Dear Sweet, Tolerant, Secular Europe

I told you so.


Love, your Mother,

The Catholic Church

Two more random thoughts.

1. Thankfulness. Thankfulness is a unique and distinctively Christian ability. Of course I don't ignore that being thankful is a natural human phenomenon; in fact, anthropologists write whole books on the oddly universal nature of Gift and Return. (Wonderfully, the very idea of gift--something freely given without expectation of return, explodes categories of commerce so totally as to be an important core to the New Evangelization, but more on that later). Thankfulness has one element that not only separates theists from atheists, but in fact, sets apart Christians from the human race. The beautiful irony is that, inasmuch as it separates and distinguishes Christians, it unites the whole human family.
   
   What I mean is this. Christians are aware by faith of a God who is all self-giving. Thus as deep as our charity--our friendship with the divine--is, that strong our thankfulness will be. The Christian has a source, a wellspring for infinite self-gift and good works, and its name is thankfulness to God.
   
   Pretty basic. But inside there's more. The Christian is aware not only of the gift of God's continuous creation--that God gives us each breath of air that we breathe. He is also aware of God's ultimate self-gift in his Son, who truly makes our breathing worthwhile. Yet presented with so unsurpassable a gift, we should be totally powerless to thank God; were it not for the Holy Spirit, God's sacrifice of his Son could be an occasion for despair. But the Spirit teaches us to pray, for "we do not know how to pray as we ought" (Rom 8:26). This is not merely an invisible, individual teaching, but in the Church, the Spirit teaches us to thank God in a way that is truly pleasing to him... Eucharistein, the Eucharist.
   
   Thus Christians are set apart by this, and it is acting out of thankfulness which is the singular, inique, concrete way that God breaks in upon a world, offends the logic of sin, to "proclaim liberty to captives" and "let the oppressed go free." See: I, Robot, Sunny's explanaion of his dream: "This is the place where robots meet. Look--you can see them here as slaves to logic, and this man on the hill comes to free them."
   
   
2. The freedom of God. God's own freedom is a notion in theology which tends to be shoved to the back. Part of the blame for this may lie on William of Ockham, who distorted God's freedom into a sort of a joke; he thought he could glorify God's freedom by describing God as if he had total freedom but no love, no honesty, no self-consistency, who had no purpose for creation. The God who saves through a scratch on Jesus's hand or through incarnation as a mule, is a God who says one thing and does another; who confounds his creatures, who indeed does not reveal himself. Ockham's description of God as free is the seed of creeping modern despair at the self-revelation of God.
   
   In my opinion, the beginning of modernity corresponded with a forgetfulness of the non-competitive otherness of God; a forgetfulness that God is that which is greater than that than which nothing greater can be thought.
   
   The result of this is the birth of two false gods: the god of the philosophers, and the god of process theology--either the impersonal, rationally necessary, ineffable One Beyond Being which has no will, does not command or reveal, or the personal, dynamic, changing, sympathetic, finite god(s) who are the objects of worship, and have demonstrable freedom, but always veer on the edge of absurdity, or else topple over it. I should say, not so much "birth" but rather resucitation--these are nothing more than Aristotle's "unmoved mover" and the deities of the Illiad, respectively. The only difference is that the "god of the philosophers", if it is spoken about at all, is sometimes called a fifth dimension, or else it takes on Heidegger's critique and becomes the ineffable "Ereignis". But whatever it is, it is never "personal"--such is an insult, either to the ineffable grouund of all being, or to the process of reasoning about it (which, funny enough, are sometimes hard to distinguish). Nobody reads Heidegger anymore but everybody knows his critique, and how to lobby it against believers in a personal deity. "Why do you insist on imposing your artificial, mythical categories on this great mystery? Why do you try to possess, control this great 'What' with the machinations of your puny language? You, who try to make god into someone like yourself--are you not just a metaphysical colonist? Have you not sabotaged our rational reflection with a human desire? While we are thinking, are you not merely emoting?"
   
   Yet this is the result of a forgetfulness. Because there is one question, perhaps a little mixed with human desires, but primarily rational, and it asks: is the god of the philosophers free? And the answer is no. When the philosophers exclude from God all of the anthropomorphisms of the Christian God, they have to throw out freedom. And perhaps they will say, whatever rational evidence there is of a God, there is no evidence for 'its' freedom. I will grant that proving such from Aquias's 5th Way is a little sketchy, and Anselm is tautological.
   
   But consider the consequences. First, if the ultimate ground of being is not free, then there is no such thing as freedom. If the god of the philosophers is that which is primordial, basic, ultimately simple; and the evolution of beings involves an increase of complexity of matter, then if freedom did not exist from the beginning as a real thing, then it could have never existed. No degree of complexity or dynamism of matter can yield freedom, only an illusory simulacrum thereof.
   
   This is not a controversial point; many atheists hold to it with delight. It is a tragedy of reason that so many people who do not think they are atheists, and believe that we are free beings, will also deny freedom to the ultimate Being, saying "It is stupid to think God is personal". They do no realize that freedom, will, intellect, and in the end, personality, come as an indivisible 'package deal'. If God is not a person, then God is not free; if It is not free, then there is no freedom; if there is no freedom, then we are hubristic animals, the Sophists are right, Nietzsche is right, and why the heck are we all discussing this anyway? (A doctoral student at Louvain said that Nietzsche would have been a lot more credible if, instead of writing books, he simply ran out and started hitting people.)
   
   Second, if the ultimate ground of being is not free, then it is not ultimate. I am not, here, making exactly the same argument as Anselm, but a version of it. I do not even presuppose that 'freedom' is a perfection, or that the ultimate ground of all being need to be perfect. But it is after all, ultimate--not only "first cause" but "continual cause"; the cause of the cause of the causes of all causes, ad infinitim. The "Because" of "Why is there something and not nothing?"
   
   Yet a non-free "ultimate ground" cannot be this "because". If it is not free, then it acts (not to be confused with "moves") either eternally, unconsciously, and continuously, or else not at all. If the latter, then nothing would be. If the former, then nothing would not be. (This last sentence has taken me a long time to come up with. I'm still trying to probe it for validity).
   
   ...more to come!
   

Urgent Message

That is all.

Four random thoughts.

1. The "Age of Reason"--it denotes the 17th and 18th centuries, characterized by anticlericism and dominance of libertine philosophies, and also the seventh year of a child, the age at which he just barely has the mental faculties to do wrong. Coincidence? I think not.
   
   
2. Genesis 14:18-20--"And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said, 'Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be Go Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!'"
   
   This could be used as a good scriptural apologetic against the notion that the Church has the option to use rice as the matter of the Eucharist. The preeminence of bread and wine in both the New and Old Testament--and in the hands of Melchizedek no less, whose 'order' the Catholic priest is said to join (as distinct from the order of Levi)--demands that continuity--that sign of unity, not only geographically but across eons.
   
   
3. "What are we swimming in?" - the half-sleeping thought that popped into my head before this afternoon's 20 minute nap. The being that underlies all being, the real behind the surface. I conjured an image of all three-dimensional being as two dimensional, and this "sheet" of being as the canvas of God's creation, who gives certain of his paintings more texture, more three-dimensionality than others.
   
   
4. I hate "praise and worship" and other forms of Christian rock--it's bad rock and it's bad Christianity. It's bad rock, smacking of sacharine Disneyland pop-Christian Jesus-Freak "nicety nice" vapid flatulence that ruins the adrenaline rush of good secular classic and metal rock; and it's often bad Christianity, reducing the Gospel to nerve stimulation and flights of middle-class starry-eyed ephemeral sentimental optimism--the perfect target for sin and death to crush into a puddle of bored and narrow-minded despair. When Christian rock is tacked onto the Mass as a "kid grabber," it's worse. Christian rock hijacks the holy sacrifice of the Mass and turns it into the vehicle for a worldly agenda, deifying the lesser good; it reduces beauty to taste, covenant to relevance, charity to infatuation, universal to particular, history to modernity, and ultimately, glorification to Pelagian praise ("we do it"), and salvation to experience.
   
   A youth group should have two goals with respect to music, which have an analogy to the liturgical purposes of the Glorifying of God and the Sanctification of Man. First, teens should be exposed to, immersed in, and practicing well done, traditional, Catholic music--from multiple ages and cultures (from the most ancient accessible chants, to Byzantine, Gallic, to post Reformation, African, Latino, etc.)--and insodoing, they can see how a distinctive American worshipping music can be a development, and not a break from Catholic music past. Second, teens should be able to listen to all the contemporary stuff with the gift of discernment of spirits, to find where the paschal mystery hides in all of secular culture, in their favorite songs, and in the rest of pop culture; then they will have the freedom that comes from truth, and be able to enjoy secular entertainment in a way their friends couldn't even imagine
   
   The basic idea is that the Mass, the Source and Summit of Christian life, exports, rather than imports the Gospel that heals and perfects culture.
   

Funny image...

While on the subject of hunting, a guy at a lunch conversation mentioned that you can't even find a bear in the woods without a circle of hippies protecting it anymore. The thought made me think of the environmentalist protestors who would chain themselves to trees in order to stop the voracious appetites of logging companies.

So I said... hippies chaining themselves to bears?

And there was much laughter. ("Rooaaarrr")

Then I had a very philosophical thought, which I am inclined to do: maybe that image is very much an analogy of how European secular tolerance and irreligion is allowing Muslim extremists take gradually more and more control over the continent...

A quick, early morning thought

Ideology, as Hannah Arendt tells us, is the domination by the "logic" of an "idea." Any good idea--a model, a theory, a scientific "fact"--is accompanied by an inner pattern. When this inner pattern breaks outside of the original, "factual" content of the model, takes on a life of its own, and begins to enslave thought in foreign spheres, then it becomes ideology. Examples: Naziism as an outgrowth of Darwinism; Communism as an outgrowth of Hegelianism; Ideological Republicanism as an outgrowth of Adam Smith; Relativism as an outgrowth of sociology. See also: VIKI's totalisation of the "Three Laws" in the "I, Robot" movie--"My logic is undeniable."

Democracy is good, not because it has an especially keen eye for truth (it doesn't), but because it is the best natural bulwark against ideology. I.e., the best way to humanize the ideas driving government is to throw as many humans at them as possible.

However, we must remember that Hitler was "legitimately" elected in a democratic process. Why? Because the electors were, not persuaded by, but attracted to Hitler. Why? The mass media, image manipulation, and mob psychology.

The mass media--particularly that which is controlled by the few, i.e., television and radio--is the nemesis of democracy. It is a parasite on the system which prevents it from humanizing government as it ought. It is the means by which ideology subverts its only bulwark. Democracy, full of hope for the humanization of government in the 19th century, is now just as utterly defunct as monarchy.

What about the Internet as a democratizing influence? Several problems. (1) Not nearly as many people have it, or can take full advantage of it, (2) though useful as a tool of research, it can also be (and is, generally) used by individuals to reinforce already-held views bestowed upon them by media-controlled culture, (3) is only too often the "handmaid" of the media.

The new golden rule: the one who controls ideas controls the nations; ideas are manipulable via images and omission of information; governments are built to legitimize and promote lifestyles cooked up in the minds of sitcom writers.

~~~~~~~~

Addendum:

Sitcoms and drama shows are miniature, super-controlled universes, where nothing happens except exactly what the writer wishes to happen; "Sex and the City," "Friends," etc., vividly show an actualized, possible "Age of Aquarius," at every turn and in every living room purveying a "hey-this-stuff-ain't-so-bad" fictional fracture between sex and the origin of life, family and identity, trivial choices and life-altering/breaking consequences. The clarion call of "Murphy Brown," "Viva la liberated single mother!" deliciously omits her profound agony, and her child's future inability to form deep relationships. And it does it, not for liberating women, but liberating men: "get out while you can, she can take care of herself just fine."

~~~~~~~~

Addendum 2:

The sympathetic protagonist of modern televized fiction is always in danger of becoming an absolute center of value; the quasi-divine arbiter of right and wrong. There is an ominous truth to the title of "everyman" often assumed by characters like Frasier, Clark Kent, Raymond, etc. This character's worries become my worries; this character's joys become my joys; this character's enemies become my enemies; this character's solutions become my solutions. It will not matter if an individual can admit that there are "good priests and bad priests;" the more often priests are the antagonists in films--or that the "good priests" have, as their antagonists, the Catholic faith--the more habitually priests will be seen as either the bearers, the dupes, or the tragic slaves of "oppressive tradition."

Obviously it will be objected that people are not such sheep, and that this is a demeaning theory of the effect of television. But may I be so bold as to point out that the only film I can recall in the last decade not to assume that people in love must shack-up before they marry was, in all irony, "The 40 Year Old Virgin"? Consider also that, as many gullible or sheep-like individuals there may be, not a single one of them will admit to being such. In fact, this is the most telling sign of it: "I am no sheep; I am a radically independent individual. I form my own values; I am my own man/woman; I am free." Is this not the very thing promised and/or granted by every commercial advertisement, not merely in fact, but in method? Show me the one who is terrified to be influenced by television, and I will show you the radically independent thinker.

A good evening with friends

I had a wonderful night out tonight with my fellow 3-West cam members; a spontaneous little bratwurst and beer on our balcony. We joked about things, shot the breeze, and so on. It's a good way to end an evening of prayer and recollection, and a long day.

Today we processed around the lake with the Blessed Sacrament, stopping at significant intervals along the way. I had the honor of carrying a candle, but my winky little arms hurt something awful after 80 minutes of carrying the thing. I felt a sense of dread as we approached the site of the crash; I'm very happy that Fr. Canary, the rector, reconsecrated the campus.

Wow. I'm not much for long-windedness at the moment. I'm afraid that's the best I can do after a couple of beers. God bless.

Apologetics as Inculturation

Note: the last post was satire. This one is not. :)

Peter Berger wants to ease the mind of theologians. He tells them: do not take those nasty relativists too seriously, because after all, they are not true relativists. They have used their Darwin and their Frued and their sociology to reduce religion into Durkheimian plausibility structures. Yet they have only neglected to do the same to themselves. Berger believes that he has done so, and hence we enter into a bright future of the "level playing field", where irreligion and secularism must compete without any a priori advantages over of the great religious traditions.

That's the playing field, but what is the game? For Berger, the game is the inductive method. For his money, the true religion, bustling about in the midst of all the false ones, will irresistably sing to the discerning and rational seeking mind, who only takes the time to investigate.

[to be continued...]

[continuing...]

Title: Apologetics as Inculturation (as Opposed to Berger's Empirical Induction)

Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that "inculturation," as a necessary activity of the Church, is an ideal framework for the business of apologetics. When apologetics is understood as a kind of inculturation of the Gospel directed at relativistic culture, two things happen: (1) the specific flaws of Berger's inductive method are corrected, and (2) the positive insights of Pascal and Ratzinger are actualized.

The point of the paper is not to shoehorn apologetics into the mold of inculturation, but to expand the sense in which apologetics makes use of reason in order to demonstrate the rationality of Christian faith. Namely, if, from the side of faith, reason cannot be asbtracted into a fully autonomous, "pure" instrument without doing damage to itself, then the 'reason' used by apologetics must have two features beyond its counterfeit double: (1) rooted in faith, and (2) directed primarily to the heart of its audience. Enter inculturation. Inculturation has always been constituted by these insights, whatever culture it addresses. Apologetics cannot be truly effective if it regards itself as making an appeal only to sound reason. It must incorporate an inculturating paradigm, and make an appeal to hearts which are de facto feverishly concerned with sound reason. What makes apologetics apologetics, is not so much its unique method, as its unique audience. The purpose of this turn is to heighten the apologist's awareness of the pre-rational (desire-based) foundations of rationalist/relativist claims, not for the purpose of attacking them as inconsistent with the professed rationalism, but to see them as seeds of the Gospel and reorder them towards it as their highest fulfillment.

I. Introduction
II. Apologetics as inculturation: Correlating Ratzinger's notion of culture with Berger's notion of plausibility structures.
III. Problems in the inductive method resolved.
IV. Insights by Ratzinger and Pascal incorporated.
V. How other things fall into place: Wretchedness of man + greatness of God; the limits of reason
VI. Conclusion

[Just to illustrate further...]

Inculterative apologetics is not a reductive approach to reconciling cognitive dissonance, though they share the concern with rationally making connections between Christian faith and the deepest desires of modern relativist culture. Apologetics rooted in faith, however, does not immediately grant credence to relativist culture's superficial concerns (any more than inculturation would grant that eating human hearts was the deepest desire of the Aztecs).

Inculterative apologetics is not a deductive approach to preserving Catholic identity, though it shares the goal of demonstrating to relativist culture that its superficial satisfactions are dross compared to the gold available only to a faith which is passive to the supreme providence of a loving God active in history via the Church. Apologetics does not assume the sheer disorder of relativist passions, and seeks inroads to the relativist's heart via reason and desire-fulfillment.

Inculterative apologetics is not Berger's inductive approach, though it does share the requirement that the members of relativist culture have an active exercise in rational, and experiential investigation. It does not assume that these tools, unaided by faith (even the faith of another person), are not wrapped in personal wishes and distorted by disordered desires, or that even if they were not, that they alone are not totally inadequate to "find" faith because they misjudge what faith is.

"Shut Up, You're Stupid."

"Hello. My name is Doctor Ribble Namejokes. I have over forty years of experience in applied abnormal psychology and evangelical mission. I have been an advisor of dialogue and dispute for many prestigious Catholic pastors such as Marcel Levebre and Hans Kung, as well as authors like Michael Rose, and the journalists of the National Catholic Reporter. Years of training and study have taught me one important lesson, which I have made the center of a new approach to dialogue and apologetics in the Catholic Church. It is all summed up in the title of my new book, Shut Up, You're Stupid: Dialogue and Apologetics in the Catholic Church.

In my book, I outline a series of helpful strategies for engaging in various encounters between the Catholic faith and the outside world. Strategies like, "Tell them, 'Shut up, you're stupid',"

[skit]

or my personal favorite, "Imply, 'Shut up, you're stupid.'"

[skit]

Of course, sometimes with that last one, if subtlety is lost on the dialogue parter, it helps to return to one of the prior strategies, or better, find a crowd to help improve your credibility.

[skit]

It is my true hope that, by teaching us to channel our efforts into their most natural expression, this book will usher in a new age of productive and exciting dialogue and apologetics. In the meantime, I also recommend my other popular books, Stop Your Stupid Whining: Pastoral Care and Counseling in the Catholic Church and You Can't Do Anything Right, Can You? A Beginner's Guide to Conducting the Liturgy."

Divided. Really?

While reading an assigned chapter for my sacramental theology class, I came across a throwaway line about the divisions among Christian denominations: despite our divisions, we are united. Probably because I was highly caffeintated at the time (I'm not, now--fancy that), I wrote on my white-board: "Are we united in spite of our divisions, or are we divided in spite of our unity?" I can understand the optimistic impulse in ecumenical dialogue--it's healthy for progress. At the same time, I have a deep suspicion of throw-away lines meant to sustain a polite veil over what really is an ugly situation.

I am not saying that we definitely are divided in spit of our unity; but the question should be looked at.

To explain myself: the term you want to emphasize is always the second term in the sentence. I.e., "In spite of our [superficial quality], we are [deeper, underlying quality]." To say that we are united in spite of our divisions, is to imply that the divisions, real though they may be, occupy a superficial category relative to our unity. This can be taken in the extreme sense that the superficial category is actually illusory or trivial; the "divisions" mean nothing, and we can get along fine if we exclude discussion of them entirely, and focus only on the deeper unity. There is a powerful impulse in that direction in ecumenical dialogue, as well as interreligious dialogue. The fatal flaw in it is that it takes a category of details--i.e., those which are "superficial" relative to another, deeper category; and it makes them "superficial", absolutely. E.g., if belief in Mary as Mother of God divides us, and it is relatively more superficial than our agreed upon belief in the Trinity, then it is "superficial" can therefore can be discarded.

There is a logical confusion here. Relative superficiality is not the same as superficiality. Eyes are superficial organs relative to the human heart; that hardly means life would not be devastatingly affected if we plucked them out.

But even when the "superficial" category, i.e., the alleged divisions amid Christians, is not regarded so flippantly, it is still considered of less importance of the "deeper" category. It's a post-Vatican II truism--not to mention a doctrine as laid out by Ut Unum Sint, that the things that bond all Christians together as One are more profound than the things that divide them.

"If Christians, despite their divisions, can grow ever more united in common prayer around Christ, they will grow in the awareness of how little divides them in comparison to what unites them" (UUS #22). (I can't believe I actually found that quote. Yay me.)

But bring the question into the philosophical realm (*note the weeping and gnashing of teeth in the background*), there remains a problem with speaking of more-or-less superficial categories of either division and/or unity" the referent.

Things are never simply relative to one-another. Why? Because to be relative to something else implies some level of distance (conceptual distance or phsyical distance); and wherever distance is implied, the limits of that distance are implied.

[I'm going to cut off this reflection, started last Friday, here. It was interrupted that night by a couple of beers with friends, thereby making analysis impossible. My mind has gone on to other things, and I no longer have motivation to finish. Yay, beer!]