2017-04-03T16:49:58-04:00

Reply to Failed Anti-Catholic Protestant Attempts to Tear Down St. Peter and His Papal Authority

PeterPaulMary
The original Peter, Paul, & Mary: Madonna and Child with Sts. Peter and Paul (1608-1609), by Giuseppe Cesari (1568-1640) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

(8-10-12)* * * * *

One of my better-known articles / papers is my piece, 50 New Testament Proofs for Petrine Primacy and the Papacy, which was part of my first book, A Biblical Defense of Catholicism (2001), and published in The Catholic Answer in Jan / Feb. 1997, right before I put up my website.

Lo and behold, an anti-Catholic Protestant apologist named Jason Engwer, wrote, back in 2002, a turn-the-tables rhetorical reply to my piece, which he called, “51 New Testament Proofs for Pauline Primacy and the Papacy.” I refuted that, and he made another counter-reply, which I rebutted also.

Apparently his paper was no longer online, and someone made a request for him to re-post it (which he did). Here is his current explanation about what he was trying to accomplish:

I wrote it in response to a Roman Catholic apologist’s list of 50 alleged Biblical proofs of a Petrine papacy. Some of the items in my list are meant to parallel items in that Catholic’s list. For example, he cited the performance of a miracle through Peter’s shadow (Acts 5:15) as evidence of Petrine primacy. I paralleled that with a citation of Acts 19:11-12 as evidence of Pauline primacy. I don’t actually think a Pauline papacy is implied by Acts 19 or any other passage I cite below. What I was doing was demonstrating how the same sort of bad reasoning that Catholics often apply to Peter can be cited to justify similar conclusions about other Biblical figures, like Paul.

Catholics can’t object to my list by pointing to post-Biblical evidence for a Petrine papacy, since the issue under discussion is whether the Biblical evidence supports a papacy. Nobody denies that a Petrine papacy eventually developed in Rome. The question in this context is whether that papacy was just a later development or is a teaching of the scriptures as well.

Amidst the usual worthless anti-Catholic bilge in the comments for Jason’s paper, the guy who requested him to post it (a former Catholic, just for the record) made some remarks: a few of which I will reply to, as sort of a fun continuation of the spirit of my two rebuttals. He gushed in rapt admiration:

Jason, this article is a CLASSIC (!!!!!). Thanks for posting it again. In my opinion, your Biblical argument for Pauline Papacy is SOOOOOO much stronger than Catholic Biblical arguments for Petrine Papacy. You BEAT them (not merely match them) at their own sophistical game.

* * *
I then made my reply:

Jason, no doubt by a mere inadvertent oversight (seeing that he was kind enough to also keep my name anonymous), neglected to mention that I responded at great length not only to this paper of his, but also to his follow-up effort. For any who care to read both sides of a dispute (I know that that is sort of a quaint outdated custom these days), here they are.

Suffice it to say that Jason’s was a failed effort. He didn’t prove at all what he set out to prove, and Petrine primacy, as indicated in the Bible, is as strong as ever, with the Pauline data not undermining it one bit: neither in point of fact nor in terms of turning-the-tables rhetoric, counter-analogy, or reductio ad absurdum (as in Jason’s paper).

So, here are some things I would add to your list (though, they are already there implicitly).

Regarding: . . . 

#37. The demons don’t recognize Peter.

In context, why would they? The context of Paul being named was Paul’s handkerchiefs healing folks and casting demons out of them (Acts 19:11-12): which is precisely a secondary relic in Catholic theology: God using an object connected to a holy person to bring about miracles. Even Peter’s shadow healed folks (Acts 5:15), so the two were not unlike in that respect.

The Jewish exorcists specifically mention Jesus and Paul (Acts 19:13-14). Therefore, the demon answered and said, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know” (Acts 19:15).

It doesn’t follow (in any sense) that they would never mention (or “recognize”) Peter in another context, or that Paul is therefore above Peter, simply because Paul was mentioned in this instance and the demon recognized his name. Nothing is proven by this example.

Even if the NT doesn’t mention a specific example of Peter being named by a demon, that isn’t proof that it never happened; only proof that it is not recorded in the Bible (as many many things were not).

We know, in any event, from the Gospels, that Peter, as one of the twelve, cast out demons.

Much ado about nothing . . .

#1 . . . Peter is never said to be an apostle to Gentiles; but only the Jews. . . .

How very odd, then, that God gave Peter the vision of all foods being clean: an issue that had specifically to do with Gentiles in relation to Jewish law (Acts 10:9-16).

Doubly odd (given what you claim) is the fact that Cornelius, a Roman Gentile, was told by an angel specifically to seek out Peter, and he sent men to beseech him (Acts 10:1-817-18).

Peter is told by the Holy Spirit that they have arrived (Acts 10:19-20). Peter then visited and ate with Cornelius and a great many persons and spoke about how Gentiles were now part of God’s plan of salvation (Acts 10:21-43).

The Holy Spirit then fell upon these men, and Peter baptized them (Acts 10:44-48).

All this (an entire chapter devoted to it), yet you claim that Peter was to preach only to the Jews? Quite a strange position indeed . . . Here God, and angels are communicating all over the place, to Peter and a righteous Gentile, but we are told by you that “Peter is never said to be an apostle to Gentiles” — as if that has any relevance to anything. Here, right in Scripture, we see him reaching out to the Gentiles most dramatically.

It’s one of innumerable Protestant “either/or” false dichotomies that I shoot down almost on a daily basis in my apologetic work.

This particular anti-Catholic site has a record of deleting my comments, so I made sure to preserve them in this new paper. Thanks for the opportunity, guys, to give further support to the primacy of St. Peter over against failed and illogical attempts to shoot him down!

* * *

My opponent came back for a second round.  I won’t cite all his words here, but they can be read in the discussion thread. I respond to most of his additional particular counter-arguments:

Dave, you act as if Jason was genuinely attempting to make a case for Pauline Papacy such that his arguments (and my comments) have to make sense. In actual fact, he was attempting to show how Catholic-style eisegesis (not exegesis) could be used to argue for Pauline Papacy.

I did no such thing. I know exactly what he was trying to do: knew it originally (ten years ago) and now. I can read his own explanation, and in fact, I quoted his explanation of the nature of his counter-argument in my Internet post that I made out of this exchange: precisely so my readers wouldn’t be confused about that (since it is a somewhat complex form of counter-argument).

And so my replies presuppose the nature of the argument utilized. If he or you argue that it is just as plausible or more so, to argue for a Pauline papacy (whether it is merely rhetorical or not doesn’t change the validity of logic or exegesis used), I come back and show how it is not: that the argument fails.

I fully understand it, and I think I refute it on its own terms: not as a straw man. The entire argument fails, period. It was fun to interact with, but I think it is thoroughly fallacious all down the line, and my two long replies show exactly how and why I think that. You expanded upon his reasoning in the same “mode” and I believe I’ve shown how you fail, too. Nothing personal. :-)

Your argument about Peter and demons was that they didn’t “recognize” him. I showed how it fails, by delving into the context of the demons and Paul: from which you derived your argument.

One must also understand the intent of my original paper. I wasn’t claiming that all 50 points were equally strong or earth-shaking. Some are merely interesting in terms of showing that Peter was more eminent in Scripture than is commonly supposed.

Jason’s tongue-in-cheek #37 was “The demons in Acts 19:15 recognize Paul’s primacy.” You follow up with “The demons don’t recognize Peter.” Neither one can withstand scrutiny. The fact remains that these arguments can be shot down, but mine are valid examples from the Bible. The data in Acts about a demon and Paul is irrelevant because it wasn’t tied to primacy in the first place.

The strength of my paper comes from its cumulative effect. Some of the 50 points are far more important (namely, the “rock” and “keys of the kingdom” that are supported by massive Protestant scholarly comments, as to Peter being an extraordinary leader).

There are a lot of quite significant things: Peter was the first to preach the gospel after Pentecost, first to  perform a miracle, to raise the dead, to receive the Gentiles into fellowship, to recognize and refute heresy and to pronounce an anathema, etc. These are not insignificant.

It’s not a “wild inference” from Scripture that Peter was the first pope. A guy like F. F. Bruce, after all, could write:

So in the new community which Jesus was about to build, Peter would be, so to speak, chief steward.

(Hard Sayings of Jesus, Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1983, 143-144)

Likewise, The New Bible Dictionary:

So Peter, in T.W. Manson’s words, is to be ‘God’s vicegerent . . . The authority of Peter is an authority to declare what is right and wrong for the Christian community. His decisions will be confirmed by God’ (The Sayings of Jesus, 1954, p. 205).

(New Bible Dictionary, edited by J. D. Douglas, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962, 1018)

There’s something going on there. It isn’t just flimsy, arbitrary Catholic propaganda, as you guys pretend. There is real and solid biblical indication of serious, profound leadership, and from this we derive the notion of a pope: the leader of the Christian Church.

Just as James’ statements to the other Apostles of “listen to me [James]” (Acts 15:13) and “Therefore I [James] judge” (verse 19) could be jumped upon to prove Jacobean Papacy. Does anyone doubt that if Peter had said “therefore I judge” that Catholics would use that to argue for Petrine Papacy? I know that when I was a Catholic I personally would have loved for Peter to have said it, rather than James. I would have prayed, “Lord, why didn’t you have Peter say it instead since Peter actually was the Pope? Father, shouldn’t the Holy Spirit not have inspired Scripture to record James’ statement even if he did say it? Why Lord? Why?!?!”

I dealt with this in my latest book, 100 Biblical Arguments Against Sola Scriptura (#74; p. 95):

We learn that “after there was much debate, Peter rose” to address the assembly (15:7). The Bible records his speech, which goes on for five verses. Then it reports that “all the assembly kept silence” (15:12). Paul and Barnabas speak next, not making authoritative pronouncements, but confirming Peter’s exposition, speaking about “signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles” (15:12). Then when James speaks, he refers right back to what “Simeon [Peter] has related” (15:14). Why did James skip right over Paul’s comments and go back to what Peter said? Paul and his associates are subsequently “sent off” by the Council, and they “delivered the letter” (15:30; cf. 16:4).

None of this seems consistent with the notion that Paul was above or even equal to Peter in authority. But it’s perfectly consistent with Peter’s having a preeminent authority. Paul was under the authority of the council, and Peter (along with James, as the Bishop of Jerusalem) presided over it. Paul and Barnabas were sent by “the church” (of Antioch: see 14:26). Then they were sent by the Jerusalem Council (15:25, 30) which was guided by the Holy Spirit (15:28), back to Antioch (15:30).

I stand by my statement that Peter is never said to be an Apostle to the Gentiles (i.e. commissioned to or sent especially to them).

And I stand by my assertion that this is perfectly irrelevant, insofar as we know (from the Bible) that Peter evangelized Gentiles as well as Jews. This is why I showed the example of an entire chapter of Acts, while you insist on playing non sequitur word games.

We have in the Bible, Peter stating at the Jerusalem Council (RSV): “”Brethren, you know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe.” (Acts 15:7).

The great Bible scholar and self-described “Paulinist” F. F. Bruce, in his book, Peter, Stephen, James, & John (Eerdmans, 1979, p. 32) states:

That Peter’s missionary activity was not restricted to Jews is implied here and there in the New Testament. . . . 1 Peter . . . is addressed in Peter’s name to Gentile converts in various provinces of Asia Minor (including two which were evangelized by Paul).

2 Peter also seems to be addressed to Gentiles, though it is debatable.

Bruce also noted (p. 33) that Peter was among the eleven disciples that Jesus commissioned to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19 ff.): thus obviously including Gentiles. So we know that Peter did indeed have such a commission.

We Protestants acknowledge all of those passages and conclude that none was above another in authority (even if Peter was a “leader” of sorts). . . . Actually, it’s you who doesn’t properly acknowledge the other passages we cite that balances the truth of Peter’s position in the early Church.

It’s not just me, nor just Catholics. In my book on the papacy I cite a host of Protestant scholars who agree with a Bible-based Petrine primacy (based on “rock” and “keys of the kingdom” and other passages); so do even the Orthodox [see. e.g., The Primacy of Peter, edited by John Meyendorff (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992].

You’re not even in line with John Calvin, for heaven’s sake, who wrote:

One was chief among the apostles, . . . That twelve had one among them to direct all is nothing strange. Nature admits, the human mind requires, that in every meeting, though all are equal in power, there should be one as a kind of moderator to whom the others should look up. There is no senate without a consul, no bench of judges without a president or chancellor, no college without a provost, no company without a master. Thus there would be no absurdity were we to confess that the apostles had conferred such a primacy on Peter.

(Institutes, Book IV, 6:8)

This was part of my book about Calvin. You don’t even appear to be aware of it, since you claim that Protestants en masse deny that Peter had primacy.

Not Calvin, and not lots of other Protestant scholars, whose word carries far more weight in your circles and in the world of Bible commentary than yours or Jason’s.

* * *
My opponent, to his credit, came back for a third round of debate. But at this point of the debate  censorship problems arose, as usual, at Triablogue, where the debate was taking place:
It’s been about thirty-one hours now since I tried to post some additional comments in the thread (my “meta-analysis below). They’re still not up.
1) Thus it appears quite likely that Triablogue is censoring my latest comments on the thread (which it has often done in the past), to make it look like I have no further replies to several vigorously argued posts from my opponent (that I reply to below), and that he emerged triumphant by default, due to my apparent silence. It’s not absolutely certain that censorship is taking place. But, you know the saying: ” it it walks like a duck, smells like a duck . . . ” This site has a notorious track record of cowardly censorship, especially where I am concerned, so I may be excused for suspecting it again, after two comments of mine have not yet appeared in 31 hours.
2) Jason Engwer originally re-posted his paper from ten years ago without mentioning that it was a reply to my paper. I’m never named and am only referred to as “a Roman Catholic apologist.” This is a game many anti-Catholic sites have played for some time now, so that they can avoid being found in a Google search. They almost never inform me that any writing of mine is being critiqued on their sites. Fortunately, my opponent in the present debate mentioned my name (the big naughty no-no), thus allowing me to locate the post. :-)

3) Furthermore, he neglected to mention that I responded at length not only to this paper at the time, but also his follow-up paper. Dialogue or debate is not Jason’s forte (he once departed a major one with me in the large anti-Catholic forum CARM in mid-stream), but he loves the one-way lectures, with no mention of any replies made.

4) Moreover, Bishop “Dr.” (?) James White has broken his sacred code of silence concerning me, by posting a snide little post that merely links to Jason’s; entitled, “Excellent Thoughts on How You Can Manufacture Evidence of ‘Primacy’ By Selective Citation.” He shows himself, therefore (and not for the first time, by a long shot), a coward, by blasting someone without (again!) mentioning their name, in linking to the paper that did the same thing. And his site has never allowed comments. Dialogue and debate on the Internet is not Mr. White’s thing to do, either. He avoids it like the plague. On several occasions when I ventured into his chat room I was promptly banned.

What do these people have to hide, if they are supposedly so confident of the superiority of their case over against the one true Catholic Church? What are they so scared of?

I started my third counter-reply with a meta-analysis of “Annoyed Pinoy’s” methodology:
Dave I want to say that I respect your intellect. You’re smarter than myself. I don’t want my disrespecting anyone (including you) take away from my credibility or my own objectivity about issues I debate. I have crossed the line in the past when I’ve made reference to you (whether you’re aware of it or not). I apologize for that.

Thanks for your kind words. It has been an enjoyable dialogue. I wanted to preface any reply by noting the curious irony of the structure of all your questions: “If the Papacy is true, why [Bible passages x, y, z, etc.] . . . ?”

This is, of course, an argument from plausibility: precisely similar to many in my 50 Petrine Bible Proofs. But you and Jason have bashed that form of argument when I make it on behalf of a papacy. He described my method as “the same sort of bad reasoning that Catholics often apply to Peter.” You called it “Catholic-style eisegesis” and a “sophistical game.”

The logical structure of most (but not all) of my 50 proofs was:

1. “IF we assume for the sake of argument that Peter was indeed a leader / “pope” then would the (presented) data in the Bible about Peter be consistent with that notion?”

You simply flip that around, using the same logical structure for the opposite proposed conclusion:

2. “IF we assume for the sake of argument that Peter was NOT a leader / “pope” then wouldn’t the (presented) data in the Bible about Peter be consistent with that notion and inconsistent with his being pope?”

It’s the same sort of argument: from plausibility, analogy, and strong to the degree that it creates a cumulative effect: if each point can be solidly defended under scrutiny.

Therefore, since (far as I can tell), your fifteen questions are perfectly serious: not merely a reductio that utilizes (as you view it) unworthy Catholic eisegetical methods, how is it that it is legitimate exegetical analysis or permissible speculation when you use it to argue against the papacy, but sophistical eisegesis when I use it to defend same?

You seem to be perfectly serious, rather than tongue-in-cheek or turning the tables (merely rhetorically) when you state things like “for someone like myself, these questions seriously call into question the concept of the Papacy.” That’s not just joking and fooling around, is it?

It seems to me, then, that if you wish to argue in this way, you have to retract your opinion of my method as a whole in my 50 Proofs paper. You can still, of course, disagree with my particular and broad conclusions (just as all Bible exegetes will question others in good faith).

That is much different, however, from questioning the entire methodology from a to z, and classifying it as “sophistical eisegesis” etc. It’s simply attempted exegesis that you disagree with for [biblical] reasons a, b, c.

We could also compare your method and mine in another way by using your exactly stated structure:

AP: “If the Papacy is true, why [Bible passages x, y, z, etc.] . . . ?”

Dave: “If the Papacy is untrue, why [Bible passages x, y, z, etc.] . . . ?”

You say I can’t and shouldn’t argue in that fashion in my paper, yet you are allowed to do it with your 15 questions? It’s a disconnect and inconsistent.

Either both are legitimate forms of argumentation (considered apart from the particular premises and conclusions drawn) or neither is. It can’t be (logically) that one is legitimate and the other not. For elaboration on arguments from plausibility, see this book devoted to it (esp. p. 3 ff.).

Paul and Barnabas were sent by “the church” (of Antioch: see 14:26).


You imply that being sent signifies that Paul wasn’t Pope. Then what do you do with Acts 8:14 which says, “Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John:“? By the use of your own logic, Peter wasn’t Pope because he himself was “sent” by the Apostles.

I think this is a good point. Let me try to give my best answer. In context, I made this remark in my recent book a section that started off by stating, “Paul’s ministry was not ‘self-validating.'” I was trying to overthrow a rather common Protestant outlook that regards Paul as totally above all assemblies and churches and sort of a lone ranger apostle: as if he could never conceivably be told to do anything by a mere local assembly..

The Catholic view holds that Peter is above all churches in terms of being the first pope, but we also think that categories of ecclesiology were fluid and less developed than they were later on (just as trinitarian theology was). Thus, we have no problem  with instances where it doesn’t seem as “worked out” as it is later on.

But beyond that. we can also surmise that St. Peter was humble enough to be sent by a group of apostles in Jerusalem, even assuming he was the leader. He listened to the judgment of the Church, just as popes today work in concert with ecumenical councils. This doesn’t necessarily imply inequality, since the Father sent the son and the Holy Spirit, while they remained equal with Him. Jesus as a boy was “subject” to Joseph and Mary, even though he was God and they were creatures.

Imagine as an analogy, the President of the United States having a conference with his cabinet, about a serious crisis in a foreign country. They decide together that it is best for the President and the Secretary of tate to visit the trouble spot. So in that sense the group sent the leader, but he remained the leader all the while.

I realize, though, that this could all apply to Paul, too, so it is a point well taken. The bottom line about Peter remains all the particular distinctives and prerogatives given to him that were not seen even in an apostle as great as Paul. Like I’ve said, it is a cumulative argument, and the evidence becomes strong when seen all together.

None of this seems consistent with the notion that Paul was above or even equal to Peter in authority. But it’s perfectly consistent with Peter’s having a preeminent authority.

Just because it’s “consistent” with it, doesn’t prove it.

I agree. All I claimed above (in your very quotation from me) was that it was consistent with Peter, but not with Paul. Logical inconsistency can, however, rule out certain things, even if it doesn’t prove others. It depends on the nature of the argument, as I discussed above. Arguments from analogy or accumulation of themes are not ironclad proofs. But they can be quite strong, as more pieces are found to fit into them.

The burden of proof is on Catholics to positively prove Peter is the Pope.

I think the cumulative case, rightly understood, and not caricatured, is very strong. It may not be absolute proof (not like, say, “God exists” or “man was created,” but it is quite impressive.

If Peter were the Pope, and if he was especially sent to the Jews, then wouldn’t it make sense that he stay in Jerusalem (as the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church)? Jerusalem was center and birthplace of the Christian Church. That’s precisely why the council of Jerusalem was held there and not elsewhere.

He spent time there but also elsewhere, as I have shown. He did a lot of evangelization of Gentiles, too.

Like I said above, even if we interpret Acts 10 as Peter being commissioned to Gentiles, it’s irrelevant if we’re paralleling the bad arguments that Catholics often make (emphasizing one set of texts to the exclusion of others).

Again, I agree. This wasn’t part of my original argument for Petrine primacy (which you imply in your comments preceding the above). I was responding here to your additional claim that Paul was sent to Jews and Gentiles and Peter only to Jews. I have now provided about five counter-examples. You then confused my argument on that score with my proofs for primacy; but this is not part of that. It’s simply proving that Peter evangelized Gentiles, too, over against your extreme assertion.

It’s not just me, nor just Catholics. In my book on the papacy I cite a host of Protestant scholars who agree with a Bible-based Petrine primacy (based on “rock” and “keys of the kingdom” and other passages); so do even the orthodox.

Primacy is not equivalent to Papacy. 

I agree, which is precisely why I used the word “primacy” above. It’s a prerequisite for papacy, but not equivalent. So you tell me nothing new.

Primacy is consistent with Papacy, but it doesn’t amount to Papacy.

Exactly. But it is not insignificant. It is a strong indication of a possible papacy existing in primitive and less developed form at that time: just as all doctrine develops.

That’s why even though the Orthodox willingly acknowledge Petrine Primacy, they deny the Papacy. They even go so far as to say that for the first few centuries the Roman See was “the first among equals“.

Exactly. Again, you tell me nothing new, that I don’t already know. The reason I brought this up was that you seemed to be denying even the primacy of Peter, so I noted that lots of folks (including John Calvin) don’t go that far. They (the Orthodox and many Protestants) accept it, while denying a papacy based upon it. It all depends on what one is trying to prove at any given time. I’m very precise with my terminology and aware of precisely what I am arguing at any given time.

The burden of proof is on Catholics to prove Papacy, not merely to prove things consistent with it.

We can demonstrate or argue for it a lot more successfully than many doctrines of Protestantism can be supported from Scripture (yet you guys casually accept them anyway). Sola Scriptura isn’t at all seen in Scripture (I’ve written two whole books about that). The canon of Scripture obviously isn’t, also. Sola fide is unable to be harmonized with all of Scripture: especially Pauline teachings. Many other false Protestant doctrines (such as denominationalism or a symbolic Eucharist) are difficult if not impossible to establish from Scripture alone. But Protestants have no problem accepting them, almost by osmosis.

It’s only when it comes to Catholicism, that the most rigorous, philosophically compelling evidence is required, in a way that is never applied to the many Protestant doctrines that are radically unbiblical. It’s a double standard (needless to say). And I’ve seen it a hundred times in my apologetics dialogues, if I’ve seen it once. It’s standard Protestant modus operandi.

I have no problem with Calvin’s quote or in even saying that Peter had “primacy”, if we mean by that he was the leader of the Apostles. Affirming that the apostles were equals doesn’t mean that one can’t at the same time affirm that Peter had primacy. I didn’t intend to “claim that Protestants en masse deny that Peter had primacy.” I affirm Peter’s primacy in that sense. I think the Bible is clear about that.

Good. Then if you grant that Peter was the leader of the apostles, then you are closer to grasping that he was the leader of the Church: since the apostles were the early Church in capsule form. And you can perhaps be persuaded that if there was a leader at first, then God intended for there always to be one, just as with other offices: priest (presbyter or elder in Scripture), deacon, and bishop. That’s just common sense: why would the Church have a leader till Peter died, and not have any leader for the next 2000 years? It makes no sense. But Protestants (typically) simply pick and choose which offices they like and which they will discard.

Previously I said…

However, you’re the one who’s using EITHER/OR [i.e. false dichotomy] thinking in saying, either Peter is the Pope because of the passages you highlight OR Protestants are wrong because they don’t properly acknowledge those passages.


I should have said “However, you’re the one who’s using EITHER/OR [i.e. false dichotomy] thinking in saying, either Peter is the Pope because of the passages you highlight OR these passage shouldn’t exist if he wasn’t the Pope.”

I have defended the logic and form of my arguments above, and have demonstrated, I think, that you use the same form in your 15 points (below).

Let’s be honest. If Peter was the Pope then:

1. Why were the Zebedee brothers asking if they could be Jesus’ right-hand and left-hand men (Matt. 20:20ff) if Jesus already made it clear that Peter was to be the Pope in Matt. 16? Why wouldn’t the Gospel writers correct their misunderstanding and state that Peter was Pope?

The disciples didn’t understand a lot of things, including the necessity of the crucifixion, and that Jesus would rise from the dead (even though He told them repeatedly that they would happen, and arguably made it quite “clear”). Peter likely didn’t know what Jesus meant, himself, when he was being commissioned in Matthew 16. But after he received the Holy Spirit, he did, as seen in his behavior. So why would you think that they would understand this fully? It is an unreasonable demand that has no force. The Gospel writers need nopt spell out everything in declarative statements. They teach mostly by example.

If you are so convinced my 50 proofs are bad ones and unable to withstand scrutiny, then you can take on all 50 yourself. Even Jason Engwer didn’t do that (no one ever has these past 15 years). He chose to engage in a failed reductio instead, that I shot down twice as fallacious and ultimately irrelevant to my arguments.

2. Why wouldn’t Paul make the exception of Peter when he sarcastically referred to “super apostles” (2 Cor. 11:5) if the Papacy is true?

Because this is a non sequitur with regard to Peter. Paul wasn’t referring to real apostles, but sarcastically (11:1: “foolishness”; cf. 11:13-14) to those who preached another Jesus or another gospel.

3. When Paul’s apostleship was questioned by some, why didn’t he immediately appeal to the fact that the Pope acknowledged his genuine apostleship to settle the issue, if the Papacy is true?

In the previous example he used sarcasm and appealed to his preaching of the true gospel over against the heretics. He didn’t have to do that every time. But he did do it in Galatians, where he says rthat he went to see Peter for fifteen days (Gal 1:18) and Peter, James, and John at a later date (2:9): who gave him “the right hand of fellowship.”

4. In light of 1 Cor. 1:12ff and the whole of chapter 3, why wouldn’t Paul refer to Peter as Pope? If the Papacy is true, then there can be a genuine sense in which one could say, “I am of Cephas/Peter”. Even if there might be negative fleshly sense in which it can be said.. Yet Paul doesn’t explicitly affirm or implicitly acknowledge the Papacy. Nor does Paul address the abuses of the Papacy but deals with himself, Peter and Apollos as equals. 

You are taking all that out of context. This is an unreasonable, senseless demand, since in that passage Paul was contrasting the Lordship of Jesus Christ (1:10, 13, 17); to the factions made by man. In any event, if someone was “of Peter” and Peter was the head of the universal Church, then that would simply be saying that “I am of the universal Church,” which is perfectly acceptable. Thus, St. Augustine (I’m compiling a book of is quotes right now) habitually referred to Peter as representative of the whole Church in his person.

It seems to me that a Pope cult developed years later (as the Orthodox have documented).

The papacy developed, for sure: a lot more rapidly after persecution ended, as Cardinal Newman has demonstrated and discussed in his Essay on Development. So did many other Christian doctrines, so this is not surprising at all, let alone novel. But there is plenty of indication already in Scripture.

5. If the Papacy is true, why would Paul (in Gal. 2:9) refer to James, Cephas, and John as seeming/reputed pillars of the Church when he knows all along that there is a special sense in which Peter is pope? He refers to all three as if they were equals.

Because there is a sense in Catholic ecclesiology that all bishops are equals. I went through these dynamics earlier in the discussion of Paul and Peter being “sent.” All bishops are “pillars of the Church.”

6. Regarding the same context, if the Papacy were true, why would Paul say what he did in Gal. 2:6?

And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me.-ESV

But from those who were of high reputation (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)– well, those who were of reputation contributed nothing to me.-NASB

Paul implies his equality with them (including Peter).

Not really. He was simply saying that they added nothing to him in terms of his having received the gospel and commission directly from God. It doesn’t follow, however, that he regarded himself as their equals in the Church (which is what is at issue in this debate). This is shown by his notion that he had to have his ministry confirmed by the Church’s leaders. He was consulting with them specifically for that purpose (Gal 2:1-2). He never denies that they were “of repute.”

None of this is inconsistent with the notion of Peter being the leader. Even Paul’s famous hypocrisy rebuke of Peter (one of the great favorites of Protestants) strongly  implies this, insofar as Peter is singled out as especially sinful in committing hypocrisy, on the principle of “to whom much is given, much is required.”

That hypocrisy is not inconsistent with leadership is shown in Jesus telling His disciples to follow the teachings of the Pharisees, despite their being hypocritical (Matthew 23).

7. If central authority was essential to Christianity, why didn’t Jesus do something about those others who were preaching in His name (Mark 9:38ff)? If the Papacy were true, why would Jesus say, “For he that is not against us is on our part”? Notice I cited Mark’s gospel. The gospel that may have been based on Peter’s sermons. Why wouldn’t Mark make clear in this passage (or any where else in this gospel) that Peter is the Pope?

At that point the Church per se was not yet formed (the real beginning was after Pentecost). Therefore, leadership issues of that sort were not yet put into place or operation (and not as yet fully understood, since the disciples misunderstood many important things). Jesus was simply saying that if these guys were doing good works in His name, to let them do it: “he that is not against us is for us.”

8. If the Papacy is true, why in John 12:20-22 did Philip go to Andrew and then together they went to Jesus, when Philip could have gone to Peter as the Pope? The only way I can understand this is if the Church didn’t realise Peter was the Pope until later. Maybe after the resurrection. If so, when exactly after the resurrection? Before or after Paul’s conversion? Before or after Peter’s own death? How many generations or centuries afterward? 

This is straining at gnats. You don’t even look at what the text says, in your rush to run down Peter and the papacy. And where are you finding all these 15 points? I highly doubt that they are all original with you. The answer here is easy: Peter isn’t Jesus! The text plainly asserts that “we wish to see Jesus.” Why in the world would Philip have to go to Peter, seeing that the inquirers were looking specifically for Jesus? Next objection?

9. If the Papacy is true, why isn’t that office mentioned in Eph 4:11-121 Cor. 12:28-291 & 2 Timothy or Titus?

I guess for the same reason that bishops aren’t mentioned in the Ephesians passage, while they are elsewhere. Neither bishops nor deacons are mentioned in 1 Cor 12:28-29. Obviously, not everything has to be mentioned in every passage, or you yourself wouldn’t argue that there are no bishops in the Bible, because these two passages didn’t mention them, while mentioning many other offices. By the same token, we see Petrine primacy and the papacy in all the various indications I set forth in my paper. peter alone was given the keys, called the “rock”, told to feed the sheep, etc.You want to major on the minors and completely ignore the majors, which is the usual methodology in critiques of the papacy. You argue as the atheist does who denies Christianity and an inspired Bible altogether: poke a 100 supposed holes in something: yet each “poke” is shown to be irrelevant or fallacious upon close scrutiny.

I did an extensive study of Paul’s word usage and discovered some very interesting things:

Colossians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, Titus, and Philemon neither mention “Scripture” nor cite the OT, and Philippians doesn’t mention the word and makes just one OT citation.

In Ephesians, the Church/Tradition ratio to Scripture is 18-6; other books are similar: Philippians (4-1), Colossians (12-0), 1 Thessalonians (5-0), 2 Thessalonians (3-0), Titus (4-0). Would any sola Scriptura advocate have predicted such an outcome before studying these words? Not likely . . .

By your reasoning, then (that you apply to Peter and the papacy), because five NT books never mention Scripture, it is not our rule of faith. And because tradition or the Church are often mentioned far more than Scripture, therefore, they should be part of the rule of faith, whereas Protestants exclude them.

Meanwhile, you apply a double standard in relation to things you do accept. The Bible nowhere spells out its own canon, yet you accept the standard canon confirmed by the Church in councils in the 4th century (minus the seven books you arbitrarily threw out).

The Bible never teaches sola Scriptura at all, yet you make it one of your pillars, your rule of faith, and build everything else upon it. It’s merely a false tradition of men, and your whole system rests upon it. Meanwhile, you demand excruciating, compelling proof of the papacy, while expecting no proof at all of sola Scriptura, and accepting it in blind faith.

10. If the Papacy is true, why doesn’t Peter (in his epistles) acknowledge or make reference to it? In fact, Peter refers to himself as a “fellow elder” (1 Pet. 5:1ff) in a context where it would be supremely fitting for him to appeal to his position as Pope.

Peter was humble, just as popes are today, referring to themselves as “the servant of the servants of God.” Jesus told His followers not to Lord it over others (in the autocratic sense). The pope is a fellow bishop with other bishops. But he is the leader of them, too. Peter acts as a leader. He lets his actions speak louder than his words. Even Jesus usually did the same. He didn’t go around always saying, “I’m God, I’m God!” He called His disciples (far lesser than Him) brothers and friends and sons, and subjected Himself to Joseph and Mary as a child. God (Jesus as a child) did what a mere created man and woman told Him to do. But you’re saying that a pope can’t even say someone is a fellow elder? It’s absurd. You don’t grasp biblical / Hebraic categories and thinking very well if this is how you argue.

11. If the Papacy is true, then why doesn’t the author of Hebrews acknowledge the Papacy in light of the fact that authority and priesthood are two of the main topics of the book? How could such a supposedly vital and useful office not be referred to in any of the epistles (including Peter’s) or in this very long book (Hebrews)?

Hebrews is about the priesthood of Jesus in particular, not all priests. So this should not surprise anyone. Petrine primacy is referred to in the epistles, though not very explicitly (as the papacy was still a developing doctrine). If you had read my 50 Proofs you would have known this already:

I already mentioned Paul confirming his ministry initially through Peter. But I guess you never saw that passage, huh? Paul distinguishes the Lord’s post-Resurrection appearances to Peter from those to other apostles (1 Cor 15:4-8). Why? He was obviously singling him out as more significant. Paul refers to Peter as distinct among apostles (1 Cor 9:5). Peter acts, by strong implication, as the chief bishop/shepherd of the Church (1 Pet 5:1), since he exhorts all the other bishops, or “elders.” Peter interprets prophecy (2 Pet 1:16-21). Peter corrects those who misuse Paul’s writings (2 Pet 3:15-16). Peter wrote his first epistle from Rome, according to most scholars, as its bishop, and as the universal bishop (or, pope) of the early Church. “Babylon” (1 Pet 5:13) is regarded as code for Rome.

“For those who have eyes to see . . .”

12. If the Papacy is true, why didn’t Christ sent Paul immediately to the Pope to be instructed and have his apostleship legitimized? 

I don’t know. But we know that Paul did do so after three years (Gal 1:18). You ignore the significance of that and major on the minors by honing in on the time period. Like I said, you argue exactly like atheists who try to find all these alleged “difficulties” in the Bible. I know, because I’ve debated many of them. I was in a room with 16 one time, answering their rapid fire objections. You lack faith. You need to pray to God to open your eyes to be able to see all this evidence, if you can’t see it, and can only try to relentlessly poke holes. God wants you in the one true Church, in the fullness of faith. He wants you back.

Or why didn’t Christ send Peter to Paul ahead of time like Cornelius did when he sent two of his servants and one of his soldiers to find Peter?

Beats me.  Why does God do a lot of things? Why doesn’t he judge and annihilate America, since we have sinned far more than Sodom and Gomorrah ever did, with the blood of some 50 million aborted babies all over us? We don’t understand a lot of things God does.

Instead Christ sends Ananias to Paul. You might say that it’s because Ananias was closer.

God uses whom He wills, for His purposes. He once used a donkey to speak to a prophet..

But Paul didn’t visit Peter for years afterward. In all those years, Paul could have gone to see Peter, or Peter to have seen Paul. When they do meet, Paul refers to Peter and the others as not having “added/contributed anything” to him (Gal. 2:6). How could the Pope not add/contribute anything to Paul? 

Dealt with above . . .

After Paul’s conversion, many Christians feared whether he was a false convert. At any time he could have sought the Pope’s confirmation.

Again, you minimize the fact that he did do so, and make it a matter of “why did it take so long?” You miss the forest for the trees.

13. If the Papacy is true, then wouldn’t the Jews know that Peter was the Pope and therefore the leader of Christianity? If so why didn’t they go after him and “cut off the head”, as it were? Why, instead, go after Paul (Acts 21:28)? As Jason said, “he’s the man they hold most responsible for teaching Christianity everywhere.” It was Paul, not the Pope that opponents of Christianity wanted to assassinate (Acts 23:12).

It’s not either/or. Paul as the most active missionary was an obvious target. They did go after him. I guess you overlooked Acts 12:1-11 in your Bible-reading. And he was regarded by the Jews (Acts 4:1-13) as the leader and spokesman of Christianity, along with John, but here Peter had a more prominent role. So that is two incidents before they ever went after Paul, who wasn’t even yet a Christian during the first, and barely converted at the time of the second. Peter was also the first traveling missionary, before Paul, and first exercised what would now be called “visitation of the churches” (Acts 9:32-38,43).

14. Paul says in 1 Cor. 11:1 “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” (ESV). Why doesn’t Paul or any other writer of the NT say that about Peter, especially since he’s supposed to be the Pope? Excluding Matthew (because of the disputed interpretation of chap. 16), no New Testament writer teaches about or refers to (even implicitly acknowledge) the office of the Pope (or Peter as Pope). Not the writer of Hebrews, or Mark, James, Jude, or in the entire Lukan, Johannine, Pauline, (EVEN!) Petrine corpus.

Any saint is worthy of imitation, as we see in Hebrews 11 and the heroes of the faith. This is simply irrelevant. It was valid for Paul to say he should be imitated because he was a great follower of Christ.

As for the second claim, poppycock. Go read my 50 Proofs and other papers of mine where I defend the papacy on various grounds, from the Bible.

15. If the Papacy is true, why would Peter’s centrality fade in NT history as the book of Acts shows and as the rest of the epistles show by their deafening silence of Peter? Before Luke published Acts, he could have conferred with other Christians regarding the Pope’s whereabouts and activities. But he didn’t.

There is plenty there, and more than enough to bolster Catholic claims. Broad claims like this are not really arguments in the first place. You have to demonstrate your grandiose claims. I’ve given many biblical arguments in my defenses of the papacy, as seen in this very paper.

Finally, EVEN IF Peter were the Pope, that doesn’t prove that his successors have the same or similar prerogatives. Apostolic succession is an additional burden of proof Catholics need to shoulder.

Technically, that’s correct, though I argue that it is strongly implied by analogy and cross-examples of other Church offices. I have made the case for apostolic succession as well: both biblically and historically.

Dave, admittedly these 15 questions are very basic and so I assume that you’ve got ready answers for them. But for someone like myself, these questions seriously call into question the concept of the Papacy. I say that as someone who likes the idea of the Papacy. So, I don’t think I’m being biased about this issue.

Good! Then you can be persuaded! If God wants you back in the Catholic Church (as I’m sure He does), you’ll feel the Holy Spirit “tugging” you, assuming you truly are willing to go wherever he leads you.

But I realize that there are a lot of things that I would like to be the case, or that I think that God should have done and God didn’t do. God often does things counter-intuitively both in Redemptive History as well as providentially.

That’s very true. He often does fool and surprise us in what He does. All of Christianity has shocking and surprising elements that no one could have predicted (including the incarnation and crucifixion and Resurrection themselves), and that many cannot accept at all. So why should the papacy be any different?

* * *

My opponent made a few more replies on his blog, in the combox (one / two). He stated, “I have no problem with the form of argument you used.. . . I didn’t bash the form of the argument.” I reply as follows:

You described my article as a “sophistical game.” That’s not merely a disagreement in good faith on the conclusions of an opponent’s exegesis. It’s loaded, polemical language.

I then answered four specific questions that he asked:

1. Do you believe that the NT explicitly or implicitly teaches the Papacy?

Implicitly in most cases, but since there is quite a bit, it is cumulative. In other instances (such as Matthew 16), it is fairly explicit, once cross-referencing and the cultural and OT background are considered in the overall equation.

2. When do you believe the Church explicitly and consciously believed in the Papacy?

From the beginning, but with increasing development as time went on. By the time of Pope Leo the Great (440-461), it was pretty much developed, except for fine details. But it continues to develop.

3. Do you believe that sometime during his lifetime Peter consciously knew he was the Pope? If so…

Yes. That derived from his commission in Matthew 16 (“rock” and keeper of “the keys of the kingdom”).

4. Do you believe Peter knowingly had all the prerogatives that Vatican I says the Pope has? Or do you believe he had them, even if he wasn’t aware of having them (since maybe it was later understood by the Church that Popes have such prerogatives)?

No, because that incorporated another 1800 years of development. I believe he knew he was the leader and had strong central authority as somehow the shepherd over the flock of the universal Church.

Much of Protestant misunderstanding of the papacy, as with many “Catholic” doctrines, such as Mariology, has to do with an insufficient grasp of development of doctrine. That’s why the latter was key in my own conversion. Once I understood that, it was the final piece of the puzzle found. It explained many things to me that were formerly perplexing.

* * *

2017-04-24T13:36:18-04:00

. . . Explanations of its Plausibility, Necessity, and Factuality

Hell2
[Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0 license]

(12-26-08)

The following is a response to a person who is sincerely seeking to understand Catholic teaching on hell. He is “currently completing a PhD on the philosophy of Aristotle”: so one can see that it is quite a challenge to me to answer his inquiring objections. His words will be in blue.

* * * * *

I believe good, honest, sincere questions deserve a good answer, so I will offer mine, and hope that it is an aid to you as you work through the issue and come to a decision about Catholicism one way or the other.

I took about eight courses in philosophy in college and have always loved it. I delve into some philosophical theology now and then in the course of doing apologetics, and love to apply the socratic method in my own debates.

[There] are certain basic Catholic doctrines which I find it impossible to reconcile with the dictates of my conscience. I am hoping that somebody on this forum will be able to help me to find clarity regarding some of the issues troubling me.

I hope so too. I admire your evidently sincere search for truth in these matters. You show yourself a true philosopher, in the best meaning of the word.

I want to make it very clear that my expression of disagreement with certain Catholic positions, as I understand them, is not intended to be polemical. I am deeply struggling with the question of conversion. What I am looking for is clarification, which will hopefully make it possible to reconcile my conscience with the Church’s teachings, thus removing the obstacles to conversion.

That’s what the apologist tries to do: the very heart of our endeavor: to remove obstacles and roadblocks that hold people back, in good faith.

I know that on some issues my own convictions differ from the teachings of the Church. What I am hoping for is a statement of the Church’s position on the issues I mention, but a statement which responds to the concerns I have, in a way which helps me to see why I am wrong ( if that is the case) and why the official Catholic position is not subject to the problems I mention.

I’ll do my best. I suspect that, given your education, some of what you seek will probably have to come from fellow philosophers who are Catholic (or otherwise Christians if it involves doctrines that are agreed), but I think I can offer you something to ponder. Just take from my replies whatever you think is useful to you.

My first and foremost problem is with the doctrine of Hell. I realise that this is not exclusive to Catholicism, but I am interested in the Catholic perspective on this. I have tried since I first grappled with the idea at 17, to find some way of reconciling this doctrine with my understanding of God and morality and I have been unable to. I have spoken with many Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, and nothing they have said has made the doctrine acceptable to me. I consider this to be a question of fundamental importance in so far as a conception of hell implies a certain understanding of God. I cannot relate to this doctrine purely intellectually. It offends me at some fundamental level, since it seems to me to be a calumny against God.

So you might be wondering what exactly my problem with hell is, and what kind of conceptions I reject.

I definitely would, in order to answer properly. Objections to hell generally fall into relatively few general categories. But there are lots of particular variations. To give a solid answer, I would need to know with great specificity what your objections are. That may very require a few back-and-forths. If it becomes inappropriate here at a certain point, I’d be more than happy to continue such a discussion on my blog.

Let me try to give you a brief statement of my views.

Good!

Firstly, I am not talking simply about the conception of hell which sees its punishments as essentially retributive. The view that God actively punishes the damned is to me so morally abhorrent, indeed blasphemous, that I have never been able to even consider it as a real possibility.

Well, it seems that you have a very strong emotional reaction to your conception of the Christian doctrine of hell. I think, oftentimes, we project onto God thoughts of our own, as if hell reduces to some kind of petty revenge on God’s part or His desire to exercise a sort of sadistic power to torture people who disagree with Him. I don’t think any of this is true. I wrote in one of my debates with an agnostic:

Those who go to hell do so in their own free will, by their own free choice, having rejected the God Whose existence and nature is “clearly seen” by all (Romans 1). For the life of me, I don’t understand why this should be so objectionable: God allows free creatures to reject Him and even spend eternity without Him if they so desire. Would you rather have Him force you to go to heaven rather than give you the freedom to freely choose heaven or hell as your ultimate destination? In any event, the existence of hell is no proof whatsoever that God is evil. It proves (almost more than anything else) that men are free.

In my main defense of the Christian doctrine of hell, I stated:

The essence of hell is separation from God. God in effect says: “so you want to live apart from Me? You think that is a preferable state of affairs to living with Me? Very well, then, go ahead; see how you like it.” Of course, God would have a great deal more love and compassion than that (I’m applying human emotions to Him — a sort of anthropomorphism in reverse), but this is the basic idea. The Bible talks about God giving men up to their own devices and the hardening of their hearts (the same sort of notion).

C.S. Lewis stated that “the doors of hell are locked from the inside.” God respects human free will so much that He is willing to let men reject Him and spend eternity away from Him, if that is their choice. Of course, those who choose this don’t have the faintest idea of what an existence utterly without God is like, because they have not yet experienced it. This is the tragic folly of the whole thing.

The instant they do experience it, they’ll know what a terrible mistake they made, and in my speculative opinion that will be the primary horror of hell: the intense, irreversible self-loathing, self-hatred, and regret at having made such a stupid and perfectly avoidable mistake as to end up in an unspeakably dreadful, hideous place or state like hell. We know from this life how difficult it is to live with bitter regret: the mulling over the “if only’s” of life and our bittersweet journey through it.

Imagine doing that for eternity! And, of course, this is one big reason why Christians want to proclaim the gospel, so people can avoid that miserable fate, and can live eternally the way God intended them to live, without suffering and sin: complete, whole, perfect creatures, rejoicing in God’s wonderful presence forever.

If this is indeed the official doctrine of the Catholic Church then any possibility of my finding my home there is ruled out. I hope, and my conversations with a number of intelligent Catholics has given me reason to hope, that this is not in fact the case, and that enlightened theological opinion rejects this view. In my conversations and reading I have come across the view, supposedly quite influential, that the punishments of hell are not inflicted by God, so much as a necessary result of the post-mortem state of the soul of someone who has cut himself off from God. This seems to me far superior to the former view.

I think this may be another way of expressing what Lewis meant by saying that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. It’s not that God forces people to follow Him, but that they don’t want to follow Him, because of, often, misconceptions about what it means to follow God as a disciple.

But even here I find grave problems. Essentially I cannot accept the view that hell, even on this conception, is eternal, that once in hell it is impossible to leave it, and that the soul is, after death, fixed in its orientation and unable to make spiritual progress.

Why would this be inconceivable to you? There is a temporal and a timeless existence, as David Emery alluded to. Once we die we enter into a timeless eternity, which cannot be other than what it is. Therefore, once we grant that there are moral distinctions to be made in this life, between good and evil, and we grant that there is a good God, it seems rather straightforward that the concept of divine justice would make it absolutely necessary for there to be a rather definite and compelling cosmic justice and weighing of the facts of what a person has done and believed in this life.

The necessity of judgment is apparent from the human analogy of laws and judges. When we do bad things, there are consequences. And often, they are irreversible. If we murder a person, they are gone from the earth forever. The act had a consequence that to us, from the earthly, temporal perspective, is final. If we get drunk and ride a motorcycle and crash and have to lose an arm or leg or suffer brain damage, those things are irreversible. The dumb behavior had definite consequences. A price had to be paid. This is simply reality. By analogy, if (as I would strongly contend) the dumbest thing a person can do is reject and disbelieve in God, or in His goodness and mercy, then we would expect that there would be some extremely severe consequences to this in the long run.

Since souls are eternal by nature, that consequence is an unending place or state that is separate from God, that we have no remote conception of now: how horrible it is. And to end in hell is entirely our fault, not God’s. So why would anyone in effect “try God” for the existence of hell, since no one ever had to go there in the first place? It’s like blaming a judge who gives the sentence, for the existence of a penitentiary. Does that make any sense? Yet this is essentially what you have done by finding hell objectionable and somehow a thing that casts aspersions upon God’s character.

God the Father has provided a way for any man to be saved who desires to. He has made the way of salvation available through the death of His Son Jesus, Who is in fact God, and the second Person of the Holy Trinity. Catholicism isn’t Calvinism, inasmuch as it doesn’t teach that God predestines people to hell. I think that view (double predestination) does indeed lay God open to the charge of cruelty and arbitrariness and injustice. But that is their argument: let them defend it. It’s not our burden.

Catholicism and Arminian Protestantism and Orthodoxy (which constitute the vast majority of Christians now and at all times throughout Christian history) reject this. And that may constitute part of your objection. When it is seen that people choose hell of their own free will and that God allows them to go there if they insist, that takes the “blame” off of God, in my opinion. There is a strong sense in which it is absurd to even blame God for it, just as men habitually blame God for every evil: including ones that are the fault of man altogether (things like the Holocaust or unjust laws or wars).

Even on the more moderate view that the punishments of hell are a consequence of alienation from God, not of God’s active punishment, it makes no sense to me that they could be eternal.

But you have to step back and ask yourself several things that you have assumed as premises before you even get to this point: “on what basis do I find an eternal state apart from God nonsensical or implausible or impossible?” Your presuppositions entail a necessary examination of anthropology: i.e., from the theological perspective: what is man? Of what does he consist? Does he have a soul; what is that, and is it temporal or dies it have no end? Is there such a thing as sin? If so, how does God judge it and what are its consequences? Is there such a thing as original sin or the Fall, sufficiently serious enough in its rebelliousness and wrongdoing to require in the nature of things justice and punishment from the God against whom we have rebelled? Is this corporate, and involving the whole human race (as the Bible clearly teaches)?

On what possible basis can one conclude that an eternal existence apart from God, of creatures who have expressly rejected this God, is an a priori impossible or unjust or implausible state of affairs? To me it’s rather simple: we are creatures who will exist from this point into the future. We will never have an end to our existence. We’re like a ray in geometry: with a beginning but no end. We can be with God in eternity after we die or without Him. The choice is ours. No one has to go to hell if they will simply believe in God and follow Him, enabled by His grace to do so. These things are essentially matters of faith, part of revelation. But they are also able to be defended by many analogies to human experience and felt internal conceptions of morality and justice.

If they were, any purpose or value that they might have would be totally removed. It would simply be purposeless suffering without end.

I reject your premises and fail to see why a timeless state apart from God (hell) reduces to a situation where, thereby, no “purpose” or “value” is present. The purpose is a combination of “cosmic justice” and the determination of God to permit human free will even where it entails a rejection of Him and eternal misery. Human beings are given an adequate chance to avoid all that. The choice is theirs. But to say that timelessness in and of itself wipes out all purpose makes no sense. One has to first establish that there is no such thing as atemporality. Even the laws of physics after Einstein make that rather difficult to do. Therefore, if there is an existence outside of time or beyond time or in other dimensions, then those who have chosen certain paths will be present in this state either happily or unhappily, just as they live on this state in basically one condition or the other, in the deepest depths of their heart and soul.

To me a God Who would countenance the existence of such suffering would be not much better than one who actively punished sinners. When I have brought these thoughts up with Catholic friends, they have usually responded by saying that hell is a necessary consequence of free will, and that God respects human choice even if this is the choice of eternal separation from God.

Okay; let’s play along with that, then. We can pursue several alternative choices:

1) God chooses to annihilate people rather than their being eternal creatures (i.e., relatively from the time of their origination, not absolutely, like God, Who has no beginning or end).

2) God chooses to annihilate the ones who aren’t worthy of salvation (this is the Jehovah’s Witness and Christadelphian belief).

3) God chooses to not judge anyone at all. The evil as well as the good all end up the same. There is no “cosmic justice.”

4) God saves everyone.

5) God predestines all to hell no matter what they do or believe. (the flip side of #3).

Now, let’s examine each, and see if they make more sense than an eternal hellfire (and heaven).

Reply to Option 1: Here one argues from the existence of things that cannot be otherwise. We can comprehend many such things. The laws of non-contradiction and of geometry or mathematics are two such things. Can we really imagine any possible universe in which one can exist and not exist at the same time, or in which a square is a circle or a line is a triangle? No. Can we imagine a universe with no spatial characteristics at all, even one in which there was no matter? We can easily comprehend a possible universe that is entirely non-material or pure spirit, with no matter, but we can’t comprehend either a completely dimensionless universe or a state of affairs where nothing whatever existed, even space.

Therefore, by the analogy of things such as the above that cannot be otherwise, we reason, based in part on the revelation about the existence of both eternity and souls, that souls, too, are included in the class of things that cannot be otherwise: that they are what they are (in terms of duration) by nature. They are unending, just as a ray in geometry is unending. They simply keep going indefinitely, analogous to rays of light that will travel throughout the universe without end. We may not understand it, but is it inconceivable? No, not at all. I see nothing implausible or unreasonable at all in the notion. And if we accept this and also some law of justice that applies to all sentient beings with moral responsibility, then we arrive at the Christian notion of heaven and hell as final destination places or conditions.

Reply to Option 2: This is certainly possible, but it is contrary to biblical revelation, and it has the characteristic of “metaphysical asymmetry.” If saved souls live forever, then it would seem to follow that damned souls would also, not that they would be annihilated, because in both cases, human souls are involved, and souls have the characteristic of either being temporary or endless. So it would seem to make a lot more sense that either all souls are annihilated or none (in order to have one consistent definition of a soul), but not one class only.

Reply to Option 3: This would make the world a meaningless place, where there is no consequence to good or evil actions. That is far more horrible than the state of affairs in which good, saved people are eternally happy, and bad, damned ones eternally miserable. Instead, we can commit any evil whatever and not expect any undesirable consequences for our actions. That would make “god” worse than the worst person imaginable. He would become evil Himself, as well as a weakling and the furthest thing from omnipotent.

Reply to Option 4: This is also logically possible, but the problem is that it makes mincemeat of human free will and it makes moral behavior meaningless. And of course it is utterly contrary to biblical revelation, if a person believes in that by faith.

Reply to Option 5: Variation of #3 and subject to the same replies.

We conclude, then, that the Christian scenario of heaven and hell makes (philosophically) far more sense (considered apart from revelation) than any of the alternatives.

Really, the issue for me has less to do with human choice and more to do with God.

But then you are discounting that we all make the choice to follow God or not. This contradicts your own introductory statements, that presuppose that you are making religious choices of your own free will (“I began my own path of questioning and eventually found my way back to Christianity, . . . I am currently struggling with the question of conversion to Catholicism”); indeed, this entire discussion would be meaningless if you have no free will to make such choices.

Even if we could choose hell,

What makes you think that we couldn’t or wouldn’t do so in the first place? This is the thing to ponder. Do you deny that there is such a thing as an atheist?

the more pertinent question is how could God countenance the existence of creatures condemned to eternal suffering.

Because God values free will more than a bunch of mindless, will-less, soulless robots that “love” Him. He wants us to enjoy the freedom of choice to do the good or the bad that He Himself possesses. God always chooses good. He can’t make us creatures that way without denying free will, but at least He can give us the freedom to do good and to believe truth.

That being the case, there must necessarily be a class of those who will exercise this free will wrongly and stupidly. How could it be otherwise?

What kind of God could countenance something like that?

The true God doesn’t countenance anything bad. I am contending that what you see as a “bad” thing is either misunderstood by you as to its actual nature, or isn’t the case, period. Not all suffering and bad choices of creatures can be blamed on God. If there is free will, then there is also moral responsibility of the ones who possess it. And that simply can’t be blamed on God. It’s a bum rap.

It does not seem enough to me to say that God would suffer knowing that there were souls in hell.

God has compassion on all souls. He can’t be otherwise. It’s because God is love.

I cannot see how God could refrain from actively working to lead those souls out of darkness, however long it took.

They have an entire lifetime, and (many believe) a chance right after death, too. The thing to ask here is why you have this notion that God must work eternally to redeem souls? He is under no such obligation. He only has to give every person an adequate chance to believe in Him or reject Him, and we believe as Christians, based on revelation, that He more than amply does that in this lifetime.

You are presupposing that what God does to redeem a stray soul is never enough, but then we’re back to blaming God again for the rebel, rather than placing the blame with the rebel, which is where it belongs. This makes no sense. We always want to blame God for everything. It’s a sort of “cosmic blame-shifting.” We never want to blame evil, rebellious man for anything. He’s always a poor, pitiful victim, and it’s always God, God, God Who is supposedly at fault for not having done enough. I would urge you to stop and consider (granting a good God’s existence) the gross unfairness of that endeavor and “spirit.”

To say that God respects a human beings choice of eternal suffering is to limit God’s love, His compassion, His wisdom.

How? I don’t see that this follows at all. God, in effect, is saying:

1) You will live forever.

2) You can choose to believe in Me.

3) Or you can choose to reject Me, because I have given you the dignity of having the free will to do so and to make intelligent choices.

4) Both choices have eternal consequences because your soul is eternal (#1).

5) If you believe in Me, you will have a wonderful existence in heaven with Me for eternity. You’ll have all your aspirations and dreams and deepest impulses and desires and longings completely fulfilled, beyond your wildest imaginings. You were created to serve Me, which is why you are happy and joyful and at peace only when you do that.

6) If you reject Me, you will suffer terribly. I love you and am trying to save you from that fate, and am giving you all the information from My revelation, and internal intuitions and knowledge, and the witness of other human beings and changed lives and miracles, and my enabling grace, to avoid this, But I will not deny your free will.

That’s the choice given, according to biblical revelation. Yet you want to say that such a state of affairs is unloving on God’s part? How? I swear that I don’t comprehend it. Do we blame a parent when he or she does absolutely everything that they should to adequately train and provide for a child, yet the child goes astray in the exercise of his or her free will? We all know people like this. Is it their fault (at least in terms of primary responsibility) or the child’s?

How is it at all unwise, either? God could either give us a free will or create us as robots Who followed His commands just like robots do ours. Would you rather be a robot? This very conversation would be meaningless. Once free will is granted, then it makes entire sense to speak of good and bad eternal destinations. Souls are eternal by nature, so the afterlife is eternal (or, I should say, timeless and unending) as well.

It is to say that evil can triumph against God, that God can be faced with an evil which He cannot overcome by means of what is most truly His, namely love, gentleness, compassion.

That’s correct. That is the nature of free will. How can God force a free agent to love Him? Then it would no longer be free will. He can’t do that, just as He can’t annihilate Himself or make a square circle. These are logical impossibilities, not limitations on His omnipotence, which means, “ability to do all that is logically possible to do.” This is the proper response for the problem of evil as well.

For who is to say that God will never find a way to lead a soul out of darkness without infringing on human freedom?

He can give a human being every way out of darkness but they have to follow, just as the horse has to drink the water after being led to it, and we can’t force it to do so.

So the argument that hell is a necessary consequence of free will seems to me to be unconvincing.

For the life of me, I don’t understand why. I never have. Perhaps you can explain to me why you find it to be so, so I can comprehend the objection.

There is no reason why God could not forgive sinners again and again and again, even after death, until they learn and are reconciled to him.

To the contrary, there is no reason why He should be required to exercise mercy indefinitely and not have a cut-off point. If indeed, all men have a more than adequate chance in this life to repent and follow God, then there is no reason whatever why God should have to extend this mercy indefinitely after death. He is under no “moral obligation” to extend mercy at all, let alone indefinitely.

Take the analogy to our legal system again. The judge says that a person can be paroled, given a few (not at all impossible) conditions. This is legal “mercy.” But the prisoner fails to abide by these, and so he doesn’t gain parole. Now, in your thinking, the one to blame for this is the parole officer or judge, because He didn’t exercise enough mercy and should have forgiven the prisoner an infinite amount of times for all his violations. In my thinking, the prisoner is at fault and the judge, not in the slightest, because he was exercising clemency and mercy and the prisoner in his stupidity failed to do the few things he had to do in order to receive this gracious gift.

This would in no way infringe on free will.

It certainly would because it renders free will itself ridiculous, insofar as any acts done with this free will have absolutely no consequences and errant or evil acts must be forgiven an infinite number of times. That makes mincemeat of the very notion of justice and morality as well, along with free will.

The idea that a human being could be rebellious to the bitter end may be possible in an abstract sense, but it seems to me thoroughly unrealistic.

We see it all the time. How is it unrealistic? We see many examples of evil people who never reform, even when given chances to do so. And that is because evil has the capacity to completely corrupt a soul. Your problem is that you are (as presupposed by your argument, if not consciously) soft-pedaling man’s evil and rebellion. It’s very common, because it is natural man’s natural response to being told that he is an evil rebel. We always raise ourselves higher than we are. We don’t see as God sees.

Assuming that God did provide for the possibility of purification after death, it is highly implausible to suggest that human sinfulness could win out in the end.

How so? The existence of any moral evil at all in the world, shows that evil men can “prevail” over God, because God allows evil to exist: because of free will.

One Catholic priest I spoke with stated that a Catholic is obliged to believe in Hell only as a logical possibility, necessarily arising from free-will.

He is wrong. Hell is a dogma of the Church and clearly taught in the Bible.

On this priests view, the Church has never definitively stated that any particular person is in hell.

That’s correct, but it doesn’t follow logically that there is no hell. There certainly is, according to the teaching of Jesus (Who talked about it even more than He did about heaven) and other teachings in the Bible.

More strongly still, this priest stated that strictly speaking a Catholic is not expected to believe that there is anyone in hell. In other words, while rejecting the very possibility of hell is heretical, it is acceptable to believe that hell is empty. Is this an accurate account of Catholic doctrine?

No. We can hope that any individual person will be saved in the end, but the Bible is clear that many people will be damned, and the place of the damned soul is hell. This is what we teach.

Let me say outright that I have no problem with the idea that we have to take responsibility for our actions and that sometimes the only way to correct error and to move forward is through suffering.

Then I think that some of my replies should carry some force with you, because they expand upon your own principles.

My own deeply considered belief is that after death, the soul, freed from some of the deep seated egocentrism of earthly life, and by the grace of God, will be able to see its earthly life with a clarity and comprehensiveness which was impossible earlier. We will see all our failings, all of the hurt we have caused others, the unknown consequences of our actions, and we will have to take responsibility for them, feel genuine contrition, and certainly, in all likelihood, suffer terrible pangs of conscience.

The Church has not ruled out a possible salvation right after death. We simply don’t know much about it, from revelation alone. But there is no concept of a “long” time after death or souls going from hell to heaven, etc. Those in purgatory are saved. it is inevitable that they will be in heaven in due course. That’s entirely different from the reprobate in hell.

I imagine also, that a soul excessively attached, one might say addicted, to earthly life, pleasure and so on, would also suffer “withdrawal symptoms” of a sort, as it accustomed itself to a new form of existence. In the case of somebody deeply mired in evil, I suppose those pains would be both terrible and prolonged.

That’s exactly why we Catholics believe in purgatory. It makes perfect sense. But as I just stated, those souls are saved already, not in the process of being saved. We are saved by Jesus Christ and God’s grace, not our works.

So, basically, the only conception of hell that makes sense to me is closer to the Catholic conception of Purgatory, as I understand it.

Good. But you have to allow for hell as well, for those who continue to reject God.

In other words, a period of post-mortem purification, whose duration and intensity depends on the individual. It is not retributive. If it is painful, the pains are not a punishment but the result of a conscience enlightened by God. Unlike the usual conception of hell, which seems to be based on the assumption that no spiritual progress is possible after death ( at least for the damned), my view would be that everybody can make progress, repent and be redeemed and that purification, however long and painful, must have an end.

On what basis do you believe such a thing? You actually want to deny that a person can achieve a state of being irreformably evil and opposed to God? Why would you think that?

I am certain that my views are incompatible with Catholic doctrine in so far as I am familiar with it.

You are correct.

I hope and pray that somebody will be able to clarify the Catholic position on this question in a way which will allow me to reconcile myself with the Church’s teachings.

I’ve given it my best shot (for an “introductory” reply, anyway). I eagerly look forward to further interaction. Perhaps I can persuade you! But it goes far beyond mere persuasion. It requires grace and faith to believe in all the things of the Catholic faith. If you are truly open to God, and willing to follow Him wherever He leads, He will give you this enabling grace to believe these things. And you will see (if you are persuaded) that they don’t cast doubt on God’s goodness or power or justice at all.

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NicholasSt
St. Nicholas Byzantine icon from the Chapel of the Holy Trinity at Theological School of Chalki, Heybeliada Turkey. Photo by “Lapost”: 11 July 2005 [Wikimedia Commons /  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license]
(12-8-12)
My name is St. Nicholas; and from the 4th century I do hail;
I was Bishop of Myra, on the southwestern coast of Turkey.
I spent time in the Holy Land, and also in Diocletian’s jails;
Fought the Arian heretics at Nicaea, but my history is murky.
* * * * *
I was most known for helping the poor, under cover of night;
Dropping gifts down a chimney, landing in stockings drying.
I loved children and sailors: by grace aiding all whom I might;
Once multiplied wheat, to save many in a famine from dying.
* * * * *
My feast day is December 6th: the day I departed this earth;
My relics still exude sweet myrrh-like rose water every year.
Christians around the world celebrate the day with great mirth;
Lots of stories of my life, young and old alike do annually hear.
* * * * *
I was named Nikolaos the Wonderworker due to many prayers
Answered often through my intercession, with miracles as well.
The Dutch called me Sinterklaas, adding on legends by layers;
They say I leave coins in wooden shoes; maybe so: I won’t tell!
* * * * *
The tales and fables grew through the centuries, far and wide;
Mostly in the countries where German and English are spoken.
As Christkindl or Kris Kringle: to Jesus’ holy name I was tied;
Now I’m often called Santa Claus: in long tradition unbroken.
* * * * *
In America my legend, through Washington Irving and others,
Spread in folklore, “Twas the night before Christmas,” and such.
Thomas Nast drew me as a jolly old soul, of all men a brother;
Of reindeer, North Pole, red suits, and elves were heard much.
* * * * *
At length, the fables became so secular, commercial, and obscure
That their initially Christian contents became shallow and hidden.
It’s not Santa who sees all and rewards children good and pure;
But God the Father: the source of all graces and gifts we’re given.
* * * * *
It’s Jesus Who, dying for us, gave life such deep meaning and hope;
I am just His messenger, spreading His gospel of salvation and peace.
Without His sustaining power and love, surely none of us could cope;
This true joy of Christmas, till the end of the world will never cease.

Written on 8 December 2012: the feast of the Immaculate Conception.



[see also the “Protestant” version or Version II on Facebook: with a few theologically “controversial” lines changed]

[my other Christmas poems and many other articles are found on my Christmas web page]

 My four children: Christmas 2010

* * * * *

 

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Part of our Dept. 56 “Dickens Village” (2013)

* * *

Compiled  in December 2005.

Primary (But Not Exclusive) Sources:

  The Hymns and Carols of Christmas
(remarkable website from Douglas D. Anderson; all fact sheets and midi sound files are linked to from this site. Web page most used: The Hymns and Carols)

  MusicExpert.com: Christmas: Complete Lyrics for 200 Songs  —– red-colored songs = secular or not overtly-Christian in theme —–

—– current number of carols and songs: 135 —–

 

Master Alphabetical Listing

Ah, Bleak and Chill the Wintry Wind (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1945] | mp3 sample |
 
All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth(Donald Yetter Gardner) [1946] | lyrics and audio file |
 
Spike Jones introduced it in 1948.
 
All on A Christmas Morning (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1946] | mp3 sample |
 
Angels From The Realms Of Glory (music: Englishman: Henry Thomas Smart, 1867 / words: Scotsman James Montgomery, 1816) | fact sheet | midi amazon wma sample with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians |
 
Angels We Have Heard On High (18th century French carol; possibly originally from Lorraine. It achieved rapid popularity in France and Quebec in the 1840s, and was translated into English by Englishman Bishop James Chadwick; popular from the 1860s in England) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians |
 
Ave Maria (music by Austrian Franz Schubert: 1797-1828 / alternate version by Frenchman Charles Gounod: 1818-1893) | fact sheet | amazon wma sample with Stevie Wonder (Schubert) | amazon wma sample with Barbra Streisand (Gounod) |
 
Away In A Manger (music [version 1]: American James Ramsey Murray, 1887 / music [version 2]: American William J. Kirkpatrick, late 19th c.? / words: unknown: Philadelphia: 1885 and verse 3: John T. McFarland, 1887) | fact sheet | midi #1 midi #2 | amazon wma sample with Nat King Cole |
 
The alleged composition of this carol by Martin Luther is almost certainly untrue. The words surfaced in an American Lutheran setting.
 
Blue Christmas (Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson) [1948] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Elvis Presley |
 
Boar’s Head Carol, The (English Trad. / Queens College Version, Oxford, England; First published 1521) | fact sheet midi |
 
From fact sheet: “One of the first carols to be printed (in 1521). It was probably created about a century earlier, anonymously, and probably in Oxford, England. The presumption of its fifteenth-century Oxford origins is founded on the custom of singing the song in Christmas celebrations at Queen’s College, Oxford, for well over 500 years.”
 
Bring A Torch, Jeannette, Isabella (music: French trad.: 14th c. / words: Emile Blemont, c. 1901) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians |
 
Carol, Brothers Carol (W. A. Muhlenberg; collected in 1916) | fact sheetmidi |
 
Carol of the Bells (music: Ukrainian composer Mykola Dmytrovich Leontovich, based on an old Ukrainian melody, 1916 / adaptation and lyrics by Czech-American Peter J. Wilhousky, 1936) | fact sheet amazon wma sample with Robert Shaw Chorale |

Caroling, Caroling (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Wihla Hutson) [1954] | mp3 sample | amazon wma sample with Nat King Cole | 

Cherry Tree Carol (Trad. English; Herefordshire, c. 1400) | fact sheet | amazon wma sample with Peter, Paul, and Mary |
 
Children, go where I send thee (African-American trad., collected by Jean Ritchie in Kentucky; possibly three centuries old) | fact sheet | midi amazon wma sample with The Weavers|
 
From fact sheet: “It has been collected in the southern mountains, the north atlantic states, Ohio, Michigan, and in Canada. These versions trace back to Cornwall and the west country of England, where it was popular as a Christmas carol and as a harvest song . . . Another version of this same carol also exists, thought to have been brought to the United States by Cornishmen who worked in the copper mines along Lake Superior.”
 
Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late) (Ross Bagdasarian [David Seville] ) [1958] | lyrics and audio file |
 
Christ in the Stranger’s Guise (American Alfred E. Burt / lyrics: An Old English Rune of Hospitality) [1948] | mp3 sample |
 
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) (Americans Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry) [1963] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Darlene Love |
 
Christmas Cometh Caroling (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Fr. Andrew) [1942] | mp3 sample |
 
Christmas In Killarney (Words and Music by John Redmond, James Cavanaugh and Frank Weldon) [1950] | amazon wma sample with Bing Crosby |
 
Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire) (Robert Wells and Mel Torme) [1945] | fact sheet amazon wma sample with Nat King Cole |
 
Christmas Time Is Here (Vince Guaraldi and Lee Mendelson) [1965] | amazon wma sample with Vince Guaraldi Trio |
 
From television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas; performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
 
Christmas Waltz, The (Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn) [1954] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Frank Sinatra |
 
Come, Dear Children (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Wihla Huston) [1952] | mp3 sample |
 
Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus (music: German? Christian Friedrich Witt, 1715 / words: Charles Wesley, 1744) | fact sheet | midi |
 
Coventry Carol, The (Words Attributed to Robert Croo, 1534 / English Melody, 1591) | fact sheet | amazon wma sample with Robert Shaw Chorale |
 
It is named after the city of Coventry, England, where the 15th Century Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors depicted Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, told in the lyrics.
 
Cradle In Bethlehem, A (Lawrence Stock and Al Bryan) [1952] | lyrics amazon wma sample with Nat King Cole |
 
Deck The Hall (Welsh trad., prob. 16th century) | fact sheet | midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |
 
Ding Dong! Merrily On High (music: French trad., collected in 1588 / English lyrics: Englishman? George Ratcliffe Woodward, early 20th c.) | fact sheet midi amazon wma file with Taverner Consort |
 
Do You Hear What I Hear? (Gloria Shayna and Noel Regney) [1962] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Bing Crosby | amazon wma sample with Andy Williams |
 
Feliz Navidad (Jose Feliciano) [1970] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Jose Feliciano |
 
First Noel, The (Trad. English: 16th century; possibly dating from as early as the 13th Century. This tune and the present lyrics were first published in 1833). | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |

From the facts sheet: “The usual and typical impression derived is that the carol is of French origin. But such an inference is thoroughly and unequivocally incorrect . . . All the historical evidence points clearly to the carol’s being English, and probably from the remote Cornwall region in southwest England. Although the words were not published until 1823 and the tune not until 1833, a sixteenth-century date is reasonably certain. The song as we know it today, however, acquired a crucial alteration during the nineteenth century. When first published, part of the tune of the refrain was different. By the 1870s the notes for the words “Born is the King” had been changed, thus developing the version we are familiar with now. The person responsible for the inspired modification is unknown, but it is conceivable that Englishman John Stainer (1840-1901) could have been the rearranger.”
 
“The song is probably the oldest popular carol in the English language, handed down by custom over the centuries.”
 
For Unto Us a Child Is Born (German-English composer Georg Frederic Handel, from The Messiah) [1717] | fact sheet | midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |
 
Frosty The Snowman (music: Steve Edward Nelson; lyrics: Walter E. “Jack” Rollins) [1950] | fact sheet amazon wma sample with Gene Autry |
 
Recorded by Gene Autry in 1951.

 
Gesu Bambino (“The Infant Jesus”) (written in 1917 by Pietro Alessandro Yon while he was musical director and organist at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City; English text by Frederick H. Martens) | lyrics | wma sound file |
 
Gifts They Gave, The | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Harry Belafonte |
 
Go Tell It On The Mountain (adapted by American John W. Work, Jr., 1907, based on an African-American Spiritual, probably early 1800s) | fact sheet | midi amazon wma sample with Blind Boys of Alabama |
 
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (Trad. English: 18th c.) | fact sheet | midi amazon wma sample with Nat King Cole |
 
Good Christian Men, Rejoice (Latin, In Dulci Jubilo) (Words: Attributed to Heinrich Suso: c. 1295-1366; freely translated from Latin to English by Englishman John Mason Neale in 1853 / music: In Dulci Jubilo, 14th Century German melody) | fact sheet: notes | fact sheet: English lyrics | fact sheet: Latin lyrics | midi |
 
Good King Wenceslas (Words: Englishman John Mason Neale, 1853 / music: 13th c., quite possibly Scandinavian) | fact sheet midi|
 
Hallelujah Chorus (German-English composer Georg Frederic Handel, from The Messiah) [1717] | fact sheet | midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |
 
Happy Birthday, Jesus (Estelle Levitt and Lee Pockriss) [1977] | lyrics amazon wma file with Alabama |
 
Happy Holiday (Jewish-American Irving Berlin) [1941] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Bing Crosby |
 
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) (Yoko Ono and John Lennon) [1971] | lyrics amazon wma file with John Lennon |
 
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (Words: Charles Wesley, 1739; amended by George Whitfield, 1753 and Martin Madan, 1760; other changes occurred in 1782, 1810, and 1861 / music: German Felix Mendelssohn, 1840; arranged by Englishman William Hayman Cummings and first presented Christmas Day, 1855) | fact sheet | midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir  

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Words: Ralph Blane / music: Hugh Martin) [1943] | amazon wma sample with Perry Como | amazon wma sample with Tony Bennett |
 
From the film, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944); performed by Judy Garland.
Here Comes Santa Claus (Gene Autry and Oakley Haldeman) [1946] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Gene Autry |
 
Here We Come A-Caroling (aka Here We Come A-Wassailing orThe Wassail Song) (Trad. English: 17th c.) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians |
 
Holly And The Ivy, The (Trad. English: c. 1700; possibly from an ancient carol of French? origin; possibly from the Gloucestershire region; printed at Birmingham in 1710) | fact sheet midi | 

Holly Jolly Christmas, A (Johnny Marks) [1962] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Burl Ives | 

From the television special, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (1962); performed by Burl Ives.
 
(There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays (music: Robert Allen / words: Al Stillman) [1954] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Perry Como |
 
Recorded by Perry Como in 1954.
 
Huron Carol, The (Fr. Jean de Brebeuf, 1640 from an old French tune; English translation by J. E. Middleton [d. 1960] ) | fact sheet midi |
 
From fact sheet: “. . . originally written in the Huron Indian language in 1640 [near the eastern shores of Lake Huron in Ontario] . . . In retelling the story of the Nativity, Father Brebeuf used symbols and figures that could be understood by the Hurons, and the hymn entered the tribe’s oral tradition. It was sung by the Hurons in Ontario until 1649, when the Iroquois killed Father Brebeuf, wiped out the Jesuit mission and drove the Hurons from their home. In Quebec, to which many of the Hurons escaped, the carol re-emerged and was translated into English and French. This version is still sung today throughout Canada and is considered a national treasure . . . “
 
I Believe In Father Christmas (Greg Lake and Peter Sinfield) [1975] | lyrics | amazon page wma sample |
 
I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day (Words: American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christmas Eve, 1863; music: Englishman John Baptiste Calkin, 1872) | fact sheet midi |
 
An alternate melody which has become popular in recent years, was written by Johnny Marks in 1956 (listen to an amazon wma sample with Frank Sinatra).
 
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (Tommie Connor) [1952] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Ronettes |
 
I Saw Three Ships (Trad. English: 17th c.; possibly from Derbyshire) fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Nat King Cole |
 
I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas (John Rox) [1953] {performed by Gayla Peevey} | lyrics | FAQ page | wav music file of Peevey record |
 
I Wonder As I Wander (Words and Music collected by John Jacob Niles in Murphy, North Carolina in 1933; it is uncertain how old the folk tune is) [1933] | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Barbra Streisand |
 
From fact sheet: “John Jacob Niles, the singer and collector of folk songs, said that he based his “I Wonder As I Wander” on a line or two of haunting music that he heard sung by a young girl in a small North Carolina town. He asked her to sing the few notes over and over, paying her a few pennies each time, until he had jotted it all down in his notebook. So close was the finished song to its Appalachian inspiration that Niles is often cited as arranger of the tune rather than its creator.”
 
Niles himself wrote: “After eight tries, all of which are carefully recorded in my notes, I had only three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material–and a magnificent idea. With the writing of additional verses and the development of the original melodic material, “I Wonder As I Wander” came into being. I sang it for five years in my concerts before it caught on. Since then, it has been sung by soloists and choral groups wherever the English language is spoken and sung.”
 
Il Est Ne, Le Divin Enfant (He Is Born, The Divine Christ Child) (Trad. French; possibly from an old Normandy hunting tune; collected by 1862) | fact sheet midi amazon wma file with Taverner Consort |
 
I’ll Be Home For Christmas (music by American Walter Kent / words by American James Kimball Gannon; also Buck Ram) [1943; revised in 1948] | lyrics amazon wma sample with Bing Crosby | amazon wma sample with The Carpenters |
 
From fact sheet: ” ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas’ proves that songs need not be complex to stir the affects of the public. This little gem, perfectly suited for Crosby’s rolling baritone, is Bing’s third most successful Christmas song, behind ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Silent Night.’ He recorded it Oct. 4, 1943, backed by the John Scott Trotter Orchestra, and within two months the song was on the charts, where it stayed for 7 weeks, eclipsing ‘White Christmas.’ The recording hit the charts again in December 1944 and earned Bing his fifth gold record.”
 
In the Bleak Midwinter (Words: Englishwoman Christina Georgina Rossetti, 1872; music: Englishman Gustav Holst, specifically for the text, 1906) | fact sheet midi |
 
From fact sheet: “Harold Darke’s well-regarded setting was written in 1911 and published by Stainer and Bell, London. It was originally made famous by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge.”
 
Irish Carol (Music: Irish folk carol, 16th or 17th Century / words: possibly by Fr. Willian Devereaux (c. 1728); translator possibly Dr. W. H. Grattan Flood) | fact sheet | midi |

It Came Upon The Midnight Clear (Words: American Edmund Hamilton Sears, 1849; music: American Richard Storrs Willis, 1850) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Frank Sinatra |
 
From a bio pageComposer Willis was born in 1819 in Boston, studied in Germany, and was a personal friend of Felix Mendelssohn. He moved to Detroit (where I grew up) in 1861, and died there in 1900.
 
It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas (Meredith Willson) [1951] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Perry Como | amazon wma sample with Bing Crosby 
 
Recorded by Perry Como in 1951.
 
It’s Christmas Time (Stevie Wonder) [1970] | amazon wma sample with Smokey Robinson & the Miracles |
 
It’s the Most Wonderful Time Of The Year (George Wyle and Eddie Pola) [1963] | lyrics amazon wma sample with Andy Williams |
 
Jehovah The Lord Will Provide | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Harry Belafonte |
 
Jesu Parvule (“Poor little Jesus”) (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1943] | mp3 sample |
 
Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head (Kentucky folk carol; collected by John Jacob Niles: 1912-1913 and 1932-1934) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |
 
Jingle Bell Rock (Joseph Carleton Beal and James Ross Boothe) [1957] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Brenda Lee |
 
Jingle Bells (American James Lord Pierpont [a Unitarian], 1857) | fact sheet | amazon wma sample with Barbra Streisand |
 
Jolly Old St. Nick (Anonymous; second half of 19th c. or early 20th c. – see notes for Up on the Housetop) | lyrics and audio file |
 
Joy To The World (Words: Englishman Isaac Watts: 1719 / Music: American Lowell Mason, 1848) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |
 
Musicologists now largely agree that the music was not derived from Handel, as formerly widely believed.

King Jesus Hath a Garden (Heer Jesus heeft een Hofken) (Trad. Dutch, 17th c.) |fact sheetmidi 
 
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (music: Jule Styne / words: Sammy Cahn) [1945] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Andy Williams |
 
Linus and Lucy (Vince Guaraldi and Lee Mendelson) [1965] | amazon wma sample with Vince Guaraldi Trio |
 
From television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas; performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
 
Little Drummer Boy, The (Katherine K. Davis, Henry V. Onorati and Harry Simeone; adapted from a Czech carol) [1941; charted in the US in 1958] | brief history | amazon wma sample with Harry Simeone Chorale |
 
Little Saint Nick (Brian Wilson and Mike Love) [1963] | lyrics amazon wma sample with The Beach Boys |
 
Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming (Words: 15th c. German carol; translated by American Theodore Baker, 1894; music: Anonymous, 16th Century; arr. by German composer Michael Praetorius, 1609) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Robert Shaw Chorale |
 
Marshmallow World, A (Music: Peter De Rose / words: Carl Sigman) [1949] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Brenda Lee | amazon wma sample with Darlene Love |
 
Mary Had a Baby (19th c. spiritual from St. Helena Island, off of South Carolina) | fact sheet midi |
 
Mary’s Little Boy Child (Jester Hairston) [1956] | lyrics amazon wma sample with Harry Belafonte |
 
Merry Christmas, Baby (Brian Wilson) [1963] | lyricsamazon wma sample with The Beach Boys |
 
Merry Christmas, Darling (words: Frank Pooler, 1946 / music: Richard Carpenter, 1970) | lyrics | amazon wma sample with The Carpenters |
 
Mistletoe and Holly (Frank Sinatra, Dok Stanford and Henry W. Sanicola) [1957] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Frank Sinatra |
 
My Favorite Things (Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) [1959] | lyrics amazon wma sample with Andy Williams |
 
Nigh Bethlehem (Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1947] | mp3 sample |
 
O Come, All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis) (Englishman John Francis Wade: c. 1743 / English translation by Frederick Oakeley: 1841) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |
 
Wade was a Catholic, who later relocated to Douay, France due to the religious persecution in England.
 
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (words: anon. 8th Century Latin; translated into English by John Mason Neale, 1851 / music: 15th Century French Plain Song melody) | fact sheetmidi |
 
O Hearken Ye (Alfred S. Burt / lyrics: Wihla Hutson) [1953] | mp3 sample |
 
O Holy Night (Words: Frenchman Placide Cappeau, 1847; translated into English by John Sullivan Dwight, a Unitarian minister [1812-1893] / Music: Jewish Frenchman Adolphe-Charles Adam, 1847; first performed at midnight Mass that year) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Luciano Pavarotti |
 
O Little Town Of Bethlehem (Words: Phillips Brooks, Episcopal minister of Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1868 / Music: Lewis Henry Redner, 1868. Redner served as Brooks’ organist. The tune came to him on Christmas Eve, and was first sung the next day) | fact sheetmidiamazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |
 
From fact sheet: “By the time he went to bed the night before the Christmas program, Redner had not produced a satisfactory tune. During the night, the story continues, he woke up with ‘an angel strain’ sounding in his ears. He immediately jotted down the melody, which he called ‘a gift from heaven,’ and the following morning added the harmony . . . probably the most popular of all American carols . . . first appeared in the Episcopal hymnal in 1892.”
 
O Sanctissima (Latin prayer set to a Sicilian melody called “The Sicilian Mariner’s Hymn to the Virgin”; first published, with its original Latin text, in 1794 in the United States) | fact sheetmidi |
 
O Tannenbaum (O Christmas Tree) (Trad. German; first published in 1799; likely based on a Westphalian folk song) amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir | English translation | fact sheet and German lyrics | midi |
 
From the fact sheet: “In both England and America, the song could not have become popular until after the mid-19th century. The popularity of the Christmas tree did not arise until after 1841 in England when Prince Albert erected a tree for his bride, Queen Victoriaand shortly thereafter in the United States . . . By the 18th century the custom of the Christmas tree was common in Germany, and in fact German settlers had introduced the practice into North America as early as the 17th century. Hessian soldiers also practiced the custom while fighting in America during the Revolutionary War . . . The world’s first electrically lighted Christmas tree is installed in December, 1882 in the New York house of Thomas Edison’s associate Edward H. Johnson. And President Coolidge lights the first White House Christmas tree in 1923 to begin a lasting tradition.”
 
Once In Royal David’s City (Words: Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander, 1848 / Music: Henry John Gauntlett, 1849. Written in Ireland) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir |
 
One Small Child (David Meece) [1971] | lyrics | amazon wma file with Jubilate Deo Chorale |
 
This beautiful song was made popular by the contemporary Christian singer Evie Tornquist.
 
Pat-A-Pan (Frenchman Bernard De La Monnoye, c. 1700 – from the Burgundy region) | fact sheet midi amazon wma sample with Mormon Tabernacle Choir 
 
Peace on Earth / The Little Drummer Boy {performed in 1977 by Bing Crosby and David Bowie} | amazon wma sample |
 
Pretty Paper (American Willie Nelson) [1962] | lyrics | amazon wma file with Roy Orbison |
 
Riu Riu Chiu (Spanish trad., 16th c., from Valencia) | amazon wma file with Taverner Consort |
 
Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree (Johnny Marks) [1958] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Brenda Lee |
 
Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer (Johnny Marks) [1949] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Gene Autry |
 
Santa Baby (Joan Ellen Javits, Philip Springer, Tony Springer) [1953] | lyrics | amazon wma file with Earth Kitt |
 
Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me) (Aaron Schroeder and Claude DeMetruis) [1957] | lyrics | amazon wma filewith Elvis Presley |
 
Santa Claus Is Back In Town (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) [1957] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Elvis Presley |
 
Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town (J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie) [1932] | lyrics fact sheet | amazon wma sample with Gene Autry |
 
Eddie Cantor first sang it on his Thanksgiving radio show in 1934. The original recorded version dates from September 27 1935: by Joe Harris with Benny Goodman & His Orchestra. Versions by Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters and Perry Como were the most successful.
 
Silent Night (Words: Rev. Joseph Mohr, c. 1816 / Music: Franz Xaver Gruber, c. 1818) | fact sheet | midi German lyrics English translation | amazon wma sample with Bing Crosby |
 
From fact sheet: “It is likely the most popular Christmas carol in the world, but for many years, the history of the carol was a source of great confusion. The traditional story is that Rev. Josef Mohr (1792-1848) and Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863) wrote it in Oberndorf, Austria, on Christmas Eve [1818] when they discovered the church organ was damaged (different versions say it rusted out, or mice chewed through vital parts). Charming as those stories are, they are only folklore. In fact, in a letter written by Franz Gruber, son of the composer, he noted that “During the time when my father was the organist of the church of St Nikola, there was a very poor almost unusable organ there. This may well explain why the Reverend Mohr preferred to accompany the carol on a well-tuned guitar than on an off-pitch organ.” An old manuscript has reportedly been discovered that shows Rev. Mohr wrote the lyrics in 1816, and that Franz Gruber wrote the score two years later at Rev. Mohr’s request . . . Gruber did not disclose why Mohr made the request to add music to the poem (and you can safely disregard any stories which invent a dialogue between the two men). Whatever the reason, this is the most popular of all Christmas carols, and a favorite worldwide for almost 200 years . . . the carol was first performed at the midnight mass on Christmas Eve, 1818. Mohr sang the tenor part, Gruber sang the bass, and the church choir did the refrains of each verse, which consisted of the last two lines of the verse. Mohr played the guitar accompaniment. It was said to have been enthusiastically received by by the congregation . . . The definitive English translation by Rev. John Freeman Young (1820-1885) was first published in The Sunday-School Service and Tune Book: Selected and arranged by John Clark Hollister, in 1863.”
 
Silver Bells (Ray Evans and Jay Livingston) [1950] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Bing Crosby |
 
From the film, The Lemon Drop Kid (1950); performed by Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell; first recorded by Bing Crosby.
 
Sleep Baby Mine (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Wihla Huston) [1949] | mp3 sample |
 
Sleigh Ride (music: Leroy Anderson [1948] ) (words: Mitchell Parish [1950] ) | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Andy Williams |
 
Snowfall (Claude Thornhill and Ruth Thornhill) [1941] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Tony Bennett |
 
Some Children See Him (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics: Wihla Hutson) [1951] | mp3 sample | amazon wma sample with Perry Como |
 
Someday at Christmas (Ron Miller and Bryan Wells) [1967] | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Stevie Wonder |
 
Soul Cakes (aka A Soalin’ or The Souling Song) | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Peter, Paul, and Mary |
 
Star Carol, The (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics: Wihla Hutson) [1954] | mp3 sample |
 
Star in the East, A | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Harry Belafonte |
 
Sussex Carol (aka, On Christmas Night) (Trad. English, 17th c.; collected in Sussex county in 1919 by Ralph Vaughan-Williams) | fact sheet |midi |
 
This Is Christmas (Bright, Bright The Holly Berries) (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics: Wihla Hutson) [1950] | mp3 sample |
 
The Twelve Days Of Christmas (Trad. English, c. 1700) | fact sheet | midi | amazon wma sample with Perry Como |
 
From fact sheet: “There is the widely circulated notion that this is a disguised catechism song sung by Roman Catholics during a long period of repression in England. Most scholars discount this notion for the fundamental reason that the elements were largely common to both the Church of Rome and the Church of England [the seven sacraments would be one difference]. Usually, the explanation runs as follows:
* The Partridge in a Pear Tree = Jesus Christ, the Son of God
* 2 Turtle Doves = The Old and New Testaments (or the sacrifice offered in the temple by Joseph and Mary at the presentation of Christ in the Temple)
* 3 French Hens = Faith, Hope and Charity, the Theological Virtues (see: I Corinthians 13) (or the gifts of the Magi)
* 4 Calling Birds = the Four Gospels (or the Four Evangelists)
* 5 Golden Rings = The first Five Books of the Old Testament (the “Pentateuch”)
* 6 Geese A-laying = the six days of creation
* 7 Swans A-swimming = the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven sacraments
* 8 Maids A-milking = the eight beatitudes (see: Matthew 5: 3-11)
* 9 Ladies Dancing = the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit (see: Galatians 5:22-23: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control)
(or the nine choirs of angels)
* 10 Lords A-leaping = the Ten Commandments
* 11 Pipers Piping = the eleven faithful apostles
* 12 Drummers Drumming = the twelve points of doctrine in the Apostle’s Creed”
 
There’s a Song In The Air (Words: Josiah Gilbert Holland, 1872, and W. T. Giffe, 1874 / Music: Karl Pomeroy Harrington, 1904) | fact sheetmidi|
 
This Endris Night (Trad. English, 15th c.) | fact sheetmidi amazon wma file with Taverner Consort |
 
Up On The Housetop (American Benjamin R. Hamby, c. 1860) | fact sheet |midi | amazon wma sample with Gene Autry |
 
From fact sheet: “Up on the Housetop may well have been the first American song of importance which elaborates on the theme on Santa Claus. It also is one of the first entirely secular Christmas songs composed in the Unite States. Written by little-known Benjamin R. Hanby (1833-1867), sometime in the 1850s or 1860s, and probably in Ohio, this vivacious song could possibly predate the early secular classic, Jingle Bells (1857). The best estimate, though, is that Hanby’s song was created in the 1860s.
 
Hanby’s life was short, less than 35 years. Yet he did manage to contribute this bouncy song, which is an especial favorite of children, to the enduring literature of the holiday. Furthermore, he may possibly have composed another popular carol, Jolly Old Saint Nicholas which is of roughly the same period and which has a suspiciously similar style of music and lyrics. There is absolutely no evidence that Hanby was responsible for the other song, yet the chronological and stylistic coincidences, plus the total anonymity of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, do elicit the conjecture that Hanby might have authored both songs. At the least, Hanby’s Up on the Housetop may have influenced Jolly Old Saint Nicholas.”
 
Wassail, Wassail (aka Gloucestershire Wassail) (Trad. English folk carol: 17th c.) | fact sheet midi |
 
We Three Kings Of Orient Are (John Henry Hopkins, Jr., 1857; written as part of a Christmas pageant for the General Theological Seminary in New York City) | fact sheet midiamazon wma sample with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians |
 
We Wish You a Merry Christmas (Trad. English [west country], 16th c.) | fact sheetmidi amazon wma sample with Peter, Paul, and Mary |

We Wish You the Merriest (Les Brown, Date Unknown) | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby |
 
We’ll Dress the House (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Wihla Huston) [1954] | mp3 sample |
 
Wexford Carol, The (Trad. Irish: 12th c. from County Wexford [?]) | fact sheet | midi 2nd audio file |
 
What Are the Signs (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1944] | mp3 sample |
 
What Child Is This? (Words: Englishman William Chatterton Dix, 1865 / Music: Greensleeves, 16th Century English melody) | fact sheet | midi |
 
What Fragrance is That? (Quelle est cette odeur agreable) (French trad., 17th c.) | English lyrics | French lyrics | midi |
 
Where The Little Jesus Sleeps | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Harry Belafonte |
 
While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night (Words: Nahum Tate, c. 1701 / Music: “Christmas,” George Frederick Handel, 1728) | fact sheet | midi |
 
From fact sheet: “The great English classical composer George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) has been commonly linked with two great English Christmas carols. One of these connections, as composer of the melody for Joy to the World!, is completely bogus. The other connection, as composer of one of the melodies for While Shepherds Watch Their Flocks, is, on the other hand, definitely valid.”
 
White Christmas (Jewish-American Irving Berlin) [1940] | fact sheet amazon wma sample with Bing Crosby |
 
From the film, Holiday Inn (1942); performed by Bring Crosby.
From the fact sheet: “White Christmas was written in 1940 by a Irving Berlin for the 1942 movie “Holiday Inn” starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Berlin’s assignment was to write a song about each of the major holidays of the year. But Berlin, who was Jewish, found that writing a song about Christmas was the most challenging. He drew upon his experiences of the holiday in New York (including Christmas Trees erected by neighbors when he was a boy) and Los Angeles, but still felt that the end result was wanting. However, when Bing first heard Berlin audition “White Christmas” in 1941 he reassured Irving that he had created a winner. Bing’s preliminary evaluation turned out to be a gross understatement . . . Bing’s single of “White Christmas” sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and was recognized as the best-selling single in any music category for more than 50 years until 1998 when Elton John’s tribute to Princess Diana, “Candle in the Wind,” overtook it in a matter of months. However, Bing’s recording of “White Christmas” has sold additional millions of copies as part of numerous albums, including his best-selling album “Merry Christmas”, which was first released as an L.P. in 1949.”
 
“. . . According to a 1998 press release from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), “White Christmas” remains the number one performed Christmas carol, and is the most recorded Christmas carol (over 500 versions in “scores of languages”). The other top five are “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride.”
 
By 2003, however, “White Christmas” had slipped to the number two position on their list of Christmas songs. The number one song was “The Christmas Song” (Mel Torme and Robert Wells). The other three in the top five are “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town (J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie), “Winter Wonderland” (Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith), and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin). For more information, see the ASCAP Top 25 Holiday Song List.”
 
Winter Wonderland (music: Felix Bernard / lyrics: Richard B. Smith) [1934] | fact sheet | lyrics | amazon wma sample with Tony Bennett |
 
From fact sheet: “Winter Wonderland [was] an immediate hit for Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (1934). Then, in 1946, rival recordings were made by Perry Como and The Andrews Sisters (backed by Guy Lombardo) that established the bubbly tune as a Yuletide favorite.” 
Chronological Listing of Carols and Songs
(Dates Based on the Music, Not Lyrics)  

12th c. Wexford Carol, The (Trad. Irish: 12th c. from County Wexford [?])
13th c. Good King Wenceslas (Words: Englishman John Mason Neale, 1853 / music: 13th c., quite possibly Scandinavian)
First Noel, The (Trad. English: 16th century; possibly dating from as early as the 13th Century. This tune and the present lyrics were first published in 1833).
14th c. Bring A Torch, Jeannette, Isabella (music: French trad.: 14th c. / words: Emile Blemont, c. 1901)
Good Christian Men, Rejoice (Latin, In Dulci Jubilo) (Words: Attributed to Heinrich Suso: c. 1295-1366; freely translated from Latin to English by Englishman John Mason Neale in 1853 / music: In Dulci Jubilo, 14th Century German melody)
1400 Cherry Tree Carol (Trad. English; Herefordshire, c. 1400)
15th c. This Endris Night (Trad. English, 15th c.)
Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming (Words: 15th c. German carol; translated by American Theodore Baker, 1894; music: Anonymous, 16th Century; arr. by German composer Michael Praetorius, 1609)
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (words: anon. 8th Century Latin; translated into English by John Mason Neale, 1851 / music: 15th Century French Plain Song melody)
1521 Boar’s Head Carol, The (English Trad. / Queens College Version, Oxford, England; First published 1521)
16th c. Deck The Hall (Welsh trad., prob. 16th century)
Riu Riu Chiu (Spanish trad., 16th c., from Valencia)
We Wish You a Merry Christmas (Trad. English [west country], 16th c.)
What Child Is This? (Words: Englishman William Chatterton Dix, 1865 / Music: Greensleeves, 16th Century English melody)
1588 Ding Dong! Merrily On High (music: French trad., collected in 1588 / English lyrics: Englishman? George Ratcliffe Woodward, early 20th c.)
1591 Coventry Carol, The (Words Attributed to Robert Croo, 1534 / English Melody, 1591)
1600 Irish Carol (Music: Irish folk carol, 16th or 17th Century / words: possibly by Fr. Willian Devereaux (c. 1728); translator possibly Dr. W. H. Grattan Flood)
Children, go where I send thee (African-American trad., collected by Jean Ritchie in Kentucky; possibly three centuries old)
17th c. Here We Come A-Caroling (aka Here We Come A-Wassailing orThe Wassail Song) (Trad. English: 17th c.)
Wassail, Wassail (aka Gloucestershire Wassail) (Trad. English folk carol: 17th c.)
Sussex Carol (aka, On Christmas Night) (Trad. English, 17th c.; collected in Sussex county in 1919 by Ralph Vaughan-Williams)
I Saw Three Ships (Trad. English: 17th c.; possibly from Derbyshire)
What Fragrance is That? (Quelle est cette odeur agreable) (French trad., 17th c.)
King Jesus Hath a Garden (Heer Jesus heeft een Hofken) (Trad. Dutch, 17th c.)
1640 Huron Carol, The (Fr. Jean de Brebeuf, 1640 from an old French tune; English translation by J. E. Middleton [d. 1960] )
1700 Holly And The Ivy, The (Trad. English: c. 1700; possibly from an ancient carol of French? origin; possibly from the Gloucestershire region; printed at Birmingham in 1710)
Pat-A-Pan (Frenchman Bernard De La Monnoye, c. 1700 – from the Burgundy region)
The Twelve Days Of Christmas (Trad. English, c. 1700)
1715 Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus (music: German? Christian Friedrich Witt, 1715 / words: Charles Wesley, 1744)
1717 For Unto Us a Child Is Born (German-English composer Georg Frederic Handel, from The Messiah) [1717]
Hallelujah Chorus (German-English composer Georg Frederic Handel, from The Messiah) [1717]
1728 While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night (Words: Nahum Tate, c. 1701 / Music: “Christmas,” George Frederick Handel, 1728)
1743 O Come, All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis) (Englishman John Francis Wade: c. 1743 / English translation by Frederick Oakeley: 1841)
18th c. Angels We Have Heard On High (18th century French carol; possibly originally from Lorraine. It achieved rapid popularity in France and Quebec in the 1840s, and was translated into English by Englishman Bishop James Chadwick; popular from the 1860s in England)
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (Trad. English: 18th c.)
1794 O Sanctissima (Latin prayer set to a Sicilian melody called “The Sicilian Mariner’s Hymn to the Virgin”; first published, with its original Latin text, in 1794 in the United States)
1799 O Tannenbaum (O Christmas Tree) (Trad. German; first published in 1799; likely based on a Westphalian folk song)
Early 1800s Ave Maria (music by Austrian Franz Schubert: 1797-1828)
Go Tell It On The Mountain (adapted by American John W. Work, Jr., 1907, based on an African-American Spiritual, probably early 1800s)
1818 Silent Night (Words: Rev. Joseph Mohr, c. 1816 / Music: Franz Xaver Gruber, c. 1818)
1840 Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (Words: Charles Wesley, 1739; amended by George Whitfield, 1753 and Martin Madan, 1760; other changes occurred in 1782, 1810, and 1861 / music: German Felix Mendelssohn, 1840; arranged by Englishman William Hayman Cummings and first presented Christmas Day, 1855)
1847 O Holy Night (Words: Frenchman Placide Cappeau, 1847; translated into English by John Sullivan Dwight, a Unitarian minister [1812-1893] / Music: Jewish Frenchman Adolphe-Charles Adam, 1847; first performed at midnight Mass that year)
1848 Joy To The World (Words: Englishman Isaac Watts: 1719 / Music: American Lowell Mason, 1848)
1849 Once In Royal David’s City (Words: Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander, 1848 / Music: Henry John Gauntlett, 1849. Written in Ireland)
1850 It Came Upon The Midnight Clear (Words: American Edmund Hamilton Sears, 1849; music: American Richard Storrs Willis, 1850)
19th c. Mary Had a Baby (19th c. spiritual from St. Helena Island, off of South Carolina)
1857 Jingle Bells (American James Lord Pierpont [a Unitarian], 1857)
We Three Kings Of Orient Are (John Henry Hopkins, Jr., 1857; written as part of a Christmas pageant for the General Theological Seminary in New York City)
1860 Up On The Housetop (American Benjamin R. Hamby, c. 1860)
1862 Il Est Ne, Le Divin Enfant (He Is Born, The Divine Christ Child) (Trad. French; possibly from an old Normandy hunting tune; collected by 1862)
1867 Angels From The Realms Of Glory (music: Englishman: Henry Thomas Smart, 1867 / words: Scotsman James Montgomery, 1816)
1868 O Little Town Of Bethlehem (Words: Phillips Brooks, Episcopal minister of Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1868 / Music: Lewis Henry Redner, 1868. Redner served as Brooks’ organist. The tune came to him on Christmas Eve, and was first sung the next day)
1872 I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day (Words: American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christmas Eve, 1863; music: Englishman John Baptiste Calkin, 1872)
1887 Away In A Manger (music: American James Ramsey Murray, 1887)
1900 Jolly Old St. Nick (Anonymous; second half of 19th c. or early 20th c. – see notes for Up on the Housetop)
1904 There’s a Song In The Air (Words: Josiah Gilbert Holland, 1872, and W. T. Giffe, 1874 / Music: Karl Pomeroy Harrington, 1904)
1906 In the Bleak Midwinter (Words: Englishwoman Christina Georgina Rossetti, 1872; music: Englishman Gustav Holst, specifically for the text, 1906)
1916 Carol, Brothers Carol (W. A. Muhlenberg; collected in 1916)
Carol of the Bells (music: Ukrainian composer Mykola Dmytrovich Leontovich, based on an old Ukrainian melody, 1916 / adaptation and lyrics by Czech-American Peter J. Wilhousky, 1936)
1917 Gesu Bambino (“The Infant Jesus”) (written in 1917 by Pietro Alessandro Yon while he was musical director and organist at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City; English text by Frederick H. Martens)
1932 Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town (J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie) [1932]
1933 I Wonder As I Wander (Words and Music collected by John Jacob Niles in Murphy, North Carolina in 1933; it is uncertain how old the folk tune is) [1933]
1934 Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head (Kentucky folk carol; collected by John Jacob Niles: 1912-1913 and 1932-1934)
Winter Wonderland (music: Felix Bernard / lyrics: Richard B. Smith) [1934]
1940 White Christmas (Jewish-American Irving Berlin) [1940]
1941 Happy Holiday (Jewish-American Irving Berlin) [1941]
Little Drummer Boy, The (Katherine K. Davis, Henry V. Onorati and Harry Simeone; adapted from a Czech carol) [1941; charted in the US in 1958]
Snowfall (Claude Thornhill and Ruth Thornhill) [1941]
1942 Christmas Cometh Caroling (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Fr. Andrew) [1942]
1943 Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Words: Ralph Blane / music: Hugh Martin) [1943]
I’ll Be Home For Christmas (music by American Walter Kent / words by American James Kimball Gannon; also Buck Ram) [1943; revised in 1948]
Jesu Parvule (“Poor little Jesus”) (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1943]
1944 What Are the Signs (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1944]
1945 Ah, Bleak and Chill the Wintry Wind (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1945]
Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire) (Robert Wells and Mel Torme) [1945]
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (music: Jule Styne / words: Sammy Cahn) [1945]
1946 All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth (Donald Yetter Gardner) [1946]
All on A Christmas Morning (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1946]
Here Comes Santa Claus (Gene Autry and Oakley Haldeman) [1946]
1947 Nigh Bethlehem (Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1947]
1948 Blue Christmas (Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson) [1948]
Christ in the Stranger’s Guise (American Alfred E. Burt / lyrics: An Old English Rune of Hospitality) [1948]
Sleigh Ride (music: Leroy Anderson [1948] ) (words: Mitchell Parish [1950] )
1949 Marshmallow World, A (Music: Peter De Rose / words: Carl Sigman) [1949]
Sleep Baby Mine (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Wihla Huston) [1949]
Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer (Johnny Marks) [1949]
1950 Christmas In Killarney (Words and Music by John Redmond, James Cavanaugh and Frank Weldon) [1950]
Frosty The Snowman (music: Steve Edward Nelson; lyrics: Walter E. “Jack” Rollins) [1950]
Silver Bells (Ray Evans and Jay Livingston) [1950]
This Is Christmas (Bright, Bright The Holly Berries) (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics: Wihla Hutson) [1950]
1951 It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas(Meredith Willson) [1951]
Some Children See Him (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics: Wihla Hutson) [1951]
1952 Come, Dear Children (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Wihla Huston) [1952]
Cradle In Bethlehem, A (Lawrence Stock and Al Bryan) [1952]
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (Tommie Connor) [1952]
1953 I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas (John Rox) [1953]
O Hearken Ye (Alfred S. Burt / lyrics: Wihla Hutson) [1953]
Santa Baby (Joan Ellen Javits, Philip Springer, Tony Springer) [1953]
1954 Caroling, Caroling (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Wihla Hutson) [1954]
Christmas Waltz, The (Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn) [1954]
(There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays(music: Robert Allen / words: Al Stillman) [1954]
Star Carol, The (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics: Wihla Hutson) [1954]
We’ll Dress the House (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Wihla Huston) [1954]
1956 Mary’s Little Boy Child (Jester Hairston) [1956]
1957 Jingle Bell Rock (Joseph Carleton Beal and James Ross Boothe) [1957]
Mistletoe and Holly (Frank Sinatra, Dok Stanford and Henry W. Sanicola) [1957]
Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me) (Aaron Schroeder and Claude DeMetruis) [1957]
Santa Claus Is Back In Town (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) [1957]
1958 Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree (Johnny Marks) [1958]
Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late) (Ross Bagdasarian [David Seville] ) [1958]
1959 My Favorite Things (Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) [1959]
1962 Do You Hear What I Hear? (Gloria Shayna and Noel Regney) [1962]
Holly Jolly Christmas, A (Johnny Marks) [1962]
Pretty Paper (American Willie Nelson) [1962]
1963 Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) (Americans Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry) [1963]
It’s the Most Wonderful Time Of The Year (George Wyle and Eddie Pola) [1963]
Little Saint Nick (Brian Wilson and Mike Love) [1963]
Merry Christmas, Baby (Brian Wilson) [1963]
1965 Christmas Time Is Here(Vince Guaraldi and Lee Mendelson) [1965]
Linus and Lucy (Vince Guaraldi and Lee Mendelson) [1965]
1967 Someday at Christmas (Ron Miller and Bryan Wells) [1967]
1970 Feliz Navidad (Jose Feliciano) [1970]
It’s Christmas Time (Stevie Wonder) [1970]
Merry Christmas, Darling (words: Frank Pooler, 1946 / music: Richard Carpenter, 1970)
1971 Happy Xmas (War Is Over) (Yoko Ono and John Lennon) [1971]
One Small Child (David Meece) [1971]
1975 I Believe In Father Christmas (Greg Lake and Peter Sinfield) [1975]
1977 Happy Birthday, Jesus (Estelle Levitt and Lee Pockriss) [1977]
Peace on Earth / The Little Drummer Boy {performed in 1977 by Bing Crosby and David Bowie}

 

Listing of Christmas Carols and Songs by Country (Up to 1945)
(Based on the Music, Not Lyrics)


England

First Noel, The (Trad. English: 16th century; possibly dating from as early as the 13th Century. This tune and the present lyrics were first published in 1833).
Cherry Tree Carol (Trad. English; Herefordshire, c. 1400)
This Endris Night (Trad. English, 15th c.)
Boar’s Head Carol, The (English Trad. / Queens College Version, Oxford, England; First published 1521)
Deck The Hall (Welsh trad., prob. 16th century)
We Wish You a Merry Christmas (Trad. English [west country], 16th c.)
What Child Is This? (Words: Englishman William Chatterton Dix, 1865 / Music: Greensleeves, 16th Century English melody)
Coventry Carol, The (Words Attributed to Robert Croo, 1534 / English Melody, 1591)
Here We Come A-Caroling (aka Here We Come A-Wassailing or The Wassail Song) (Trad. English: 17th c.)
Wassail, Wassail (aka Gloucestershire Wassail) (Trad. English folk carol: 17th c.)
Sussex Carol (aka, On Christmas Night) (Trad. English, 17th c.; collected in Sussex county in 1919 by Ralph Vaughan-Williams)
I Saw Three Ships (Trad. English: 17th c.; possibly from Derbyshire)
Holly And The Ivy, The (Trad. English: c. 1700; possibly from an ancient carol of French? origin; possibly from the Gloucestershire region; printed at Birmingham in 1710)
The Twelve Days Of Christmas (Trad. English, c. 1700)
For Unto Us a Child Is Born (German-English composer Georg Frederic Handel, from The Messiah) [1717]
Hallelujah Chorus (German-English composer Georg Frederic Handel, from The Messiah) [1717]
While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night (Words: Nahum Tate, c. 1701 / Music: “Christmas,” George Frederick Handel, 1728)
O Come, All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis) (Englishman John Francis Wade: c. 1743 / English translation by Frederick Oakeley: 1841)
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (Trad. English: 18th c.)
Angels From The Realms Of Glory (music: Englishman: Henry Thomas Smart, 1867 / words: Scotsman James Montgomery, 1816)
I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day (Words: American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christmas Eve, 1863; music: Englishman John Baptiste Calkin, 1872)
In the Bleak Midwinter (Words: Englishwoman Christina Georgina Rossetti, 1872; music: Englishman Gustav Holst, specifically for the text, 1906)
America
Children, go where I send thee (African-American trad., collected by Jean Ritchie in Kentucky; possibly three centuries old)
Go Tell It On The Mountain (adapted by American John W. Work, Jr., 1907, based on an African-American Spiritual, probably early 1800s)
Joy To The World (Words: Englishman Isaac Watts: 1719 / Music: American Lowell Mason, 1848)
It Came Upon The Midnight Clear (Words: American Edmund Hamilton Sears, 1849; music: American Richard Storrs Willis, 1850)
Mary Had a Baby (19th c. spiritual from St. Helena Island, off of South Carolina)
Jingle Bells (American James Lord Pierpont [a Unitarian], 1857)
We Three Kings Of Orient Are (John Henry Hopkins, Jr., 1857; written as part of a Christmas pageant for the General Theological Seminary in New York City)
Up On The Housetop (American Benjamin R. Hamby, c. 1860)
O Little Town Of Bethlehem (Words: Phillips Brooks, Episcopal minister of Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1868 / Music: Lewis Henry Redner, 1868. Redner served as Brooks’ organist. The tune came to him on Christmas Eve, and was first sung the next day)
Away In A Manger (music: American James Ramsey Murray, 1887)
Jolly Old St. Nick (Anonymous; second half of 19th c. or early 20th c. – see notes for Up on the Housetop)
Gesu Bambino (“The Infant Jesus”) (written in 1917 by Pietro Alessandro Yon while he was musical director and organist at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City; English text by Frederick H. Martens)
Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town (J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie) [1932]
I Wonder As I Wander (Words and Music collected by John Jacob Niles in Murphy, North Carolina in 1933; it is uncertain how old the folk tune is) [1933]
Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head (Kentucky folk carol; collected by John Jacob Niles: 1912-1913 and 1932-1934)
Winter Wonderland (music: Felix Bernard / lyrics: Richard B. Smith) [1934]
White Christmas (Jewish-American Irving Berlin) [1940]
Happy Holiday (Jewish-American Irving Berlin) [1941]
Snowfall (Claude Thornhill and Ruth Thornhill) [1941]
Christmas Cometh Caroling (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Fr. Andrew) [1942]
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Words: Ralph Blane / music: Hugh Martin) [1943]
I’ll Be Home For Christmas (music by American Walter Kent / words by American James Kimball Gannon; also Buck Ram) [1943; revised in 1948]
Jesu Parvule (“Poor little Jesus”) (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1943]
What Are the Signs (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1944]
Ah, Bleak and Chill the Wintry Wind (American Alfred S. Burt / lyrics by Bates G. Burt) [1945]
Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire) (Robert Wells and Mel Torme) [1945]
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (music: Jule Styne / words: Sammy Cahn) [1945]
Ireland
Wexford Carol, The (Trad. Irish: 12th c. from County Wexford [?])
Irish Carol (Music: Irish folk carol, 16th or 17th Century / words: possibly by Fr. Willian Devereaux (c. 1728); translator possibly Dr. W. H. Grattan Flood)
Once In Royal David’s City (Words: Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander, 1848 / Music: Henry John Gauntlett, 1849. Written in Ireland)
France
Bring A Torch, Jeannette, Isabella (music: French trad.: 14th c. / words: Emile Blemont, c. 1901)
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (words: anon. 8th Century Latin; translated into English by John Mason Neale, 1851 / music: 15th Century French Plain Song melody)
Ding Dong! Merrily On High (music: French trad., collected in 1588 / English lyrics: Englishman? George Ratcliffe Woodward, early 20th c.)
What Fragrance is That? (Quelle est cette odeur agreable) (French trad., 17th c.)
Pat-A-Pan (Frenchman Bernard De La Monnoye, c. 1700 – from the Burgundy region)
Angels We Have Heard On High (18th century French carol; possibly originally from Lorraine. It achieved rapid popularity in France and Quebec in the 1840s, and was translated into English by Englishman Bishop James Chadwick; popular from the 1860s in England)
O Holy Night (Words: Frenchman Placide Cappeau, 1847; translated into English by John Sullivan Dwight, a Unitarian minister [1812-1893] / Music: Jewish Frenchman Adolphe-Charles Adam, 1847; first performed at midnight Mass that year)
Il Est Ne, Le Divin Enfant (He Is Born, The Divine Christ Child) (Trad. French; possibly from an old Normandy hunting tune; collected by 1862)
Germany / Austria
Good Christian Men, Rejoice (Latin, In Dulci Jubilo) (Words: Attributed to Heinrich Suso: c. 1295-1366; freely translated from Latin to English by Englishman John Mason Neale in 1853 / music: In Dulci Jubilo, 14th Century German melody)
Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming (Words: 15th c. German carol; translated by American Theodore Baker, 1894; music: Anonymous, 16th Century; arr. by German composer Michael Praetorius, 1609)
Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus (music: German? Christian Friedrich Witt, 1715 / words: Charles Wesley, 1744)
O Tannenbaum (O Christmas Tree) (Trad. German; first published in 1799; likely based on a Westphalian folk song)
Ave Maria (music by Austrian Franz Schubert: 1797-1828)
Silent Night (Words: Rev. Joseph Mohr, c. 1816 / Music: Franz Xaver Gruber, c. 1818)
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (Words: Charles Wesley, 1739; amended by George Whitfield, 1753 and Martin Madan, 1760; other changes occurred in 1782, 1810, and 1861 / music: German Felix Mendelssohn, 1840; arranged by Englishman William Hayman Cummings and first presented Christmas Day, 1855)
Scandinavia
Good King Wenceslas (Words: Englishman John Mason Neale, 1853 / music: 13th c., quite possibly Scandinavian)
Netherlands

King Jesus Hath a Garden (Heer Jesus heeft een Hofken) (Trad. Dutch, 17th c.)
Canada
Huron Carol, The (Fr. Jean de Brebeuf, 1640 from an old French tune; English translation by J. E. Middleton [d. 1960] )
Spain

Riu Riu Chiu (Spanish trad., 16th c., from Valencia)
Sicily

O Sanctissima (Latin prayer set to a Sicilian melody called “The Sicilian Mariner’s Hymn to the Virgin”; first published, with its original Latin text, in 1794 in the United States)
Czech Republic

Little Drummer Boy, The (Katherine K. Davis, Henry V. Onorati and Harry Simeone; adapted from a Czech carol) [1941; charted in the US in 1958]
Ukraine

Carol of the Bells (music: Ukrainian composer Mykola Dmytrovich Leontovich, based on an old Ukrainian melody, 1916 / adaptation and lyrics by Czech-American Peter J. Wilhousky, 1936)

2018-03-16T15:33:12-04:00

Original title: “How Cardinal Newman Convinced me of the Apostolicity of the Catholic Church”

Newman35(PD)

Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) in the 1840s, at the time of his own conversion [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

* * *

 [Written in 1996. Published in The Coming Home Newsletter, Sep-Dec 1997, pp. 1-8; also in The Latin Mass, Fall 1999, Vol. 8, No. 4, 65-71. This is the most “theologically technical” version of the several variants of my conversion story]

* * * * *

As a committed evangelical Protestant with a great respect for the history of Christian doctrine, I subscribed to a fairly widespread non-Catholic view of Church history: a vague, ethereal, semi-legendary conception of the early Church as quasi-Protestant, and lacking those elements which are now termed “Catholic distinctives.” If the early Christians weren’t technically & exhaustively Protestant (as defined theologically and ecclesiologically by the revolutionary movement in the 16th century), they certainly (in the main, anyway) weren’t Catholic — or so I had casually assumed.
 
Many Protestants (particularly evangelicals) date the downfall of the early Church at 313, with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine and the subsequent “paganization” of institutional Christianity. Others will place this alleged calamitous event around 440, with the beginning of the papal reign of Pope St. Leo the Great, who — in the eyes of many Protestant historians — was the first pope in the full-blown jurisdictional sense (however that is defined by these same historians).
*
Still another school of thought believes that the derailing of the young Christian Church occurred soon after the last Apostle’s death and the cessation of the writing of New Testament books, around the year 100, or else sometime during the course of the second century A.D. at the latest.
 
This whole endeavor to date the “apostasy” of institutional, historic Christianity strongly reminds me of arbitrary attempts to maintain that human life or personhood in the womb begins at a time other than conception, which is clearly the determinative biological event. It simply can’t be done with any logical or historiographical rigor. The Church, like a human soul and body in the womb, organically develops from the beginning in a gradual, consistent fashion, and it is altogether futile to try and assign a date to its supposed demise. Like the preborn child, the essence is there from the first.
 
Intuitively sensing this, I myself took a more complex, nuanced view that the ostensible “Church” was truly Christian all through this period, down through the early Middle Ages, up to the period of the Inquisition and Crusades (roughly 1100-1500), at which time it did, however, lose much of its integrity and moral authority, if not the title and claim “Christian” altogether. I was reluctant to go the whole way and deny that Catholicism was Christian, because I knew too much about what it had always taught on the “central doctrines” of Christianity, such as the Trinity and all the Christological doctrines, and its indispensable role in preserving both medieval culture and the Bible itself.
*
To deny Christian status to Catholicism at any point of its development would be to cut off the limb on which Protestantism sits: in effect, this would logically reduce to a very curious and self-defeating standpoint that Christianity is not an historical religion by its very nature.
 
Rather, I believed that the Catholic Church had “passed the baton,” so to speak, to the Protestants in the sixteenth century, who succeeded in reforming the Church universal. In other words, I held to an “organic” conception of Church history, somewhat like the Protestant Church historian Philip Schaff, and many Reformed, Anglican and Lutheran theologians and historians, whereby Protestantism was a legitimate development of, heir to, and legatee of, historic Catholicism.
*
Henceforth, in my thinking, Protestantism became the superior and more “biblical” form of Christianity, since the Catholic Church had “obviously” compromised itself both morally and theologically with its reactionary and extremely harsh, “un-ecumenical” Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.
 
This was the background of my ecclesiological thinking when, in early 1990, I began to moderate an ecumenical discussion group in my home. A friend of mine, John McAlpine, whom I had met in the pro-life movement, and with whom I enjoyed conversing, stunned me one night when he claimed that the Catholic Church had never contradicted itself in any of its dogmas. This, to me, was self-evidently incredible and a priori implausible, and so I embarked immediately on a research project designed to debunk once and for all this far-fetched notion that any Christian body could even claim infallibility, let alone actually possess it.
 
During the course of this study, I gleefully discovered many of the standard “anti-infallibility” works, which are cited again and again: the Anglican George Salmon’s The Infallibility of the Church (originally 1890), Johann von Dollinger’s Letters of Janus and Letters of Quirinus (1869-1870) and Hans Kung’s Infallible?: An Inquiry (1971). Salmon’s work has been refuted decisively twice, by B.C. Butler, in his The Church and Infallibility: A Reply to the Abridged “Salmon”, and also in a series of articles in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, in 1901 and 1902 (1)
 
Yet Protestant polemicists Norman Geisler and Ralph MacKenzie still claimed in 1995, in a major critique of Catholicism, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences(2) that Salmon’s book has “never really been answered by the Catholic Church.” I was amused recently by the accusation of a prominent professional anti-Catholic, that I must have never been familiar with the best Protestant arguments against infallibility and Catholicism in general – hence my eventual conversion on flimsy grounds!
*
The truth was quite otherwise: the above works are the cream of the crop of this particular line of thought, as evidenced by Geisler and MacKenzie’s citation of both Salmon and Kung as “witnesses” for their case (3). And the Church historian Dollinger’s heretical opinions are also often utilized by Eastern Orthodox polemicists as arguments against papal infallibility. I know this well as a result of my own ongoing dialogues with Orthodox Christians over the Internet.
 
George Salmon revealed in his book his profoundly biased ignorance not only concerning papal infallibility, but also with regard to even the basics of the development of doctrine:
*

Romish advocates . . . are now content to exchange tradition, which their predecessors had made the basis of their system, for this new foundation of development . . . The theory of development is, in short, an attempt to enable men, beaten off the platform of history, to hang on to it by the eyelids . . . The old theory was that the teaching of the Church had never varied. (4)

Here Salmon is quixotically fighting a straw man of his own making and seeking to sophistically force his readers into the acceptance of a false and altogether logically unnecessary dichotomy: that development of doctrine implies change in the essence or substance of a doctrine and therefore is utterly contrary to the claims of the Church to be the Guardian and Custodian of an authoritative tradition of never-changing dogma. But this is emphatically not the Catholic notion, nor that of Newman, to whom Salmon was largely responding.
*
Nor is it true that development was a “new” theory introduced by Cardinal Newman into Catholicism, while the “old theory” was otherwise. This is unanswerably proven by the writing of St. Vincent of Lerins, one of the Church Fathers, who died around 450 A.D., in his classic patristic exposition of development, The Notebooks:
*

Will there, then, be no progress of religion in the Church of Christ? Certainly there is, and the greatest . . . But it is truly progress and not a change of faith. What is meant by progress is that something is brought to an advancement within itself; by change, something is transformed from one thing into another. It is necessary, therefore, that understanding, knowledge and wisdom grow and advance strongly and mightily . . . and this must take place precisely within its own kind, that is, in the same teaching, in the same meaning, and in the same opinion. The progress of religion in souls is like the growth of bodies, which, in the course of years, evolve and develop, but still remain what they were . . . Although in the course of time something evolved from those first seeds and has now expanded under careful cultivation, nothing of the characteristics of the seeds is changed. Granted that appearance, beauty and distinction has been added, still, the same nature of each kind remains. (5)

St. Augustine (354-430), the greatest of the Church Fathers, whom Protestants also greatly revere, expressed similar sentiments in his City of God (16, 2, 1), and On the 54th Psalm (number 22), so this concept predated Newman by at least fourteen centuries, Salmon’s claims notwithstanding. George Salmon thus loses much credibility as any sort of expert on Christian history, papal infallibility, or development, for this and many other reasons, as demonstrated by his Catholic critics. Yet Geisler and MacKenzie, while presenting a fairly accurate picture of Newman’s (and Catholic) development themselves, state that Salmon’s book is “a penetrating critique of Newman’s theory.” (6)

It is beyond our purview here to examine the faulty and jaundiced reasoning employed by the above-cited “anti-infallibility” works, and my own ambitious and zealous adoption of them, in my effort to refute the Catholic Church on historical grounds. Suffice it to say that it is largely a matter of misunderstanding or misapplying the true doctrine of infallibility, as defined dogmatically by the First Vatican Council in 1870, or else a conveniently selective and dishonest presentation of historical facts and patristic citations. These practices run rampant throughout the current anti-Catholic literature, and always have. And I, too, was guilty of it. Bias has a way of blinding one to even basic logical errors.
 
The First Vatican Council of 1870 defined papal infallibility as follows:
*

We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, is, by the divine assistance promised to him in Blessed Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that His Church should be endowed in defining doctrine regarding faith or morals; and that, therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, irreformable.

Thus, the conciliar definition was careful to limit absolute infallibility to very specific and strict parameters, and it is these which anti-Catholic polemicists almost always overlook or distort when bringing to the table such famous examples of supposed papal fallibility as Honorius, Vigilius and Liberius. None of them succeed when subjected to the proper historical and logical scrutiny. They only “work” when presented in isolation without the Catholic counter-replies which reveal their utter inadequacy.

Furthermore, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) did not change this teaching in the slightest, despite the claims of heterodox self-proclaimed “Catholics” and misinformed non-Catholics and nominal, undereducated Catholics. Referring to the decree on the Pope from Vatican I, the Council declared:
*

This teaching concerning the institution, the permanence, the nature and import of the sacred primacy of the Roman Pontiff and his infallible teaching office, the sacred synod proposes anew to be firmly believed by all the faithful . . .

The college or body of bishops has for all that no authority unless united with the Roman Pontiff, Peter’s successor, as its head, whose primatial authority, let it be added, over all, whether pastors or faithful, remains in its integrity. For the Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, namely, and as pastor of the entire Church, has full, supreme and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered. The order of bishops is the successor to the college of the apostles in their role as teachers and pastors, and in it the apostolic college is perpetuated. Together with their head, the Supreme Pontiff, and never apart from him, they have supreme and full authority over the Universal Church; but this power cannot be exercised without the agreement of the Roman Pontiff. The Lord made Peter alone the rock-foundation and the holder of the keys of the Church (cf. Mt. 16:18-19) . . . (7)

Returning to my own intellectual and spiritual journey; to give one example as an illustration of faulty “anti-Catholic” reasoning: I quickly realized that the early Christians held a very “high,” literal view of the Eucharist (the Real Presence), as does the Catholic Church today. The historical and patristic evidence supporting this fact is so overwhelming that even the most vehement opponents of the Catholic Church rarely seek to deny it. But, undaunted, I stooped to the level of special pleading, in claiming that St. Augustine, the greatest of the Fathers, adopted a symbolic view of the Eucharist.
*
I based this on his oft-stated notion of the sacrament as “symbol” or “sign.” I failed to realize, however, that I was arbitrarily creating a false, logically unnecessary dichotomy between the sign and the reality of the Eucharist, for St. Augustine – when all his remarks on the subject are taken into account – clearly accepted the Real Presence. The Eucharist – for Augustine, and objectively speaking – is both sign and reality. There simply is no contradiction.

A cursory glance at Scripture confirms this general principle. For instance, Jesus refers to the sign of Jonah, comparing the prophet Jonah’s three days and nights in the belly of the fish to His own burial in the earth (Matthew 12:38-40). In this case, both events, although described as signs, were quite real indeed. Jesus also uses the terminology of sign in connection with His Second Coming (Matthew 24:30-31), which is believed by all Christians who adhere to the Nicene Creed, and who have not denied biblical authority or the possibility of miracles, to be a literal event, and not symbolic only.
 
Protestants tend to use the same flawed analysis when they find the abundant patristic citations extolling the greatness and centrality of Holy Scripture, and thus assume that these Fathers believed in the Protestant formal principle of Scripture Alone (sola Scriptura), when in fact, further objective study reveals that they accepted Tradition and Scripture as part of a unified whole. The historical centrality of Scripture in the contention against heretics, for example, did not mean that Tradition was divorced from Scripture, since the Church Fathers routinely appealed to apostolic Tradition in order to decisively counter heretical claims.
*
In actuality, that was the bottom line for the Fathers, the coup de grace. And this appeal was an historical, rather than a biblical argument, based on apostolic Church authority, as opposed to the methodological approach of Scripture Alone.
 
Examples in the Fathers are legion. For instance, St. Augustine makes many remarks which show that he regarded the authority of the Church as supreme, all the while accepting the primacy of Scriptures. In other words, they were two sides of the same coin for him and the early Church, not opposed in terms of ultimate authority, as in Protestantism:
*

The authority of our Scriptures, strengthened by the consent of so many nations, and confirmed by the succession of the Apostles, bishops and councils, is against you. (8)

No sensible person will go contrary to reason, no Christian will contradict the Scriptures, no lover of peace will go against the Church. (9)

Wherever this tradition comes from, we must believe that the Church has not believed in vain, even though the express authority of the canonical Scriptures is not brought forward for it. (10)

To be sure, although on this matter, we cannot quote a clear example taken from the canonical Scriptures, at any rate, on this question, we are following the true thought of Scriptures when we observe what has appeared good to the universal Church which the authority of these same Scriptures recommends to you. (11)

Not knowing facts such as the above, or else refusing to acknowledge them, I proceeded with my hostile research, cavalierly assuming beforehand that the early Church was much more Protestant than Catholic, and that the Catholic Church had become corrupt over time (even while technically remaining Christian by the minimalist, Protestant criterion of “central doctrines”). Such is the standard view of Protestants, especially those most in line with “Reformation thought.” They assume, usually almost without any direct analysis, that the Catholic Church has added to the Christian faith, that faith which was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3).

My Catholic friend John, confronted with the mass of jaded, highly selective historical evidence I had compiled, and my relentless polemics, was understandably frustrated. He kept urging me to read John Henry Cardinal Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. What little familiarity I had with Newman had shown me that he was a very impressive figure. I knew that he was a brilliant Church historian, and highly respected by all, regardless of theological affiliation.
 
So I started reading the Essay in October 1990, after having been somewhat “softened” in the previous months by my reading of Catholic books by the cultural historian Christopher Dawson, pro-life heroine Joan Andrews, the famous Trappist monk and convert Thomas Merton, and the marvelous, unparalleled summary The Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam, which has been described by Lutheran historian Jaroslav Pelikan as the best single volume written for the purpose of explicating and defending Catholicism. The timing – in God’s Providence, and in retrospect – was perfect.
 
A few months before, I had also concluded, as a result of intense discussions in my ecumenical group, that the Catholic Church possessed the highest and most sublime moral theology of any Christian group. Furthermore, I had been convinced (around July 1990) of the wrongness of contraception, after involved arguments and the dumbfounded realization that all Christians of all types had opposed it until 1930, when the Anglicans adopted it at their Lambeth conference for “hard cases” only. This was my first overt change of opinion, but little did I suspect what was yet to come.
*
Charles Harrold, the editor of an anthology of Newman’s writings, described the Essay as follows:
*

It was composed in 1845, when Newman was halting midway between two forms of Christianity . . . Its aim was to explain and justify what Protestants regarded as corruptions and additions to the primitive Christian creed, and to show these to be legitimate developments . . . In a series of eloquent and erudite analogies, he seeks to show that the present highly complex doctrines of the Church lay in germ in the original depositum of faith, which has evolved or developed through progressive unfolding and explication. (12)

One can see, given the above description of my views and methodology in 1990, that the Essay was probably the most appropriate and relevant work I could have read at that time, regardless of whether I was going to be convinced by it or not. It provided the “best shot” that the Catholic Church was likely to give, in defense of its doctrines which showed marked “growth” (a neutral term) throughout history, to the dismay of Protestants.

Finally, I was now reading some sort of response to the research I had been doing for months, under the influence of thoroughly Protestant presuppositions. Newman wrote, near the beginning:
*

However beautiful and promising that Religion is in theory, its history, we are told, is its best refutation . . .
*
In reply to this specious objection, it is maintained in this Essay that, granting that some large variations of teaching in its long course of 1800 years exist, nevertheless, these, on examination, will be found to arise from the nature of the case, and to proceed on a law, and with a harmony and a definite drift, and with an analogy to Scripture revelations, which, instead of telling to their disadvantage, actually constitute an argument in their favour, as witnessing to a superintending Providence and a great Design in the mode and in the circumstances of their occurrence. (13)

I was already quite intrigued and looking forward (intellectually) to what Newman was going to say. The very premise of his approach was so novel and curious to me that it guaranteed my continued avid interest. He went on to assert, shortly after this statement:
*

And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this. And Protestantism . . . as a whole, feels it, and has felt it. This is shown in the determination . . . of dispensing with historical Christianity altogether, and of forming a Christianity from the Bible alone: men never would have put it aside, unless they had despaired of it . . . To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant . . . I have elsewhere observed:

“So much must the Protestant grant that, if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge . . . Let him take which of his doctrines he will, his peculiar view of self-righteousness, of formality, . . . his notion of faith, . . . his denial of the virtue of the sacraments, or of the ministerial commission, or of the visible Church . . . the Scriptures as the one appointed instrument of religious teachings and let him consider how far Antiquity, as it has come down to us, will countenance him in it” (14) . . .

That Protestantism, then, is not the Christianity of history, it is easy to determine. (15)

This was clearly now a frontal attack on the entire edifice of my Protestant ecclesiology: a turning of my argument on its head, with the forceful assertion that it was Catholicism, not Protestantism, which had the historical record on its side. And I respected history enough to shudder at this prospect. I also knew full well that Newman would bring to bear an enormous weight of historical evidence to support his case, as the book before me was 445 pages long!

After summary statements such as the above, Newman proceeded to make brilliant specific analogies in order to bring home his point. The first had to do with the doctrine of purgatory, vis-a-vis the doctrine of original sin, which is, of course, accepted by Protestants as well:
*

Some notion of suffering, or disadvantage, or punishment after this life, in the case of the faithful departed, or other vague forms of the doctrine of Purgatory, has in its favour almost a consensus of the first four ages of the Church. (16)

Newman then recounts no less than sixteen Fathers who hold the view in some form. But in comparing this consensus to the doctrine of original sin, we find a disjunction:
*

No one will say that there is a testimony of the Fathers, equally strong, for the doctrine of Original Sin. (17)In spite of the forcible teaching of St. Paul on the subject, the doctrine of Original Sin appears neither in the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creed. (18)

This is a crucial distinction. It is a serious problem for Protestantism that it by and large inconsistently rejects doctrines which have a consensus in the early Church, such as purgatory, the (still developing) papacy, bishops, the Real Presence, regenerative infant baptism, apostolic succession, and intercession of the saints, while accepting others with far less explicit early sanction, such as original sin. Even many of their own foundational and distinctive doctrines, such as the notion of Faith Alone (sola fide), or imputed, extrinsic, forensic justification, are well-nigh nonexistent all through Church history until Luther’s arrival on the scene, as, for example, prominent Protestant apologist Norman Geisler recently freely admitted:
*

. . . these valuable insights into the doctrine of justification had been largely lost throughout much of Christian history, and it was the Reformers who recovered this biblical truth . . .During the patristic, and especially the later medieval periods, forensic justification was largely lost . . . Still, the theological formulations of such figures as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas did not preclude a rediscovery of this judicial element in the Pauline doctrine of justification . . .

. . . one can be saved without believing that imputed righteousness (or forensic justification) is an essential part of the true gospel. Otherwise, few people were saved between the time of the apostle Paul and the Reformation, since scarcely anyone taught imputed righteousness (or forensic justification) during that period! (19)

On the other hand, Protestants clearly accept developing doctrine on several fronts: the Canon of the New Testament is a clear example of such a (technically “non-biblical”) doctrine It wasn’t finalized until 397 A.D. The divinity of Christ was dogmatically proclaimed only at the “late” date of 325, the fully worked-out doctrine of the Holy Trinity in 381, and the Two Natures of Christ (God and Man) in 451, all in Ecumenical Councils which are accepted by most Protestants. So development is an unavoidable fact for both Protestants and Catholics.

The trick for Protestants (granting Church history an important and legitimate role, whether it is considered normative and authoritative or not), is to determine a non-arbitrary rationale for accepting some doctrines while rejecting others. It will not do to simply say that certain doctrines are “unbiblical” and thus unworthy of Protestant allegiance, since it must immediately be explained why the majority of early Christians believed in them, and why beliefs such as the Canon of the New Testament and Scripture Alone are adopted despite the absence of biblical rationale, or why (chances are) many other strands of Protestantism disagree with the one making the claim, when Scripture is allegedly so “clear” and able to be interpreted in the main without difficulty by the layman.
*
Newman writes, regarding the New Testament Canon:
*

As regards the New Testament, Catholics and Protestants receive the same books as canonical and inspired; yet . . . the degrees of evidence are very various for one book and another . . . For instance, as to the Epistle of St. James . . . Origen, in the third century, is the first writer who distinctly mentions it among the Greeks and it is not quoted by name by any Latin till the fourth . . . Again: The Epistle to the Hebrews, though received in the East, was not received in the Latin Churches till St. Jerome’s time . . . Again, St. Jerome tells us, that in his day, towards A.D. 400, the Greek Church rejected the Apocalypse, but the Latin received it. Again: The New Testament consists of twenty-seven books . . . Of these, fourteen are not mentioned at all till from eighty to one hundred years after St. John’s death, in which number are the Acts, 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, and James. Of the other thirteen, five, viz. St. John’s Gospel, Philippians, 1st Timothy, Hebrews, and 1st John, are quoted but by one writer during the same period. On what ground, then, do we receive the Canon as it comes to us, but on the authority of the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries? . . . The fifth century acts as a comment on the obscure text of the centuries before it. (20)

Newman makes another brilliant analogy between the “lateness” of the development of the papacy and the Marian doctrines, and the Creed and the Canon:
*

Ecclesiastical recognition of the place which St. Mary holds in the Economy of grace . . . was reserved for the fifth century, as the definition of our Lord’s proper Divinity had been the work of the fourth . . . In order to do honour to Christ, . . . to defend the true doctrine of the Incarnation . . . to secure a right faith in the manhood of the Eternal Son, the Council of Ephesus determined the Blessed Virgin to be the Mother of God . . . The title ‘Theotokos,’ or Mother of God, was familiar to Christians from primitive times, and had been used, among other writers, by Origen, Eusebius, . . . St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Gregory Nyssen. (21)

If the Imperial power checked the development of Councils, it availed also for keeping back the power of the Papacy. The Creed, the Canon, in like manner, both remained undefined . . . All began to form, as soon as the Empire relaxed its tyrannous oppression of the Church. (22)

The venerable Cardinal then defines seven characteristics of all true developments:
*

It becomes necessary . . . to assign certain characteristics of faithful developments . . . the presence of which serves as a test to discriminate between them and corruptions . . . I venture to set down Seven Notes . . . as follows: – There is no corruption if it retains one and the same type, the same principles, the same organization; if its beginnings anticipate its subsequent phases, and its later phenomena protect and subserve its earlier; if it has a power of assimilation and revival, and a vigorous action from first to last. (23)

A corruption is a development in that very stage in which it ceases to illustrate, and begins to disturb, the acquisitions gained in its previous history . . . A true development . . . is an addition which illustrates . . . the body of thought from which it proceeds . . . it is of a tendency conservative of what has gone before it. (24)

After consideration, especially, of Newman’s analogies between Protestant developments and distinctively Catholic ones, and his “Seven Notes,” it became clear to me that Protestantism represented a massive corruption of historical Christianity, rather than a consistent development, as I formerly believed, and my thinking underwent a paradigm shift of massive proportions. For Protestantism undeniably introduced radically new doctrines such as sola fidesola Scriptura, sectarianism, private judgment, the notion of an invisible, non-hierarchical church, and symbolic baptism and Eucharist, which were sheer novelties, rather than reforms, supposedly hearkening back to the alleged state of affairs in the early Church. But they simply cannot be found in the early Church.
 
Newman builds his case to its climax, with the following lucid comment:
*

If it be true that the principles of the later Church are the same as those of the earlier, then . . . the later in reality agrees more than it differs with the earlier, for principles are responsible for doctrines. Hence they who assert that the modern Roman system is the corruption of primitive theology are forced to discover some difference of principle . . . for instance, that the right of private judgment was secured to the early Church and has been lost to the later, or again, that the later Church rationalizes and the earlier went by faith.
*
Moreover . . . the various heresies . . . have in one respect or other . . . violated those principles with which she rose into existence, and which she still retains. Thus Arian (25) and Nestorian (26) schools denied the allegorical rule of Scripture interpretation; the Gnostics (27) and Eunomians (28) for Faith professed to substitute knowledge; and the Manichees (29) also . . . The dogmatic Rule . . . was thrown aside by all those sects which, as Tertullian tells us, claimed to judge for themselves from Scripture; and the Sacramental principle was violated, ipso facto, by all who separated from the Church . . . In like manner the contempt of mystery, of reverence, of devoutness, of sanctity, are other notes of the heretical spirit. As to Protestantism it is plain in how many ways it has reversed the principles of Catholic theology. (30)

In other words, the early heretics were the ones who usually operated on the basis of the so-called perspicuity, or clearness of Scripture, without authoritative interpretation by authoritative ecclesiastical bodies. Protestants look back today with the benefit of hindsight and speak of the “early Church” or simply, “the Church,” yet fail to recognize that this “Church” which they tacitly assume was one and unified, is none other than the organically-connected ancestor of the present-day Catholic Church, which operates on the same principles (apostolic succession, a certain understanding of the organic relationship of Church, Bible, and Tradition, sacramentalism, sacerdotalism, papacy, conciliarism, episcopacy, the communion of saints, etc.).
 
One need not posit an absolute break of continuity in order to equate the present Catholic Church with the “Church” of the early centuries. One need only understand the true nature of development, whereby doctrines can grow in the sense that they are more clearly understood, and more deeply and thoroughly explicated, while not undergoing any essential transformation. But Protestantism requires a radical change of principle, and hence, fails the test of what constitutes a true development, in Newman’s analysis. Besides, corruption can just as easily consist of subtraction as addition. Corruption entails a departure from normalcy and precedent.
 
Furthermore, it is instructive to realize that what we now consider orthodox in early Christianity, is simply the position of the Roman apostolic see, which was proven right again and again on this score, far beyond coincidence, given the multiplicity of heretical sects in the early centuries, and the thousands of competing Christian denominations today.
 
This fact and the others recounted above in Newman’s Essay and my own commentary upon it, are what basically compelled me to become a Catholic (along with the profundity and beauty of unchanging Catholic moral teaching). I had too much respect for logic, historical theology, and Church history to resist what I felt to be an utterly unanswerable argument.
*
I discovered, with the inestimable assistance of Cardinal Newman, that the Catholic Church had far and away the most cogent, consistent claim to ecclesiological and apostolic preeminence. Coupled with my simultaneous intensive study of what happened in the sixteenth century (especially the stated reasons for the Protestant Revolution, and the motivations of its leading proponents) and the theological and moral views of the major Protestant Founders (such as: sola fidesola Scriptura, libertine views of clerical vows and divorce, lying, filthy language, disrespect for authority and precedent, plundering and violence, iconoclasm, anti-intellectualism, etc.) this made any further resistance to Catholicism on my part equivalent to rearranging chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic.
 
Thus it was fitting that a little more than a month after completing the Essay, while reading Cardinal Newman’s meditation on “Hope in God the Creator,” I quietly gave up what little remaining emotional resistance I had to conversion, and realized that I had already entered the gates of Rome (and therefore, historic Christendom) for good. And, thus far, I’ve never had the slightest desire or inclination to look back.

FOOTNOTES

1. Butler: New York, Sheed & Ward, 1954, 230 pages. A friend was recently able to obtain the articles from the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in the library of a well-known evangelical seminary in the Chicago area.
2. Geisler, Norman L. and Ralph E. MacKenzie, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1995, p.206, which calls it the “classic refutation of papal infallibility.” See also p. 459.
3. Geisler and MacKenzie, ibid., pp. 206-207.
4. Salmon, George, The Infallibility of the Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House (originally 1888), pp. 31-33 (cf. also pp. 35, 39).
5. 23:28-30, cited from Jurgens, William A., The Faith of the Early Fathers (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1979), vol. 3, p. 265.
6. Geisler and MacKenzie, ibid., p. 459.
7. Vatican II: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, chapter III: “The Church is Hierarchical,” sections 18, 22. From edition / translation by Austin Flannery (Northport, New York: Costello Publishing Co., 1988 revised ed., pp. 370, 375).
8. C. Faustus, 8, 5.
9. The Trinity, 4, 6 ,10.
10. Letter 164 to Evodius of Uzalis.
11. C. Cresconius, 1,33.
12. Harrold, Charles F., A Newman Treasury, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1943, pp. 83-84.
13. All quotes from the Essay are taken from the edition published by the University of Notre Dame Press, 1989, with a foreword by Ian Ker, from the 1878 edition of the original work of 1845; pp. vii-viii.
14. Newman, John Henry, Historical Sketches, vol.1: The Church of the Fathers, London: 1872, p. 418.
15. Newman, Essayibid., pp. 7-9.
16. Ibid., p. 21
17. Ibid., p. 21.
18. Ibid., p. 23.
19. Geisler and MacKenzie, ibid., pp. 247-248, 503.
20. Newman, Essay, pp. 123-126.
21. Ibid., p. 145.
22. Ibid., p. 151.
23. Ibid., pp. 170-171.
24. Ibid., pp.199-200, 203.
25. Arianism: a heresy holding that Jesus Christ was a mere created being and not co-equal with the Father.
26. Nestorianism: a heresy which denied that Christ had a Divine Nature.
27. Gnosticism: a heresy which claimed a secret knowledge (“gnosis”) which went beyond revelation, faith, and reason.
28. Eunomianism: akin to Arianism, it held that Jesus was inferior in essence to the Father, and that the Holy Spirit was created by Jesus.
29. Manichaeanism: a form of Gnosticism; it held to a sub-personal cosmic dualism between good and evil and was severely ascetic.
30. Newman, Essay, pp. 353-354.

2017-04-24T19:40:59-04:00

GKC85(PD)

Caricature of G.K. Chesterton by David Low (1928) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons

* * *

Quotations from my book, The Wisdom of Mr. Chesterton (2009)

* * * * *

 

Agnosticism

When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass.

Trees have no dogmas. (H, ch. 20)

Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell’s chapel. (WWW, I-3)

It would be much truer to say that agnosticism is the origin of all religions.

That is true; the agnostic is at the beginning not the end of human progress. (AWD, “Something” [1910] )

The agnostics have been driven back on agnosticism; and are already recovering from the shock. (NJ, ch. 8)

It is the business of the agnostic to admit that he knows nothing; and he might the more gracefully admit it touching sciences about which he knows precious little. (ILN, “Mr Mencken and the New Physics,” 6-14-30)

We need not deny that modern doubt, like ancient doubt, does ask deep questions; we only deny that, as compared with our own philosophy, it gives any deeper answers. (WEL,“The Well and the Shallows” )

Atheism

But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. (O, ch. 2)

An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two. (NJ, ch. 6)

The intellect exercises itself in discovering principles of design or pattern or proportion of some sort, and can find nothing to work on in the only really logical atheist cosmos – the fortuitous concourse of atoms of Lucretius. (ILN, “A Defense of Human Dignity,” 2-22-30)

Determinism

It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will.

The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say “if you please” to the housemaid. (O, ch. 2)

Intelligentsia, The; Scholars; The Learned

As I have pointed out elsewhere in this book, the expert is more aristocratic than the aristocrat, because the aristocrat is only the man who lives well, while the expert is the man who knows better. (H, ch. 16)

I think that you and I are quite justified in disagreeing with doctors, however extraordinary in their erudition, if they violate ordinary reason in their line of argument.

For I rebel against the man of learning when he suddenly, and in public, refuses to think.

But when learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven’t got any. (ILN, “Arguing With Erudition,” 10-31-08)

One does not need any learning to say that a man was killed or that a man was raised from the dead.

One does not need to be an astronomer to say that a star fell from heaven; or a botanist to say that a fig tree withered; or a chemist to say that one had seen water turned to wine; or a surgeon to say that one has seen wounds in the hands of St. Francis. (ILN, “Miracles and Scientific Method,” 4-17-09)

The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind.

The Prigs rise above the people by refusing to understand them: by saying that all their dim, strange preferences are prejudices and superstitions.

The Prigs make the people feel stupid; the Poets make the people feel wiser than they could have imagined that they were.

The Prigs who despise the people are often loaded with lands and crowned.

In the House of Commons, for instance, there are quite a number of prigs, but comparatively few poets.

He has not sufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob.

His only notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut across it, in accordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell himself that, whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong.

He forgets that ignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of innocence. (AD, ch. 23)

But the curious thing about the educated class is that exactly what it does not know is what it is talking about. (UTO, “The Empire of the Ignorant”)

Why is it that for the last two or three centuries the educated have been generally wrong and the uneducated relatively right?

What the educated man has generally done was to ram down everybody’s throat some premature and priggish theory which he himself afterwards discovered to be wrong; so wrong that he himself generally recoiled from it and went staggering to the opposite extreme. (ILN, “The Wisdom of the Ignorant,” 8-9-24)

The professor can preach any sectarian idea, not in the name of a sect, but in the name of a science. (ILN, “Compulsory Education

and the Monkey Trial,” 8-8-25)

And those who have been there will know what I mean when I say that, while there are stupid people everywhere, there is a particular minute and microcephalous idiocy which is only found in an intelligentsia.

I have sometimes fancied that, as chilly people like a warm room, silly people sometimes like a diffused atmosphere of intellectualism and long words. (ILN, “The Defense of the Unconventional,” 10-17-25)

So many people, especially learned people and even clever people, seem to be quite unable to see the upshot of a thing; or what the French call its reason of being. (ILN, “The Point – Getting It and Missing It,” 10-30-26)

I have frequently visited such societies, in the capacity of a common or normal fool, and I have almost always found there a few fools who were more foolish than I had imagined to be possible to man born of woman; people who had hardly enough brains to be called half-witted.

But it gave them a glow within to be in what they imagined to be the atmosphere of intellect; for they worshipped it like an unknown god.

Intelligence does exist even in the Intelligentsia.

Anyhow, it is in this intellectual world, with its many fools and few wits and fewer wise men, that there goes on perpetually a sort of ferment of fashionable revolt and negation. (TT, ch. 6)

But a large section of the Intelligentsia seemed wholly devoid of Intelligence.

As was perhaps natural, those who pontificated most pompously were often the most windy and hollow. (A, ch. 7)

Materialism (Scientific and Philosophical)

I have come into the country where men do definitely believe that the waving of the trees makes the wind.

That is to say, they believe that the material circumstances, however black and twisted, are more important than the spiritual realities, however powerful and pure.

By perpetually talking about environment and visible things, by perpetually talking about economics and physical necessity, painting and keeping repainted a perpetual picture of iron machinery and merciless engines, of rails of steel, and of towers of stone, modern materialism at last produces this tremendous impression in which the truth is stated upside down. (TRE, ch. 14)

It was the materialists who destroyed materialism, merely by studying matter.

We have been accused of hostility to the scientist, when we are merely hostile to the materialist.

The venerable Victorian materialist wanted the world to grow more and more scientific; but only on the strict condition that the science should grow more and more materialistic. (ILN, “Old Science and New Science,” 5-9-31)

If fifty years hence the electron is as entirely exploded as the atom, it will not affect us; for we have never founded our philosophy on the electron any more than on the atom. (WEL, “The Collapse of Materialism”)

Science, Scientists, and Popular Science

The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. (H, ch. 3)

The only evil that science has ever attempted in our time has been that of dictating not only what should be known, but the spirit in which it should be regarded.

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

There is no objection to scientists splitting open the world like the uncle’s watch; in order to look at the works of it so long as those scientists feel like children. (ILN, “Science: Pro and Con,” 10-9-09)

The extreme doctrine of Science for Science’s Sake has proved just as impossible as Art for Art’s Sake. (ILN, “Evolution and Ethics,” 9-10-27)

They had no right to insist on men accepting the latest word of science as the last word of science.

Yet they were also insistently boasting that science had not concluded and would never conclude. (ILN, “The Bible and the Sceptics,” 4-20-29)

Quackery is false science; it is everywhere apparent in cheap and popular science; and the chief mark of it is that men who begin by boasting that they have cast away all dogma go on to be incessantly, impudently, and quite irrationally dogmatic. (ILN, “Quackery About the Family,” 7-12-30)

Science (and Religion)

The truths of religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved. (ILN, “Faith Healing and Medicine,” 11-5-10)

We in the West have “followed our reason as far as it would go,” and our reason has led us to things that nearly all the rationalists would have thought wildly irrational. (NJ, ch. 9)

The problem of Religion and Science is still presented in the narrow Victorian version of a quarrel between Darwin and Moses. (ILN, “The Younger Pagans,” 8-21-26)

But in the Victorian debates between Science and religion, about such a question as the Deluge, there was a double ignorance and an ambiguity on both sides. (ILN, “The Bible and the Sceptics,” 4-20-29)

The Electron, as now expounded, is much more of a mystery than the Trinity.

There were, indeed, venerable Victorians, of the agnostic sort, who would have been very much surprised to learn that science had not destroyed religion by A.D. 2030. (ILN, “Religion and the New Science,” 4-12-30)

It is amusing to think that even religious people may still be driven to abandon religion by a science which scientists have abandoned. (ILN, “The Place of Mysticism,” 5-24-30)

Secularism

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. (O, ch. 8)

Nearly all newspaper correspondences now revolve around religion, which we were told about fifty years ago had finally disappeared. (ILN, “Modern Doubts and Questioning,” 2-13-26)

Never until the nineteenth century was it supposed that the Church or Temple was a sort of side-show that had nothing to do with the State. (ILN, “The Guilt of the Churches,” 7-26-30)

For the word “secular” does not mean anything so sensible as “worldly.”

To be secular simply means to be of the age; that is, of the age which is passing; of the age which, in their case, is already passed.

There is one adequate equivalent of the word “secular”; and it is the word “dated.” (WEL, “The Well and the Shallows”)

What is totally intolerable is the idea that everybody must pretend, for the sake of peace and decorum, that moral inspiration only comes from secular things like Distributism, and cannot possibly come from spiritual things like Catholicism. (WEL, “The Don and the Cavalier”)

Skepticism (Religious); “Freethinkers”

Opponents of Christianity would believe anything except Christianity. (ILN, “The Neglect of Christmas,” 1-13-06)

For example, one can hardly count the number of times that Christianity has been destroyed or might have been destroyed if its enemies had known where it was or anything about it. (ILN, “Creed and Deed,” 2-2-07)

Nobody supposes that the best critic of music is the man who talks coldly about music.

But there is an idea that a man is a correct judge of religion because he looks down on religions. (ILN, “The History of Religions,” 10-10-08)

If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction?

But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”

But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn.

As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. (O, ch. 3)

One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise.

It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with.

But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique.

Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad — in various ways. (O, ch. 6)

Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church. (O, ch. 8)

The sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias.

The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. (O, ch. 9)

Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough. (ILN, “Hangmen and Capital Punishment,” 2-6-09)

I will not engage in verbal controversy with the sceptic, because long experience has taught me that the sceptic’s ultimate skepticism is about the use of his own words and the reliability of his own intelligence. (ILN, “Objections to Spiritualism,” 10-30-09)

It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians. (ILN, “Civilization and Progress,” 11-30-12)

Moreover, while it is rare for a great legend to grow out of nothing, it is much easier for a sceptical theory to be woven out of nothing, or next to nothing. (ILN, “The Legends of Merlin,” 9-8-23)

But the people now calling themselves freethinkers are of all thinkers the least free.

In order to explain the opinion of their opponents, they have to deny them the right to hold any opinion at all; and explain away all opinions by servile necessities of the hereditary mentality or the sub-conscious mind. (ILN, “The Reason For Fear,” 2-27-26)

What is now called free thought is valued, not because it is free thought, but because it is freedom from thought; because it is free thoughtlessness. (CCC, ch. 4)

The person whose position is perpetually growing shaky, shifting, sliding, and breaking away from under him, is the advanced sceptic who is attacking the tradition of orthodoxy. (ILN, “The Crumbling of the Creeds,” 11-26-27)

To begin with, we can hardly be surprised if the Bible-Smasher had never read the Bible, because the Bible-Reader had never read the Bible either. (ILN, “The Bible and the Sceptics,” 4-20-29)

What I think has really happened, in the case of the more sophisticated youth of to-day, is that they have become skeptical of everything, including skepticism. (ILN, “The Sophistication – and Simplicity – of the Young,” 5-18-29)

The sceptic, like the schoolboy with a penknife, is always ready to start making a small crack in some of the planks of the platform of civilization; but he has not really the courage to split it from end to end. (ILN, “Mr. Darrow on Divorce,” 10-19-29)

For what strikes me most about the skeptics, who are praised as daring and audacious, is that they dare not carry out any of their own acts of audacity. (ILN, “The Modern Recoil From the Modern,” 11-9-29)

The truth is that the first questions asked by the sceptic sometimes have an air of intelligence; but if the sceptic has no answer, or only a negative answer, the silence that follows soon becomes the very negation of intelligence.

In short, there came to be an entirely false association between intelligence and skepticism. (ILN, “A Defense of Human Dignity,” 2-22-30)

How much longer are we expected to put up with people who have no arguments whatever, beyond the assertion that religion requires them to believe “what no intelligent man can accept,” or “what thinking people can non longer regard as rational”?

But what are we to say of the superior philosophical sceptic, who can only begin the controversy by calling the other controversialist a fool, and in the same moment end the controversy because he need not controvert with fools? (ILN, “The Creeds and the Modernist,” 5-17-30)

There are very few sceptics in history who cannot be proved to have been instantly swallowed by some swollen convention or some hungry humbug of the hour, so that all their utterances about contemporary things now look to us almost pathetically contemporary. (WEL, “The Well and the Shallows”)

What has troubled me about sceptics all my life has been their extraordinary slowness in coming to the point; even to the point of their own position.

I have heard them denounced, as well as admired, for their headlong haste and reckless rush of innovation; but my difficulty has always been to get them to move a few inches and finish their own argument. (A, ch. 16)

Utopias

The skeptical theorist is allowed to throw off Utopia after Utopia, and is never reproached when they are contradicted by the facts, or contradicted by each other. (ILN, “Buddhism and Christianity,” 3-2-29)

Abbreviations

A Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1936)

AD Alarms And Discursions (London: Methuen & Co., 1911)

AWD The Apostle and the Wild Ducks (London: Paul Elek, 1975)

CCC The Catholic Church and Conversion (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1926)

H Heretics (New York: John Lane Co., 1905)

ILN The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume XXVII: The Illustrated London News: 1905-1907 (edited by Lawrence J. Clipper; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986)

ILN The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume XXVIII: The Illustrated London News: 1908-1910 (edited by Lawrence J. Clipper; general editors: George J. Marlin, Richard P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987)

ILN The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume XXIX: The Illustrated London News: 1911-1913 (edited by Lawrence J. Clipper; general editors: George J. Marlin, Richard P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988)

ILN The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume XXX: The Illustrated London News: 1914-1916 (edited by Lawrence J. Clipper; general editors: George J. Marlin, Richard P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988)

ILN The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume XXXIII: The Illustrated London News: 1923-1925 (edited by Lawrence J. Clipper; general editors: George J. Marlin, Richard P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990)

ILN The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume XXXIV: The Illustrated London News: 1926-1928 (edited by Lawrence J. Clipper; general editors: George J. Marlin, Richard P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991)

ILN The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume XXXV: The Illustrated London News: 1929-1931 (edited by Lawrence J. Clipper; general editors: George J. Marlin, Richard P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991)

NJ The New Jerusalem (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920)

Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Co., 1908)

TRE Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen & Co., 1909)

TT The Thing: Why I am a Catholic (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1929)

UTO Utopia of Usurers, and Other Essays (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1917)

WEL The Well and The Shallows (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935)

WWW What’s Wrong With the World (London: Cassell, 1910)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2017-04-24T19:42:38-04:00

SpaceCloud
NASA photo [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

(12-29-06)

[all passages RSV]

* * * * *

1. “Cloud of Witnesses” – Hebrews 12:1

. . . we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses . . .

Word Studies in the New Testament (Marvin R. Vincent, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980; originally 1887; Vol. 4, p. 536), a famous, standard Protestant reference work, comments on this verse as follows:

‘Witnesses’ does not mean spectators [Greek martus, from which is derived martyr], but those who have borne witness to the truth, as those enumerated in chapter 11. Yet the idea of spectators is implied, and is really the principal idea. The writer’s picture is that of an arena in which the Christians whom he addresses are contending in a race, while the vast host of the heroes of faith who, after having borne witness to the truth, have entered into their heavenly rest, watches the contest from the encircling tiers of the arena, compassing and overhanging it like a cloud, filled with lively interest and sympathy, and lending heavenly aid.

Saints in heaven are therefore aware of, and observe events on earth, “with lively interest,” as Vincent puts it.

2. Prayers in Heaven for Those on Earth

Revelation 6:9-10 . . . I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne; they cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before thou wilt judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?”

Here the martyrs in heaven are saying what are known as “imprecatory prayers”: pleas for God to rescue and vindicate the righteous. Examples can be found particularly in the Psalms (Psalms 35, 59, 69, 79, 109, 139) and in Jeremiah (11:18 ff., 15:15 ff., 18:19 ff., 20:11 ff.). An angel offers up a very similar prayer in Zechariah 1:12. Jesus mentions a type of this prayer in Matthew 26:53, in which He stated that He could “pray” to the Father and receive legions of angels to prevent His arrest had it been the Father’s will.

Therefore dead saints are praying for Christians on earth. If they can intercede for us, then why shouldn’t we ask for their prayers? Clearly, they’re aware of what is happening on earth. They are more alive, unfathomably more righteous, and obviously closer to God than we are. Omniscience isn’t required for them to hear our prayers, as is often charged. Rather, we have reason to believe that they are out of time, by God’s power, because to be in eternity is to be outside of the realm of time. That allows them to answer many requests for prayer because they have an infinite amount of “time” to do it.

Even Martin Luther and John Calvin admitted that the saints may be praying for us in heaven:

Although angels in heaven pray for us . . . and although saints on earth, and perhaps also in heaven, do likewise, it does not follow that we should invoke angels and saints.

(Smalcald Articles, 1537, Part II, Article II in Theodore G. Tappert, translator, The Book of Concord, St. Louis: Concordia Pub. House, 1959, 297)

I grant they pray for us in this way.

(Institutes of the Christian Religion, III, 20, 24)

If so, then how can it be wrong to simply ask dead saints to pray for us, since they are aware of earthly happenings?

3. Saints and Angels Presenting Our Prayers to God

Revelation 5:8 . . . the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.

Revelation 8:3-4 And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer; and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar before the throne; and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God. (cf. Tobit 12:12,15)

It’s somewhat unclear whether the twenty-four elders in this scene are angels or men, and commentators differ. References to them clad in white garments, with golden crowns (4:4,10) suggests the view that these elders are glorified human beings (see, for example, 2:10, 3:5,11, 6:11, 7:9,13-14, 2 Timothy 4:8, James 1:12, 1 Peter 5:4). In any event, in both examples above, creatures – whether men or angels – are involved with our prayers as intercessory intermediaries, which isn’t supposed to happen according to most versions of Protestant theology, where all prayer goes straight to God with no creature involved other than the one who prays the prayer. What in the world are these creatures doing with “the prayers of the saints”?

Also the deuterocanonical book 2 Maccabees (15:13-14), describes Jeremiah the prophet loving his people after his death and praying for them. since Protestants don’t accept that book as inspired, we might offer them also Jeremiah 15:1: “Then the Lord said to me, ‘Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward this people.'”

Here it appears that God receives the prayers of the dead saints as a matter of course. Moses and Samuel were both known as intercessors. One could argue that this is only a hypothetical, yet even parables can’t contain something that isn’t true. This mentions a state of affairs which is assumed to be possible (or else why would Jeremiah mention it at all, as coming from God?)

4. No Contact Between Heaven and Earth?

A) 1 Samuel 28:12,14-15 (Samuel): the prophet Samuel appeared to King Saul to prophesy his death. The current consensus among biblical commentators (e.g., The New Bible CommentaryThe Wycliffe Bible Commentary) is that it was indeed Samuel the prophet, not an impersonating demon (since it happened during a sort of seance with the so-called “witch or medium of Endor”). This was the view of, e.g., St. Justin Martyr, Origen, and St. Augustine, among others. Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 6:19-20 reinforces the latter interpretation: “Samuel . . . after he had fallen asleep he prophesied and revealed to the king his death, and lifted up his voice out of the earth in prophecy, to blot out the wickedness of the people.”

B) Matthew 17:1-3 (the Transfiguration: Moses and Elijah): . . . Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain apart. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. (see also Mark 9:4 and Luke 9:30-31)

C) Matthew 27:52-53(raised bodies after the crucifixion): . . . the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.

D) Revelation 11:3,6 (the “Two Witnesses”): And I will grant my two witnesses power to prophesy for one thousand two hundred and sixty days . . . they have power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall . . . and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood, and to smite the earth with every plague . . .

These two witnesses are killed (11:7-9), then raised after “three and a half days” and “stood up on their feet” (11:11), and then “went up to heaven in a cloud” (11:12). Many Church Fathers thought these two were Enoch and Elijah, because both of them didn’t die; thus this would explain their dying after this appearance on earth. Some Protestant commentators think the two witnesses are Moses and Elijah, because of the parallel to the Transfiguration, and also similarities with the plagues of Egypt and the fact that Elijah also stopped the rain for three-and-a-half years (James 5:17).

We must conclude based on the above passages that contact between heaven and earth is God’s will; otherwise He wouldn’t have permitted it in these instances. The Catholic belief in more interconnection between heaven and earth cannot be ruled out as “unbiblical”. One has to try other arguments to refute our beliefs in this regard.

5. Prayers for the Dead in the New Testament

Prayers for the dead are very clearly presented in the deuterocanonical book of 2 Maccabees (12:39-45). Protestants don’t accept that book as part of the Bible, of course, so is there anything about prayers for the dead in the New Testament? It may shock and surprise Protestants to hear it, but yes, there is. I contend that there are three passages:

A) 1 Corinthians 15:29 Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?

Protestants consider this one of the most mysterious and odd passages in the entire Bible. But it really isn’t that difficult to interpret. It’s very similar to 2 Maccabees 12:44: “It is superfluous and vain to pray for the dead if the dead rise not again. . . .” That gives us our clue as to what Paul means here. In the Bible “baptism” can describe not just the water ritual but also afflictions and penances (Luke 12:50, Mark 10:38-39, Matthew 3:11, 20:22-23, Luke 3:16). So Paul is saying that we pray and fast and undergo penance for the dead in purgatory precisely because they are resurrected and will live eternally. The “penance” interpretation is supported contextually by the next three verses, where the Apostle speaks of being in peril every hour, and dying every day. So this is a proof of both purgatory and prayers for the dead.

B) 2 Timothy 1:16-18 May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me; he was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me eagerly and found me – may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that Day – and you well know all the service he rendered at Ephesus.

This is another passage that gives Protestants fits. The problem is that it seems to plainly imply that Paul is praying for a dead man. Yet Protestants can’t accept that practice because of their theology; therefore, they must explain this away somehow. What they do is either deny that Onesiphorus is dead, or that Paul is praying. Most of the nine Protestant commentaries I consulted for this passage seen admit that he was praying, but deny that the person was dead. Some try to say that Paul was merely “wishing”, but I don’t see any difference between that and a prayer: it looks like a word game to avoid the implications. The same commentaries said he was possibly dead (two), take no position (two), think he was “probably not” dead (one), or deny it (three). A.T. Robertson, the great Baptist Greek scholar, felt that he was “apparently” dead and that Paul was “wishing” rather than praying. I think it’s much more plausible to simply take the Catholic position: the man died and Paul was praying for him.

C) Acts 9:36-37,40-41: Now there was at Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which means Dorcas . . . In those days she fell sick and died . . . But Peter . . . knelt down and prayed; then turning to the body he said, “Tabitha, rise.” And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter she sat up. And he gave her his hand and lifted her up. Then calling the saints and widows he presented her alive.

Now, what would Peter have been praying for?: obviously, that Tabitha would be raised from the dead. So it seems indisputable that St. Peter literally prayed for a dead person, the very thing that Protestants say is not permitted, and supposedly not recorded in the Bible. And Jesus prayed for Lazarus, just before he was raised from the dead, in John 11:41-42 (“Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. I knew that thou hearest me always, but I have said this on account of the people standing by, that they may believe that thou didst send me”). The Bible informs us that the disciples raised people from the dead (Mt 11:5, Lk 7:22) and that Jesus told them that they would be able to, and should, do so (Mt 10:8). So they went out and did it. It’s natural to assume that prayer would accompany these extraordinary miracles (because God performs miracles – thus we ask). So almost certainly they prayed for the dead, too. It’s as simple as that. The prophet Elijah did the same thing in the Old Testament:

D) 1 Kings 17:21-22: Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this child’s soul come into him again.” And the Lord hearkened to the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived.

Martin Luther and his successor as head of Lutheranism, Philip Melanchthon, accepted prayers for the dead:

As for the dead, since Scripture gives us no information on the subject, I regard it as no sin to pray with free devotion in this or some similar fashion: “Dear God, if this soul is in a condition accessible to mercy, be thou gracious to it.”

(Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, 1528, in Luther’s Works, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 37, 369)


[W]e know that the ancients speak of prayer for the dead, which we do not prohibit . . .


(Apology to the Augsburg Confession: Article XXIV, 94)

2017-04-24T19:59:40-04:00

Hypocrisy Meter, Pegged

Image by “KAZ Vorpal” (9-15-15) [Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0 license]

* * *

The following “brass tacks” and exceptionally straightforward exchange took place in the combox of my post, Atheists’ Worldviews (Deep Mystery?). The words of BeaverTales will be in blue.

* * * * *

We are empiricists. I think most atheist won’t deny we don’t know the unknowable. The difference between us and theists is that we don’t attribute qualities (i.e. invent convenient facts) and attribute them to the unknowable. We also don’t attribute omniscience, infallibility or morality to the unknowable.

We just call it “the unknown” and proceed to study it before inventing facts about it. We see miracles in particle colliders, but record them on a photon collector or cloud chamber. Theist miracles are never recorded on camera, never to be verified to anyone who isn’t already part of the delusion. Why does your God perform the miraculous as “proof”, but can’t pose for a photo, or do something people other than a select group of Catholics can see. Why do you care what atheists think? We’re not burning you at the stake. We are merely asking for proof and we refuse to accept that you have the right to tell others how to live their lives outside of secular law.

Obviously we don’t consider God “unknowable” or “unknown.” If we thought that and attributed qualities to “who knows what” then I agree, it would be absurd, but since we don’t believe that, we don’t do what you describe. You think He is unknowable and you don’t know Him, so for you it makes sense to not describe what you don’t know.

You expressly imply that we do these silly things by stating, “The difference between us and theists is that we [unlike them] don’t attribute qualities (i.e. invent convenient facts) and attribute them to the unknowable.”

This makes us look like gullible idiots and simpletons, which is the usual atheist modus operandi and opinion.

I haven’t “told” anyone how to live their life. I don’t have that “right.” That’s ridiculous. I have explained what Catholic morality or general Christian moral teaching holds, and why we believe in these things.

But of course we Christians have now been forced to accept a radical redefinition of marriage that contradicts what we believe. When that happens, we are conscientious objectors to the law, just as we are against legal childkilling and torture that takes place with 3,000+ babies every day in America. So, you wanna talk about being forced to live a certain way?: how about being forced to forfeit your life even before you see the light of day? That is being forced or coerced.

I care about what atheists think because I care about what all people think, because I care about all people, and have Good News to share with them.

I usually haven’t sought out atheists here. They keep coming here to comment, and so I talk to ’em, because I enjoy it (atheists usually being very sharp people, and obviously challenging to me as a Christian).

And I love to debate. I have about 800 debates posted online.

But you make a blog post titled “Atheists’ Worldviews (Deep Mystery?)”???

Yep. It was because JGravelle came to my blog and made some comments that I thought were worthwhile to respond to. He came here, to me. I didn’t go seek him out (if he even has a website): precisely as I stated above. And then I made a new post consisting of our interaction.

Um. Yeah…well, we don’t have a leader…we don’t have a rulebook, and while we generally disagree on nearly everything, we DO have a unifying philosophy: Humanism-where whoever makes the best rational argument about what benefits all of humanity wins. If mystified by our worldview, just ask us to explain. Thanks.

Here’s my worldview, it’s simple : don’t be sadistic, don’t be focused on money…don’t be dumb. a.k.a. Wheaton’s Law. Easy Peasy.

When atheists/humanists find examples of Christians being sadistic, venal and dumb, that’s somehow “bad”? You should be glad someone is drawing attention to abuses committed in the name of your faith. But usually you folks just circle the wagons and knowingly hide your misdeeds. Atheists think theists treat us like we’re stupid too. This is the usual Christian modus operandi and opinion.

Can you blame atheists for thinking Christian folks spend all their time lying to themselves? Why should we trust you? Especially about “presences” that only you can see and feel?

You think we spend all our time lying to ourselves and being fundamentally dishonest? Or is that just what most atheists think, and you dissent from the charge?

I have posts here defending atheists against unjust charges from Christians. I oppose such treatment.

Dave, I can’t speak for all atheists any more than you speak to all Catholics. This is a loaded question (i.e. are you still beating your wife?). No matter how I answer, it’ll be wrong. This isn’t my first time at the rodeo.

I’d be impressed if the Catholic rank and file explained why they tolerated the existence of a pedophile ring under their noses for probably millenia. Or the free hookers in the Vatican. No church should be above the law. Atheists aren’t….we have our criminals too….but we regularly and viciously criticize our own, we demand transparency and we don’t shelter our criminals from justice.

Being in a nation where gay non-Christians can marry somehow diminishes you as Christians…but sheltering pedophiles doesn’t? Seriously?

See the many links I have collected about the sex scandal.

You say I asked a loaded question. It wasn’t in the slightest. You wrote: “Can you blame atheists for thinking Christian folks spend all their time lying to themselves?”

So I was curious if this was your own opinion or if it was only a “sociological” remark.

And you still didn’t answer. I suppose, though, that if you think I am an inveterate liar, simply by virtue of being a Christian, it’ll come out soon enough. You won’t be able to hide it.

I think being in denial can be a form of lying to oneself. I won’t question your awareness of RCC malfeasance any further. It’s a great list and I intend to read it all when I can.

Dave, I don’t hate or dislike you…. you seem like someone fun to have an adult beverage or a doob with. But your chosen religion scares me…..so much hate and hypocrisy would scare anyone. I am mystified why it gives you comfort….or anyone else.

I care about freedom. Freedom means not living in fear of an omnipresent peeping Tom who hates humanity simply for being human.

My mother was a Catholic. I asked her about the hypocrisy and bigotry, and her knee jerk reaction was the apologetics. When I told her I was gay, she distanced herself at a time when I needed her most. What does it take to make a mother stop loving her son? It took religion. We are now close again. The Vatican brainwashing robbed us of almost 20 years together. I despise your theology for bringing my family and millions of other families to the brink of ruin and beyond.

I don’t care about God (God doesnt exist, so why should I?) but I despise religion and am much happier without it.

I’m fully Catholic and I don’t hate anyone. I love all people, even people in ISIS.

The presence of bad (or fallible, sinning, hypocritical) people in a particular group doesn’t prove that the group as a whole is a “hate group.” All it proves is that “Person X in Group Y fell short in attribute Z, which Group Y teaches.”

Period.

I can also love people I disagree with. I know that is a novel, “bizarre” concept today but it is perfectly possible.

Your mother couldn’t do that for twenty years. And you think that somehow has something to do with me? I’m not her! My religion doesn’t teach the behavior she extended to you.

Nor did she have to leave Catholicism to figure out that she had to love her son.

What do you expect me (us) to say? “Some Catholics were hypocrites; therefore the entire religion is hogwash and untrue“?

Like that makes any sense?

Emotional arguments against anything never accomplish what they claim to accomplish, because they’re not logical.

BeaverTales later wrote, replying to John:

When someone asks my opinion, I tell them what I think. I don’t have to ask the Holy See, my mommy, my daddy or Santa Claus if it is okay to love someone, whether a sibling, child or parent or life partner. It’s tough to explain to someone with Stockholm syndrome that love and real freedom don’t come with a set of bizarre conditions required to save your soul.

You realize atheistic humanists have emotional lives too, right? We seek comfort and nurturing from other humans, not from deities, spirits, angels or demons. I bet if I took a bath in “holy” water or with the evil kind that comes from the tap, I’ll be just as clean either way. Do I have evidence? No, but I’m willing to test the hypothesis.

How many atheists do you know intimately? I was raised by a Catholic woman. I’ve had more than enough Catholic mystery in my life. I don’t need magic ideas to have a meaningful life. Reality is far more liberating than living out someone else’s fantasies, superstitions or theology. That was my mother’s hypothesis…her biggest regret now is that she didn’t do it a lot sooner.

“PineCone” gave a superb reply, which I fully endorse and agree 100% with:

How do you know John has Stockholm syndrome? [link]

Are you a mental health expert? What if John goes to a mental health expert and is not diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome? Should he trust the expert with an education from a prestigious college and other credentials? Or some guy named “Beaver” in a comment section of a blogging network dedicated to discussion about faith and religion?

It is possible you are wrong about John having Stockholm syndrome. And if we prove you are, by sending John to The Menninger Clinic, having him rigorously tested and sending you an official decree that he is mentally sound, would you see our dilemma? Do you know how hard it is to talk to someone who has misdiagnosed you as having a mental disorder? Especially when that person uses that misdiagnosis to further their argument and expresses no sympathy to the fact that they believe you have a mental disorder that needs treatment.

I know atheists very intimately. In fact I was an atheist for about 20 years of my life. And most of it was spent in the Bible Belt. And I’ve had family members who were not religious or anti-religious that did things similar to what your mother does. It isn’t just a Catholic or religious trait.

And I grew up in an era when ridiculing homosexuals was part of the secular culture. I was a part of the counter-culture/punk rock scene. There was a lot of music that was a) anti-religious and b) anti-homosexual. Look at hip hop music. I went to a very secular public school. There were lots of anti-homosexual sentiments being shared. Some jokingly, but some sincerely.

I’m sorry you had a rough time with your mother. I’ve had bad experiences with family members, too. Some that were religious – and that does turn me off to some aspects of religion. And some that were with people that were not religious, or even anti-religious.

Anyway, good luck with your Stockholm syndrome hypothesis. If you find a way to test this hypothesis and it turns out you are wrong – how different are you treating John in comparison to how your mother treated you?

And if you are wrong – who are you to be preaching at other people about reality? From where I sit it sounds like you are asking people to believe that you have exclusive access to reality.

Also, it sounds like you are holding onto resentments from the past. And it may be manifesting itself in unhealthy ways. And this is something I am guilty of myself. It is something I work on everyday. And I just wanted to let you know, for me, resentments are toxic.

2017-04-27T11:41:19-04:00

Augustine8

St. Augustine in His Study (bet. 1490 and 1494), by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

* * *

(8-30-12)

These are excerpted from my book, The Quotable Augustine: Distinctively Catholic Elements in His Theology (2012). Many more quotations on most of these topics are in the book. This is only barely scratching the surface.

[the context and background of all quotations can be consulted by following the links made in each instance to the primary sources — themselves all in the public domain]
* * * * *

1. Absolution . . .the peace of the Church looses sins, and estrangement from the Church retains them, not according to the will of men, but according to the will of God . . . (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, iii, 18, 23)

2. Angels, Intercession of . . . they [prayers] may be made known also to the angels that are in the presence of God, that these beings may in some way present them to God, and consult Him concerning them, and may bring to us, . . . according to that which they have there learned to be their duty; for the angel said to Tobias: “Now, therefore, when you prayed, and Sara your daughter-in-law, I brought the remembrance of your prayers before the Holy One.” [Tobit 12:12] (Letters, 130 [9, 18]: to Proba [412] )

3. Anointing, Sacrament of For unless that sign be applied, whether it be to the foreheads of believers, . . . or to the oil with which they receive the anointing chrism, . . . none of them is properly administered. . . . every good thing is sealed to us in the celebration of His sacraments . . . (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 118, 5)

4. Apostasy (Falling Away from the Faith or Salvation) Wherefore let us now consider that, which ought to be cast forth from the hearts of religious persons, that they lose not their own salvation through evil security, if they shall think faith sufficient in order to attain to it, and shall neglect to live well, and in good works to hold the way of God. (On Faith and Works, 21)

5. Apostolic Succession In this respect the testimony of the Catholic Church is conspicuous, as supported by a succession of bishops from the original seats of the apostles up to the present time, and by the consent of so many nations. (Against Faustus the Manichee xi, 2)

6. Baptism and Being “Born Again” . . . born again by baptism; the generation by which we shall rise again from the dead, and shall live with the Angels for ever. (Expositions on the Psalms, 135:13 [135, 11] )

7. Baptism and Justification . . . the question of baptism, . . . justified by the grace of God, . . . (Against the Letters of Petilian the Donatist, iii, 50, 62)

8. Baptism and Salvation . . . that sacrament, namely, of baptism, which brings salvation . . . (Letters, 98 [1]: to Boniface [408] )

9. Baptismal Regeneration  . . . the sacrament of baptism is undoubtedly the sacrament of regeneration . . . (On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism ii, 43 [XXVII] )

10. Bishops . . . if in the office of bishop, or presbyter, or deacon, the orders of the Captain of our salvation be observed, there is no work in this life more difficult, toilsome, and hazardous, especially in our day, but none at the same time more blessed in the sight of God. (Letters, 21: to Bishop Valerius [391] )

11. Celibacy; Consecrated Virginity  So, again, if your exhortations to virginity resembled the teaching of the apostle, “He who gives in marriage does well, and he who gives not in marriage does better;” [1 Corinthians 7:38] if you taught that marriage is good, and virginity better, as the Church teaches which is truly Christ’s Church, you would not have been described in the Spirit’s prediction as forbidding to marry. (Against Faustus the Manichee xxx, 6)

12. Church and Salvation . . . the Church our Mother, by whom we are born unto life eternal. (Sermons on the New Testament, 7, 2 [LVII] )

13. Church: Authority of . . . they admit the necessity of baptizing infants—finding themselves unable to contravene that authority of the universal Church, which has been unquestionably handed down by the Lord and His apostles . . . (On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism i, 39 [XXVI] )

14. Church: Blaspheming of  What does it serve you, if you acknowledge the Lord, honour God, preach His name, acknowledge His Son, confess that He sits by His right hand; while you blaspheme His Church? (Expositions on the Psalms, 89:52 [89, 41] )

15. Church, Catholic  . . . the name itself of Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house. (Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus, 4, 5)

16. Church: Fullness of the Faith  For when men come to the peace of the Catholic Church, then what was in them before they joined it, but did not profit them, begins at once to profit them. (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, vi, 9, 14)

17. Church, Holy Mother  For have ye now merely heard that God is Almighty? But ye begin to have him for your father, when you have been born by the church as your Mother. (Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed, 1)

18. Church, Indefectibility of  No one can erase from heaven the divine decree, no one can efface from earth the Church of God. (Letters, 43 [9, 27]: to Glorius, Eleusius, the Two Felixes, and Grammaticus [397] )

19. Church, Infallibility of  For in the belly of the Church truth abides. Whosoever has been separated from this belly of the Church must needs speak false things: . . . (Expositions on the Psalms, 58:3 [58, 5] ) [syntax modified]

20. Church, One “True” . . . let them come to the true Church of Christ, that is, to the Catholic Church our mother . . . (Letters, 185 [9, 36 / 10, 46]: to Boniface [416])

21. Church, Sinners in  My advice to you now is this: that you should at least desist from slandering the Catholic Church, by declaiming against the conduct of men whom the Church herself condemns, seeking daily to correct them as wicked children. . . . Those, again, who with wicked will persist in their old vices, . . . are indeed allowed to remain in the field of the Lord, and to grow along with the good seed; but the time for separating the tares will come. (On the Morals of the Catholic Church, 34, 76)

22. Church, Visible . . . you are not in the city upon a hill, which has this as its sure sign, that it cannot be hid. It is known therefore unto all nations. But the party of Donatus is unknown to the majority of nations, therefore is it not the true city. (Against the Letters of Petilian the Donatist, ii, 105, 239)

23. Confession Who is the proud? He who does not by confession of his sins do penance, that he may be healed through his humility. (Expositions on the Psalms, 94:12 [94, 11] )

24. Confirmation, Sacrament of . . . the laying on of hands now, that persons may receive the Holy Ghost . . . Then if you would know that you have received the Spirit, question your heart: lest haply you have the sacrament, and have not the virtue of the sacrament. (Homilies on the First Epistle of John, 6, 10)

25. Contraception; Contralife Will The doctrine that the production of children is an evil, directly opposes the next precept, “You shall not commit adultery;” for those who believe this doctrine, in order that their wives may not conceive, are led to commit adultery even in marriage. They take wives, as the law declares, for the procreation of children; but . . . their intercourse with their wives is not of a lawful character; and the production of children, which is the proper end of marriage, they seek to avoid. . . . you seek to destroy the purpose of marriage. Your doctrine turns marriage into an adulterous connection, and the bed-chamber into a brothel. (Against Faustus the Manichee, 15, 7)

26. Councils, Ecumenical They attempt, accordingly, to prevail against the firmly-settled authority of the immoveable Church . . . But He who is the most merciful Lord of faith has both secured the Church in the citadel of authority by most famous ecumenical Councils and the Apostolic sees themselves, and furnished her with the abundant armour of equally invincible reason . . . (Letters, 118 [5, 32]: to Deoscorus [410] )

27. Creation Days (Old Earth) . . . no one who reads the Scriptures, however negligently, need be told that in them “day” is customarily used for “time.” (City of God  xx, 1)

28. Cross, Sign of the Let them all sign themselves with the sign of the cross of Christ . . . (Homilies on the First Epistle of John, 5, 7)

29. Dead, Almsgiving for Nor can it be denied that the souls of the dead are benefited by the piety of their living friends, who . . . give alms in the church on their behalf. (Enchiridion: Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love, 110)

30. Dead, Masses for These things she [his mother Monica] entrusted not to us, but only desired to have her name remembered at Your altar, which she had served without the omission of a single day; whence she knew that the holy sacrifice was dispensed, . . . (The Confessions ix, 13, 36)

31. Dead, Offerings for . . . we take care, in regard to the offerings for the spirits of those who sleep, which indeed we are bound to believe to be of some use, . . . that which is a pious and honourable act of religious service shall be celebrated as it should be in the Church. (Letters, 22 [1, 6]: to Bishop Aurelius [392] )

32. Dead, Prayer for For if we cared not for the dead, we should not, as we do, supplicate God on their behalf. (On the Care of the Dead, 17)

33. Denominationalism; Sectarianism . . . there were to be schisms in various quarters of the world, which would be jealous of the Church Catholic spread abroad in the whole round world, and again those same schisms dividing themselves into the names of men, and by loving the men under whose authority they had been rent, opposing themselves to the glory of Christ which is throughout all lands . . . (Expositions on the Psalms, 72:9 [72, 12] )

34. Deuterocanon (So-Called “Apocrypha”) There are other books which seem to follow no regular order, and are connected neither with the order of the preceding books nor with one another, such as Job, and Tobias, and Esther, and Judith, and the two books of Maccabees, and the two of Ezra, which last look more like a sequel to the continuous regular history which terminates with the books of Kings and Chronicles. Next are the Prophets, in which there is one book of the Psalms of David; and three books of Solomon, viz., Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. For two books, one called Wisdom and the other Ecclesiasticus, are ascribed to Solomon from a certain resemblance of style, but the most likely opinion is that they were written by Jesus the son of Sirach. Still they are to be reckoned among the prophetical books, since they have attained recognition as being authoritative. . . . The authority of the Old Testament is contained within the limits of these forty-four books. (On Christian Doctrine, ii, 13; deuterocanonical books included are presently italicized; Augustine would have included Baruch as part of the book of Jeremiah)

35. Development of Doctrine For many things lay hid in the Scriptures: and when heretics had been cut off, with questions they troubled the Church of God: then those things were opened which lay hid, and the will of God was understood. . . . Therefore many men that could understand and expound the Scriptures very excellently, were hidden among the people of God: but they did not declare the solution of difficult questions, when no reviler again urged them. For was the Trinity perfectly treated of before the Arians snarled thereat? Was repentance perfectly treated of before the Novatians opposed? . . . (Expositions on the Psalms, [55, 21] )

36. Dissent (from Catholicism) / Anti-Catholicism “Let them be confounded and turned backward, as many as have evil will at Sion” [Psalm 129:5]. They who hate Sion, hate the Church: Sion is the Church. And they who hypocritically enter into the Church, hate the Church. They who refuse to keep the Word of God, hate the Church . . . (Expositions on the Psalms, 129:5 [129, 8] )

37. Divorce and Remarriage . . . the sanctity of the Sacrament, by reason of which it is unlawful for one who leaves her husband, even when she has been put away, to be married to another, so long as her husband lives, . . . (On the Good of Marriage, 32)

38. Ecumenism But there may be something Catholic outside the Catholic Church, just as the name of Christ could exist outside the congregation of Christ, in which name he who did not follow with the disciples was casting out devils. [Mark 9:38] . . . (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, vii, 39, 77)

39. Eucharist and Salvation If, however, Christ did not die in vain, then human nature cannot by any means be justified and redeemed from God’s most righteous wrath— in a word, from punishment— except by faith and the sacrament of the blood of Christ. (On Nature and Grace, 2 [II] )

40. Eucharist: Transubstantiation . . . Catholics . . . have eaten the body of Christ, not only sacramentally but really, being incorporated in His body, as the apostle says, “We, being many, are one bread, one body;” [1 Corinthians 10:17] (City of God xxi, 20)

41. Eucharistic Adoration . . . He walked here in very flesh, and gave that very flesh to us to eat for our salvation; and no one eats that flesh, unless he has first worshipped: we have found out in what sense such a footstool of our Lord’s may be worshipped, and not only that we sin not in worshipping it, but that we sin in not worshipping. (Expositions on the Psalms, 99:5 [99, 8] )

42. Evangelical Counsels When the judges, however, accepted Pelagius’ answer, they did not take it to convey the idea that those persons keep all the commandments of the law and the gospel who over and above maintain the state of virginity, which is not commanded—but only this, that virginity, which is not commanded, is something more than conjugal chastity, which is commanded; . . . the state of virginity, persevered in to the last, which is not commanded, is more than the chastity of married life, which is commanded. (On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 29 [XIII] )

43. Excommunication . . . what is bound on earth is bound in heaven, and what is loosed on earth is loosed in heaven,— for when the Church excommunicates, the excommunicated person is bound in heaven . . . (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 50, 12)

44. Faith Alone (Falsity of) Who is he that believes not that Jesus is the Christ? He that does not so live as Christ commanded. For many say, “I believe”: but faith without works saves not. Now the work of faith is Love, . . . (Homilies on the First Epistle of John, 10, 1)

45. Faith and Works Therefore, the apostle having said, “You are saved through faith,” [Ephesians 2:8] added, “And that not of yourselves, but it is the gift of God.” And again, lest they should say they deserved so great a gift by their works, he immediately added, “Not of works, lest any man should boast.” [Ephesians 2:9] Not that he denied good works, or emptied them of their value, when he says that “God renders to every man according to his works” [Romans 2:6]; but because works proceed from faith, and not faith from works. Therefore it is from Him that we have works of righteousness, from whom comes also faith itself . . . (On Grace and Free Will, 17)

46. Fast, Eucharistic Must we therefore censure the universal Church because the sacrament is everywhere partaken of by persons fasting? . . . for the honour of so great a sacrament, that the body of the Lord should take the precedence of all other food entering the mouth of a Christian . . . (Letters, 54 [6, 8]: to Januarius [400] )

47. Fasting and Abstinence And this is man’s righteousness in this life, fasting, alms, and prayer. Would you have your prayer fly upward to God? Make for it those two wings of alms and fasting. (Expositions on the Psalms, 43:5 [43, 7] )

48. Free Will . . . we may not so defend grace as to seem to take away free will, or, on the other hand, so assert free will as to be judged ungrateful to the grace of God, in our arrogant impiety. (On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism ii, 28 [XVIII] )

49. Free Will and God’s Foreknowledge . . . we are by no means compelled, either, retaining the prescience of God, to take away the freedom of the will, or, retaining the freedom of the will, to deny that He is prescient of future things, which is impious. But we embrace both. We faithfully and sincerely confess both. The former, that we may believe well; the latter, that we may live well. (City of God v, 10)

50. Friday Abstinence . . . the Lord suffered on the sixth day of the week, as is admitted by all: wherefore the sixth day also is rightly reckoned a day for fasting, as fasting is symbolic of humiliation; whence it is said, “I humbled my soul with fasting.” (Letters, 36 [13, 30]: to Casulanus [396] )

51. God: Circumincession / Coinherence / Perichoresis . . . we have already shown, by many modes of speech in the divine Scriptures, that, in this Trinity, what is said of each is also said of all, on account of the indivisible working of the one and same substance. (On the Trinity i, 12, 25)

52. God: Foreknowledge of . . . God most high, who is most rightly and most truly believed to know all things before they come to pass . . . (City of God v, 8)

53. God: Immutability (Unchangeable) And should any one suppose that anything in God’s substance or nature can suffer change or conversion, he will be held guilty of wild profanity. (On the Morals of the Catholic Church, 10)

54. God: Impeccability of (Impossibility of Sinning) Then again, inasmuch as, in an infinitely greater degree, it is God’s not to sin, shall we therefore venture to say that He is able both to sin and to avoid sin? God forbid that we should ever say that He is able to sin! (On Nature and Grace, 57 [XLIX] )

55. God: Middle Knowledge of For God knows His own future action, and therefore He knows also the effect of that action in preventing the happening of what would otherwise have happened . . . (Against Faustus the Manichee xxvi, 4)

56. God: Omniscience of The infinity of number, though there be no numbering of infinite numbers, is yet not incomprehensible by Him whose understanding is infinite. (City of God xii, 18)

57. God: Outside of Time But the place and time of these miracles are dependent on His unchangeable will, in which things future are ordered as if already they were accomplished. For He moves things temporal without Himself moving in time, He does not in one way know things that are to be, and, in another, things that have been; neither does He listen to those who pray otherwise than as He sees those that will pray. (City of God x, 12)

58. God, Providence of . . . all things in the universe, from the highest to the lowest, are governed by God’s providence. (Against Faustus the Manichee xxii, 19)

59. God: Self-Sufficiency of For He is perfect and independent, underived, not divided or scattered in space, but unchangeably self-existent, self-sufficient, and blessed in Himself. (Against Faustus the Manichee xiv, 11)

60. God: Simplicity of But the Catholic Church has taught me many other things also, . . . that God is not corporeal, that no part of Him can be perceived by corporeal eyes, that nothing of His Substance or Nature can any way suffer violence or change, or is compounded or formed . . . (On the Usefulness of Believing, 36)

61. God: Sustainer of Creation . . . sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, and yet possessing all things. (The Confessions i, 4, 4)

62. God the Father: Monarchia / Principatus of The Holy Spirit thus receives of the Father, of whom the Son receives; for in this Trinity the Son is born of the Father, and from the Father the Holy Spirit proceeds. He, however, who is born of none, and proceeds from none, is the Father alone. (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 100, 4)

63. Gospels: Harmony of . . . any contradiction between the evangelists will fail to be detected, as nothing of that nature really exists. (Harmony of the Gospels iii, 2, 8)

64. Grace: Degrees or Greater Measure of . . . only let us love, only let us grow in grace . . . (Expositions on the Psalms [128, 8] )

65. Grace, Irresistible (Falsity of) If, however, being already regenerate and justified, he relapses of his own will into an evil life, assuredly he cannot say, “I have not received,” because of his own free choice to evil he has lost the grace of God, that he had received. (On Rebuke and Grace, 9 [VI] )

66. HadesSheol; Paradise; Intermediate State During the time, moreover, which intervenes between a man’s death and the final resurrection, the soul dwells in a hidden retreat, where it enjoys rest or suffers affliction just in proportion to the merit it has earned by the life which it led on earth. (Enchiridion: Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love, 109)

67. Hardening of the Heart Nor should you take away from Pharaoh free will, because in several passages God says, “I have hardened Pharaoh;” or, “I have hardened” or “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart;” for it does not by any means follow that Pharaoh did not, on this account, harden his own heart. For this, too, is said of him, after the removal of the fly-plague from the Egyptians, in these words of the Scripture: “And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also; neither would he let the people go.” [Exodus 8:32] Thus it was that both God hardened him by His just judgment, and Pharaoh by his own free will. (On Grace and Free Will, 45 [XXIII] )

68. Hell (Eternal Punishment) It is in vain, then, that some, indeed very many, make moan over the eternal punishment, and perpetual, unintermitted torments of the lost, and say they do not believe it shall be so; . . . (Enchiridion: Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love, 112)

69. Heresies . . . all the heresies have proceeded which deceive by the use of Christian terms. (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, v, 15, 20)

70. Holy Days Celebrate with temperance the birthdays of the Saints, that we may imitate those who have gone before us, . . . (Expositions on the Psalms, 89:52 [89, 41] )

71. Holy Items But, it will be said, we also have very many instruments and vessels made of materials or metal of this description for the purpose of celebrating the Sacraments, which being consecrated by these ministrations are called holy, in honour of Him who is thus worshipped for our salvation: . . . Do we pray unto them, because through them we pray to God? (Expositions on the Psalms, 115:7 [115, 7] )

72. Holy Places; Shrines But in regard to the answers to prayer which are visible to men, who can search out His reasons for appointing some places rather than others to be the scene of miraculous interpositions? To many the holiness of the place in which the body of the blessed Felix is buried is well known, and to this place I desired them to repair; because from it we may receive more easily and more reliably a written account of whatever may be discovered in either of them by divine interposition. (Letters, 78 [3]: to the Church at Hippo [404] )

73. Holy Spirit: Procession of (Filioque Dispute) And yet it is not to no purpose that in this Trinity the Son and none other is called the Word of God, and the Holy Spirit and none other the Gift of God, and God the Father alone is He from whom the Word is born, and from whom the Holy Spirit principally proceeds. And therefore I have added the word principally, because we find that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son also. But the Father gave Him this too, not as to one already existing, and not yet having it; but whatever He gave to the only-begotten Word, He gave by begetting Him. Therefore He so begot Him as that the common Gift should proceed from Him also, and the Holy Spirit should be the Spirit of both. (On the Trinity xv, 17, 29)

74. Homosexual Acts But as regards any part of the body which is not meant for generative purposes, should a man use even his own wife in it, it is against nature and flagitious. Indeed, the same apostle had previously [Romans 9:26] said concerning women: “Even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature;” and then concerning men he added, that they worked that which is unseemly by leaving the natural use of the woman. Therefore, by the phrase in question, “the natural use,” it is not meant to praise conjugal connection; but thereby are denoted those flagitious deeds which are more unclean and criminal than even men’s use of women, which, even if unlawful, is nevertheless natural. (On Marriage and Concupiscence ii, 35 [XX] )

75. Images, Icons, and Statues: Use and Veneration of But in regard to pictures and statues, and other works of this kind, which are intended as representations of things, nobody makes a mistake, especially if they are executed by skilled artists, but every one, as soon as he sees the likenesses, recognizes the things they are likenesses of. (On Christian Doctrine, ii, 39)

76. Indulgences . . . when one is reconciled by the Church, the person so reconciled is loosed in heaven . . . (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 50, 12)

77. Jesus Christ: Supposed “Ignorance” of Certain Matters . . . they ought to have said to Him, whom they knew to be omniscient, “Thou needest not to ask any man,” . . . He, who knew all things, had no need even of that, and as little need had He of discovering by their questions what it was that any one desired to know of Him, for before a question was put, He knew the intention of him who was to put it. (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 103, 2)

78. Jonah and the Whale . . . either all the miracles wrought by divine power may be treated as incredible, or there is no reason why the story of this miracle should not be believed. The resurrection of Christ Himself upon the third day would not be believed by us, if the Christian faith was afraid to encounter Pagan ridicule. . . . I am much surprised that he reckoned what was done with Jonah to be incredible; unless, perchance, he thinks it easier for a dead man to be raised in life from his sepulchre, than for a living man to be kept in life in the spacious belly of a sea monster. . . . with how much greater force might they pronounce it incredible that the three young men cast into the furnace by the impious king walked unharmed in the midst of the flames! (Letters, 102 [30-32]: to Deogratias [409] )

79. Judgment and Works Next, in what manner is that true which He will say unto them whom He will set on his left hand, Go ye into everlnsting fire, which is prepared for the devil and his angels? Whom He rebukes, not because they have not believed in Him, but because they have not done good works. (On Faith and Works, 25)

80. Judgment of Nations Accordingly this seems to me to be one principal reason why the good are chastised along with the wicked, when God is pleased to visit with temporal punishments the profligate manners of a community. They are punished together, not because they have spent an equally corrupt life, but because the good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; . . . (City of God i, 9)

81. Justification, Infused As therefore, for example’s sake, a man who is lamed by a wound is cured in order that his step for the future may be direct and strong, its past infirmity being healed, so does the Heavenly Physician cure our maladies, not only that they may cease any longer to exist, but in order that we may ever afterwards be able to walk aright—to which we should be unequal, even after our healing, except by His continued help. . . . For, just as the eye of the body, even when completely sound, is unable to see unless aided by the brightness of light, so also man, even when most fully justified, is unable to lead a holy life, if he be not divinely assisted by the eternal light of righteousness. God, therefore, heals us not only that He may blot out the sin which we have committed, but, furthermore, that He may enable us even to avoid sinning. (On Nature and Grace, 29 [XXVI] )

82. Lent . . . Christians, not heretics, but Catholics, in order to subdue the body, that the soul may be more humbled in prayer, abstain not only from animal food, but also from some vegetable productions, without, however, believing them to be unclean. A few do this always; and at certain seasons or days, as in Lent, almost all, more or less, according to the choice or ability of individuals. (Against Faustus the Manichee xxx, 5)

83. Marriage: Sacrament . . . in the City of our God, in His Holy Hill, that is, in the Church, wherein of marriage, not the bond alone, but the Sacrament is so set forth, as that it is not lawful for a man to deliver his wife unto another . . . (On Faith and Works, 10)

84. Mary: Mother of God (Theotokos) Moreover, those parties also are to be abhorred who deny that our Lord Jesus Christ had in Mary a mother upon earth; . . . Neither is there anything to compel us to a denial of the mother of the Lord, in the circumstance that this word was spoken by Him: “Woman, what have I to do with you? Mine hour is not yet come.” But He rather admonishes us to understand that, in respect of His being God, there was no mother for Him, the part of whose personal majesty (cujus majestatis personam) He was preparing to show forth in the turning of water into wine. . . . if, on the ground of His having said, “Who is my mother?” every one should conclude that He had no mother on earth, then each should as matter of course be also compelled to deny that the apostles had fathers on earth; since He gave them an injunction in these terms: “Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your Father, which is in heaven.” (Of Faith and the Creed, 4, 9)

85. Mary: New Eve; Second Eve . . . since through a female death had happened unto us, life unto us through a female should be born: that so of either nature, that is, the female and male, the devil being overcome might be put to torment, seeing that he was rejoicing in the overthrow of both; . . . (On the Christian Conflict, 24)

86. Mary: Perpetual Virginity of . . . being born of a mother who, although she conceived without being touched by man and always remained thus untouched . . . (On Catechizing the Uninstructed, 22, 40)

87. Mary: Sinlessness We must except the holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom I wish to raise no question when it touches the subject of sins, out of honour to the Lord; for from Him we know what abundance of grace for overcoming sin in every particular was conferred upon her who had the merit to conceive and bear Him who undoubtedly had no sin. [1 John 3:5] (On Nature and Grace, 42 [XXXVI] )

88. Mary: Virginity In Partu (During Childbirth) The body of the infant Jesus was brought forth from the womb of His mother, still a virgin, by the same power which afterwards introduced His body when He was a man through the closed door into the upper chamber. [John 20:26] (Letters, 137 [2, 8]: to Volusianus [412] )

89. Mass, Daily . . . some partake daily of the body and blood of Christ, others receive it on stated days: in some places no day passes without the sacrifice being offered; . . . (Letters, 54 [2, 2]: to Januarius [400] )

90. Mass, Sacrifice of And hence that true Mediator, in so far as, by assuming the form of a servant, He became the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, though in the form of God He received sacrifice together with the Father, with whom He is one God, yet in the form of a servant He chose rather to be than to receive a sacrifice, . . . Thus He is both the Priest who offers and the Sacrifice offered. And He designed that there should be a daily sign of this in the sacrifice of the Church, which, being His body, learns to offer herself through Him. Of this true Sacrifice the ancient sacrifices of the saints were the various and numerous signs; . . . To this supreme and true sacrifice all false sacrifices have given place. (City of God x, 20)

91. Mass, Sacrifice of (and the Crucifixion) You know that in ordinary parlance we often say, when Easter is approaching, “Tomorrow or the day after is the Lord’s Passion,” although He suffered so many years ago, and His passion was endured once for all time. In like manner, on Easter Sunday, we say, “This day the Lord rose from the dead,” although so many years have passed since His resurrection. But no one is so foolish as to accuse us of falsehood when we use these phrases, for this reason, that we give such names to these days on the ground of a likeness between them and the days on which the events referred to actually transpired, the day being called the day of that event, although it is not the very day on which the event took place, but one corresponding to it by the revolution of the same time of the year, and the event itself being said to take place on that day, because, although it really took place long before, it is on that day sacramentally celebrated.Was not Christ once for all offered up in His own person as a sacrifice? And yet, is He not likewise offered up in the sacrament as a sacrifice, not only in the special solemnities of Easter, but also daily among our congregations . . .? (Letters, 98 [9]: to Boniface [408] )

92. Merit Merit is accumulating now to the believer, and then the reward is paid into the hand of the beholder. . . . As far as each one has been a partaker of You, some less, some more, such will be the diversity of rewards in proportion to the diversity of merits . . . (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 68, 3)

93. Monks and Nuns . . . servants of God, who wished to hold a more lofty degree of sanctity in the Church, in cutting off all ties of secular hope, and dedicating a mind at liberty to their godly service of warfare . . . (On the Work of Monks, 19)

94. Mortification and Self-Denial Emulate each other in prayer with a holy rivalry, with one heart, for you wrestle not against each other, but against the devil, who is the common enemy of all the saints. “By fasting, by vigils, and all mortification of the body, prayer is greatly helped.” [Tobit 12:8] (Letters, 130 [16, 31]: to Proba [412] )

95. Original Sin; Fall of Man It was not I who devised the original sin, which the catholic faith holds from ancient times; but you, who deny it, are undoubtedly an innovating heretic. In the judgment of God, all are in the devil’s power, born in sin, unless they are regenerated in Christ. (On Marriage and Concupiscence ii, 25 [XII] )

96. Orthodoxy (Correct Beliefs) But the right faith of the Catholic Church rejects such a fiction, and perceives it to be a devilish doctrine: . . . Let us therefore reject this kind of error, which the Holy Church has anathematized from the beginning. (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 34, 2)

97. Paganism and Christianity Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said anything that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. . . . take and turn to a Christian use. (On Christian Doctrine, ii, 60)

98. Papacy; Popes For who does not see in what degree Cœlestius was bound by the interrogations of your holy predecessor and by the answers of Cœlestius, whereby he professed that he consented to the letters of Pope Innocent, and fastened by a most wholesome chain, so as not to dare any further to maintain that the original sin of infants is not put away in baptism? . . . What could be more clear or more manifest than that judgment of the Apostolical See? (Against Two Letters of the Pelagians ii, 6 [IV] )

99. Paul the Apostle: Commissioned by the Church Let us beware of such dangerous temptations of pride, and let us rather consider the fact that the Apostle Paul himself, although stricken down and admonished by the voice of God from heaven, was yet sent to a man to receive the sacraments and be admitted into the Church; [Acts 9:3] . . . (On Christian Doctrine, Preface, 6)

100. Penance On this account it is also, either for the demonstration of our debt of misery, or for the amendment of our passing life, or for the exercise of the necessary patience, that man is kept through time in the penalty, even when he is no longer held by his sin as liable to everlasting damnation. (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 124, 5)

101. Peter: Primacy of . . . the Apostle Peter, in whom the primacy of the apostles shines with such exceeding grace, . . . I suppose that there is no slight to Cyprian in comparing him with Peter in respect to his crown of martyrdom; rather I ought to be afraid lest I am showing disrespect towards Peter. For who can be ignorant that the primacy of his apostleship is to be preferred to any episcopate whatever? (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, ii, 1, 2)

102. Prayer (of the Righteous) For one single prayer of one who obeys is sooner heard than ten thousand of a despiser. (On the Work of Monks, 20)

103. Priests; Sacrament of Holy Orders In like manner as if there take place an ordination of clergy in order to form a congregation of people, although the congregation of people follow not, yet there remains in the ordained persons the Sacrament of Ordination; and if, for any fault, any be removed from his office, he will not be without the Sacrament of the Lord once for all set upon him, albeit continuing unto condemnation. (On the Good of Marriage, 32)

104. Priests and “Call No Man ‘Father’” . . . Paul the elder says, “Not to confound you I am writing these things, but as my dearly beloved sons I am admonishing you:” [1 Corinthians 4:14] though he knew of a truth that it had been said by the Lord, “Call ye no man your father on earth, for One is your Father, even God.” [Matthew 23:9] And this was not said in order that this term of human honour should be erased from our usual way of speaking: but lest the grace of God whereby we are regenerated unto eternal life, should be ascribed either to the power or even sanctity of any man. (Expositions on the Psalms, 78:12 [78, 10] )

105. Procreation . . . cohabitation for the purpose of procreating children, which must be admitted to be the proper end of marriage, . . . child-bearing, which is the end and aim of marriage. (On Marriage and Concupiscence i, 16 [XIV] )

106. Purgatory . . . will any man say this time of faith can be placed on an equal footing with that consummation when they who offer sacrifices in righteousness shall be purified by the fire of the last judgment? . . . after the judgment those who are worthy of such purification shall be purified even by fire, and shall be rendered thoroughly sinless, and shall offer themselves to God in righteousness, and be indeed victims immaculate and free from all blemish whatever . . . (City of God xx, 26)

107. Relics For even now miracles are wrought in the name of Christ, whether by His sacraments or by the prayers or relics of His saints . . . The miracle which was wrought at Milan when I was there, and by which a blind man was restored to sight, could come to the knowledge of many; . . . the occurrence was witnessed by an immense concourse of people that had gathered to the bodies of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius, . . . By virtue of these remains the darkness of that blind man was scattered, and he saw the light of day. (City of God xxii, 8)

108. Reprobation; Causes of Damnation God no doubt wishes all men to be saved [1 Timothy 2:4] and to come into the knowledge of the truth; but yet not so as to take away from them free will, for the good or the evil use of which they may be most righteously judged. This being the case, unbelievers indeed do contrary to the will of God when they do not believe His gospel; nevertheless they do not therefore overcome His will, but rob their own selves of the great, nay, the very greatest, good, and implicate themselves in penalties of punishment, destined to experience the power of Him in punishments whose mercy in His gifts they despised. (On the Spirit and the Letter, 58)

109. Roman Primacy For already have two councils on this question been sent to the Apostolic see; and rescripts also have come from thence. The question has been brought to an issue; would that their error may sometime be brought to an issue too! (Sermons on the New Testament, 81, 10 [CXXXI] )

110. Rule of Faith / “Three-Legged Stool” (Bible-Church-Tradition) But those reasons which I have here given, I have either gathered from the authority of the church, according to the tradition of our forefathers, or from the testimony of the divine Scriptures, . . . No sober person will decide against reason, no Christian against the Scriptures, no peaceable person against the church. (On the Trinity iv, 6, 10)

111. Sacramentals and Sacramentalism Sanctification is not of merely one measure; for even catechumens, I take it, are sanctified in their own measure by the sign of Christ, and the prayer of imposition of hands; and what they receive is holy, although it is not the body of Christ—holier than any food which constitutes our ordinary nourishment, because it is a sacrament. (On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism ii, 42)

112. Sacraments . . . that they may be healed of the plague of their sin by the medicine of His sacraments . . . (On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism iii, 8)

113. Sacraments and Grace . . . grace, which is the virtue of the Sacraments, . . . (Expositions on the Psalms, 78:1 [78, 2] )

114. Sacraments and Salvation . . . the sacraments of the Church, without which there is no entrance to the life which is the true life. (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 120, 2)

115. Sacraments: Ex Opere Operato Remember, therefore, that the characters of bad men in no wise interfere with the virtue of the sacraments, so that their holiness should either be destroyed, or even diminished; but that they injure the unrighteous men themselves, that they should have them as witnesses of their damnation, not as aids to health. (Against the Letters of Petilian the Donatist, ii, 47, 110)

116. Saints: Awareness of and Contact with This World Hence too is solved that question, how is it that the Martyrs, by the very benefits which are given to them that pray, indicate that they take an interest in the affairs of men, if the dead know not what the quick are doing. . . . We are not to think then, that to be interested in the affairs of the living is in the power of any departed who please, only because to some men’s healing or help the Martyrs be present: but rather we are to understand that it must needs be by a Divine power that the Martyrs are interested in affairs of the living, from the very fact that for the departed to be by their proper nature interested in affairs of the living is impossible. (On the Care of the Dead, 19)

117. Saints, Communion of For the souls of the pious dead are not separated from the Church, which even now is the kingdom of Christ; otherwise there would be no remembrance made of them at the altar of God in the partaking of the body of Christ, . . . For why are these things practised, if not because the faithful, even though dead, are His members? (City of God xx, 9)

118. Saints, Incorruptible Bodies of . . . the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius, the martyrs (whom You had in Your secret storehouse preserved uncorrupted for so many years), . . . (The Confessions ix, 7, 16)

119. Saints, Intercession of It is true that Christians pay religious honor to the memory of the martyrs, both to excite us to imitate them and to obtain a share in their merits, and the assistance of their prayers. (Against Faustus the Manichee xx, 21)

120. Saints, Invocation of There was a fellow-townsman of ours at Hippo, Florentius, an old man, religious and poor, who supported himself as a tailor. Having lost his coat, and not having means to buy another, he prayed to the Twenty Martyrs, who have a very celebrated memorial shrine in our town, begging in a distinct voice that he might be clothed. . . . he, walking on in silence, saw on the shore a great fish, gasping as if just cast up, . . . on cutting up the fish, the cook found a gold ring in its belly; . . .(City of God xxii, 8)

121. Saints, Veneration of But we build altars not to any martyr, but to the God of martyrs, although it is to the memory of the martyrs. No one officiating at the altar in the saints’ burying-place ever says, We bring an offering to you, O Peter! Or O Paul! Or O Cyprian! The offering is made to God, who gave the crown of martyrdom, while it is in memory of those thus crowned. The emotion is increased by the associations of the place, and love is excited both towards those who are our examples, and towards Him by whose help we may follow such examples. We regard the martyrs with the same affectionate intimacy that we feel towards holy men of God in this life, when we know that their hearts are prepared to endure the same suffering for the truth of the gospel. There is more devotion in our feeling towards the martyrs, because we know that their conflict is over; and we can speak with greater confidence in praise of those already victors in heaven, than of those still combating here. (Against Faustus the Manichee xx, 21)

122. Sanctification But it may be inquired how they were no more of the world, if they were not yet sanctified in the truth; or, if they already were, why He requests that they should be so. Is it not because even those who are sanctified still continue to make progress in the same sanctification, and grow in holiness; and do not so without the aid of God’s grace, but by His sanctifying of their progress, even as He sanctified their outset? And hence the apostle likewise says: “He who has begun a good work in you, will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” [Philippians 1:6] (Lectures on the Gospel of John, 108, 2)

123. Scripture: Canon of . . . to maintain this opposition he must bring evidence in support of his statement from writings acknowledged by the Church as canonical and catholic, not from any writings he pleases. In the matters of which we are now treating, only the canonical writings have any weight with us; for they only are received and acknowledged by the Church spread over all the world, which is itself a fulfillment of the prophecies regarding it contained in these writings. (Against Faustus the Manichee xxiii, 9)

124. Scripture: Perspicuity (Clearness of) For many meanings of the holy Scriptures are concealed, and are known only to a few of singular intelligence . . . (Expositions on the Psalms, 68:30 [68, 36] )

125. Scripture: Septuagint (Ancient Greek Translation) . . . the Septuagint translators, who, being themselves under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in their translation . . . (On Christian Doctrine, iv, 15) [the Septuagint included the deuterocanonical books]

126. Sin: Mortal and Venial He, however, is not unreasonably said to walk blamelessly, not who has already reached the end of his journey, but who is pressing on towards the end in a blameless manner, free from damnable sins, and at the same time not neglecting to cleanse by almsgiving such sins as are venial. (On Man’s Perfection in Righteousness, 9, 20)

127. Sola Scriptura (Falsity of) For if none have baptism who entertain false views about God, it has been proved sufficiently, in my opinion, that this may happen even within the Church. “The apostles,” indeed, “gave no injunctions on the point;” but the custom, which is opposed to Cyprian, may be supposed to have had its origin in apostolic tradition, just as there are many things which are observed by the whole Church, and therefore are fairly held to have been enjoined by the apostles, which yet are not mentioned in their writings. (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, v, 23, 31)

128. Suffering, Redemptive (Participation in Christ’s Suffering) . . . whatsoever thing you suffer from those that are not in the members of Christ, was wanting to the sufferings of Christ. Therefore it is added because it was wanting; you fill up the measure, you cause it not to run over: you suffer so much as was to be contributed out of your sufferings to the whole suffering of Christ, that has suffered in our Head, and does suffer in His members, that is, in our own selves. (Expositions on the Psalms, [62, 2])

129. Synergy: Cooperation with God’s Grace as “Co-Laborers” . . . the grace of God, which does work not only remission of sins, but also does make the spirit of man to work together therewith in the work of good deeds, . . . To believe in God therefore is this, in believing to cleave unto God who works good works, in order to work with Him well. (Expositions on the Psalms, 78:8 [78, 7] )

130. Theosis; Divinization For this thing God does, out of sons of men He makes sons of God: because out of Son of God He has made Son of Man. See what this participation is: there has been promised to us a participation of Divinity: . . . For the Son of God has been made partaker of mortality, in order that mortal man may be made partaker of divinity. . . . He that to you has promised divinity, shows in you love. (Expositions on the Psalms, 53:3 [53, 5] )

131. Total Depravity (Falsity of); Human Nature . . . no one is evil by nature, but whoever is evil is evil by vice . . . (City of God xiv, 6)

132. Tradition, Apostolic But such a Council had not yet been held [in the third century], because the whole world was bound together by the powerful bond of custom; and this was deemed sufficient to oppose to those who wished to introduce what was new, because they could not comprehend the truth. (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, ii, 9, 14)

133. Tradition, Oral And this custom, coming, I suppose, from tradition (like many other things which are held to have been handed down under their actual sanction, because they are preserved throughout the whole Church, though they are not found either in their letters, or in the Councils of their successors), . . . (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, ii, 7, 12)

134. Works, Good (in Grace) If the love of the Father abide not in you, you are not born of God. How do you boast to be a Christian? You have the name, and hast not the deeds. But if the work shall follow the name, let any call you pagan, show by deeds that you are a Christian. For if by deeds you do not show yourself a Christian, all men may call you a Christian yet; what does the name profit you where the thing is not forthcoming? (Homilies on the First Epistle of John, 5, 12)

135. Worship (Latria) What is properly divine worship, which the Greeks call latria, and for which there is no word in Latin, both in doctrine and in practice, we give only to God. . . . holy beings themselves, whether saints or angels, refuse to accept what they know to be due to God alone. (Against Faustus the Manichee xx, 21)

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2020-05-18T10:53:23-04:00

JesusRembrandt

Head of Christ (c. 1648), by Rembrandt (1606-1669) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

* * *

Alphabetical by Author

JESUS: DIVINITY OR DEITY OF 

 

Jesus is God: Biblical Proofs (Dave Armstrong, 1982)

The Validity of a Categorical Syllogism Supporting Christ’s Deity (Francis J. Beckwith, 1986)

Jesus Christ, God Manifest: Titus 2:13 Revisited (Robert M. Bowman, Jr., 2008)

The Deity of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels (Daniel Doriani, 1994)

Jesus as God in the Second Century  (Paul Hartog, 2006)

Cosmic Christology and Colossians 1:15-20 (Larry L. Helyer, 1994)

God-Christ Interchange in Paul: Impressive Testimony to the Deity of Jesus (Don N. Howell, Jr., 1993)

Incarnation and Christology (Peter van Inwagen, 1998)

The Divinity of Christ (Peter Kreeft, 1988)

The Preexistence of Christ Revisited (Douglas McReady, 1997)

The Self-Understanding of Jesus: Synoptics (Glenn Miller)

The Self-Understanding of Jesus: Gospel of John (Glenn Miller)

Responses to Jesus in the Gospels (Glenn Miller)

Literary Responses to Jesus in the writings of the NT (+ Part II) (Glenn Miller)

The NT Witness: Other data relative to the deity of Jesus (Glenn Miller)

Summary–The Deity of Jesus Christ (Glenn Miller)

Pushbacks: Problems in the NT Witness to Jesus (Glenn Miller)

Does Jesus’ submission to the Father disprove His deity? (Glenn Miller)

The Messiah and the Hebrew Bible (John H. Sailhammer, 2001)

The Man Jesus Christ (Bruce A. Ware, 2010)

A New Occurrence of the Divine Name, “I Am” (Ronald Youngblood, 1972)

 

JESUS: HISTORICAL SUPPORT

 

Jesus Seminar Should Go Back to School (Jimmy Akin, 1996)

Archaeology & Jesus’ Baptism “Beyond the Jordan” (Dave Armstrong, 2014)

Archaeology & St. Peter’s House in Capernaum (Dave Armstrong, 2014)

Locations of Jesus’ Crucifixion, Tomb, & the Via Dolorosa (Dave Armstrong, 2014)

Who does the Jesus Seminar really speak for? (Craig L. Blomberg, 1994)

Early Historical Documents on Jesus Christ (Catholic Encyclopedia)

“You Can’t Trust the Gospels. They’re Unreliable” (Paul Copan)

Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar (William Lane Craig, 1998)

Establishing the Gospels’ Reliability (William Lane Craig, 2007)

The Gnostic Gospels [Elaine Pagels]: a Review Article (Wayne S. Flory, 1981)

Basis for the Historical Jesus (Lewis A. Foster, 1963)

The Gospels As Historical Sources For Jesus, The Founder Of Christianity (R. T. France)

Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? (book by Maurice Goguel, 1926)

Gnosticism and the Gnostic Jesus (Douglas Groothuis, 1990)

A Summary Critique: Questioning the Existence of Jesus [G. A. Wells] (Gary R. Habermas, 2000)

Recent Perspectives on the Reliability of the Gospels (Gary R. Habermas, 2005)

The Corrected Jesus (Richard B. Hays, 1994)

The Search for Jesus Hoax (Hank Hanegraaff, 2000)

Qumran Evidence for the Reliability of the Gospels (Larry W. Hurtado, 1968)

The Historical Jesus According to John Dominic Crossan’s First Strata Sources: A Critical Comment (Dennis Ingolfsland, 2002)

Jesus and the “Earliest Sources” (Dennis Ingolfsland, 2003)

The Historicity of Jesus Christ (Wayne Jackson)

The Reliability of History in John’s Gospel (Thomas D. Lea, 1995)

Extrabiblical Witnesses to Jesus before 200 A.D.  (Glenn Miller, 1996)

What about the Gospel of Thomas? (Glenn Miller, 1996)

The “Jesus Seminar”: The Quest for the “Imaginary Jesus” (Brian Onken, 1986)

Did Jesus Exist? Books for Refuting the Jesus Myth (Christopher Price)

Did Josephus Refer to Jesus?: A Thorough Review of the Testimonium Flavianum (Christopher Price, 2003)

Scholarly Opinions on the Jesus Myth (Christopher Price, 2003)

A History of Scholarly Refutations of the Jesus Myth (Christopher Price, 2003)

Review of Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Robert J. Rabel, 2000)

Defending the New Testament Jesus (Lee Strobel, 2007)

Evangelical Responses to the Jesus Seminar (Robert L. Thomas, 1996)

Review Article of Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman (Daniel B. Wallace, 2006)

The Jesus Seminar and the Gospel of Thomas (James R. White)

The Jesus Seminar (Jimmy Williams, 1996)

The Gnostics and History (Edwin Yamauchi, 1971)

 

JESUS: RESURRECTION

 

The Resurrection of Jesus: a Clinical Review of Psychiatric Hypotheses for the Biblical Story of Easter (Joseph W. Bergeron, M.D. & Gary R. Habermas)

Visions of Jesus: A Critical Assessment of Gerd Lüdemann’s Hallucination Hypothesis (William Lane Craig)

The Disciples’ Inspection of the Empty Tomb (William Lane Craig, 1992)

Debate: Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus? (William Lane Craig vs. Bart Ehrman, March 2006)

‘Noli Me Tangere’: Why John Meier Won’t Touch The Risen Lord (William Lane Craig, 2009)

The Witness of the Pre-Pauline Tradition to the Empty Tomb (William Lane Craig, 2010)

In Defense of the Resurrection (Norman L. Geisler, 1991)

The Shroud of Turin and its Significance for Biblical Studies (Gary R. Habermas, 1981)

The Shroud of Turin: A Rejoinder to Basinger and Basinger (Gary R. Habermas, 1982)

Resurrection Claims in Non-Christian Religions (Gary R. Habermas, 1989)

Jesus’ Resurrection and Contemporary Criticism (+ Part II) (Gary. R. Habermas, 1989 and 1990)

Explaining Away Jesus’ Resurrection: The Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories (Gary R. Habermas, 2001)

The Late 20th-Century Resurgence of Naturalistic Responses to Jesus’ Resurrection (Gary R. Habermas, 2001)

Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What are Critical Scholars Saying? (Gary R. Habermas, 2005)

Experiences of the Risen Jesus: The Foundational Historical Issue (Gary R. Habermas, 2006)

The Lost Tomb of Jesus: A Response to the Discovery-Channel Documentary Directed by James Cameron  (Gary R. Habermas, 2007)

Dale Allison’s Resurrection Skepticism: A Critique (Gary R. Habermas, 2008)

The Minimal Facts Approach to the Resurrection of Jesus: The Role of Methodology as a Crucial Component in Establishing Historicity (Gary R. Habermas, 2012)

The F-E-A-T That Demonstrates the Fact of Resurrection (Hank Hanegraaff, 1998)

Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ (Peter Kreeft, 1994)

Eliminating the Impossible: Can a Scientist believe the Resurrection? (John Lennox, 2014)

Making the Case for the Resurrection at 36,000 Feet (Michael Licona, 2006)

Collapsing the House of Cards Over the “Lost Tomb of Jesus” (Paul L. Maier, 2007)

Evidence for the Resurrection (Josh McDowell, 1992)

The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (Lydia & Timothy McGrew, 2009)

Resurrected as Messiah: The Risen Christ as Prophet, Priest, and King (Gavin Ortlund, 2011)

Was the Tomb Really Empty? (Robert H. Stein, 1977)

The Probability of the Resurrection of Jesus (Richard Swinburne, 2012)

Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History? (Edwin M. Yamauchi, 1974)

 

MIRACLES

 

New Testament Miracles and Higher Criticism (Craig L. Blomberg, 1984)

Review of Colin Brown, Miracles and the Critical Mind (William Lane Craig, 1984)

The Problem Of Miracles: A Historical And Philosophical Perspective (William Lane Craig, 1986)

Creation, Providence, and Miracle (William Lane Craig, 1998)

On Hume’s Philosophical Case Against Miracles (Daniel Howard-Snyder)

Of “Of Miracles” (Peter van Inwagen, 1997)

Miracles and the Laws of Nature (Robert A. Larmer, 2015)

Do Miracles Require Extraordinary Evidence? (Robert A. Larmer, 2015)

Miracles and the Progress of Science (Robert A. Larmer, 2015)

Miracles as Evidence for God (Robert A. Larmer, 2015)

Miracles and Christian Apologetics (Robert A. Larmer, 2015)

Did the NT authors invent the miracle stories in the gospels? (Glenn Miller, 2002)

Were the Miracles of Jesus invented by the Disciples/Evangelists? (Glenn Miller, 2002)

The Miracles of Jesus: A Historical Inquiry (Christopher Price, 2004)

 

PROPHECY, BIBLICAL

 

Reply to Atheist “ProfMTH” on Alleged Misuse of OT Messianic Prophecies (+ Part II / Part III) (Dave Armstrong, 2010)

When Prophecy Appears to Fail, Check Your Hermeneutic (Robert Chisholm, 2010)

The Old Testament as Messianic Prophecy (Robert D. Culver, 1964)

Micah 5.2: The Bethlehem Issue (Glenn Miller)

Does Micah 5 speak about the birth-place of the Messiah, or only His birth-family? (Glenn Miller)

The Fulfillment of Prophecy (Glenn Miller, 1997)

Did Jesus Fail to Fulfill all the Messianic Prophecies? (Glenn Miller, 2000)

Is Isaiah 53:10 more likely referring to Israel than to Jesus? (Glenn Miller, 2001)

The Isaiah 7:14 passage [Virgin Birth] (Glenn Miller, 2002)

Messianic Prophecies (Glenn Miller, 2006)

The Arrangement of Jeremiah’s Prophecies (J. Barton Payne, 1964)

 

SCRIPTURE: HISTORICAL RELIABILITY OF / ARCHAEOLOGICAL SUPPORT

 

Debate on the “Last Days” / Was the Author of Hebrews a False Prophet? (Dave Armstrong vs. Ed Babinski, 2006)

Dialogue on the Documentary Theory of Biblical Authorship (JEPD) and of Dissenting Liberal Hermeneutics Generally (Dave Armstrong, 2007)

Alleged Bible “Contradictions” and “Difficulties”: Master List of Christian Internet Resources for Apologists (Links) (Dave Armstrong, 2010)

The Documentary Theory of the Authorship of the Pentateuch: Collection of Critical Articles (Links) (Dave Armstrong, 2010)

Reply to Atheist “ProfMTH”: Is the Biblical Paul Self-Contradictory? (Dave Armstrong, 2010)

Debate with “DagoodS” on Skepticism Regarding the Ancient Hittites (+ Part II / Part III / Part IV) (Dave Armstrong, 2011)

Archaeology & Joshua’s Altar on Mt. Ebal (Dave Armstrong, 2014)

Sodom & Gomorrah & Archaeology: North of the Dead Sea? (Dave Armstrong, 2014)

Manuscript Evidence: NT vs. Plato, Etc. (Dave Armstrong, 2015)

The Census and Quirinius: Luke 2:2 (Wayne Brindle, 1984)

Disunity and Diversity: The Biblical Theology of Bart Ehrman (Josh Chatraw, 2011)

The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch (Duane L. Christensen & Marcel Narucki, 1989)

Jesus and the Inspiration of Scripture (Gary R. Habermas, 2002)

Christians and Archaeology (Daniel L. Hoffman, 2004)

Facts for Skeptics of the New Testament (Greg Koukl, 2004)

Biblical Archaeology: Factual Evidence to Support the Historicity of the Bible  (Paul L. Maier, 2004)

The Faulty Criticism of Biblical Historicity (Paul L. Maier, 2004)

Christian ‘bias’ in the NT Writers– Does it render the NT unreliable or inadmissible as evidence? (Glenn Miller, 1996)

On the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (Glenn Miller, 1997)

Was the Pentateuch “adulterated” by later additions? (Glenn Miller, 1998)

A Critique of Certain Uncritical Assumptions in Modern Historiography (John Warwick Montgomery, 1997)

Historical Narrative and Truth in the Bible (Grant R. Osborne, 2005)

Earl Doherty and the Apostolic Tradition (Christopher Price, 2003)

Are the Biblical Documents Reliable? (Jimmy Williams, 1995)

The Rise and Fall of the 13th-Century Exodus-Conquest Theory (Bryant G. Wood, 2005)

The Biblical Date for the Exodus is 1446 B.C. (Bryant G. Wood, 2007)

A Critical Analysis of the Evidence from Ralph Hawkins for a Late-Date Exodus-Conquest (Rodger C. Young & Bryant G. Wood, 2008)

***

All links verified as working: 6-10-18

 

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