It is better to be divided by truth than to be united by error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals than [to speak] falsehood that comforts and then kills. ~~Adrian Rogers
All in all, modern-day Jews get uneasy when Christians begin getting enthusiastic about evangelization. On the one hand, some Jews are flattered to think that Christians are concerned about their spiritual welfare. On the other hand, they soon become annoyed when they discover that Christians fail to recognize what Jews know about themselves, namely, that they are already called (beginning with Abraham), already confirmed in the ways of God (by virtue of doing Torah), and already assured of inclusion in God’s final kingdom (by virtue of the grace of their chosenness). Pinchas Lapide, an Orthodox rabbi and Israeli scholar, responds to those Christians trying to convert him to Jesus in the following terms:
Since Sinai we have known the way to the Father. You on the other hand were very much in need of it. Therefore, your becoming Christian is for me a portion of God’s plan of salvation, and I do not find it difficult to accept the church as an instrument of salvation. But please, you do not need to sprinkle sugar on top of honey, as you do when you wish to baptize us. The sugar on top of honey is simply superfluous. We are already “with the Father” and we know the way. . . .[1]
This chapter has three goals: (a) to recall the history of the evangelization of Jews with a special emphasis upon the case of Edgardo Mortara; (b) to examine the church’s mission to evangelize from the vantage point of Jesus; and (c) to explore Paul’s declaration that Israel’s “hardening” (Rom 11:11f) was providential and that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26).[2]
Pius IX and the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
The year was 1858. A young woman in Bologna confessed to her parish priest that six years earlier she had worked illegally as a maid for a Jewish family named Mortara. While serving in the household, the one-year-old son of the Mortaras fell ill. The pious teenage girl, thinking that the Jewish boy might die without baptism[4], took it upon herself to secretly baptize him. Later, the boy recovered. Upon hearing this story from the woman in the confessional, her parish priest insisted that he had to inform the church authorities.
After considering all aspects of the case, the clerical authorities concluded that little Mortara was effectively a Christian by virtue of his baptism. They further concluded that his parents, being Jews, were entirely unfit to foster his Christian identity. Accordingly, the police, acting under clerical orders, seized the seven-year-old Edgardo from his home and sequestered him in the Vatican. He was placed under the care of a group of nuns. In due course, Pius IX took a fond interest in the boy. In fact, he won him over with presents and gradually gained a place in his heart such that Edgardo began addressing him as “uncle.” With time, Edgardo even became a priest, and Pius IX assigned to him the special mission of reaching out to “the fallen race of Jews” so that they too, like him, might come to know the grace and mercy of Christ.
The pleas of the Mortaras for the return of their son fell on deaf ears. Those who supported the return of Edgardo to his parents argued that parents had the natural right to raise their own children in their own religion.[5] Pius IX, given his growing personal interest in this case, argued that spiritual rights took precedence over natural rights and that Edgardo’s baptism effectively released him from the constraints of his Jewish parents.
All over Europe, even some notable Catholics raised objections, but Pius IX was impervious to their arguments. When a Catholic wrote a respectful letter suggesting that Edgardo should be returned, the Pope scribbled on the bottom of the letter, “aberrations of a Catholic . . . doesn’t know his catechism.”
When his own Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, suggested that Pius might be alienating other countries by such a high-handed use of power, the Pope answered that he did not care who was against him: “I have the blessed Virgin on my side.”[6] He told the Catholic ambassador from France that the Mortaras had brought their trouble on themselves by illegally employing a Christian as their servant.[7]
The actions of the parish priest, the police, and the pope in 1858 were not entirely unexpected. Catholics were always encouraged to perform emergency baptisms in cases where unbaptized children were “in danger of death.” Once performed, however, the child was considered regenerated by Christ’s Spirit and, once this fact was made known to the authorities, the child was taken from his/her Jewish home and placed in a pious Christian home in order to insure a proper Catholic nurturing.
This became a common practice. In Rome itself, during the years 1814-1818, scholars have been able to discovered no less than sixty instances wherein children were forcibly separation from their Jewish parents following such emergency baptisms.[8] Again, in 1864, six years after the uproar that accompanied the abduction of Edgardo, “a nine-year-old Jewish boy, Giuseppe Coen, was baptized without his parents’ permission in Rome and sequestered from them.”[9] The Mortara case, consequently, was just the tip of an iceberg.
The unsavory history of forced conversions
In earlier centuries, the records show that large numbers of Jewish adults were terrorized into accepting baptism. Most Christians are entirely unaware of the ugly underbelly of evangelization during the Middle Ages. Fr. Edward H. Flannery, a pioneer in Jewish-Catholic dialogue, wrote The Anguish of the Jews in order to chronicle the relations between Christians and Jews in Europe during the course of two thousand years. Here is his account of the conditions of the Jews in Spain in the late fourteen century:
Three months later [in 1391] the holocaust began. With renewed fury, the [Catholic] mob broke into the Juderia [the required Jewish ghetto] of Seville and left it in ruins. Four thousand Jews were killed, but the majority . . . escaped death by accepting baptism. From Seville, the carnage spread like a plague throughout all Spain . . . engulfing some seventy Jewish communities. In some Juderias not a single Jews was left [alive], and many synagogues were turned into churches. Authorities were helpless before the onslaught (158).
Even after these pogroms died down, Fr. Flannery notes that the remaining Jews in Spain “appeared to the Church as a scandal and a temptation to their converted brethren.”[10] Thus, Jews were forced to listen to pious sermons and to attend public debates orchestrated to persuade Jews of the manifest superiority of Christianity and the utter bankruptcy of Judaism. Even holy men who were later to be canonized as Saints in the Catholic Church were caught up in the fervor of this unholy enterprise:
Above these towers the figure of St. Vincent Ferrer, Dominican, miracle-worker, an excellent preacher, and totally dedicated to the conversion of the Jews. Throughout Castile and Aragon [in Spain], he passed from synagogue to synagogue, the Torah in one hand, the crucifix in the other and a band of devout [converts] at his heals. . . . He is credited with 35,000 baptisms of Jews between 1411 and 1412. When he failed to persuade he was severe and is believed to have inspired the first compulsory Spanish ghettoes and the oppressive legislation of 1414 that narrowly circumscribed Jewish social activities.[11]
The combined effect of forced sermons, public debates, crowded ghettos, and intrusive legislation was that a steady stream of Jewish converts poured into the Church.[12] Each Sunday, nearly a hundred thousand converts from Judaism crowded into the various Spanish churches for the Eucharist. The Catholic populace was aware that many of these converts from Judaism were not completely persuaded of the infinite merits of Christ and had entered into “baptisms of convenience” calculated to enable them to escape from the diseased and crowded conditions of ghetto existence and from the severe curtailment of their legal rights as Jews. Thus, converted Jews were mercilessly watched by their neighbors for any sign or indication that their conversion was not sincere or that they held on to any of their former Jewish customs.[13] If so, the Dominican watch-dogs were notified.
In time, the number of suspected false conversions was so large that a special Inquisition was formed in 1480 to handle the problem. This Inquisition inspired elaborate regulations for detecting and uprooting “incomplete conversions.”[14] When the Dominican priest, Torquemada, became the Inquisitor General in 1483, “the Inquisition attained an efficiency and ruthlessness that held not only Marranos but all Spanish Jewry in a state of terror.”[15] Accusations multiplied. Confessions were extracted through the use of systematic and progressive tortures. Those who confessed that they secretly continued to practice Judaism were burned at the stake. Public burnings reminded other converts, who were derisively called “pigs” (marranos) by the Catholic populace, that those who failed to keep their baptismal vows had to suffer dire consequences.[16]
Every Jew remembers 1492. Christians remember this date because it marks the sailing of Columbus who, in quest of a new route to China, discovered the “new world” of the Americas. Jews, however, remember this date because this was the year that the pious Christian rulers of Spain and Portugal, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, decreed that every Jew had three choices: (a) convert to Christianity; (b) forever leave their country; or (c) death. At the time, this was regarded by the Vatican as a fair resolution to the vexing Jewish question.
After the Alhambra Decree was passed, Spain’s entire Jewish population was given only four months to either convert to Christianity or leave the country. The edict promised the Jews royal protection and security for the effective three-month window before the deadline. They were permitted to take their belongings with them, excluding “gold or silver or minted money or other things prohibited by the laws of our kingdoms.” In practice, however, the Jews had to sell anything they could not carry: their land, their houses, and their libraries, and converting their wealth to a more portable form proved difficult.[17]
Needless to say, the overwhelming Catholic population was not concerned that Jews had to sell their homes and all their furnishings at a sharply reduced prices. The Catholic buyers had only to wait as the asking price decreased week by week. When Jews tried to purchase diamonds or other precious gems to take abroad with their families, the gem dealers sold their goods at sharply inflated prices because they were aware that the four-month deadline insured that, out of desperation, Jews had either to pay the inflated prices or to leave their wealth behind.
“As a result of the Alhambra Decree and persecution in prior years, over 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism and between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled.”[18] Those who converted kept their wealth, but they lost their freedom. They would spend their whole lives being watched like hawks by their Catholic neighbors. One misstep, and they would be dragged before the Inquisition. When the natives of the New World were sorely abused by the conquistadores, there were Franciscan friars who alerted the authorities. When the Spanish and Portuguese Catholics sorely abused the Jews, we have no one alerting the authorities. The Jews who killed Jesus were getting exactly what they deserved.[19]
A Nun saves a Jewish boy from the Warsaw ghetto in 1940
Needless to say, the brutality of these times has largely passed. For Christians, however, this short recital helps to explain why Jews shudder when the Christians manifest any zeal for the conversion of the Jews. Even when conversions were used to rescue a Jew from mob violence, such conversions must be lamented and their results must rend the heart of fathers and mothers who, of necessity, can imagine what they might feel if the tables were turned. Consider the following true story:
The [Jewish] parents were fortunate in being able to place their son with a [Christian] friend who lived outside the [Warsaw] ghetto. . . . The parents were shipped off to Auschwitz, separated, and managed by hook and crook to survive the final solution. Neither was aware of the fate of the other or of the[ir] child. At the age of five, supplied with a new birth certificate by a Roman Catholic parish, the boy walked out of the ghetto holding the hand of the woman who saved his life. He was spirited away to a Roman Catholic orphanage in the countryside, where he went to church every Sunday, said his prayers twice a day, and learned the Our Father and Hail Mary. The nun who looked after the children converted the boy to Christianity. She taught him that he “would have to give up all Jewish things.” He was baptized. He was taught the classic Christian attitude toward Jews. When he and his mother were reunited after the war, “he hated everything Jewish.” “The Jews,” he said, “killed the Lord Jesus.”[20]
Anyone who repudiates the final solution of Hitler must accordingly repudiate everything within Christian theology and practice that systematically destroys the faith of Jews. The nun in this story was surely not an evil person. Far from it. She accepted the boy into the orphanage at some risk to herself and to the others. One might even imagine that she regarded the boy’s conversion as an act of necessity since children are unable to undertake a double-identity that requires systematic dissimulation. The boy’s physical life was thus spared at the cost of obliterating his religious and cultural identity. One can only imagine the anguish of his mother and the disturbance within the boy himself at discovering that he himself and his parents were Jews. The poison of anti-Judaism within Christianity was thus calculated to turn his personal being against his own identity and his own family. The nun in this story was thus the unwitting contributor to Hitler’s final solution.
Observe, Judge, and Act
Q1. Up until this point of time, the message given to you by loving parents and by your religion teachers is that, in the case of an emergency, anyone can administer baptism. So, when Mortara was sick, the Christian maid administered baptism. Then, after considering all aspects of the case, the clerical authorities concluded that little Edgardo Mortara was effectively a Christian by virtue of this baptism. They further concluded that his parents, being Jews, were entirely unfit to foster his Christian identity. Accordingly, the police, acting under clerical orders, seized the seven-year-old Edgardo from his home and sequestered him in the Vatican. He was placed under the care of a group of nuns.
Did the Italian priests act honorably and justly in this case? How so? But did not Edgardo’s Jewish parents have the right to raise him as a Jew? Is this not their natural right? In a case such as this there is a conflict of rights. At the end of the day, whose rights were honored? Whose rights were overlooked? Was justice done? Explain yourself.
Q2. When the esteemed Dominican theologian, Thomas Aquinas, considered cases such as this, how did he decide? As it turns out, he ruled that children should not be baptized without their parents’ consent, since they have immediate authority over them (Summa Theologica III 68,10, ad 2). Pius IX took a fond interest in the boy. In fact, he won him over with presents and gradually gained a place in his heart such that Edgardo began addressing him as “uncle.” Thus, with the passage of time, Edgardo began to take pride in having such a powerful man, Pius IX, as his benefactor. Hence, with time, Edgardo relished his Catholic faith, and he felt no attraction to his former Jewish upbringing. In fact, he preferred the company of Pius IX more than the visits from his parents.
Pius IX ignored the appeals made on behalf of his Jewish parents. When his own Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, suggested that Pius might be alienating other countries by such a high-handed use of power, the Pope answered that he did not care who was against him: “I have the blessed Virgin on my side.” Explain this. What was Pius IX indicating when he claimed that “the blessed Virgin is on my side”?
Q3. As it turns out, Spain had a long and calculated history of abusive disregard of for the religious rights of Jews—spontaneous pograms, crowded ghettoes, forced attendance at sermons, the Alhambra Decree of 1492, the Spanish Inquisition.
Q4. To what degree is this true? To what degree is this false?
The Church must also struggle with Elie Wiesel’s charge that “any messiah in whose name men are tortured is a false messiah.” Wiesel explains this in his own experiences:
As a child I was afraid of the church . . . not only because of what I inherited‑-our collective memory‑-but also because of the simple fact that twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, Jewish school children would be beaten up by their Christian neighbors. A symbol of compassion and love to Christians, the cross has become an instrument of torment and terror to be used against the Jews.
Q5. To what degree is this true? To what degree is this false?
In humility and truth, consequently, the false doctrines (named in Q3) and horrendous deeds of Christians (named in Q4) may have temporarily (and maybe even permanently) ruined the chances that Jesus of Nazareth will still be God’s choice for the Moshiach of Israel. No appeal to the infallibility of the popes or to the persistent faith of the Church could possibly overturn this terrible conclusion.
Q6. Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz speaks forthrightly for hundreds of thousands of Jews when he says, quite categorically, that the name of Jesus of Nazareth has to be struck from the list of potential candidates for moshiach. His reasons are clear and uncompromising:
This Jesus is the one who validated the hatred and oppression of his own people.
He is the Jesus who stands for crusades, inquisitions, ritual murder charges, and forced conversions.
He is the Jesus who did not protest the Holocaust. That Jesus may not hate his kinfolk in his heart, but he has stood idly by while his kinfolk bled.
Jews like Rabbi Borowitz shake their heads and tremble in rage whenever they encounter zealous Christians contorting the Hebrew Scriptures into saying that the Moshiach had to undergo a barbaric death in order to coax God into forgiving sins. Such a scheme of things perverts the Jewish image of a just and merciful Father that is plainly written in their sacred texts.
It also demonstrates how ignorant Christians can be of the Jewish experience of receiving God’s love and forgiveness. The shame is not that Christians (as gentiles) experience the loving forgiveness of the God of Israel through Jesus; the shame is that so many Christians believe that no one can legitimately have an experience of God’s forgiveness of sins without praising the name of Jesus.
Q7. No one can change her mind without first of all having slept on the evidence. The process of deep sleep allows one to forget the non-essentials that are cluttering your mind and feelings. Therefore, I urge you not to commit yourself until you sleep on it for a few nights. Where has your mind and heart settled after three days?
Q8. After a week, open your heart and mind to a trusted and informed guide who is willing to hear the depths of your soul. Share your whole process of finding flaws in your original position. How and why have you undertaken to study this issue more deeply. What new evidence has jumped out at you and how has it changed you? Give yourself forty days to test drive the position of Rabbi Elis Wiesel.
Conclusions
My conclusions are disturbing even to myself. How far I have come from the teenager joining in the roar of the crowd that proclaimed, “Because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world!” The Baltimore Catechism that I then used entirely passed over two thousand years of salvation history. Jews were seen not as “the first to believe” but as “the first to betray” God. Salvation, meanwhile, was narrowly rescripted to mean “the forgiveness of sins” and the “opening of the gates of Heaven”‑-realities that were given central and universal importance while completely ignoring God’s abiding love and enduring promises to Israel. In this climate, it was easy and natural for me, an impressionable Catholic youth, to pity (and even to despise) Jews.
I take courage in the fact that Vatican II began to extract the poison that infected my Church. It is not enough, however, to acknowledge with Paul that “Jews remain very dear to God” (Nostra Aetate 4) and to insist that we share “a common spiritual heritage” (Nostra Aetate 4) when, as this chapter makes clear, Catholics have hardly begun to gauge the carefully disguised ways in which our ancestors have distorted the faith of the early church in favor of a false gospel that poisoned our minds and hearts against the children of Abraham and Sarah.
The five chapters in this little book expose five different ways that the religious teaching I received at Holy Cross Grade School “poisoned” me. These five chapters also bring forward five different remedial steps whereby each “poison” might be purged. As you know, my long journey toward finding an antidote to the “poison” fed to me by my wonderful Ursuline Sisters[21] started with my coming to work for Mr. Martin. I give thanks to that humble Jew every day of my life. And, for you, the patient reader of my story, I would hope that you have already met or you are getting ready to meet your “Mr. Martin.”
It is not enough for Catholics to recover the Jewishness of Jesus; rather, we Catholics must also recover the Jewish mindset of Jesus whereby he prayed (a) that “our Father” would bring the Kingdom of God to earth and (b) that sins would be forgiven “without the death of Jesus.” On this score, so much remains to be done. Most Catholics have little investment in the Kingdom of God coming to us on this earth. They are praying to Mary “for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” The Jesus prayer opens up our hearts to the arrival of our Father on earth (maybe as in Rev 21:1-7, 22:1-7). The Hail Mary prayer, by way of contrast, directs us to prepare for the time of our death because that is the hour when her Son will judge us and send our immortal souls into the afterlife that we justly deserve. Two different prayers, two different futures, two different hopes. Let there be no confusion on this point.
Peace and joy in searching for the truth
Endnotes
[1] Pinchas Lapide and Jürgen Moltmann, Jewish Monotheism and Christian Trinitarian Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 69‑70.
[4] In the early centuries of the Christian era, there was no compelling reason to promote infant baptism. Quite to the contrary, the adult catechumenate of two to three years presupposed that converts had not been baptized until their formation period was completed. Furthermore, the early church manuals designated Easter Sunday or Pentecost Sunday as the preferred time for baptisms. It was only when Augustine devised the notion of original sin that parents were forced to protect their infants with early baptisms. Augustine recognized that many, like himself, had adapted the notion that they could sew their wild oats and then to have all their sins forgiven when they completed their catechumenate. Thus, Augustine threatened parents with the prospect that infants with original sin were destined for hell [or limbo] should they die before their baptism. In so doing, infant baptisms gradually became the common practice. This had the effect of destroying the benefits of the adult catechumenate. For full details, see Nathan Mitchell, “Dissolution of the Rite of Christian Initiation,” 50–82 in Made, Not Born, which draws on the classic study of J. G. Davies, “The Disintegration of the Christian Initiation Rite,” Theology 50 (1947): 407–12.
[5].Thomas Aquinas argued that children should not be baptized without their parents’ consent, since they have immediate authority over them (Summa Theologica III 68,10, ad 2).
[6].Pius IX solemnly declared the Immaculate Conception as a belief to be held by all the faithful on December 8th, 1854. Four years later, an unexpected miracle was reported from Lourdes. Bernadette Soubirous, an uneducated French girl of fourteen, reported to her bishop that she had been visited by a “mysterious lady” in an apparition. The bishop wisely asked Bernadette to ask of the lady who she was. When she did so, she received the reply, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” This was popularly hailed as a firm confirmation, coming from Our Lady herself, that she agreed with the earlier papal initiative. Pius IX, consequently, felt that he had the blessed Virgin on his side not only in making his earlier dogmatic declaration but also in refusing to return Edgardo.
[12] The text of the Alhambra Decree accused the Jews of trying “to subvert the holy Catholic faith” by attempting to “draw faithful Christians away from their beliefs.” This claim seems suspect. In fact, it was the practices of the Church that brought thousands of Jews to the baptismal font. The Jews had no systematic plan to convert life-long Catholics. At best, one might suspect that Jews would have occasionally tried to encourage Jewish converts to return to their ancestral faith. Nothing more.
[13] As an illustration of this, Elvira del Campo was brought before the Tribunal of Toledo because it was reported that she never ate pork and she changed her underclothes every Saturday. When it was further discovered that her Catholic mother had Jewish ancestry, the Tribunal suspected that she might be a crypto-Jewess. Mercilessly tortured, the young woman asked repeatedly to be told what crime she must confess to in order to stop the administration of more pain. After such intense indignities (including being stripped of her clothes), she lapsed into incoherent speech. For details, see the four-volume work of Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1922) III 6.7.24, URL=<http://libro.uca.edu/lea3/6lea7.htm>
[14] For a careful examination of how alternative motives were also brought forward to completely understand this period of history, go to URL=<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain>.
[16] The Spanish Inquisition still remains a hot topic. As such, many Catholic historians consider it a matter of loyality to point out the exaggerations found in the reports of Protestants. Some online reports are entirely unreliable. I just read a report that begins, “The goal of the Spanish Inquisition was to expell, convert, or kill all Non-Catholics in Spain” (URL=https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/spanish-inquisition-258743421/258743421). Given the climate of honesty in reporting, I generally find Wikipedia and major journal articles to be reliable. Blogs are most prone to confessional or person biases. Occasionally one finds Catholics lamenting the deeds of their ancestors associated with the Spanish Inquisition. One such statement includes this: “As a Catholic priest, I am here to express this sorrow and ask for forgiveness from my Jewish brothers” URL=<https://jewinthepew.org/2015/11/01/1-november-1478-pope-sixtus-iv-establishes-spanish-inquisition-otdimjh/>
[19] The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespear dramatizes how the Christians outwitted the Jewish money lender and stole from him his daughter and his wealth. Shakespear wrote to get the applause of the crowds, and, needless to say, it’s the Christians who are applauded and the Jews who are despised. Nonetheless, one cannot expect a small note of sympathy for the Jew in his famous lament.
[20] From Alexander Donat’s personal memoir, Holocaust Kingdom, cited in Sidney G. Hall III, Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul’s Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 12.
[21] If you want to see what the Ursuline Sisters look like and what they are doing in Cleveland today, then go to URL=https://www.ursulinesisters.org/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~end of notes~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Christians have proclaimed a false and misleading G-d to the Jews, and the Jews were right to reject it entirely. Since this falsehood is so intimately associated with Jesus, it remains unclear whether God could endorse Jesus as the Moshiach of Israel in the end times without giving a false witness and a tacit approval to an abhorrent misrepresentation of G-d.
Bishop N.T. Wright names “going to heaven” as “totally and utterly wrong”
Space does not allow me to demonstrate, point by point, just how far the Socratic thinkers within the Jesus Movement refashioned and distorted the message of Jesus. My most worthy companion in this task is N.T. Wright, one of the world’s finest biblical scholars, a prolific author, and the former Bishop of Durham for the Church of England. In a nutshell, here is Wright’s thesis:
Mention salvation, and almost all Western Christians assume that you mean going to heaven when you die. But a moment’s thought, in the light of all we have said so far, reveals that this simply cannot be right. . . . If God’s good creation—of the world, of life as we know it, or our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams—really is good . . . , then to see the death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. Itistotallyandutterlywrong!
As we have seen, the whole of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, speaks out against such nonsense. It is, however, what most Western Christians, including most Bible Christians of whatever sort, actually believe. This is a serious state of affairs [and my intention is to join with others in correcting it].50
My limited space here does not allow me to justify Wright’s “bold certainty”51 in this matter. For the moment, therefore, let’s assume that Wright is correct when he concludes that Jesusnever,never,neveranticipatedamassexodusfromearthinorderthathisfaithfuldiscipleswouldspendaneternity with him inHeaven. Sure enough, Jesus himself was taken up into Heaven by his Father, but that was an exceptional move. Jesus and Elijah were both taken up alive into Heaven only because God had future plans for them, and he was getting them ready for the roles that would be assigned to them when he sent them back to earth to prepare for God’s Kingdom that would arrive following the resurrection of the dead and the Final Judgment. No book in the bible takes the position that all those saved by Jesus will be resurrected and then they will be taken to Heaven for an eternity enjoying the beatific vision.
Now, at this late period of my life—I want to come clean. I want to realign myself with Jesus of Nazareth and to risk my life by openly abandoning Socrates. I also want to go on record for advocating to all Catholics that a return to Jesus requires a long and careful reexamination of how the faith of Jesus has been compromised by uncritically embracing a Jesus dressed in Socratic undergarments. Do not depend upon me to have all the answers. Do the work necessary to find your own answers.[i]
Before considering the conflicts that have arisen over the identity and the function of the Messiah, it is necessary to remember that Judaism and Christianity share a common hope[ii] in the coming of the Kingdom of God. In dialogue with Jews, both the Christian and the Jewish participants would do well to begin with this and, after all the controversies have been considered, to return to it as the basis for what we hold in common.
According to the Synoptics, the coming kingdom was the central metaphor dominating Jesus’ public ministry:
The central aspect of the teaching of Jesus was that concerning the Kingdom of God. Of this there can be no doubt and today no scholar does, in fact, doubt it. Jesus appeared as one who proclaimed the Kingdom; all else in his message and ministry serves a function in relation to that proclamation and derives its meaning from it.[iii]
In Matthew’s Gospel, for instance, Jesus’ public ministry is summarized by saying that “he went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the Gospel of the kingdom. . .” (Matt 4:23 and par.). And again, when Jesus is presented as anticipating the future, it is summarized in these terms: “This Gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come” (Matt 24:14). The “end” referred to here is the passing of this present era in order to make way for the Kingdom of God that will manifest itself everywhere on Earth.
Heralding the kingdom did not bring the kingdom into existence. Heralding the kingdom serves to prepare God’s people to get ready for God’s arrival. Most of Jesus’ parables are really metaphors of getting ready. For the women, Jesus tells the parable of how ten virgins, friends of the bride, kept their lamps burning as they awaited the arrival of the bridegroom with his male friends who, it seems, completely lost track of time and arrive after midnight (Matt 25:1-13). Notice that the virgins are “in the correct place.” They stay at the home of the bride. They rightly assume that the groom will come and the wedding will take place in the home of the bride. At no point is there the slightest hint that they are getting ready to be transported into Heaven.
For the men, Jesus tells the parable of how the male servants need to keep busy (literally, “keep their loins gird”) while their master is away at a wedding feast and could arrive home unexpectedly at any moment. When the master returns, he surprises everyone by girding himself, setting a table, and waiting personally on his faithful servants (Luke 12:35-40). Parables such a this emphasize that God was coming to gather Israel into a festive meal, that the moment of his arrival is uncertain, that he will arrive in the dead of night (when evil is afoot), and that those awaiting him needed to keep busy (about their Father’s business) until the moment of his arrival. The surprise in this parable is that when the Master arrives, he immediately sets about his business of serving his faithful servants.
The Acts of the Apostles makes it clear that the proclamation of the kingdom continued to form the central agenda of the early church. Philip, one of the Seven ordained by the Twelve, is presented as reaching out to the Samaritans in these terms: “he preached Good News about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 8:12). Likewise, Luke characterized the mission of Paul in these same terms: “he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, arguing and pleading about the kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8). The whole of Acts closes with this summary of Paul’s final mission to the Romans: “he [Paul] lived there [in Rome] for two whole years . . . preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered (Acts 28:31).
In sum, what Luke presents to us it that, at the time of his writing of Acts, the proclamation of the coming kingdom of God was the Good News that formed the focal message of Jesus and the early disciples. Furthermore, Luke also makes plain that at the time when Jesus’ importance in the drama of salvation was being expanded, Jesus’ role was always integrated within and subordinated to God’s kingdom.[iv]
The kingdom prayer of Jesus
Jesus’ prayer addressed the “Father” and petitioned that his “kingdom come.” This prayer, accordingly, admirably captures the central core of Jesus’ preaching as explained above. Having studied this prayer, Joachim Jeremias concluded that the first two petitions in the Lord’s Prayer were not “newly constructed by Jesus, but come from the Jewish liturgy, namely from the Kaddish, the `Holy’ prayer with which the synagogue liturgy ended and which was familiar to Jesus from childhood.”[v] James D.G. Dunn, writing twenty years later, came to this same conclusion (seemingly independently) when he noted how “striking” it was that the Lord’s Prayer “was so closely modeled on Jewish prayers of the time–particularly the Kaddish.”[vi] The Kaddish used in the synagogue during the time of Jesus was surmised[vii] to be as follows:
Exalted and hallowed be his great name.
In the world which he created according to his will,
may he establish his kingdom in your lifetime
and in the lifetime of the whole household of Israel,
The entire prayer expresses the Jewish hope that God’s kingdom would come and establish his kingdom “speedily.” The highlighted phrases, more especially, help show the remarkable affinity to the opening petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. Thus, when the Lord’s Prayer is appreciated as an expression of the long-standing hope of Israel,[ix] one can justifiably imagine that this prayer would have been easily understood and readily received even by Jewish fishermen.
I believe with a perfect faith in the coming of the Moshiach
Judaism lives primarily within orthopraxis (rightly serving God) while Christianity has placed its emphasis within orthodoxy (rightly believing God). Nonetheless, Jews do sometimes formulate what Christians understand as “creeds.” One such important faith summary was prepared by Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) in his commentary to the Mishnah Sanhedrin. This is familiar to Jews as the Shloshah-Asar Ikkarim (“The Thirteen Articles of Faith”) and, in some congregations, they are publicly recited. Each of the thirteen articles begins with “I believe with a prefect faith. . . .” The first is as follows: “I believe with a prefect faith that God is the Creator and [he] guides all creation.” The fifth affirms: “I believe with a prefect faith that God only and no one else is worthy of our prayers.” For our discussion here, however, the twelfth proposition is of especial importance: “I believe with a perfect faith in the coming of the Moshiach, and though he may tarry, still I await him every day.”
The use of the Hebrew term Moshiach in the above “creed” refers to what has come into the English language as “Messiah” or “Christ” (from the Greek word christos = “the anointed”). Jews, however, are often painfully aware that when Christians use such terms, they mean very different things:
The term “moshiach” or “messiah” literally means “the anointed one,” and refers to the ancient practice of anointing kings with oil when they took the throne. The moshiach is the one who will be anointed as king in the End of Days. The word “moshiach” does not mean “savior.” The notion of an innocent, divine or semi‑divine being who will sacrifice himself to save mankind from the consequences of their own sin is a purely Christian concept that has no basis in Jewish thought. Unfortunately, this Christian concept has become so deeply ingrained in the English word “messiah” that this English word can no longer be used to refer to the Jewish concept.[x]
Accordingly, in what follows, I will do what we often did in dialogue—we used “moshiach” when emphasizing the Jewish understanding and “messiah” when emphasizing the Christian understanding.
Catholic faith in the coming of the Messiah
In order to check out what Jews may be reacting to, I decided to look at the description of the Messiah found in the official Catechism of the Catholic Church. The results confirmed the cautions voiced above. The Catechism declares that “Jesus . . . unveiled the authentic content of his messianic kingship . . . in his redemptive mission as the suffering Servant [on the cross]” (sec. 440).[xi] Here the messianic kingship is cast entirely as a past event with no bearing whatsoever on the future Kingdom of God. This is disappointing, for it demonstrates that the traditional medieval Christology has been retained with its focus on the atoning death without giving (a) due attention to a half-century of Catholic biblical studies regarding the Kingdom of God and (b) without making use of Vatican II statements that might easily have been introduced at this point. Consider the following:
We are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, whose happiness will fill and surpass all the desires of peace arising in the hearts of man [woman]. Then with death conquered, the sons [daughters] of God will be raised in Christ. . . (Gaudium et Spes 39).
The bishops here use the phrase “new earth” because the language of the Kingdom of God has been so traditionally associated with “going to heaven.” Notice that the future tense is used throughout and that the general resurrection is associated with the moshiach.
This being said, the bishops then give a caution to those who get so fixated on God’s future that they fail to fix their faucets, their families, and their failing world:
Far from diminishing our concerns to develop this earth, the expectancy of the new earth should spur us on, for it is here that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come. That is why . . . such progress [now] is of vital concern to the [future] kingdom of God (Gaudium et Spes 39).
The progress named here is not principally in the areas of technological, agricultural, or industrial development, but specifically focused on “human dignity, brotherly communion, and freedom.” These “fruits of our nature,” the bishops assure us, will be “cleansed . . . from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love, and peace” (Gaudium et Spes 39). To this end, the bishops further note that “Christ is now at work in the hearts of men by the power of his Spirit; not only does he arouse in them the desire for the world to come but he quickens, purifies and strengthens the generous aspirations of mankind to make life more humaine . . .” (38). What the bishops identify as the ongoing work of the moshiach, however, only comes to completion in the age to come: “Here [now] on earth the kingdom is mysteriously present, when the Lord comes it will enter into its perfection” (39). In sum, the work of Jesus as Messiah does not come to completion with his death (as the Catechism implies); rather, the Spirit continues to work in the hearts of believers until, on the last day, Jesus returns to complete his mission. “Then comes the end,” explains Paul, “when he [the Moshiach] hands over the kingdom to God the Father . . . , then the Son [the Moshiach] himself will be subjected to the one [the Father] who put all things under subjection to him, so that God [the Father] may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:24, 28).
Whether Jesus fulfilled all the Jewish prophesies
For nearly two thousand years, Christians have rallied around Jesus and hailed him as the one whom God has sent as the Moshiach of Israel. Immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden, for example, Christians discover the first promise that God would send a redeemer in the words directed to the serpent:
I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he [her offspring] will strike your head, and you [the serpent] will strike his heel” (Gen 3:15).
At face value, one might suspect that one has here some ancient Jewish folklore designed to explain why there is a mutual antagonism between people and snakes. The children of Eve fear snakebites; hence, they kill snakes by clubbing them on the head. Prior to the eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree, it should be noted, Eve felt no fear or antagonism toward the serpent. On the contrary, she found the serpent to be an attractive dialogue partner prompting her to explore the hidden power of the forbidden fruit.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “this passage in Genesis is called the Protoevangelium (“first Gospel”), the first announcement of the Messiah and Redeemer, of a battle between the serpent and the Woman, and the final victory of a descendant of hers” (410).
The Catechism, in this case, has championed the allegorical reading of Irenaeus (130-200 C.E.) where the woman = the Virgin Mary and her offspring = Jesus. Far from being an etiology for why humans kills snakes, therefore, this obscure Jewish text becomes, in Christian eyes, a revelation of how the future moshiach will strike out and destroy evil (serpent = Satan) on the face of the earth.[xii]
Consider a second example. The early Church Fathers saw in the command of God and in the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his “only son” (Gen 22:16) a prefiguring of the future mystery of redemption wherein God the Father would willingly sacrifice his only-begotten Son. The blessings follow:
Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and . . . by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice (Gen 22:16-18).
According to Christian commentators, “your offspring” here refers, first and foremost, to the future Messiah who will not only redeem Israel but “all the nations of the earth” as well. Thus, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son has been used by Christians as prophetically prefiguring how God would in the future accomplish the universal redemption through Jesus Christ.[xiii]
The early followers of Jesus clearly favored their Teacher as God’s favored Son. Peter, as the tradition has it, was the first to believe that Jesus was also God’s Moshiach. He came to this not because “flesh and blood revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matt 16:17). This makes clear that Jesus did not preach or teach anything about his messianic connection, but that Peter came to this directly due to divine inspiration. On the way to Jerusalem, the disciples were obsessed with “who is the greatest” (Matt 18:1 and par.), and the Zebedee sons wanted to be Jesus’ first lieutenants when he arrived “in his kingdom” (Matt 20:21 and par.). They clearly anticipated that Jesus would reveal himself as the Moshiach in Jerusalem. What a brutal letdown, then, when Jesus was handed over to Pilate and crucified as an insurrectionist.
“No one expected the Messiah to suffer. . . . No one expected the Messiah to rise from the dead, because he was not expected to die.”[xiv] These events undoubtedly threw the disciples into fits of despair and confusion. Gradually, over time, however, they discovered in their Jewish Scriptures (they had no other authoritative source) ways of squaring what actually had happened with their abiding hope that Jesus would be appointed as God’s Moshiach. Paul did this in his way. Each of the four evangelists did this in their ways. Everyone came to believe that the suffering, death, and resurrection was “according to [God’s plan as revealed in] the [Hebrew] Scriptures.”
Given this historical background, it is no surprise that Christians today are persuaded that the Hebrew Scriptures (esp. Gen 22, Ps 22, Isa 53) contain nearly three hundred texts that reveal both the promise and the character of the messiah. We have just examined two of these texts above. Based upon this pattern of “prefiguring” and “fulfillment,” the temptation is very strong for Christians to confront Jews with a list of “prefiguring” texts in their Scriptures with the expectation that they will (if their minds are opened) recognize in Jesus their “fulfillment.”
Compulsory sermons for Jews become normal after the sixth century.[xv] When these sermons did not have the required effect, some Christians relieved their frustration by beating “stubborn Jews” in the same way that they had seen schoolmasters beat recalcitrant pupils. At other times, Christians forced Jews to take part in public debates.
Happily, these times are nearly over. I say “nearly” because I am aware that, as you are reading this book, militant Fundamentalist churches are preparing to send out trained missionary teams (college students for the most part) to vacation in the State of Israel with the express intent of snaring Jews into recognizing Jesus as the Moshiach.[xvi] One has only to surf the web to locate their sites.
A Rabbi responds: Whether Jesus may have been the Messiah
Fundamentalist Christians have prepared pamphlets, comic books, and websites especially targeting Jews whom, as they say, “many never have had the opportunity to explore the possibility that their own Scriptures point to Jesus.” The Christian who wrote the email below was undoubtedly persuaded that he might be able to offer Rabbi Richman such an “opportunity.”
To Rabbi Chaim Richman,
Greetings from a Christian living in Washington, D.C. Do you think that Jesus may have been the messiah? Why or why not . . . ? In the New Testament it is written that Jesus fulfilled all of the prophecies of the prophets and the law. . . .
I am including a list of biblical verses[xvii] that I would like you to look at. . . . Also the Psalms speak of many prophecies fulfilled by Jesus. . . . Please take a look and see if Jesus was the Moshiach.
Again I say that I hope that this letter did not offend you, however I must do what G‑d requires of me.
Thank you very much. (signed ‑‑‑)
Here then is Rabbi Richman’s response:
My dear friend,
Thank you very much for your sincere letter. . . .
The identity of the messiah is not up to you or me; it is up to his performance to prove. . . Can a little booklet one receives in the mail prove that the messiah has come? Is that all it takes? The state of the world must prove that the messiah has come; not a tract. Don’t you think that when the messiah arrives, it should not be necessary for his identity to be subject to debate‑-for the world should be so drastically changed for the better that it should be absolutely incontestable!
According to the prophets of the Bible, amongst the most basic missions of the messiah are:
to cause all the world to return to G‑d and His teachings,
to restore the royal dynasty to the descendants of David,
to oversee the rebuilding of Jerusalem, including the Temple, in the event that it has not yet been rebuilt;
to gather the Jewish people from all over the world and bring them home to the Land of Israel,
to reestablish the Sanhedrin,
and to restore the sacrificial system. . . .
You have stated that in the New Testament it is written that Jesus fulfilled all of the prophecies. . . . But which of these above requirements did Jesus fulfill? And if he is going to fulfill them the second time [when he returns], why did he not attend to them the first time? This in itself is one concept which no amount of Biblical sleuthing can find a prophetic basis for—[namely] for the notion that the messiah does not accomplish these things upon his [first] appearance, and therefore must return a second time. . . .
Finally, there had to be an explanation for the first coming and its catastrophic end. The basic structure of this explanation was to shift the function of the messiah from a visible level (the only level emphasized by the Bible)-‑where it could be tested-‑to an invisible level-‑where it could not. The messiah’s goal, at least the first time around, was now not said to be the redemption of Israel (which had clearly not taken place) but the atonement for original [and actual] sin[s]. . . .
But for Jews, if the Bible’s description of the messiah has not been fulfilled, then for authentic Jews there can only be one explanation: he has not yet come. To Jews, who were often subjected to mockery and contempt when asked where their messiah was, this conclusion was painful. But an honest facing of the facts makes it inescapable. In adversity and joy, through holocaust and statehood, Jews who are truly faithful to the Torah and prophets can only repeat the words of their forefathers: “I believe with complete faith in the coming of the messiah; and though he may tarry I shall wait for him every day.”
I have had no intention, Heaven forbid, to offend you. But just as you feel that you must do what G‑d requires of you, so have I done as well. If you, or any of our readers, wish to correspond with me and truly establish a dialogue, I am at your service. . . .
(signed ‑‑‑)
When I was engaged in debating during my high school years, we were trained to ferret out the best possible arguments of our opponents and to devise ways to turn them around to our own advantage. In the case of R. Richman’s letter, consequently, I am prompted to accept it and to weigh its true merits:
To begin with, I would have to agree with R. Richman that the messianic expectations listed in his letter (plus many more unlisted) were not accomplished by Jesus and, if the truth be known, there is no way for either of us to know how many or how few will be accomplished when the Lord actually arrives.
Going further, I would have to acknowledge as a believer and as a scholar that the Hebrew Scriptures contain such a diverse and divergent set of particulars regarding the end times that is accurate to say that no single individual could ever fulfill everything. Within the collected apocalyptic poems of Isaiah, for instance, there are times when the Egyptians are slated for utter destruction (31:3) and other times when the Lord “will send a savior to protect and deliver the Egyptians” (19:20) such that, in the end, they too will receive his favor: “Blessed be my people Egypt” (19:25). Similarly, there are times when the Lord, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, limits the final ingathering to “your offspring [Israel]” (43:5); while, at other times, the prophet (or someone speaking in his name) says that “the nations of every tongue” (66:18) will be gathered by the Lord.
Those churches and synagogues claiming that the bible contains a single and unified scenario for the arrival of God’s kingdom have not yet dealt squarely with the sheer diversity and incompatibility found within the prophetic and apocalyptic writings. Unless both Christians and Jews get a measure of honesty on this issue, both sides will end up continually talking past each other.
Dialogue that honors a Jewish interpretation of Scripture
How then would one start a true dialogue? Well, to begin with, it would be very helpful for each side to acknowledge that, by virtue of their belonging, they have been schooled to expect certain things from God in the future and to neglect other things. Next, each side might want to explore how their separate commitments lead them to use and reuse certain prophetic texts while turning a blind eye to other texts. In so doing, both sides might come to realize that their “opponents” are not just self-serving or idiosyncratic in their selection of texts, but rather that there is an authentic diversity of religious and intellectual passions operative when it comes to God’s future. If these initial honest admissions go well, then participants from each side might more easily make sincere inquiries and learn to respect the diversity of viewpoints that will be expressed between and among those present. Furthermore, each side might discover that, at times, their use of a prophetic text is paper thin and bound to carry little conviction whereas, in other cases, the textual meaning seems rock solid. In the end, all those involved might be willing to allow that they are poised before a future that is in God’s hands and that is bound to hold surprises for all concerned.
In 2001, official Vatican explorations of the Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures opened up a new era of honesty. This began by posing to Catholics a potentially embarrassing question:
The horror in the wake of the extermination of the Jews (the Shoah) during the Second World War has led all the Churches to rethink their relationship with Judaism and, as a result, to reconsider their interpretation of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament. It may be asked whether Christians should be blamed for having monopolized the Jewish Bible and reading there what no Jew has found.[xviii]
This admission is noteworthy. On the basis of what has been said above, Christians have pushed forward “their interpretation” of “their messianic fulfillment texts” without any regard for the Jewish understandings of the texts in question. Jews were even sometimes beaten because they failed to find these “Christian interpretations” within their texts. The Vatican document honestly asks whether Christians “should be blamed for having monopolized the Jewish Bible and reading there what no Jew has found.” The Vatican team responded as follows:
Christians can and ought to admit that the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures from the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian reading which developed in parallel fashion. Both readings are bound up with the vision of their respective faiths, of which the readings are the result and expression. Consequently, both are irreducible.[xix]
This is noteworthy! No longer can it be said that Jews are hard-headed dunces unable to recognize the correct interpretation of their own Scriptures. Rather, the Vatican allows that the Jewish interpretations (devoid of any hidden references to Jesus) are “possible” (nay, even more, “valid”) because they grew out of their history of interpretation and are responsive to the particular set of religious passions nurtured by their community. The same thing, of course, could be said of Christian exegesis—it also is “possible” (here again, I would say, “valid”) for the very same reasons. The conclusions drawn are twofold: (1) “Both readings are bound up with the vision of their respective faiths,” and (2) “Both are irreducible.”
In brief, for eighteen hundred years, Christians have interpreted the Jewish Scriptures in such a way as to undercut Jewish values and Jewish integrity. The presumption was that, in the face of two irreducibly different interpretations of any given text, only one could be right; hence, the Jews had to be wrong! Now, however, the Vatican has acknowledged that the Jewish reading of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is valid for them, while our finding of a hidden reference to the forthcoming sacrifice of Christ is valid for us. The Vatican then goes on to draw the practical conclusion that Catholics “can learn much from Jewish exegesis practiced for more than two thousand years.” Reciprocally, Catholics, for their part, can hope that Jews “can derive profit from Christian exegetical research.”[xx]
Mutual unwillingness to sanction a tyrannical future
After having arrived at this mutual recognition of how and why our interpretations of messianic texts are irreducibly different, then the dialogue partners might be able to move on to honestly reflect upon the tyrannical power that would be necessary to implement certain prophetic anticipations. To take an example, consider a specific case from R. Richman’s list, namely the expectation that the messiah would “cause all the world to return to God and his teachings.” Such a hope finds an honored place in the daily prayers of Jews and is widespread in the prophetic literature‑-“To me [the God of Israel] every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isa 45:24). In like fashion, Christians generally expect that, in the end times, the teachings of Jesus would be universally accepted by all humanity “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend” (Phil 2:10).
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that Phil 2:10 would be fully implemented by the Lord when he comes. In this new world order, are we to imagine that the teachings of the rabbis and the patterns of synagogue prayer would suddenly lose their legitimacy and deserve to be outlawed and stamped out? Are we to imagine that the Jewish way of life would have no sanction whatsoever in the eyes of Jesus and his twelve disciples (who would presumably be raised from the dead as believing Jews)? How could any moshiach, even one who had a divine charisma and who worked repeated miracles, be expected to bring the entire Jewish world to turn itself inside out in order to welcome a Christian theology, a Christian liturgy, and Christian eschatology? A world tyrant (the anti-Christ or a neo-Nazi revival) might be able to coerce a measure of conformity in these matters; yet, strong-arm measures would violate freedom of conscience and debase human rights. Must the Christian Messiah then become a ruthless tyrant in order that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend” (Phil 2:10)?
As for myself, I say to you, the reader, that if this were to come to pass, Christians and Jews would have to band together in order to overthrow such a tyranny! No divine future can be tolerated that would force Jews to bend their knees before Jesus. Even if the Son of God would do it, it would still be “unworthy of God” and have to be overthrown. This, for me, is the breathtaking and scary realization that grips my soul when I read triumphalist texts such as Phil 2:10.[xxi]
Mutual uncertainties regarding God’s future
The renowned Catholic scholar, Karl Rahner stated quite boldly his conclusion that “the imaginative portrayals of Scripture [regarding the last days] cannot be harmonized with one another.”[xxii] According to Rahner, fantastic and impossible-to-attain metaphors are deliberately used in order to remind readers that the future as future remains both known and unknowable: “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor 13:12). Thus, it would be mistaken to imagine that “the sheep will be [literally] turned into wolves” (Did. 16:3) or that the elect “will be caught up [literally] in the clouds” (2 Thess 4:17). If this were so, we would do well to study the behavior of wolves or take up skydiving in order to prepare ourselves for the last days. It would be likewise mistaken to join with Tim LaHaye[xxiii] in his expectation that, when the rapture takes place, vehicles will be running out of control and causing havoc everywhere because their drivers had been instantaneously caught up in the clouds. Accordingly, I would like to challenge the eschatological values of Tim LaHaye by asking him, “What kind of God would cause such senseless destruction when initiating his finest hour?”
Relative to the Hebrew Scriptures, humility and truth would seemingly enable us as Christians to positively adhere to the way of Jesus without imagining that all or most of the prophetic texts either directly or indirectly point to his life, death, and resurrection. The sheer complexity, incompatibility, and obscurity of the Jewish prophetic texts ensure that no Messiah or messianic series of events could possibly fulfill them all. When the disciples of Jesus found aspects of his life obscurely referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures, they were selectively reading back into their cherished Jewish sources key aspects of Jesus’ life. Their faith in Jesus, it must be made clear, came from their intimate association with Jesus and not the other way around. No one became a disciple of Jesus by virtue of drawing together a thousand prophetic texts and then scoring every living Jew for many generations to see whether someone comes up with a “perfect” match. This would be sheer lunacy.[xxiv] Even more importantly, the early disciples of Jesus used their Scriptures both to support their adherence to Jesus and their adherence to Judaism. Most modern disciples, in contrast, are intent upon using the Hebrew Scriptures to bring Jews to Jesus while entirely uprooting and destroying their adherence to Judaism. This, in itself, must serve as a “warning sign” and a “wake-up call” to both Christians and Jews as to how perfidious this enterprise is and how contrary to both the spirit and the letter of the early church traditions.
When it comes to the use of prophetic texts, Christians and Jews should be able to say to themselves and to each other that we cannot know when God will elect to establish his kingdom on earth. Nor can we know the precise details that this kingdom will include. Jews, naturally and legitimately, will want to include the ingathering of all the dispersed Jews from all over the world into the rebuilt temple in the new Jerusalem. Might it not be possible, on the other hand, that many Diaspora Jews would elect to remain rooted within those regions that they have come to know and love due to their long habituation? Furthermore, might it not be the case that the territory of Israel would create an ecological and sociological disaster should all Jews living in all times elect to return to the Land of Israel. Going further, if the Lord expected by Israel is just and favors the oppressed, then would it not be expected that the needs and the purposes of the Palestinians would gain some permanent recognition and generous response on the part of the Lord in the world to come. Abraham opposed the Lord face-to-face when his plans included the destruction of the innocent with the guilty (Gen 18:23-25). Would not the sons and daughters of Abraham then be expected to oppose any formation of God’s future Land of Israel that would be crassly insensitive to the legitimate needs and rights of their Palestinian neighbors?[xxv]
A few pages earlier, I objected to the literal fulfillment of Phil 2:10. Now I endeavor to examine the Jewish expectation of the ingathering of the exiles in the face of ecological, sociological, and political realities of which the Jewish prophets were ignorant. My hope is that Jews might learn from this that they can and must challenge, for example, those Israelis who use the Hebrew Scriptures to support the view that not an inch of land (conquered by recent wars) can legitimately be returned to the goyim. My hope earlier was to demonstrate that Christians can and must challenge bible thumpers who preach that Phil 2:10 (and associated texts) gives them the right to trample the religious sensibilities and legitimate practices of the Jews (or the Muslims) here and now because God himself holds out a future when he himself will trample any Jew who does not bend his knee at the name of Jesus. What? How can those engaged in Christian-Jewish dialogue continue to be insensitive and indifferent to such things? All in all, Christian-Jewish dialogue can and does (I am even tempted to say “must”) empower believers on both sides to go home and clean up the mess made by their own co-religionists in their own houses.[xxvi]
Whether Christians have destroyed Jesus’ future
The Christian Scriptures give ample testimony to the supreme importance that Jesus had for the lives of those Jews who had accepted him and walked in his ways. For modern Christians, however, a new situation has arisen that may nullify God’s choice of Jesus as the Moshiach:
Christians have shamed the God of Israel by painting him as locked in unforgiveness from the fall of Adam to the death of Jesus. Such a doctrine, even in its mitigated forms, has always stood in contradiction to the lavish experience of forgiveness described in both the Hebrew Scriptures and in the parables of Jesus.
Christians have, accordingly, proclaimed a false and misleading god to the Jews, and the Jews were right to reject it entirely. Since this falsehood is so intimately associated with Jesus, it remains unclear whether God could endorse Jesus as the Moshiach of Israel in the end times without giving a false witness and a tacit approval to an abhorrent misrepresentation of God.
According to Matthew Gospel, Jesus anticipated that his disciples would someday “sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt 19:27f). How could the disciples of Jesus be expected to properly judge or guide Israel if they have been poisoned by a doctrine that “salvation is only found in the name of Jesus” and that “salvation consists in applying to Jews the merits Jesus earned dying on the cross”?
The Church must also struggle with Elie Wiesel’s charge that “any messiah in whose name men are tortured is a false messiah.”[xxvii] Thus, in humility and in truth, Christians must wonder whether the long history of Christian harassment, intimidation, and torture of Jews does not entirely preclude God from giving anyone associated with these horrendous events any significant role in the future of Israel.
One can speak glibly of Jesus as being Jewish and sinless; however, this does not remove the pain and horror of millions of Jews who were tormented in the name of Jesus Christ. Wiesel himself recounts his own story:
As a child I was afraid of the church . . . not only because of what I inherited‑-our collective memory‑-but also because of the simple fact that twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, Jewish school children would be beaten up by their Christian neighbors. A symbol of compassion and love to Christians, the cross has become an instrument of torment and terror to be used against the Jews.[xxviii]
Just as it is impossible to contemplate that God would use former S.S. officers to keep order during the final judgment and to usher Jews into the world to come, so too, it remains unclear whether the God of Israel could be so crass and insensitive as to allow the Crucified Savior Jesus Christ to be the most credible candidate for the Moshiach of Israel.
In humility and truth, consequently, the false doctrines and horrendous deeds of Christians may have temporarily (and maybe even permanently) ruined the chances that Jesus of Nazareth will still be God’s choice for the Moshiach of Israel. No appeal to the infallibility of the popes or to the persistent faith of the Church could possibly overturn this terrible conclusion. In fact, when understood correctly, it is the very teaching and conduct of the popes and the very persistent faith and conduct of the Church that will be used by God to explain why the name of Jesus has been withdrawn as his choice as Moshiach.
Observe, Judge, and Act
Q1. Up until this point of time, the message given to you by loving parents and by your religion teachers is that “Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah sent by God to redeem his people.” This message has been repeated so often and has been enforced by loving teachers to the point that “there can be no doubting that this is exactly the greatest gift that God offers us.” Think back to the moment in your life to when you felt absolutely certain that “Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah sent by God to redeem his people.” What assurance did you have that backed up your conviction. What feeling tones did this leave you with?
Q2. Think back to the moment in your life when you felt some doubt that “Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah sent by God to redeem his people.”. Describe one of these moments. What feeling tones did this doubt and burden leave you with?
Q3. To what degree is this true? To what degree is this false?
Christians have shamed the God of Israel by painting him as locked in unforgiveness from the fall of Adam to the death of Jesus. Such a doctrine, even in its mitigated forms, has always stood in contradiction to the lavish experience of forgiveness described in both the Hebrew Scriptures and in the parables of Jesus.
Q4. To what degree is this true? To what degree is this false?
The Church must also struggle with Elie Wiesel’s charge that “any messiah in whose name men are tortured is a false messiah.” Wiesel explains this in his own experiences:
As a child I was afraid of the church . . . not only because of what I inherited‑-our collective memory‑-but also because of the simple fact that twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, Jewish school children would be beaten up by their Christian neighbors. A symbol of compassion and love to Christians, the cross has become an instrument of torment and terror to be used against the Jews.
Q5. To what degree is this true? To what degree is this false?
In humility and truth, consequently, the false doctrines (named in Q3) and horrendous deeds of Christians (named in Q4) may have temporarily (and maybe even permanently) ruined the chances that Jesus of Nazareth will still be God’s choice for the Moshiach of Israel. No appeal to the infallibility of the popes or to the persistent faith of the Church could possibly overturn this terrible conclusion.
Q6. Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz speaks forthrightly for hundreds of thousands of Jews when he says, quite categorically, that the name of Jesus of Nazareth has to be struck from the list of potential candidates for moshiach. His reasons are clear and uncompromising:
This Jesus is the one who validated the hatred and oppression of his own people.
He is the Jesus who stands for crusades, inquisitions, ritual murder charges, and forced conversions.
He is the Jesus who did not protest the Holocaust. That Jesus may not hate his kinfolk in his heart, but he has stood idly by while his kinfolk bled.
Jews like Rabbi Borowitz shake their heads and tremble in rage whenever they encounter zealous Christians contorting the Hebrew Scriptures into saying that the Moshiach had to undergo a barbaric death in order to coax God into forgiving sins. Such a scheme of things perverts the Jewish image of a just and merciful Father that is plainly written in their sacred texts.
It also demonstrates how ignorant Christians can be of the Jewish experience of receiving God’s love and forgiveness. The shame is not that Christians (as gentiles) experience the loving forgiveness of the God of Israel through Jesus; the shame is that so many Christians believe that no one can legitimately have an experience of God’s forgiveness of sins without praising the name of Jesus.
Q7. No one can change her mind without first of all having slept on the evidence. The process of deep sleep allows one to forget the non-essentials that are cluttering your mind and feelings. Therefore, I urge you not to commit yourself until you sleep on it for a few nights. Where has your mind and heart settled after three days?
Q7. After a week, open your heart and mind to a trusted and informed guide who is willing to hear the depths of your soul. Share your whole process of finding flaws in your original position. How and why have you undertaken to study this issue more deeply. What new evidence has jumped out at you and how has it changed you? Give yourself forty days to test drive the position of Rabbi Elis Wiesel.
Q8. Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz speaks forthrightly for hundreds of thousands of Jews when he says, quite categorically, that the name of Jesus of Nazareth has to be struck from the list of potential candidates for moshiach. His reasons are clear and uncompromising:
This Jesus is the one who validated the hatred and oppression of his own people.
He is the Jesus who stands for crusades, inquisitions, ritual murder charges, and forced conversions.
He is the Jesus who did not protest the Holocaust. Jesus may not hate his kinfolk in his heart, but he stood idly by while his kinfolk bled.
Jews like Rabbi Borowitz shake their heads and tremble in rage whenever they encounter zealous Christians contorting the Hebrew Scriptures into saying that the Moshiach had to undergo a barbaric death in order to coax God into forgiving sins. Such a scheme of things perverts the Jewish image of a just and merciful Father that is plainly written in their sacred texts.
It also demonstrates how ignorant Christians can be of the Jewish experience of receiving God’s love and forgiveness. The shame is not that Christians experience the loving forgiveness of the God of Israel through Jesus; the shame is that so many Christians believe that no Jew can legitimately have an experience of God’s forgiveness of sins without praising the name of Jesus.
Can a Jew be certain that Jesus was not the Moshiach?
From what has already been said, it is clear that Jews can take their stand within their religious tradition and say, with calm assurance, that Jesus was not the Moshiach. This is so primarily because Jews cannot rightly imagine that God’s Moshiach was somehow sent into the world unequipped to establish even a small part of God’s design for Israel in the end times. To this can be added the painful fact that the smoke of the burning children at Auschwitz conclusively demonstrates that God’s kingdom has not arrived. Just as there are false Messiahs, so too there are also false claims as to the presence of the kingdom (made by well-meaning Christians). The smell of the flesh of burning children keeps Jews honest on this point.
Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz speaks forthrightly for hundreds of thousands of Jews when he says, quite categorically, that the name of Jesus of Nazareth has to be struck from the list of potential candidates for moshiach. His reasons are clear and uncompromising:
This Jesus is the one who validated the hatred and oppression of his own people.
He is the Jesus who stands for crusades, inquisitions, ritual murder charges, and forced conversions.
He is the Jesus who did not protest the Holocaust. That Jesus may not hate his kinfolk in his heart, but he has stood idly by while his kinfolk bled.
One can still hear the reverberations of anger between the lines. Jews like Rabbi Borowitz, consequently, can barely stomach the hypocrisy of pious Christians who naively applaud Jesus as the Messiah. Jews like Rabbi Borowitz shake their heads and tremble in rage whenever they encounter zealous Christians contorting the Hebrew Scriptures into saying that the Moshiach had to undergo a barbaric death in order to coax God into forgiving sins. Such a scheme of things perverts the Jewish image of a just and merciful Father that is plainly written in their sacred texts. It also demonstrates how ignorant Christians can be of the Jewish experience of receiving God’s love and forgiveness. The shame is not that Christians experience the loving forgiveness of the God of Israel through Jesus; the shame is that so many Christians believe that no one can legitimately have such an experience without praising the name of Jesus.
The case of Jews who admire Jesus
On the brighter side, some Jews have explored the teachings and the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth and come away with admiration in their hearts. At the turn of the century, for example, Max Nordau, the faithful collaborator of Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, wrote, “Jesus is the soul of our soul, as he is flesh of our flesh.”[xxix] Martin Buber, a little later, began describing Jesus as the “elder brother” to whom “belongs an important place in Israel’s history of faith.”[xxx] Since then, a handful of Jewish scholars have made extensive studies of the person and the teachings of Jesus.[xxxi] The study of Shalom Ben-Chorin, in particular, captures both the affinity and the strangeness that most Jews experience when making contact with Jesus through the Christian Scriptures:
I feel his brotherly hand which gasps mine, so that I can follow him. . . . It is not the hand of the Messiah, this hand marked with scars. It is certainly not a divine, but a human hand, in the lines of which are engraved the most profound suffering. . . . The faith of Jesus unites us, but faith in Jesus divides us.[xxxii]
Rabbi Pinchas Lapide met with Jürgen Moltmann in a small parish church in Germany and, quite unexpectedly, a very intense and open dialogue took place. During this exchange, Lapide acknowledged some things that must have sent shudders of delight in the hearts of the Christians present. For beginners, he said, “I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event.”[xxxiii] Next, he explained that, for him, “Jesus is immortal.”[xxxiv] Furthermore, Lapide allowed that Jesus is truly “son of God”[xxxv] and that “the Christ event leads to a way of salvation which God has opened up to bring the Gentile world into the community of God’s Israel.”[xxxvi] Having come so far, Lapide then took the bold final step of characterizing the success of Christianity in converting the Gentile world as a “messianic event.”[xxxvii] Having said all these heart-warming things about Jesus and the movement he left behind, R. Lapide then baffled his Christian hearers by admitting that he was, never the less, unable to say with certainty that Jesus is the Moshiach. Why so? He explained:
No Jew knows who the coming moshiach is [with certainty], but you [Christians] believe to know his identity with certitude. I cannot contrapose your certainty with a no, but merely with a humble question mark. Thus I am happily prepared to wait until the Coming One comes, and if he should show himself to be Jesus of Nazareth, I cannot imagine that even a single Jew[xxxviii] who believes in God would have the least thing against that.[xxxix]
This is baffling. Rabbi Lapide clearly entertains a wait and see attitude. In so doing, he graciously puts aside all his terrible memories of what has been done to Jews in the name of Jesus. One might think that he is playing a game with his audience by way of sugarcoating his quiet “no” to Jesus. Possible. From my reading of the entire dialogue, however, my hunch is that Lapide trusts God to make the right choice for Israel—even if it entails his choice for Jesus. In the end, consequently, Rabbi Lapide humbly professes a messianic faith that allows God to be God! Would that Christians would learn from him how to moderate the absolute certainties surrounding their own messianic faith.
What unites Jews and Christians
Given our differences on so many points, it seems important to close this chapter by remembering what unites us—that we all anticipate the coming of the kingdom, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and life everlasting. A dialogue group composed of rabbis and priests in Los Angeles summarized their findings as follows:
The concept of the Kingdom of God serves as a source of comfort and hope in both Judaism and Christianity. God is King so good will ultimately prevail, thus the human struggle against evil is meaningful. Our roots give us security and strength, but it is our vision of the future promised by God that enlightens our minds and gladdens our hearts.[xl]
Thus, because the Moshiach of Israel is not the Messiah of Christians, the anticipation of the Kingdom of God has much to divide us. On the other hand, since the God of David is coming on behalf of Israel and those Gentiles who have been grafted onto the root of Israel thanks to Jesus, there is much to `enlighten our minds and gladden our hearts.’
Conclusion
At the end of this chapter, many things come into focus: (a) that the core of Jesus’ ministry was his heralding of the coming of the Kingdom of God; (b) that Jesus did not fulfill many of the Jewish expectations regarding the expected Moshiach; and (c) that Christians must ponder whether the long history of Christian harassment, intimidation, and torture of Jews combined with the Church’s persistent pejorative theology of God and of Judaism does not entirely preclude that God would assign Jesus any significant role when it comes to the future of Israel.
[i] Marrow (1999) represents an excellent example of a Jesuit who systematically explored the biblical records and came to the firm conclusion that the “immortal soul” was never part of the teaching of Jesus. Likewise, within Evangelical Protestant circles, The Carson Center for Theological Renewal under the direction of Dr. Benjamin L. Gladd has arrived at similar findings. See “Why We Won’t Spend Eternity in Heaven” (24 October 2024). URL=<https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/wont-spend-eternity-heaven/> A popular pastor, Rev. Jacob Prahlow, gets to the heart of our future life, with his “Life after Life after Death,” Conciliar Post, 04 Oct 2024. URL=<https://conciliarpost.com/theology-spirituality/life-after-life-after-death/>
[ii] The expectation of God coming to gather the exiles and to establish his reign was first sounded in the synagogue Sabbath prayer: “Hurry, Loved One, the holy day [of our deliverance] has come: show us grace as [you did] long ago.” Next, it showed up in our analysis of the Jewish character of the opening phrases of the Lord’s Prayer. Finally, it was spelled out in detail in the section entitled, The Priority of Israel’s Salvation in the Message of Jesus, in Chapter Three.
[iii] Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967) 54.
[iv] In Acts 19:8, for instance, only the kingdom preaching is mentioned. In Acts 8:12 & 28:31, the kingdom preaching is named first and, only then, “teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ.” A detailed analysis of the sermons in Acts would also show this same relationship, but it is beyond the scope of this book to work this all out. For a detailed and highly readable study of how the expectation of God’s coming as Savior gets gradually overlayed with the saving acts of the Messiah, see John A.T. Robinson, Jesus and his Coming (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979).
[v] Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus. Tr. John Bowden from the 1971 German orig. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971) 198.
[vi] James D.G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1991) 38.
[vii] Paul F. Bradshaw, in his Search for the Origins of Christian Worship (Oxford: University Press, 1991), makes the point that most scholars in the last century had “a considerable degree of assurance what Jewish worship was like in the first century” (1) but that this assurance had almost entirely evaporated by the turn of the century. To begin with, Bradshaw draws attention to the fact that no surviving synagogue prayer book goes back earlier than the ninth century (1). Moreover, instead of assuming that the rabbis shaped daily prayers thereby ensuring a degree of uniformity, Bradshaw demonstrates that recent scholars have concluded that “diversity and variety” characterized this development and that the rabbis, by the end of the second century, had only partially succeeded in bringing a degree of standardization to the prayer life of their followers (6). In brief, Bradshaw concludes that a survey of all the relevant documents leads to the conclusion that three regular prayers were used by many ordinary Jews during the first century: the Shema, the Tefillah, and grace at meals. The Kaddish only developed later, hence, it is extremely unlikely that the Lord’s Prayer was shaped by first-century prayers used in the synagogue as scholars such as Jeremias and Dunn have supposed.
[viii] Cited in Dunn, The Partings of the Ways, 38.
[ix] Sometimes Judaism can be presented in such a way as to mimic Protestant or Catholic ways of thinking. Here is an example of this: author undisclosed, “Belief in Heaven is Fundamental to Judaism,” Jews for Judaism URL=https://jewsforjudaism.org/knowledge/articles/belief-in-heaven-is-fundamental-to-judaism Quite early the author attributes King Solomon with the doctrine of Socrates:
At death the soul and body separate. King Solomon said, “The dust will return to the ground as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7). This means the soul returns to heaven, back to God, where it is enveloped in the Oneness of the Divine.
The author mistranslates his own self-chosen text. When he says “the soul returns to heaven,” this hints at the transmigration of souls that is a standard Socratic assumption. Later, however, the author clearly speaks of judgment and rewards when talking about heaven:
After we die we are judged by God, since He is the only true judge who knows our actions as well as our motives. Our place in heaven is determined by a merit system based on God’s accounting of all our actions and motives.
While the author here suggests that everyone is given a rank in heaven due to our actions and motives, at another point the author flatly opposes acting to gain favor with God:
We perform the mitzvot [good deed] because it is our privilege and our sacred obligation to do so. We perform them out of a sense of love and duty, not out of a desire to get something in return. There is a practical reason for this. If we lived a righteous life for the sake of a monetary or heavenly reward it would be serving God for an ulterior motive.
For further examination of this, go to URL=<https://jewsforjudaism.org/knowledge/articles/belief-in-heaven-is-fundamental-to-judaism>
[xi] The Catechism of the Catholic Church [abbr: CCC] followed the schema used in the Roman Catechism produced following the Council of Trent. Thus, the atoning death stands as the primary metaphor for understanding Jesus’ mission and forms the horizon of understanding for making sense of how Jesus is the “Christ” (especially par. 440). All the biblical material cited above regarding the centrality of the Kingdom of God in the mission of Jesus finds occasional references here and there. The citations from Vatican II offered above are grouped together under the heading, “The Hope for the New Heaven and the New Earth” (sec. 1042-1050) but show little evidence of having been integrated into Jesus’ role as Messiah. Thus, in general terms, the CCC is a very fragmented production. The atoning death is taken out of the medieval ST and serves to specify the “redemption” that Jesus brought. The CCC entirely overlooks the Synoptics and Acts wherein Jesus refused to present himself as “the Messiah.” Jesus anticipated the coming of the Kingdom of God that the Father would bring. At no point does the Catechism deal with (a) the thousand-year reign of the Messianic Kingdom and (b) the coming of the Father to “wipe away every tear” (Rev 7:17, 21:4). To discover “why the Messianic Kingdom is omitted from the Catechism,” I did a search on <www.magisteriumai.com>. Here are the results:
The Catholic Church has historically rejected the idea of a literal, earthly thousand-year reign of Christ and the saints, known as “millenarianism” or “chiliasm.” This view was held by some early Christian groups like the Cerinthians and Ebionites, but was rejected by the mainstream Church.
The Catholic understanding is that the “thousand years” mentioned in the Book of Revelation refers symbolically to the entire period between Christ’s first and second comings, not a literal millennium. St. Augustine, a prominent early Church Father, interpreted the thousand years as representing the perfection and completeness of the Church’s reign, not a specific temporal period.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that the Church will receive her “perfection only in the glory of heaven” at the end of time, when “the universe itself will be renewed” and the righteous will reign forever with Christ. This final, eternal kingdom is the fulfillment of the Messianic kingdom, not a literal thousand-year reign on earth.
References 1.= Catholic Encyclopedia 2.= CCC sec. 1042
In sum, the Catholic Church has entirely removed itself from our Lord’s faith that “your [our Father’s] kingdom come on earth.” Perfection, for individuals and for the Church itself, ultimately takes place in Heaven where God dwells. Thus, Socrates has won out over the historical Jesus. Only in the afterlife is perfection available because, only there (in Heaven), the body does not hinder the eternal longing of our immortal souls. Here then is the doctrine of Socrates:
It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure [i.e., certain and unchanging] knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body. . . . If while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one or two things follows—either [pure] knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, [pure knowledge can be attained only] after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone.
In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with the bodily nature [which is unreliable because it is continually changing], but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure . . . (Phaedo, 1022).
I did research on the Catholic Church’s new super site on the coming of the Lord to “wipe away every tear” (Rev 7:17, 21:4). I did this because the Book of Revelation (Rev 21:2-5) makes it absolutely clear (a) that God is coming to us for this event [we do not need to die in order to get to God in heaven] and (b) that God aspires to spend his entire future on earth [as opposed to taking us to be with him in heaven]. Here are the results of my search:
The Book of Revelation describes the ultimate goal of our Christian pilgrimage – the heavenly Jerusalem [that is “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:3)] where God will dwell with humanity and wipe away all tears, mourning, and pain.[^1] This vision of the new heaven and new earth represents the fullness of God’s kingdom, where the righteous will reign forever with Christ in glorified bodies and souls.[^2] [Notice that “the heavenly Jerusalem” remains “heavenly” whereas, according to Rev 21:2, the “new” Jerusalem is “coming down out of heaven from God.” The phrase, “the heavenly Jerusalem” never appears in the entire Book of Revelation. Has the Catechism distorted the bible? Quite possibly.]
The Church is the Bride of Christ, awaiting the day when He will return [to earth as in Rev 21:2-4] and complete the “recapitulation” – the final restoration of all things under His lordship.[^3] At that time, the Church and the redeemed community will no longer be wounded by sin, stains, or self-love, but will experience the beatific vision and eternal communion with God [in heaven].[^4] [Notice that “Bride of Christ” never appears in the Book of Revelation. Nor does “the Church.” Rather, it is the “new Jerusalem” that has been “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 2:2) that is the focal point of the eschaton. God and Jesus show up, not as endorsing a particular “Church,” but as “light” for the nations:
And the city [“the new Jerusalem that comes down out of heaven” (Rev 21:10)] has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day‑‑and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations (Rev 21:23-26).
This eschatological hope is not a mere utopia, but a reality that God is already bringing about through Christ’s Paschal mystery.[^5] The newness of God is already present in the world, inspiring the Church and renewing human history.[^6] The Church, with the Spirit, continues to pray “Marana tha” – “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20), longing for the day when every tear will be wiped away.[^3]
[Notice that the Catholic Church prays “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20). In so doing, they short-circuit the eschatology of the Book of Revelation that anticipates “the Lord God” as also coming shortly: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” (Rev 21:3). The Catholic Church has no sufficient cause to promote God’s coming. In fact, the Church implies that Jesus will be the one to wipe away tears when he returns and that, in Heaven, we will live with Jesus “as our God.” Thus, Almighty God is again upstaged by Jesus in yet another significant biblical alteration.]
[^1] [General Audience of 28 June 2000](https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/2000/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_20000628.html)
Again and again, it might appear that the Catholic Church has subverted the Scriptures in order to proclaim its own message at the expense of an honest and informed examination of the Scriptures. Thus, by expanding “blood guilt” to include all Jews in all future generations, my Catholic teachers denigrated Judaism and caused me needless anxiety regarding Mr. Martin’s risk of being tormented in eternal hellfire. Next, by portraying God as unable to forgive sins prior to the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, Catholics had to tamper with the apostolic teaching and to overturn the teachings of Rabbi Jesus regarding the supreme readiness of God to forgive sins at all times and in all places where teshuvah was operative. Next, the Catholic Church of the second and third centuries gave priority to the Socratic doctrine of the naturally immortal soul by way of altering the when and how of the afterlife. Catholics are thereby bound to think that (a) Jesus came to save their souls from eternal punishment and that (b) Jesus assured good Catholics that making use of the Sacraments would assure them of receiving the “beatific vision” when they die and go to Heaven.
Still other Catholics in my generation still believe that, if they faithfully wear a brown scapular, they would be assured of going to Heaven on the first Saturday after their death. See “Sabbatine Privilege” at the URL=<https://ogdensburgcatholics.org/the-brown-scapular-promises> [Note: Please exercise caution on this site–spiritual advice is being offered that gets close to “borderline superstition”? Why did the intelligent and kind Sisters teach me about the supreme benefits of the brown scapular? For a more balanced presentation of the devotion to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel that stands behind the use of the scapular, see URL=<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnOviWvWDg8>
[xii] One can see, from this first instance, that the hidden meanings found in Gen 3:15 go way beyond the literal meaning of the text within its original context. It is even a stretch of the imagination to regard Gen 3:15 as a messianic text. Don Juel, in his excellent book, Messianic Exegesis (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988) notes that one finds in Christian exegesis of the Jewish Scriptures something akin to rabbinic midrash—it was a “highly artful, even fanciful, history of interpretation” (13). Catholic biblical scholars such as Bruce Vawter pose serious problems to the continued use of Gen 3:15 as the “protoevangelium” of salvation (On Genesis: A New Reading, 83-84).
[xiii] Both the Aqedah (the binding of Isaac) and the atoning death of Jesus serve to transform events of horror into events of honor. Just as Jews could speak of the unfathomable blessings that emerged due to the “sacrifice” of Isaac, Christians on their part claimed that no sin ever gets forgiven without the merits of Christ’s passion and death. These merits bedazzle the onlooker and cover over the implied cruelty of God hidden in the wings. See, for example, Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends (New York: Random House, 1976) & Philip Borenstein, “Sermon for Second Day of Rosh Hashannah 5757 (1996),” URL=<http://www.rjca.rog/5757rh2akedah.html>
[xv] William Horbury, Jews and Christians: In Contact and in Controversy (Edinburg: T&T Clark, 1998) 227.
[xvi] This form of misguided proselytism seldom works for various reasons: (a) because it operates in ignorance of the Jewish history of interpretation of the text, (b) because it arrogantly presupposes that the “Christian interpretation” represents the only true meaning that could possibly be applied to the text, and (c) because it promotes an image of the Messiah that runs counter to the moshiach of every informed Jew. It is one thing for the early Christians to find in their Hebrew Scriptures allegorical interpretations that supported their continued adherence to Jesus and his Judaism; it is quite another thing for later Christians to use these same allegorical interpretations by way of uprooting and destroying the foundations of Judaism.
The most common list of messianic predictions fulfilled by Jesus are the following:
Messiah would be a descendant of King David: 2 Samuel 7:12-16
Messiah was to be born at Bethlehem: Micah 5:1
Messiah would arrive before the destruction of the Second Temple: Daniel 9:24-27
Messiah would present himself by riding on a donkey: Zechariah 9:9
Messiah would be tortured to death: Psalm 22:1-31
Messiah’s life would match a particular description, including suffering, silence at his arrest and trial, death and burial in a rich man’s tomb, and resurrection: Isaiah 52:13-53:12
[xviii] Pontifical Biblical Commission, “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible,” published with a preface from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Rome: Vatican Press, 2001) sec. 22.
[xxi] Texts such as Phil 2:10 deserve a cautionary footnote in Catholic bibles that might read something like this: “The Jews remain very dear to God . . . and should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed” (Nostra Aetate 4); hence, we can be certain that God will respect their rightful beliefs and religious liberty in the world to come. Given the enormity of crimes inflicted upon Jews in the name of Jesus, it remains doubtful whether, following the general resurrection, these same Jews will be inclined to bend their knees “at the name of Jesus.” If God returns to “wipe away every tear” (Rev 21:4), then there might be some prospect that Jesus might eventually gain some recognition among the people of Israel. For the moment, however, Christians should recognize that it would be cruel and inhumane for God to impose Jesus upon the Jews in any capacity whatsoever in the world to come. Texts such as Phil 2:10 must therefore be understood as representing a prophetic prospect that has been subverted by the conduct of Christians in the course of history.
[xxii] Karl Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions,” Theological Investigations IV (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966) 335.
[xxiii] Launched in 1995, the Left Behind series authored by the retired Fundamentalist pastor, Tim LaHaye, in collaboration with the fiction writer, Jerry B. Jenkins, has sold fifty million copies and spawned three New York Times best-sellers (as of late 2002). According to LaHaye, “the enormous success of our books indicate that there are still millions of people in our country who believe that the bible has the answer to the problems of life and bible prophecy reveals what the future holds for our troubled world” (Time Magazine). In the first volume of this ten-volume series, flight attendants aboard a 747 bound for Heathrow suddenly find half the seat empty save for the clothes, rings, and dental fillings of believers who were suddenly raptured. Down on the ground, great numbers of cars and trucks on the highways suddenly go out of control because their drivers have been likewise raptured.
[xxiv] In 2001, the Vatican noted the following: “It would be wrong to consider the prophecies of the Old Testament as some kind of photographic anticipations of future events. All the texts, including those which later were read as messianic prophecies, already had an immediate import and meaning for their contemporaries before attaining a fuller meaning for future hearers” (Pontifical Biblical Commission, “The Jewish People,” sec. 21).
[xxv] A few pages earlier, I vehemently objected to the literal fulfillment of Phil 2:10 (see n. 18 above). Now I endeavor to examine the Jewish expectation of the ingathering of the exiles in the face of ecological, sociological, and political realities of which the Jewish prophets were ignorant. My hope is that Jews might learn from this that they can and must challenge those Israelis who use the Hebrew Scriptures to support the view that not an inch of land (conquered by recent wars) can legitimately be returned to the goyim. My hope earlier was to demonstrate that Christians can and must challenge those bible thumpers who imagine that Phil 2:10 gives them the right to trample the religious sensibilities and legitimate practices of the Jews (or the Muslims) here and now because God himself holds out a future when he himself will trample any Jew who does not bend his knee at the name of Jesus. All in all, Christian-Jewish dialogue can (and sometimes does) empower believers to go home and clean up the mess made by their own co-religionists in their own houses. I, for one, have been empowered within this dialogue to prepare the topics in this book in such a way that I directly and immediately challenge cherished Catholic positions. I do this because most Catholics are blissfully ignorant of how deep the poison of anti-Judaism goes within the routine attitudes and sanctioned literature of their Church. I will scandalize many in speaking as I do. On the other hand, those who continue to support a polite and inoffensive Catholic-Jewish dialogue also scandalize by what they are afraid to reconsider and afraid to challenge in their own faith. The same thing, of course, can be said of Jewish participants.
[xxvi] I, for one, have been empowered within this dialogue to prepare the topics in this book in such a way that I directly and immediately challenge cherished Catholic positions. I do this because most Catholics are blissfully ignorant of how deep the poison of anti-Judaism goes within the routine attitudes and sanctioned literature of their Church. I will scandalize many in speaking as I do. On the other hand, those who continue to support a polite and inoffensive Catholic-Jewish dialogue also scandalize by what they are afraid to reconsider and afraid to challenge in their own faith. The same thing, of course, can be said of Jewish participants.
[xxvii] Elie Wiesel, The Oath (New York: Random House, 1973) 138.
[xxviii] Elie Wiesel, “Art and Culture after the Holocaust,” Auschwitz‑-Beginning of a New Era? Ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV, 1977) 406.
[xxix] Cited in Hans Küng, On Being a Christian (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976) 173.
[xxx] Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) 12f.
[xxxi] Among the better known Jewish studies of Jesus that have appeared in English are the following: David Flusser, Jesus (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969); Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Macmillan, 1925); Pinchas Lapide (with Jürgen Moltmann), Jewish Monotheism and Christian Trinitarian Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970); C.G. Montefiore, The Synoptic Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1927); Samuel Sandmel, We Jews and Jesus (Oxford: University Press, 1965); Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1973). For an excellent overview and analysis, see Donald A. Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984).
[xxxii] Shalom Ben-Chorin, Bruder Jesus (München: Verlag, 1967) 14.
[xxxiii] Pinchas Lapide and Jürgen Moltmann, Jewish Monotheism and Christian Trinitarian Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 59.
[xxxiv] Lapide and Moltmann, Jewish Monotheism, 60.
[xxxv] Lapide and Moltmann, Jewish Monotheism, 67.
[xxxvi] Lapide and Moltmann, Jewish Monotheism, 69.
[xxxvii] Lapide and Moltmann, Jewish Monotheism, 71.
[xxxviii] At this moment, R. Lapide obviously wasn’t thinking of the hundreds of thousands of Jews that very much think like R. Borowitz.
[xxxix] Lapide and Moltmann, Jewish Monotheism, 79.
[xl] The Los Angeles Priest-Rabbi Committee offers this conclusion to its dialogue on the importance, the nature, and the contemporary implications of the Kingdom of God.
Ch3 Experience of death within the Jewish tradition
Few ideas are as unsupported, ridiculous and even downright harmful as that of the ‘human soul.’ And yet, few ideas are as widespread and as deeply held.
What gives? Why has such a bad idea had such a tenacious hold on so many people?
~D.P. Barish
Fake photo of an immortal soul leaving a dead body.
In the Garden of Eden, our Creator told Adam and Eve where they would go upon their death – nowhere! No heaven and no hellfire. They would simply go “back to dust” (Gen 3:19). This is the outcome for all humans and all animals at the time of their death. They stop breathing. They go back to being as they were prior to their first breath. Nothing more. Nothing less.
When someone takes their first breath, their life begins; when someone takes their final breath, their life ends. It’s very simple and very natural. This is the Jewish understanding that God ordains throughout the five books of Moses.
Is this a pleasant thought? Is this a scary thought? Is this the sort of future that you anticipate at the time of your death? If not, what sort of future do you expect when you breathe your last breath?
According to Genesis, God fashioned Adam out of the clay of the earth and breathed life into this inanimate form (Gen 2:7). When God later went on to create animals and birds, he used essentially the same process that he used when fashioning Adam (Gen 2:19). At no time does Genesis say that Adam was created with an “immortal soul” while animals were created with “mortal souls.” In fact, to be clear, Genesis says nothing about “souls” whatsoever.[1]
In the Jewish tradition, “breathing” was understood as the dynamism that kept someone “living.” When someone stopped breathing, this was the prime indication that someone has died. This was what I experienced during the three hours when my father was dying:
My father was being cared for by the staff at Cleveland Clinic Euclid Hospital which is located just a ten-minute walk from my family home. I was alone with my Dad throughout the night. His condition had been slowly growing worse during the past three days, and the nurse told me that he could die at any time. After sunset, the lights in the hospital room were dim and the only sounds were the faint beeps of electronic monitoring devices and the soft breathing of my dad.
Just after eleven o’clock, I noticed that the slow rhythms of my Dad’s breathing quietly came to a stop. The rising and the falling of his chest also stopped. Then, after missing two or three breaths, he slowly began breathing again. I came closer and held his hand. Over a period of three hours, the interruptions in his breathing occurred more and more frequently. At first they came every 15 minutes. After two hours, they came every three minutes. Then, without any distress or commotion of any kind, my Dad peacefully interrupted his breathing as he had done so many times before. After five minutes, I knew that my Dad had taken his last breath. His whole life had come to an end.
At this point in my life, I was no stranger to death. A few years back, one of our beloved cats was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition. The afternoon she died, I was holding her in my lap because I noticed that she had become weaker and weaker during the day. In her case, I could not hear her breath but I could clearly see her chest gradually expanding and contracting. At the moment of death, she made a slight jerking motion and then stopped breathing entirely. Her life had come to an end. It was no different for my Dad.
If I had been raised in a Jewish household, no one would have been telling me that these two deaths had very little in common. Yet, when I allow myself to block out the idea that my Dad’s soul rises out of his body at death and takes flight toward heaven, then the experience of life as intimately associated with breathing demonstrates a remarkable parallel. The Book of Genesis makes this clear.
In the Garden of Eden, our Creator told Adam and Eve where they would go upon their death – nowhere! No heaven and no hellfire. They would simply go back to dust. This is the outcome for all humans at death.
In the sweat of your face, you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return (Genesis 3:19 KJV).
For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing at all, nor do they have any more reward, because all memory of them is forgotten. Also, their love and their hate and their jealousy have already perished, and they no longer have any share in what is done under the sun (Ecclesiastes 9:5-6).
Whatever your hand finds to do, do with all your might, for there is no work nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom in the Grave, where you are going (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
For there is an outcome for humans and an outcome for animals; they all have the same outcome. As the one dies, so the other dies; and they all have but one spirit. So, man has no superiority over animals, for everything is futile (Ecclesiastes 3:19).
The treatment of death and immortality in Gen 2-3
Walter Brueggemann is a prolific, Protestant scholar and theologian who is widely considered one of the most influential interpreters of the Hebrew Scriptures in the last several decades.[2] In 1994, Brueggemann published a review of James Barr’s fresh and challenging reading of Gen 2-3 entitled, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality. Brueggemann approvingly summarized Barr’s thesis in the following terms:
Barr shows (in agreement with much current scholarship) that in Genesis 2-3, or in the Old Testament more generally, there is nothing of “The Fall” or “Original Sin,” or the notion of death as punishment.
The “Pauline understanding of Adam and Eve” is based only in certain later strata of the Old Testament and in literature outside the present Hebrew canon (p. 18) [hence, it cannot be used as the litmus test for understanding Gen 2-3.]
In Barr’s closely reasoned argument, death is no heavy-duty punishment, but is what happens to the primal couple when the peculiar chance of immortality is offered by God and lost. As a consequence . . . , he [Barr] considers that death is natural, that it is willed by God and is not to be considered as a punishment for sin.[3]
Using Bruggemann and Barr as my own starting point, I have carefully studied Gen 2-3 with the help of both Jewish and Catholic scholars. After twenty years, I came to discover that the original meaning of Gen 2-3 was to explain how our primal parents sought to become like their beloved Father.
When examined closely, the “serpent” in Genesis functions as a spirit-guide within ancient Middle Eastern culture (see Matt 10:16). Far from deceiving Eve, this “serpent” is assuredly a truth-teller: “You will not die [when you eat this fruit]; for God knows that when you eat of it [a] your eyes will be opened, and [b] you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5-6). And, according to the text, this is exactly what happens.[4]
Adam, meanwhile, has been telling Eve that God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die” (Gen 3:3). Adam deliberately added, “nor shall you touch it.” When Eve touches the fruit, however, nothing happens. Adam clearly is mistaken. So, she eats it. And the eating has wondrous effects. No one dies. Thus, Eve, with the help of the serpent, exposes the errors of Adam on both counts.
Eve and Adam are expelled from the Garden. According to the prevailing theology of the churches, this expulsion takes place due to God abhorrence of their grave sin [the “original sin”]. The text itself provides quite another explanation: “The LORD God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever,’ therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden” (Gen 3:22-23). Thus, God finally approves how his children have “become like one of us”; yet, God does not want his children to “live forever.”
In the Garden, God has planted not one but two empowering trees: “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and “the tree of life.” God intended his children to be mortal. The text specifies this intention clearly, “You are [made out of] dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19). Hence, God expels his children from the Garden, not due to some supposed “sin” but in order to ensure that the “tree of life” remains out-of-reach of his beloved children.
The text says that God assigns to a “cherubim” the task of “guard[ing] the way to the tree of life” (Gen 3:24). Here again the text indicates clearly that “sin” was not an issue here; rather, protection of the “tree of life” was God’s primary concern.
I do not have the space or the time here to develop each of these propositions. In my book, each of these points are spelled out in greater detail. For the moment, however, three potential pillars for interpretating Genesis will be put forward as in need of further study and application:
#1 Death is natural, (a) that it is willed by God and (b) that it is not punishment (Barr).
#2 Eve is (a) the explorer and (b) the innovator–just exactly the sort of helpmate that Adam so desperately needed.[5]
#3 God expels his children from the Garden, not due to some supposed “sin” but in order to ensure that the “tree of life” remains out-of-reach for his beloved children.[6]
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in the 4th century, would have been entirely opposed to the interpretation of Gen 2-3 that I have put forward. I cannot give any attention to his objections here. Yet, even within academia, the weaknesses of Augustine,[7] esp. his tendency to misinterpret Gen 2-3 and to overplay the gravity of the sin of Adam[8], are gaining more and more attention. I draw attention to the studies of Peter C. Bouteneff that were published in the prestigious Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation and reveal the weaknesses of the classical interpretation of Gen 2-3:
The Hebrew Scriptures indicate that the understanding of Adam and Eve as the originators of sin and death, and thus at the heart of ‘the fall’, is foreign to ancient Judaism where, if anything, Cain’s sin is more grievous and cataclysmic than Adam’s (e.g. Wis 10.3–4). The word ‘sin’ first occurs in reference to Cain (Gen 4.7; see also Jude 1.11). [It is never used in reference to Adam and Eve.] It is Paul who, uniquely in the entire Bible, establishes Adam in the role of inaugurator of sin/death.[9]
Taking notice of the absence of soul-talk in the Synoptics
When the Gospels present us with the grueling death of the Lord Jesus, I find it instructive that the writers of the Gospels tell us that “Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last” (Mark 15:37 and par.). Ἐξέπνευσε is the Greek term that literally means “he breathed out” and, since the verb is in the Aorist Indicative, this signals that a single, one-time event is being specified, thus, “his final breathe” is clearly implied.
What is noteworthy is that the Gospels tell us that “Jesus died” in precisely the same way that other men and women die. The oldest creed known to us, the Apostles’ Creed says quite simply, “He [Jesus] was crucified, died, and was buried.” It is noteworthy that none of the Gospels tell us that, at the moment of his death, his immortal soul was released and took flight toward heaven.
With the raising of Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:22–24, 35–43); the raising of the widow’s son at Nain (Luke 7:11–17), the raising of Tabitha (Acts 9:36–41) and the raising of Eutychus (Acts 20:9–12), the reader is never told that their souls had to be lured out of Hades in order to reanimate their bodies.
The case of Lazarus is especially detailed (John 11:1–44). In this instance, Lazarus has been dead and buried for “four days” (John 11:17). In order to raise Lazarus, Jesus first orders that the tombstone be removed (John 11:39). Clearly both Jesus and the Jewish mourners understand that someone being raised from the dead cannot be supposed to have sufficient strength to move the tombstone by themselves from the interior of the tomb. Secondly, Jesus prays: “”Father, I thank you for having heard me” (11:41). This implies that Jesus has asked his Father to raise Lazarus and that Jesus was aware that his petition was accepted. Thirdly, Jesus cries out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” (11:43). The result is reported: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth “(John 11:44). He was breathing, but his movements were hindered by the burial cloths that were used to attach aromatic herbs to his body at the time of his burial.
Had this been a Greek narrative, everyone would be wondering how the soul of Lazarus had been able to escape from the confines of Hades. The Greeks knew of a few instances wherein some daring person had descended into the Underworld with the object of persuading Lord Hades to release some cherished soul that was confined there. It would have been entirely unthinkable, however, that Jesus could somehow liberate a soul confined in Hades simply by raising his voice. “This could never happen,” the Greeks would insist.
Within a Jewish milieu, everything was different. No one would ask Lazarus what he experienced during the last four days when he was no longer breathing. Why not? Because, with death there was no longer any hearing, seeing, smelling, etc. Thus, very simply and directly, there was “nothing”[10] to report. The dead had stopped breathing. They were no longer living. They were totally unconscious. Thus, among the Jews, there was no possibility for someone living to consult the dead.[11] The dead were no more.[12]
How I grew up trying to save my immortal soul
When I was five years old, I began attending Holy Cross Grade School that was situated just a short ten-minute walk from my parents’ home. Here the Ursuline nuns gave us copies of the Baltimore Catechism that was to become the framework guiding my religious instruction for the next eight years. Just a week ago, I want back and found my Baltimore Catechism and was astonished at how massively the Jewish message of Jesus had been overlaid by the Socratic philosophy of the Greeks. You can discover this for yourself:
3 Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.
4 Q. Is this likeness in the body or in the soul?
A. This likeness is chiefly in the soul.
5 Q. How is the soul like to God?
A. The soul is like God because it is a spirit that will never die, and has understanding and free will.
6 Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him [in Heaven] forever in the next.
7Q. Of which must we take more care, our soul or our body?
We must take more care of our soul than of our body.
When I read the Baltimore Catechism today, I immediately realize how strangely unbiblical it is. In point of fact, none of the Gospel stories presents Jesus as teaching his disciples that their bodies will only last a short time–eighty years tops–but that their spiritual souls would last for an eternity. Moreover, Jesus never understands his teaching mission to be about “saving souls.”[13] Nor does the entire New Testament tell us that our everlasting happiness consists in shedding our mortal bodies at the time of our death such that our souls might be taken up into Heaven in order to live with God and enjoy the Beatific Vision forever and ever.
How I first learned that Jesus never endorsed an immortal soul
Cullmann gave his Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man in 1955. The thesis of his lecture was that there was no biblical evidence supporting the immortality of human souls, and that this doctrine had nothing in common with the Christian hope in the resurrection of the body. Fifty years later, the academic and pastoral tide has massively turned in Cullmann’s direction:
The concept of an immaterial soul separate from and surviving the body is common today but according to modern scholars, it was not found in ancient Hebrew beliefs.[28] The word nephesh never means an immortal soul[29] or an incorporeal part of the human being[30] that can survive death of the body as the spirit of the dead.[31] URL=<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_in_the_Bible>
In my first year of graduate studies at the Graduate Theological Union; I was required to read Oscar Cullmann’s Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead? (1956).[14] I was shocked and dumbfounded by what I discovered. Giving my religious instruction under the guidance of the Ursuline nuns followed by four years learning from the Marianist Brothers at St. Joseph High School, it never entered my mind that Jesus did not believe that every person had an immortal soul that survived the death of the body. After a single reading, however, I realized that Jesus never endorsed the immortality of the soul. Thus, it became clear to me that the Baltimore Catechism that was the pillar of my early Catholic upbringing had been contaminated by dubious unbiblical ideas that originated with Socrates.
I felt betrayed.
The sweet Ursuline nuns who taught me for eight years using the Baltimore Catechism had misled me. They taught me that the Baltimore Catechism[15] had an “imprimatur” that assured readers that everything it contained was in harmony with the Catholic faith. They had assured me that the successor of Peter, the Pope in Rome, was our divinely appointed watchman who faithfully passed on the teachings of Jesus. My Baltimore Catechism assured me that this was the “guarantee of authenticity” that was promised to me as a Roman Catholic.
124 Q. What do you mean by the infallibility of the Church?
A. By the infallibility of the Church I mean that the Church cannot err when it teaches a doctrine of faith or morals.
125 Q. When does the Church teach infallibly?
A. The Church teaches infallibly when it speaks through the Pope and the bishops, united in general council, or through the Pope alone when he proclaims to all the faithful a doctrine of faith or morals.
I remember very clearly that the nuns assured me that, should any pope ever get confused and set his mind upon teaching a false doctrine, God would quickly intervene by paralyzing or even killing him so that he could not proceed. Thus, in my mind, I had imagined that everything found within the Baltimore Catechism was backed up and certified as infallible by the Pope.
I now recognized that I had been misled by my kind and intelligent Ursuline Sisters. I came to realize that God would never step in and paralyze wayward popes. What kind of cruel Father would act in this way? In fact, I had to come to grips with the realization that my Church had endorsed other doctrinal errors[16] as well. For the first time in my life, I lost my smug certainty that papal infallibility was far more important than the biblical infallibility claimed by Protestants.
I also came to realize that I could learn some very important truths from Protestants like Oscar Cullmann. All my life I had relied exclusively upon Catholics teaching Catholic doctrines. The sweet Sisters at Holy Cross Grade School warned me that Protestants could not be trusted to know and to teach what Jesus knew and taught. Hence, I made it my rule of life to exclusively trust only those books and pamphlets that had the “imprimatur.” In our school library, there was a section reserved under lock and key which held books written by Protestants. Only “well-informed” and “true blue” Catholics were able to get permission to read these books.
Now, however, at the Graduate Theological Union[17], I realized that Oscar Cullmann had discovered a very serious flaw in my Catholicism that not even the Pope and all his Jesuit advisors had been able to uncover. I was learning astonishing things I never thought possible.[18]
Within Protestant commentaries on the bible, it was commonplace to find strong affirmations of the “immortal soul.” When I explored the very popular Pulpit Commentary[19], for example, I discovered a strong Socratic interpretation of Luke 23:46. Here is their judgment:
This commending his spirit [πνεῦμά] to his Father has been accurately termed his entrance greeting to heaven. This placing his spirit as a trust in the Father’s hands is, as Stier phrases it, an expression of the profoundest and most blessed repose after toil. . . . Doctrinally it is a saying of vast importance; for it emphatically asserts that the soul[20] will exist apart from the body in the hands of God. This at least is its proper home.[21]
Thus, this makes clear that Cullman must have been very unwelcome in very many Protestant churches as well. At this time Prof. Cullmann was a full professor of theology at the University of Basel and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He himself acknowledged that “no other publication of mine has provoked such enthusiasm or such violent hostility.”[22] Given my own personal turmoil at reading Cullmann’s thesis, I completely understood the “violent hostility” that was visited upon him from both Catholic and Protestant circles.
Why Socrates and Jesus were sentenced to death as “troublemakers”
Socrates was regarded by the civil authorities as a “troublemaker.” He was publicly tried[23] and convicted of having “corrupted the youth of Athens” due to his critical attitude toward the popular religious notions of his day. As punishment, Socrates was required by the court to take his own life by drinking poison hemlock. Socrates died on 15 February 399 BCE at the age of 70.
Jesus was also regarded by the temple authorities as a “troublemaker.” He, too, trained his disciples to take a critical attitude toward the popular religious notions of his day. He was privately questioned by the Sanhedrin and convicted of having unlawfully disrupted the temple operations. As punishment, the chief priests handed Jesus over to Pilate as a threat to Roman rule by virtue of his laying claim to be “King of the Jews.” He was crucified by the Romans on the basis of these trumped-up charges. Jesus died on 3 April 33 CE[24] at the age of 34 (+/- 3 yrs).
But here is where the parallels end. As Plato narrates it, Socrates faced his impending death with the utmost tranquility.[25] Surrounded by his grieving disciples, he encouraged them not to lament his death. Socrates explained to them that the poison hemlock would destroy the life in his body but it would not in any way disturb his immortal soul. Thus, following his death, Socrates anticipated that his soul would ascend into the celestial world where he would have the satisfaction of continuing his search for truth among the deceased philosophers who died before him. In this setting, Socrates assured his disciples that his life mission would continue unabated in a place beyond the reach of the nervous civil authorities of Athens. In fact, Socrates made the bold claimed that, only after death, would the task of discovering the truth become easy and natural because everything would be illuminated by “the light of truth”:
It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure [i.e., certain and unchanging] knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body. . . . If while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one or two things follows—either [pure] knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, [pure knowledge can be attained only] after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone.
In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with the bodily nature [which is unreliable because it is continually changing], but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth (Phaedo, 1022).[26]
This is the very doctrine that is secretly being expounded in the Baltimore Catechism:
“The soul cannot have pure [certain and unchangeable] knowledge [of God]” in this life. Only when “the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone” can she have the beatific vision of God. So, we must “keep ourselves pure [free from mortal sins] until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us.” Then and only then can we “hold converse with the pure [the Saints]” and “know of ourselves [in] the clear light everywhere [through the beatific vision].”[27]
Unlike Socrates, Jesus never explains to his disciples that he has an immortal soul that insures his continued existence on the other side of death. Rather, Jesus was rooted in the conviction that God, his Father, was preparing to come to earth (a) to raise the dead[28] to life, (b) to judge the living and the dead, and (c) to gather his elect into his Kingdom on earth. This was the “good news” that Jesus had tirelessly preached to God’s beloved people, the Jews. Jesus wanted to be here on earth when God arrived.
At the Passover that his disciples had celebrated on the night of his arrest, Jesus reassured his disciples saying, “I have longed to celebrate this Passover with you.” Jesus even went so far as to make a vow “that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes” (Luke 22:18). This was the holy night when, many years earlier, God heard the cries of his suffering people, and he came down to earth to liberate them from their Egyptian taskmasters. Here again, the dominant narrative is that God comes to us.
The faith of Socrates (a troublemaker in Athens, 499-430 BCE)
The faith of Jesus (a troublemaker in Galilee and Jerusalem, 3-33 CE)
Philosophers are truth-seekers now and in the afterlife
Prophets are God-seekers and God-responders.
Here on earth, our immortal souls are handicapped because they are imprisoned in our mortal bodies.
Here on earth, God comes to us, to make covenants with his people, to liberate them, to establish his Kingdom.
Socrates knew that his soul was safe from his persecutors; his body not so.
Jesus knew he was vulnerable, but he trusted in his Father’s time-table.
Socrates faced his impending death with utmost tranquility.
Jesus faced his impending death with terror and sweating blood.
Ultimately, Socrates looked forward to continue his truth-seeking among the dead philosophers in the celestial realm.
Ultimately, God raised Jesus from the dead and brought him to Heaven in order to prepare him for his return to earth.
So, as the night wore on and his anxiety grew, he began to pray. Gone is the naïve assurance that his prophetic mission was somehow so essential that his God would shield him from his powerful enemies. Even the inevitability of the coming of God upon the clouds to establish his reign on earth was of little comfort. God would come when God would come. The death of one prophet would not serve to either hurry him up or to slow him down. As the early Evangelists tell it, Jesus was so thoroughly gripped by fear that he actually “sweat blood” while he urgently prayed to his Father that he would rescue him from drinking from the “cup of suffering” that was all-to-quickly overtaking him. “Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:43-44).
Jesus never appeals to his immortal soul to save him
Jesus, unlike Socrates, never tells his disciples that his immortal soul is beyond the reach of his tormentors. Jesus, as he is presented in the Gospels, knew himself to be vulnerable in the face of his enemies.[xxix] Sure, he could have disguised himself and quietly hid himself outside of Jerusalem until the threats posed by the high priests might cool down. Matthew tells the story of how, as an infant, his parents quietly left Bethlehem taking the coastal road to Egypt in order to evade the plot of Herod the Great on his life (Matt 2:12-22). Was there something to be learned from this infancy narrative? Was it sometimes permissible to take flight? When and how?
Yet, Jesus had chosen to take on the dangerous calling of a prophet; and, no prophet worthy of his calling leaves town with his tail between his legs. How could he expect his disciples to stand fast in the face of danger if he himself was always ready to take the safe road out of town? Consider the case of modern prophets such as Martin Luther King[xxx], Óscar Romero, Malcolm X, Mahatma Ghandi, J.F.K., and Robert Kennedy–once they began to bring needed changes into society, it was always just a matter of time before they would risk being cut down by lawless and cowardly men.
Jesus, himself, reflected on the Jewish prophets. He knew that a prophet who was welcomed by everyone was assuredly more of a crowd pleaser rather than an effective social change-agent acting in the name of God. Here are a few of the reflections on this that show up in Matthew’s Gospel:
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven[xxxi], for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you (Matt 5:11-12).
Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward . . . ; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones [my disciples] in the name of a disciple‑‑truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward (Matt 10:41-42).
Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house (Matt 13:57).
When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee” (Matt 21:10-11).
The supreme horror of Roman crucifixions
Modern scholars tell us that the Romans had perfected the craft of crucifixion by way of terrorizing onlookers. Once a trouble-maker was scourged and nailed to wooden beams in a public place, the unfortunate victim was guaranteed to be screaming on an instrument of torture designed to intensify and prolong the suffering and humiliation of its trapped victim.[xxxii] Records show that those being crucified could be made to suffer for a few hours or a few days.
In the case of Jesus, the Romans undoubtedly wanted him to have a quick death because the Sabbath would begin at sundown. In the case of Jewish victims, the family of the deceased would not be able to bury the victim if he died too late in the day. This presented certain problems for the Romans in charge. Thus, the Roman guards were ready to break the legs of those victims whom they wanted to die quickly.[xxxiii] The Synoptic accounts specify that the Romans found that Jesus had already died; hence, it would have been useless to break his legs.
Images of Jesus on the cross routinely depict him as having a loin cloth. The Synoptic Gospels narrate that Jesus was stripped of his clothing. Nothing is said regarding his loin cloth. Historians assure us that Romans stripped their victims of all their clothes thereby adding “forced nudity” to their public humiliation. The victim on the cross was thus forced to puke, piss, and shit in plain sight of everyone. Onlookers were encouraged to jeer and abuse victims verbally. Supporters were forced to watch at a distance but never allowed to relieve the suffering of the naked, bruised, and humiliated victim.
The Renaissance artists sought to capture the ignominy of Jesus being crucified. They wanted “realism” but they had to respect the sensibilities of Italians visiting their art in churches. They didn’t want true believers turning away in disgust. They didn’t want believers to regurgitate their lunches in front of their paintings. They didn’t want weak-spirited women to be passing out. Hence, artists had to “intentionally “reduce the realism” such that a pious onlooker would be “mildly shocked” but not “overcome” by the great price Jesus had to pay to gain for us the forgiveness of our sins.
The notion of “soul” had a history of development
The meaning of words changes as one moves into different cultural and social contexts. Living in China, the frailty of words is constantly brought to my attention.
Just today I saw a sign pointing out the direction to “Dung Chapel.” By translating one word, “chapel,” and leaving the name of the chapel, “dung,” untranslated, the creators of the signage leave a very unsavory impression. As in happens, “dung” has a variety of meanings in Mandarin. But, when I learned that this was an Anglican chapel, I then suspected that “Dung” was the name of the donor who donated this chapel to the Anglican Church. And, sure enough, I was correct. “Mr. Dung,” a Chinese convert to the Anglican Church, had this chapel built in the 1800s. His name was honored by naming it “Dung Chapel.” Hence, my first shock at hearing that a chapel was named as “dung” was entirely misplaced. A person’s name is never translated and is never offensive. Hence, it was only by getting the words back into their original cultural background was I able to understand it correctly.
At times visitors to China can find many signs created for tourists to be downright humorous. In a large park that I visit, for instance, there is a water canal and a large sign at the edge of the canal reads, “Don’t walk on the water!” Do you suppose that this sign is meant for Jesus when he returns? Not a chance.
Near my home in Shanghai, there is a sign next to a water fountain that reads, “Don’t paddle in the water.” I have to presume that the writer meant to say, “Don’t swim in the water.” In my Chinese-English dictionary, the Mandarin word for “to paddle” is the same as for the word “to swim.” So, going by the dictionary, the two words are, more or less, equivalent. Even in English, “dog-paddling” is a form of “swimming.” Nonetheless, a fluent English speaker would always say, “Don’t swim in the water.” But someone with only a modest mastery of English could hardly be expected to capture the different nuance that separates “to paddle” and “to swim.” When I speak Mandarin using my limited vocabulary, I’m quite sure that I often say some very silly things, but the Chinese are much too polite to laugh at me. I prefer that they would laugh so that I might learn to speak correctly, but this isn’t going to happen. I can’t expect a five-thousand-year-old culture to change so as to help me to speak correctly in Mandarin.
A better instance took place when I was a young man first visiting Oxford University. It was Michaelmas Term (known as “Fall Semester” in the USA), and went into the main entrance and admired the perfectly manicured lawns in the quadrangle. I had taken a book along with me that I was reading at the time just in case that I arrived before the main entrance was opened. About ten minutes later, I was checking out the dorms. I noticed a lift (elevator) and the door opened and I stepped in. There was a student there and we were both going up to the third floor. He asked me very casually, “What are you reading this term?” I immediately showed him the book I was reading. He showed puzzlement on his face, and I immediately broke out laughing, because I suddenly realized that he was not interested in my book. At Oxford, one “reads” a course. He was asking me what courses I was taking. So, a perfectly good English word, “read,” had thrown us off. Given my USA background, “what I was reading” was the book that I was carrying. Given his Oxford background; however, he was asked me “what I was reading [i.e., what courses I was taking]” this term.
Now here is the kicker. For nearly three thousand years, “soul” (ψυχή “psyche”) was a perfectly good word in the Greek language. When the Greeks first began to imagine the difference between a living being and a dead being, they decided to use this word to refer to that spiritual entity which imparts life into a dead thing. When “soul” (ψυχή “psyche”) enters into the womb, a dead being starts to live. When the “soul” (ψυχή “psyche”) leaves the body, then a living being becomes a dead being. As time passed, the “soul” (ψυχή “psyche”) in plants was seen as quite different from the “soul” (ψυχή “psyche”) in animals; yet, without the soul, there would be no living plants and no living animals. The same holds true of humans.
The Greeks never supposed that plants, or animals, or humans lived forever. Each of them was born in due time and each of them died in due time. The “soul” (ψυχή “psyche”), on the other hand, was eternal. Thus, the Greeks give us a doctrine of reincarnation. This means that while specific plants are born and later die, the plant “soul” (ψυχή “psyche”) continues to give life in generation after generation of plants. It is the same for animals and humans. Achilles lived once and died once. His soul (inhabiting different bodies) showed up generation after generation.[xxxiv] That means that it was incarnated hundreds of thousands of time before it came to reside in Achilles. After the death of Achilles, his soul gave life to thousands of other persons, generation after generation. Achilles was dead. His soul was nothing more than “a shadow in Hades.” Touch him, and your hand will pass through him. In the Greek circles of thought, the number of souls of each kind was, more or less, a constant. Thus, in brief, the soul is immortal while the bodies are always being born and dying. Achilles and everyone else for that matter had only one opportunity to live on Earth, and, at a certain point of time, everyone took up residence in Hades.
Whether the second century churches supported the immortality of the soul
Just as I used Justin Martyr earlier, I want to make use of him again. Justin is important because he traces how he first became a Stoic and then an avid Platonist. At the age of 20, due to a single encounter with an “old man walking along the lake,” he completely lost faith[xxxv] in the immortal nature of the human soul. Those who want to recover the narration of this encounter with the “old man” can easily do so. For our purposes here, however, it suffices to note that Justin Martyr converted to Christianity only when he had lost faith in the Socratic eternal soul.
Most Christians today, by way of contrast, are holding tightly to the reality of the “natural immortality” of the soul. They have persuaded themselves that God himself needs immortal souls to keep alive the “human identity” of those who are waiting to be raised from the dead on the last day. But this is a wish-driven fantasy.[xxxvi]
In the second and following centuries, the outreach mission of the Jesus Movement was greatly facilitated by harmonizing the Gospel message with many of the tenants of Socratic philosophy that circulated within Greco-Roman culture at that time. In the gentile world, Socrates [Middle Platonism] was widely admired; hence, the credibility of the Jesus Movement had much to gain by acknowledging their indebtedness to Socrates.
This situation no longer prevails today:
Modern believers do not feel indebted to Socrates. Rather, if they believe they have an immortal soul, this is due to their religious formation or due to Near Death Experiences or due to apparitions of the Saints. I have yet to meet a Catholic who tells me that Socrates led him/her to Jesus.
Even dedicated Socratic philosophers teaching in institutions of higher learning are aware that the so-called “proofs of the immortal soul” are entirely unconvincing. One must also acknowledge that the norms for such a “proof” is much higher today than what was expected during the lifetime of Socrates.
Those unfortunate persons who experience a brain trauma or who are suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease67 lose their personal histories and sense of self as the disease progresses. Thus, the soul (if there were one) cannot be relied upon to prevent irreversible memory/identity loss as is commonly supposed.
Socrates was, as I have tried to show, sadly misguided when he persuaded our forebearers that our exalted destiny[xxxvii] was to leave our material bodies behind as our spiritual souls seek to be absorbed for all time by the majestic vision of God in Heaven. In so doing, the eschatological Jewish hope of Jesus has been subverted by Socrates. Jesus preached that “The kingdom of God/Heaven68 has come near” (Mark 1:15 and par.) to us here on Earth while Socrates teaches his disciples that only his death will free his soul from bondage to the flesh.
Does Socrates condemn us to an eternity of solitary confinement?
Even if Socrates were successful in demonstrating that every human has a soul, there was still grave uncertainty as to whether disembodied souls would be able to communicate with each other after death. On earth, we communicate with each other exclusively due to our body’s ability to touch, to see, to hear, to write, and to speak. Take away our ability to touch, to see, to hear, to speak, to feel, and one arrives at a state of complete and total isolation:
Moreover, apart from the question of immortality or otherwise, there is the further question whether the soul, if it does have some form of existence after the person has died, “still possesses some power and wisdom” (Phaedo, 70b; cf. 76c). Answering both questions, Socrates says not only that the soul is immortal, but also that it contemplates truths after its separation from the body at the time of death. Needless to say, none of the four main lines of argument that Socrates avails himself of succeeds (a) in establishing the immortality of the soul, or (b) in demonstrating that disembodied souls enjoy lives of thought and intelligence [during those periods when they live independent of human bodies after death].[xxxviii]
Socrates presupposed that he would be able communicate with the souls of other dead philosophers after his death. Judging from our current situation, however, souls after death would be doomed to exist in complete and total isolation.[xxxix] At best, one might expect some fleeting dreams. Even after receiving a dream, however, one could never have any way to communicate the content of a dream to anyone else. And, since we cannot transmit our dreams soul to soul on earth, it remains extremely unlikely that we will be able to do so in the afterlife.
Can the living contact the dead? Can the dead contact the living? Can the dead contact the dead? No, no, and no.
Why the unbiblical “immortal soul” has such a tenacious hold on Catholics
D.P. Barish caught my attention when he wrote this:
Few ideas are as unsupported, ridiculous and even downright harmful as that of the ‘human soul’. And yet, few ideas are as widespread and as deeply held. What gives? Why has such a bad idea had such a tenacious hold on so many people?
After reading nearly fifty articles dealing this this topic, I discovered that S.B. Marrow, S.J., presented the best response to Barish’s urgent question by first exploring how the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures speak about death. Here is what he concludes:
Death [in the Bible] is never partial, but total. Between being dead and being alive, no other possibility exists. . . . Because death is such an absolute, every generation in every age seems to have attempted to devise some means of escape[xl] from its unseemly finality, [and] to find a solution to Ps 89:48, “What can live and never see death? Who can escape the power of Sheol [Hades]?”[xli]
What Marrow[xlii] points out is that the Christian Scriptures were written with a firm adherence to the experiential certainty of death; but then, there emerged a hope in the resurrection of the dead. But by the beginning of the second century, Hellenized converts were already accustomed to escape the certainty of death by virtue of accepting the teachings of Socrates that were held in high esteem. The writers of the Gospels knew that “between being dead and being alive, no other possibility exists.” But, the genius of Socrates taught a “middle way”—at death, the body rots in the pit but the soul lives on in full vitality. In the Phaedo, Socrates tells his disciples, “All who have duly purified themselves by philosophy live henceforth altogether without [any dependence upon their] bodies, and [after death they] pass to still more beautiful abodes” (Phaedo 114c).
Accordingly, Marrow notes that the Hellenized converts partially removed the “scandal” of the “resurrection of the dead,” by explaining that it was only the “resurrection of the body.” The immortal soul protected the intelligence, the memories, and the personal identity alive and well. God had only to “resurrect the body” and, in the twinkling of an eye, the immortal soul would spontaneously reseat itself into the newly created body. Socrates thought of the soul as immaterial and immortal (just like the gods); hence, the “middle way” removed the insurmountable task of creating a soul. Socrates, you may recall, believed that souls were eternal. When someone died, their soul was passed through the bath of forgetfulness and then reinserted into a new embryonic body. This is the logic of reincarnation. Hellenized converts attached to Socrates thus found it very plausible that the soul of a Christian would be asleep until such time that the archangels sounded their trumpets and all the sleeping souls would be taken from their sleep and reincarnated as part of the collective resurrection of the dead. In this way, Marrow notes that, with the passage of time, “the immortality of the soul” gradually became “an unalterable part of the Christian’s worldview, an indispensable presupposition for reading the gospel.”[xliii]
It wasn’t until the works of Aristotle were acquired from Islamic scholars and translated into Latin during the 15th century that the trouble began. Aristotle, a disciple of Socrates, rejected the notion of the eternal soul. For Aristotle, the soul was the form of the body; hence, when a person died, both the matter and the form died. At the Fifth Lateran Council at the end of 1513, Pope Leo X solemnly condemned and reproved “all those who assert that the intellectual soul is mortal . . . , or those who raise doubts in this matter.” Accordingly, Rev. S.B. Marrow, S.J., and Prof. Aaron Milavec are on notice for, quite clearly, we have “raised doubts in this matter.”
So, what needs to be done? Many, of course, would affirm that this is serious matter, that an ecumenical council has solemnly declared an infallible teaching, and that faithful Catholics have no choice but to humbly renounce our heresies and to realign ourselves with the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.
But no, this is not the way forward. What Marrow and I have come up against is a stubborn mistake that has deep roots within the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. This is a mistake that has deep roots comparable to the (a) condemnation of all Jews for the death of Jesus Christ and (b) the notion that God has firmly renounced his loving covenant with Israel and has transferred his abiding love to the Gentiles who have embraced the Gospel due to their love for Jesus Christ, the Son of God. This is a mistake that has deep roots comparable with the tenants of the vicarious atonement theories to explain the “divine necessity” for the crucifixion of Jesus.
Anyone who would choose to love Jews and anyone who would cherish the “light” given to the Gentiles cannot back down “in the name of blind obedience.” Rather, in the name of Jesus, one has to carefully expose the Socratic undergarments that Jesus has been forced to wear for over eighteen hundred years. Otherwise, one is forced to promote a social condition within the Church where “the blind are leading the blind.”
The propositions affirmed by the Jesuit S.B. Marrow
Here then are the propositions that Marrow puts forward by way or returning to Jesus:
#1 The NT neither teaches nor, in and of itself, presupposes that the immortality of the soul is an exegetically verifiable fact[xliv].
#2 Authority, even the most sacred, cannot unmake a given fact. [One cannot settle this issue by reaffirming a solemn decree. Rather one has to start a fresh examination as to whether Jesus taught the “immortality of the soul.”]
#3 The immortal soul—corruptible body dichotomy misunderstands death and, therefore, is unable to understand life rightly. It cannot but reduce the resurrection of the body to an ornamental increment to a life that is already there.[xlv] [As such, the immortal soul distorts the teaching of Jesus and misguides the faithful in this matter.]
#4 By the resurrection of the dead [as distinct from the “resurrection of the body” in the Apostles Creed] the NT understands the resurrection of identifiably the same individual who died—body, soul, [memories,] and spirit.
#5 Eternal life is difficult to conceive as an absolute gift [of God] in Christ Jesus. [It cannot be a natural endowment available to everyone, nor can it be, strictly speaking, earned by our merits (cf. Rom 3:28).
How one Christian denomination defused the immortal soul and life with God in Heaven
Marrow says that before one studies the texts, one has to get reconnected to the experience of death. I did this earlier. Now I have found one of those rare denominations that actually “taught the faithful” that death has a natural finality (that was subverted by our ancestors who mistakenly got attached to the Greek notion of “soul”).
What is the soul?
The word “soul” in the Bible is a translation of the Hebrew word neʹphesh and the Greek word psy·kheʹ. The Hebrew word literally means “a creature that breathes,” and the Greek word means “a living being.” The soul, then, is the entire creature, not something inside that survives the death of the body.
In the Garden of Eden, our Creator told Adam and Eve where they would go upon their death – nowhere! No heaven and no hellfire. They would simply go back to dust. This is the outcome for all humans at death.
In the sweat of your face, you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return (Genesis 3:19 KJV).
For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing at all, nor do they have any more reward, because all memory of them is forgotten. Also, their love and their hate and their jealousy have already perished, and they no longer have any share in what is done under the sun (Ecclesiastes 9:5-6).
Whatever your hand finds to do, do with all your might, for there is no work nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom in the Grave, where you are going (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
For there is an outcome for humans and an outcome for animals; they all have the same outcome. As the one dies, so the other dies; and they all have but one spirit. So, man has no superiority over animals, for everything is futile (Ecclesiastes 3:19).
All are going to the same place. They all come from the dust, and they all are returning to the dust. The Bible is clear about the condition of the dead. There is no power, wisdom, emotions, or thought that continues at death.
You [God] make mortal man return to dust; You say: “Return, you sons of men” (Psalm 90:3).
As for mortal man, his days are like those of grass; He blooms like a blossom of the field (Psalm 103:15).
Therefore, do not let sin continue to rule as king in your mortal bodies so that you should obey their desires (Romans 6:12).
Therefore, because humans are mortal we rely on Jesus for a future resurrection. Through the power given to him (as he demonstrated on Earth) humans can be resurrected and will be resurrected in the future. But not by our own power.[xlvi] [And certainly not by relying upon our fictitious souls.]
Christian denominations that believe in an immortal soul get this teaching, not from the Bible, but from ancient Greek philosophy. The Encyclopædia Britannica says: “Biblical references to the soul are related to the concept of breath and establish no distinction between the ethereal soul and the corporeal body. Christian concepts of a body-soul dichotomy originated with the ancient Greeks.”
Observe, Judge, and Act
Q1. Up until this point of time, the message given to you by loving parents and by your religion teachers is that “everyone has an immortal soul.” This message has been repeated so often and has been enforced by loving teachers to the point that “there can be no doubting that this is exactly the greatest gift that God offers us.” Think back to the moment in your life to when you felt absolutely certain that God made you with an immortal soul? What feeling tones did this leave you with?
Q2. Think back to the moment in your life to when this was not a joy and salvation but a doubt and a burden. Describe one of these moments. What feeling tones did this doubt and burden leave you with?
Q3. In Ch3 of this religious autobiography, Aaron has explained how, during his first year of graduate studies at the Graduate Theological Union, he was required to read Oscar Cullmann’s Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead? (1956).[xlvii] He was shocked and dumbfounded by what he discovered. Giving his religious instruction using the Baltimore Catechism under the guidance of the Ursuline nuns it never entered his mind that Jesus did not believe that every person had an immortal soul that survived the death of the body. After a single reading, however, he sadly realized that Jesus never endorsed the immortality of the soul as explained in Q2 to Q7. Thus, it became clear to him that the Baltimore Catechism that was the pillar of my early Catholic upbringing had been contaminated by dubious unbiblical ideas that originated with Socrates.
Do you share Aaron’s disappointment that the Baltimore Catechism had been contaminated by dubious unbiblical ideas that originated with Socrates? How so? Did Aaron rightly discover, thanks to Oscar Cullmann, that the Pope made a tragic mistake when it came to endorsing the immortal soul?
Q4. No one can change her mind without first of all having slept on the evidence. The process of deep sleep allows one to forget the non-essentials that are cluttering your mind and feelings. Therefore, I urge you not to commit yourself until you sleep on it for a few nights. Where has your mind and heart settled after three days?
Q5. After a week, open your heart and mind to a trusted and informed guide who is willing to hear the depths of your soul. Share your whole process of finding flaws in your original position. How and why have you undertaken to study this issue more deeply. What new evidence has jumped out at you and how has it changed you? Give yourself forty days to test drive the position of Oscar Cullmann.
Q6. In the Garden of Eden, our Creator told Adam and Eve where they would go upon their death – nowhere! No heaven and no hellfire. They would simply go “back to dust” (Gen 3:19). This is the outcome for all humans and all animals at death. They stop breathing. They go back to being as they were prior to their birth. Nothing more. Is this a pleasant thought? Is this a scary thought?
Q7. Jesus really died but then God brought him back to life. He appeared to his disciples. He ate with them. They touched him. Never did any of his disciples ask him what it was like being in Hades for three days.[xlviii] Why didn’t this question come up?
The ancient Hebrews had no idea of an immortal soul living a full and vital life beyond death, nor of any resurrection or return from death. Human beings, like the beasts of the field, are made of “dust of the earth,” and at death they return to that dust (Gen. 2:7; 3:19). The Hebrew word nephesh, traditionally translated “living soul” but more properly understood as “living creature,” is the same word used for all breathing creatures and refers to nothing immortal. URL=https://jewishromanworldjesus.com/ and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_in_the_Bible>
[2] Brueggemann received an honorary doctorate from the Jesuit School of Theology in 1965. His work often focuses on the Hebrew prophetic tradition and sociopolitical imagination of the Church. He argues that the Church must provide a counter-narrative to the dominant forces of consumerism, militarism, and nationalism.
[4] My early religion teachers had taught me that the result of the eating was (a) that Adam and Eve disobeyed God, (b) that sin had entered Paradise, and (c) that our first parents and all their future children were doomed to die. No one had told me that (a) Adam and Eve were young children and (b) that their wise Father had planted a tree in the center of the garden that would give his children super-powers—the ability to discern good and evil for themselves. Up to this point, God had to tell them what to do and what not to do. When they arrived at a point of maturity, God had intended to introduce his children to eat of the tree and to gain super-powers that would give them the power to discern for themselves what is good and what is evil. This is a wonderful gift! And our Father is a wonderful father in preparing this gift for his children. Every child wants to become like their parents. Now, this desire is fulfilled. Unhappily, however, Eve learns of the super-powers from the spirit-guide—the serpent. She touches the fruit. Nothing happens. Adam had added that bit about “not touching” the fruit. He was clearly mistaken. So, having gained a curiosity that was not yet developed in her brother, she went ahead and ate of the fruit. Yowzer! “Her eyes were opened!” For more details on this, see Milavec (2016a) 1-15.
[5] The second chapter of Milavec (2016a) spells out how Tertullian took the Greek myth of Pandora Box and projected it as the background text for interpreting the betrayal of Eve in Gen 2-3. This presented a terrible disservice to all women since, by implication, they were all taught that they had inherited the same treachery and gullibility that was manifest by Eve (1 Tim 2:13-14, 1 Cor 11:8). They were “tools of the devil” and “betrayers of God,” hence, entirely unreliable to serve as teachers within the Jesus movement.
[6] When one examines the New Jerusalem that God sends down from heaven, one notices that the tree of life shows up. Thus, the first book and the last book of the bible are linked. The “tree of life” in Rev 2:7, 22:2, and 22:19; however, is much different from the “tree of life” in Genesis.
[7] Bouteneff draws attention to the fact that Augustine was entirely dependent upon the Latin Vulgate which, in the case of Rom 5:12, was mistranslated from the Greek. To this I would add that Augustine was acutely aware that many converts had delayed their baptism in order to wisely use the “complete pardon of all their sins” that would come with the rite of baptism. By promoting the literal transmission of “original sin,” Augustine was expecting to solve the pastoral problem posed by delayed baptism. Hence, he felt no qualms when he told mothers that, should their children die without baptism, they would spend an eternity with the damned. He could has said that, “due to the desire of their parents to have their child baptized,” they would enter into Heaven due to their “baptism of desire.” But no. He accutely knew that he had delayed his own baptism and that his mother Monica had wept bitter tears when he repeatedly refused to complete his adult catechumenate. So, Augustine terrorized mothers who wanted their children baptized a.s.a.p. This strategy eventually killed the catechumenate. A few years back, when the CDF had an opportunity to disassociate the Church from Augustine’s ill-conceived move toward infant baptism, they failed to find the courage to do so. They settled the issue by giving terrorized mothers the lame assurance that the Lord is merciful.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church in China discontinued infant baptism in 1984. When I asked them why, they told me, “Given the climate in the public schools here in China, no parent could any longer give any assurance that their children would embrace their faith.” Buddhism and Confusianism has a long and compelling association within Chinese culture. The Chinese don’t even think of Buddhism and Confusianism as “religion.” On the other hand, Christianity (in all its forms) is spoken of as “a religion” that is vaguely associated with the Opium Wars. Accordingly, new churches have to obtain permission of the government in order to establish themselves. Even when they have government approval, they are prohibited from advertising themselves and using public media to make converts. The same thing holds true for “militant atheists” in the Chinese Communist Party; they are forbidden to publicly promote “atheism” or to discriminate against those who are “not atheists.” Both “militant atheists” and “militant Catholics” are thus free to practice their rites in private; in public, they are forbidden to advertise and to promote their way of thinking.
[8] In the medieval period, scholars such as Thomas Aquinas speculated that, if Eve alone had transgressed, then the grace of Adam would have been transmitted to all his children. The subtext here, of course, is that fathers alone rule and decide the futures of their children. Mothers are of no consequence. This is not the prevailing notion of the Book of Genesis. Women, in Genesis, are key actors and, in instances where the men fail, the women step forward and do what is just. A glaring case of this is the interaction of the patriarch Judah and Tamar. When the damning evidence is brought forward, “Judah acknowledged before all present that “She is more in the right than I.” (Gen 38:26). In like fashion, I am pleased to say that Bouteneff gives ample testimony that he is aware that female scholars are reading his work. Consequently, when tracing the heavy burden of guilt that are often placed on women due to our reading of Gen 3, Bouteneff presents a strong counter-example in Gregory of Nazianzus, Archbishop of Constantinople, who was convinced to convert to Christianity by his wife Nonna in 325.:
Gregory of Nazianzus is emphatic that Eve (and with her, the rest of womankind) is not the root of sin or evil. Immediately after a passage that decries the sexist character of the legal system of his day, he goes on to chide his male listeners [in the Church] for their own moral double standards, wherein chastity is expected of women and not men (531).
[10] Even when Jesus was in Hades for three days after his own death on the cross, Jesus had “nothing” to report regarding his condition in the afterlife. He seemingly did not think his disciples wanted to know how his soul went to work by preaching his prophetic message to those confined in Hades. In the second century, however, this will change. Jesus will witness his extraordinary success in liberating souls from Hades. Later we will hear of these reports in detail.
[11] In fact, there is one instance in which the spirit of King Saul was consulted.
[12] This does not mean that there are a few instances in the late books of the bible wherein a “soul” was understood to offer a diminished existence after death:
The concept of an immaterial and immortal soul – distinct from the body – did not appear in Judaism before the Babylonian exile,[1] but developed as a result of interaction with Persian and Hellenistic philosophies.[2] Accordingly, the Hebrew word נֶ֫פֶשׁ, nephesh, although translated as “soul” in some older English-language Bibles, actually has a meaning closer to “living being”.
[13] There are a few places where some English translations of the Greek speak about “losing your soul.” Mark 8:36 comes to mind. Jesus says, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to lose his own soul [καὶ ζημιωθῆναι τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ]?” This comes in the context of Jesus talking about the cost of following him. The way of Jesus can be a dangerous undertaking—you could get crucified (Mk 8:34). If you don’t follow him, on the other hand, you could get filthy rich (“gain the whole world”) but, alas, you would at the same time “lose your soul” in the process.
In Socratic circles, it was common to hear Socrates urging his disciples “to save their souls” and “to give preference to protecting their souls.” Such admonitions within Socratic circles served to affirm the importance of living an examined life and freeing oneself from the false opinions of the multitudes. The Baltimore Catechism talks about “saving one’s soul” in the sense of “saving one’s soul from eternal hellfire.” When carefully examined, the Baltimore Catechism uses its metaphors to convey an idiosyncratic meaning that is far removed from what one finds in the Socratic dialogues and in Mark 8:36. Moreover, the Socratic use of these metaphors provides no help when it comes time to interpret Mark 8:36.
Think of the metaphor, “Be wise as serpents” (Matt 10:16). Since we live in a society which does not associate “serpents” with “wisdom,” we are at a loss for what this might mean. Does the wisdom of snakes lie in their powers to blend in with their environment but, when cornered, they strike like lightning? Does their wisdom lie in their powers to remain vigilant even though they eat sparingly? Does their wisdom lie in their ability to regain their youth by sloughing off their skins? Socrates and the Baltimore Catechism are of no use in helping us decide. The snake in the Chinese Zodiac symbolizes “the most mysterious and also the wisest [personality]. They don’t allow others to know much about them, and they usually keep things to themselves.” Thus, Chinese Christians might be prone to think they have a ready-made interpretation of Mark 8:36; yet, in their wisdom, they might not want to imagine that Jesus used a metaphor when communicating with Jews that was imported from China. The same caution applies to American Christians who would be tempted to interpret “losing your soul” based on their reading of the Socratic-inspired Baltimore Catechism.
[14] Cullmann gave his Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man in 1955. The thesis of his lecture was that there was no biblical evidence supporting the immortality of human souls, and that this doctrine had nothing in common with the Christian hope in the resurrection of the body. Fifty years later, the academic and pastoral tide has massively turned in Cullmann’s direction:
The concept of an immaterial soul separate from and surviving the body is common today but according to modern scholars, it was not found in ancient Hebrew beliefs.[28] The word nephesh never means an immortal soul[29] or an incorporeal part of the human being[30] that can survive death of the body as the spirit of the dead.[31]URL=<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_in_the_Bible>
[15] McGuire, ed. (1942). Since its 1885 debut, the Baltimore Catechism commissioned by the Third Council of Bishops in Baltimore has instructed generations of Catholic faithful. The Ursuline Sisters gave me the Baltimore Catechism No.2, an edition that had questions for study at the end of each chapter and some simple illustrations. A catechism is a summary of the principles of Christian religion and articles of the faith. The Baltimore Catechism specifically was the de facto standard Catholic school text in the United States from 1885 to the late 1960s. For a free download, go to URL = < https://archive.org/details/baltimorecatechi14552gut>
[17] The Graduate Theological Union was founded in 1965. The GTU was dedicated to the idea that seminarians should not be isolated during their years of formation. Hence, eight different seminaries joined together their faculties and students in an ecumenical search for fraternity and for truth-seeking by opening their courses to those of different denominations. Three of the seminaries were Dominican, Franciscan, and Jesuit. In addition, graduate level courses were provided to advanced students. “The doctoral curriculum builds on the ecumenical, interreligious, and interdisciplinary strengths of the GTU, and offers enhanced opportunities for both specialization and cross-disciplinary study. The GTU’s doctoral program utilizes the depth of faculty expertise made possible by its eight member schools and more than a dozen academic centers and affiliates” (URL=<https://www.gtu.edu/academics/doctoral-program>).
[18] Cullmann acknowledged many years later that “no other publication of mine has provoked such enthusiasm or such violent hostility.” Given my own personal turmoil when I first read Cullmann’s thesis in 1969, I completely understand the “violent hostility” that was visited upon him. Source URL=<https://www.religion-online.org/book/immortality-of-the-soul-or-resurrection-of-the-dead/>.
[19] The Pulpit Commentary is a homiletic commentary on the Bible created during the nineteenth century under the direction of Rev. Joseph S. Exell and Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones. It consists of 23 volumes with 22,000 pages and 95,000 entries, and was written over a 30-year period with 100 contributors.
[20] This is sloppy textual analysis. The term πνεῦμά in Greek signifies breath, wind, or spirit. It does not signify “soul” as the author implies. In fact, the author wants us to believe that Luke 23:46 “emphatically asserts that the soul will exist apart from the body”—a thing that it cannot do since the proper term for “soul” is not found here.
[21] These same sentiments are offered in Gill’s Commentary on the Entire Bible: “This shows, that his spirit, or soul, belonged to God, the Father of spirits, and now returned to him that gave it; that it was immortal, and died not with the body, and was capable of existing in a separate state from it, and went immediately to heaven; all which is true of the souls of all believers in Christ” (https://biblehub.com/commentaries/luke/23-46.htm). Here again, the sloppy textual analysis continues, for Gill claims that Luke 23:46 implies that the “soul of Christ” went immediately “to heaven.” Gill completely forgets that, according to the Apostles’ Creed, the soul of Christ immediately descends into Hades for three days. Furthermore, if Gill had done his homework, he would have discovered that, during the second and third centuries, the souls of both Christians and pagans also descended into Hades after death. This illustrates that even Protestant biblical commentaries are content to interpret a key text in the way that their mentors and peers have done so. Gill has no grasp that the original meaning of the text in the first century is beyond his grasp and, sad to say, beyond his interest as well. See the instructive exchange between pastors and scholars on the significance of the “descent into Hades” texts of the second and third centuries—URL=https://www.academia.edu/s/b56e1b238f
[23] Here is a reconstruction of the events from the sources:
On a day in 399 BC the philosopher Socrates stood before a jury of 500 of his fellow Athenians accused of “refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state” and of “corrupting the youth.” If found guilty; his penalty could be death. The trial took place in the heart of the city, the jurors seated on wooden benches surrounded by a crowd of spectators. Socrates’ accusers (three Athenian citizens) were allotted three hours to present their case, after which, the philosopher would have three hours to defend himself. . . .
After hearing the arguments of both Socrates and his accusers, the jury was asked to vote on his guilt. Under Athenian law the jurors did not deliberate the point. Instead, each juror registered his judgment by placing a small disk into an urn marked either “guilty” or “not guilty.” Socrates was found guilty by a vote of 280 to 220.
The jurors were next asked to determine Socrates’ penalty. His accusers argued for the death penalty. Socrates was given the opportunity to suggest his own punishment and could probably have avoided death by recommending exile. Instead, the philosopher initially offered the sarcastic recommendation that he be rewarded for his actions. When pressed for a realistic punishment, he proposed that he be fined a modest sum of money. Faced with the two choices, the jury selected death for Socrates.
The philosopher was taken to the near-by jail where his sentence would be carried out. Athenian law prescribed death by drinking a cup of poison hemlock. Socrates would be his own executioner. [“The Suicide of Socrates, 399 BC,” EyeWitness to History, URL=<http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com> (2003).]
[25] One must allow that crucifixion is designed to bring death with as much pain (physical and psychological) as possible. Drinking Hemlock is a milder method of inducing death in a short time. According to the Cleveland Clinic:
Hemlock poisoning can occur after ingesting even small amounts of poison hemlock. The plant contains several toxic compounds called alkaloids. These alkaloids slowly poison your neuromuscular junctions, which send messages from your nerves to your muscle fibers. This poisoning can cause your breathing muscles to fail. When your breathing muscles fail, you can go into respiratory failure and die. (URL=<https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24122-poison-hemlock>)
[27] This is my own melding of Catholic and Socratic ideas and doctrines. This creative exercise was to show how, with the passage of time, it was impossible to disassemble the roots of the synthesis proposed.
[28] “Raising the dead” is very different from “reuniting the immortal soul to a new body.” The latter is a variation on the transmigration of souls.
[29] In the Gospels of Matthew and John, this vulnerability is sometimes denied. See Matt 26:52-53 and John
[xxx] From my study of the life of Martin Luther King [abbr: MLK], I remember reading that the freedom marches had to face hecklers, rock throwers, and mad dogs. The inner circle surrounding MLK pleaded with him to let others do the freedom marches: “You’re too important for the movement to risk losing you due to some random act of violence.” MLK rebuked his disciples saying, “How can I expect others to do what I am unwilling to do myself?”
In the weeks before MLK was shot down by a sniper, it has been reported that MLK told his disciples that he had a premonition that “the time was short” before someone would try to destroy the movement by silencing his voice. If this is true, then MLK was doing exactly what Jesus is said to have done when he predicted his violent death on the road to Jerusalem.
Many Christians want to insist that Jesus, the Son of God, knew, for a fact, when and how he would die. But this is a fatal error. Not even God knows the future in full detail. God knows what has happened and what is happening. The future, however, does not yet exist. Thus, even God has to wait and see what will be. If one reads the Summa Theologica carefully, one can notice how carefully Thomas Aquinas protects the human knowing limitations of Jesus. Christians sometimes think that they are honoring Jesus by declaring that he, at every moment, knows exactly what his disciples and his enemies will do and say in the future. But this is absurd because this would turn Jesus into an automaton that mechanically repeats the lines that he knows he must say because they are already, in his mind, known to him in full detail. This is a form of the heresy of Docetism. Jesus only appears to be human. His divine foreknowledge destroys completely his ability to live within the divinely predetermined limitations of the human condition.
[xxxi] This text is sometimes used to tell Christians that they have to show up in Heaven to collect their reward. Upon examining the text, this is not so. Note that Jesus does not say, “Your reward will be in heaven.” Rather, “your reward” is now in heaven with God. You don’t have to go there to collect it. Rather, God is coming to us in the end times and he will be bringing your reward.
[xxxii] The Roman orator Quintillion (circa 35-90 C.E.) observed that, “whenever we crucify the guilty, the most crowded roads are chosen, where most people can see and be moved by this fear. For penalties relate not so much to retribution as to their exemplary effect [in evoking terror]” (Declamationes 274).
[xxxiii] Scholars have shown that the details of the crucifixion were known to those who narrated the Gospels. Once the legs were broken, the victim would not be able to raise his body up so that he could continue breathing. Unable to breath, the victim suffocated in two or three minutes. Breaking the legs, therefore, was not done primarily to cause further suffering. It was done to bring on a quick death so that the Roman soldiers could give the body to his family for burial and then they could go home.
[xxxiv] For the fine details of how, even at its best, one only gets to live one lifetime, see Nightingale, Andrea, “The Mortal Soul and Immortal Happiness,” in The Cambridge Critical Guide to Plato’s Symposium, edd. Pierre Destree and Zina Giannopoulou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017), pp. 142-159. URL=< https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/platos-symposium/mortal-soul-and-immortal-happiness/3E2C03A74ED6BC5381D1A20F919A78F1>
[xxxv] As my mentor, Michael Polanyi, always reminded me, “Every faith works in the eyes of the believer.” Justin, accordingly, went through the intellectual and emotional turmoil of a profound “philosophical-religious conversion.” The walk along the lake undoubtedly broke the confidence that Justin had regarding the immortality of the soul. Within the Socratic system of thinking, there was no beginning and no end to the life of the soul. Nor was there any occasion for additional souls to be created. Thus, with each new generation, souls from the previous generation had to be immersed in the bath of forgetfulness and to reincarnate as “new” births. Thus, the immortality of the soul was an absolute necessity in such a system; yet, no single individual could lay claim to the permanent use of a single soul. But, once an active God was introduced into this closed system, new souls could be created as needed (by the Logos). Every life form that has a beginning must necessarily anticipate its end. Thus, the “old man” persuaded Justin of this:
Now the soul partakes of life, since God wills it to live. Thus, then, it will not even partake [of life] when God does not will it to live. For to live is not its attribute, as it is God’s; but as a man does not live always, and the soul is not for ever conjoined with the body, since, whenever this harmony must be broken up, the soul leaves the body, and the human being exists no longer . . . (Dial. 6).
[xxxvi] The Saints and the theologians of the middle ages all believed that the resurrection of the dead would have fantastic effects on our bodies as well. Father Paul A. Duffner, O.P., a devoted Thomist, summarizes some of these fantastic effects as follows:
The risen body will no longer be subject to constant change, e.g. of growth or aging, as in this life. All nutritive functions will cease, because in that state they will no longer have need of them. The body will no longer need food, or drink, or sleep to sustain life and strength as in the present life. It is true that Jesus in his glorified body ate fish in the presence of the apostles, but he did this to show that he had bodily risen from the dead, and not because he had need of it. [Vol 43, No 1, Jan.-Feb. 1990] URL=<https://rosary-center.org/ll43n1.htm>
I have yet to find a single Thomist who would object to this superficial line of reasoning. Duffner imagines that Jesus’ eating was just a matter of demonstrating that he was a living, human being and not a ghost. But, are we to understand that Jesus did not taste the fish, did not smell the roasted skin in the fire, and, even if the fish were rotten, the poisons in the flesh of the fish would not have adversely affected his body in any way?
What can Fr. Duffner say about the words of Jesus when he healed the servant of a Centurion (Matt 8:5-13). To the Jews following him, he said, “In no one in Israel have I found such faith” (Matt 8:10). Furthermore, Jesus continues saying, “I tell you, many [like this gentile] will come from east and west and will eat [anaklithēsontai is used here signifying a banquet where guests recline] with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 8:11, also Luke 13:29). Clearly Jesus is describing how, in the world to come, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob will be raised to life in Jerusalem where they will banquet with the holy ones of Israel. Then Gentiles like this Centurion will join the fellowship of this banquet. Clearly Thomas Aquinas and Fr. Duffner have made no provisions for telling Jesus that he is sadly mistaken since, after the resurrection, feasting at table would no longer be possible or necessary.
Thomas and Duffner, needless to say, never explored why Jesus has so many instances in which eating (nay, even feasting) take place in the world to come. If one wants to encounter the faith of Jesus, care must be taken to notice that, in the Didache community, the Eucharist is clearly the assembly point where the chosen will be gathered from the four winds into the community of those who are blessed and sanctified.
Thomas and Duffner provide another instance of “fantastic effects” here:
Some persons die in infancy, some in middle age, some in old age. At what stage of development will they be at the resurrection of the dead? Theologians are of the opinion that, regardless of bodily condition or stage of growth at the time of death, all will be brought back at the stage of perfect development, at the prime of life, a condition that will remain for all eternity. Too, the body will be without any defects it had in this life. The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will walk, the deformed or retarded will no longer be so.
This does grave injury to our human interactions in the world to come:
#1 A father cannot any longer easily recognize his son—he died at the age of 4 and now, in the twinkling of an eye, he is 24. A daughter cannot recognize her grandmother—she died at 87 and, among the resurrected, she is 27. All inter-generational relationships would be fractured. A specialist in glazing pottery or in meditative practice would seemingly have to lose some of their skills as ten to thirty years were scraped off from their chronological age. Terms such as grandmother, father, and daughter would become useless when inter-generational coaching and production comes to a halt.
#2 Of what use is having perfect health if the art and the sciences of healing are, due to the “miraculous” and all-pervasive “blessing” of perfect health, rendered useless and unnecessary. Of what use are perfectly tones muscles if there is no longer competitive athletic games and no need for perfecting advanced forms of agriculture and horticulture. If one is not improving on a skill (such as football, dance, pottery production), then that skill is gradually being lost to the performers and, with time, lost entirely to the society at large.
#3 There is no benefit of prolonging life if the quality of that life becomes increasing flat, dull, and repetitious. The assurance of eternal life may serve those who are creatively producing stage plays and various forms of interpretative dancing. For so many, however, the prospect of eternal life will quickly evolve into a dangerous monotony wherein one spends ten hours each day watching recorded movies or replaying 3d football games. No one depends upon what I choose to do or what I choose not to do. There is no need for risk, for invention, for collaboration—not for bridge-builders, not for genetic decoders, not for astronauts, not for dance instructors, not for oceanographers. Mental, emotional, and cathartic death necessarily follow as night follows the day.
The fatal flaw in medieval theology is that “the perfect life” was anticipated as entirely other-worldly and heavenly. In heaven, there are no bridges to be built, no practicing medical doctors, and no dance productions. Thomas Aquinas and Fr. Duffner invented “the beatific vision” as the source of peace, love, and creativity of being forever with God in Heaven. According to Fr. Duffner, “the essential happiness of heaven” is “the unspeakable happiness of the beatific vision (the direct union of the faculties of the soul with the divine essence). In so doing, Aquinas and Duffner depart entirely from the faith and hope of Jesus. Return to p.29 in this volume where this heading is shown: Bishop N.T. Wright calls “going to heaven” as “totally and utterly wrong.”
[xxxvii] Socrates believed that imperfect souls would pass through the waters of forgetfulness and be reborn in new bodies. Only those souls entirely perfected could expect to take their place shining “among the stars” for all eternity.
[xxxix] As it turns out, some philosophers have posed this problem:
Furthermore, even if an incorporeal existence were in fact possible, it could be terribly lonely. For, without a body, could it be possible to communicate with other minds. In Paul Edward’s words: “so far from living on in paradise, a person deprived of his body and thus of all sense organs would, quite aside from many other gruesome deprivations, be in a state of desolate loneliness and eventually come to prefer annihilation” (Edwards, 1997:48). URL=<https://iep.utm.edu/immortal/#H3>
Believers, on the other hand, can refute this by insisting that God has designed the “Beatific Vision” so as to ensure that the rewards of Heaven are not plagued with isolation and desolate loneliness. Thomas Aquinas, for example, has taken this situation seriously. He admits that, without the body, the soul is severely handicapped. To offset this, Aquinas posits that the “Beatific Vision” enables God to transmit to the isolated soul news from friends and relatives back home. He even goes so far as to use the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus as a proof that, in the afterlife, visual and audible communications need to exist. This “proof” of Aquinas is very suspect, however. Why so?
In his Parable, Jesus is clearly not intending to address the issue of communications in the afterlife. Aquinas commits a non sequitur.
Jesus never presumes that humans are so constructed such that the soul can be detached from the body at the time of death and still be functional. Hence, Aquinas has no reason to believe that Jesus is addressing issues regarding the detached soul.
Likewise, a parable of Jesus cannot be used to decide conditions in the afterlife. If that were the case, then Aquinas would have to allow (a) that Abraham is in charge of Heaven and (b) that righteous Jews and Christians can expect to find their principal comfort in the presence of Abraham once they enter Heaven.
But no Christian has ever made such an assertion. On the contrary, Catholics generally presuppose that God and his angels are in charge of Heaven and that the greatest comfort in the afterlife is to be in the presence of Jesus Christ and his Saints. Thus, it must be admitted that Aquinas misuses the Parable of Jesus when formulating his argument in favor of speculating that there are visual and audible communications in Heaven. For further details, go to “Appendix 2” in URL=<https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/479/where-did-samuel-come-from-when-he-was-summoned-by-the-medium-of-en-dor>
[xl] For my generation, the preferred escape was “Near Death Experiences [NDE].” I must admit that, for myself, I spent twenty-five years mesmerized by the variety and the certainty of NDE. And, then, quite suddenly, I was disenchanted. Why so? My confidence that NDEs enabled one to prove the possibility of an afterlife began to break down when I discovered that the content of NDEs is massively shaped by one’s particular religious and cultural upbringing. Jesus or Mary showed up repeatedly in the NDEs of Catholics; meanwhile, in India, Ram and Krishna showed up in their NDEs, in Iran, Shia Imams showed up. For further study of how OBEs cannot prove or disprove the survival of the “soul” outside of the body, see Blackmore (2015) 519-527 and K. Augustine (2023).
[xlii] Marrow (1999) represents an excellent example of a Jesuit who systematically explored the biblical records and came to the firm conclusion that the “immortal soul” was never part of the teaching of Jesus. Likewise, within Evangelical Protestant circles, The Carson Center for Theological Renewal under the direction of Dr. Benjamin L. Gladd has arrived at similar findings. See “Why We Won’t Spend Eternity in Heaven” (24 October 2024). URL=<https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/wont-spend-eternity-heaven/> A popular pastor, Rev. Jacob Prahlow, gets to the heart of our future life, with his “Life after Life after Death,” Conciliar Post, 04 Oct 2024. URL=<https://conciliarpost.com/theology-spirituality/life-after-life-after-death/>
[xliv] The use of “fact” is problematic in so far as, in physics and in theology, it remains true that “Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use.”
This astute observation by Albert Einstein enabled him to explain how theories in physics enable the physicist to see certain things and, at the same time, to be perfectly “blind” to other things or events not covered by the theory. Aristotle, for example, assumed that the Earth was a sphere that stood motionless in the center of the universe and that, all over our spherical planet, heavy objects, when released, moved toward this center of the earth because “dense earth-matter moves toward its natural place.” Aristotle assumed that the “natural place” for heavy objects was the center of the spherical earth. Meanwhile, Aristotle postulated that objects in the heavens were made of aethereal matter whose “natural motion” was to move in perfect circles at a constant velocity. Aristotle and his disciples were perfectly happy with his theory because it satisfactorily explained the phenomena that interested them.
Once Copernicus first postulated that the Earth was not motionless in the center of the Universe (as Aristotle had affirmed) but was one of seven planets that moves in a perfect circular motion around the sun, he was forced to abandon Aristotle’s notion of “natural place.” Galileo, Kepler, and Newton expanded upon the insights of Copernicus, and they gradually developed the Theory of Universal Gravitation that postulates that every object in the Universe is attracted to every other object with a force equal to the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance between them. This hypothesis enabled physicists to explain how and why heavy objects fall toward the center of the earth even when the earth is travelling at 18,000 mph around the sun. To their astonishment, this hypothesis served to explain how and why the moon orbited the earth (as a satellite). If the gravitational force did not reach out to the moon, it would immediately travel in a straight line at a uniform velocity and escape into outer space. The slow and progressive confirmation of “gravitational forces” within our solar system eventually led astrophysicists to boldly assume that Newton’s laws of gravitation applied universally throughout the universe. This is admittedly a radical assumption—one might even say it is a “leap of faith.”
In the field of religion, theological theories decide what can and what cannot be “seen” in the sense of “being taken into account.” Epistemologically speaking, there is no such thing as a neutral “fact” in biblical theology. As in the case of physics, what can be seen is predetermined by the theory that one uses.
The NT was written by writers that believed that humans were “dust and unto dust they will return” (Gen 2). As such, when God wished to animate his clay model, he breathed life into its nostrils. As long as a person is alive, that person is breathing. Once breathing stops (as explained earlier), animation ceases. Death sets in. The person no longer exists.
For the Greeks, however, the notion of “spiritual souls” allowed Socrates to expect that all the powers of the soul remain intact even after the death/destruction of the body. Since the soul was “spirit,” it was necessary to think of it as immortal (since it can never wear down nor fall apart).
If there is going to be punishment in the afterlife, Christian theologians had to imagine that there was a special “fire” that was capable of punishing souls without destroying them. Earth fires always burn out eventually. Eternal punishment, therefore, required “eternal fires” that burn without the need of adding additional fuel. In the end, one could write a whole essay about the nature of the “fires” in Hades without ever having been there and without any indication that Hades exists.
Jesus makes no mention of fire in Hades; hence, within his theological horizon, he was “blind” to such things. Jesus was also “blind” to an afterlife in Heaven. In his theological horizon, God brought to Heaven only those whom he was planning to send back to Earth as the principal actors in the final days. That’s why “two men in white” explain to his disciples, “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 2:11). For Jesus, there could be no “afterlife” of any kind prior to his being returned to earth in the end times. There would be no preliminary judgment. There would be no conversations with God the Father. Prior to the end times, the fires of Gehenna have no occupants. Prior to the end times, there are less than a handful of persons in Heaven.
When many Christians embraced the “immortal soul” and the “afterlife speculations” of Socrates during the second century, they had no choice but to concern themselves with an afterlife that took place immediate after death. For the first time, it became possible to ask, “Where was the soul of Jesus following his death on the cross?” Their answer: “His soul was in Hades.” Then they could ask, “What was Jesus doing when he was in Hades for three days?” Without the Socratic immortal souls, these questions could not even arise. This explains why none of the Gospels make any reference to Jesus’ visitation of Hades.
In the second century, however, the theology of Socratic Christians became paramount. Hence, they now could notice what no one had expected earlier. Now, for the first time, speculations could arise regarding the activities of Jesus in Hades. Now, for the first time, speculations would arise regarding the punishments of the souls of unrepentant sinners and the blessings of the souls of the righteous. Jesus, in the Synoptic Gospels, is perfectly “blind” to any afterlife activities between the moment of death and the moment when the trumpet sounds for the universal resurrection of the dead.
For Thomas Aquinas, however, avoiding Hell and going to Heaven formed the apex of the Christian message. This situation persisted during the period when the Baltimore Catechism was in use. For Jesus and his contemporaries, no afterlife took place prior to the universal resurrection of the dead. For Aquinas, however, the immortal soul separated from the dead body had to be given a preliminary judgment immediately after death. No where in the entire bible is there any mention of this preliminary judgment. Yet, the moment that “immortal souls” begin to show up, there has to be a fresh invention of a “preliminary judgment.” Without this, there would be no authoritative judgment as to who goes to Heaven, who goes to Purgatory, who goes to Hell.
During Vatican II, all the Socratic information displaying in questions 3-9 of the Baltimore Catechism became completely obsolete. That’s a sign that there was a change in theology taking place among the fathers of Vatican II. With this change in theology, new realities became evident and the old realities quietly disappeared. As John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote, “To live is to change; to grow perfect is to have changed often.” All of this is by way of saying, “Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theology which you use.”
[xlv] If the soul survives after death, then the very notion of “death” is denied since only the body decays while the intellectual soul remains alive and well and fully-conscious in another realm. For the friends of God, their souls enjoy the beatific vision along with the angels in Heaven. For the enemies of God, their souls suffer in Hell since they anticipate that they will be condemned at the final judgment. Likewise, resurrection is also altered in so far as God has only to recreate the body and rejoin it to the eternal soul. In effect, this understanding leaves Christianity with a doctrine of the transmigration of the soul.
Since the Socratic soul cannot die, “eternal life” is a guaranteed possession of the human person. Within the Socratic system, there is no God who creates new souls; hence, for life to persist on earth, it is necessary that any given soul would be passed on from body to body for all eternity. Thus, the transmigration of souls was necessary in order to explain how new bodies became “alive” generation after generation. The soul was immortal, to be sure, but no person or animal was immortal since they all died (decayed in the grave). Billions of individuals borrowed any given soul and lived for a short life-span. The soul departs and eventually passes through the bath of forgetfulness in order to prepare itself for a new life-span for another person. This is why Socratic thinkers could never imagine the eternal life of individuals while the Israelites could. Israelites believed that every individual was created from clay and imparted with the “breath” of life. This notion allowed that God could recreate from scratch those whose life had been cut short due to the evil of tyrants.
When God chose Abraham and Sarah and made a covenant with them, he promised to give them offspring more numerous than the stars in the night sky. None of them, however, were promised “immortality.” One has to wait for the Maccabean Revolution (167-160 BCE) before the children of Abraham and Sarah had their first thoughts of “resurrection from the dead.” The martyrs faced a cruel death because they refused to abandon their faith in God. But death, for them, was not permanent. God promised to return to them the life that the tyrants stole from them. It was as though they had entered into a dreamless sleep, and the sound of the trumpet awakened them from the sleep of death on the last day.
[xlvii] Cullmann gave his Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man in 1955. The thesis of his lecture was that there was no biblical evidence supporting the immortality of human souls, and that this doctrine had nothing in common with the Christian hope in the resurrection of the body. Fifty years later, the academic and pastoral tide has massively turned in Cullmann’s direction:
The concept of an immaterial soul separate from and surviving the body is common today but according to modern scholars, it was not found in ancient Hebrew beliefs. The word nephesh never means an immortal soul or an incorporeal part of the human being that can survive death of the body as the spirit of the dead. URL=<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_in_the_Bible>
[xlviii] Earlier I showed that Aquinas is not consistent in his description of salvation for the “holy fathers [of Israel].” Earlier in the Summa Theologica, Aquinas identifies the descent of Jesus into hell [Hades] as the cause for the liberation of the holy fathers from that prison: “Christ the Lord descended into hell that, having seized the spoils of the devils, he might conduct into heaven those holy fathers and other pious souls liberated from prison” (ST I 6, 6).
Fr. McMonigle, vested in his somber black cope, called out in a loud voice, “We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee.” All of us children then dropped to our knees and answered in a deafening chorus, “Because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world!”
~Stations of the Cross at Holy Cross Grade School
While the Catholic Church has not officially endorsed any specific soteriology[1], the most popular by far during the last eight hundred years is the theology whereby God forgives all sins due to the merits of Christ’s passion on the cross. During my eight years at Holy Cross Grade School in Euclid, Ohio, I recall vividly how we knelt on the wood floor next to our desks every morning and faced the large crucifix above the blackboard as we recited our morning prayers. On Fridays in Lent, we were herded into the church and confronted with an even more vivid reminder of the drama of our salvation.
The Stations of the Cross consisted in fourteen graphically depicted sufferings of Jesus, which covered the sidewalls of Holy Cross Church. At the beginning of each station, Fr. McMonigle, vested in his somber black cope, called out in a loud voice, “We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee.” All of us children then dropped to our knees and answered in a deafening chorus, “Because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world!”
Whether all Christian writers endorsed vicarious atonement
The early Chistian writers had no uniform way of accounting for the efficacy of Jesus’ death. One has to wait for Anselm of Canterbury before one finds a systematic reliance upon vicarious substitutionary atonement.
Justin Martyr (d. 165 CE) was the first of the philosopher-apologists[2] who was converted by a chance encounter with a Christian in 130 CE. In his “Dialogue with Trypho,” Justin recalls the whole of this encounter (Dial. 3-9). Following his conversion, Justin spent thirty years openly advocating the superiority of the Jewish prophets over the Greek and Roman philosophers. In recounting how the companions of God must of necessity be limited to those who are free of sin and are cultivating a life of virtue, Justin explains the role played by heartfelt contrition as follows:
All who wish for it can obtain mercy from God: and the Scripture [Ps 32] foretells that they shall be blessed, saying, ‘Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputes not sin;’ that is, having repented of his sins, that he may receive remission of them from God. . . .
Athanasius (d. 363), for example, depicted Jesus as entering a wrestling match with the Devil. At the end of the match, Jesus was done in by the Devil, but, given the ferociousness of the match, the Devil was considerably weakened and exhausted–thereby allowing the disciples of Jesus to overcome him in the future (De Incarnatione 8, 24, and 27).
Augustine (d. 430), in his day, depicted the Devil as tempting Jesus, becoming frustrated, and savagely killing his body because he could not touch his soul. Yet, this was a divine plot to lure the Devil into overstepping his proper rights by killing the innocent. God, consequently, was then free to legally penalize the Devil by taking from him those persons whom he had claimed as his own (On Free Will 3.10.31).
Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) in his masterpiece, Cur Deus Homo [Why God Became Man] made the bold step of formulating a soteriology based on the claim that all sins in every time and in every place were forgiven exclusively due to the passion and death of Jesus. Anselm was a pastor doing pastoral theology. In his day, Anselm was disturbed by the prevailing notion that the Devil was given such an important role in the drama of salvation, and he set about to use the medieval notions of honor and fealty to reconstruct the drama of salvation. In this revised drama, the Devil was no longer the chief antagonist, but it was the offended honor of God the Father that had to be appeased. Anselm’s theological speculation and intellectual persuasiveness, key traits of the on-the-way-to-be-invented scholastic method, proved so compelling that he became the chief contender for accounting for the efficacy of the cross.[3]
The medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas[4] (d. 1274), working more than a century later, spoke of the merits and the efficacy associated with the incarnation and the preaching of Jesus—cherished ideas that dominated the first five centuries. When it came time to discuss the passion of Jesus; however, Aquinas entirely slipped into the path of penal substitution that Anselm had promoted before him. Thus, according to Aquinas, “If he [God] had willed to free man from sin without any satisfaction, he would have acted against justice” (III 46, 6, ad 3). This, however, is the foundation stone that Anselm used to insist that God could not forgive any sins whatsoever without the penal substitution of Jesus on the cross.
There are some areas where Aquinas even exceeds Anselm in demonstrating the all-encompassing efficacy of the cross:
While the middle ages had invented gruesome forms of prolonged torture, Aquinas had no difficulty in affirming that “Christ’s passion was the greatest pain ever suffered” (III 46, 6). Needless to say, this judgment can only be a pious exaggeration for it finds no confirmation in any of the Gospels.
Given this pious exaggeration, Aquinas uses it to enforce the notion that “Christ’s passion was not only sufficient but superabundant atonement for the sins of the human race” (III 48, 2). Thus, in effect, every sin from the first sin of Adam to the last sin by the last humans on earth at the end of time could be forgiven without exhausting the “superabundant” atonement of Christ. This, too, strikes me as possibly another pious exaggeration.
Aquinas invokes the notion that the “gates of heaven” were permanently closed following the sin of Adam (Summa Theologica II-II 164, 2). This enforces the logic of Anselm’s universality of sin (both original and actual sins) and the utter inability of anyone to atone for their own sins in order to get into Heaven. But then, due to Jesus’ initiative, salvation finally arrives: “The gate of heaven’s kingdom is thrown open to us through Christ’s passion” (III 49, 5).
Aquinas’ use of “gates of heaven” needs to be examined. The phrase “gates of heaven”[5] exists nowhere in the entire bible—Jesus never used it; neither did any of the Jewish prophets. Meanwhile, if souls are separated from their bodies at the time of death, then metal gates would have been useless to keep them out. So, it is probable that Aquinas is using “gates of heaven” as a pious metaphor. Nonetheless, Aquinas wants his readers to understand that the “gates of heaven” were closed following the sin of Adam (Summa Theologica II-II 164, 2) and that these gates would not be opened again until right after the death of Jesus on the cross.
Aquinas argues that not even those Jewish patriarchs “who were sinless” would be able to enter Heaven: “The holy fathers were detained in Hell for the reason that, owing to our first parent’s sin, the approach to the life of glory [in heaven] was not open” (III 52, 5). Notice that Aquinas does not say “suffered in hell.” Aquinas here is referring to the notion of the Church Fathers that the saints and the sinners were “detained in Hades[6].” The source of this confusion will be detailed later.
At another point, Aquinas says: “The holy fathers [of Israel], by doing works of justice, merited to enter the heavenly kingdom through faith in Christ’s passion . . .” (III 49, 5, ad 1). The deliverance of the Jewish patriarchs, consequently, was not due to their assimilation of the faith of Abraham or to their lifelong fidelity to the way of life that was pleasing to God; rather, it is “through faith and charity, [by which they] were united to Christ’s passion” (III 52, 7).
Aquinas might be on thin ice here. Consider the case when Jesus meets a pious young man who asks him, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” (Matt 19:16). Jesus here is addressed as Διδάσκαλε (“teacher”). From his response, one can surmise that Jesus is being honored as a learned “rabbi.” Jesus responds, “Keep the commandments” (19:17). “Which?” Then Jesus names three negative and two positive commandments of Moses. “I have kept all these; what do I still lack?”(19:20) Jesus, therefore, raises the bar: “If you wish to be perfect. . . .” (19:21). Aquinas would have expected Jesus to say something about his passion and death, but he does not. Nor does Jesus tell him that his faith in Abraham and Moses is useless and that only Christianity has a saving faith. This, of course, is what Aquinas believed; but, to be sure, it was definitely not what Jesus believed.[7]
Aquinas is not consistent in his description of salvation for the “holy fathers [of Israel].” Earlier in the Summa Theologica, Aquinas identifies the descent of Jesus into hell [Hades] as the cause for the liberation of the holy fathers from that prison: “Christ the Lord descended into hell that, having seized the spoils of the devils, he might conduct into heaven those holy fathers and other pious souls liberated from prison” (ST I 6, 6).[8] In the final part of the Summa; however, Aquinas says that the holy fathers “merited to enter the heavenly kingdom through faith in Christ’s passion . . .” (ST III 49, 5, ad 1). So, was it Jesus’ descent into hell [Hades] or his dying on the cross—or maybe some combination of both choices—that brings the holy fathers of Israel into heaven? Aquinas lacks consistency here.[9]
Whether Gen 3 Is Correctly Interpreted by the Baltimore Catechism
Here is what the Baltimore Catechism teaches:
45. Q. What evil befell us on account of the disobedience of our first parents?
A. On account of the disobedience of our first parents, we all share in their sin and punishment, as we should have shared in their happiness if they had remained faithful.
46. Q. What other effects followed from the sin of our first parents?
A. Our nature was corrupted by the sin of our first parents, which darkened our understanding, weakened our will, and left in us a strong inclination to evil.
47. Q. What is the sin called which we inherit from our first parents?
A. The sin which we inherit from our first parents is called original sin.
48. Q. Why is this sin called original?
A. This sin is called original because it comes down to us from our first parents, and we are brought into the world with its guilt on our soul.
49. Q. Does this corruption of our nature remain in us after original sin is forgiven?
A. This corruption of our nature and other punishments remain in us after original sin is forgiven.
For an extended examination of Gen 2-3 over and against Tertullian’s ideological reading of the text, see Milavec, Eve as the Pioneer of Adam’s Salvation (2016). A free study-copy of this book can be found here:
Traditional theology speaks of Eve as being deceived by the “devil” who was bent upon the destruction of Adam. The “serpent” described in the text, however, is never associated with the “devil” within the entire book of Genesis. So something is wrong here.
When examined more closely, the “serpent” functions as a spirit-guide within ancient Middle Eastern culture. Far from deceiving Eve, this “serpent” is assuredly a truth-teller: “You will not die [when you eat this fruit]; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5-6 NRSV). And, according to the text, this is exactly what happens.
Adam, meanwhile, has been telling Eve that God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die” (Gen 3:3). When Eve touches the fruit, however, nothing happens. Adam clearly is mistaken. So, she eats it. And the eating has wondrous effects. Thus, Eve, with the help of the serpent, exposes the errors of Adam on both counts.
Eve and Adam are expelled from the Garden. According to the prevailing theology of the churches, this expulsion takes place due to God abhorrence of their grave sin [the “original sin”]. The text itself provides quite another explanation: “The LORD God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever,’ therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden” (Gen 3:22-23).
In the Garden, God has planted not one but two empowering trees: “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and “the tree of life.” God intended his children to be mortal. The text specifies this intention clearly, “You are [made out of] dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19). Hence, God expels his children from the Garden, not due to some supposed “sin” but in order to insure that the “tree of life” remains out-of-reach.
The text says that God assigns to a “cherubim” the task of “guard[ing] the way to the tree of life” (Gen 3:24). Here again the text indicates clearly that “sin” was not an issue here; rather, protection of the “tree of life” was God’s primary concern.
It is instructive that Eve and Adam lived nearly a thousand years. If we trust the bible when it teaches us that a long life is a sign of God’s blessing, then we have to conclude that Eve and Adam were wondrously blessed with long lives. In fact, just before leaving Eden, God gave both his children a very important gift. Maybe you know what that gift might be. Take a guess.
Whether Jews know forgiveness apart from Jesus
Without saying it in so many words, the synthesis of Thomas Aquinas takes the entire tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures regarding the readiness of God to forgive and turns it on its head. Consider, for example, Psalm 32:
Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin (Ps 32:1-5).
What one discovers here is the assurance of forgiveness for those who turn back to the Lord and acknowledge their sin. Quite independent of any question of the efficacy of sacrificial rites or of acts of atonement (by oneself or by another), Israel has always believed that the act of teshuvah (“turning back”) ensures God’s forgiveness.[10] The classical Christian tradition as formulated by Anselm and Aquinas, however, would say the psalmist was sorely mistaken.[11]
In the Hebrew Scriptures one finds hundreds of instances wherein Jewish sins are forgiven. In the case of King David, one remembers how the prophet Nathan confronted the king with the parable that served to expose his treachery in having Uriah killed in battle such that he could lay claim to his wife (2 Sam 12:2-4). David responds quickly and unambiguously, “I have sinned against the Lord” (2 Sam 12:13). Once David has confessed his guilt, then the prophet offers God’s consolation: “Now the Lord has put away your sin. . .” (2 Sam 12:13b). No one has to offer a sacrifice or to suffer an inhuman whipping to enable “the Lord” to pardon David’s sins.
Whether the Gospels speak of forgiveness apart from Jesus
In the Gospels one finds a fierce challenge to the theology of the atoning death. When the Gospels speak of John the Baptizer “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3 and par.), this accords well with the prevailing Jewish tradition of forgiveness following upon repentance. Yet no mention of Jesus’ death is made in this place. Later, even Jesus said to the man who was a paralytic, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you” (Luke 5:21). In this instance, if Jesus had studied his Baltimore Catechism, he should have said, “Friend, your sins will be forgiven once the Son of Man is lifted up on the cross.”
As for Jesus’ parables of the kingdom, none of them make any mention of the fall of Adam in the Garden and the impossibility of attaining forgiveness of sins prior to Jesus’ death. In fact, none of them focus upon the passion of Jesus as opening the gates of Heaven either.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son goes to the extreme of having the son who squandered half of his father’s resources with loose women return home in order to find his father running to him and pardoning him even before he gets a chance to confess his failings. According to the terms of this parable, the son feels that his sins are unpardonable, and he can only expect, at best, to get a job: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands” (Luke 15:18f).
The thrust of Jesus’ parable is to demonstrate that the love of our Father in heaven exceeds the weight of our sense of being beyond forgiveness. In its essence, Jesus’ parable dramatizes the Jewish notion that God is our loving Father; and, accordingly, he has always been ready to forgive his children. Parables found among the rabbis capture this same lesson.[12] When all is said and done, therefore, the classical atonement theories would have to end up declaring that Jesus was sorely mistaken—no sins can be forgiven unless there is an appropriate amount of suffering involved.
How Jews find abundant forgiveness without Jesus
E.P. Sanders, more than any other scholar, has given a long hard look at the host of distortions that crowd into Christian literature. Some Christians, therefore, would try to reconcile the problems within the classical tradition by emphasizing that God is always ready to forgive but that atonement‑-understood as the penal suffering due to every sin‑-can never be made without the merits of Christ. Within the rabbinic tradition, one finds various instances wherein atonement is granted: (a) “repentance effects atonement,” (b) “the Day of Atonement effects atonement,” (c) “death effects atonement,” (d) “almsgiving effects atonement,” and (d) “chastisements (in this life or in Gehenna) effect atonement.”[13] In none of these cases, however, is atonement understood as “automatic” or “earned.” It was always a graced occasion:
Their way of phrasing the sentences about atonement may mislead readers into thinking that they conceived the process of atonement to be automatic. The Rabbis doubtless had confidence that God would forgive those who did what was appropriate for atonement, but they did not suppose that atonement would be effective apart for the reconciling forgiveness of God. They pictured God as always ready to forgive, and so had no need of saying `repentance atones if God chooses to forgive.’[14]
Recovering God’s grief at the death of his Son
Atonement theories have the effect of wiping away the shame of the cross and of presenting Jesus’ death as the brightest moment in salvation history. According to the Synoptics, however, Jesus’ death is presented as the darkest event: “From the sixth hour, there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour” (Matt 27:45 and par.). Such “darkness” points to lamentation. The prophet Amos, for example, speaks of the darkness with which the Lord will cover the earth on the last day as “turn[ing] your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation . . . like the mourning for [the death of] an only son” (8:10). Robert Gundry cites a long list of parallels.[15]
Popular theology has sometimes associated this “darkness” with “the fearful concept of Jesus `bearing,’ even actually `becoming’ our sin.”[16] This interpretation of the “darkness,” however, is determined by the projection of atonement motifs into the passion narrative: “Nowhere in Mark is Jesus said to bear the sins of others; so, Mark’s audience could hardly be expected to interpret the darkness thus.”[17]
At the moment of Jesus’ death, my childhood Catechism presents the image of the gates of heaven being thrown open after having been locked ever since the sin of Adam. According to the Synoptics, however, it is the temple veil that is rent in two “from top to bottom” (Matt 27:51 and par.).
In most instances, this rending of the veil has been interpreted to signal that the crimes of the priests were so grievous that God abandoned the holy of holies‑-tearing through the temple veil as he exited. Such an interpretation fails to take into account that the disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem went to the temple daily to pray and to teach (Acts 2:46, 3:1, 5:42). At no time do they draw attention to the “absence” of the Lord.
Other scholars have suggested that this tearing “originally represented Jesus’ death” and later became a “supernatural portent of Jesus’ deity.”[18] But why represent Jesus’ death symbolically when, in actual fact, the event itself was just narrated?
Hebrews makes an oblique reference to “the new and living way that he opened for us through the [temple] curtain” (Heb 10:20), but it would be risky to transpose the theology of Hebrews back into the Synoptics.
Finally, in an unexpected moment, I chanced upon an explanation by David Daube,[19] a Jewish scholar. The moment I heard it, all the clues of the text snapped into place:
One has to be aware of the modes of expressing grief then current among the Jewish people. When a father of Jesus’ day would hear of the death of a son, he would invariably rend his garment by grabbing it at the neck and tearing it from top to bottom [see, e.g., Gen 27:34, Job 1:20, b. Moed Qatqan 25a, b. Menahot 48a]. This is precisely the gesture suggested by the particulars of Matthew’s text: “The veil of the Temple as torn in two from top to bottom” (27:51). In truth, God is Spirit. Symbolically, however, the presence of God within the holy of holies was rendered secure from prying eyes by the veil which surrounded that place. As such, the veil conceals the “nakedness” of God. It is this “garment” which grief-stricken Father of Jesus tears from top to bottom when he hears the final death-cry of his beloved son. Even for the Father, therefore, the death of Jesus is bitter tragedy and heartfelt grief.[20]
This interpretation has the merit of paying attention to the form of the tearing (“from top to bottom”) and of harmonizing completely with the “darkness” that preceded it. Both symbols, consequently, serve to signal to the Jewish reader the grief and the rage of God at the death of his Son. At the same time, these symbols serve as a point of departure for reeducating ourselves as to how we might recapture our own suppressed rage and indignation[21] at the brutal and needless suffering of Jesus. Finally, this reading of the passion allowed me to weep for Jesus—tears that had been blocked so long by a theology bent upon sugarcoating his death.
Recent criticism of substitutionary atonement
Within the last twenty years, the soteriology of the atoning death has fallen upon hard times.[22] To begin with, God’s threat of death (Gen 2:17) directed toward his own children in the Garden strikes modern ears as a cruel and excessive punishment for a single infraction of eating the forbidden fruit.[23] Furthermore, studies by Herbert Haag, demonstrate that “the idea that Adam’s descendants are automatically sinners because of the sin of their ancestor . . . is foreign to Holy Scripture.”[24] As Martin Buber would have it, the descendants of Adam sinned “as Adam sinned and not because Adam sinned.”[25] Furthermore, the notion that forgiveness for the guilty must be achieved at the price of torturing the innocent runs the risk of supporting a very dubious and unbiblical notion of divine injustice. Accordingly, Stephen Finlan notes quite pointedly in his book-length examination of atonement theories in the Christian Scriptures: “It does us no good to perceive Jesus as heroic if we are forced to view God as sadistic.”[26]
Richard Rohr, meanwhile, in his retreats and homilies, tells his hearers: “As our own Franciscan scholar John Duns Scotus taught, Jesus did not need to die. There was no debt to be paid. Jesus died to reveal the nature of the heart of God.”[27]
Feminist theologians, for their part, alert us that classical soteriology espouses a sadistic case of “divine child abuse.”[28]
Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., in equally telling terms, concludes his lengthy study of the topic of suffering by saying, “First of all, we must say that we are not redeemed thanks to the death of Jesus but despite it.”[29]
Parallel critiques within Protestant circles
Wolfhart Pannenberg, a leading Lutheran theologian, notes that “Anselm’s conception . . . was also taken over by the dogmatics of Protestant orthodoxy in the seventeenth century, although its primary concern is foreign to the authentically evangelical understanding of salvation.”[30]
John T. Carroll and Joel B. Green, meanwhile, conclude their extensive study of Paul with this caution: “Paul uses an almost inexhaustible series of metaphors[31] to represent the significance of Jesus’ death, and penal substitution (at least as popularly defined) is not one of them.”[32]
By way of measuring the pastoral impact of the atonement theory, a recent Protestant study closes with a strong cautionary note:
“We believe that the popular fascination with and commitment to penal substitutionary atonement has had ill effects in the life of the church in the United States and has little to offer the global church and mission by way of understanding or embodying the message of Jesus Christ.”[33]
Why Rabbis distrust the substitutionary atonement of Jesus
Rabbi Tovia Singer, in response to a Christian inquiry, ended up reminding his questioner that, after all is said and done, the notion that Jesus’ death on the cross was a “sacrifice” would have been abhorrent to God “since the Jewish people were strictly prohibited from offering human sacrifices under any circumstances.”[34]
To this, one might also add that, in Jewish circles, any true sacrifice had to be offered by a Jewish priest in the Jerusalem temple.[35] On these grounds alone, one can be certain that whenever Paul speaks of Jesus’ death[36] as a sacrifice, he is using metaphors that cannot and must not be taken literally. In the Letter to the Hebrews, this Jewish-Christian treatise fully acknowledges that “Now if he [Jesus] were on earth, he would not be a priest at all” (8:4, 7:14). When it comes time to choose a suitable “sacrifice,” Jesus repeats the theme of Jer 7:22[37]: “Sacrifices and offerings you [my Lord] have not desired . . . ; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure” (Heb 10:5-6).
Rabbi Gerald Sigal speaks for contemporary Jews as follows:
God forgave sin before Jesus’ appearance and continues to forgive without any assistance from the latter. It is no wonder that many centuries before the time of Jesus, Isaiah declared: “Israel is saved by the Lord with an everlasting salvation”? (Isa 45:17) . . . . This is true at all times and in all places.[38]
Conclusions
Once the weight of all this evidence is acknowledged, then the following becomes evident:
The Jewish Scriptures repeatedly speak of God’s readiness to forgive sins independent of Jesus. Hence, any preaching or teaching to the effect that every and all sins of all persons everywhere[39] can be forgiven only due to the merits accumulated by the death of Jesus must be exposed as a false faith based upon a false theology bent upon misrepresenting Jesus’ death and totally misrepresenting Judaism as well.
Christians honor Jesus as the Son of God who reliably and truthfully expresses mind and the heart of our Father in heaven. Substitutionary atonement theories, when examined closely, grossly misrepresent[40] our Father in Heaven (a) as frozen in unforgiveness prior to the brutal death of his Beloved Son and (b) as supporting a false theology whereby the suffering of the innocent one is the necessary price for forgiving the guilty. Such theories obscure the teaching and the practice of the rabbis. Such theories obscure the teaching and the practice of Rabbi Jesus as well.
The notion that the gates of Heaven were closed beginning with the sin of Adam and that they remained closed until the death of Jesus cannot be confirmed.[41] Needless to say, there is no direct experiential evidence of this. Biblical evidence, meanwhile, is sparce and questionable. Most especially, however, such a notion is inherently anti-Jewish because it tacitly denies and discredits the experience of Jews as receiving the grace of divine forgiveness in nearly all times and in nearly all places.
As an act of honesty and humility, Christians need to explore the possibility of admitting to themselves and to the children of Abraham and Sarah that, just as Christians unfairly implicated all Jews in the death of Jesus; so, too, they have unfairly implicated the suffering and death of Jesus in the forgiveness of Jewish sins. Thomas Aquinas, consequently, must be revised along with all other catechetical materials so as to acknowledge that “God forgave sin before Jesus’ appearance and [he] continues to forgive [Jewish sins] without any assistance from the latter” (as cited above).
When Christians use their theology of the suffering and death of Jesus to cultivate a mystique of suffering and try to sugarcoat the suffering of others, one comes into contact with the ugly dark-side of substitutionary atonement. Here are a few examples that illustrate the horrific insensitivity of some prominent and highly-educated Catholics in the face of the Nazi extermination of six million Jews during the Shoah (also referred to as “the Holocaust”):
Case #1: Cardinal John O’Connor, the Catholic Archbishop of New York, had this to say as part of his reflections following his visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel:
The crucifixion and its enormous power continue mystically and spiritually in this world in our day and will continue to the end of time. Christ . . . continues to suffer in his Body, the Church. . . . And this suffering has a purpose and an effect, as does ours if we conjoin it with his, if we “offer it up”. . . . [Consequently] if the suffering of the crucifixion was infinitely redemptive [for us Christians], [then]the suffering of the Holocaust, potentially conjoined with it, is incalculably redemptive [for Jews](47-48).
Archbishop O’Connor, mesmerized by the infinite redemptive sufferings of Christ, undoubtedly thought he was honoring Jewish suffering in the concentration camps as “incalculably redemptive” for Jews in the same way that the sufferings of Christ are “infinitely redemptive” for Christians. Survivors of the death camps and their relatives (see) were neither flattered nor consoled[42] by the Archbishop’s crude attempt to extend a “bizarre” Christian atonement theology to sugar-coat the horrendous evil inflicted upon European Jews by the Nazis.
Case #2: Sorry to say, even John Paul II flirted with applying a mystique of suffering to the Shoah. When addressing the Jews of Warsaw on 14 June 1987, he spoke to them as follows:
We [Christians] believe in the purifying power of suffering. The more atrocious the suffering, the greater the purification. The more painful the experiences, the greater the hope. . . (cited in Jacobs:53).
A year later, while visiting Mauthausen Concentration Camp, John Paul II further observed that “the Jews [killed here] enriched the world[43] by their suffering, and their death was like a grain that must fall into the earth in order to bear fruit” (cited in Jacobs:53).
Such language is painful to hear and is outright blasphemous for most Jews. Does a Jewish father whose daughter has been conscripted to provide sexual favors to the German troops in the front lines tell his daughter that her suffering will purify her love, purify her body, purify the Nazi ideology? Does a Jewish mother tell her little son who is about to be separated from her and to die a slow starvation in the Nazi transport trains that the more painful his experience, the greater hope he ought to have? Hope for what? Even popes, one can see, sometimes make injurious and jaundiced remarks when blinded by unexamined and unethical doctrines surrounding the sufferings of Christ.
Edward Schillebeeckx painstakingly researched the whole gamut of biblical references pertaining to the suffering and death of Jews (Jesus included). By way of summarizing his findings, he wrote:
God and suffering are diametrically opposed. . . . We can accept that there are certain forms of suffering that enrich our humanity. . . . However, there is an excess of suffering and evil in our history. . . . There is too much unmerited and senseless suffering. . . . But in that case we cannot look for a divine reason for the death of Jesus either. Therefore, first of all, we have to say that we are not redeemed thanks to the death of Jesus but despite it (1980:695, 724f, 729).
Whether it is Jews being tortured by perverse medical experiments in the camps or Jesus tortured on a Roman cross deliberately designed to humiliate and prolong death, there is no divine logic that can sanction such horrors. God cries out with the victims and tears his garments in grief as he does so. Any other would-be G-d cannot be said to be in solidarity with innocent victims.
Observe, Judge, and Act
Q1. Up until this point of time, the message given to you by loving parents and by your religion teachers is that “We adore thee and bless thee, O Lord [Jesus Christ], because by thy holy cross thou had redeemed the world.” This message has been repeated so often and has been enforced by loving teachers to the point that “there can be no doubting that this is exactly the greatest gift that Jesus Christ offers us.” Think back to the moment in your life to when this was your most precious joy and your salvation. What feeling tones did this leave you with?
Q2. At some times and places, however, you were perhaps doubtful and dissatisfied with this notion that the three-hours of suffering on the cross was able to atone for all the sins of world, beginning with the betrayal of Adam and Eve and passing through time when the last human being on earth sinned and died. Think back to the moment in your life to when this was not a joy and salvation but a doubt and a burden. Describe one of these moments. What feeling tones did this doubt and burden leave you with?
Q3. In Ch2 of this religious autobiography, Aaron has explained how the forgiveness of King David’s sins demonstrates that God has always been open to pardoning those who are remorseful. Aaron further explains that the parables of Jesus never celebrate the suffering of Jesus as necessary for forgiveness. Quite to the contrary, the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son jumps to greet his returning son and does not give him any chance to say, “I am not worthy to be your son.” The mystery of divine forgiveness does not turn around “suffering and satisfaction” as taught by our religion teachers. What the medieval supporters of atonement had forgotten was the generous and abiding love of a father who thinks of his son fondly even while his son foolishly squanders his inheritance and foolishly does things that he foolishly thinks are unpardonable. Do you share Aaron’s protest against the suffering death as the price for forgiveness? How so? Where does Aaron go wrong? Where does Aaron hit the nail on the head?
Q4. No one can change her mind without first of all having slept on the evidence. The process of deep sleep allows one to forget the non-essentials that are cluttering your mind and feelings. Therefore, I urge you not to commit yourself one way of the other until you sleep on it for a few nights. Where has your mind and heart settled after three nights?
Q5. After a week, open your heart and mind to a trusted and informed guide who is willing to hear the depths of your soul. Share your whole process of finding flaws in your original position. How and why have you undertaken to study this issue more deeply. What new evidence has jumped out at you and how has it changed you? Give yourself forty days to embrace the position of Aaron. Some will find the temptations of Satan in Aaron’s position. Others will find a troublesome gap between “the loving father” and “the just judge.” Where does Jesus stand? Where does Paul stand? Where do you stand?
Q6. Evangelical Protestants are prone to exaggerate their unworthiness and Catholics are prone to exaggerate the sinlessness of Jesus. Consider the following Quora discussion on “Whether Jesus was sinless”:
If we can define some sins we can all agree to be sins, then it could be possible to reach a consensus on whether Jesus sinned. If the gospel events occurred as described, [then] I suggest one sin would be wilful destruction of property:
When Jesus is described as sending the demons into a herd of around 2000 pigs who drowned in the Sea of Galilee as a result (Mark 5:13).
When Jesus is described as cursing the fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. This also involves the sin of [irrational] anger.
Jody Gattey, student and teacher of the Bible for 45 years.
The book of Hebrews in the New Testament tells us that Jesus was tempted in every way that we are, but yet He did not sin (Heb. 4:15). It also says [this] for this reason, He understands what we go through and He is able to help us to resist temptations when we lean on Him (Heb. 2:18).
He is the only man who has walked on earth who is sinless.[44] That is why He was the perfect and acceptable sacrifice on the cross–the spotless Lamb of God who paid the price for our sins, and because of His sinlessness He became the only acceptable mediator between God and mankind.
When one examines the Gospels and compares the stories with the commandments of the Torah (Hebrew Bible) this doctrine of a “sinless Jesus” is not supported. Instead we find that Jesus in fact violated a number of Biblical commandments:
Procreation
“Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). This obligates a person to marry and have children. Jesus remained single his entire life. He also encouraged others to disobey this commandment by recommending celibacy (Matthew 19:12).
Sabbath Observance
“The seventh day is a Sabbath to the L-rd your G-d. Do not do any work” (Exodus 20:9). Jesus defended his “hungry” disciples when they plucked grain on the Sabbath. This is agricultural labor and is unquestionably a violation of the Sabbath.
Christian apologists insist that Jesus was revealing the true meaning of the Sabbath when he said, “The Sabbath is not made for man; man is made for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27).” [Benjamin fails to quote the text correctly. The text says that “The Sabbath was made for man” in the sense that not working is beneficial for refreshing the laborer and his animals.] This is untenable. . . .
If Jesus meant that they were starving and their lives were threatened, the Gospel account must be fictional. Talmudic (Pharisee) law agrees this would be a reason to violate the Sabbath (Talmud Yoma ch.8). The Rabbis would not have quarreled with Jesus if this were the case. If there was no danger to life, then plucking grain violates the Sabbath and the apostles were probably guilty of theft for eating from a field not theirs. [Plucking by hand was permitted (Deut 23:25).]
Not Honoring Parents
“Honor your father and mother” (Exodus 20:12). Jesus ignored his mother when she came to visit. “Someone told him, ‘your mother and brother are standing outside, wanting to speak to you’ He replied to him, ‘who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers” (Matthew 12:47-49).
Jesus caused his parents a whole day of worrying. His parents returned from Jerusalem, assuming Jesus was with them. In fact, Jesus stayed in Jerusalem without informing his parents. They returned to Jerusalem to look for him. “His mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you?’ (Luke 2:48).” [It is impossible to imagine that Jesus was without guilt when he was so engrossed with the Torah discussions in the Jerusalem temple as to create panic for his father and mother who could not locate him for three whole days. His mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety” (Luke 2:48). I take this as a sharp rebuke that is rightly deserved. Jesus’ self-defense, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house” (Luke 2:49), holds no water. A twelve-year-old boy is expected to stay with his parents during Passover when over a million visitors have crowded into Jerusalem. Should he deviate from this, then he would be obliged to keep his parents informed as to where he plans to go and what he plans to do. And, to be relieved of anxiety on both sides, plans would also need to be made as to where and when their teenager would meet up with them at the appointed time. As a parent myself who once lost his child in a crowded mall, I have no doubt that Jesus sinned on this occasion. The pain he caused his frantic parents was unnecessary and sinful. Luke seemingly fails to notice this.]
Endnotes
1 Soteriology seeks to make sense of how God offers salvation to his/her people. Jesus and his immediate disciples anticipated the coming of God from heaven to gather the Jewish exiles and to establish his kingdom on earth. The Church Fathers preferred to think that the divine Logos had become human in order to establish that humans could, by successive stages, attain to that divinization to which they were destined by God. During the medieval period, Christians were preoccupied with sin‑-Adam failed God in the Garden and accordingly, all his children were conceived in sin and destined for eternal damnation. Jesus, the Son of God, however, became human such that a human could make complete satisfaction by his death on the cross for all the sins of the world. Whether God is envisioned as bringing the kingdom or as restoring human access to divinization or as providing satisfaction for sins makes a big difference in how God is understood and how Jesus relates to God and to our salvation. Interested readers might read Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993).
[2] The Dialogue with Trypho is a discussion in which Justin tries to prove the truth of Christianity to a learned Jew named Trypho. Justin attempts to demonstrate that a new covenant has superseded the old covenant of God with the Jewish people; that Jesus is both the messiah announced by the Old Testament prophets and the preexisting logos through whom God revealed himself in the Scriptures; and that the gentiles have been chosen to replace Israel as God’s chosen people. URL=<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Justin-Martyr>
[3] In both Catholic and Protestant circles today, some form of substitutionary atonement is generally heralded as the principal mode for accounting for the importance of Jesus as our redeemer. Only in the Eastern Orthodox Churches does one find a primacy being given to the incarnational theologies of the Church Fathers and the continued insistence that “Christ became human in order that humans might become divine.”
[4] While the late middle ages saw the creation of numerous dogmatic syntheses, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas gradually came to be preferred in most Catholic circles. The Roman Catechism produced in 1568 following the Council of Trent was thus massively dependent upon Aquinas. The Baltimore Catechism produced in the United States in 1858, in its turn, was a brief version of the Roman Catechism that served for the religious formation of American Catholics for four generations prior to Vatican II. In this latter Catechism, the penal atonement theory of Anselm is presented as the sole explanatory matrix for delineating Jesus’ identity and purpose. Protestant catechisms invariably assimilated variations of this and, accordingly, have also focused their attention upon Jesus’ death on behalf of our sins.
[5] “Gates” can be used figuratively for the glory of a city (Isaiah 3:26; 14:31; Jeremiah 14:2; Lamentations 1:4; contrast Psalms 87:2), but whether the military force, the rulers or the people is in mind cannot be determined. In Matthew 16:18 “gates of Hades” (not “hell”) may refer to the hosts (or princes) of Satan, but a more likely translation is `the gates of the grave (which keep the dead from returning) shall not be stronger than it.’ The meaning in Judges 5:8,11 is very uncertain, and the text may be corrupt. [Orr, James, M.A., D.D. General Editor. “Entry for ‘GATE'”. “International Standard Bible Encyclopedia”. 1915.] URL=<https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/gate/ >.
[6] The original notion of Hades was the gathering place of all those who had died. There was no one to judge the dead. Hence, saints and sinners awaited the final judgment. Then, quite gradually, Hades was emptied of the saints who had been taken with Jesus into Heaven at the end of three days. With the saints removed, Hades increasingly became the medieval hell wherein the damned were made to suffer in anticipation of the final judgment.
[7] My comments here have made a deliberate attempt to identify “soft spots” in Aquinas’ presentation of the salvific efficacy of the death of Jesus. Hands down, Aquinas was a gifted interpreter and reinterpreter of the Gospel. But every gifted theologian is prone to accept without question a certain number of unbiblical notions that were popular in their day. Among these notions, one might expect to find some pious exaggerations and anti-Jewish superstitions which need to be exposed. I myself was a passionate advocate of Thomas Aquinas during my first ten years of teaching seminarians. But then, as I became aware of more and more “soft spots” in Aquinas, I quickly moderated my blanket approval of Aquinas. There is so much in biblical spirituality and in Vatican II theology that is not present in Aquinas. Hence, the ST should not be overly relied upon. And, when it is used, its limitations and flaws need to be explored along with its positive contributions. Otherwise, we risk stagnating the faith and mission of the Church in 1274 CE.
[8] The contemporary Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats this message describing it as follows: “the Gospel was preached even to the dead” (sec. 632 & 634 following 1 P 4:6). This event is interpreted in universal and eschatological terms: “This is the last phase of Jesus’ messianic mission, a phase which is condensed in time [three days] but vast in its real significance: the spread of Christ’s redemptive work to all men [women] of all times and places . . .” (sec. 634).
[9] How could one account for this inconsistency? Could it be that the efficacy of Jesus’ descent into Hades was argued for early in his writing of ST 1 but, much, much later (a thousand pages later), in ST 3 when it came time to discuss the efficacy of the death of Jesus, Aquinas, having favorably read Cur Deus Homo, now argues that faith in the atoning death of Jesus enables the Jewish patriarchs to enter heaven? Or just maybe Aquinas wants to have it both ways. He wants to endorse the efficacy of the descent into Hades—a position that originates among the second and third century Church Fathers; and, at the same time, he wants to endorse the efficacy of the death on the cross—a position that originated recently with Anselm but has yet to get the approval of an overwhelming majority of the medieval theologians. This seems to be a more satisfying solution. Aquinas lived at a time when it was impossible to dismiss the older theology; yet, the newer theology of the cross was steadily gaining adherents, so it would have been rash to (a) entirely dismiss it, just as it would be rash to (b) prematurely declare it as the all-time winner. Today, there is no contest. Based on the number of publications produced in the last twenty years, I would estimate that 80% endorse some form of the substitutionary atonement theology of the cross. Yet, the reader will discover that substitutionary atonement has fallen into hard times. A vocal minority of pastors and a substantial minority of theologians are now becoming aware of the hazards of most or all substitutionary atonement theology. You will shortly discover that I count myself in this “substantial minority.” My unique position is that substitutionary atonement is unbiblical, is opposed by Jesus, and it is overwhelmingly anti-Jewish. In its place, I develop an alternative theology of the death of Jesus (a) that is endorsed by Jesus in the Synoptics, (b) that validates the divine forgiveness found in the Hebrew Scriptures, and (c) that is fiercely endorsed by the rabbinic tradition practiced by Jews.
[10] E.P. Sanders, after making an extensive study of this topic, summarizes by noting that “the universal view [of the rabbis] is that every individual Israelite who indicates his [her] intention to remain in the covenant by repenting, observing the Day of Atonement and the like, will be forgiven for all his transgressions” (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 182).
[11] Within Judaism, sins were understood as freely forgiven by God. According to Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, God was not free to forgive sins unless some suitable satisfaction was made for the loss of honor inflicted on the deity by sinners. While the early Church Fathers would have understood sorrow and penance as serving to promote such satisfaction, Anselm argued that such deeds done by humans were already expected by God and, hence, incapable of restoring the lost honor that was his due. In an absolute sense, therefore, Anselm argued that no sin (along with the satisfaction due to sin) could be forgiven without appealing to and transferring the merits of Christ’s death on the cross.
When taken to an extreme, some Christians misuse the atonement theology by way of rigidly denying that they can help themselves and can ask for help from persons other than Jesus. Meanwhile, they completely fall into trap of allowing “that I am a sinner” and “that I disgust God”—end of story. So, they run to Jesus and to him alone. “Heal me Jesus!” “Save me from Hell!” If Jesus does not step in and entirely take over their life, then they abase themselves further and intensify their total reliance upon him. This leads to an unnatural and unhealthy over-dependence on God combined with a psychotic negation of their personal agency in cooperating with God’s grace.
[12] To date, there have been many fine studies of how the rabbis taught in parables in much the same way as did Jesus. Especially noteworthy are the following: Harvey K. McArthur, et al., They Also Taught in Parables (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990); Clemens Thoma, et al., eds., Parable and Story in Judaism and Christianity (New York: Paulist, 1989); Brad H. Young, Jesus and His Jewish Parables (New York: Paulist, 1989).
[13] E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) 158.
[18] Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church under Persecution (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994) 575.
[19] David Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London: Athone Press, 1956) 23-26.
[20] Aaron Milavec, To Empower as Jesus Did: Acquiring Spiritual Power Through Apprenticeship (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1982) 57.
[21] After writing this, I experienced, first hand, the rage and indignation of Kathy, a Catholic teenager, upon viewing the film, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” She stomped out of that theater visibly angry. She told her mother how she hated “the bully” (Caiaphas) and that “stupid queer” (Annas) who “hurt Jesus.” In the face of her fury, her mother calmly proceeded to explain to her how it was necessary that Jesus should suffer in order to atone for our sins. At that moment, I saw clearly how Anselm had so thoroughly subverted even the ability of this mother to sympathize with the appropriate rage of her daughter. Yet, how would Anselm explain to this single child how such a disgusting crime was part of God’s eternal plan to redeem the world? If we ourselves are prohibited from using an evil means to accomplish a good end, how can our Father continue to be revered when he is reputed to sanction the torture of the innocent in order to forgive the guilty? For further details, see Milavec, “Is God Arbitrary and Sadistic?”
[22] The theological, biblical, and pastoral deficiencies of the substitutionary atonement is an immense topic. In what follows, I can only touch the surface. Readers who want an in-depth and very readable introduction to the topic might want to go to David Heim, “Rethinking the Death of Jesus,” URL=<http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3167>
[23] Some of the early Church Fathers (Irenaeus, Origen) regarded Adam and Eve as literally children growing up in their Parent’s Garden. Being children, the “fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:17) was naturally inaccessible to them; yet, God planted this tree in the middle of the Garden because he wanted them to eat of it when he discerned that they were ready. As often happens, however, children rush ahead and seize adult ways prematurely. According to Origen, Eve’s initiative merely represents the well-known case that girls mature earlier than boys. The serpent in this narrative is not what will later be identified as Satan in disguise (Wis 2:27; Rev 20:2) but the wisdom figure of ancient cultures. The serpent, accordingly, reveals quite rightly to Eve that by touching the fruit, she will not die—on the contrary, “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened [so as to discern good and evil] and you will be like God” (Gen 3:5). They ate and “the eyes of both were opened” (Gen 3:7)—just as the serpent revealed. The fact that they notice, for the first time, that they are naked only demonstrates that they are indeed seeing with adult eyes (and have lost the innocence of childhood).
Eve and Adam are expelled from the Garden. According to the prevailing theology of the churches, this expulsion takes place due to God abhorrence of their grave sin [the “original sin”]. The text itself provides quite another explanation: “The LORD God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever,’ therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden” (Gen 3:22-23).
For an extended examination of Gen 2-3 over and against Tertullian’s ideological reading of the text, see Milavec, Eve as the Pioneer of Adam’s Salvation (2016).
In so doing, God, acting like a good father, gets Adam ready for the burdens of farming, and Eve is prepared for the burdens of childbearing. In brief, Adam and Eve enter the adult world wherein their Parent will no longer do everything from them.
This reading of Genesis (which prevails today within the Eastern Orthodox Churches and within many Jewish circles as well) captures much more of the deep nuances of the ancient narrative than do those later readings that imagine Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan and committed a grievous sin worthy of death. Anselm regarded the crime as one of unpardonable treason since the children of God had taken the side of God’s enemy against him. In Anselm’s day, the punishment for treason was death, not only for the guilty participants in the crime, but for their children as well. It thus seemed natural that the death penalty imposed (‘spiritual death”) fell not only upon our first parents but upon all their future children as well.
[24] Herbert Haag, Is Original Sin in Scripture? (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969) 106.
[25] Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith (New York: Macmillan, 1951) 158.
[26] Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2005) 97. Finlan’s citation here captures the critique of Michael Winter. Ever since 2005, Finlan has been one of the most formidable challengers to substitutionary penal atonement. I regret to note, however, that in some quarters this has led to a push-back whereby older forms of atonement have been resurrected. See, for example, P.J. Scaer: 2008. Thus, the author retrieves and reaffirms tried and true atonement themes in Matthew. Not one of the problems put forward by S. Finlan gets addressed and resolved.
[28] See, for example, Rita Nakashima Borck, “And a Little Child Will Lead Us: Christology and Child Abuse,” in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carol R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim, 1989) 42-61.
[29] Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (New York: Seabury, 1980) 729.
[30] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus‑-God and Man (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968) 43.
[31] Among the metaphors used by Paul to account for the saving activity of Jesus are the following: (a) “justification” as understood with a court of law, (b) “redemption” as a commercial transaction, (c) “reconciliation” between individuals and groups, (d) “sacrifice” in the context of ancient worship, and (e) “triumph over evil” as a battleground image. None of these metaphors taken individually or collectively adds up to Anselm’s theory of substitutionary atonement. Only when substitutionary atonement is read back into all the metaphors of Paul does everything appear to come together into a unified theory. Yet, when one examines the particulars, problems persist. An example: Why does Paul say, “Jesus . . . was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom 4:25) or “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17)? Substitutionary atonement theories do not know how to give due importance to the resurrection of Jesus. Another example: Paul sometimes presents Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, but he also urges believers “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice,” and he refers to his own preaching the gospel as his “priestly [i.e., sacrificial] service” (Rom 15:16). Atonement theories do not know how to give due importance to these other “sacrifices.” For details, see Robert J. Daly, The Origin of the Christian Doctrine of Sacrifice (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978) and notes 24 and 25 above..
[32] John T. Carroll and Joel B. Green, eds., The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1993) 263.
[33] Joel B. Green & Mark D. Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000) 220. For a clear and insightful examination of the “saving death” interpreted within its cultural context, see Stephen J. Patterson, Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).
[35] After the destruction of the temple, the rabbis designed substitutes for temple sacrifices. The descendants of Eli, accordingly, could find no atonement by sacrifice and meat-offering, but they might receive pardon through the occupation with the study of the Torah and acts of loving-kindness (b. Rosh Hashanah 18a). According to another tradition, the Holy One, blessed be he, foresaw that the Holy Temple would be destroyed and promised Israel that the words of the Torah, which is likened unto sacrifices, will, after the destruction of the Temple, be accepted as a substitute for sacrifices (Tanchuma ahri 10; Midrash Tanchuma 3.85a).
[36] When it comes to interpreting Jesus’ death, the authentic Pauline epistles must be understood as severely handicapped in contrast with the Gospels. Paul acknowledged that he was the last to be called as an “apostle” and that he never had the advantage of day-in and day-out contact with Jesus while he was training his disciples in Galilee. Paul, on the other hand, had the advantage of being trained “at the feet of Gamilel” (Acts 22:3) and, being fluent in Hebrew and Greek, he was intimately familiar with the Hellenized beliefs and practices of the Jews of Asia Minor. Nonetheless, Paul reminds the Corinthians that the focal point of his teaching, preaching, and ministry among them was simply “Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1-2). But what Paul brings to the Corinthians is not the narrative of how and when Jesus came to be crucified (as illustrated by the Gospels). Rather, Paul reduces his interest in Jesus solely to the blessings his followers receive because of his death and resurrection. And he frames this within the horizon of understanding he received from Gamilel along with his own excellent intuitions of what would attract the attention of Jews in Asia Minor. Thus, Paul wanted to do theology for which he was gifted and to totally leave aside narrating Gospel stories.
[37] The prophets speak for the Lord designating that he is not pleased with temple sacrifices; rather, he wishes a heartfelt obedience. Ps 40:6-8 LXX more closely approximates the words in Heb. See also Ps 39:7-9, 51:16-17 and 1 Sam 15:22. The Letter to the Hebrews makes the point that Jesus as a priest according to the order of Melchizadek will enter the superior sanctuary, namely, the heavenly sanctuary where God dwells permanently. There are no animals there. Hence Jesus begins a new order of “sacrifice” as the eternal highpriest who delights in doing the will of his Father. Needless to say, Hebrews has many diverse interpretations. There is not the time or space here to adjudicate even a fraction of them.
[38] Gerald Sigal, “Jews for Judaism: Reference Section,” #081, URL=<http://jewsforjudaism.org/j4j-2000/html/reflib/tri081.html>
[39] Catholic and Protestant churches have exaggerated the universal significance of Jesus’ death by imagining that no sin, whether original or actual, could ever be forgiven and atoned for without appeal, in faith, to the infinite merits of Jesus. This is the heresy that emerged as Christianity broke free of the guidance and wisdom of Jesus and of the holy rabbis of Israel as well. Christians have to join with Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., and to study the character of suffering in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures by allowing that, “First of all, we must say that we are not redeemed thanks to the death of Jesus but despite it” (1980, 729).
[40] When Christians misrepresent the death of Jesus, they often do so because they have “powerful religious feelings of gratitude for Jesus” who willingly took up his cross in order to gain forgiveness for their sins. These powerful religious feelings blind them to the fact that the good name of Jesus is being purchased at the cost of seriously undermining the good name of his Father? Moreover, substitutionary atonement theories blind us to the fact that Jesus understood himself as a prophet and that Jesus warned his disciples that they must anticipate being abused and hated because being a prophet was always regarded as a hasardous occupation.
[41] The theology of substitutionary atonement is based upon two dubious notions: (a) that God the Father was unable and unwilling to forgive sins from the time of Adam to the death of Jesus and (b) that, once Jesus died, God transfers the merits gained by him to everyone who calls upon his name, as the apostle Paul tells us:
If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (Rom 10:9).
Thankfully, we have Jesus to correct those Christians who come down hard on Rom 10:9. When Jesus tells us about the final judgment, when the elect are placed on the right, does he tell them, “Blessed are you because you confessed with your mouth that ‘Jesus is Lord’? Of course not. According to Jesus, therefore, those who are placed on the right are not there because of their profession of faith in Jesus. Nor do they get chosen because they believe in the resurrection. Jesus even goes so far as to say, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt 7:21). So, when Paul is being twisted out of shape, Rabbi Jesus comes to the rescue and corrects him.
Meanwhile, Bishop N.T. Wright, an international Pauline specialist, harmonizes Paul and Jesus by saying:
There was no clash [in Paul’s theology] between present justification by faith and future judgment by works [Rom 14:9-10 and 2 Cor 5:10]. The two actually need, and depend upon, one another (140).
[42] Extensive Jewish responses to the insensitive words of Archbishop O’Connor can be found in Jacobs (1993) 52-55.
[43] It is shocking that John Paul II who was surrounded by well-informed and trusted advisors would not have been cautioned against repeating the crude remarks he made to the Jews in Warsaw a year earlier. Sad to say, however, even a champion of honest and open exchanges with Jews could retain the idea that Jews suffering in the concentration camps somehow contributed to the spiritual redemption of the world. In my extensive contact with Jews, I have heard the pain and the anger that the families of Jewish survivors felt in the face of the pious nonsense that Christians promoted by way of identifying the “hidden benefits” of the Shoah. For more examples and for theological reflection on “The Limits of Forgiveness” in the presence of the scent of burning children in the camps, see Milavec (20003a) 882-901. Jewish survivors of the camps were brutally direct when it came time to challenge rabbis who wanted to persuade them that the horrors of the Shoah were due to the failure of most European Jews to maintain the kosher food laws. It is no mystery to me that over 90% of the Jews in the present-day State of Israel no longer believe in the God of their ancestors due to such misdirected support of the Nazi death camps.
[44] Even the Scriptures never make such exaggerated claims. The Jesus was sinless is one thing; that Jesus is the sole human who is sinless is quite another.
Ch1 Whether Mr. Martin was destined for an eternity in hell
If Mr. Martin did not harm me, even in little ways,
how could he have ever consented to handing an innocent man over to Roman torturers two thousand years ago?
~my private thoughts at age 16
My early religious training within Catholic schools in an ethnic suburb of Cleveland at the outbreak of World War II made it quite natural for me to pity, to blame, and to despise Jews. Had I been bombarded by Hitler’s speeches blaming and shaming Jews, I would undoubtedly have cheered him on. The greater part of my family and neighbors would have done the same. In point of fact, however, I never had contact with a single living Jew. But, then, in an unexpected moment, a real flesh and blood Jew, Mr. Martin, made his way into my life. This unsettled me. It also changed the course of my life. In retrospect, this was a graced encounter.
Mr. Martin agreed to employ me part‑time as a stock‑boy in his dry goods store on East 185th Street in Cleveland, Ohio. I had just turned sixteen, and I desperately needed a larger income than my Cleveland Plain Dealer route had been able to afford me; hence, I felt lucky to have landed this new job. On the other hand, I was anxious upon learning that Mr. Martin was “a Jew.” Would he exploit me? Could he treat a Christian fairly? Would he want me to work on Sundays or other religious holidays? Would he try to convert me to Judaism?
Over the months I was testing Mr. Martin and, unbeknownst to me, he was testing me as well. Let me explain. One evening, after closing, I was sweeping the long isles in the store my broom suddenly dislodged a crumpled twenty-dollar bill under the counter. My starting salary was fifty cents per hour, and twenty dollars represented a lot of money for a teenager in 1955.
Yet, without thinking twice, my Christian instincts guided me forward, and I turned the money over to Mr. Martin “lest someone come looking for it.” It did not even enter my mind that the money might become mine if no one claimed it or that I might receive a reward if someone did. Even more so, it never occurred to me that Mr. Martin would be deliberately testing me because he had already encountered many Christians who set out to cheat him or to steal from him because they thought of him “as nothing but a dirty Jew.”
As for my own tests, Mr. Martin passed with flying colors. He was genuinely sensitive to my religious convictions and school obligations when it came to scheduling my work hours. He treated me fairly, at times even generously, and this disarmed all my earlier reservations. In fact, I slowly came to admire Mr. Martin, and this admiration presented me with a new problem–a theological problem.
Given my Catholic upbringing, I knew that God had slated all Jews[i] for eternal damnation because of the terrible things they did to Jesus. I also knew that Jews could not go to confession to a priest to obtain pardon for such a grievous sin. On the other hand, it seemed unfair, somehow, that God should hold Mr. Martin guilty for such a crime. If Mr. Martin did not harm me, even in little ways, how could he have ever consented to handing an innocent man over to Roman torturers two thousand years ago? Thus began my soul-searching journey to try and find a way to rescue just one Jew from the everlasting fires of hell.
Whether Mr. Martin was guilty of having killed Jesus
I never took my theological problem to any of my teachers or pastors. Given my upbringing, I felt secretly ashamed[ii] that I had developed an emotional attachment to a Jew. I suspected that I might be ridiculed for what I was attempting to do. Thus, I was left to work out a private solution to my problem.
For starters, I already knew that for someone to commit a mortal sin, three things were necessary:
Q. How many things are necessary to make a sin mortal?
To make a sin mortal three things are necessary: a grievous matter, sufficient reflection, and full consent of the will.
Thus, when it came to the death of Jesus, I had to believe that God could only condemn those Jews who knowingly and willingly recognized the enormity of the sin and then went ahead and approved of it anyway. It was hardly imaginable to me that Mr. Martin was that kind of Jew. With a certain boyish simplicity, consequently, I felt that I had succeeded in finding a theological loophole whereby Mr. Martin was safe from ever having to spend an eternity in hell.
A week later, another problem popped up. Mr. Martin certainly did not commit a mortal sin relative to the death of Jesus, but he still had that “original sin” which every human being inherited from our first parents, Adam and Eve. Here is what I learned about original sin in my Baltimore Catechism:
Q. What is the sin called which we inherit from our first parents?
The sin which we inherit from our first parents is called original sin.
Q. Why is this sin called original?
This sin is called original because it comes down to us from our first parents, and we are brought into the world with its guilt on our soul.[iii]
I had to admit that Mr. Martin was not a Catholic and that he did not have access to the Sacrament of Baptism that would have served to “wash away” his original sin. I knew original sin could be a serious obstacle since, without Baptism, even Catholic babies were prevented from ever going to Heaven. At best, they could expect to go to a place of natural happiness called “limbo.” Thus, I felt sorry for Mr. Martin. While safe from eternal hellfire, I was forced to see him relegated, for all eternity, to some minor place in the world to come.
How could my Church error when it came to Jewish guilt?
Never, never, never, in my wildest imagination, could I, in 1955, have perceived that the “blood guilt” of the Jews was a poison invented in the third century and systematically passed down as part of Catholic identity in all future generations. After all, I was assured that Jesus had sent the Holy Spirit to guide the teachers of my Church and to preserve them from all errors until the end of time. Here is what I was taught by my religious teachers using the Baltimore Catechism:
Q. What do you mean by the infallibility of the Church?
By the infallibility of the Church I mean that the Church cannot err when it teaches a doctrine of faith or morals.
Q. When does the Church teach infallibly?
The Church teaches infallibly when it speaks through the Pope and the bishops, united in general council, or through the Pope alone when he proclaims to all the faithful a doctrine of faith or morals.
It seemed unthinkable to me that my parents, my teachers, my pastors‑‑people whom I knew and loved‑‑could be the mindless purveyors of such a demonic distortion such as “blood guilt.” I mention these things, not by way of casting blame upon my Catholic forebears, but by way of indicating how blind even sympathetic and thoughtful persons can be when their hearts and minds are taken over by dark tendencies that claim to have God’s full endorsement.[ix]
Faced with this realization, I found little comfort in Fr. Eugene Fisher’s reminder to Jews during the 6th National Workshop on Christian‑Jewish relations that the popes and councils of the Church never actually defined “blood guilt” as part of the deposit of faith.[x] The shocking truth is that the popes and people alike so routinely accepted the notion of “blood guilt” that no concerted attack ever arose from any quarter within the Church such that a council or a pope would have had occasion to resolve a disputed question. Nor is it an issue of imagining that it was only ill‑informed and venial prelates who preached hatred for Jews. This idea might bring us some comfort. However, as the Jewish scholar Emil Fackenheim reminded his audience, “it was also the saints and the bishops who preached contempt for Jews.”[xi]
How Pope John XXIII made a decisive initiative
In June of 1960, Pope John XXIII met with Jules Isaak to discuss Catholic-Jewish relations. Soon thereafter, when he announced his decision to convoke the Second Vatican Council, he simultaneously decided to submit to the Council a revised vision of Judaism. He specifically asked the well-respected German Old Testament scholar, Cardinal Augustin Bea, to prepare the first draft.
Debates both inside and outside the Council in 1963 served to expand the scope of the projected declaration to address, not only a revised vision of Judaism, but of Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism as well. After vigorous debates and a multitude of revisions, the assembled bishops overwhelmingly voted on 28 October 1965, with 2221 votes in favor and 88 against, to promote the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. This Declaration that bears the Latin title of Nostra Aetate (being the first words of the document, “In this age of ours”) directly addresses and overturns each of the three propositions named above:
#1 Limited Guilt: Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ, neither all Jews indiscriminatingly at the time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his passion (Nostra Aetate 4).
#2 Limited Retribution: The Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or cursed as if this follows from Holy Scripture (Nostra Aetate 4).
#3 Jews Remain as the Lord’s Chosen People: Jews for the most part did not accept the Gospel. . . . Even so, the apostle Paul maintains that the Jews remain very dear to God, for the sake of the patriarchs, since God does not take back the gifts he bestowed or the choice he made (Nostra Aetate 4).
How my Church rectified some false notions of Jews and Judaism
Following Vatican II, all the standard textbooks, liturgical manuals, and homilies had to be revised in order to reflect these altered ways of understanding Jews and Judaism. In other areas, however, few, if any, changes were being made. This is especially true in those areas where the superiority of Christianity was contrasted with the deficiencies of Judaism. This will become crystal clear in the next chapter.
For over fifteen hundred years, Catholics were forbidden to enter a synagogue and, with even greater force, were forbidden to learn about God’s plan of revelation from Jews. In 1986, John Paul II broke a long-standing barrier when he visited the principal synagogue in Rome. It was on this occasion that John Paul II spoke of the “common spiritual patrimony that exists between Jews and Christians” (a theme already present in Nostra Aetate) and then confirmed, for those Jews present, that “you are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.” So, the affection that I felt for Mr. Martin at the age of sixteen was not a shameful and misplaced affection (as I had wrongly imagined as a teenager). Rather, it was a totally proper affection for a man who knew the love of our Father in heaven far better and far longer than I had.
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Here are some probative questions that will allow you to go deeper.
Q1. As a Catholic teenager, Aaron admits that he was anxious upon learning that Mr. Martin was “a Jew.”
Would he exploit me? Could he treat a Christian fairly? Would he want me to work on Sundays or other religious holidays? Would he try to convert me to Judaism?
How do you explain this “spontaneous distrust” of Mr. Martin? Which of his fears seem to be grounded in experience? Which of his fears appear to be groundless?
Q2. Aaron admits that Mr. Martin was testing him. He also admits that he was testing Mr. Martin:
As for my own tests, Mr. Martin passed with flying colors. He was genuinely sensitive to my religious convictions and school obligations when it came to scheduling my work hours. He treated me fairly, at times even generously, and this disarmed all my earlier reservations. In fact, I slowly came to admire Mr. Martin, and this admiration presented me with a new problem–a theological problem.
What does this “theological problem” reveal about the way that Aaron was trained by the Ursuline Sisters at Holy Cross Grade School? If Aaron had attended a public school, would this have made a significant difference regarding the so-called crime of all Jews as having unlawfully killed Jesus?
Q3. Aaron tells us:
I never took my theological problem to any of my teachers or pastors. Given my upbringing, I felt secretly ashamed that I had developed an emotional attachment to a Jew. I suspected that I might be ridiculed for what I was attempting to do.
How do you explain that Aaron “felt secretly ashamed”? How and why was Aaron trained to “feel secretly ashamed” of his “emotional attachment to a Jew”? Is this the way that prejudice gets maintained in a community dedicated to hating Jews? What experience have you had wherein a religious community isolated you from a sector of society that was deemed as “destined for hellfire.” How did you deal with this?
Q4. How did Aaron when in the sixth grade so easily dismiss “the emotional blackmail” of his teacher? Why could he not see that he himself was entrapped by “the emotional blackmail” preached against the Jews by Peter (Acts 2:23 and 2:36) and by Pope Pius IX and by most priests ordained in the 1950s? What experience have you had with emotional blackmail? Did it harm you or help you? How so?
Q5. Every textbook, every Catechism, every prayer book had to be rectified and changed in order to take into account the new perspective of Nostra Aetate.
For over fifteen hundred years, Catholics were forbidden to enter a synagogue and, with even greater force, were forbidden to learn about God’s plan of revelation from Jews. In 1986, John Paul II broke a long-standing barrier when he visited the principal synagogue in Rome. It was on this occasion that John Paul II spoke of the “common spiritual patrimony that exists between Jews and Christians” (a theme already present in Nostra Aetate) and then confirmed, for those Jews present, that “you are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.”
What is the significance of John Paul II addressing the Jews in Rome as “our dearly beloved brothers”? . . . as “our elder brothers”?
When I think of Mr. Martin, I recognize him as “my elder brother.” He taught me some very important lessons. He helped me to identify and to reverse the mindless hatred that Catholics around me had manufactured by way of implicating every Jew in the grave sin of killing Jesus. And this was only the beginning:
Once I identified one serious error within Catholicism, it was only a matter of time before other serious errors popped up as well. So, my spiritual journey continues. . . . God was calling me to make Catholicism a safe haven for Jews. God was calling me to make Catholicism a safe haven for the faith of Jesus.
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Please post your comments at the end of this page. You may want to tell other readers (a) when and how you were personally helped by this exploration; (b) when and how were you challenged; (c) when and how you were distressed by what I wrote.
Thanking you in advance,
Dr. Aaron
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How to unravel your religious problems in three minutes
Many pastors have told me to “bring my problems to Jesus.” Others have advised me to “talk it out with Mary.” When I was sixteen, all my praying was directed toward the Virgin Mary. Jesus seemed like the heavy weight. After all, he would be my final judge. That was a bit scarry. Hence, I liked having conversations with Mary.
Over the years, however, I have discovered a practice that works for just about everyone—no matter where they happen to be in their prayer life. This even works for those who, due to very legitimate reasons, are unable to prayer at all. I call it my “three- minute relaxed breathing.” Here is how it functions:
Breathing plays an important role in clarifying and in unraveling your religious problems. Slow, deep breaths calm your nervous system and prepare your body for deep relaxation which will enable you to discover solutions while you are sleeping.
Prepare yourself for going to sleep as you usually do. Tuck yourself into your bed with great gentleness. Lie on you back and bring your attention to your natural breathing. Gently begin to breathe in through your nose and breath out through your mouth. Don’t rush your breaths. Follow the rhythm that your body finds most natural. When you are confortable with this, introduce an audible sound as you exhale. Let the sound come naturally and don’t judge it. Continue to do this for about three minutes.
While doing so, recall the most pressing religious problem that you are aware of. Tell yourself (mentally) that you want to unravel this problems and then automatically to slowly wake you up as soon as you discover a possible solution. Have a notebook or audio recorder ready if you decide to remember your solution. Be sure to include feeling tones since this serves your emotional intelligence.
This three-minute relaxed breathing usually does not work the first night. Tell yourself, “that’s OK.” Continue to do this for one week.
Once the power dreaming does kick in, you will decide when you wish to wind it down to a halt. To do this, you will tell yourself during the three-minute relaxed breathing that, should any solution show up, you will want to forget it and return to deep sleeping.
~~~~~Endnotes for experts~~~~~
[i] At the time when the Gospel of Matthew was compiled (65-75 CE), no one was thinking that “all Jews” were somehow guilty of having killed Jesus. After all, nearly everyone in the Jesus Movement was still recognized as Jewish. Furthermore, “the crowd” that “spread their cloaks on the road” (Matt 21:8) and shouted “Hosanna to the Son of David” (Matt 21:9) were not guilty of killing Jesus. Likewise, “the crowd” that was “astonished at his [Jesus’] teaching” (Matt 22:23) in Jerusalem were certainly not plotting to kill Jesus. Thus, Matthew’s Gospel makes clear that it was only “the chief priests and the elders” who “wanted to arrest him” (Matt 21:46) and who “were looking for false testimony against him” (Matt 26:59). The bloodguilt fell on them and their collaborators alone. This would have included Judas who betrayed him and later tried to return the “blood money” (Matt 27:6) to the chief priests and elders. It might also have included the crowd hired by the chief priests who called out “Crucify him” and “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children” (Matt 27:24-25) when Pilate was actively seeking a way to release Jesus because he and his wife were persuaded that he was “innocent” (Matt 27:19, 24). All in all, Matthew’s Gospel would incline its readers to estimate that only 200 to 300 Jews were actively implicated in destroying Jesus.
With the passage of time, the recruitment of Jews into the Jesus Movement dried up. Gentiles who became Christians were prone to exaggerate Jewish guilt because they met more and more Jews who openly rejected Jesus as their Messiah. Meanwhile, following the destruction of the Temple (66-70 CE) and the utter failure of the Bar Kochba revolt (135 CE), Christian were prone to explain the enormous sufferings of the Jews as due to God’s intention to punish them for having killed Jesus. Thus, with time, the bloodguilt of the Jews was enlarged to include all Jews.
[ii] As the age of sixteen, I had been engaged in the study of religion for approximately 45 minutes on every school day for the past ten years of my life. When I think back upon these years, I remember that there was a lot of talk about Jews, both individually and collectively. I remember that references to Jews was almost entirely negative because, following the Gospel narratives, Jews were invariably presented as critical of Jesus and as actively working to harm him. I cannot remember any of my teachers reminding me that the Jewish crowds that heard Jesus overwhelmingly admired Jesus and that their public support prevented the chief priests and elders from taking decisive action to silence him (e.g., Matt 21:46).
None of my teachers ever told us stories of meeting and admiring any contemporary Jews who were working to create a better world. We heard about Catholic heroes such as Dr. Tom Dooley and Senator Joseph McCarthy. We heard about the stellar scientific achievements of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, but none of my teachers bothered to tell us that these two scientists were Jewish and that their participation in the Manhattan Project was inspired by their fear that Nazi Germany might succeed in creating a nuclear bomb first (URL=<https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-jewish-story-behind-christopher-nolans-oppenheimer-explained/>). So, yes, due to the anti-Jewish bias of my teachers, I was cautious, self-protective, and ashamed to tell any of them that I was trying to save my hero, Mr. Martin, from hellfire.
[iii] I remember that my religion teacher had taught me that, if Adam had not eaten the forbidden fruit that Eve had tasted, then he would have remained in the state of grace. Accordingly, all his children would have been born in the state of grace as well. This conclusion was derived from the faulty genetics of that period. The male deposited the “seed” (semen in Latin) into the fertile feminine womb. In this agricultural model of genetics, the “seed” of the man contributes everything while the female merely nourishes the “seed.” Thus, the offspring belong entirely to the man. Women who divorced walked away without any children. Then a totally surprising string of discoveries were made:
Once the offspring were perceived as the product of the sperm and ovum, one might think that ownership of children would immediately change. Not so. It took well over a hundred years for the cultural and legal norms to change such that, today, younger children are usually given to the mother during the divorce proceedings because mothers are usually more active and more responsible in nurturing preteen children. Did the teaching on the transmission of original sin change? To my best knowledge, no.
[v] This is the first instance that “some activity” is undertaken “in the name of Jesus.” Clearly Jesus is not here. Peter, however, judges that “the prophet” treated so badly would have authorized these baptisms “in his name.” This is fitting. The one injured by the Jews is now the one who authorizes baptisms of these Jews such that, due to their repentance, their sins against Jesus are forgiven. Notice that there is not the slightest hint that “the merits of the crucifixion are somehow needed for this act of repentance and forgiveness.”
[vi] Scholars and pastors have resorted to providing imaginative ways of relieving Peter of his bad judgment. Here are some illustrations:
It is probable some of those who had cried, Crucify him, crucify him, or who had been otherwise aiding and abetting [the chief priests and the elders] in the murder, were here present, and that Peter knew it. Be this as it may, it was justly looked upon as a national act, because done by the vote of the great council, and by the voice of the great crowd, clamoring for his blood. [Benson Commentary. URL=<https://biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/2-23.htm>]
The fact that St. Peter thus describes the Jewish people as the actual murderers of Jesus is not a proof that in such language we have an instance of anti-Judaism [that is] quite inconsistent with the historical truth. . . . [Expositor’s Greek Testament. URL=<https://biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/2-23.htm>]
By the hand of lawless men. “By the hand of” is the common Hebrew phrase בְיַר, by means of, through the agency of. The Jewish nation (ἄνδρες Ἰουδαῖοι) had crucified the Lord of glory by the hand of the heathen Romans. Acts 2:23 [Pulpit Commentary. URL=<https://biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/2-23.htm>]
Notice that the [Protestant] Pulpit Commentary says explicitly that the “Jewish nation (ἄνδρες Ἰουδαῖοι) had crucified the Lord.” In so doing, the Commentary overlooks the fact that the Synoptic Gospels limit their blood guilt to “the high priests and elders” who forced Pilate to crucify him. The Commentary also overlooks the fact that crucifixion is a Roman penalty. Had the chief priest found him guilty of blasphemy, the penalty would have been stoning.
[vii] Even the bloodguilt of Matthew only goes forward for one generation: “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matt 27:25). Nothing is said about “grandchildren.”
[viii] If I live long enough, I would like to spell this out in full detail on my website=<https://www.churchonfire.net> and to provide open space where you and other readers could narrate their own stories.
[ix] The Protestant Reformation changed the practice of the Church substantially; however, none of the reformers challenged Jewish “blood guilt.” Martin Luther, in his treatise “On the Jews,” engages in the same vehement hate speech that had been perfected by Catholics for over a thousand years. This is how “deep prejudices” work. At first, one learns how to hate from some parent or respected person. When hateful thoughts emerge spontaneously, then one can be sure that the learning phase has been successful. These spontaneous hateful thoughts lead to hateful speech. Finally, hateful speech erupts in hateful action.
This chain of causes and effects has nothing to do with the devil or with original sin. It is simply the natural way that we learn to protect ourselves from the dirty contagion carried by Jews. This same chain saves us from child molesters, from credit card frauds, from Covid contamination, from religious fanatics, etc. Go to my footnote that cites Albert Einstein to better discover how prejudices work.
[x] Fr. Eugene Fisher was appointed to his present post as Executive Secretary of the Secretariat for Catholic‑Jewish Relations of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) in May of 1977. He succeeded Father Edward H. Flannery, who had held the post since its establishment in 1968 as part of the NCCB Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. In 1981 Fisher was named Consulter to the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews. He is one of nine Consulters to the Vatican Commission worldwide. He is also a member of the International Catholic‑Jewish Liaison Committee representing the Holy See. His furtive attempt to calm the fear of Jews by explaining to them that no pope or council ever dogmatically defined “blood guild” was aptly responded to by the Jewish scholar Emil Fackenheim.
[xi] Here is a case of a Saint that devoted himself to converting Jews by making their lives miserable:
St. Vincent Ferrer, Dominican, miracle-worker, an excellent preacher, [was] totally dedicated to the conversion of the Jews. Throughout Castile and Aragon, he passed from synagogue to synagogue, the Torah in one hand, the crucifix in the other and a band of devout [flagellants] at his heals. . . . He is credited with 35,000 baptisms of Jews between 1411 and 1412. When he failed to persuade he was severe and is believed to have inspired the first compulsory Spanish ghettoes and the oppressive legislation of 1414 that narrowly circumscribed Jewish social activities (E.H Flannery: 1985, p. 134).
He cast himself as a simple pilgrim, walking barefoot or astride a humble ass. As he approached town, a long procession of flagellants drew up, their groans ascending: ‘Have pity!, Have pity!’ Marching feet and the crack of whips on blood-soaked backs set arhythmic beat. The escort did penance, while Ferrer rode or walked at the head of this fearsome procession to symbolize his imitation of Christ. He would have a huge wooden cross just behind him; cross and preacher were the first to enter town (C.M. Losata: 2015, 205).
Preaching generally took place in the open air, as few churches could hold all who came to hear. The preacher stood on a purpose-built stage, with the whole town, from dignitaries down to peasants watching – not omitting the Moors [Muslims] and Jews coerced [to be present] for their instruction. Spain often compelled Jews to witness Christian preaching. But Ferrer, more than once, threatened the authorities, who were happy to comply, obliging Jews to attend and laying heavy fines or prison if they failed to come (CM.. Losata: 2015, 206).
[xii] For a very readable overview of how Jews have been despised as “Christ killers,” read E.H. Flannery, Anguish of the Jews. See also n. 13.
[xiii] After vigorous debates and a multitude of revisions, the assembled bishops of Vatican II overwhelmingly voted on 28 October 1965, with 2221 votes in favor and 88 against, to implement the changes defined in Nostra Aetate [English title =Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions.
Unwed mothers allowed to take Communion, Vatican insists The Vatican’s doctrinal office reminds “rigorist” priests and other Catholics that unwed mothers are permitted to receive the sacraments and their children can be baptized By Loup Besmond de Senneville | Vatican City Published in La Croix International, 15 December 2023
The Vatican’s doctrinal office has issued a new statement to remind “rigorist” Catholics of Pope Francis’ insistence that women who have had children out of wedlock can and should be allowed to receive Holy Communion.
“Pastoral work should be done in the local Church to make people understand that being a single mother does not prevent that person from accessing the Eucharist,” says Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), in a letter to a bishop in the Dominican Republic that was made public on Thursday.
The bishop expressed concern over single mothers who “abstain from communion out of fear of the rigorism of the clergy and community leaders”, the cardinal re-states at the beginning of his letter.
“It is noted that in some countries, both priests and some lay people prevent mothers who have had a child outside of marriage from accessing…
Read more at: https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/unwed-mothers-allowed-to-take-communion-vatican-insists/18868
On 14 January 2022, Thomas J. Olmsted, Bishop of Phoenix, alerted all the faithful regarding a matter of grave importance. In his own words:
“It is with sincere pastoral concern that I inform the faithful that baptisms performed by Reverend Arango, a priest of the Diocese of Phoenix, are invalid. This determination was made after careful study by diocesan officials and through consultation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [abbr: CDF] in Rome.”
Father Arango acknowledged to his bishop that, for the past fifteen years, he had been performing baptisms in four different parishes using the words, “We baptize you in the name of the Father. . . .” Since the official rites of the Roman Catholic Church indicate that baptism is administered using the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” Bishop Olmsted judged that the use of “we” instead of “I” had the effect of invalidating thousands of baptisms.
Are we really obliged to believe that all of Father Arango’s baptisms were invalid? Bishop Olmsted says,
“Unfortunately, we have no choice but to repair the mess made by Father Arango.”
The CDF, in an official ruling, agreed with the Bishop, “Without the right words, the Sacrament is invalid.”
Let’s step back for a moment and examine this case more closely:
#1 BIBLICAL CONSIDERATIONS
In the Acts of the Apostles, thousands of baptisms are described. At no time does the sacred text indicate what words (if any) were used to administer the rite. Must we then doubt the validity of these baptisms (as the CDF proposes)? Hardly. At this historic time, baptism was being administered by immersion in water. The repeated use of the Greek term, βαπτίζειν (baptizein), means “to immerse in water.” The only requirement for baptism was the conversion of heart. In a typical case Peter says: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38, 8:16, 10:48, 19:5; 1 Cor 1:13; Gal 3:27).
Matthew alone reads, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (28:19). Vööbus points out, however, that Eusebius (d. 340) cites the great commission of Matthew more than two dozen times as “teach all nations in my name” (1968:36). It is quite probable, consequently, that Eusebius’ text of Matthew’s Gospel did not have a trinitarian formula and that this was later edited into copies of Matthew’s Gospel. All in all, most scholars are in agreement that baptism “in the name of Jesus” was the earliest norm and that this norm gradually shifted toward baptism “in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (Did 7:3) in the early second century.
Moreover, theologians generally agree that Matt 28:19 gives us a rubric without in any way implying that these are “the words that must be recited to make the immersion a valid baptism.” No one in this period imagined that, at every baptism, divine grace does not flow unless “the required words” were said. The judgment of the CDF, “Without the right words, the Sacrament is invalid,” is thus a ruling that finds no foundation whatsoever within early church practice. [For more details, click here.]
“The servant of God, [insert name], is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The Eastern Churches acknowledge the validity of Roman Catholic baptisms even though they do not require full immersion or their normative words. Roman Catholics likewise acknowledges the baptismal traditions of the Eastern Churches. These accords recognized that there is essentially only “one baptism” even while there is a “legitimate diversity” in how these baptisms are administered. Is the CDF aware that insistance upon one form of baptism might effectively undercuts the “mutual recognitions” made with the Eastern Churches? [Click here for more details.]
#3 LINGUISTIC CONSIDERATIONS
Dr. Vincent Ryan Ruggiero makes this linguistic observation:
The plural form “we” includes the singular “I”; in fact, it is impossible to use “we” in a way that excludes “I.”
If Bishop Olmsted had known this, would he have pounced upon Fr. Arango the way he did? Did Bishop Olmsted destroy the reputation of Fr. Arango unjustly? Did he grievously error in making a mountain out of a molehill? Yes and yes.
Judith Hann assists us here in making a careful study of how Thomas Aquinas regards situations in which the minister uses alternate words. This study was published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical Law Society in 2021. Without going into the details, here are the conclusions that Hann brings to us:
Aquinas . . . does not adhere to a radical literalism with regard to sacramental formulas. Instead he refers to the intention [of the minister] to do what the Church does and to the meaningfulness of the sacramental act for those who participate in it. In doing so, he proves that his understanding of sacramental speech is less that of spells with a magical automatism and more that of communication. Understanding sacramental speech as communication, as acts of conveying sacramental meaning to the community, demands a greater tolerance with regard to wording. (Source)
What does this say regarding the “radical literalism” being proposed by the CDF? Two points: (1) The CDF judged the minister using “We beptize you . . .” too harshly. These words, in and of themselves, do not clearly reveal an intention to deviate from what the Church intends by the rite; and (2) The CDF appeals to Aquinas, but, in so doing, the CDF mistakenly assumes that Aquinas affirms the “radical literalism” that the CDF wants to impose on all ministers of baptism.
#4 ECCLESIA SUPPLET
When I was taking my first course on the Sacraments some sixty years ago, it was pointed out that the “intention” of the minister decides the outcome. Thus, if in case of an emergency, a young mother baptizes her infant son who has turned blue and has stopped breathing, and she uses the words, “I baptize you in the name of God and of Jesus,” this suffices as a valid baptism. How so? Because she intends to do what the Church has done, namely, to baptize her son. The Church tacitly supplies what is missing. This principle is called Ecclesia supplet, which in Latin means “the Church supplies.” If Bishop Olmsted had remembered his first course in Sacraments, might he not have used this principle to dispel any fear that the case of Fr. Arango involved any invalid baptisms. Bishop Olmsted declares,
“I do not believe Fr. Andres [Arango] had any intentions to harm the faithful or deprive them of the grace of baptism and the sacraments.”
That’s all that is needed. Ecclesia supplet. All of the baptisms of Fr. Arango are valid. There is no mess to clean up. That’s the good news for everyone involved! But the Bishop is unable to see this.
#5 PASTORAL CONSIDERATIONS
As things now stand, a grave danger is about to erupt. An overly zealous and marginally incompetent bishop has set the wheels going in the direction of finding those who are the victims of “invalid baptisms” and making arrangements to have them repeat their baptism. Then they will, in most instances, have to repeat their confirmations and marriages as well. At this point, only one priest has his reputation ruined. I would estimate that once Catholics come to understand that they too might be invalidly baptized, then more priests will be called on the carpet. More reputations will be shattered. Meanwhile, overworked priests will be required to give time and attention to thousands of Catholics who fear that their baptisms were invalid. Many more thousands will come forward and ask to be conditionally rebaptized “in order to give themselves peace of mind that their spiritual welfare is secure.”
Meanwhile, Fr. Matthew Hood in the Archdiocese of Detroit has admitted that he discovered, upon seeing a family video of his baptism, that his own baptism was invalid. So he was rebaptized, reconfirmed, reordained. Now he is anxious because he is aware of the fact that he administered hundreds of Sacraments without recognizing that most of them were “invalid” because he himself was “invalidly” ordained to begin with. Yipes! So here is another overly zealous and marginally incompetent priest who is spreading uncertainty and fear. How many more will come after him? [Click here for further details and discussion regarding Fr. Hood.]
Parce Domine! [Spare us, O Lord!] Someone in authority needs to come forward soon and expose the false judgment of the CDF and the incompetent pastoral solution championed by Bishop Olmsted. The faithful need to be reeducated as to why ALL THEIR BAPTISMS WERE VALID ALL ALONG. Fr. Arango can then be reinstated. He can undertake the new task of wiping away the tears of all those Catholics who were horrified by the false alarm and the sleepless nights. The mountain can finally be seen again as just a molehill.
Review of TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CHURCH REFORM: Memoirs of a Catholic Priest, by John Wijngaards (Acadian House Publishing: Lafayette, Louisiana USA, 2022) 261 pp. with an index, hardcover $22.95
John Wijngaards has written his memoirs detailing how he was brought to the position where “in conscience” he could no longer function as a priest within the Roman Catholic Church. His book is entitled, Ten Commandments for Church Reform (Acadian House, 2021). This title is misleading. His subtitle, Memoirs of a Catholic Priest, gets closer to describing his content. Had I been his publisher, I would have suggested, Memoirs of a Catholic PriestBent Upon Reforming his Church.
I find a strong affinity with Wijngaards. We are roughly the same age. We both grew up in a pious Catholic family. We were both immersed in Catholic devotions. Reflecting on this early period in his life, Wijngaards writes, “Looking back at that time, I now recognize an element of unreality in my obsessive devotion [to Jesus]” (p. 47). I would say the same thing, but, for me, it was “my obsessive devotion to Mary.” The “unreality” in my own devotions consisted in my adamant conviction that my daily rosaries formed the “essential spiritual warfare” enabled the Blessed Virgin Mary to bring about the conversion of Russia. Wijngaards says, “I had fallen in love with a phantom Jesus”—a Jesus who wanted me “to be wary of woman” as a danger to my spiritual life. Here, too, this has a resonance in my own early spirituality.
As a result, Wijngaards joined the Mill Hill Missionaries. He completed his high school and college years in Mill Hill institutions. Then, his superiors sent him to the Gregorian University in Rome to get a doctoral degree in Sacred Scripture. My guess is that, as his studies of the Gospels began, the “phantom Jesus” of his devotional period was replaced by the Jesus of the Gospels. Then he was ordained and sent to Hyderabad, India, where he taught Scriptural Studies to future Indian priests, 1964-1976. These were exciting times to be a priest. In 1962-1965, Vatican II had provided Catholics with an upbeat plan for reorienting religious and priestly life. Religious vocations abounded everywhere.
It is significant, for me, that Wijngaards founded a formation center for Religious Sisters precisely because these women were routinely sent out to do pastoral work without having any substantial theological training. Here I notice quite clearly that Wijngaards took measures to uplift the women in the Church of India who were prized for their unpaid labor, their humility, and their submissiveness. This was not an assignment given to him. John Wijngaards was clearly not a “yes” man waiting for someone to tell him what to do–when he saw something that was not quite right, he stepped up to the plate and began to do something by way of correcting it. He exhibited a “can-do attitude.” What I find significant is that, right from the very start, he exercised his talents in favor of women.
In the ten years following Vatican II, women were entering into all the professions that had been formerly been reserved exclusively for men. The Women’s Rights Movement, meanwhile, was dedicated to securing for women equal access to education and employment, equality within marriage–married woman were given the right to own property, to have bank accounts, to receive wages, to have custody over her children and control over her own body. The Society of Biblical Literature was 98% male in the early 1960s. Year by year, this Society saw a growing influx of female theologians. Meanwhile, Catholic Colleges and University began hiring qualified female theologians. For a number of years, the chances of being hired by a Catholic institution was decidedly higher if you were a woman. By the 90s, nearly 40% of the members of the Society of Biblical Literature were female.
During these same years, Wijngaards offers his readers (p. 121-126) a full-blown analysis of how, in Holland, Paul VI appointed bishops with the deliberate purpose of destroying the harmony and collaboration between the Dutch bishops. In 1972, Fr. Joannes Gijsen was named bishop of Roermond. In so doing, the pope entirely bypassed the honored Dutch tradition whereby episcopal candidates were drawn from a list generated by a diocesan synod. Cardinal Alfrink, Archbishop of Utrect, went to Rome to contest this “disregard” for a long-standing nomination procedure, but without success. Fr. Gijsen had the reputation of having “a negative and destructive personality,” and, in quick order, he undid all the Vatican II reforms that had been joyfully and painstakingly embraced by the vast majority of Dutch Catholics in his diocese. In addition, he created his own seminary since he did not trust the formation in the common seminary to be sufficiently orthodox. Wijngaards tells his readers: “The reaction to his appointment was one of outrage” (p. 122).
Wijngaards gives a hint of his future decision to resign from the ministry half-way through the book. He reports on a radio interview given by Bishop Simonis (another bad appointment by Paul VI). The bishop was asked how he understands the CDF’s rejection of women to holy orders. His response: “Men are active, [they] are leaders by nature. Women are passive.”
“How do you know this,” the interviewer prodded him.
“Well,” he said. “Look at what happens right at conception. The female ovum is lying passively in the womb, the male sperm fights its way in and captures the ovum with a sting” (p. 123).
Besides his dubious portrait of the biology of conception, Simonis uses this mental picture to justify his bold generalization that “men are active by nature; women are passive.” Clearly anyone who would say something like this has had little or no experience of a fierce women like Wijngaards’s mother. Nor, for that matter, can we really believe that Simonis never met any “passive men.” Not even the CDF would try to get away with this sort of shoddy thinking. The bishop’s prejudice against women was showing through. No doubt about it.
For Wijngaards, the 1995 attempt by John Paul II and Ratzinger to make the ban against women appear to be “infallible” was the final straw that broke his resolve to continue his official ministry. Wijngaards specifically details how John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger–by permanently denying the priesthood to women–delivered a crushing blow. As Housetop in London and even in the missionary field in India, Wijngaards was accustomed to working with women who were outstanding and competent. Anyone who reads the opening chapters of his book will notice also that his own mother was a fierce tigress when it came time to keep her family together and alive during the period when they were sequestered in detention camps by the Japanese. In an era where humility and subservience were routinely prized as the virtues of women, Wijngaards was rescued from the jaws of death by a woman ready to face down ruthless soldiers who were accustomed to using acts of cruelty to intimidate the vast numbers of prisoners that were under their supervision.
Wijngaards was especially creative and visionary in the missionary field of India where he spent the better part of fourteen years. Even after Ivan Illich (p. 115) wrote his stunning report on the failure of European priests to step aside and to give native-born priests the full responsibility for the missionary outreach in their own countries, Wijngaards immediately recognized the appropriateness of this appeal, and he began to take steps to implement the very measures that would render his own religious order as “no longer needed.” From my reading of Wijngaards’ narrative, however, I would judge that this had little or nothing to do with his leaving the priesthood.
Wijngaards himself omits this when he announced his resignation in 1998. At that point, he fingers exclusively his “conflict of conscience” as necessitating his leaving. Here are his words:
Since I perceive Rome’s ban on women’s ordination (a) as not legitimately founded on Scripture or Tradition, (b) [as] not arrived at after proper consultation of the Church, (c) [as] harmful to ecumenism, and (d) [as] highly injurious to the spiritual wellbeing of the faithful, I feel bound in conscience to continue voicing my sincere opposition. . . . Moreover, (e) I want to stand on the side of those men and women who are so casually and unjustly dismissed by the Vatican. It is only by distancing myself now from the institutional Church that I can extract myself from the guilt of taking part in the conspiracy of silence.
Notice here how Wijngaards lists the four defects of Rome’s ban on ordination. (a) and (b) deal with the failure of the CDF in doing its homework. (c) and (d) name the chief harmful consequences. (e) appears as an afterthought but, in reality, it is the “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise” statement of Martin Luther when he was asked to recant his positions. Wijngaards puts emphasis upon the “conspiracy of silence” of bishops, theologians, priests at all levels who, instead of speaking out forcefully, have retired in silence thereby deceiving the faithful and leaving the prophets to take on the brutal and inhumane treatment of the CDF alone. This last item is extraordinary. Wijngaards is challenging the “guilty bystanders.” Do recall that John Wijngaards was never interrogated by the CDF regarding his writings. Nor was he ever silenced and prevented from teaching or publishing on the “hot button” topics that were being defined by Rome. It would have been very easy for him to join the “guilty bystanders” who tacitly enabled the tyranny of the CDF, but he did not.
Wijngaards makes clear that his leaving ministry within his Church was a manifest protest against the “conspiracy of silence.” This leaving, however, did not diminish his priestly mission as he saw it: “Christ wanted me to continue as a priest for those who sought my help and as a prophetic teacher in a Church so badly in need of reform” (p. 229). Wijngaards discovered that the professional team working with Housetop Ministries (his innovative catechetical works) wanted to follow his prophetic move by creating world-wide resources whereby the issue of women’s ordination would be thoroughly researched and discussed [URL = http://womenpriests.org]. Thus, the past twenty-four years have been filled with his continued ministry on behalf of women.
If you go to HypeStat.com, you will discover that http://womenpriests.org has an average of 435 unique daily visitors and 1131 daily page views. Quite clearly, http://womenpriests.org is a resource center to be reckoned with. In the past eight years, Housetop evolved into the world-renowned Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research which coordinates leading academics to publish research projects on issues facing the international Catholic community.
For anyone who believes that the Roman Catholic Church has a future in God’s divine plan, I would strongly recommend John Wijngaards’ Memoirs. For anyone who thinks that John Wijngaards choices are driven by pride or by the promptings of Satan, his Memoirs have much to offer you as well. It is a positive sign that the Mission Hill Fathers published a strongly supportive review on their official website. His hardback book can be purchased for $23 directly from Acadian House Publishing. For a $10 Amazon Kindle version, click here. For a review by Fr. Flannery, click here.
The Sins of Abusive Dishonesty within the Catholic Hierarchy–Five Case Studies
by Aaron Milavec
Case One: Dishonesty regarding Martin Luther
Case Two: Dishonesty Regarding Priestly Celibacy
Case Three: Dishonesty Regarding the Pill
Case Four: Dishonest Advertising in favor of NFP
Case Five: Dishonesty Regarding Gay Sexuality
The Catholic hierarchy has a long history of dishonesty hidden in the dark corners of official Catholic moral teachings. This is especially true in the domain of sexual ethics. Again and again, decisions have been made by the highest authorities in the Church on the basis of an ideologically driven agenda that makes use of shoddy biblical scholarship and false notions of church history.
Once made, these decisions are imposed from the top down. The Catholic hierarchy has no vested interest in feedback loops. No one is responsible for measuring the impact of any given legislation. Moreover, there is no systemic apparatus whereby the suffering imposed by compliance with a piece of legislation could be taken into account and used intelligently by way of reformulating the original decision so as to reduce “unnecessary suffering.” Generally, in the face of any opposition, the Catholic hierarchy responds by assuring themselves that the original decision was rock solid and that the suffering associated with implementing seemingly-bad decisions serves as an opportunity to embrace humility and “take up your cross and follow Jesus.”
Case One: Dishonesty regarding Martin Luther
With the declaration of papal infallibility during Vatican I in 1870, many in the Catholic Church thought that there would be no reason to ever again have an ecumenical council since, when it came to deciding what God wanted us to believe and to do, the pope alone was preserved, thanks to the Holy Spirit, from error.
The truth surrounding papal infallibility is much more complex. In the early church, no one ever imagined that Peter was somehow exalted above all the other apostles and that he and his successors, the bishops of Rome, were the divinely ordained managers and decision makers for the universal church. Pope John XXIII himself had no delusions on this point. He deliberately reeducated a group of seminarians by declaring, “I am not infallible.” He knew that there were deep flaws within the Roman Catholic system of governance, but he also knew that he was no match for the deeply entrenched Cardinal Ottaviani, the head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, who was hell-bent upon keeping everything in place. So, Pope John XXIII convoked Vatican II. . . .
Protestants, in contrast, believed that no one in the Church was beyond the pale of self-deception and that even the pope was capable of committing errors of judgment and of promoting false notions of what we must do to be saved. And when Protestants want to think of how far from the way of Jesus the pope could take us, they had only to recall the papal decrees that enabled the Friar Johann Tetzel in Germany to collect huge sums of money directed toward the completion of the rebuilding of the church of St Peter’s in Rome. In exchange for their efforts, the pope allowed that the local bishop and Friar Tetzel would receive a handsome collector’s fee. And, to sweeten the deal for their German benefactors, donors were issued a “plenary indulgence” with a papal seal that guaranteed that, should the donor die that very day, his/her soul would bypass Purgatory and immediately be welcomed by St. Peter into the company of the Saints in heaven.
Fr Martin Luther objected to this sale of papal indulgences. He did not want to believe that the rich who could afford to pay for such indulgences were somehow able to bypass doing the fasting and prolonged prayers that served to wipe away the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven in confession. Friar Johann Tetzel, being a fair-minded collector, responded by adjusting the price for a plenary indulgence in accordance with one’s personal income. Nor did Martin Luther want to believe that well-disposed Catholics could purchase a plenary indulgence and then to apply it, not to themselves, but to some beloved father or aunt who neglected fasting and other penances during their lifetime and were destined to spend a prolonged period suffering in the fires of Purgatory. Friar Tetzel, of course, insisted that the pope had the right, as the Vicar of Christ on earth, to apply the treasury of merits accumulated by Jesus and the saints to anyone he deemed worthy. And who would be more worthy than those who contributed to the building of the greatest church on earth, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome?
Rome, in the end, tried Luther in absentia and proclaimed his teachings as filled with heresies that endangered the eternal welfare of anyone giving heed to his voice and following his example. Support for the building of St. Peter’s Basilica languished and entirely dried up in some parts of Germany while, in other parts, the sale of indulgences reached new highs. In these areas, the authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth invariably becomes even more absolute. In simple laymen’s terms: ‘The Son of God gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. He gave no keys whatsoever to that heretic Martin Luther.’
What can one learn from this period of history?
That the papacy has sometimes forced its own parochial interests on the faithful and ruthlessly harassed those who would dare to address their pastoral concerns to those holding papal power.
That the Reformation churches received the benefit of many of the Vatican II reforms four hundred years before Roman Catholics were able to do so.[i]
That Roman Catholic historians and theologians were constrained to vilify Luther and to justify the papal indulgences for over four hundred years. No biography of Luther was permitted to be read by Catholics that had any good things to say about Luther or any bad things to say about Pope Leo X.[ii]
Case Two: Dishonesty Regarding Priestly Celibacy
Paul VI, during the final meeting of Vatican II in 1965, made an extraordinary intervention to forbid any discussion of the rule of priestly celibacy since he had elected to study this issue himself. Accordingly, on 24 June 1967, Paul VI published an encyclical on priestly celibacy known as Sacerdotalis Caelibatus.
Explaining how he arrived at his decision, Paul VI wrote: “We have, over a considerable period of time earnestly implored the enlightenment and assistance of the Holy Spirit and have examined before God opinions and petitions which have come to us from all over the world, notably from many pastors of God’s Church” (sec. 1). To his credit, Paul VI acknowledges having received and prayerfully considered opinions and petitions coming from pastors.[iii] To his discredit, Paul VI failed to consult the bishops by letter. He similarly refused to open this delicate pastoral issue up at both the Vatican Council II and at the tri-annual Synod of Bishops in Rome. Paul VI effectively bypassed the principle of collegiality affirmed at Vatican II and, in its place, he imposed a treatise of his own choosing/making.
To his credit, he did not evoke papal infallibility by way of enforcing this decree. At times he even hinted that Humanae Vitae was only a position paper intended to evoke free and open discussion. At no time did he imply that “the assistance of the Holy Spirit” was given to him alone. Nonetheless, one finds dozens of online Catholic websites that claim that Humanae Vitae constitutes an infallible and irreversible teaching. [Hint: Do a google search using “Humanae Vitae was an infallible teaching” to discover for yourself how hotly contentious this issue is to this very day.]
History Regarding the Origins of Priestly Celibacy
Every informed pastor (the Pope included) knows that celibacy was not universally imposed upon the clergy until the Middle Ages, but only very few are aware of the bloody history whereby the papal attacks on clerical marriage were resisted for many generations by pastors and their wives. The origins of clerical celibacy emerged as an unexpected byproduct when eleventh century church reformers tried to deal with problems surrounding the inheritance of properties and of offices by the legitimate sons of clergymen. Reforming popes initially tackled this problem by reducing the number of “sons” fathered by priests. Priests and their wives were initially required to sleep in separate beds. When this approach failed, their wives were required to live in separate houses. Fines were imposed. Priests living with their wives were suspended. Bishops bent upon making pastoral visitations and forcibly separating priests from their lawfully wedded wives were often bombarded by angry parishioners throwing rotten fruit. Wives who became pregnant were to be publicly shunned and, in some instances, priests wanting to advance their careers were forced to abandon their wives and children.
The bishops gathered at the Second Lateran Council (1139 CE) were so frustrated by their inability to impose compliance to earlier legislation that they went so far as to declare all sacramental marriages of priests “null and void.” The Council decreed “that marriages already contracted by such persons [priests] must be dissolved, and that the persons [both husbands and their wives] be condemned to do penance.”
In a Church that was endeavoring to sustain the notion that no sacramental marriage could ever be dissolved by anything less than death of one of the spouses, the First Lateran Council’s open hostility toward the sacramental marriages of priests was a shocking (and many would say “ungodly”) departure from its own theology of the indissolubility of the marriage bond.
There followed three centuries where discovering secret mistresses and identifying illegitimate children became the ongoing concern of most bishops. Only when the laity was finally persuaded to boycott the altars of priests “living in sin” and only when the bishops demanded a permanent vow of celibacy prior to ordination did the campaign for clerical “chastity” finally take hold.
All in all, the whole bloody mess surrounding the imposition of celibacy did not approach anywhere near a universal adherence until the seminary system was instituted following the Council of Trent. In the new seminaries, the sexuality of young boys could be closely monitored and their youthful characters could be informed (some would say traumatized) with a morbid fear of having any contact whatsoever with women outside of the confessional.
This opened up the floodgates for developing novel theologies calculated to foster clerical “virginity.” Gifted preachers promoted this message: “That a priest’s hands ought to be entirely virginal since only then can they worthily touch the body of Christ [at the words of consecration] just as did the Virgin Mary [after Jesus was born in the stable].” It was due to such pietistic theologies during the 17th and 18th centuries that Paul VI was able to invent his own notion of celibacy as recorded in Sacerdotalis Caelibatus.
What Paul VI did not want to tell us about celibacy
Needless to say, Paul VI, in his encyclical, tells us nothing of the pain, anguish, and understandable resistance to imposed celibacy that marked the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. In its place, Paul VI gives us an alternative pietistic story of the origins of priestly celibacy. Paul VI begins with his mistaken impression that Jesus himself freely chose celibacy as an essential character of his own service of his Father when he declared that “there are eunuchs [like myself] who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 19:12).[iv] Paul VI then wants to give us the impression that the link between celibacy and priesthood that Jesus took as his own orientation gradually grew within the church, and, after many generations, priests voluntarily accepted celibacy as an imitation of what Jesus had done. Furthermore, Paul IV points out that Jesus saw his celibacy as an eschatological sign of the life that everyone would one day enjoy in heaven for “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mt 22:30). The celibacy of the priest, consequently, was heralded in Sacerdotalis Caelibatus as the proleptic “presence on earth of the final stages of salvation.” [v]
The question that needs to be posed here is whether Paul VI was blissfully ignorant of the understandable resistance to imposed celibacy that marked the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. If he was, then we might want to excuse him for telling us a pious fable of how priestly celibacy emerged triumphant because priests wanted to imitate Jesus, their high priest. But isn’t there something that Paul VI fails to acknowledge? Here are some thoughts that Paul VI leaves out of his encyclical:
According to the Gospels, Jesus never mentions celibacy when he chooses any of his disciples. Peter, who is clearly recognized as a married man, receives no admonition to separate himself from his wife.
Paul, it would be remembered, prizes his own celibacy, but at no time does he state or imply that this brings him closer to Jesus or that this is part of his “priestly” calling. On a pragmatic level, Paul was able to move around freely because he had no family. Thus, he recommends celibacy for all Christians because this would give them greater freedom to love God without being distracted and held back by a spouse.
The Letter to the Hebrews is the only place in the NT where Jesus is identified as a high priest. According to this text, however, Jesus practices a new kind of priest who offers a new kind of sacrifice: “Behold, I have come to do your will, O Lord.” At no time is celibacy mentioned.
When it comes time to appoint bishops, “Paul” in 1 Tim 3:2 says that “a bishop must be above reproach, married only once [a one-woman man]” and, in Tit 1:7, we read that a presbyter should also be “someone who is blameless, married only once, whose children are believers.”
Instead of promoting celibacy, therefore, the late apostolic tradition clearly moves in the opposite direction by requiring that bishops and presbyters have a wife and children. Why so? For this reason: “For if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he be expected to take care of God’s church?” (1 Tim 3:5).
The embarrassing fact is that Sacerdotalis Caelibatus is entirely silent regarding the above evidence against priestly celibacy found in the Gospels and the letters of Paul. Does this mean that Paul VI failed to notice these things in the sacred Scriptures? Or, did he notice these things but deliberately omitted to mention them because they threatened to collapse his argument in favor of priestly celibacy? If Paul VI failed to notice these things, then his competence as a biblical scholar has to be questioned. If Paul VI noticed these things but deliberately wanted us not to notice them, then his honesty as a scholar and teacher has to be questioned.[vi]
In sum, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus is tainted with biblical inadequacies and gross deceptions.
The falsification of the origins of priestly celibacy
Likewise, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus gives us inaccurate perceptions of church history. Priests loved their wives and their marriages were held in honor until the 11th century when the bishops decided to systematically undercut both of these values. This is not a pretty picture. But it is an essential chapter in the origins of priestly celibacy.
Why did biblical scholars and church historians not object to Sacerdotalis Caelibatus during the past fifty years? Did they fail to notice the deficiencies? If so, they were plagued with the same incompetence as Paul VI. The more probable explanation is that they knew very well just how flawed Sacerdotalis Caelibatus was but were afraid to speak their minds because they were afraid to speak their truth to power. A few did speak out and did publish their findings. Edward Schillbeeckx, Clerical Celibacy Under Fire (1968) and Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000) & Why Priests?: A FailedTradition (2013) are two brave and noteworthy exceptions.
How Sex Is Understood Differently Today
In developed countries, the negative stigma attached to sexuality even in the case of marriage has been largely dissipated. Sex is no longer registered as surrender to concupiscence or as an impediment to holiness but is widely seen as a sign and seal of love. Men no longer use their wives to relieve their sexual urges and to produce their children; rather, the act of sexual union is now commonly referred to as “love making.” As such, love making is a sacramental sign that communicates and celebrates the intimacy, transparency, and mutual self-surrender between two persons.
Thus, among my seminary students, many of them confided to me that they experienced an acute personal struggle between their calling to priesthood and their calling to intimacy. “What kind of God,” one seminarian asked, “would call me to be a celibate priest while confounding me with an equally strong calling to be a loving husband and father?” This is the question that Paul VI did not know how to handle. This is the question that most bishops today cannot begin to an answer.
Archbishop Pilarczyk, speaking at an ordination, said that it was unthinkable to imagine that God was not calling sufficient men to supply the church with all the ordained ministers its needs. “The problem is with those who receive this call. In today’s culture, young men are selfish; hence, they are unwilling, like the rich young man, to give away their riches so as to follow Jesus.”
There is some truth in what my Archbishop told me, but his small truth should not be used to cover up a greater truth, namely, that celibacy can no longer be seen as a necessary step for anyone who wants to love and to serve God with his whole heart. Just the opposite. Only someone who is in love with life, with women, and with children can be expected to know the love of “our Father who is in heaven.” Intimacy, self-examination, and self-improvement can be achieved today more easily and more naturally by the self-surrender of a man to a woman.[vii] The joys of sex are not meant to be stifled or postponed; rather, they are meant to be expressed and enjoyed and amplified in the blessed freedom and dignity that two committed lovers offer to each other.
I myself tried celibacy for fifteen years. I allowed myself to believe all the pietistic theology that named this as “a higher calling.” But, in the end, the hunger for intimacy won my heart. And, because of this, I said to my friends, “God called me to surrender my sexuality in religious life, and the same God later called me to follow my yearning for intimacy outside of religious life.”
Knowing this reveals to me a secret that is concealed from Archbishop Pilarczyk. Intimacy is “the higher calling” which more strongly attracts sensitive young men who, in the last generation, would have chosen celibacy. Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, unfortunately was totally unable to answer the central question of my seminarian: “What kind of God would call me to be a celibate priest while confounding me with an equally strong calling to be a loving husband and father?” The true answer, as I see it, is that it is not God who requires celibacy of the priest; rather, it is those bishops who, due to their lack of vision and the lack of empathy[viii], prefer to follow the dishonest scholarship of Paul VI rather than to bring the church back to its foundational practice during the first ten centuries.
Read the tirade at the end of Sacerdotalis Caelibatus where Paul VI coldly brands those priests who sent in their letters asking to be dispensed from celibacy as “traitors” to God and to the Church. He challenges these “unfaithful” priests to pray without ceasing that God might rekindle their love of chastity. It never occurs to Paul VI that their appeals might be the urgent voice of God calling to Paul VI to end their suffering by allowing at least some worthy priests to marry.
With the renewal of the Church following Vatican II, tens of thousands of priests had anticipated a relaxation of the rule of celibacy.[ix] The adamant position taken by Paul VI in his encyclical, however, killed any hope for compassionate change. Many Spirit-filled priests, facing a crisis of conscience between their call to ministry and their call to marriage,[x] decided to apply for laicization because there was no other option open to them. All told, 200,000 priests worldwide left their ministry over a period of ten years in order to marry. Had Paul VI relented, we would have easily moved into having married and unmarried clergy living and working side-by-side. But Paul VI killed this prospect. As a result, those who stayed called for more collegiality and more discussion on this matter. In 1970, nine German theologians, including Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), signed a letter publically calling for a fresh discussion of the rule of celibacy.
In 1971, an open discussion on obligatory priestly celibacy spontaneously erupted during the Synod of Bishops that was devoted to the growing problems confronting priests. After days of deliberation, a vote was taken on a proposal for ordaining married men “if the needs of the faithful warranted it and the pope approved.” The proposal was defeated by a vote of 107 to 87. If the curial bishops had been removed from the voting, then the vote of the bishops-pastors would have carried the day. Nonetheless, when Paul VI closed the Synod, he said to those assembled, “From your discussions, it emerges that the bishops from the entire Catholic world want to keep integrally this absolute gift [of celibacy] by which the priest consecrates himself to God.” This, of course, was not quite the truth. He should have said, “From your discussions, it emerges that more than half of the bishops from the entire Catholic world favor returning to the earlier practice of ordaining married men while the curial bishops here in the Vatican are almost unanimously opposed to this course of action.” Here again one can gauge how Paul VI manipulated the results of the Synod in order to maintain the illusion that clerical celibacy was universally approved by bishops worldwide. Here again dishonesty and authoritarianism prevailed.
When ministers within Anglican and Lutheran denominations were welcomed into the Catholic communion, it was particularly difficult for long-suffering priests to notice how easily Rome was able to relax the rule of celibacy for these Protestant pastors who were escaping churches that endorsed the ordination of women. I have frequently heard bitterness expressed by older priests on this matter. “The Pope spits on our long-suffering appeals to allow some of us to marry. But then these Protestants arrive, and immediately they are ordained as priests while keeping their wives.” Another priest noted, “Look how easy it would be for Rome to bend the rules and to introduce married priests into our parishes.” This caused and continues to cause an enormous amount of personal suffering[xi] for priests and for those who are close to them. The bishop who said, “I doubt whether the Lord would be pleased with our loneliness,” may have been saying what so many others knew in their heart but were afraid to reveal.
Case Three: Dishonesty Regarding the Pill
The birth control pill was first released in 1960. Initially no one could say for sure whether Catholic couples could use the pill by way of deciding when they wanted to conceive and when they wanted to prevent conception. Catholics had already become familiar with the menstrual cycle and they were aware that there was a period of five to eight days in the middle of each cycle when the body of the woman was naturally fertile. Outside of these times, the woman was infertile and sexual coupling never resulted in fertilizing an egg.
The birth control pill was “natural” in so far as it adjusted the hormonal levels in the woman’s body so as to produce conditions in her body that mimic the situation when the woman is naturally infertile.[xii] For eight years, Catholics unsure about the morality of the birth control pill consulted with their priests in the confessional.[xiii] Many priests gave them permission to use the pill. Others discouraged them from doing so. Moral theologians were divided on the issue, thus there was an eight year period when the faithful and their priests had no definite or unanimous judgment regarding the pill. Every Catholic was permitted to follow her own conscience.
This practice was abruptly halted on 25 July 1968 when Paul VI published Humanae Vitae. This papal encyclical was another instance wherein Paul VI bypassed collegiality and subsidiarity. In this case, however, the dishonesty of Paul VI is even more grievous because when the collegial process set in motion by John XXIII failed to return the response that Paul VI expected, he scuttled their report and set out to publish an answer written by an outsider. Let us skim over the facts of this case:
Pope John XXIII received many inquiries regarding the morality of the pill. Accordingly, in 1963, he established a commission of six European non-theologians to study the issue of birth control in the face of an exponential growth in the human population.
After John’s death later in 1963, Pope Paul VI added theologians to the commission and over three years expanded it to 72 members from five continents. This included 16 theologians, 13 physicians, and 5 women. Meanwhile Paul VI added an executive committee of 16 bishops, including seven cardinals.
The Pontifical Birth Control Commission produced its report in 1966. An impressive 90% of the voting members agreed that “artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil” and that Catholic “couples should be allowed to decide for themselves” what methods were to be employed by way of exercising responsible parenthood in a world where overpopulation presented a growing dangers. According to the Commission’s final report, use of the contraceptive pill could be regarded as an extension of the natural infertility that was divinely ordained as a providential part of the menstrual cycle.[xiv]
The members of the Commission were forced to take an oath of silence, so, even during the time of Vatican II, few people knew who was on the Commission and what sort of discussions/decisions the Commission was taking. For two years after delivering their final report, the members themselves were patiently waiting upon Pope Paul VI to communicate their findings to the world. Most of them were surprised and shocked when Paul VI completely rejected the Commission’s recommendations on the grounds that the decision of the seventy-two member commission “had not been unanimous.” Needless to say, no one can rightly expect that 72 persons discussing a hotly contended issue could ever arrive at a “unanimous decision.” Thus, Paul VI created a flimsy excuse that allowed him to scuttle the Commission’s report.
Some would argue that those in authority always retain the right to reject an advisory report when it goes against their personal judgments. To do so, however, is risky because a truly wise man has to be always ready to learn from his trusted advisors. For him to shun them all and then to absolutize his personal opinion without even mentioning the weight of evidence against him is both reckless and dishonest. Only in authoritarian institutions can those in authority get away scott-free with this manner of acting.
In Humanae Vitae, Paul VI mandated that the use of the pill could not be authorized under any circumstances because, following the analysis of Pius XI in Casti Connubii (1930), every act of sexuality had to be open to its natural procreative function. Thus abstinence and what would later be called “natural family planning” (NFP) became the only morally permissible means whereby Catholic couples were permitted to regulate their reproductive capacity so as to safeguard the future.
The absoluteness of the Pope’s moral judgments here was confusing. At first he affirmed Vatican II when it declared that “it is the married couples themselves who must in the last analysis arrive at these judgments” (Gaudium et Spes § 50) and then he makes an about face by declaring that “the married are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting life” (Humanae Vitae § 10).[xv]
The deposit of revelation says nothing about “the pill”; hence, moral guidance in this realm had to rely upon general moral principles and the immediate and direct experience of Catholic couples. Since Paul VI had no experience with sexual love and no experience with NFP, it was incumbent upon him to learn about these things indirectly by sympathetically entering into the experience of married couples?
Three Thousand Letters from the CFM
Patricia Crowley, a lay member of the Birth Control Commission, had given him a selection of letters from members of the Catholic Family Movement around the world tied together by a blue ribbon. The Crowleys had gathered replies from three thousand members of the Christian Family Movement living in eighteen countries. 43% of the couples using NFP said they found it helpful in spacing their children. On the other hand, 78% “claimed that it had also harmed their relationship due to tension, loss of spontaneity, fear of pregnancy, etc.” (90). As an example, a wife who conceived and gave birth to seven children during her fourteen years of marriage writes this chilling and brutally honest account of her experience with NFP:
The slightest upset, mental or physical, appears to change the cycle and thereby renders this method of family planning useless. Our marriage problem is not financial. . . . But my husband has a terrible weakness when it comes to self-control in sex and unless his demands are met in every way when he feels this way, he is a very dangerous man to me and my daughters. Apart from these times he is completely normal and tries in every way he knows, such as morning Mass, sacraments, prayers, etc., to accumulate grace [self-restraint]” (91).
Other letters detailed the hardships and frustrations associated with irregular menstrual cycles and with the unplanned and unintended pregnancies that resulted from NFP.[xvi] Was it appropriate for Paul VI to ignore these testimonies of human suffering and to impose, using the weight of his office, a universally binding judgment that turned a blind eye to the pain and frustration of so many faithful Catholic couples who tried to make NFP work for them?
If Paul VI had been transparent and collegial, he could have said that NFP was “the better way,” even “the best way.” But, as many theologians have pointed out, he had no grounds whatsoever whereby he could declare it to be the ONLY WAY?
From the very start, the absolute rejection of modern methods of birth control was met with stiff opposition among Catholics—both on the practical grounds of their own experience and also on the theoretical grounds that it enforced outmoded norms of human sexuality.[xvii] The Winnipeg Statement represents the strongest episcopal opposition. “The purge” unleashed against dissenting priests and theologians in the USA was without precedent.
The noted American moral theologian, Richard McCormick, SJ, observes that the “coercive ecclesial atmosphere” surrounding the issue of birth control not only heaped irreversible harm upon hundreds of thousands of Catholic couples, it had the effect of damaging the credibility of the bishops themselves as reliable guides:
By “coercive ecclesial atmosphere” I refer to a gathering of symptoms familiar to all. Bishops are appointed by ideological conformity. Theologians and bishops are disciplined [for nonconformity]. Obedience is demanded to all teachings. Judicial processes fail the criteria of due process. Consultation is secret and highly selective, [and includes] only those qualifying who agree with a predetermined position. . . .
It was contended that the Church could not modify its teaching on birth regulation because that teaching had been proposed unanimously as certain by the bishops around the world with the pope over a long period of time. To this point Cardinal Suenens replied:
“We have heard arguments based on ‘what the bishops all taught for decades.’ Well, the bishops did defend the classical position. But it was one imposed on them by authority. The bishops didn’t study the pros and cons. They received directives, they bowed to them, and they tried to explain them to their congregations.”
Coercive insistence on official formulations tells the laity in no uncertain terms that their experience and reflection make little difference. This in spite of Vatican II ‘s contrary assertion: “Let it be recognized that all of the faithful — clerical and lay — possess a lawful freedom of enquiry and of thought, and the freedom to express their minds humbly and courageously about those matters in which they enjoy competence” [Gaudium et Spes § 62]. If such humble and courageous expression counts for nothing, we experience yet another wound to the authority of the ordinary magisterium. The search for truth falls victim to ideology.[xviii]
Marriage Preparation following Humanae Vitae
As a Catholic theologian, I became aware that the Catholic hierarchy was so mindlessly supportive of NFP as to neglect to inform users that, as in the case of all medical advice, there were potentially dangerous “side effects” for those using NFP. This practice of one-sided dishonesty is not only unfortunate, it is criminal negligence. The bishops should have listened to the faithful and have alerted them to known failures as part of their pact to maintain “honesty in advertising.”
A: Natural family planning is not[xix] as effective as most other methods of birth control. One in four women who use this method becomes pregnant. The method is not suited for the following women:
Women who should not get pregnant because of medical reasons
Women with irregular menstrual periods who may not be able to tell when they are fertile
Women with abnormal bleeding, vaginitis, or cervicitis (these make the cervical mucus method unreliable)
Women who use certain medications (for instance, antibiotics, thyroid medications, and antihistamines) that may change the nature of vaginal secretions, making mucus signs impossible to read
Women with certain problems unrelated to fertility (for instance, fever) that can cause changes in basal body temperature (source)
If our bishops had included these on a “warning label” with their NFP promotional pitches, then Catholic women who suffered through unwanted pregnancies would have felt relieved that it was not entirely their fault that they got pregnant while using NFP. Meanwhile, those using NFP for the first time would would have been encouraged in knowing that their bishops were straight shooters and that they were not blinded by ideological and theological factors. I have yet to find a single bishop who attaches an informed “warning label” when he approaches NFP. Paul VI surely did not do so.
In fact, when I go to examine what my own diocese has posted on its website, I find statements that are flatly contradicted by The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Here are a few:
Any married couple can use NFP! A woman need not have “regular” cycles.[xx]
NFP methods support reproductive health. They are good for the body. The natural methods have none of the harmful side effects caused by contraception, especially chemical contraceptives (e.g., pill, injection, etc.).[xxi]
When wishing to avoid pregnancy, studies show that couples who follow their NFP method’s guidelines correctly, and all the time, achieve effectiveness rates of 97-99%.[xxii]
The most outrageous deception, however, is this one:
The methods of NFP are the only approach to true responsible parenthood because they respect God’s design for married love!
It is to the credit of Paul VI that he popularized the notion that “responsible parenthood” requires parents to decide how many children to bring into this crowded world and when they are to be conceived. Earlier generations of Catholics had the notion that family planning was unnecessary (maybe even impossible) and that partners had sex at random times with the notion that ‘God decides how many children to give us.’ Bishops even created the fantasy that doctors who warned women to avoid future conceptions were to be ignored due to the rubric: “Let God take charge of your life.”[xxiii] Also, large families were regarded as especially blessed by God.
As things now stand, the glowing testimonials in favor of NFP are motivated by the “unspoken truth” that NFP is the ONLY OFFICIALLY APPROVED method for regulating pregnancies (other than abstaining from sex altogether). Hence, Catholics who believe that Paul VI could make no error in drafting Humanae Vitae are prompted to do fancy cartwheels to demonstrate that he was 100% right about NFP.
So I went online to check this out. Should you visit the cheerful site known as Catholic Online, you will discover a Catholic mother of six giving a faith-based testimony of how she decided to hold fast to NFP. Along the way, however, she makes some pretty fantastical claims:
When women learn to read their [menstrual] cycles, they often report a renewed sense of self-worth. . . . Women often can’t place their finger on it, but they sense this. Not surprisingly, couples who practice a method of NFP have only a 5% rate[xxiv] of divorce by comparison to the 50% rate in the population at large. Clearly, when couples treat one another with dignity and respect, honoring the wholeness of each person, their relationship is positively effected [sic].
I say “fantastical” because if the claim of a “5% rate” was actually true, then sex therapist and couples counselors would have used this info by way of shoring up sagging marriages everywhere–and not just among Catholics. Yet, in most things, if something seems too good to be true, it probably a scam.[xxv] And this is unfortunately the case here, despite the fact that I have heard and seen this unsubstantiated[xxvi] claim routinely repeated in dozens of NFP promotionals. Hence, this is something like being told to take huge doses of vitamin C to prevent the onset of the common cold. “Every belief works in the eyes of the believer” (Michael Polanyi). Thus we have here an instance in which NFP is being dishonestly promoted with undocumented and exaggerated claims.
Why Paul VI thought contraceptive use was immoral
Why exactly are contraceptives always immoral? The Church is not against interventions into nature. We approve of vaccinations and use eye glasses? Why then are medically safe contraceptives not permitted to Catholics for limiting and spacing pregnancies in the way that Paul VI mandated?
The reason is that every act of intercourse must be open to conception. Hence, it follows that married couples cannot do anything that would prevent conception.
NFP is permitted only because nothing is done to prevent conception. But this is ludicrous! Couples use NFP precisely with the intention of making love without conceiving a child. There is nothing “natural” about the process. Each morning the mucus is checked and the basal temperature is taken. By so doing, the couple can determine when ovulation takes place. Five days after this, the “safe period” begins and lasts for eight to fifteen days. These are the days chosen to make love. The whole business of NFP, therefore, it terribly contrived and quite artificial. For those who are using NFP to have good sex without risking hellfire, the effort seems to pay off.
Some advocates even explain that periods of complete abstinence followed by periods of unlimited sex “brings them into the mood of recalling their honeymoon period that following their abstinence leading up to marriage.” I can relate to that. What I can’t relate to is how the zealots for NFM completely overlook the natural fact that, for women, their mucus is slippery (they are wet) and their desire is high just at the time that ovulation is taking place. If this is a normal aspect of female fertility, then the God who created women’s fertility cycle was surely promoting both the heightened sexual desire and the heightened pleasure enabled by the slippery mucus. But, according to the designers of NFP, the sexual pleasure of women is seemingly not all that important[xxvii] and God’s design for increased arousal at the time of ovulation can be ignored. This is another grave reason why NFP is so completely “unnatural.”
How the Bishops Promote NFP
The Bishops’ Committee on Pastoral Research and Practice decided in 1989 to urge bishops to mandate that every engaged couple must take a full course in natural family planning prior to their wedding. Experience showed that fewer than 5% of Catholics made use of NFP. Experience also showed that almost no engaged couples took a course in natural family planning unless they were required to do so. Hence, almost everywhere now, the Pre-Cana Retreat required of Catholics who want to marry in the Church includes a healthy dose of NFP.
In my own experience of marriage preparation in the archdiocese of Cincinnati, I relished the fact that NFP was presented by two enthusiastic married couples who taught us a method that combined mucus testing and temperature taking. The emphasis was upon the “hidden miracle” of the fertility cycle and “how neat it was” to be aware of how the woman’s body changes along with (but not because of) the phases of the moon. NFP was also presented as the “green” and “chemical-free” form of birth control—aspects that very much agreed with our shared ecological life values.
Despite this positive and upbeat approach to NFP that I myself experienced, I was surprised that the official polls show only 1 to 3 percent of fertile Catholics depend upon NFP as their only method of birth control. This must be terribly depressing for bishops who are spending lots of money promoting NFP. It must also be depressing for those couples who spend so much time and attention to NFM during the marriage preparation sessions.
On the down side, I am also aware that younger Catholic couples don’t take kindly to bishops telling them what they can and cannot do in the privacy of their bedroom. Older Catholics don’t approve of the way that the bishops require all patients treated in Catholic hospitals to follow the moral rubrics of the Vatican. Thus Catholic hospitals do not allow physicians employed by them to prescribe birth control to their patients or to perform IVF, vasectomies, or tubal ligations. Is this a case where the Catholic bishops are deliberately curtailing physicians employed by them from giving sound medical advice consistent with modern medical journals and proven clinical practice? It surely is! Do most physicians manage to speak “confidentially” and “off the record” to their patients such that they patients can distinguish when the medical dictates of the RCC run counter to the health and well-being of their patients? I surely hope so. Yet, if and when they do so, they risk being reported to the authorities for doing so and ultimately losing their employment in all Catholic institutions.
This coercive situation injures the dignity of all those involved. The plain truth is that the Catholic bishops have failed to convince 95% of their own people to rely solely upon NFP and not to use contraceptives. So, as a last ditch stand, they appear to resort to treating adults like children. They force hospitals to refuse to offer contraceptives because “father knows best.” The bishops even tried to force Obama to drop contraceptives from the insurance coverage given to employees in Catholic institutions. Rape victims, meanwhile, who find refuge in a Catholic hospital, are denied the “morning after pill.” Why so? Because the Catholic bishops have never permitted extenuating circumstances to ever justify the use of contraceptives. In Catholic practice, a woman who has just been raped has no special exemption from the “no contraceptives” clause that blindly determines medical practice within Catholis hospitals. The dishonesty of these measures is that, while the “moral purity” of the bishops is being safeguarded, the rights of patients to choose and the rights of doctors to place the well-being of their patients first is being trampled upon.
The mentality of the US Catholic bishops is that every act of intercourse must be open to conception. This assumption is the weak link underpinning NFP and the ban against all contraceptives. Objections to this assumption are many. Here are the most prominent:
Just because Catholics regard sex as the natural route for fulfilling the command to “be fruitful and to multiply” does not mean that every sex act must accomplish this. In actual practice, even Catholic couples with large families acknowledge that only a small percentage of their love-making results in pregnancies.
God himself designed the menstrual cycle in such a way as to put in place a period of infertility interspersed with a period of fertility. This can be interpreted to mean that even God favors times of sexual bonding, sexual play, and sexual exploration between partners without any conception resulting.
If “family planning” is mandated for modern-day Catholics, then all forms of safe birth control are not only permitted but absolutely required in order to prevent an irresponsible overpopulation of the earth that would ultimately lead to deforestation, over-fishing the seas, and new eruptions of starvation and war. NFP can be permitted only as long as its weaknesses are known and acknowledged. As Pope Francis declared in talking with reporters following his January 2015 papal visit to the Philippines, “God does not intend us to multiply like rabbits.” [https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/01/20/]
The Suffering of Future Generations due to Overpopulation
Given the exponential growth in the world population, the question naturally emerged in 1968 as to whether unchecked human growth is sustainable during the next hundred or two hundred years.
Many dismissed this on the grounds that there was ample space for housing developments nearly everywhere (even in Hong Kong); hence, the earth could easily sustain two to three times our present population. Pope Pius VI in Humanae Vitae agreed with this optimistic projection.
But now we know what we could not know in 1968. Three points and a conclusion:
#1 According to the United Nations, one in every five humans depends on fish as their primary source of protein. (United Nations, 2004) On the other hand, marine ecologists fear that the biggest single threat to marine ecosystems today is overfishing. Our appetite for fish is exceeding the oceans’ ecological limits and industrial fishing has had devastating impacts on marine ecosystems. The cod fisheries off Newfoundland, Canada, collapsed in 1992, leading to the loss of some 40,000 jobs in the industry. The cod stocks in the North Sea and Baltic Sea are now heading the same way and are close to complete depletion. As population grows, the pressure for more and more effective fishing increases, and no government can, in conscience, limit the growth of industrial fishing so that sustainability can again be achieved. For this crime, we and our children’s children will suffer. . . .
#2 The story for oil shows exactly the same phenomena. Recently developing countries like India and China are legitimately moving toward increased industrialization in order to feed, clothe, and house their teeming populations. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2010 World Energy Outlook estimated that conventional crude oil production has peaked and depleting at 6.8% per year. Meanwhile, no government is currently rationing oil products; rather, every nation is trying to out-produce everyone else so that their people can enjoy the luxurious lifestyle that manufactured goods promise. But who is speaking for those who will be living when the industrialized landscape has to begin shutting down due to the worldwide scarcity of crude oil? For this crime, our children’s children will suffer. . . .
#3 Governments have admitted that acid rain is a serious international environmental problem and many countries have taken steps to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. But air pollution does not stop at national boundaries. As the industrialization of India and China moves into high gear, new coal-burning plants[xxviii] increase those toxic emissions that show us as smog in their cities. This is the immediate effect. Meanwhile, these invisible poison gases enter the atmosphere and, much later, forests and fish living thousands of miles away are put at risk due to the falling of acid rain. Some of the most dramatic effects on forests have been observed in Europe. In 1983, a survey in West Germany showed that 34% of the country’s total forest is damaged by air pollution. This included about one half of the famous Black Forest. Switzerland, despite its careful management of its forest reserves, has recorded losing 14% of her forest trees due to the pollution originating outside its borders. For this crime, we and our children’s children will suffer. . . .
The world population when Humanae Vitae was first published was 3.5 billion. Today’s world population is 7.2 billion. This is more than double. Let’s face it. If current trends continue, another fifty years of reckless population growth will inevitably produce an immeasurable amount of human suffering. So now, in view of the destructive side-effects of population growth, what is stopping our bishops from sponsoring conferences aimed at reexamining the optimistic notes regarding population growth in Humanae Vitae? Not to examine the flaws in HV[xxix] now can only give blind support to the practices that disrupt the ecosystems of our dear home and planet. This blindness puts our children and our children’s children at risk.
Case Five: Dishonesty Regarding Gay Sexuality
Before same-sex unions could imagine and then to actually fight for the right to be married, three important conditions within heterosexual marriages had to change. Here they are:
#1 Roles assigned to men as money-makers and women as home-makers had to become flexible. It had to become possible for a husband to decide to stay home to keep the house and to raise the children while his wife, an engineer or a lawyer, goes to work each day and earns the money to keep their enterprise afloat with only one salary. If a husband and wife can live this way and even, to some degree, relish “exchanging roles,” then it is possible that two women or two men could do the same thing and call what they have “a loving and fruitful marriage” with the same fierce conviction.
#2 Men had to become less authoritarian and women had to become less submissive. Even Aristotle was able to acknowledge that “true friendship” can flourish only when “both men are social equals.” I can illustrate this best by examing the lives of my own parents and grandparents. In my grandparents generation, men alone could open bank accounts, men alone could buy a home or an automobile on credit, men alone could decide what companions and what forms of recreation were suitable for his wife, men alone could initiate sex in the bedroom, men alone could decide what sort of education was appropriate for each of his children[xxx], men alone had the legal right to claim their offspring as “belonging to them” in the case of a contentious divorce.
#3 The paradigm of sex had to shift from “making babies” to “making love.” It is rare, in my experience, to find a celibate priest who talks knowingly about what it means for a couple to be “making love.” On the other hand, “making babies” is much more understandable for celibates because the logic of an orgasm in a vaginal canal that has an ovum ripening is primary an intellectual affair. Since most priests are intelligent, they find it easy to understand “making babies.”
This is precisely where Cardinal Ratzinger has focused his attention and this is his backdrop for doing his moralizing. He is speaking eloquently to my grandparents generation. However, he cannot be trusted to address the moral values and concerns of the present generation. Moreover, being a priest and an archbishop further isolates him from knowing and appreciating the art of love-making.[xxxi]
Making love cannot be understood by attending lectures, by reading books, by watching romantic films. Making love begins with a mutual sexual attraction that matures within a series of give and takes, trials and errors, into a budding romance that builds upon mutual admiration woven together with sustained trust. Sex begins with light touches, hand-holding, sitting close, telling secrets, etc. Two people make loving following a path that they carve out for themselves that is filled with deep intuitions, playfulness, and surprises. No two people do it in the same way. No two people do it in the same way even after twenty years of marriage. Cardinal Ratzinger is a complete stranger to most of this.
Since “making babies” is easier to understand and easier to talk about, clerics such as Cardinal Ratzinger usually only talk about “making babies.” The art of “making love” attracts them, escapes them, baffles them, but they usually don’t talk about it. Either they are aware of how little experience they have and, thus, they stay away from talking about “making love” for fear that they would come across as superficial or downright stupid. Or, on the other hand, clerics might be aware of how much experience they have had and they prefer not to reveal such intimate moments of their lives, especially if they have had significant “love-making” with another man. Perhaps this is the reason why the official Vatican theology of sexuality along with its morality is framed almost entirely in the safe but outdated paradigm of “making babies.”
This is unfortunate. For what reason? Fr. Shaji George Kochuthara, CMI, associate professor of theology at Dharmaram Vidya in Bangalore, made a thorough study of how sex as “making babies” was accepted, for a very long time, as the supreme value of sex. Then, as Catholic experience grew in tandem with contemporary society, sex as “making love” attached itself to “making babies.” Thus, in the 60s, there were two supreme values of marital sex. In the 80s, however, sex as “making love” took on such importance as to supplant the earlier supreme value of sex. Fr. Kochuthara, in his groundbreaking study, The Concept of Sexual Pleasure in the Catholic Moral Tradition, summarizes his discovery in these words:
When we consider the theological developments from the second half of the 20th century, we can identify a notable change in the emphasis on procreation. The emphasis is no more on procreation, but on love. Mutual love and union of the couple is the most important purpose of marriage as well as that of the marital union. We may understand the difference only when we consider that tradition up to modern times, which practically assigned no place to the discussion on love as pertaining to conjugal life. Besides considering love as a necessary condition for conjugal intimacy, all other aspects of conjugal life, including the procreative dimension, are given their significance based on the criterion of love.[xxxii]
In plain-speaking and vulgar language, what Fr. Kochuthara is saying is that, in my grandparents’ generation, a man could fuck[xxxiii] his wife and be proud of himself. He was fulfilling God’s command to be “fruitful and to multiply.” His wife, meanwhile, had “done her duty” by patiently submitting to her husband’s sexual advances and by raising his children so that he could be proud of them. Nothing more was required.
The time is quickly arriving and is already here when “fucking” is not enough. Any husband who does not allow his wife to coach him in the art of love-making is not worthy to be called a lover. His erection and his sexual satisfaction is not the end all and be all. Unless a husband can escape being exclusively absorbed by his sexual arousal and actively turn his attention to pleasuring his wife, there can be no mutuality in sex and their love-making will inevitably be less humane than what it could be.
Cardinal Ratzinger appears never to have understood this. How could he? In the back of his mind, sex was still about “making babies.” This he could understand. This he could logically explain. “Making love” was nebulous and inconsequential and frightening.
That is why he took the mandate of Pius XI, “Every act of sexuality had to be open to its natural procreative function,” and made it his mantra.
This is why he automatically eliminated same-sex unions as worthy of any consideration: no two men or two women can “make babies.”
This is why he routinely refers to marital intercourse as “the conjugal act” and never once uses the more precise and more modern term, “making love.”
Furthermore, Cardinal Ratzinger seemingly never had the occasion to admire and to care for anyone who had a homosexual orientation. Just to the contrary, he had some painful interactions with gay men in 1968[xxxiv], and the trauma of these interactions appears to have blocked him from any desire to meet or to understand gays or lesbians from that point forward. As a result, he had no interest in creating a Church dedicated to understanding, loving, and protecting its gay and lesbian members. Quite to the contrary, he felt impelled to create a Church wherein “baby-making” was the core of permissible sex and that, as a result, homosexual sex was “objectively disordered” and same-sex unions had no intrinsic value whatsoever when contrasted with the divinely approved marriage of a man and a women.
Furthermore, Cardinal Ratzinger was never the parent of a child, and, as a result he never had the opportunity to learn the art of love that plays itself out between a parent and a special child. Hence, while he was a brilliant theologian, he lacked the emotional intelligence and the empathy that his office, as Father of the Church, requires.
Cardinal Ratzinger’s Dark Side
I do not fault Cardinal Ratzinger for being true to himself by taking what he could understand, namely sex as “baby-making,” and making it the center of his moral theology of marriage. I cannot fault him for allowing the traumatic events of 1968 to insulate him from any further contacts with the LGBT community. I cannot fault him from being authoritarian. Nor can I fault him from growing old and, in so doing, to become less and less aware of the changing values of young married couples. I can even excuse him for become less and less aware of the horrendous spiritual pain and psychological suffering that his doctrine of homosexuality imposed on young people who grew up loving the Church. In all these things, Cardinal Ratzinger was being true to himself.
I want to fault Cardinal Ratzinger only for this: that he was so unaware of his “dark side” as to suppose that he was so well-informed and so knowledgeable as to be capable of resolving “by himself” all the complex psychological, physiological, and theological aspects of homosexuality. Only someone with an overextended estimate of his own capabilities could do something like that. And then to make matters even worse, he spent hours and days and months using the powers of his office to harass and to silence anyone within the Church who openly disagreed with him. This, too, is his dangerous “dark side.”
In brief, he was an “inquisitor” of the old school. He evoked fear in his victims. Those who did not accept his moral norms were stripped of their right to teach and their right to publish. And, for this, he gained much praise from those who also have authoritarian personalities and admire Cardinal Ratzinger because he slammed his fist down and refused to apologize for taking draconian steps to protect the indisputable truths of the Catholic Church. But none of his victims ever praised the fairness of his inquisitorial process. None of them were convinced by his brilliant arguments.
As for the repressive conduct of the Cardinal Ratzinger and a large segment of the hierarchy in these matters, one would do well to remember the cautionary words of Harry S. Truman:
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror[33] to all its citizens and creates a country [Church] where everyone lives in fear.
Needless self-hatred, loneliness, and false guilt
So, in the end, I have tried to make clear why Cardinal Ratzinger’s doctrine of homosexuality stands upon a theology of sexuality that is seriously flawed and antiquated. It should be commended to no one, and pastors who recommend it are setting up their LGBT parishioners for an “unnatural” celibate life that is filled with needless self-hatred, loneliness, and false guilt. In a word, Ratzinger’s doctrine which has become the bedrock of the Catholic bishops worldwide is a serious sin and a criminal action against the Beneficent Creator who gives to each person their particular calling and sexual orientation.
Finally, If homosexual orientations are not voluntarily chosen but are a gift of God “discovered” during the time of the sexual awakening that marks adolescence, then it is “blameless.” Cardinal Ratzinger entirely agrees with this. The problem is that he then goes on to take the rules governing sex among heterosexuals in my grandparents generation and applies this to homosexuals. This is clearly an absurd notion. If heterosexual men are gifted with a natural attraction to women, then it would be absurd to suggest that they had this impulse but were never able to act upon it. Likewise, for lesbians to have a natural attraction to women, it would likewise be absurd (a violation of natural law) to suggest that they had this God-given impulse but were never permitted (according to Ratzinger’s doctrine) to act upon it. Thus all the clever tricks that Cardinal Ratzinger uses to demoralize lesbians and gays runs against God’s own manifest intentionality in giving them a calling which has its own special rules. Cardinal Ratzinger never came to understood this. This is the glaring absurdity stuck in the middle of his entire absurd system.
What lessons can be learned from this dishonesty?
During the course of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), free and open discussions gradually took hold among the assembled bishops once the curial grip on the Council was challenged. Within this aggiornamento [1] that was endorsed by John XXIII, the bishops discovered how creative collaboration with each other and with the Holy Spirit served to chart a visionary program of collaborative pastoral renewal that received overwhelming approval by the assembled bishops.
Once the bishops went home, however, the wisdom of free deliberations and collective decision making was quickly ignored by Paul VI. Before they went home, however, the bishops made plans for a tri-annual Synod of Bishops that would meet in order to further define and extend the pastoral renewal of Vatican II. Very quickly the curia took charge of the agenda of these Synods, and the popes who chaired them reduced them to becoming consultative rather than the deliberative bodies. The Synod of 1971 marked a turning point. Since then, the Synods meeting in Rome have been toothless tigers that have had no consequences for defining the key pastoral challenges facing the Church. Much less did these Roman Synods have any opportunity to examine and to reform practices that were dishonestly arrived at and that had caused Catholic an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering.
Pope Francis indicated his intention to return to the vision of Vatican II. He planned an ordinary Synod on the Family for 4-25 Oct 2015. Meanwhile he mandated that an extraordinary Synod on the Family planned for 5-19 Oct 2014 would do the planning and the preparatory work for the ordinary Synod that would come a year later.
My sources indicate that, in early 2014, Pope Francis met with the organizers of this Synod and made plain his requirement: “I want discussion.” The chair responded, “The bishops are not accustomed to having discussions during these synods.” Pope Francis rebuffed this challenge saying, “I want lots of discussions.” Thus, the organizers have effectively been mandated to return to the free and open discussions that marked Vatican II. Pope Francis emphasized this point in opening this Synod.
Why the Pope Doesn’t Quickly Clean Up the Mess
Pope Francis could push the Church ahead by virtue of a series of “executive commands” but this would be a defeat of the collaborative and decision making mandated by Vatican II. We have suffered under three popes who have squelched collaboration and have mandated changes that, in my view, defeated and reversed both the spirit and the letter of Vatican II. If Pope Francis would conduct himself as did these popes, then the people of God would be subjected to more authoritarian policies that would inevitably continue to divide the Church into factions. Moreso, if Pope Francis would adapt an authoritarian style of papal leadership, this would further entrench the practice of papal authoritarianism and effectively incite bishops to oppose him in the name of a future conservative pope who would be elected to the Roman episcopal office. It would also give the College of Cardinals the impulse to choose a successor for Pope Francis who would reverse everything done by him. In effect, therefore, even a “bully” with a progressive agenda in the papal office is still a “bully” whose style of leadership defeats the Gospel and negates the functioning of Synods as envisioned by Vatican II.
Pope Francis has made it abundantly clear that he favors “synodolism,” the term he prefers to use interchangeably with “collegiality.” During the first ceremony of the blessing and imposition of the pallium on 34 metropolitan archbishops on 29 June 2013, Pope Francis spoke about “the path of collegiality” as the road that can lead the Church to “grow in harmony with the service of primacy.” He has publicly chosen an international group of eight cardinals to work with him in reforming the Curia. He has convoked an Extraordinary Synod on the Family, and, at the same time, he has promoted an international survey intended to allow the bishops to hear the joys and sorrows, the trials and tribulations that surround family issues. The conducting of this worldwide survey was erratic and the tabulation of the results left significant loopholes; nonetheless, Francis opened the door to hearing the “sensus fidelium” and signaling to the bishops at the Synod that real people with real problems were counting on them for mercy and justice and love.
Collegiality is not just an invention of Vatican II. Collegiality was the hallmark of Peter’s authority in the early church. Collegiality was the defining character of the Patristic churches as well. Papal absolutism was only invented in the middle ages when authoritarian monarchs populated the European landscape. In that era, the Vatican States had to have its own absolute monarch so as to be able to hold its head high in the assembly of monarchs.
But this era has passed away. The European states gradually discovered the wisdom of limiting the divine right of kings, and, eventually, they dethroning monarchs entirely. Thus, the papacy represents the last of the absolute monarchs in Europe. And the Vatican wants us, like gullible children, to believe that Matt 16:18 represents the will of the divine savior to establish Peter as an absolute monarch in governing the church. . . .
On this last point, Pope Francis flatly disagrees with a papacy that functions like an absolute monarchy. In fact, Pope Francis has been promoting the reading and the implementation of archbishop emeritus of San Francisco John R. Quinn’s book, Reform of the Papacy. This is the best good news about Pope Francis! How far and how successful Pope Francis will be in this reform remains to be seen. One thing is for sure: Pope Francis needs to get allies for this project at all levels of church organization. Here is where you, the reader, and I, the author of this essay, come to play our parts. Either we can continue to blindly believe that incompetent popes made bad decisions that were upheld as unquestionable and unchangeable or we can join with Pope Francis and expose the dishonesty that surrounds bad decisions that have been imposed from the top down.
[i] The papacy prior to John XXIII has been quick to silence innovative pastors and to hinder any reforms that did not advance the papal agenda. Without a reforming pope like John XXIII, we Catholics would still be reciting our rosaries and reading our private missals during a Mass that had a mystery and holiness that was largely unintelligible to us and removed from our direct participation. Thus, the directives of Vatican II offer a remarkable summary of the pastoral changes that Martin Luther fostered among the Catholics who favored the reforms of the sixteenth century: “The rite of the Mass is to be revised in such a way that… devout and active participation by the faithful may be more easily achieved. For this purpose the rites are to be simplified… The treasures of the Bible are to be opened up more lavishly so that a richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God’s word… The homily is to be highly esteemed as part of the liturgy itself… It should not be omitted except for a serious reason” [Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy § 50-52].
The counter-Reformation, on the other hand, made sure that no one moved ahead or stayed behind the authoritarian Vicar of Christ on earth. Without Rome’s approval, nothing went forward. The reforms of Martin Luther were therefore to be despised and hindered.
[ii] James Atkinson, “Catholic Devaluation of Luther, 1517-1939: The Period of Hostility and Destructive Criticism,” Martin Luther: Prophet to the Catholic Church, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983, 3-47.
[iii] Paul VI received a substantial number of letters from pastors who favoured a change in the rule of celibacy. See n. 15.
[iv] Fr. Christian Cochini, SJ, examines the question of when the tradition of priestly celibacy began in the Latin Church, and he is able to trace it back to its apostolic origins. Hence, his book is aptly titled Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990). Some Catholics believe that Fr. Cochini provides the meticulous research into the origins of priestly celibacy that were lacking at the time that Pius VI wrote Sacerdotalis Caelibatus. George T. Dennis, SJ, on the other hand, examines the data offered by Cochini and concludes that his book provides no evidence that celibacy had apostolic origins: “There is simply no clear evidence of a general tradition or practice, much less of an obligation, of priestly celibacy-continence before the beginning of the fourth century.” Peter Fink, SJ, agrees, saying that underlying premises used in the book “would not stand up so comfortably to historical scrutiny.” See also Roger Balducelli, “The Apostolic Origins of Clerical Continence: A Critical Appraisal of a New Book,” Theological Studies 43 (1982) 693-705. While Cochini’s book may have been enthusiastically received in some circles in his native India, the website of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India presents a narrative that roundly rejects his thesis (http://www.cbci.in/Celibacy-In-The-Catholic-Church.aspx).
[v] What functions will and will not prevail in the world to come remains open to study. The theme of the heavenly banquet where eating and drinking at the abundant love feast would require an earth that has harvests and skilled ranks of harvesters, bakers, wine brewers, cooks, etc. It would also require that the resurrected bodies are functioning bodies capable of practicing and perfecting the agricultural and culinary arts. When sexuality is considered as procreation and marriage is considered as bonding a woman to the use of one man who is not free to divorce her, then one can see how, in the first century, Jesus might have been inclined to imagine that the institution of marriage would be set aside in the world to come. This says nothing, however, about the loss of the human sexual appetite and the hunger for intimacy. In an earlier age when sex was considered as a hindrance to true holiness, Christians were naturally inclined to imagine Jesus was a virgin. It was in harmony with this earlier age that Paul VI wrote his encyclical. The new wine, however, will have to be transported in new wine skins and not in the old skins of Sacerdotalis Caelibatus.
[vi] For more details, see Edward Schillbeeckx, Clerical Celibacy Under Fire, Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1968, and Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, New York: Doubleday, 2000, 104-150.
[vii] In some segments of American culture, patriarchy still rules and a man who surrenders himself to his wife is considered weak and unmanly. In Africa, on the other hand, patriarchy is still very prevelent and “virility” is invariably associated with “the number of children” that a man fathers. I find this attitude to be true to some African-American men as well. Such men wear a small earring for each child that they fathered. In Africa, clerical celibacy is often forced to take a second place when it comes time for priests to gain the respect of their congregations.
[viii] The empathy that I am thinking of here is the recognition that so many seminarians already have a dual vocation.
[ix] The National Association of Pastoral Renewal conducted a survey of active priests in the U.S.A. in 1967. 62% of the respondents favored optional celibacy. 92% favored allowing married priests and their wives to receive communion. At the 1971 convention of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, the delegates voted nine-to-one in favor of changing the law requiring celibacy. Terence Sweeney, SJ, polled the 312 American Catholic bishops on this question and 24% of the respondents favored optional celibacy. The 1985 Gallup Poll of Catholic laity found that 63% favored married priests. This and other data can be found in Joseph H. Fichter, SJ, Wives of Catholic Clergy, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1992, 172-180.
[x] I myself, as a seminary professor for twenty-five years, have witnessed many seminarians who honestly and painfully spoke of their crisis of conscience forced upon them by a hierarchy that refused to distinguish between the gift of celibacy and the calling to ordained ministry. Even for those going ahead toward ordination admitted that they were often ‘confused that God should seemingly confound them by giving them such a powerful hunger for intimacy and for family.’
[xi] More recent studies demonstrate that the rule of celibacy has continued to be a heavy burden for many priests. Research conducted by Professor Jozef Baniak at Poznand University in Poland found that 54 percent of Polish priests support an end to mandatory celibacy (The Tablet 2/14/09). Nearly one-third of these Polish priests described themselves as being in intimate relationships with women while 12 percent admitted that they were living with a woman. In 2011, hundreds of German, Austrian and Swiss theologians (249 as of February 15, 2011) signed a letter calling for the ordination of married priests (http://www.memorandum-freiheit.de/?page_ id=518). Other appeals can be found here: http://www.ca.renewedpriesthood.org/ page.cfm?Web_ID=1609. One can find priests struggling with intimacy telling their personal storied at “Priests at the Crossroads” (http://www.leavingthepriesthood. com/
PriestsatCrossroads.html#anchor_10).
[xii] Hormonal contraceptives (the pill, the patch, and the vaginal ring) all contain a small amount of estrogen and progestin hormones. These hormones work to inhibit the body’s natural cyclical hormones to prevent pregnancy. Pregnancy is prevented by a combination of factors. The hormonal contraceptive usually stops the body from ovulating. Hormonal contraceptives also change the cervical mucus to make it difficult for the sperm to find an egg. Hormonal contraceptives can also prevent pregnancy by making the lining of the womb inhospitable for implantation. For more details, see http://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/birth-control-pills.
[xiii] When asked about birth control, a priest in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati explained to me that he would ask the penitent how many children have been given to them by the Lord. “If they said two or more, then I explained to them that they had fulfilled their obligation to be fruitful and that the Lord now granted them complete freedom to decide if and when they would conceive any future children. This being the case, the use of birth control was permitted.”
[xiv] For the most detailed description of the inside story of the Papal Birth Control Commission, see Robert McClory, Turning Point, New York: Crossroad, 1995. Other helpful accounts are given by a Vatican II reported, Robert Blair Kaiser, The Politics of Sex and Religion: A Case History in the Development of Doctrine, Kansas City: Leaven Press, 1985, and by a Benedictine monk, Philip S. Kaufman, Why You Can Disagree [with the Pope on Birth Control] and Remain a Faithful Catholic, New York: Crossroad, 1992.
[xv] Shaji George Kochuthara, CMI, in his excellent study, The Concept of Sexual Pleasure in the Catholic Moral Tradition, Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 2007, 310 n. 214.
[xviii] Richard McCormick, SJ, “Theologians and the Magisterium,” Corrective Vision, Explorations in Moral Theology, Sheed & Ward (now a subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Landham, Maryland) 1994, 95. See also John M. Swomley, “The Pope and the Pill” (http://www.population-security.org/swom-98-02.htm).
[xxi] http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/natural-family-planning/what-is-nfp/benefits.cfm Notice that “the harmful side effects caused by contraception” are intimated here without naming them and without any reference to independent research. Neither are the “harmful side effects of NFP” mentioned.
[xxii]http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/natural-family-planning/what-is-nfp/effectiveness.cfm Notice that no reference is given to substantiate this claim. The website does say, however, that “Others, who are unclear about their family planning intention (i.e., spacing or limiting pregnancy) or are less motivated, will not consistently follow the method’s guidelines and have a lower effectiveness rate of 80-90%.” But 80% is still very high compared with the 25% effectiveness rate determined by medical experts.
[xxiii] Here is a case that illustrates the pietistic bravado of clerics:
John Paul II recounted [during the funeral homily on 07 Feb 1998] the story of Pironio’s mother, as the cardinal had once related it to the pope: “In the history of my family,” the pontiff said quoting the late cardinal, “there is something miraculous. When she gave birth to her first son, my mother was barely 18 years old and fell seriously ill. After her recovery the doctors told her that she would not be able to have any more children without risking her own life. So she went to consult the Auxiliary Bishop of La Plata, who told her: ‘Doctors can be mistaken: put yourself in God’s hands and do your duty as a wife.’ My mother then gave birth to 21 more. I am the last, and she lived until she was 82.”
Notice the thrust here. The Bishop of La Plata advises this woman to ignore her doctors and risk death in order to “do your duty as a wife.” This is a patriarchal burden placed on women who give themselves over completely to be used and abused by their husbands. The confusing message was “put yourself [recklessly] in God’s hands.” It never occurs to the bishop that her serious illness and her doctor’s warnings might also be “messages” sent to her from God. [See Pope Francis and his response in such circumstances.]
[xxiv] This figure of 5% is repeated endlessly. No sources are given. It appears that Catholic read what others have written and repeat their unwarranted claims because they judge that this represents solid research. See, for example, http://catholicvoiceomaha.com/couples-say-natural-methods-family-planning-are-healthy-and-promote-communication-and-respect
[xxv] In the article making this claim, 2 out of 3 were skeptical. Polloybook, for example, writes:
We practiced NFP (first CCL, then Creighton) for over a decade and did not find it [useful for] marriage building at all. I am always happy for those couples who do, but in our experience, they are the exception and not the rule.
Johnson, representing the 1/3 who defended Paul VI writes this: “The Holy Roman Catholic Church had spoken. I prefer to listen to the wisdom of Christ’s Holy Church.” James Hope writes in response:
You can’t have a church without the people. But in any case, the point I was making was that if well-meaning and conscientious Catholics, having prayerfully considered the issue, come to a decision not to use NFP, despite knowing the church’s position, maybe they are speaking very clearly on the issue.
Then this followed:
Telling the truth about NFP doesn’t make it appealing to the average church[-]going Catholic, let alone to the general public. So lies were attempted instead. Unfortunately for the promoters of NFP, lies aren’t working too well either.
[xxvi] To examine the flaws in the single reported case study linking NFP with low divorce rates, go to https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4650/does-natural-family-planning-decrease-divorce-rates
[xxvii] I have read an immense amount of literature regarding the various types of NFP. In addition, my wife and I participated in a Pre-Cana Retreat that gave over 25% of it time to NFP. Not once did I hear anything about the research that shows that wives find sex in marriage significantly less appealing than do their husbands men. It is a known fact that most wives reach an orgasm far less often. In such a climate, it does not amaze me that NFP experts would knowing omit the fact that organically and psychologically women are predisposed toward elevated sexual pleasure during the ovulation period.
[xxviii] Such plants, to be sure, could use the new high-tech measures that nearly eliminate sulfer dioxide and other airborn pollutants from their smoke stacks. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is not a “toxic” byproduct of combustion but the normal effect of all burning. What we now know is that as the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere increase, less heat escapes to outer space and the net result is global warming. As the atmospheric carbon dioxide goes above 350 parts per million, scientists have recorded the melting of the Artic ice sheets, rising sea levels, and an increase in weather patterns that produce flooding, wildfires, and heat waves. But who is speaking up for the planet earth and the limitations on the carbon dioxide levels that it can safely absorb? For this crime, we and our children’s children will suffer. . . .
[xxix] Here is one change that could be made soon. When Pope Francis mandated that feedback should be solicited from Catholics in preparation for the Synod on the Family, this question was included: “Question 7 f. How can a more open attitude towards having children be fostered? How can an increase in births be promoted?” This enforces the “bigger is better” mentality that has infected Catholic family planning for the last hundred years. In the future, when Humanae Vitae is reexamined and revised, I would expect a new question would be asked: “Question 7 f. How can an open attitude towards small families and childless couples be fostered? How can a decrease in births be promoted?” [Pope Francis has since changed his mind regarding the “bigger is better” mentality.]
[xxx] A beloved friend who is twenty years younger than me confided to me that her father decided that his two sons had to have a college education. Why so? “They needed to prepare themselves to become bread-winners for their families.” For his two girls, however, a college education was, to his way of thinking, “a waste to time and a waste of money because their purpose was to make babies and not to bring home a paycheck.” This patriarchal mindset still exists in many places today. See, for example, Emily Reimer-Barry, “Reasons Not to Send Your Daughter to College?” Catholic Moral Theology, 13 Sept 2013 (https://catholicmoraltheology.com/reasons-not-to-send-your-daughter-to-college-why-fix-the-family-is-broken/).
[xxxi] There is an art to making a good Slovenian wine. My grandfather understood this art. There is an art to making potica (a nut loaf particular to Slovenians). My grandmother understood this art. Someone who takes a vow never to drink wine or to enjoy a slice of potica can never be “an insider” who understands and appreciates the art of making Slovenian wines and poticas. The same holds true for the art of love-making. An outsider can never know what “an insider” knows. And what “an insider” knows cannot be entirely said in words. As Michael Polanyi frequently says, “We know more than we can tell.”
[xxxii] Fr. Kochuthara, The Concept of Sexual Pleasure in the Catholic Moral Tradition (Roma: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2007)
[xxxiii] I deliberately use a vulgar term here because I want to capture the vulgar sex that the men caught up in the patriarchal mindset imposed upon their wives.
[xxxiv] In the case of Cardinal Ratzinger, I depend upon the conversation during a plane ride to have revealed an important limitation. Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledges that he was harassed in 1968 by gay students who broke up a faculty meeting as part of their campus-wide protest. Ratzinger was 41 at the time. Beyond this, he admitted that he was not aware of having any significant contact with homosexuals. Such an admission is telling.
• • •
In light of the Irish vote to legalize same-sex marriage, a decision that has its Catholic leaders pondering what the future might hold, I thought we might discuss a few thoughts about traditional Christian teaching on sexuality, in particular the place of “natural law” in understanding sexual morality.
We traditional Christians tend to think our view of morality is a slam-dunk. That nature itself teaches clearly the purposes and goals for sexual relations, and that God’s revelation in the Bible and the Church’s Word and Spirit-prompted traditions are unequivocally compatible with those natural laws. As Peter Leithart writes at First Things: “Through the creation, human beings know the ordinance of God that there is a ‘natural function’ for sexuality.”
In Humane Vitae (1968), the monumental Catholic document about contemporary sexual morality, the Church teaches that moral sexual acts meet three criteria. They must be:
• Marital
• Unitive
• Procreative
As the Catechism says:
Conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter—appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of will. It aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility. In a word it is a question of the normal characteristics of all natural conjugal love, but with a new significance which not only purifies and strengthens them, but raises them to the extent of making them the expression of specifically Christian values.
This makes sense to me. I count myself traditional when it comes to matters of sexual morality.
But I wonder if appealing to natural law is really the best way to make the traditional point. It seems to me that nature teaches us some things fundamental about biology and reproduction. Male and female bodies complement one another. Human beings reproduce by joining them together in sexual intercourse. If we bring our Creator into the discussion, we might say that God designed our bodies this way for this purpose — this biological, procreative purpose. . . .
I’m not convinced that nature teaches us that sex should be marital. Or that “marital” must involve only one man and one woman, joined together for life. It seems to me that we need more information than what we could get from observing the natural world to come up with that.
A gay relationship, like a straight relationship, can be a significant avenue of meaning, growth, and fulfillment. It can realize a variety of genuine human goods; it can bear good fruit. . . . [For both straight and gay couples,] sex is a powerful and unique way of building, celebrating, and replenishing intimacy.
The sort of relationship Corvino describes seems clearly one that would contribute to a couple’s fulfillment as human beings — whether the sex involved is hetero- or homosexual. Isn’t this just what it should mean to live in accord with human nature?
Noting that proponents also use natural law to show the immorality of birth control, masturbation and even non-reproductive sexual acts between heterosexuals, Gutting asks two questions:
First, why, even if non-reproductive sex were somehow less “natural” than reproductive, couldn’t it still play a positive role in a humanly fulfilling life of love between two people of the same sex?
Second, why must non-reproductive sex be only for the selfish pleasure of each partner, rather than, as Corvino put it, a way of building, celebrating, and replenishing their shared intimacy?
He is making the argument that the unitive and marital functions of sexuality can be fulfilled in relationships and through practices that are not necessarily procreative. The most conservative Catholic teachers disagree, and deny that any sexual act that leads to orgasm apart from intercourse is [il-] legitimate, even for heterosexual married couples. Yet we know that married couples continue their sexual relations long past childbearing years when no procreative purpose is in view, and find ways of pleasuring one another apart from intercourse alone. I suspect that those teachers don’t have a full appreciation of the significance of mutual pleasure in the sexual relationship.
As a traditionalist, if I were listing the essential elements of a “moral sexual act,” I would add “mutual pleasure” to marital, unitive, and procreative.
This “pleasure principle” is where a closer look at nature and human nature in particular might backfire on the traditional view. For example, because of the male anatomy, sexual intercourse is perfectly designed for male pleasure. This is not the case, however, with women. The anatomy of the female orgasm is focused on the clitoris, which is outside the vagina. The vast majority of women do not experience sexual climax through intercourse, but through direct stimulation of this external organ, and it’s entirely possible that those who do have orgasms during coitus have them because they receive indirect stimulation there. In other words, if sex is for mutual pleasure, then nature provided women with the wrong equipment to receive that pleasure through the procreative act alone.
It is not only nature, but the Bible itself that emphasizes the “mutual pleasure” significance of sex. In fact, one entire book of the Bible is devoted to it: The Song of Songs. This inspired, canonical work celebrates the unitive and mutual pleasure facets of love and sexuality with little emphasis on its marital aspects and no emphasis at all on its procreative possibilities. Maybe this book is one way God laughs at our little moral formulae.
Now, none of this is enough to persuade me to be anything other than the conservative person I am when it comes to sex, marriage, and family. And I have no agenda here of trying to persuade anyone else of anything. All this is simply to say that observations like these make me more cautious about thinking any case for a certain form of morality is strictly black and white, especially when based upon so-called “natural law” teaching.
This also makes me want to take much less of an “us vs. them” approach to talking about sexuality. The fact is, people who do not practice traditional morality may find great meaning, satisfaction, and deep bonds of love in their sexual relationships. For me to simply dismiss those people out there in “the world” as enslaved and bound by selfish desires, seeking their own pleasure at the expense of others, is not an honest portrayal of the people I observe every day. Loving my neighbor means I can learn from my neighbor, appreciate my neighbor, and see the image of God in him or her even though we hold different moral views.
I can maintain my moral beliefs and still confess that things can get a bit murky.
There are three things which are too wonderful for me,
For which I do not understand:
The way of an eagle in the sky,
The way of a serpent on a rock,
The way of a ship in the middle of the sea,
And the way of a man with a maid. (Proverbs 30:18-19, NASB)
=======================================
E.G. says:
May 27, 2015 at 12:24 am
Appeals to ‘natural law’ can really go awry.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination
Robert F says:
May 27, 2015 at 5:34 am
I increasingly have a hard time putting any credence in any sexual morality that attempts to micromanage from outside what happens inside other people’s sexual lives. Such intrusion seems extremely unnatural to me, any way you cut it.
Miguel says [to Robert F]:
May 27, 2015 at 12:07 pm
Right? I mean, Jesus and all them had some important stuff to say about the topic and all, but I kind of appreciate how general and vague they tended to be. There’s a few things clearly over the line, and the rest is “love your neighbor.” ….just not in that way.
The Finn says:
May 27, 2015 at 6:03 am
> I count myself traditional when it comes to matters of sexual morality. Same here
> I’m not convinced that nature teaches us that sex should be marital. Agree. It does not seem nature has much interest in the matter.
> the Church may have overplayed her hand with its emphasis on natural law teaching I agree. Natural Law upon analysis very often looks like “what we thought was ‘normal’ yesterday” more than it appears to be derivative of something from Nature. Nature is massive, you can find all kinds of things within it.
> All this is simply to say that observations like these make me more cautious about thinking any case for a certain form of morality is strictly black and white, especially when based upon so-called “natural law” teaching.
+1
> For me to simply dismiss those people out there in “the world” as enslaved and bound by selfish desires, seeking their own pleasure at the expense of others, is not an honest portrayal of the people I observe every day Amen. I know some really amazing people ‘of the world’; to accuse them of selfishness in their personal relationship would be unconscionable.
Henry Darger says:
May 28, 2015 at 6:16 am
Why does “traditional” Christianity always boil down to its most bigoted aspects? Whatever happened to love, the Golden Rule, etc.? On the subject of sex, the internet atheists are far more sensible and ethically grounded than this retrograde claptrap:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2015/05/22/the-church-doesnt-get-to-make-the-rules-about-sex-anymore/
Stephen says:
May 27, 2015 at 9:12 am
May I point out that a Church who privileges celibacy just might not be the best source of advice on human sexuality? And we should probably note that the Church’s teachings on sexuality are one of the most often cited factors in the rise of the ‘Nones’?
I was reading an article recently on the so-called “Purity Ball” movement in some Conservative Christian groups where ceremonies are held in which daughters pledge their virginity until marriage to their Fathers. The article pointed out that polls show young girls who pledge their virginity are just as likely to have premarital sex as ones who do not. But there is a striking increase in the likelihood of sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies among the pledgers because they aren’t taught about contraception!
Chaplain Mike says:
May 27, 2015 at 5:08 pm
Earlier in the post I mentioned that the pleasure factor enhances unity, but I think it’s more than that, especially when viewed from the standpoint of what nature teaches. By nature, the sex act is pleasurable and since both partners are capable of orgasm, it is apparently designed for mutual pleasure. I think that traditional teaching has understated this for fear that an emphasis on pleasure will undercut moral responsibility. In my view that has had disastrous consequences. Neither nature nor the Bible is shy about the pleasure sex provides. If God made our bodies and the sexual process, he apparently designed them for pleasure as well as procreation, and in the case of females that doesn’t happen usually through intercourse. I thought that these were points worthy of making “mutual pleasure” a separate point.
If I had been raised in a Jewish household, no one would have been telling me that these two deaths had very little in common. Yet, when I allow myself to block out the idea that my Dad’s soul rises out of his body at death and takes flight toward heaven, then the experience of life as intimately associated with breathing demonstrates a remarkable parallel. The Book of Genesis makes this clear.
John Wijngaards has written his memoirs detailing how he was brought to the position where “in conscience” he could no longer function as a priest within the Roman Catholic Church. His book is entitled, Ten Commandments for Church Reform (