Theology Archives - Page 7 of 11

Good eisegesis

Yesterday, I described a “magic” that happens with writing. Along the way, I mentioned the particular magic that seems to happen when you practice eisegesis, that is, “reading into” the text instead of just “receiving from” the text, or exegesis.

It’s a phenomenon related to what I have called the Reality Enhancement Factor. We are built to see a dim and sketchy scene and flesh it out mentally until everything seems clear and bright. Even though this can lead us astray if we lack self-awareness, it can also draw our attention to important facts: what was first a guess, a creative filling of the gap, makes us pay closer attention to evidence that is actually there and verifies the guess.

The act of making up a story kicks the REF into high gear. Consequently, the story writer who starts from a biblical text is not turning on a faculty of creation ex nihilo, but what turns out to be a faculty built for seeing things. Eisegesis can yield exegesis.

Done in the right spirit, eisegesis can yield striking insights because it is an exercise of creativity within limits. It begins with the text as a given set of dots and tries to connect them to make a picture; it begins with the text as a series of pictures and tries to supply the story line. In one way or another, creativity goes places it would never have gone without the specific limits imposed by this particular text, and the eisegete actually learns from his reading. Anyone who has done creative work knows what I mean.

As a result, the text itself ends up expressing itself through the eisegete’s work. Good reading into the text does not dominate in the end but serves it.

A Tribute to John the Theologian

Today’s martyrology speaks of John the Apostle in a way unlike all the other apostles: “In his Gospel and other writings he shows himself to be a theologian….” Tradition holds all the apostles to be the foundation of theology, and the evangelists to be the model of the theologian, but even among the evangelists the Fathers single out John as the “eagle,” the one who soars high into the realm of mystery.

In the earliest days of the Church, Matthew’s Gospel was the most popular gospel, but from the days of scholasticism onward theologians of all stripes and denominations have preferred John’s Gospel together with the letters of Paul. Theologians like arguments more than stories, and John has long, wonderful discourses in which Jesus gives theological arguments. If you look for example of St. Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on John, you’ll see that his exposition of the story parts is OK while his unpacking of the discourses is marvelous. He is just more comfortable with argument.

But of course John’s Gospel blends story and argument, and both elements earn him the title “theologian”. That’s one reason I have a special devotion to him at this season: in the coming year, I hope to write stories and I hope to write arguments, and some of the arguments I hope to write are arguments about stories. As a tribute to St. John, I’d like to share with you an outline of John’s Gospel that I developed over a few years of teaching sophomores at Wyoming Catholic College. On my account, if you take time and place as dividers of the text, you end up with a liturgically themed chiastic structure–maybe a bit bold, but a lot more fun than what you’ll find in standard commentaries! Click here for a .pdf file; the outline is on the first page and some explanatory notes on the second.

How St. Matthew Actually Read Isaiah 7

Our reading at Mass today is taken from the seventh chapter of Isaiah, that wonderful prophecy about the child Emmanuel, born of a virgin. It is one of those passages where the traditional interpretation, based on Matthew’s Gospel, conflicts terribly with modern interpretations, leaving one seemingly to choose between tradition and scholarship. Some years ago, a friend wrote to me during Advent with a heartfelt question about this chapter, and I offered him my own approach to solving the age-old debate. This year, I have decided to share that reply with you.

***

Your whole family, you say, has been wondering about Isaiah 7:14-15:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.

What a joy to hear that your whole family grows anxious over Scripture, when most of the world is anxious over shopping lists, tax deductibles, and gaining weight on holiday goodies! When most of us hesitate over which Christmas chocolates and cookies and meats to serve, your mind hovers over a more puzzling menu: what can it mean that Jesus will eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good?

Unfortunately, my answer can be neither short nor simple. Isaiah 7:14 is one of the most controverted passages in all of Scripture, and I do not know any other scholar who holds exactly my position, but I am happy to share my reflections, and your family can take or leave them. In essence, I hold that we must depart from the traditional interpretation in order to return to it more forcefully; so I am estranged from traditional interpreters on the one hand and from modern exegetes on the other. Let me explain. Continue reading “How St. Matthew Actually Read Isaiah 7”

Metaphor and Analogy

As I rev up for my writing projects in the spring, I have been reading Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s helpful book, Is There a Meaning in This Text? In the first stage of my academic life, I worked at carving a niche for myself through the combination of biblical studies and St. Thomas Aquinas; then I worked at founding a college in the middle of nowhere; at no stage of my progress did I find the leisure to read contemporary philosophy of language. Vanhoozer offers a very nice summary of Derrida, Fish, Ricoeur, and others.

As one would expect, everyone he mentions seems to have a finger on some truth or other. But last night I came across this quotation from Derrida: “A noun is proper when it has but a single sense. … No philosophy, as such, has ever renounced this Aristotelian ideal. This ideal is philosophy.”

Misleading at best. It is true that a word taken in its literal sense has only one literal meaning, but then again the same thing is true, mutatis mutandis, of metaphors: if I say “God is a rock,” then I’m only saying that God is a rock, not that God is a fish or that God is a cloud. The fact that you can always translate a single metaphor into multiple literal statements does not prove that one word always conveys multiple metaphors. I can do the same trick with a word taken literally: it might take several pages amounting to several dozen literal statements to unpack the single word potency in a sentence by Aristotle.

But at worst, Derrida’s claim may be the opposite of what Aristotle meant. If we look at how a word is used over the course of a page of literal prose, Aristotle will look for constantly shifting meanings. This is guy who delineated eleven separate meanings of the word “in,” for crying out loud. One of the most powerful ideas in his philosophy is that every word in every language has multiple non-metaphorical meanings. In fact, the realization that the word “being” has multiple literal meanings may be his most important contribution to philosophy.

Just thinking out loud here. I’m no expert on Derrida, of course: I’m reading about him rather than reading him. But it has been my year-in and year-out experience as a teacher that people have a hard time separating metaphor from analogy, and the problem leads to endless confusion.

Gender in Catholic Theology

In recent months, many Catholic and other universities have hosted discussions on “gender expression” and “the gender binary.” These are not obscure institutions, but big name universities like Notre Dame, Villanova, and the University of San Diego. The assumption behind such discussions is that “gender” is a fluid thing, capable of many different forms and even allowing a person to shift from one form to another. Since the whole concept of “fluid gender” is new, even faithful Catholics may feel at a loss for a response. What does a Catholic believe about the importance of masculinity and femininity? How do we speak to a secular world that has lost its bearings on gender?

The Catholic Church bases her view of masculinity and femininity on Scripture, which places man and woman at the center of every stage of Salvation History. Let me take you on a brief tour of this story, beginning at the very beginning. After that I’ll look at why the culture around us makes it hard to understand Scripture’s teaching, and I’ll offer a few thoughts about speaking to a secular world. But first, a look at Salvation History. Continue reading “Gender in Catholic Theology”

Material heresy in America

According to a recent survey, material heresy is alive and well in America. For example, the Arian and Macedonian heresies continue to prove their perennial appeal:

The complete survey results are worth reading, covering a range of doctrine from Incarnation to morality. How are you doing? Take the Material Heresy Diagnostic Exam today and find out!

After the Synod: What’s a Catholic to say?

In the aftermath of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, friends often send me “whatcha think?” links about the direction Pope Francis is likely to take in the coming year. It’s a hard situation, because a lot of what is out there is negative about the Holy Father: “He botched the Synod,” “He is out to get conservative Catholics,” “He has a radical agenda of reform,” and so on. As a Catholic one wonders how to navigate the conversation.

Based on recent exchanges, I have worked up a few rules of thumb for myself that others may find helpful as well. When I consider how I should react to the situation Pope Francis faces, there are three things to consider: (1) the situation, (2) Pope Francis, and (3) me.

Rule of Thumb #1: Focus on the situation

This is conflict resolution 101, really. It is rarely helpful to talk about motives or speculate about events unfolding far away, but it is always helpful to talk about the reality right around you. And the reality around us is that people are confused, despite any pretense to the contrary. So while I will not say, “Pope Francis intends to do this” or “Pope Francis is to blame for that,” I will say, loud and clear, that people are confused and agitated after the Synod.

During the Synod there was a wash of helpful and unhelpful commentary online. Unhelpful commentary dwelt with anguish on the bold and impious motives of this or that key figure in the drama, while helpful pieces gave factual information about the unfolding events and offered a frank assessment of the resulting situation in the world. It was not angry or bitter to say that people were afraid of a harmful relaxation in the Church’s practice; it was not harsh or hurtful to say that many Catholics took scandal at the appearance of political maneuvering. It was just stating the experience of Catholics as a reality. So long as the focus stayed on the situation and off the dramatis personae, it was a true exercise of the prophetic charism every Catholic possesses in virtue of Baptism.

Focusing on the situation not only keeps us from saying potentially unjust things about Pope Francis but also keeps us focused on what the Holy Spirit is asking us to do. We know that the Holy Spirit guides the Church and will ultimately preserve her from ruin, but this principle tempts us to look far away at things outside of our responsibility and trust the Holy Spirit wa-a-a-ay over there. “Gee, it looks like the Pope is doing X or Y, but I know the Holy Spirit is taking care of things. Wow, it looks like the bishops are saying A or B, but I know the Holy Spirit is taking care of things.” As long as we focus on the Pope, we forget that the Holy Spirit is also working through us, right here. Focusing on the situation at hand reminds us that we need to stop wringing our hands about what happens in Rome and start looking for what the Holy Spirit wants to do right under our noses.

Rule of Thumb #2: Balance realism and reverence

Of course, we can’t just avoid all conversations about the Pope. People will ask us what we think, and anyway we should pay enough attention to form specific prayer intentions for him. So what do we say if asked point-blank about the Pope’s intentions or culpability or whatever?

First, we have to be realistic. There have been truly rotten popes in the past, and there may be truly rotten popes in the future. The Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Church does not give her immunity from all bad leadership. We need to get familiar with some Church history so we can offer people this context, because if people are not realistic then they will be lazy in prayer and more easily scandalized if things do turn bad.

Second, we have to be reverent. The fact that the Pope is a public figure does not make him fair game for any unfeeling remark; on the contrary, his office demands respect. When we see certain facts reported in the News or the blogosphere, inevitably the facts will admit of a range of interpretations from best to worst, any one of which a reasonable person could hold. To my mind, realism means admitting that this is in fact the range of reasonable interpretations while reverence means that we choose to believe one of the better interpretations until coerced by contrary evidence.

The very nature of the current crisis calls for reverence in speaking about the Pope. What one side wants and the other side fears is calling into question the Church’s teaching authority, saying that her doctrine is always revisable no matter what a pope or a Church Council may have said. Even if the man who happens to be pope were himself contributing to an erosion of the world’s opinion about his authority, we the faithful need to make sure that reverence for the office doesn’t go out with respect for the man. Trash talking the Pope because we thought he was undermining the Church’s teaching would be a classic case of sawing off the branch we sat on.

We might take inspiration from David’s dealings with King Saul. Saul was in fact a bad man, and David had been chosen by God to replace him, and yet out of reverence for the king’s office David would not take up arms against his enemy: “The LORD forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the LORD’s anointed, to put forth my hand against him, seeing he is the LORD’s anointed.” (1Sam 24:6) Given that the Pope is a good man, and I have certainly not been chosen by God to replace him, how could I take up the slings and arrows of outrageous rhetoric against the vicar of Christ?

Rule of Thumb #3: Fix the problem at home first

There are some people whose jobs put them close to the Pope, and those people have a moral obligation to speak to him and warn him if he goes off the rails. I could be wrong, but I don’t think any of those people are reading my blog, so I’m going to assume that you all are like me, far from the Pope and without any real ability to influence a Synod. So what do we do, right here where we are?

If the problem is that people are misguided and confused, then the solution is to fill the atmosphere with good guidance and clear teaching. Practically, that means that we each need to be well-informed and vocal, and in that order. How we are vocal depends on our situation: I don’t see lots of people, but I write; one of my friends doesn’t write much, but he spends all his days in conversation with important Catholics. The key is to look for your opening and take it.

But how we are well-informed is the same for all of us. Even if you think of yourself as pretty much conversant with the Church’s teachings on marriage and family, take the current situation as an occasion to re-read some old things and to take on some new things. As Cardinal Burke suggests, we should all study the Catechism as a starting point. You could follow the footnotes from there, but if you’re looking for a short and informative read, take up John Paul II’s Letter to Families next, and after that Pius XI’s Casti Connubii. I would be happy to suggest a reading plan, but you get the idea.

Here is the key: seize your chance to be vocal, you need to tell people that they should read up on marriage and family. And to tell them they should read up, you need to convince them by example, by talking about what you read just recently. It doesn’t matter how much you have read, so long as every time you talk to someone you can say that you read something helpful just the other day….

The Dignity of the Human Person

[Last summer I was asked by my diocesan bishop to prepare a short reflection on the dignity of the human person within the context of the Diocese of Wyoming. Given that today is election day, it seems appropriate to share what I wrote for him.]

The Dignity of the Human Person

Our Contemporary Situation

As Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae says, our times are characterized by an increasing emphasis on the dignity of the individual human person: “A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man, and the demand is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of a responsible freedom, not driven by coercion but motivated by a sense of duty.” (DH 1) This is a positive fruit of the Enlightenment era, which perceived the use of reason as requiring a greater stress on the individual.

Formed in the last stages of the settlement of America, Wyoming and the American west especially value freedom and individuality. The rugged frontier attracted self-reliant, pioneer personalities, and the isolated conditions re-enforced and rewarded independence and responsibility. Consequently the culture of the frontier, which persists to this day, further emphasized the individualism of the modern era. The “cowboy ethic” stresses the virtues of responsibility, persistence, temperance, and everything else requisite for true independence.

While the positive side of the modern and western situation is evident, the individualism of the modern era can easily veer into autonomy, to the detriment of human dignity. As Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes points out:

Modern atheism often takes on a systematic expression which, in addition to other causes, stretches the desires for human independence to such a point that it poses difficulties against any kind of dependence on God. Those who profess atheism of this sort maintain that it gives man freedom to be an end unto himself, the sole artisan and creator of his own history. They claim that this freedom cannot be reconciled with the affirmation of a Lord Who is author and purpose of all things, or at least that this freedom makes such an affirmation altogether superfluous. (GS 20)

The consequence of this explicit or implicit atheism is a lack of grounding for morality and a loosening of the bonds between persons. The same modern era which has brought worker’s rights, increased societal roles for women, and an end to slavery has also given us abortion and the Gulag. Absolute individualism leads, by a surprising logic, to the devaluation of the individual and its dissolution into a collective. The same western culture which led to a famously early recognition of women’s rights can produce an indifference to religion and morality, as though ethics and ultimate questions are purely private affairs left to the individual’s whim. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church expresses the balance required:

The human individual may never be thought of only as an absolute individual being built up by himself and on himself, as if his characteristic traits depended on no one else but himself. Nor can the person be thought of as a mere cell of an organism that is inclined at most to grant it recognition in its functional role within the overall system. (CSDC 125)

Human Dignity in the Catholic Tradition

However, this balance is not achieved by looking to individualism on the one hand and collectivism on the other and then charting a course in between them. As so often happens in the moral life, the mean is found only by finding a new beginning point, a new trailhead. Secular attempts to find the basis of human dignity easily swerve toward one extreme or another because the basis of human dignity is not secular. The Catholic tradition grounds the dignity of the human person in two mysteries: creation and redemption.

Creation and the Dignity of the Person

Man the Image of God

The mystery of man’s creation is unfolded above all in the first chapters of Genesis, where man and woman are created in God’s image and likeness on the sixth day in Genesis 1. In this text which portrays God as the wise architect who exercises dominion over all creation through his word, man is established as a steward of the earth who exercises dominion in wisdom and rationality after the pattern of God his maker. Psalm 8 meditates with wonder on man’s authority over the world:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have established; ⁴what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? ⁵Yet you have made him little less than God, and you crown him with glory and honor. ⁶You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you hast put all things under his feet, ⁷all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, ⁸the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea. ⁹O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

It is on the one hand a wonderful dominion man exercises, and yet on the other hand it is given to him by one whose dominion is unimaginably greater and it leads man’s thoughts back to his God. Man is a vice-regent, a steward, a representative of God on earth, and this fact balances tremendous dignity with a decisive limit on man’s claims.

Man Created for God

But the account of man’s rationality in Genesis is not complete without the seventh day, which is the goal toward which the whole week of creation leads. This climactic Sabbath day expresses in a narrative way the fact that the human person exists for the sake of a relationship with God. Although every other living creature is subjected to man’s needs, man himself is ordained to divine worship.

The fact that man is subjected to God alone and not to any other creature leads to a fundamental principle: “In no case . . . is the human person to be manipulated for ends that are foreign to his own development.” (CSDC 133) That is to say, the human person can never be treated as a mere means, because that would subordinate the person to a mere creature. But the same fact, that man is subjected to God, means that the human person is not an end in itself in such a radical way as to exclude a common goal for the whole human race. All human beings have a single good, a single goal, in God. This makes it possible for persons to form community, and in fact for the whole human race to form a unity. As Gaudium et Spes expresses it, “God, Who has fatherly concern for everyone, has willed that all men should constitute one family and treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood. For having been created in the image of God, Who ‘from one man has created the whole human race and made them live all over the face of the earth’ (Acts 17:26), all men are called to one and the same goal, namely God Himself.” (GS 24)

Man the Image of the Trinity

But there is a further aspect of creation only hinted at in Genesis, namely that to be made in the image of God is to be made in the image of the holy Trinity and so to be called to share its life. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, although truly distinct as persons, live one single interior life which is nonetheless a life of relationship to one another. God, who is reason itself, lives in relation; God, who has every power and goodness, proceeds from another. When the light of this mystery is brought to bear on mankind, it reveals that the person is by the very fact of its rationality called to live in communion with others. As Gaudium et Spes says:

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, “that all may be one. . . as we are one” (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. (GS 24)

No greater dignity could be conceived than to share in the interior life and unity of the divine communion, and yet this same dignity excludes a proud individualism that would claim absolute autonomy. As good as it is to live according to one’s own reason, the Father himself by his very thought lives in communion; as good as it may appear to be self-reliant, the eternal Word, the Son, receives everything from his Father; as necessary as it may be to leave others to their lifestyles and opinions, the Holy Spirit proceeds not as tolerance but as Love. St. John Paul II captures the point:

God created man in His own image and likeness: calling him to existence through love, He called him at the same time for love. God is love and in Himself He lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. (FC 11)

Redemption

The Catholic tradition bases the dignity of the human person not only on its creation by God but also on its re-creation in Christ. The gospel message speaks of a dignity surpassing all that could have been expected, because God became man and died for us. As Gaudium et Spes observes, “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” (GS 22)

The mere fact that God took on human nature immediately gave every human being an unsurpassable dignity. Every mother is ennobled by the fact that God has a mother; every baby is a marvel because God has been a baby. In the second chapter of On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius compares the Incarnation to “when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all.”

But the entire New Testament dwells on the even more amazing fact that the God-man gave himself up to death for all. St. Peter exhorts Christians to recognize their own dignity, saying, “You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” (1Pet 1:19) St. Paul asks, with wonder, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for all, will he not give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:32) God himself has suffered death for each human person we meet: Christ warns us that at the last day he will say, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matt 25:41)

All of this can be said even of those who have not recognized the gift given them in Christ. Of those who acknowledge Christ and receive his Spirit, St. Paul teaches that they become “children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ….” (Rom 8:17) The tradition of the fathers and doctors sums this up by saying that the Son of God became man that we might become gods. (See the citations in CCC 460)

This dazzling emphasis on the dignity of each person still does not lead to an absolute individualism, but rather to a unity in Christ. The dignity given to the human person by the fact of the Incarnation and saving death of Christ gathers all humanity around a common point of reference, establishing Christ in fact as a second Adam and natural monarch of the human race. Saving faith and the reception of the Spirit makes us adopted sons of God precisely by making us members of Christ, uniting us into one mystical body.

Some Concluding Practical Notes

It seems good to point out briefly how what has been said above relates to marriage and family, one of the great “personal dignity” debates of our time, even though marriage and family are not the primary focus of this essay. A few bullet points should suffice:

If the dignity of the person is not understood, then one cannot understand how children can be the primary end of marriage. The goal or end has to be the best thing; so much in marriage is beautiful and good that only something as exalted as the human person itself could be better.
Marriage is the first communion of persons and it founds the first society, the family. The radical individualism of our times which undermines the dignity of the human person also attacks marriage and family directly.
The dignity of the human person as grounded in Christ’s redemptive death connects directly to St. Paul’s teaching that marriage is an icon of Christ and the Church.
The dignity of the human person as grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity connects directly to St. John Paul II’s teaching about family as communion—the quotation from him above was taken from his apostolic exhortation on the family.

Abbreviations:

CCC = Catechism of the Catholic Church

CSDC = Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church

DH = Dignitatis Humanae

GS = Gaudium et Spes

FC = Familiaris Consortio

Saving “Pastoral” from the Wolves

During the recent Extraordinary Synod on the Family, I would guess the Internet saw an all-time high in occurrences of the word “pastoral”. Reactions were mixed: one person’s blog post about the events was praised as “pastoral,” and another person responded in the combox with “‘pastoral’—*gag*”. It is clear that for some the word captures the greatest virtue of a priest while for others it is, to quote Lord Business of the Lego Movie, “a bunch of hippy, dippy boloney!”

While I can understand flinching at the P-word, we can’t allow political in-fighting to hijack a venerable vocabulary. So I would like to stake a stab at saving “pastoral” from the extremes by suggesting a concrete content for a Catholic context.

When used in a Catholic setting, “pastoral” surely means having true concern for the people placed in one’s care. But in addition, it seems to me that “pastoral” means something like this: Treating people’s experiences as real facts on the table with all the other facts when you make a decision. This is opposed on the one hand to making “a good experience” the immediate goal of your decision (“hippy dippy”), and it is opposed on the other hand to pretending that people’s experiences are unreal. The first extreme is what we tend to call “pastoral” with an edge of sarcasm, while the second extreme is what we tend to call “unpastoral”.

Let me offer some examples to show what I mean. Outside the Catholic sphere, I was involved once in an online exchange with Latin teachers about the best way to teach Latin—I was teaching college Latin at the time. It was a highly charged conversation, with broad theories of language learning at stake. At one point I wrote something along the lines of, “I experienced X and Y while I was learning Latin.” The response I got was something like this: “No, you didn’t.”

Excuse me? I’m sorry, but I did.

In a fit of abstract commitment, those high school and college Latin teachers denied the reality of my experience rather than expand their theories to account for it. What could have been an interesting conversation ended with a jerk.

But that kind of denial is rampant in Catholic conversations. For example, I feel lifted up when I attend a Mass celebrated in Latin, and I am one of those people who think about the consequences of the Church’s global shift to the vernacular. My brother in law, a priest in the Diocese of Vienna, mentioned to me once that he has had numerous conversations in which older parishioners who lived through Vatican II told him they get more out of the Mass in German than they had done before in Latin. It is tempting, as a lover of Latin, to say, “No, you must be mistaken!” But at some point you just have to let their experience be one of the facts on the table.

These are examples of the temptation to “unrealize” someone’s experience. But treating someone’s experience as real does not mean that you make a “happy experience” your immediate goal.

When I was Academic Dean at Wyoming Catholic College, I took part once in a disciplinary decision. The student in question had not just broken the rules but smashed them, and that repeatedly, but still we were inclined to mercy. We didn’t want to be harsh. In the end, however, we decided that the most pastoral thing for this student was expulsion, because anything short of that would teach the student that there are no limits, that one can continue to abuse trust endlessly without consequence, and we feared that lesson would later destroy a friendship, a marriage, or even a relationship with God. We treated his experience, the pain of expulsion from our little community, as a reality—a medicinal one.

So how would this way of meaning “pastoral” apply to a hot-button issue like denying communion to the divorced and remarried? On the one hand, some may view their pain and distress as illegitimate and therefore unreal: they brought this on themselves through their sinful decisions, so we have no obligation to take their experience into account. On the other hand, some may view a happy experience on Sunday as the immediate goal to be reached: we don’t want people to experience pain and distress! That makes us the bad guys!

A pastoral decision, it seems to me, would avoid both extremes. The pain and the distress of the flock would be vivid for the true pastor, and would cause him pain as well; he would mourn with those who mourn. But the true pastor might decide in the end that this discomfort is needed in order to move his flock to a new and better position. Both in the bodily and in the spiritual realms, God has given us pain as a message about where green pastures lie.

On the one hand, a calloused recital of moral doctrine spares the pastor his uncomfortable obligation of weeping with those who weep, but it does not assure the distressed that he can interpret their experience for them. On the other hand, omitting true moral doctrine to alleviate the pain denies that their experience has any meaning needing interpretation in the first place; it is, to quote Pope Francis’s closing remarks at the Synod, “a deceptive mercy [that] binds the wounds without first curing them and treating them; that treats the symptoms and not the causes and the roots.”

Faith and love

[This is the sixth in a series of posts about faith. Here all the posts in order: 1. Is faith circular? 2. Everyday faith. 3 How faith begins. 4. What revelation really is. 5. What is supernatural about faith? 6. Faith and love.]

In the previous post, I mentioned that the object of faith and the object of charity are the same thing, namely “the ultimate end, insofar as he exceeds the knowledge of our reason,” as St. Thomas puts it. In this final reflection, I want to point out how this affects what we mean by the word “faith”.

The movement of will that first moves the mind to believe revelation is not a movement of charity. The supernatural love of God which is charity can’t happen without knowledge of the self-giving God of revelation, and that God is known only through faith. In the third post of this series I listed a few things that might incline the will to that first decision in favor of revelation, but none of those motivating factors can be the God who will only be known through the decision of faith.

But once that decision has been made, and the God of revelation becomes known precisely as he who gives himself to us and calls for our response—once that decision has been made, the normal thing would be for love to spring up right away. Faith is the mind’s adequate response to revelation, and love is the will’s adequate response to revelation; even though the will moves the mind to make its adequate response, the will’s own adequate response happens as a second step.

The point is worth repeating: the will is involved in getting the mind to respond rightly to revelation, but the will’s own right response comes after the mind’s.

The consequence of this tangled situation is that the will’s right response to revelation immediately changes the way that the mind’s own response is working. The mind may first have entrusted itself to God’s authority out of fear, or out of a vague desire for a better life, or out of some other motivation, but as soon as the will desires God as our supernaturally revealed goal then this new love becomes the driving force behind faith. Love becomes the way the will moves the mind to belief.

If this did not happen, then something would be wrong. Faith is not the mind moving on its own but the mind being moved by the will, so a lack in the will’s right response to revelation is really an imperfection in the mind’s response as well. Faith without love is still faith, but it is lacking something essential to it, something bound up in its very notion as the right response to revelation.

This is why the Catholic tradition says that faith without charity is “unformed” faith. The form of a thing is its nature, its essence or notion, and there is something lacking in the notion of that mind-will composite act we call faith if the “will” part is not responding rightly to the situation. It is not just that love is one of the “forms” that faith can have, but that love is the “form” that faith must have to be itself fully.

The punchline is this. If we say the word “faith” without any qualifying adjective or clarifying context, then we are speaking about the faith that works through love. That’s the default version, the simple meaning of the word, and that is the way Scripture most often speaks of it. A “faith” separated from love is “faith” in a real but secondary sense.