Getting to the Point: revelation

Showing posts with label revelation. Show all posts

Sunday, February 10, 2013

The Unbroken Chain

There is an unbroken chain in the life of the Church, in the proclamation of the Word of God, of the celebration of the Sacraments, that has come down to us and that we call Tradition. It gives us the guarantee that what we believe is the original message of Christ, preached by the Apostles. The nucleus of the primordial proclamation is the death and the Resurrection of the Lord, from which stems the entire patrimony of the faith. The Council says: “The apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved by a continuous line of succession until the end of time” (Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, n. 8).

In this way, if Sacred Scripture contains the Word of God, the Tradition of the Church preserves it and faithfully transmits it, so that the men and women of every age might have access to its vast resources and be enriched by its treasures of grace. Thus, the Church, “in her doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes” (ibid.).

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – Well here we have a good little catechesis on revelation, the Church, and faith. Where the Reformation tradition of Luther and Calvin upholds sola scriptura (the scriptures alone) as the place of revelation, the Catholic faith has always been that God reveals Himself in His word and in the living unbroken Tradition of the Church, that which has been passed down to us from generation to generation.

If I can briefly dip into the field of apologetics, the fatal weakness of the Protestant position is that it is itself unscriptural. By its own argument—that the scriptures alone are the source of revealed truth—it is self-refuting. There is not a single Bible verse from Genesis to Revelation that states the principle of sola scriptura. It is, itself, an expression of Protestant Tradition, and extra-biblical. There is also, nowhere in the Bible, a list of the canonical books of the Bible (and no, the table of contents at the front doesn’t count). The very composition of the Bible, then, is an extra-biblical contribution of Sacred Tradition.

None of that is a problem for Catholics. It has always been our understanding that God comes to us in His word, in Tradition, and that all this is mediated by the living authority of His Church and its episcopal leadership. The Bible is a precious and unique place of God’s revelation, where the very words of Truth and salvation are recorded in an fixed, unchanging expression, but it sits in honour within a living communion of faith and love—the life of the Church.

Anyhow, enough apologetics. It is amazing, though, how many Catholics need to be reminded of our faith in this matter. For many Catholics, it is a serious business if a Protestant says to them, ‘Well, your beliefs about Mary (or Confession… or the papacy…) are not in the Bible!’ Really, this shouldn’t faze us. We could easily respond, with charity of course, ‘Well, your beliefs about the Bible are not in the Bible!’ and that would be the end of the matter.

Meanwhile, it is so very beautiful that God arranged things this way. It is, again, this whole business I have blogged about already this week—he really means it that we are to be a family, a body, a communion of love. He really wants us, and in fact is quite set on it, that the life of the Church will be a true life, and so He communicates the fullness of his Truth to us only in the life of the body.

Any fool can walk into a book store, buy a Bible, sit down and read it, and think they now possess the fullness of God’s truth. And, as we see so clearly, that approach to understanding God’s revelation results in—how many is it now?—thousands of little Protestant churches, each quite sure that their doctrines are 100% scriptural. A privatized, deeply individualistic, and ultimately relativistic view of faith is the inevitable result of sola scriptura theology.

Meanwhile, to receive Scripture and Tradition together as the fullness of truth means being part of the living communion of the Church. It means, yes, being submissive to the authority of the Church, but even the bishops and even the Pope must themselves be submissive to the 2000 years of unbroken transmission of faith in the life of the Church. It is the utter opposite of an individual, private, relativized faith—it is an entry, if we choose to take it as such, into the depths of communion with God and from that, with one another. And that is what God has revealed to us as His great desire for the human race.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Our Bloody God

I continue to blog about the Holy Father’s visit to

Lebanon

Sep 14-16, excerpting and commenting on his various talks there, which provide a much needed perspective on the challenges of the Middle East in our day.

It is moving for me to recall my journeys to the Middle East. As a land especially chosen by God, it was the home of Patriarchs and Prophets. It was the glorious setting for the Incarnation of the Messiah; it saw the raising of the Saviour’s cross and witnessed the resurrection of the Redeemer and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Traversed by the Apostles, saints and a number of the Fathers of the Church, it was the crucible of the earliest dogmatic formulations. Yet this blessed land and its peoples have tragically experienced human upheavals. How many deaths have there been, how many lives ravaged by human blindness, how many occasions of fear and humiliation! It would seem that there is no end to the crime of Cain (cf. Gen 4:6-10 and 1 Jn 3:8-15) among the sons of Adam and Eve created in God’s image (cf. Gen 1:27). Adam’s transgression, reinforced by the sin of Cain, continues to produce thorns and thistles (cf. Gen 3:18) even today. How sad it is to see this blessed land suffer in its children who relentlessly tear one another to pieces and die! Christians know that only Jesus, who passed through sufferings and death in order to rise again, is capable of bringing salvation and peace to all who dwell in your part of the world (cf. Acts 2:23-24, 32-33). Him alone, Christ, the Son of God, do we proclaim! Let us repent, then, and be converted, “that sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19-20a).

Post-synodal exhortation Ecclesia in Medio Oriente 8

Reflection – Ecclesia in Medio Oriente is a lengthy document, and I won’t be able to do more on this blog than touch on a few paragraphs of it. It is worth reading, though, for anyone who wants to really delve into the Pope’s and the Church’s vision and program for this troubled area of the world. With so many loud and bellicose voices calling out for aggressive interventions in these lands, or the cold calculus of Realpolitik and protection of economic interest, or at best a wholly secular vision of tolerance and human rights unlikely to persuade many in this most religious of all regions, it is good to consider this other voice, this other perspective of faith.

The Pope highlights here the tragic irony of this land which is so much the locus of God’s biblical action, so much the cradle of monotheism, the revelation of the God of Israel become the God of all people in Jesus Christ, which has been so torn by violence and hatred, war and death. He points out that this very irony, this terrible clash between light and darkness, love and violence, is only resolved in Jesus Himself and his conquering of violence and death by love.

It seems to me, not called to live in the Middle East, that this same dynamic appears in big and small ways in every human life. There is God and his revelation, there is love and its work in our lives, there is all manner of good and beautiful things given and unfolding in each human life. And then there is the other thread of our being, thickening and thinning in turn, blood red and pitch dark alternately, of violence and hatred and death, selfishness and coldness and alienation.

The two merge together, weave in and out, co-exist against all seeming possibility. The life of God and the death of sin, the victory of love and the persistent negation of that victory by selfish cold hatred. It may appear in our lives with dramatic soul-shaking intensity or more insidiously in the quiet working out of the heart’s intentions, but appear in our lives it does.

We are all the Holy Land. We are all this place of God’s revelation and human darkness, of God’s assent to man and man’s refusal to God. We are all this soil bearing the bloody footprints of God in Christ and the bloody footprints of Cain. And it is Jesus, our bloody God, who is our sole hope in this holy land of the world, this holy land of our hearts. Jesus, the mercy of God who penetrates to the innermost and outermost reaches of human sin, darkness, failure, with the inexhaustible power of divine love and life. Ecclesia in Medio Oriente orients all of us in the midst of life to the hope of the Church, and that hope is Christ.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Words Fall Away When Truth Itself Comes

Attention should be paid to the various types of websites, applications and social networks which can help people today to find time for reflection and authentic questioning, as well as making space for silence and occasions for prayer, meditation or sharing of the word of God. In concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated, as long as those taking part in the conversation do not neglect to cultivate their own inner lives.

It is hardly surprising that different religious traditions consider solitude and silence as privileged states which help people to rediscover themselves and that Truth which gives meaning to all things. The God of biblical revelation speaks also without words: “As the Cross of Christ demonstrates, God also speaks by his silence. The silence of God, the experience of the distance of the almighty Father, is a decisive stage in the earthly journey of the Son of God, the incarnate Word …. God’s silence prolongs his earlier words. In these moments of darkness, he speaks through the mystery of his silence” (Verbum Domini, 21).

The eloquence of God’s love, lived to the point of the supreme gift, speaks in the silence of the Cross. After Christ’s death there is a great silence over the earth, and on Holy Saturday, when “the King sleeps and God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages” (cf. Office of Readings, Holy Saturday), God’s voice resounds, filled with love for humanity.

Message for World Communications Day, May 20, 2012

Reflection – First, I have to note: Pope Benedict XVI endorses my blog! Wooo! After all, what else do I do here but “help people today to find time for reflection and authentic questioning.” That’s my bag! That’s what I’m all about! Thanks, Holy Father!

It is interesting that he dives right from this somewhat prosaic matter of what websites we should frequent into a deep and powerful meditation on the role of silence in the giving of revelation. One minute we are talking about the excessive verbiage of the information age and its impact on our social life, and then all of the sudden we are at the foot of the Cross, with Christ crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” and in the silence of the tomb.

Clearly the Pope is calling us to really deepen this understanding of silence. It is not simply a matter of taking a break from TV, music and the Internet so as to process things. It is a question of God and how He comes to us, and our ability to receive Him in totality and in depth.

God spoke so much to His people: through the patriarchs, the prophets, through his Only Son. Words of wisdom and light, words of admonition and rebuke, words of consolation and hope. We have a whole Book full of the words of God, right?

But the deepest revelation of God was not done in words, but in deed and in silent suffering. God entered that realm of pain and death where words fall away and all that remains is love. And this is the fullness of revelation of God to us, the showing of his love to the end (cf. Jn 13). Both in Christ’s own silence in the face of his persecutors, his agony on the Cross, and in the tomb’s deep silence, and in God the Father’s unfathomable silence as his human children kill his only begotten Son, there is a deep—beyond deep!—revelation of God’s love for the world and exactly how far that love goes to save us.

And indeed these are not events of the distant past. The Eucharist, our most intimate encounter with Christ in this world, is given to us in silence. Jesus comes to the altar, enters our human body and soul in Holy Communion, is adored and worshipped—all in a totality of silence.

All this tells us that words have their place, words are necessary, words surround and cradle the Truth of things, but the heart of it all is silence. Words have their place, but their place is limited and partial. When Truth comes, words fall away, and silent adoration and loving union is all-in-all.

And with that, I will follow the Pope’s recommendation and stop writing now, so as to invite you to “make space for silence and occasions for prayer” today – right now, if you can.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Setting the Stage

No matter how evident an atheistic interpretation of the universe may appear, it will never lead to the scientific certainty that God does not exist. No one can carry out experiments on the totality of existence or its preconditions. This brings us in a very straightforward manner to the unsurpassable limits inherent in the ‘human condition’ and in man’s capacity for knowledge qua man, that is, not merely with regard to his present-day circumstances, but in terms of his very essence.”

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 85

Reflection – Well, I have blogged this terrain before, more than once (click the atheism tag at the foot of the post for details). So I’m not going to go down the same path again, showing the logical absurdity of the atheist position, the impossibility in atheist materialist positivist terms of actually claiming a ‘knowledge’ of the non-existence of God. Been there, done that, and it’s a little too easy. Shooting fish in a barrel may net you some good eats, but it’s still not very sporting.

Instead, let’s explore what Ratzinger says about these ‘unsurpassable limits inherent in the human condition’. We find ourselves in a strange seeming paradox here. We are, by the normal and most sure processes of knowledge (namely scientific experiment and rigorous logical analysis of immediate experience) unable to penetrate to the most urgent core of human existence and life. What is it all about, really? What is the essence of humanity, really? How, then, are we to live in such a way that serves and is in harmony with this meaning and essence, really?

All of this is profoundly elusive to us, at least in that faculty of the intellect which seems to give us the most certainty. And yet, the urgency of the question remains. Some people, it is true, do not instinctively ‘feel’ the urgency of that question. There will always be those who just shrug off deep questions about life and just crack open another beer (literally or figuratively). Not everyone is of a philosophical bent.

But it seems to me, in answer to that, that it’s not a question of feelings and bents. Objectively, it is a question of fundamental responsibility to ourselves and our neighbor that we have some idea of who and what we are, what reality is about, and how this is to shape our choices and mode of life.

And yet we run up against the ‘unsurpassable limits’ of human knowledge right here, precisely where we most need it, where we need to know how we are to live and what we are to do. It seems to me that this dilemma sets the stage, existentially, experientially, for the granting of revelation from outside our human frame of reference.

At the very least, our experience of limitations to reason and the frustration of a real objective human need that brings to us shows that ‘revelation’ is not something alien or arbitrary or imposed upon us in some artificial way. We need help!

And indeed, when we look back into the history of religion, the notion of revelation or enlightenment pops up everywhere. The Buddha’s enlightenment, Mohammed’s reception of the Koran from the angel Gabriel, Moses and the burning bush and many more—there is a deep sense, a deep intuition in humanity that ultimate truth is received, not achieved, taught and not discovered. Reasoning can precede this revelation and inform our decision to receive it as genuine or reject it as spurious; further reasoning can flow from this revelation and expand on its implications and meaning, but the revelation is necessary nonetheless.

I realize here that I raise as many questions as I answer, and I do try to keep these blog posts to a nice manageable length which I am rapidly approaching… so to wrap things up for today, my main point in this is not to ‘prove’ the truth of Christian revelation or to evaluate the merits and demerits of various revelations given to the founders of various religions and worldviews, but to establish that in our experience of normal human life we do in fact run into a need or at the very least a real situation in which divine revelation makes sense, in which God does come out to us to do in us what we cannot do for ourselves, and which we urgently need to have done—to reveal to us the deep truth of our life and its meaning and value, and from this deep truth how we are to live today.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The Revelation of Passion

The divine power that Aristotle at the height of Greek philosophy sought to grasp through reflection, is indeed for every being an object of desire and of love —and as the object of love this divinity moves the world—but in itself it lacks nothing and does not love: it is solely the object of love. The one God in whom Israel believes, on the other hand, loves with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective love: among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her—but he does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race. God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape.

Deus Caritas Est 9

Reflection – Here we touch upon a really significant difference between the world of the Bible and the world of pre-Christian philosophy. It is the nature of God, philosophy tells us, to be perfect, to lack nothing, to possess the fullness of being.

This is indeed true. But the corollary of that is precisely what the Pope describes in Aristotle: we all want God, want this fullness of being, in a sense we cannot help wanting God, although we get very confused about what to do with that desire, to say the least.

We are moved by desire and love towards this divine presence—but He/It does not, cannot reciprocate. God lacks nothing; why would He desire us?

This is where the Bible does not so much contradict human reasoning and philosophy as complete it. We agree that God is perfect, that He lacks nothing, that in no way, shape, or form does God ‘need’ us.

But, and this is a truth that can only be revealed to us, never reasoned towards, He loves us. And this love is not some kind of disinterested thing: ‘well, he gives us being, and this in some form qualifies as ‘love’ in that He wills our existence, blah, blah, blah’.

This is not the God of the Bible. He loves us with a passionate love. His love for us is a desire to be with us, to commune with us, to engage with us in a genuine personal encounter.

I repeat, this can only be known as a revealed truth. There is no way we can reason that the Supreme Being, the One, the Mystery, the Source, the Being behind all being and beings, would have any use for us, any interest in us. Only in the revelation to Israel, completed in the revelation of Christ, and completed there in the awesome Paschal Mystery—only there do we get a glimpse that this Ultimate Mystery is one of fire, passion, intimate love.

And we have to hold together the truth our reason yields – God is perfect and needs nothing – with the truth He has told us about Himself – he is passionately concerned for us and desires us to be in communion with Him. The two held together usher us into a life of awe, gratitude, beauty and joy. The the ground of all being, the source of all, the great I AM, loves us. He loves us. Really??? He loves us, really.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Why Bitterness Towards God Might Be a Good Thing

The world of the Bible presents us with a new image of God. In surrounding cultures, the image of God and of the gods ultimately remained unclear and contradictory. In the development of biblical faith, however, the content of the prayer fundamental to Israel, the Shema, became increasingly clear and unequivocal: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Dt 6:4). There is only one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, who is thus the God of all. Two facts are significant about this statement: all other gods are not God, and the universe in which we live has its source in God and was created by him. Certainly, the notion of creation is found elsewhere, yet only here does it become absolutely clear that it is not one god among many, but the one true God himself who is the source of all that exists; the whole world comes into existence by the power of his creative Word. Consequently, his creation is dear to him, for it was willed by him and “made” by him. The second important element now emerges: this God loves man.

Deus Caritas Est 9

Reflection - We who come from a culture shaped by millennia of monotheistic Biblical faith often find it hard to imagine the world of polytheistic paganism. God for us, even if we are not especially religious or educated, is (if he exists) the Big Guy, the Head Honcho, the Man, the One.

This sense of multiple gods and goddesses reigning over different corners of the world, of competing forces treating humans like chess pieces or like toys to be played with and then tossed away, of a universe springing out of chaos, bloodshed, and strife and only precariously held in balance by gods of limited power—all of this we might know from our reading of Homer, the Greek myths, the great tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, or various other sources.

But we know it from within our own deeply ingrained monotheistic conditioning. I use that word deliberately as opposed to ‘faith’, as I am thinking here of people who may have little if any religion but who nonetheless still bear the cultural inheritance of Christianity.

I think of people who have little faith and less religion, but who have a deep bitterness towards God for the injustices, evils, and sufferings of the world and in their own life. Yet why should they be bitter towards an 'uncaring' God… unless they have a deep sense that He should not be so? Only in very late paganism, the paganism that frankly was wide open to the proclamation of Christianity, does that note of bitterness towards the gods appear. A normal pagan would never imagine that the gods should be other than what they are: capricious, vengeful, bloodthirsty little two-bit despots running a sort of cosmic protection racket – ‘nice world you’ve got here… shame if something happened to it.’

And even if there is a good god who he liked, the pious pagan was well aware that some other god or goddess, not so nice, could always seize the reins of power at least temporarily and get a few licks in.

The Jew, the Christian, and the post-Christian deeply know that this will not do with our God. He made it, He’s the only Show in town, and He is supposed to love us and be on our side. This generates for us the fearsome problem of evil and suffering, which is no small matter, and which (at least in this post, which is too long already!) I have no intention of getting into.

For now, it is important to realize that our very concept of God and the world and their inter-relation is wildly different from the non-Biblical one, and that this Biblical conception, while it generates its own questions and quandaries, opens us up to a genuine encounter with the Reality behind all realities, an encounter that at least promises to be an embrace of love and care.