Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Monday, August 15, 2022
Friday, June 24, 2022
Sunday, October 31, 2021
Monday, May 3, 2021
Monday, November 30, 2020
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Do You Not Yet Have Faith?
35 On that day, as evening drew on, he said to them, “Let us cross to the other side.” 36 Leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat just as he was. And other boats were with him. 37 A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was already filling up. 38 Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” 39 He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” The wind ceased and there was great calm. 40 Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” (Mark 4:35–40).
This account of Jesus stilling the waves speaks volumes about our lack of faith in God. The disciples, seeing the storm, believed they were going to die and that Jesus was somehow going to just let them. But his rebuking the wind and sea shows us He certainly has the authority and power that keeps everything under control. He wasn’t going to let the boat sink, even though the disciples feared he might overlook the dangers and forget them.
We might smile at the disciples, but we’re no different. We fear that He will not involve Himself in what frightens us. If pressed, we might deny that we don’t trust Him and are merely concerned with other factors, but when it comes down to it, people are afraid He is going to just let His Church collapse at the hands of those they fear the most.
Of course, free will means any one of us can act in a way that disrupts the Church. But when God makes a promise, He keeps it. He might not keep it in the way we expect—for example, the first century Jews had ideas about the Messiah that were not what God intended—but He keeps it faithfully. We, on the other hand, have a bad habit of anticipating God to fulfill his promises in a specific way, and if He does not seem to fulfill it in that way, we fear He is not going to fulfill it at all.
I think of that as some Catholics and Catholic periodicals who spent years defending the Faith and the authority of the Church, are suddenly despairing and assuming what they do not understand is the sign of a catastrophe. Because they cannot reconcile their interpretation of Church teaching with the actions of Pope Francis, they assume he must be in error. They invent theologies that can somehow have, at the same time, a “heretical” Pope and a Church protected from error.
Such Catholics lament that this is the biggest crisis to afflict the Church since the Arian heresy, and wonder what will happen to the faithful (a group that always includes them, and usually excludes those who disagree with them). But I think this is a view that is ignorant of history. The Church has always had to deal with attacks. Whether attacks from persecution, heresy, or corruption, the Church has always needed to withstand and correct. What we forget, however, is the Church has made changes to disciplines without changing her teachings in doing so.
The problem is often one of perception. If one wrongly thinks a changed discipline is a sign of heresy or corruption, that one will no doubt assume the Church is in mortal peril. If one wrongly thinks that the existence of error means the magisterium supports it or is incompetent, they will assume the Church is in mortal peril. Critics thinking this way tend to assume the Church will remain in error until she does things the way they want them done, even though the Church is not in error.
The disciples, traveling on the Sea of Galilee, assumed that being in the company of Jesus meant that they would not experience difficulty. As a result, when things became difficult, they responded in a panic. But God responded in His own time and His own way. We need to recognize Our Lord will do the same for our own troubles. No, this isn’t a call for passivity. We have tasks to do in converting the world. But we shouldn’t think that the problems of the Church means that God forgets His Church and his promises. He protected the Church in the past. He protects the Church now. He will protect the Church in the future. Recognizing this, Our Lord’s question to His disciples remains’s relevant to our own fears: Do you not yet have faith?
Thursday, April 6, 2017
To Know, Love, and Serve God
The infighting in the Church tends to overlook something important. Some stress doctrine. Some stress mercy. People from both tend to stress it as if any acknowledgment of the other side means denying what they think is most important. As a result, some hold to the idea that doctrine must be defended to the extent that comes across like the Pharisees in John 8:1-11. Others stress mercy and love to the extent that they come across like treating God’s teaching as a mere guideline, or even acting as if teachings they dislike were manmade and in opposition to God. Both positions miss the point. The fact is, God has created both the moral law and the call to love and mercy. To focus only on one is failing to obey God.
Since God designed the universe according to His goodness, how we live will either be in accord with His will or against His will. Since God commanded us to live in accord with His will (John 14:15, Matthew 7:21-23, Luke 10:16), we cannot disobey His commandments and claim we are being faithful to Our Lord. On the other hand, since Our Lord commanded mercy, love, and forgiveness, we cannot treat those who are sinners as if they deserve contempt until such a time that they return to our standard of righteousness.
The term “Pharisee” is unfortunately associated with one type of believer—the religious conservative who focusses on minutiae while ignoring the bigger picture. That’s unfortunate because it leads people to think, “As long as I am not a religious conservative, i cannot be a Pharisee.” That would be a mistake. Our Lord denounced the Pharisees because they put their manmade interpretation of how to be holy above God’s commands, often evading God’s commands. This can be done in all sorts of ways. The obvious example is the Catholic who focuses on one type of the Mass and thinks it makes him holy, even though he ignores other commands. But it is also possible to focus on social justice teachings and the failings of others while ignoring one’s own failings. When we begin thinking that as long as we are not as bad as them we are right in the eyes of God, we are playing the Pharisee—regardless of whether we are a radical traditionalist, Spirit of Vatican II Catholic or somewhere in between.
Unfortunately, it is easy to focus on the sins of others, rather than to seek out knowledge on how we should love and serve God according to His will. The word “His” is important here. It’s easy for everyone to decide for themselves that God wants what we want, and thus sanctify our actions as either good or “something God doesn’t care about.” That’s an attitude of “If I were God I’d be ok with….” But we’re not God. So we can’t argue that what we don’t care about is something God doesn’t care about.
The thing I think people miss is that both obedience and mercy are important. Our Lord wants us to keep His commandments (John 14;15, Matthew 7:21-23) and teach them to others (Matthew 28:19). So the “God doesn’t really care about X” Catholics are wrong to downplay the moral teachings of the Church. But, on the other hand, God also told us to treat the sinner with love and mercy—to forgive “seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:21-35) and that we will be judged as we judge others (Matthew 7:2). In other words, we are forbidden a merciless approach to those who do wrong. These are not contradictions. Our Lord stressed love and mercy, but He also was the one who warned us of Hell, stressing the need for repentance (Matthew 4:17).
The danger is we are tempted to think, our own sins don’t matter but those of people we despise matter a great deal. So, one Catholic condemns other Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion Catholic, but treats their own neglect of Catholic social teaching as trivial or not even a sin at all. Another Catholic condemns racism and ignoring social justice but treats sins against sexual morality as trivial or not even a sin at all. Both praise themselves and denounce the other, but both are failing to do God’s will and both will be judged if they fail to repent when they do wrong. There is no, “I do good with X, so God will overlook Y.”
All of us must remember that the Christian life isn’t a choice between moral teaching and mercy. Rather we are called to constantly evaluate where we stand in relationship with God, showing love and mercy to bring people back to a right relationship with Him, instead of leading them to despair or rebellion.
Monday, March 21, 2016
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Mercy and Misconceptions
On one of the Catholic news sites out there, I was involved in a debate with another reader about the issue of divorce and remarriage. This individual argued that the Church, in confirming that remarriage after divorce (as opposed to receiving an annulment first) is morally wrong, was ignoring the words of Our Lord concerning the parable of the lost sheep. In other words, this individual was asserting that to show mercy to the divorced and remarried, the Church had to stop teaching their actions were sinful and needed to admit them to Communion.
This kind of thinking confuses mercy with tolerating a lack of restraint, and misses the point of what mercy is. It seeks to assuage the conscience of the sinner by telling him or her that their actions are not even sins at all. The Church is accused of being merciless because she will not change herself when people demand that she stop saying things are sins. The reason she will not is because she cannot contradict God’s commands without being faithless to God. When God commands that we do X or avoid Y, the Church cannot permit us to avoid doing X or permit us to do Y. As Our Lord said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15).
For the person who seeks to know, love and serve God, we have an obligation to seek out what is right and live in accordance with it. When we find a commandment difficult, and we don’t understand why it is commanded, we are shown our task: To seek to understand why it is commanded, not to ignore it as too hard. The problem is we are used to having our way and seeking ways to justify our behavior before man, assuming that God will not punish those who choose to do what He forbade.
The mercy which God shows us can be demonstrated this way. God does not exact instantaneous punishment on us for doing what is evil. Instead He warns us of the dangers of sin, encourages turning back to Him, giving us the grace to respond. If we do respond (for grace is a gift we can refuse), He welcomes us back with open arms. If we refuse to respond, He continues to call us. Our Lord's mercy is not to tell people "It is OK to sin" or to say that what was once a sin is no longer one. It is to call people back from sin and to heal the relationship with them.But the person who refuses to heal that relationship is actually refusing the mercy Our Lord offers. The Church cannot change that reality and she cannot pretend to change that reality without being faithless to God.
So why does God command us to be merciful and to forgive? The answer is that He forbids us to behave in such a way that refuses to give mercy to the penitent and refuses to be God’s means of reaching out to the sinner. He forbids us from considering any person irredeemable. Nor can we refuse to forgive the person who has wronged us or refuse to make amends with the person we have wronged. Our task is to seek the redemption of the sinner or the person who wrongs us, not their damnation. God’s laws are made to show us how to live. Ultimately, if we reject these laws, we will face His judgment. We do have until the moment of our death to repent, but none of us know the day nor the hour of our death, so now is the time of respond to His mercy, and now is the time to be vessels of His mercy.
On the other and, when being vessels of mercy, we of course need to remember that we ourselves are in need of mercy. That means showing love and compassion for our fellow sinners who may sin in different ways than we do. We need to remember that we fall every day and are in need of Our Lord’s grace and forgiveness. That should shape how we approach others. Belittling or mocking others will probably drive them away. Nobody wants to be treated in that way, and we should ask if our attempts at humor might actually be counterproductive.
To offer a personal example, consider this account of a joke told by a Protestant minister at an interfaith meeting:
“I read a story some time ago about a man who visited the Pope. He looked around and observed the splendor and wealth of the Vatican. The Pope noticed his amazement and said laughingly, ‘We cannot say anymore that we have no silver and no gold.’ And the man answered, ‘Neither can you say, “Rise up and walk!”’” There was laughter from some in the audience, and I hoped it would break the tension.
Andrew, Brother; Al Janssen (2004-09-01). Light Force: A Stirring Account of the Church Caught in the Middle East Crossfire (p. 215). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
My response to reading this part of the book was a mental middle finger and cost him some of the respect I previously had for him. Such attempts at humor are going to turn off the people who are the butt of the joke. If one wants to offer a fraternal rebuke over what they see as wrongdoing, things like sarcasm and perceived mockery are going to drive people away. Obviously, Brother Andrew was not intending to be offensive to Catholics (though I think his writings display some casual prejudice in that area). But his tone was counterproductive to some he might have otherwise convinced in a good cause.
Now of course the offended person has to practice forgiveness as Our Lord commanded. When someone behaves badly, we have to move beyond it and seek the truth. But people are human beings with feelings that can be hurt and fears that need to be considered. So in this case, I had to work past a bad joke that implied that the Church was worldly and no longer carrying out her mission to consider the merits of his book, but his book would have been more effective if he had omitted the wisecrack.
In a similar way, we have to consider how we present our message as God’s tools to present His mercy. Do we show compassion for their fears and sufferings, even if we must say “No” to the desire to treat sin as morally acceptable? Or do we bear false witness by leading people to think “Christians are jerks”?
Unfortunately, despite the tone we take, some will just take offense simply by the fact that we say X is a sin. Americans really tend to fall for the “Either-Or” fallacy, where if we don’t support one view, we are assumed to support the opposite. So, for example, if we oppose “same sex marriage,” we are accused of supporting all of the wrongs done to persons with a same sex attraction. Or of we oppose divorce and remarriage, we are accused of wanting to trap people in an unhappy, abusive, (insert negative description here) marriage. So if we stand for the Christian definition of marriage, we are accused of “hating homosexuals” and “not caring” about the suffering of people in broken marriages.
Obviously when we defend the teaching of Our Lord as passed on by the Church, we can’t help it if one takes offense at the teaching. But we have to be sure that the way we present that teaching is not a stumbling block.
Moreover, we have to avoid being avenging angels. We’re not like the Greek “Furies” who pursued the wrongdoers with vengeance all their lives with the intent to punish. We have to make clear that our concern is one of love and wellbeing as opposed to “vanquish the heathen!” Pope Francis used the image of the Church as field hospital—we’re here to save those people who have been wounded by sin, not throw them out the door because they’re not healed.
However, just as in medicine, saving the wounded does not mean telling the man with diabetes to continue doing the things that led to the disease, saving the spiritually wounded does not mean telling the sinner to continue to sin. Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery, but He still told her “Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more.” (John 8:11).
So it’s a balancing act. We cannot give sanction to sin, and we cannot act like jerks when reaching out to the sinner. Some may refuse to accept the mercy God offers because that mercy tells them that what they want is killing them, but we still have to love them, even when they hate us and remember that ultimately God will judge both them and us.
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Do We Trust in God? Or In Ourself?
At times everyone fears what the truth might require…that accepting the truth might ask us to give up more than we want to give. This is especially the case when we have staked our claim on a position that is being challenged. If we follow the truth, and truth tells us that something we held important is actually not true, then we have to admit that we were in error. That is hard to do. Nobody wants to admit they were wrong—especially when they have to admit that their opponent might have been in the right all the time. That’s a hard situation to reconcile, and probably why many find it difficult to go from non-Christian to Christian, and from non-Catholic to Catholic. (Read some of the conversion stories out there and see how hard it was for some of them to come across to our Faith. Some of us who were already here as a part of the Catholic Christian faith either forget or never knew the difficulty of the conversion from error to truth and to admit that what they defended as truth was actually falsehood.
So why is it, when it comes to the Catholic faith which we profess to be the true Church, do we fear when the Church teaching challenges us? Why do Catholics get angry when the Pope speaks in a way which challenges our comfortable behaviors? When we’re reminded about teachings that challenge our political preferences? If we profess to believe in God, and that the Church binds and looses with the authority given to her by Our Lord, why do we fear to have our flawed understanding changed? Is it because we fear that the Church is falling into error? Or is it because we fear the consequences of having to admit we followed the faith incorrectly at times?
In other words, it’s a question of whether we are trusting in God or trusting in ourselves.
If we trust in God and recognize our own tendency towards sin and error, we can trust in the teaching authority the Church to remain under God’s protection even when the individual Bishops, Priests, Religious and Laity act sinfully and in error. We can trust that when the Church teaches and it goes at odds with what we feel comfortable with, we can change and trust in God to protect us from being misled—if we follow His Church.
But if our confidence is in ourselves—In our confidence to interpret the Scriptures or Church documents and reject anything that challenges what we feel comfortable with—then we put ourselves before God. Ultimately, we claim to know the truth and don’t feel the need to pray for guidance from God, or to obey the teaching of the Church. The funny thing is when we claim to know the truth to the point that we know better than the Church, it always seems to work in our favor. There’s seldom a case where we acknowledge our need to change. It’s always the other person who needs to change.
I think in these times, when growing numbers of Catholics are openly showing their contempt for the teachings of the Church, the teachers of the Church or both, we need to start asking ourselves where we put our trust. If our trust is in God first, then we can trust Him to protect His Church from teaching error. In such a case, we can avoid overreacting to the times when people in the Church make mistakes or do wrong. We can trust that God established a Church where we can know where to look for the truth when there are multiple factions defying it. We know that no matter how bleak things look, our enemies will not prevail against us in the end.
But if our trust is in ourselves, then we are going to become embittered and living in fear as the members of the Church continue to do things differently than we would have them done—and thus be suspicious of every change. We tell ourselves that if only the Church would do things our way, then we would not be having these problems. Some think the Church needs to change her teaching on divorce or on contraception. Others blame the rise of dissent on the diminished use of Latin and the introduction of the Ordinary form of the Mass. They say that if only the Church had changed a teaching here or not changed a discipline there, all would be well. But since the Church is having problems, it is assumed to confirm that the individual is right and the Church is wrong.
But that’s no way to live. There’s always going to be differences and disputes and disobedience—even among Catholics who generally want the same thing. If we think that our personal standards are the truth to live by, then there is going to be an awful lot of heretics out there (in our minds) and we may end up trying to oppose something that is not even wrong.
But if we recognize that God is the one whose standards we are called to follow, and that His is the Power and the Glory, we might turn our ears to listen to Him and see if we’re not acting more like Saul the Pharisee instead of Paul the Apostle, seeking to change if we do so. We recognize that the authority God gave to bind and loose is not in ourselves, but in the Church herself.
Ultimately, when we trust in God, we allow ourselves to be humble. That doesn’t mean to be passive in the face of wrongdoing, but it does mean that we need to open our eyes, ear and heart to discern what His will may be. But if we trust in ourselves, we become arrogant, and we are so sure we are right, that we forget the possibility of seeing if we’ve missed the point in following Him.
All of us (and not just the other guy) need to pray and discern to see where our trust truly lies. If it is in ourselves, then we need to pray for a change of heart.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Quick Quips—Our Perceptions and God's
Once again, it’s time for Quick Quips where I offer short reflections that I can’t really drag out into a full blog entry.
Does “Everybody” Know Anything at All?
So...
- Everybody knows that the Church is turning Protestant—except the actual Protestants…
- Everybody knows that the Church is turning Liberal—except the actual Liberals…
- Everybody knows that the Church is turning Conservative—except the actual Conservatives…
- Everybody knows that the Church is turning Modernist—except the actual Modernists…
- Everybody knows that the Church is turning Traditionalist—except the actual Traditionalists…
Basically everybody attributes to the Church a position that they associate with their foes, but those foes disagree with the accusation that the Church has embraced their own views. So maybe instead of assuming that the Church is siding with their foes, maybe everybody should consider the possibility that the Church is not changing for the worse—but rather is just calling for each one of us to change and turn to Our Lord...
Reflections on Psalm 95
Psalm 95 is the Psalm used most often in the opening (Invitatory) of the Liturgy of the Hours. It basically puts us in our place before God. It can be easy to sometimes pray it on autopilot if you have it memorized. At other times, things catch my attention. Today, what caught my attention was:
Today, listen to the voice of the Lord:
Do not grow stubborn, as your fathers did in the wilderness,
when at Meriba and Massah they challenged me and provoked me,
Although they had seen all of my works.
Forty years I endured that generation.
I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray
and they do not know my ways.
”So I swore in my anger,
“They shall not enter into my rest.”
I thought about how they challenged and provoked God even though they had seen His works—they did so by finding alternate solutions. They wanted a golden calf, they wanted to go back to Egypt, they wanted a new leader. They wanted the most gain at the least cost. So when God called on them to follow His commands, they were looking for alternate solutions that let them put the most comfort or the least pain compared to what God was guiding them to.
It makes me wonder. Are we perhaps acting like the Hebrews when we complain about the direction of the Church? Why can’t we compromise? Why can’t we go back to the way things were? Why can’t we have a different leader? If we are, perhaps we need to think about what God does with those who grumble. Now God loves us unconditionally, irrevocably as the Pope said in a beautiful homily today, but sometimes He has cause to act sternly with us.
Conclusion
There are always problems with individuals in the Church and, if we’re wise, we’ll realize we’re among the individuals causing problems. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as the role models that the Church should follow if it wants to be right and start thinking about how we stand before Him, and whether we are really any better than the Hebrews in the Exodus or the Pharisees confronting Our Lord. Let us not grow stubborn. Let us not convince ourselves that our preferences are better than God’s call.
Monday, July 13, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Love and Hell
Hell is Not Contrary to God’s Love
One of the things people in modern times find hard to reconcile is how God can be love (1 John 4:16) and the existence of Hell. The general assumption is that Hell is an arbitrary, disproportionate punishment tacked on to a crime—something like shooting a person for jaywalking. Because of this, it is assumed that God, being “good” (in an undefined way) would not really send them to Hell for their own actions. Maybe Nazis, but not “good” people. I suspect this is where the whole “God doesn’t care about X!” attitude comes from.
But this is to miss the point about what Hell is about. It is not an arbitrary sentence to a crime like, “If you commit theft, I will punish you with Prison.” It is more like, “If you jump off of a cliff, you will die.” In other words, Hell is the logical consequence for choosing to do what goes against what God has called us to be. As Peter Kreeft put it:
Take as an example God’s command to Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit. If this is a positive law, it is like a mother threatening to slap her child’s hand if he takes a cookie. If it is a natural law, it means that if we eat the forbidden fruit of disobedience to God’s will, divorcing our will and spirit from God’s, then the inevitable result will be disaster and death, for God is the source of all joy and life.
In a natural law ethic, virtue is its own reward and vice is its own punishment. Virtue is to the soul what health is to the body. It has its own intrinsic, necessary and unchangeable structures, such that all good deeds help the doer as well as the recipient and all evil deeds harm the doer as well as the victim.
The punishment of hell is inevitable, by natural law. Any human soul that freely refuses the one Source of all life and joy must find death and misery as its inevitable punishment.
[Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 293.]
Essentially the Scriptural passages of Hell are not there as a threat, but as a warning. If we know that what we want to do goes against what God commands, and we choose to do that evil anyway, we are choosing something that will cause harm to our relationship with God. Because we have an immortal soul, it stands to reason that what damages our relationship with God will have consequences after we die.
Thus we see the concept of Jesus saying “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Those who turn away from their sins and towards God with His help can be saved. Those who refuse to turn away from their sins have turned their face from God, and so long as they do so, they cannot be saved. When one thinks of it this way, we can see that the defensiveness of those who say “God doesn’t care about X!” really want things both ways. They want to be able to reject God when it suits them without the consequences of that rejection. But since Hell is a logical consequence of rejecting God, and not an arbitrary punishment, people who want the Church to declare certain things are not sins are actually wanting the impossible.
What Follows From This
Once we understand this, then the point of evangelization and speaking out against sin is clear. In doing this, Christians are not being intolerant or judgmental. They seek what is good for others. As the future St. John Paul II put it:
This is a “divine” feature of love. Indeed, when Y [he] wants the good “without limits” for X [her], then properly speaking he wants God for her: God alone is the objective fullness of the good, and only he can satisfy every man with this fullness. Man’s love through its relation to happiness, that is, to the fullness of the good, in a sense passes as close to God as possible.
[Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility, trans. Grzegorz Ignatik (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2013), 119-120.]
To love someone is to desire their happiness through what is truly good—and that true good is God. To desire a “good” for the beloved that goes against what God has designed us for is destructive. So Christians, in desiring that all people be brought to Christ, is not being hateful in saying things are sinful and endangering the soul[*]. They love the sinner and desire their greatest good, which is their being in right relationship with God.
Being human beings and sinners, we recognize that we may express ourselves poorly. We may lose our tempers or become frustrated. These things do hide the love of God from those we are trying to show it to. Popes like St. John Paul II and Pope Francis have expressed apologies for this failing by members of the Church—including those who were in positions of authority.
But it is important to remember that despite these sins and failings which mar the message we give, the Christian message is motivated by love and not hate. That message is both a warning—that our sins alienate us from God, and a promise—that God loves us and wants us to turn back to Him. It is important to remember this and not lose sight of it when the messenger expresses himself or herself poorly.
_________________________
[*] Oh sure, I recognize (sadly) that there are people who miss the point of the Christian faith and think that hostility to the person who commits sin is the same as speaking out against evil. But Christianity, properly lived, rejects this because they recognize that we are called to love each other as Jesus loved us (John 13:34), and even when we think the actions of a person are wrong, we are still called to love the sinner.
Thursday, July 9, 2015
We Cannot Set God the Father and God the Son Against Each Other
Introduction
If I were to describe the behaviors of some Christians who support the changing long held Christian moral beliefs, the term modernist comes to mind—though not in the sense that radical traditionalists abuse as an epithet—thus stripping it of any meaning.
Modernism is defined as “a tendency in theology to accommodate traditional religious teaching to contemporary thought and especially to devalue supernatural elements.” In other words, modernism is an attempt to deny or downplay the inconvenient truths that God has commanded, but modern society finds objectionable. Thus, the Christian who tries to reduce miracles to fortuitous coincidences or tries to turn “thou shalt not” into “It is OK” is guilty of modernism.
Tragically, there has been a surge in the number of Christians who openly seek to twist the meaning of Christian moral obligations since Obergefell, and there seem to be a growing number of Christians who are willing to accept their arguments because they do not like the idea of of themselves or loved ones acting in a way that Christian belief calls sinful. It’s not for me to judge the culpability of the Christians who buy into the argument, but it is not being judgmental to say that these compromises are certainly against what God has commanded and that those Christians who confuse their compromising the truth with being compassionate. We need to remember that even when loving the sinner, we cannot compromise on the truth.
Jesus Is God and We Cannot Separate Him From God in the Old Testament
One common justification for rejecting unpopular moral teachings is done in trying to separate the God of the Old Testament from Jesus Christ in the Gospel. God in the Old Testament is seen as harsh and judgmental, while Jesus in the Gospel is seen as loving and non-judgmental. But that vision of the two are wrong for several reasons—the first of which is the very fact that it divides One God into two beings where one is considered bad, and the other good. That’s basically gnosticism.
In fact, if we profess to be believing Christians, there are some principles we must accept…in fact, to deny them makes us heretical:
- We believe in One Triune God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—who has existed eternally.
- Therefore Jesus has always been God the Son.
- From this it follows that one cannot divide God into separate beings or claim that what God taught, Jesus repudiated.
- Once we recognize this, the Christian cannot use the “Jesus never said anything about X” argument without (knowingly or not) denying the Triune and eternal nature of God.
It is important to recognize these facts, because, after Obergefell, people are trying to bully Christians into abandoning their moral objections to “same sex marriage” by saying “Jesus never condemned homosexuality.” To make that claim, one has to either deny the Trinity or deny the authority of Scripture when it disagrees with one’s personal behavior. So, let’s look at that next.
The Authority of Scripture is God and We Do Not Have the Right to Overthrow It
Protestants and Catholics both recognize the authority of Scripture, though they have different ideas on what that authority means. Generally speaking, we hold that the Bible was divinely inspired, while making use of the talents of the human authors, so that it is free of error. The Catholic Church, in the Vatican II document Dei Verbum, describes it this way:
11. Those divinely revealed realities which are contained and presented in Sacred Scripture have been committed to writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. For holy mother Church, relying on the belief of the Apostles (see John 20:31; 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Peter 1:19–20, 3:15–16), holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself. In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him2 they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.4
Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation. Therefore “all Scripture is divinely inspired and has its use for teaching the truth and refuting error, for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind” (2 Tim. 3:16–17, Greek text).
So, we have to realize that since God inspired the authors to put into the Scriptures what He wanted put there, we are not free to simply pick and choose what we think is out of date. We have to understand the context of the words and the culture which the author shared with the original audience. We also have to understand that, despite the fact that the human authors wrote over a period of thousands of years, God inspired all of it, and we cannot simply pick out a section to support what we would like to be taught.
The Jewish Law and Divine Accomodation
What causes so many misunderstandings is the fact that we forget that everything in the Bible ultimately points to Christ. In the Old Testament, this means laying the framework, building the nation where Jesus can be born. This brings us to the concept of Divine Accommodation—that in teaching us, God moves from the simplest concepts to the more complex—as we grow more able to understand (See Galatians 3:23-24). He had to prepare us for receiving Christ by creating a framework. In Christ, the Law is fulfilled. That doesn’t mean the “thou shalt nots” can become “it’s OK if you want to do it.” But it does mean that the elements of the Law which were pointing to the fulfillment of Christ can be set aside—the ceremonial law, dietary law and legal strictures on what to do to transgressors—but the moral obligations of God’s teaching remain. This is what Acts 15:1-29 was affirming in saying that the Gentile Christians were not bound to keep the Law and why St. Paul took so stern a stance against those who tried to implement the circumcision and kosher laws.
What we need to keep in mind is, the legal codes of the Jewish Law were not the sudden imposition of barbarism on a genteel people. They were restrictions on how the Jews could behave in comparison to how their neighbors behaved. Yes, reading the laws of Exodus and Leviticus may sound offensive to our ears. But when one compares them with the neighboring nations, those nations did worse things on a regular basis. In other words, God wasn’t giving the Jews free rein to run wild. He was forbidding them from running wild.
Moreover, once you look at Jesus teaching the crowds “You have heard it said…but I say unto you…” He actually takes the law to a higher level. It’s not enough to avoid doing evil. We have to avoid harboring it in our hearts. So, when critics try to cite the other laws in Leviticus to deny the condemnation of homosexuality, they haven’t refuted the Christian moral teaching…they’ve merely shown they do not understand how God gradually brought His teaching to us, turning us away from evil and towards good as our minds could comprehend it. Christ is the final fulfillment of the Law. There won’t be any further revelation beyond Christ (contra the Muslims and Mormons)—we’ll just apply His teachings to new situations. In doing so, we will never see God’s teaching go from “X is a sin” to “X is not a sin.” If it ever appears to be otherwise, it merely shows we have misunderstood the essence of what was condemned.
To discuss each of the issues would take too long and cover too much ground. For example, I do not have the time to discuss St. Paul discussing Sin, Law, Gentiles and Jews in the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians. Suffice to say, if you want to know how Christians view the relationship of the Old Testament legal code in comparison to the teachings of Christ, you need to study what Christianity teaches on the subject and not merely assume that the Church must have gotten it wrong just because you don’t understand it. That’s an argument from ignorance fallacy.
Conclusion
It is vital to remember, that we cannot try to set God the Father against God the Son, the Trinity against each other to justify our own behavior. Nor can we try to set one part of the Bible in opposition to another. There is no conflict between Father and Son because God is Triune. There is no conflict between Old and New Testament because God inspired both. When a conflict appears, it is actually a conflict of our own understanding.
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