I See Men as Trees Walking Part III: The Allegory of Fear

Last updated on: March 13, 2017 at 10:25 pm By Scott Eric Alt

When Christ comes to us, he does not come for the sake of punishment; he comes to perfect us in love. It is we who cry out, “You are hurting me.” We can be so comfortable in our fear. But what I detect, in both the blind man of Jerusalem and the hypothetical prisoners in Plato’s cave, is fear also of truth. We can be so comfortable in our ignorance. We can become comfortable with lies — including the lies we tell ourselves. Christ wants to throw that all away. He wants our perfection — our physical perfection, our intellectual perfection, our moral perfection. But we have to let him. We can only cry out for so long, “You are hurting me,” before we realize we are hurting ourselves by our resistance to Christ. [Read more] Read more

Remember Your Baptism

Last updated on: March 13, 2017 at 10:22 pm By Scott Eric Alt

God has a remarkable proclivity for accomplishing his work through the material things of this earth – but foremost among them, possibly, is water. At the very beginning, God is said to be “moving over the face of the waters." Before God has created anything, water exists. He creates the “heavens and the earth,” but as yet they are “without form and void.” They are just the raw materials, created ex nihilo. But there is water; when God says, “let there be light,” his spirit is upon the waters. And then, God’s very next creative act is to “separate the waters from the waters” (Gen. 1:6). Water exists with God from the beginning. Who can list all the times God uses water to accomplish his purposes? [Read more] Read more

John Bugay’s Eisegetical Creativity

Last updated on: March 4, 2018 at 12:28 am By Scott Eric Alt

The most powerful argument that Catholic apologists have against sola scriptura is that it is self-refuting. If all that is required of Christians for faith and practice is to be found in Scripture alone, then why isn’t sola scriptura in the Bible? Is sola scriptura not a requirement for faith and practice? Protestants know that they have a difficulty here; they know that, in order to truly defend sola scriptura, they must do so from the only epistemological grounds they permit themselves: They must show where sola scriptura is to be found in the Bible. If they can’t, then sola scriptura fails its own test. Clever attempts are sometimes made to bypass this necessity on the part of the Protestant apologist. [Read more] Read more

Thoughts on Bishop Fellay and the Ugliness of Schism

Last updated on: March 11, 2018 at 2:07 pm By Scott Eric Alt

Bp. Fellay is exactly right that great harm has been done to the Church since the Second Vatican Council. But — and it is extraordinarily important to get this right — the source of that harm was not anything the Council said, but rather those who used the Council as an excuse for whatever wild innovations the misguided mind of man could dream up. Could a better job have been done in exercising Church discipline and eradicating this kind of stuff? Probably. Could a better job be done going forward? Almost certainly. But a Hydra-headed monster takes time to kill, and John Paul II and Benedict XVI have done a very good job clarifying what the Council said and what it did not. [Read more] Read more

Did Adam & Eve Practice Sola Scriptura?

Last updated on: February 25, 2018 at 5:27 pm By Scott Eric Alt

Unusual as the question sounds, this is in fact the claim that the polemical rogue John Bugay makes. The title of this article is “The First Adam, Sola Scriptura, and His Commission as King, Priest, and Protestant.” Yes, it would seem that Adam was a Protestant. Did you know that? I didn’t. But it’s remarkable what you’ll find out on Failablogue. PR attempts to derive this curious claim out of some passages in a book by G.K. Beale called A New Testament Biblical Theology. Beale is discussing the first commission of God to Adam immediately after the Creation. From the starting point of some relatively dry, academic, and innocuous passages, Mr. Bugay proceeds to leap a thousand miles. [Read more] Read more

I See Men as Trees Walking Part II: A Capacity for Wonder

Last updated on: March 13, 2017 at 5:57 pm By Scott Eric Alt

As far as paradigm shifts go, I don’t find many converts describing what the experience of one feels like. Some do. When still in RCIA, however, I had the terrific opportunity to listen to Dr. David Anders describe his conversion from Calvinism to the Catholic Church. He was one of the first to articulate certain Catholic teachings, which I was still struggling with, in a way that made sense to me and which I could embrace. That was still a difficulty for me at the time: Certain teachings I could understand logically, but there’s an important difference between that and being able to say that you’ve crossed the bridge between having something in your head and having it in your eyes . [Read more] Read more

We Await in Joyful Hope

Last updated on: March 13, 2017 at 5:31 pm By Scott Eric Alt

Today is Twelfth Night. I love vigils of any kind the Church gives us, but this one may be my favorite apart from the Easter Vigil. In an important way each is like the other: At the Easter Vigil we wait for Resurrection---Christ come back to us from the tomb; on Twelfth Night we wait for Incarnation---Christ come to us in the manger and adored by wise men. Christmas begins in Nativity and culminates in Epiphany. We wait for Christ, and we wait, and follow, and at last we behold Him, born or risen. Each year on January 5 I keep an old habit of rereading Twelfth Night. Like any dramatist, Shakespeare is best watched on the stage (or film, if you are lucky). But I’ve not had much luck with Twelfth Night. [Read more] Read more

John Bugay & the Westminster Confession on the Perspicuity of Scripture

Last updated on: March 11, 2018 at 1:28 pm By Scott Eric Alt

Over on Failablogue today (he calls it Triablogue, which I think is optimistic), the polemical rogue John Bugay informs us, with his customary mad zeal, that “God is not some kind of loon.” It’s good to know we can agree with him on that. Who among us says that God is? It's odd we should need to be told this. Is Mr. Bugay swatting the air against imaginary flies again? Does he suffer floaters? These are real questions, I am afraid. The point of the article, which I read with sober and caffeinated attention, is that God (not being a loon) would want us to understand all that He has revealed to us. Well, yes. But then the poor man wanders off and gets lost down tangled paths of non sequitur. [Read more] Read more

I See Men as Trees Walking Part I: The Tree With the Lights In It

Last updated on: March 10, 2017 at 10:40 pm By Scott Eric Alt

How many who say they see instead walk through life and miss it all? How many come to the Eucharist and walk straightway out of Mass with Christ in their mouth and still chewing? I’m comparing the experience of the blinded who see to the experience of artists and visionaries; and the reason we need them is, in Dillard’s words, “to teach us how dull is our vision.” Artists show us the created world, in unusual and startling ways. Through them we learn to see, though we’ve always had eyes. They shows us what we’ve missed. They wake us up. Who can read a description of grapes or trees, like that of the newly-sighted quoted by Dillard, and ever look at grapes or trees the same way again? [Read more] Read more