There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.

Sometime c. 1267 Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote a short piece De regno ad regem Cypri or On Kingship To The King of Cyprus. The quotes above come from book 1, chapter 11, paragraph 77 in fuller context and a slightly different translation (the Latin is also included at the link above):

First of all, among all worldly things there is nothing which seems worthy to be preferred to friendship. Friendship unites good men and preserves and promotes virtue. Friendship is needed by all men in whatsoever occupations they engage. In prosperity it does not thrust itself unwanted upon us, nor does it desert us in adversity. It is what brings with it the greatest delight, to such an extent that all that pleases is changed to weariness when friends are absent, and all difficult things are made easy and as nothing by love.

I’ve been reading a book recently that demonstrates this point, The Oxford Inklings: Their Lives, Writings, Ideas, and Influence by Colin Duriez.  Friendship, good friendship unites us and preserves and promotes virtue.  Certainly it did so for C. S. Lewis and his friends. J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and more.  Friendship allows the safety to explore and test ideas and to grow. It was the Christian commitments of his friends, men he could argue with, getting below the surface level discussion that brought Lewis (back) to Christ and church.

Materialism was sweeping the academic landscape as Lewis returned to Oxford after the first World War and matured as a scholar.   Lewis accepted this as liberating. In Surprised by Joy he writes:

In my first two years at Oxford I was busily engaged (apart from “doing Mods” and “beginning Greats”) in assuming what we may call an intellectual “New Look.” There was to be no more pessimism, no more self-pity, no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions. In a word, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, I formed the resolution “of always judging and acting in future with the greatest good sense.” (p. 199, Surprised by Joy)

Those who’ve read Northanger Abbey (one of my favorite Jane Austen books) will get the allusion. No romantic delusions. For Lewis this meant  no God.

Lewis and his friends would discuss philosophical ideas at length and, as steel sharpens steel, resulted in better formed arguments and changed perspectives. Owen Barfield had embraced Christian ideas (with an “interesting” twist) and the “Great War” between Lewis and Barfield over these ideas played an important role in Lewis’s eventual conversion.

Barfield’s arguments in their incessant “Great War” began to erode Lewis’s espousal of the “New Look.” Under his influence, Lewis saw that a dominant myth of his time was that of progress. Change itself had a supreme value in the modern world. … He came to see, however, that the “New Look” had the effect of blinding us to the past. One important consequence is that we lose any perspective upon what is good and what is bad in our own time. He explained in Surprised by Joy, “Barfield … made short work of what I have called my ‘chronological snobbery,’ the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” (p. 71-72)

Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, and Lewis, at the time an atheist, would also talk long into the night or meet regularly in the morning, with conversations that ranged far and wide. His friendship with Tolkien broke down prejudices and “proved crucial to his abandonment of atheism and conversion to Christianity.”(p. 104)  They led him to see the inadequacies and inconsistencies of his views.

Many of the details of Lewis’s conversion are interesting, and relevant yet today in a world (at least an academic world) where secular materialism is in the air we breathe and water we drink. His conversations with Tolkien helped convince Lewis that myths are “essential for coming into contact with reality: it is a mistake to regard them simply as “lies” or mere fictions.” (p. 121) Lewis later referred to the incarnation as myth become fact. In an essay now included in God in the Dock he wrote “Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.” (p. 58 God in the Dock). However, although the content of the conversations between Tolkien and Lewis, or Lewis and others of his friends, played an important role, the crucial central role was played by true friendships which allowed for these conversations in the first place.

Though hugely generous with his friendship, much later in life Lewis wrote of his appreciation of having a group of Christian friends in particular. He saw them as participating in a feast in which God “has spread the board and it is he who has chosen the guests.” (p. 124-125)

The gift of friendship is a gift to be cherished, facilitated, and nourished. With friendship comes the opportunity to talk, to disagree, to grow. Friendship is nourished through shared meals, walks (a favorite pastime of Lewis’s), and in other informal settings.

We need friends, groups of friends.

I’ll come back to this theme in a later post covering the rest of Duriez’s book, the 30’s, the war years, and beyond.

What role should friendship play in our lives and churches?

What can we do to create space for friendship?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

This post is by Jonathan Storment in his series on the seven deadly sins, this one on gluttony.

“Their god is their stomach.” –St. Paul

When I was in college, I interned at a large church in Texas, and on one day I happened to be the only “minister” in the building.  A man had walked in needing some pastoral help, and the administrative assistant asked me to talk to him.  That was a mistake.

The man was twice my age, and obviously distraught, and after a few uncomfortable moments of chit-chat here is what he told me.  Every night he waits for his wife to go to sleep, and then he creeps out of the bedroom and gets in his car and he drives to several different drive-thru stops to order copious amounts of food.

He doesn’t get all the food at any one drive-thru because of his embarrassment about how much he is going to eat.  Then he finishes his meal by going to Denny’s and ordering one or two meals.  He had been doing this for the past 6 months and when he came to church for help, he had put on well over 50 pounds.  And now he was telling me, a 20 year old junior, his story.  I knew enough to ask something like, “Why do you think you do this?”

He told me that it was because his wife beat him.  I think I said something pastorally sensitive like, “That’s messed up man.  Let’s pray.”

I tell you that rather extreme story because it is easy to see when some people have a bad relationship with food.  But what Christians call the vice of gluttony isn’t really about overeating, it is about loving food in the wrong way.  I never thought I was a glutton, now I am starting to wonder if I know anyone who isn’t.

C.S. Lewis, in his book, Mere Christianity famously made the comparison of lusting after a woman to a craving for food.  You have probably heard this quote before:

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

I have always loved that metaphor.  I have recently started to realize that it is no longer hyperbole.

Beyond C.S. Lewis’ wildest dreams these days we actually can and do gather a large audience to watch food.  We have entire channels set aside for it, and have wildly popular shows about cooking and eating (even the people who work in these shows see the problem with them).  We use the term “food porn” to talk about our relationship to food.  We are a land of gluttons.

Now when I say gluttony, you probably have some images that come to mind:  The unrecognizable obese person that the evening news shows walking in B-roll footage (but only from the neck down), or that cousin who just shovels it down at Thanksgiving.

And hey, at least that idea of gluttony is relevant.  Of all the Seven Deadly Sins, it seems that this is the only one that the world and Christianity agree.  This, everyone knows is a sin.  Western Culture, after all, despises the overweight, those pitiful souls who don’t have chiseled abs or a certain size waist.  We punish those people who can’t push away from the table.

Will Willimon points out that a recent study shows that eleven percent of Americans would abort a fetus if they were told that the fetus had a tendency toward obesity.  Elementary school children say that they are more judgmental toward the fat kid in class than they are toward a bully.  Studies have shown that an overweight person is at a distinct disadvantage in being hired for a job when compared with someone who is not overweight.  The problem is that for most of us, the thing that bothers us about gluttony is not the sin but the fat.  But this is a thin view of sin.  Because the way Christianity describes this vice, most gluttons are thin.

C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, points out that with gluttony the problem is not so much the quantity but the quality of our consumption.  At one point Screwtape, the head demon, coaching another demon gives him an example of how they had managed to get an older woman caught in this vice without her knowing.

[When it comes to food] what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate, to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern? [We have] this old woman well in hand. She is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demur little sigh and smile, “Oh, please, please . . . all I want is a cup of tea, weak, but not too weak, the teeniest weenniest bit of really crisp toast.” You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others… . . . The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which [the devil] has been doing for years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her belly now dominates her whole life. The woman is in what may be called the “All-I-want” state of mind.

Gluttony isn’t just about eating too much, it is about thinking about food and particularly self too much.  Now suddenly a whole new dimension of how this sin works opens up doesn’t it?  Many gluttons are very thin.  The problem with gluttony isn’t loving food.  It is loving food too much, or in the wrong ways.  And the punishment fits the crime, because we are a culture that loves food too much, we are also a culture that is losing the ability to appreciate it.  We eat fast, we eat alone, we eat watching television (sometimes about better food) or while staring at our phones.

Rebecca DeYoung says it this way:

Gluttony’s excessive pursuit of the pleasures of the table eventually dulls our appreciation for the food we eat, the pleasure we take in eating it, those with whom we eat, and the God who created what we eat and gave us the ability to take pleasure in it…Who will appreciate a simple piece of cheese more—one who eats several Big Macs every day, or one who has just undergone a Lenten fast, abstaining from meat and dairy for several weeks?  It is easy to misunderstand fasting as a practice that devalues eating and food or regards it as evil. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I think it is indicative that Christianity calls gluttony a vice, when Jesus was known for his banquets and feasts.  But the Jesus who was rumored to be a glutton started his ministry with fasting.

God made a good world filled with food that was meant to be enjoyed.  One of God’s first commandments was for us to eat, and the first sin was what and how we chose to eat.  We were made to both feast and fast.

Augustine once asked whether are we willing to do without pleasure if it is asked of us?  Are we overly attached to our comforts?

I think the answer to that is found on our plates, and these days, often our DVR.

Revising language is inherent to revising our approach to the issues. So says John Stackhouse in Partners in Christ: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism. This will entail inclusive language when appropriate in the Bible’s translations into English.

Language matters, and it matters immensely. It expresses and then shapes the world into which we speak.

John begins by observing what happened with mid 20th Century feminism and language, and the big point must not be missed: language carries codes, the codes can be come invisible, and the codes can be oppressive. This is true at the theoretical level, leaving open that not all agree with each language change. I (SMcK) think this has at times gone too far in the elite culture in the Western world, but that’s for another day and another set of conversations. Back to the Bible and inclusive language and how mid 20th Century feminists opened the door:

Likewise, mid-twentieth-century feminists successfully pressed for changes in standard English usage in at least two key respects. First, male terms, which had traditionally been used to refer both particularly to men and generally to all human beings, were restricted to the former usage only. “Man” was replaced by “humanity,” “his” by “his or hers,” and so on. Inclusive language is now required by all standard style guides as simply correct (= conventional) English. Second, the titles “Miss” and “Mrs.” were largely, if not universally, replaced by the single title “Ms.,” a pseudo-abbreviation (for it corresponded to no longer noun) that was simply meant as a female counterpart to “Mr.” No longer, that is, would a woman be characterized immediately by her marital status as if that were the most important thing to know about a woman on encountering her (136-137).

This, along with the inclusive translations like the NRSV, spawned the complementarian (or patriarchal) movement at the lead of John Piper and Wayne Grudem, not institutionalized in the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Stackhouse tells some of this story:

Most significant and widespread among Protestants was the criticism of the Revised Standard Version (rsv) when it was issued in the 1950s. Many Christians thought that this translation manifested an ominous theological agenda: a liberal agenda, in fact, that challenged the proper interpretation of such key doctrines as the virgin birth (so Is 7:14 and the translation “a young woman” instead of “a virgin”) and the atonement (so 1 Jn 2:2 and 4:10 and the milder word “expiation” substituted for the King James Versions “propitiation”). Other Christians, however, were not convinced that the RSV was unfaithful to the Greek and Hebrew texts, and so used it as a helpful alternative to the archaic—and therefore often more misleading—English expressions of the KJV (138).

Ironical that Piper and Grudem were perceived as progressives in favoring the RSV when many conservatives of that day saw it as as the progressive Bible. So when the NRSV came out with its inclusive language, most evangelicals happily remained oblivious to a liberalizing of the already liberal Bible! Except Piper and Grudem, who saw the signs of a feminist revolution. The battle became fixed on inclusive language: should it be “brothers” or “brothers and sisters”?

The whole thing took on colossal importance (for some) when the NIV came out with the TNIV (or the UK’s earlier version, NIVI) for it had inclusive language — the translation leader was complementarian Douglas J. Moo. (Another irony got folded into the former one.) Grudem has been a fierce critic of the NIV, preferring instead his ESV (a revision of the RSV).

Stackhouse observes that all translations have some infelicities; translation is always approximate; and gender language is notoriously difficult because culture shifts constantly. Small changes, he says, are relatively minor most of the time though some make too much of them. How big are these small changes? Stackhouse:

Enough to warrant blasting a new version with a shotgun and mailing it back to the publisher? Enough to sanction financial threats to a Bible society if they don’t cease producing the offending version? Enough to justify the dismissal of a seminary professor involved in the translation project a year before his retirement? Enough to keep a new translation out of the hands of people who would welcome it both for their own reading and for sharing the gospel with friends who might be very sensitive to gender questions? (All of these have happened during the course of this controversy.)

Conservative New Testament scholar D. A. Carson describes the disproportionate reaction of some critics as “Bible rage” (140).

Including slippery slope accusations that inclusive language will lead to goddess worship. All of this is simply wrong headed ideology and fearmongering … no goddess worship yet in any translation. We might just note here that the Gospel writers translated Jesus’ Aramaic and Hebrew words into Greek, often differently and surely at times more loosely than other times, and we’re fine with Jesus himself being translated.

The issue here is social and political agendas. Stackhouse: “the explicitly antifeminist patriarchalism so important to these critics” (141).

Oxford’s Beauty, Mystery, and Pressures

Ryan Pemberton is the author of Called: My Journey to C.S. Lewis’s House and Back Again.  It is a moving memoir about the beauty, mystery, and pressures of being a student at Oxford University.  If a good book is measured by whether it makes you choke back tears or laugh out loud, then this book qualifies, as it did both for me.  Pemberton serves as Minister for University Engagement at First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California.

The interview was conducted by David George Moore.  Dave blogs at www.twocities.org.

Moore: Give our readers a general feel for what your book is about.

Pemberton: Called is a story about what it was like to wake up and go to bed night after night with this deep feeling that I was supposed to be doing something very different with my life, to make a dramatic change not only in terms of my career, but also in terms of my general life direction. It’s a story about what unfolded after I took this step in faith that I never could have seen coming. Called is as much a story about failure as it is about success, and it asks what it looks like to be called, specifically as a Christian, in the midst of all of that.

I wasn’t completely comfortable with how many Christian writers were writing about calling as I was wrestling with my own questions on calling, and I was also feeling like my own personal experience forced me to think about calling in a different way than when I first left home, community, and career to pursue what I believed to be God’s call. I wrote this book to get at all of that, and to say, “Maybe this will help you.”

Moore: When and how did you know you wanted to be a writer?  More accurately, how did you know you were a writer even before publishing anything?

Pemberton: This was a process for me, a series of moments, rather than any one particular moment. I had a longtime fascination with words growing up—spelling them over and over again, feeling their texture on my tongue. I loved English in school, and writing stories especially, though I never considered writing as something I’d spend my free-time doing, especially not for pay. But I remember this moment in my first job out of college when I realized I was not only being paid to help my clients tell their stories, I actually really enjoyed this work. That was an important moment for me. I was also beginning to write for myself around this same time, though I wasn’t thinking of writing as a vocation—it was therapeutic for me, getting to write what I wanted to write about. The only person I shared this with at the time was my wife. Jen was the first person who encouraged me that writing was worth my time. She began sharing my work with others, which led to more and more encouragement. That kept me taking writing seriously when otherwise I’m not sure I would’ve thought much of it. There were other moments: my sister-in-law Hayley reading and sharing my words with others just before her unexpected death and getting some of the responses I did from those whose job it is to know quality writing. It was a struggle for a long time, actually, admitting that I not only wanted to be a writer, but that I somehow was a writer; I talk more about that process of realization in my book.

Moore: You mention how Lewis was such an enthusiastic teacher.  How has his love for conveying truth in a winsome and creative way influenced your own teaching?

Pemberton: I’m not so sure I would say it was C. S. Lewis’s love for what he did that influenced me, but simply experiencing how he did it. It was feeling the impact of Lewis using his creativity and his razor-sharp logic to ask the difficult questions of life and faith in Christ; it was reading his best attempt to help others come to a response to these questions; and it was his willingness to say, after all of that, “That’s the best I can do. If it’s not helpful, throw it out.” That’s what left such a mark on me, personally; seeing Lewis use his God-given gifts to help others look at the world through the lens of Christ’s in-breaking, reconciling work, and showing the difference this made for all of life. My gifts are different than Lewis’s, so my work will necessarily look different, but my aim is pretty similar. And that winsome, intellectual humility that Lewis modeled so well is something I try to emulate, though even there I go about it differently. Lewis has courage that I lack.

Moore: Walter Hooper, Lewis’s longtime secretary, has a habit of writing everyone’s name down when he first meets them.  How has this influenced the value you place on each and every individual?

Pemberton: I know what you’re talking about—Walter’s habit of writing down names of those he has just met—but I’m not so sure that specific act has influenced me. I don’t write down names, but Walter is a master of hospitality, and part of that comes simply from attending to people well. On that note, I think Walter has rubbed off on me, because I’ve been a recipient of his generous hospitality. Sometimes that comes simply from doing all I can to remember names, but other times it means taking the time to learn people’s stories, which Walter did with me, and which meant so much. Walter was a dear friend to me when I needed one—showing up in a foreign city, being dreadfully intimidated by Oxford and the people there—and when his life was already so full! I would like to think that he has helped me be a better friend to people I’ve only just met.

Moore: Michael Ward (aka “Spud”)said you might best fit as a “bridge” between academia and the church.  Do you think his counsel is accurate?

Pemberton: It’s funny, that was one of the most pointedly true, even prophetic things that anyone has ever said to me. I’ve chewed on that line for years. I think what Spud was getting at was that my work would be the work of interpretation. And even when I didn’t know exactly what that would look like, I knew Spud’s words were true, somehow. I have never thought I was being called to be a traditional, Sunday morning pulpit minister. Nor, however, did I see my role squarely in the academy. Somehow I felt like my work was going to be more for the general public than for my scholarly peers. Even though I am quite happy to be doing that scholarly work, I felt like I wouldn’t be respecting God’s call were my work not to be reaching someone who would never be interested in scholarship. And so, yeah, that has left me in a funny, in-between spot. This word was more challenging than helpful for a long-time, but now that I’m in the role I’m in—employed by a church in a highly educated, predominantly secular city, working with those who spend most of their time in the world of higher education—Spud’s words feel prophetic.

Moore: You heard from a Dominican priest that “Good theology makes us do something.”  How does this inform your present ministry?

Pemberton: One of my favorite C. S. Lewis quotes is “I warned you that theology is practical.” Karl Barth talks about the Subject of Christian theology as the God who condescends into lived experience. One of my favorite professors from Duke Divinity School when I was there, Dr. Willie Jennings, used to say all the time, “Put this on the ground.” That’s what theology is to me: practical, embodied, “on the ground.” Or else, what are we doing? I’m just as tempted to get lost in my head, lost in abstractions, as anyone, but I don’t think we get that privilege when it comes to theology. If we’ve missed that “on-the-ground-ness” of theology, we’ve missed the point, somehow. That’s central to any and all of the work I do, anytime I am talking God, about the life of faith. I am constantly trying to encourage the students I work with, for example, to think about the difference Christ makes for their life here, in this city, of all places, at this time, of all times.

Moore: You studied theology at Oxford and Duke Divinity.  They have very different philosophies of learning.  Oxford’s culminates in several big tests at the end of one’s studies.   Duke, like most American schools, has discrete semesters or quarters where you get closure on those classes and then move on to a new set of courses.  Which one do you think better facilitates learning?

Pemberton: Pedagogy is not something I spend much time thinking about. Obviously the Oxford model has been around for a long time, and it’s not likely to change anytime soon (though Cambridge did finally move away from this model not all that long ago). The tutorial system, the opportunity to work one-on-one with your instructors, is an unbelievable privilege, and that’s simply not something that many institutions can offer. But the difference in exam systems, in particular: that’s more difficult to answer. Is my recollection of the material I studied at Oxford better than that which I learned at Duke? It’s hard to say. It probably depends more on those I was working with than the institutional exam system, to be honest. I can very easily tell you which one I’d prefer never to do again!

Dr. Joshua Graves is a minister and writer. He is the author of How Not to Kill a Muslim, The Feast, and Heaven on Earth (with ChrisSeidman). You can follow him on twitter @joshgraves.

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong are famous for a definitive moment in American history –the giant leap in human creativity, engineering, and science. We simply know their moment as the first human landing on the moon. 

My generation (I was born in 1979) is virtually incapable of appreciating (even with the help of Wiki and Google and YouTube) the magnitude of Aldrin and Armstrong’s raw achievement. You’ve seen the photos. Some of you have the uncle, the conspiracy theorist, ever ready to tell you that we did not, in fact, ever land on the moon. “It’s propaganda!” This is the same uncle who believes the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers 9-11-01 was orchestrated by the U.S. government with President Bush’s approval. 

One curious story has emerged out of this seminal moment . . . the story comes directly from Buzz (Aldrin, not Lightyear, I have to remind my 4 year old son, Finn). I wonder, to myself, if Neil thought about this moment during the final few days of his life a few years ago. I wonder what these memories meant to him as he drew closer to the great mystery that is our inevitable death.

An elder in a Presbyterian Church in Houston, Buzz Aldrin wanted to mark the moon-landing occasion as a tribute to God, the Creator, and as a blessing for the rest of the world. (You can look this up in Aldrin’s book, Magnificent Desolation.) After consulting his minister, he decided the sacrament of Communion would be the most appropriate. Don’t ask me how this worked in zero gravity (one-sixth gravity technically).

During a break in the hype, hoopla, and conversation with the rest of the U.S., Aldrin took out bread and wine. He received the meal Jesus had instituted two thousand years prior, when no one could have possibly imagined space travel. Aldrin read the words of Jesus, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (Jn. 15:5) He also read Psalm 8: “You have set your glory in the heavens . . . When I consider the heavens, the words of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place . . . Who are we that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us?”

The first food ever consumed . . . the bread. The first liquid, wine. On the moon, the collision of humanity and space, the body and blood were invited to mark the magic of the moment. 

In Aldrin’s own words:  “. . . It’s interesting to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were the words of Jesus Christ, who made the Earth and the moon — and Who, in the immortal words of Dante, is Himself the ‘Love that moves the Sun and other stars.’”

When these sacred moments come to you . . . what do you do? How do you respond?

The birth of a child.

A marriage rescued from the theft of divorce.

Relief from immense physical pain.

The call that announces the absence of cancer from your body.

The end of an arduous journey.

The return of a prodigal friend or child.

Good news from a distant country.

The death of a hero, like Armstrong.

Bread and wine, a table, a thankful heart. Christianity, for centuries, call these sacramental moments. 

In a previous post I clipped some paragraphs from this steady, growing debate between Douthat and the Roman Catholic professors, and this makes part 4:

Source:

As I see it, Mr. Douthat makes three theological mistakes. First, he insists that the church cannot change any of its doctrines (“teachings”) or dogmas (“opinions”) without calling papal infallibility into question. That’s a misreading of papal infallibility. Here’s the backstory: in declaring the pope infallible in 1870, the First Vatican Council did not apply “infallibility” retroactively to the immense body of existing teachings on every imaginable topic. The pope is officially infallible only when he declares that a particular formal statement is being made “ex cathedra” or “from the chair of Peter.” With the exception of one peculiar proclamation by Pius XII in 1950, no pope has ever issued an infallible teaching. The heritage of Catholic teachings has genuine authority, but it is not infallible. Mr. Douthat’s sweeping construction of infallibility turns this heritage into an idol.

When Mr. Douthat flatly insists that the Church cannot change, he assumes a high Platonic construction of reality. Plato and Greek tradition generally assumed that the unchanging is morally superior to the dynamic, the developing, and so forth. Our culture no longer assumes that stasis is a “higher” moral state. An editorial in the National Catholic Reporter gestured toward this buried Platonism when it acknowledged that “An ongoing tension inherent in church life exists between the view of tradition as frozen, as if in holy amber, and the one that sees tradition as constantly renewing itself, expanding with new insights to meet new challenges.”

One of these new challenges, needless to say, is how dramatically different marriage is today than it was in the ancient world, where marriages were arranged, a divorced woman was left homeless and destitute, and the vast majority of people died before they turned thirty. The moral reality of faithful and holy gay marriages provides an even more direct challenge to those who insist that of course Christianity cannot change.

Mr. Douthat’s second mistake is portraying Catholicism as over-invested in condemning people, especially the publicly enacted judgmentalism involved in being refused Holy Communion. The Eucharist is not some special reward for the righteous–a ritual scrupulously to be denied to those who fail to meet “standards.” The larger theological and pastoral tradition understands the Eucharist as a sacred communal expression of God’s intimate supporting Presence to each of us and in each of us, no matter what, indelibly and incessantly. I’ve seen no mention anywhere of the immense spiritual harm done to faithful Catholics by proclaiming them forevermore unworthy of this sacrament. And why? Because after suffering through the legalities of a divorce, they refused to tangle with the expensive, arduous, and insanely bureaucratic process of an annulment–as if some remote Vatican committee could actually determine God’s views on their failed marriage.

There’s a third, even more subtle issue at stake in the confrontation between Mr. Douthat and a wide array of Catholic bishops and theologians. What is the role of critical thinking within Catholicism? Mr. Douthat and his allies in effect portray Catholic doctrines as simply deduced from unchanging and unquestionable absolutes laid down by God himself–and never mind the influence of cultural context and human fallibility upon the people who first formulated the teachings. That’s one option.