Twice in the opening question of the Summa , Thomas justifies some institution or practice in the church with a reference to the need for saving truth to be communicated to the uneducated many. Are sacred doctrine, and revelation, necessary? Yes, and partly because “the truth of God such as reason could discover would be known by a few,” an elite with the leisure and training to pursue philosophical contemplation. Should Scripture use metaphors? Yes, Thomas answers, and partly so... Read more
I offer some reflections on contemporary worship music at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning. As noted there, I owe most of my ideas to Ken Myers. Read more
I offer some reflections on contemporary worship music at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning. As noted there, I owe most of my ideas to Ken Myers. Read more
In a response to Biggar in another issue of Studies in Christian Ethics , Hays claims that “Jesus never told stories in which the good guys kill the bad guys.” Really? What will the owner of the vineyard do to the vine-growers, Jesus asks, and they say, “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end, and will rent out the vineyard to other vine-growers” (Matthew 12:40-41). Jesus doesn’t disagree. In Luke’s account, Jesus Himself is the one who says... Read more
Biggar again, defending the Augustinian view that killing in some circumstances is not a violation of love of neighbor: “I may (intend to) kill an aggressor, not because I hate him, nor because I reckon his life worth less than anyone else’s, but because, tragically, I know of no other way to prevent him from perpetrating a serious injury on an innocent neighbour. My intentional killing is ‘loving,’ therefore, in two respects: first, its overriding aim is to protect the... Read more
In a 2009 article responding to Richard Hays’s pacifist reading of the New Testament ( Studies in Christian Ethics ), Nigel Biggar argues that Hays’s Anabaptist reading of Romans 13 is “incoherent.” Hays argues that while the use of force in punishment is ordained of God, “that is not the role of believers.” Biggar responds: “If God has ordained the use of the sword to punish wrongdoers (and thereby defend innocents), then that is something that should be done. If... Read more
Father George Zabelka was chaplain to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki squadrons that dropped the bomb, and administered the Eucharist to the Catholic pilot of dropped it. He later renounced his actions: “To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as I see it . . . . I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in... Read more
Make allowances for Schmemann’s settled anti-Western bias, but there is still a lot to be said for his account of the rise of secularism in the West. Its roots lie in the abandonment of the eschatological character of early Christianity: “It replaced the tension, essential in the early Church, between the ‘now’ and the ‘to come,’ between the ‘old’ and the ‘new,’ with an orderly, stable, and essentially extra-temporal distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural,’ between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’;... Read more
In his The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy , Schmemann notes the importance of the anomaly of Constantine’s unbaptized condition. In Byzantine liturgical tradition, the conversion of Constantine is compared to that of Paul – both encountered Christ directly, without mediation of the church. Schmemann argues that this means “that Constantine was converted, not as a man, but as an emperor. Christ Himself had sanctioned his power and made him His intended representative, and through Constantine’s person He bound the... Read more
Schmemann ( Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy and the West ) admits that in the east the church “surrendered” its “juridical” and “administrative” independence to the empire. But he claims that this is not a betrayal of the church’s true independence. That independence, he insists, is not juridical anyway, but liturgical and sacramental: “the Church’s visible, institutional structure . . . is a structure not of power, but of presence .” And, so long as the empire submitted to... Read more
Leithart
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