". . . all Israel will be saved"

There has been much discussion lately about the prayer for the Jews during the Good Friday intercessions. Jews have long found the original formula

Let us pray also for the faithless Jews, that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

insulting (understandably, although I will quibble with the particulars); now some Jewish leaders have rejected the revision released by Pope Benedict in February, calling it "insulting" and saying that Pope Benedict has "lost his sensitivity." The revision reads

 

Let us also pray for the Jews: That God and our Lord may illuminate their hearts, that they acknowledge Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men. Almighty and eternal God, who want that all men be saved and come to the recognition of the truth, propitiously grant that even as the fulness of the peoples enters Thy Church, all Israel be saved. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Rabbi Walter Homolka complains that it is insulting to Jews for Catholics to believe that in order for them to be saved, they must accept Jesus Christ as the Savior. In an interview with Spiegel.com, Homolka says, "[Pope Benedict] indicates that he believes that the path to salvation, even for Jews, can only go through Jesus, the savior. This opens the floodgates for the conversion of the Jews."

Just imagine - the Pope believes that salvation is through Jesus. In all seriousness, I find it almost dumbfounding that someone, especially a learned someone, would complain that on Good Friday Catholics pray for the conversion of others. If the Rabbi is offended that on Good Friday, the Pope wants us to pray for the conversion of the Jews, then he ought to go ahead and condemn the whole of Christianity. Every book of the New Testament proclaims that Jesus is the salvation of the world - the only salvation. This has been the constant teaching of the Catholic Church for 2,000 years.

My answer to the Rabbi's objections is, Won't you please pray for my conversion also? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah foretold by the Old Testament, and therefore I hope that all peoples will find faith in Him. I believe that God desires that all be saved, including (perhaps especially) the Jews. Therefore I will pray that all people, Jews or otherwise, will become followers of Christ. I believe that the evidence supports my position. On the other hand, I hope that, as a good Jew, you believe that your religion is the true revelation of the One True God. I also hope that you pray for my conversion. I would find it insulting if you didn't.

More on this subject in a future post.

obama on race, abortion, and a hil bumper sticker

Richard John Neuhaus of First Things has written a piece on Obama's speech on the Reverend Wright. Here are a couple of standout passages:

On Obama's giving in to racial stereotyping, there is this:

"The senator lends his prestige to the claim promoted by sundry race hustlers that Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Bill Cosby, along with millions of other black Americans, are not black enough to be part of 'the black community.' One can understand why a Harvard law-school graduate born in Hawaii with a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas would, for political and perhaps personal reasons, seek the street credential of having 'roots' in a militantly black sector of the intensely race-conscious city of Chicago. But complicity in the explicit slander of America and the implicit slander of most blacks in America is a very high price to pay for a ticket of admission to 'the black community.'"

And on Obama's abortion stance, he has this to say:

"In this speech, he did not mention abortion, the single most polarizing question in our public life, but his promise is to move us beyond our divisions by taking a position so extreme that he refuses to support even the “born alive” legislation that would protect the lives of infants who survive the abortion procedure. Not for nothing is he rated the most liberal member of the Senate. His call for national reconciliation, however rhetorically appealing, is more believably a call for capitulation by those who disagree."

You can view the entire essay here.

And yesterday I saw a very amusing bumper sticker which read "Monica Lewinski's ex-boyfriend's wife for President." This is one of the little things that make the day brighter.

chesterton, von balthasar, jehovah's witnesses and the shape of the stauros

It seems to me that Jehovah's Witnesses lose much in insisting that Christ died on a single upright beam rather than a cross.

The confusion is understandable, since the Greek word that most Bibles render as "cross" (stauros) has as its original meaning "stake" or "beam." But of course, stauros does not always mean "stake" just as the Latin crux does not always mean "cross." The position of the JWs ignores the witness of the early Christian writers, including Justin Martyr, who attest to the two-beam shape of the stauros. Justin sees the cross prefigured by Moses holding out his hands during the battle with Amalek, as does the author of the Epistle of Barnabas. There is also the Alexamenos graffito, which mockingly depicts the crucifixion by portraying Christ as a donkey on a tau cross (a cross shaped like an uppercase "T"). Clearly the earliest Christians and other witnesses understood stauros to mean "cross" in the New Testament.

G.K. Chesterton wrote about the cross as a symbol of reason, health, and eternity in his spiritual autobiography, Orthodoxy:

"The Christian . . . puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds."

The cross provides not only a more perfect symbol of eternity than a circle, but it also, as Chesterton hints above, provides the means of redemption precisely because of its paradox - the "collision" and "contradiction" inherent in a vertical and a horizontal line intersecting at a single point. Hans Urs von Balthasar also points out this feature of the symbolism of the cross in Mysterium Paschale. He writes, "The point where all the dimensions of the world intersect is also the point of indifference between all contraries, and so the point of redemption."

I wonder if, in lacking the symbolism of the cross as the means of the reconciliation between God and man, Jehovah's Witnesses also lack something in their theology. It may be better to say that their lack of the symbol of the cross evidences a deficiency in their theology.

In historic Christian theology, Christ is able to reconcile God and man precisely because he is a paradox in the same way that the cross is a paradox. He can be the eternal High Priest precisely because he is at once God and Man. The cross is the perfect symbol of this contradiction: it has a vertical beam that, like the column of fire that accompanied the Israelites out of Egypt, represents the power of God and His coming down from heaven in order to save His people; the horizontal beam represents Christ's humanity, and thus humanity itself.

But Jehovah's Witnesses deny one part of this paradox, perhaps the most important part. In JW theology, Jesus, like his fellow humans, is a created being. As such, there is no saving "contradiction," no "collision" between God and creature in the person of Christ, and thus no real atonement (which is literally "at one -ment," the making of two different things one).

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Addendum 

Another passage from the early church of relevance comes from Cyril of Jerusalem's Catecheses:

"God has opened wide his arms on the Cross in order to span the limits of the earth's orb."

ruminate magazine

For those of you who are interested in fiction, art, literary magazines or all three, there are very good things happening in Ruminate: Faith In Literature and Art, a literary magazine that features great writing and art from a Christian perspective. You can read a review I wrote of the 6th issue here. While you are there, you might check out the great work my friend and classmate Travis is orchestrating at Luna Park.

(By the way, I realized after the review was published that had I screwed up royally about the original meaning of the word dogma. Latin experts beware. You will cringe at the last line.)

on dogs

I hear a lot of folks say lately that they don't like people but they love animals. One friend tells me she loves her animals because "they don't treat you like crap like people do." She tells me that she stayed up an entire night with her dachshund because he had a virus, and then admitted that she would not do the same thing for her kids. One of my teachers tells me that "animals are better than we are." The same teacher tells me that the marine who threw a puppy off a cliff in a youtube video should be killed. I didn't ask how he feels about puncturing the back of a mostly-born baby's skull and suctioning its brain out. Perhaps I'm cynical, but I think I know the answer to that one.

(By the way, I think the marine should be severly punished, too, but I wouldn't go as far as killing him. I think caning might be appropriate.)

I think Lewis says somewhere that a dog can be neither very good nor very bad (morally speaking). Dogs can be wonderful companions, as was the case of the german shepherd my family used to have. Dogs can also be very violent and dangerous (as in this case and this one). But whether they are friendly or vicious, dogs are incapable of being either good or bad in the way that humans can be. A jack russel might rescue a woman from freezing, but the same dog would not spend years of its life working for the emancipation of slaves, or give up its dream of becoming an accomplished musician in order to ensure that his daughter grows up with a caring father. A pit bull might attack a man on a morning walk, but the same pit bull is not capable of conceiving and carrying out a plan to exterminate an entire ethnic group, or of falsely accusing a coworker of sexual harrassment in order to get even with her over a personal offense.

The difference is not in degree only, but also in kind. An emotionally abusive husband might be a hero in an emergency situation. A cruel woman might spring into action to save a drowning man she has never met. The same is true for dogs. But heroics brought on by instinct are not the same as the kind of patient, all-suffering good of which humans are capable, and violent acts brought on by natural tendencies and traumatic external stimuli are not the same as the conniving of an ambitious, backstabbing coworker.

I think people who feel the way my friend and my teacher feel simply don't want to bother with the effort of loving other people. They prefer animals because with animals there's no risk. But it is a terrible loss to throw out the good that people do because we cannot forgive the bad. Most people to whom I have been close have offended me or wronged me in some way (some more grievously than others), and I have done the same to them. I would have no one if I chose not to forgive others' wrongs, and certainly no one would have anything to do with me if people were incapable of forgiving mine. And what an impoverished life we would live if that were the case.

per speculum in aenigmate

John Donne, perhaps most well known for his poetry, was also a brilliant prose writer, and his sermons are among the most profound and literary ever written. The following is an excerpt from a sermon he delivered on Easter Sunday in 1628. I shamelessly stole the title of this blog from this golden sermon:

"God made light first, and three days after that light became a sun, a more glorious light. God gave me the light of nature when I quickened in my mother's womb by receiving a reasonable soul; and God gave me the light of faith when I quickened in my second mother's womb, the church, by receiving my baptism; but in my third day, when my mortality shall put on immortality, he shall give me the light of glory by which I shall see himself. To this light of glory the light of honor is but a glow-worm; and majesty itself but a twilight; the cherubims and seraphims are but candles; and the Gospel itself, which the apostle calls the glorious Gospel, but a star of the least magnitude. And if I cannot tell what to call this light by which I shall see it, what shall I call that which I shall see by it, the essence of God himself! And yet there is something else than this sight of God intended in that which remains; I shall not only see God face to face, but I shall know him - which, as you have seen all the way, is above sight - and know him even also as I am known."

So I'm new to this blogging business, and I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to post yet. You're likely to find a lot of John Donne, G.K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis here, along with a few musings of my own. But I've been convinced for a long time that there is nothing worth saying that hasn't already been said, so mostly you'll get the words of people who have said greater things than I can say, along with a few musings of my own.

I'm a graduate student in southern Mississippi with an interest in writing, literature, religion and philosophy, and a Catholic view of things. I'm sure it seems strange for an aspiring writer to say that there isn't anything worth saying that hasn't been said. I don't have any illusions (or at least, I hope I don't) about my chosen occupation. I think it's the job of any writer to say what he or she believes to be true in a new way. New audiences often require new presentations of things. But as a writer, I know that I can and should always return to those who have said greater things than I will ever say, and have said those things with more skill and mastery of the language than I will ever possess.

Hence this blog, which will probably not be very unique. I only hope to provide some bits of wisdom that might have been forgotten, and perhaps a few of my own humble insights along the way.