good choices, bad choices, and random chance work themselves out.  As I've mentioned befoere, at least in talks, the beauty of Rowling is that, even if she didn't intend that the one really problematic moral choice made by her good guys failed because it was immoral, at the very least the story logically plays out like that.  It did fail; it did --utterly unnecessarily-- cost at least one hero their life; and "providentially" it turned out to be essential to the side of good in the closing action that it failed.  The last chapter is entitled "The Flaw in the Plan", and the flawed plan is not Voldemort's.  This happens because Rowling organizes her story within the rules of the world --Shakespeare's world, our world-- and is willing to follow it then to its natural conclusions.  She doesn't force it; she doesn't cheat; she doesn't reveal her hand.  


Contrariwise, I just read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (the trilogy containing the The Golden Compass) over the weekend, and, to put it bluntly: Pullman doesn't get this.  Now, I'll need to take some time soon and give a full evaluation of HDM, including why I read them, but I can't right now.  Part of the wait is because I want to cool off a bit first and try to give a hopefully fair discussion.  But it'll be hard because of the human, natural standards I've explained above.  I don't really care if Pullman has Christian sympathies --or any religious leanings-- the problem is that he's flawed as a writer and atrocious as a philosopher.  Heck, Eminem is about as far from Christian music as you can get, but if you listen to him, there is something honestly human and accurate in his lyrics.  Pullman lacks that.  I know that HDM is the atheist's/agnostic's answer to Narnia, but that doesn't mean he gets to skip out on the nature of humans, both as characters in his books or as his readers.  


I have many sins to accuse Pullman of, and none of them are religious.  But let's leave aside his sleight of hand, his bait-and-switches, his poor pacing, and his three anti-climatic climaxes (in one book).  Let's just compare him with the authors above.  No HDM character is self-identifiable for the average person.  They are all either too heroic or too corrupt, or just too shallow.  Nobody, good or evil, could be considered a tragic hero.  If a trait in a good character may appear initially as a flaw, it'll either get re-evaluated by the reader in light of future events (though, not matured in the character, mind you) or be subsumed into a greater trait that they always had, but which some event will bring to the surface.  If there's a flaw in a bad character, it's just part of their awful nature.  The closest thing to a really complex character is Mrs. Coulter.  Don't get me wrong: I loved Lyra, the protagonist, but while she's rounded, she's not complex.  She never has a truly hard decision; she has no major, in-world moral flaw; and she has no internal doubts.  


In HDM, there are some tragedies, but they're not real tragedies like in Shakespeare, Tolkien, or Rowling.  Oftentimes people seem to die just to add to the pain of the main characters' lives or to show the evilness of the bad guys responsible for their deaths.  A few sacrifices are brought about because of a choice or a positive character trait --one quite beautifully, actually, in Book Two-- but there are no tragic climaxes.  Not one character has to seriously pay for their personal moral choices.  Justice is served according to the political/religious stance you take.  In Shakespeare's and Rowling's canons, the sole moral codes are --just like in Pullman's-- simple, unspoken, Natural Law "right and wrong" systems.  And like those two, Pullman's world abhors the evil in itself, but unlike the first two, his world doesn't convulse and mutilate itself to expel the evil, and/or the tragic good characters along with it.  The irony is that the first two and a half HDM books prophesy a rather specific cosmic overthrow and shakedown of good and evil, justice and tyranny, freedom and bondage....but it doesn't happen, at least not as anyone would imagine.  The "greatest and last clash" between free thought/love and Authority, has next to no personal investment by most characters, it sees the presumed ultimate duel traded in for a vulture attack, the battle doesn't really "do" anything other than create cover for the kids to attain their next micro-goal, and while the main protagonists have to do hard things, they never make a real choice of forsaking one good option in order to accept a painful, but more virtuous, one.  Maybe that's why Pullman has to dump lots of unearned despair and pain in whenever he can, even at the last pages of the book, so it seems like it wasn't too easy.  The road wasn't easy, but the decisions generally were.  Oh, did I mention that while they "destroy" God and guilt, they still don't get to live happily ever after?


Someone may protest that since Pullman disbelieves in a higher power than there should no sufficient reason within his world to make it retch out the wrong.  Leaving aside comparisons to the equally divinity-less but still "morally demanding worlds" of Rowling and the Bard, I still call Pullman a cheater because in his world there are prophecies, fate, rules of metaphysical governance, and, oh yeah, a gizmo that will always tell you the truth.  Sorry Phil, that's a way more supernaturally rigorous place than Othello's universe.  The reason I feel sorry for the kids who say "His Dark Materials were my Narnia growing up" is that in HDM they never learn that you have to change behaviors, there are no personal flaws to be fearful of, there won't be peace and happiness in the end anyway, and worst of all, there's never a place where a person has to decide between two great goods and know that they're closing off a lot of stuff forever in the process and that this choice could fill their life with regret.  Summary: Philip Pullman may want to kill God, but he doesn't even have real humans with which to replace Him.

Outline from "Theology on Tap" talk

Most people, we'll call them "amateurs", write a detailed outline before they give a talk.  I find this preposterous.  If you try to write it before, how do you know what good stuff is gonna be in the talk?!  No, the truly initiated know that it's best to give the talk, let some time pass, and then come back and write down what the heck it apparently all turned out to really be about.  Or, at least that's what me and my procrastination do.  


Bluster aside, the one good thing about doing this is it lets you figure out what you didn't remember to cover/get to in the talk.  I suppose it also lets people decide if there's any good reason to listen to your crap.


So here's an Outline with some of the didn't-get-theres in [square brackets].  I'll post again afterward with the other topics I think should be discussed regarding these authors.  Then I'll spend the next 7 to 250 days developing those ideas here.  Hey, if you got a blog, you may as well feel like it matters to do something with it!


Faith, Fantasy, & Modern Literature


I. Intro
  A. Going be disagreements
     1. I'm putting my own intellect & prudence in
     2. gotta make own decisions
  B. 2 Unrelated books
     1. examples of literature forming heart & mind
  C. Church Fathers commend Iliad, Odyssey, etc.


II. G.K. Chesterton
  A. fairy tales tell you about self, your home, and your enemy
  B. "Let them be born in wonder!"
      [why the Elves look to the stars]
  C. The Ethics of Elfland 
     1. re-appreciate the wonder of the world
  D. Catharsis - get it out the right way
  E. Josef Pieper's Leisure: the Basis of Culture
     1. Love and Death can break us out of the work-a-day world
     [hmm... Potter is about death; Twilight is about love.]
  F. Bad main characters
     1. "if the characters are not wicked, the book is" -GKC
     2. the good guys aren't *good characters* unless they change


III. J.R.R. Tolkien
  A. Utterly devout Catholic 
  B. Wrote Lord of the Rings so he could play at language & myth
     1. his "throwaway" story is considered 20th century's greatest
     2. in category with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare
  C. Not a "Christian author" strictly
     1. writes from that worldview, but not an allegory


IV. C.S. Lewis 
  A. Converts C.S. Lewis to myth and to Christianity

     1. explains Incarnation using the idea of self-expression in myth

     2. Christ is Father's true myth -- writing in our "human lexicon"

     [misspoke I think: LotR = change-in-time; Space Trilogy = change-in-place]

  B. Chronicles of Narnia are much more blatant & allegorical than LotR 
     1. 1st book=Gospel; 6th=Genesis; others are chapters out of Mere Christianity or Screwtape Letters
  C. Tolkien can trust himself a few more step farther from the Gospel
     1. #1 difference b/tw Cath. & Prot. is "How much do you trust man?"
     2. Annunciation, intercession, free will, a Magisterium, prayer, Inspiration?
  D. Christ-figures.  Aslan is definite.
     1. Tolkien?  No.  Gandalf~prophetic.  Aragorn~kingly.  Frodo~sacrificial


V. Major Objections to Potter & Twilight
  A. Sorcery, witchcraft, divination
  B. Emotional chastity
  C. Blending of the real world and the "secondary worlds"
  D. Vampires, etc. are "evil by nature"
  E. Immortal creatures throw off Christian story
     1. interestingly, so do the Elves in LotR
     [never got back around to that]


VI. J.K. Rowling
  A. "A profound, 2,000 page reflection on mystery of death"
    1. written in her grieving her mother's death at age 50
  B. "The best pre-evangelization for today's world"
    1. Church Fathers saw Homer as preparing for the Gospel
    2. people today push away the Gospel when see it coming
    3. not a Christian message; a human message to prepare for Christ's
  C. Death
    1. death confounds all human beings if they're honest
    2. if we skip that, we can't appreciate what being "Victor of Death" means
    3. her meditations on death mature because Harry matures
  D. Spells and real witchcraft
    1. I'm calling Matthew Arnold's bluff -- show me specifically what's New Age/Wicca
    2. more like technology or natural abilities -- Michael Jordan; Stephen Hawking
    3. these are morally neutral like all skills & technologies 
    [Rowling chuckles at the traditional things: cauldrons are chemistry lab equipment; brooms are skateboards, etc.]
  E. The "Deeper Magics"
     1. what this is: Where no spell or technē magic is cast
     2. these are utterly clear as being morally good or bad, and condemned if bad
     3. otherwise, magic is morally neutral
         a. treat neutrals as all things: look at the object, motive, circumstances
  F. Divination, sorcery, witchcraft
    1. legit fear: GKC on demons can deliver, but demand payment 
    2. but in Potter, magic is never done by request, conjure, dealing, or converse
    3. the "Divination class" is a literal joke of the book  -- it never works
    4. I'm more worried about John Q., Million Dollar Baby, and 7 Pounds
    5. The emotional manipulation of girl in 7 Pounds overwhelms Twilight's flaws
    6. Hogwarts doesn't "teach magic" per se, it teaches responsibility of it
  G. Plenty of New Age tagging along to Tolkien 
    1. we know better, but others saw Earth-worship
    2. I worry about the subtle, "personal" magics
    3. I trust Tolkien, but would otherwise fear most Gandalf in Moria
  H. Do kids want these powers?  Heck yeah!
    1. but you get over it like failed Jedi in 1985
    2. Potter has a clearer sense of "you're no wizard" kid
    3. **discussion of Devil as father of lies
    4. but I also fear a kid thinking to ask Devil for things when prayer "fails"
    5. actually these sell well because the rules of magic are self-consistent
    [I think Philip Pullman would have to cheat or "show his hand" if breaks Natural Law]
  I. Kids lie and cheat
    1. GKC's 2 points
    [Merry and Pippin]
    2.**One great moral error by a good character...but it didn't work!
    [last chapter's called "The Flaw in the Plan".  Spoiler: the flaw wasn't the bad guys'!]
  J. Did Cardinal Ratzinger condemn Harry Potter?
    1.  No.
    2.  http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/rita-skeeter-covers-the-vatican/


VII. Stephenie Meyer
  A. Stephen King and others bust on as bad literature
    1. realize: she's not making worlds like Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling
    2. she's looking to tell a love story  (remember, "Love & Death"?)
  B. "Vampires are evil by nature"
    1. no, vampires are fake
    2. fake Chesterton quote: fear real evil; go along with fictional evil creations 
    3. yes, we can know a nature for non-exisiting things, like unicorns & vampires
    4. so, does Dracula have free will?
    5. if no, then he's dangerous, but not morally evil.  if yes, then vampires can be good
    [the importance and difficult of writing believable bad guys and their struggles]
  C. Natural Law seen in Twilight
    1. nature of the victim, not of the predator, determines the morality of the using
  D. Metaphor of blood lust for just plain lust 
    1. few pieces of media show the right way to deal with lust like these
    2. Theology of the Body for Teens analogy of Eskimo wolf self-destruction
  E. Books deal with question of "what can I do with my broken, fallen disposition?"
    1. lost gem is Midnight Sun, the web-only book from Edward's POV
    2. 1st chapter is perfect depiction of (male) lust.  maybe women's too
  F. Does require caution, but that could be great teaching tool
    1. you can't assume that because chaste Edward stays in Bella's room your BF can!
    2. A few vamps don't kill ppl; Cullens are safest; only Edward could ever snuggle 
    3. translation: you boyfriend isn't 1-in-a-million Edward; he's loving-but-weak Jasper
  G. 2 Great quotes to end with
    1. Honeymoon quote: "how do you do this without commitment?!"
    2. "Love for Edward alone grows to fit him and the baby instantly" quote
    3. Scott Hahn and Raniero Cantalamessa have similar quotes, but no teen reads them.