Honesty
I love visiting other Catholic blogs, and those of my Protestant friends as well. In all of them I find support and reinforcement for my beliefs, and a companionship in devotion.
But there are other kinds of blogs I like to visit ... those that call themselves "biblioblogs". They're blogs devoted to the subject of Biblical Studies (check out Biblioblogs: An Aggregate of Blogs Geared toward Biblical Studies).
This wasn't always the case, however. For quite a while after I became a christian, I avoided anything to do with the study of the historical Jesus. I was afraid that I would find out something I didn't want to know, that some research would turn up an incontravertable fact that would forever spoil my faith. Actually, I'm still a bit afraid of this. But what keeps me reading about the historical Jesus is the realization that a faith that is afraid of the truth isn't worth having, that faith demands honesty, if only with oneself.
One of the biblioblogs I visit most often is Duke University Professor Mark Goodacre's NT Gateway Weblog. His post - A Brit at Duke: Reflections of an Alien Professor - ended with this paragraph, which sums up my feelings well ...
.... one of the values of the best scholarship, and this is especially true of studying religion, is that it helps to keep you honest. When you set out your beliefs and attempt to use scholarship solely to defend them, rather than to question and to test them, you are engaging in apologetics. When you subject religious claims, religious literature and your own religious ideas to rigorous scrutiny in the presence of others who have different ideas, you know that you are on the right track. Publicly available evidence, publicly coherent arguments, rigorous academic scrutiny, and honesty.
But there are other kinds of blogs I like to visit ... those that call themselves "biblioblogs". They're blogs devoted to the subject of Biblical Studies (check out Biblioblogs: An Aggregate of Blogs Geared toward Biblical Studies).
This wasn't always the case, however. For quite a while after I became a christian, I avoided anything to do with the study of the historical Jesus. I was afraid that I would find out something I didn't want to know, that some research would turn up an incontravertable fact that would forever spoil my faith. Actually, I'm still a bit afraid of this. But what keeps me reading about the historical Jesus is the realization that a faith that is afraid of the truth isn't worth having, that faith demands honesty, if only with oneself.
One of the biblioblogs I visit most often is Duke University Professor Mark Goodacre's NT Gateway Weblog. His post - A Brit at Duke: Reflections of an Alien Professor - ended with this paragraph, which sums up my feelings well ...
.... one of the values of the best scholarship, and this is especially true of studying religion, is that it helps to keep you honest. When you set out your beliefs and attempt to use scholarship solely to defend them, rather than to question and to test them, you are engaging in apologetics. When you subject religious claims, religious literature and your own religious ideas to rigorous scrutiny in the presence of others who have different ideas, you know that you are on the right track. Publicly available evidence, publicly coherent arguments, rigorous academic scrutiny, and honesty.
posted by crystal | 12:11 AM
30 Comments:
You hit the bull in the eye Crystal. This is what i was thinking after Fatima debate also. I think that scientific method can and should be applied in a respectful way.
Hi Paula :-)
Good point Paula.
Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, who is in residence at my parish, likes to point out that "Faith takes us beyond reason, but should never take us beneath reason". We should never be afraid to read anything, and everything should be open to be read critically, including the criticisms.
IMO, we should never be the ones who make science an enemy of religion, and by the same token, we should never make history an enemy of religion either. At least not honest history properly understood. As Liam has pointed out elsewhere, some deconstructionist history is carried out dishonestly. What is sometimes passed off for objective history is sometimes cleverly disguised apologetics too.
I love Goodacre's blog. For me, studying the historical Jesus has actually served to strengthen my faith rather than to weaken it, even though quite a bit of it is challenging. I used to read a lot of apologetics, especially controversies between Catholicism and Calvinism. The more I learned about Jesus in his Jewish context, Hellenism, the Roman Empire and Second Temple Judaism, the more sense Catholicism and Orthodoxy made to me, and the less sense the Calvinist critique of Catholicism made to me.
Good Post, and good comments, Crystal. As for finding an "incontravertable fact" of history, I don't think that there is any such thing :). There is always too much interpretation. I remember reading about a championship chess game, and the commenter wondered why one of the players made a certain move. It was years before anyone realized that had he not made that move there would have been a forced checkmate. Sometimes we just don't see the whole thing.
I found NT Wright's work on the historical Jesus to be fascinating. He works from the point of view of Jesus's mindset, what did Jesus, think He was doing, why did Jesus act the way He did, and shows a consistant pattern through the whole gospel. Since I am not a biblical scholar, it is tought reading (I am about 3/4 of the way through it). He certainly brought Jesus alive to me as a real person. Yet still, faith must add on to that basis.
Hugs,
Mike L
"Actually, I'm still a bit afraid of this. But what keeps me reading about the historical Jesus is the realization that a faith that is afraid of the truth isn't worth having, that faith demands honesty, if only with oneself."
Crystal, your complete honesty here to me is really admirable and courageous. And on-target. If God is Truth, avoiding truths has got to be the wrong way to proceed.
Jeff, For me, studying the historical Jesus has actually served to strengthen my faith rather than to weaken it, even though quite a bit of it is challenging.
... that's just how it is for me too.
Hi Mike. I like NT Wright also, and visit his page every now and then to see what new stuff he has :-)
Hi Darius - Thanks for your comment :-)
Crystal, I'd like to second Darius's admiration for your honesty.
Biblical study is one of those things that I really want to spend time on when I have time. I think I went through too long a period of atheism for anything I come across to easily threaten my faith, so I'm not terribly afraid of hitting something that will disillusion me. Besides, you're right -- faith demands honesty. In fact, without honesty, it's not real faith, it's a pathological grasping for a certainty you know is not true.
Studying history has given me some good insights on these questions. As Mike said, there is no incontravertable fact in history. Everything can be looked at from a new persepctive, with new tools or new evidence. Thank God, otherwise there would be no work for us historians. Also, nothing exists without a historical context. We are all much more conditioned by the society that we are born into than we can imagine. If Jesus wasn't historical, that is, if he wasn't a Jew in the Levant in the first century, with all that implies, then he wouldn't be human (as well as divine). Also, no one would understand him. That's how I understand the warlike God of Exodus -- that was the only way people could have understood God at that time.
Liam,
I think you're right about history. The little that I've studied it has given me a respect for "the search" ... as Agent Mulder of the X-Files used to say, The Trhuth is out there ... but it's not exactly nail-able :-)
Maybe someday in the future, things will be different ... in the science fiction novel Doomsday Book, history students at Cambridge can go back in time to study their area of interest :-)
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Lima, I forgot to mention above that there was a discussion among the bibliobloggers about whether faith based NT scholarship was valid. if you're interested, here's a link to Stephen Carlson's entry about it ...
link
Crystal,
Thanks for the link. It is an interesting question and somewhat hard to avoid, though I think that only fundamentalists would allow their faith to condition their conclusions. We can look at the Gospels as texts in their historical context and both Christian and non-Christian scholars would come to the same conclusions about early Christianity: the early Christians believed Christ rose from the dead. That's all the text can give us. No serious scholar would say either that the text "proved" the resurrection or, coming from a completely non-Christian point of view, that since Resurrection is "impossible," the whole thing is a hoax. There is nothing in the text that "proves" either supposition. I know that Resurrection has ocurred because of my faith, and I know that I know it because of faith.
I think when my work touches on religious issues, I have my "scholar" side and my "devotional" side, and although both dialog with each other, I know that when I write a scholarly work, it has to conform to the norms of that context. My faith gives me a perspective, but will not change my objectivity (I hope).
Crystal, i read more on the marian apparitions...i doubt seriously that the merciful Mother/angry Father combination is genuine.
Liam,
scholarship done without being influenced by beliefs seems hard to imagine, becasue many of our beliefs are not even conscious, I think. Yet, still, people do seem to get "surprised" and to change their minds through scholarship.
On the one hand, you have a person who begins as a vowed religious (JD Crossan) and ends up as a Jesus Seminarian who says (I'm not sure if he's serious) Jesus' body was not resurrected, but eaten by wild dogs.
Then there are guys like John Polkinghorne, a a theoretical elementary particle physicist and Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge, who quit to become an Anglican priest.
Paula, I agree with you. I'm skeptical of the marian revelations. I can't say they are not valid, because I just don't know, but I can say that I don't want them to be :-).
Paula and Crystal, which Marian revelations are you talking about?
Crystal,I really doubt that they are.
I have no problem with the apparition that gave the miraculous medal (i even have a medal like that) and with the Lourdes apparition...Let´s talk about those apparition falling into the pattern of merciful Mother/Angry Father, these are those who really trouble me. I already posted today on this.
1.I belive that they are wrong theologicaly speaking and that the Church made a mistake by approve some of them. Or God is love, all-merciful, all-compassionate or God is angry. The Holy Spirit is not to be found in the apparitions. Where is the Trinitarian God???
2.The Mary of the apparitions is not Theotokos of the Gospels.Mary of the apparitions is in the center of the stage and she is calling herself "Quen of Peace", "Lady of the Rosary" so on.... Mary of the Gospels points to her Son always.She is humble and simple.
3. The visionaries are teenagers and children.Categories with a wild imagination and who love to have secrets.
4. The paranormal explanations cannot be excluded and many apparition look more like paranormal manifestations than genuine miracles.
Ok, this was enough for a comment.:-).
Liam I talk about Fatima-like apparitions. Merciful Mother holding back the wrath of the angry Father...Fatima, Akita, La Salette you name it...
Liam,
I mentioned also the Međugorje visitations. btw, Fr. William McNichols, SJ has made an icon of her - Our Lady of Medjugorje: The Burning Bush
Paula,
Who knows (well, maybe the Vatican :-) how many visitations and revelaions people have all over the world, about Mary, about Jesus, etc. I guess one of the jobs of a postulator is to figure out which are valid. I tend to like the ones that agree with what I already believe :-)
The thing about Mary ... maybe because I didn't grow up a catholic, I feel a little uncomfortable with the devotions to her. Thusly, I haven't spent much time reading about them, so I can't really speak intelligently on the subject.
Crystal, I done some reading in the last time because of Fatima aniversary. For me this apparition phenomenon was relatively unknown.
Paula and Crystal,
Yeah, I've never been really comfortable with the whole Virgin of Fatima thing. I've also wondered about how the whole Medugorje thing ocurred at a time of rising Croatian nationalism, which had its religious element as well.
I'm never quite sure what to think of the whole thing. I like the idea of Marian devotion, though it's not really the center of my religious life. It does occupy a huge place in popular devotion, which is always very intense but not always theologically completely orthodox or even coherent.
Perhaps a lot of people who live in situations of economic and/or political oppression find it hard to imagine an all-powerful God in a benevolent light, so they need to imagine love and mercy through Mary. If that's the situation they're in, perhaps God does not mind.
A post like the one I’m about to make could really get me into trouble with my conservative friends, but here goes anyway…
I remember working RCIA in my parish a few years back and almost losing a whole class over Marian apparitions when someone brought the topic up. We had to explain that none of it was De Fide, that none of it was in the Deposit of the Faith, and that they would not be bound to it.
The Fatima stories used to terrify me when I was a kid. Like I said over on Paula’s blog, if Our Lady had something to say to us, I doubt it would have been the kind of banalities that you’d expect to hear from a mid-level anti-modernist cleric in 1917. I’d expect the Mother of Jesus to sound more profound than a Portuguese monsignor. I also found it sort of troubling that JPII actually saw himself as a central figure in this Fatima drama.
The Church has been skeptical about these matters historically, but they tend to endorse what provokes genuine prayer and piety. Skeptics and progressives, therefore, should be careful not to dismiss and offend those to whom these are deeply meaningful. In my city, the VOTF were proud as peacocks to have pulled 3,000 people to a convention. It’s important to recall that in the same year, about 20,000 people showed up over the course of a couple of weeks in the parking lot of Quincy Hospital, because someone claimed to have seen the image of the Virgin in the reflection on a window
Hi Liam and Jeff,
last night I wrote a post about Mary, but blogger did away with it somehow. i'm under the weather right now but i'll probably repost it tonight. thanks for the comments :-)
Get well, Crystal.
Crystal take care of you and get get well soon.
Jeff,I am someone who gets familiar with these stories now, when I seriously considering to enter the Church ( i was baptized orthodox).
And I can say that they are troubling me quite a bit.From far-away the marian apparitions issue appears OK...but when i started to look closer at it things are not that innocent and nice anymore.
Paula,
If I read St. Paul correctly, he is looking for the eschaton to occur when the full number of Gentiles has been grafted into the covenant, not when the full number of Gentiles has apostasized. Therefore, I think you are right in pointing out that it’s wrong (and un-Catholic)to see Mary’s maternal intercession being the only thing holding back the wrathful anger of her son at the state of the world.
In the Magnificat, Mary praises the Lord for exalting those of low degree, scattering the proud, putting down the might from their thrones, filling the hungry, and sending the rich away empty. To me, that is a very different message from the nuclear brinksmanship of Fatima.
Jeff, i think that the theology of the angry God who demand reparation for offence is still having his fans. They try to compensate by making from Mary a protective, maternal,all-loving, powerful figure holding back the wrath of Father. I made a bit of research these days: the fans of the marian apparitions are in many cases people who see God as a wrath figure.(Not the just God from Magnificat, but a God who will punish all the humanity without discrimination). This wrath figure looks more like Moloch.:-).And Mary of the apparitions looks more and more like a Godess figure.
I am done with the apparitions.:-).Enough.Crystal thanks for being so patient with me.
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