Wendell Berry on protest

“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

—Wendell Berry, from an essay in What are People For?

Contraception

Lately I have been forced to confront the outrageous claim of the Catholic Church that an act of contraception is a grave evil.

The Catholic Church teaches in the Catechism (§2366):

“Fecundity is a gift, an end of marriage, for conjugal love naturally tends to be fruitful. A child does not come from outside as something added on to the mutual love of the spouses, but springs from the very heart of that mutual giving, as its fruit and fulfillment. So the Church, which is “on the side of life,” teaches that “it is necessary that each and every marriage act remain ordered per se to the procreation of human life.” “This particular doctrine, expounded on numerous occasions by the Magisterium, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.”

This stance is based on Pope John Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968). There, he further expounds:

Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15)

Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)

In other words, the Church teaching is that the marriage act (that is, sex) has two purposes or ends: (1) to unite the husband and wife, and (2) to bring forth children, and that, in the performance of each and every marriage act, it is immoral to act against, or direct the act away from, the attainment of either of these ends when it would otherwise occur; i.e. to have as the purpose of any deliberate action the avoidance of either of these ends.

This would exclude things like condoms, temporary or permanent sterilization, the Pill, and all other medical/chemical forms of contraception, even if they would not abort a fertilized egg, but merely prevent the fertilization of the egg. It would also exclude forms of sexual consummation that by their nature are not open to life, such as coitus interruptus (withdrawal method), mutual masturbation, and anal sex.

Notably, it does not exclude “natural family planning,” the avoiding of sex during fertile periods, which is an alternative widely practiced among Catholics. Neither would this exclude any act leading up to, or involved with, the marriage act that is not in itself endowed with the natural potential for procreation. What is prohibited is the performance of the act which is so endowed, and which is the end of sex (both teleologically and, more or less, chronologically), in such a way as to intentionally avoid the openness to life. I am speaking of the man’s climax, and that it must be…well, to borrow a word from the Catechism, “unitive.” My understanding is, it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you don’t end anywhere else.

Nevertheless, this really puts a damper on the modern person’s sex life, doesn’t it? (Or should we say, takes a damper off?) It is a hard teaching. But here is the point: If the Catholic Church is wrong about the fact that openness to children is a purpose of every marriage act, or if it is wrong that to act so as to prevent that purpose is a moral evil, then their argument falls flat, and we are all off the hook.

But if they are right about both of those premises, then it follows quite unavoidably that contraception is a moral evil, and therefore that every Christian must flee from it, trusting in God to perfect their souls through obedience, and to teach them how to more fully love and embrace the good to which that evil is contrary.

Avoiding a Purpose

Now, it is clear that to act in obedience to a command in such a way that one avoids accomplishing the purpose for which the command was given, is not simply the absence of obedience in that particular act, but the presence of disobedience.

Consider Johnny, who is having a birthday party against his will. His mother tells him, “Johnny, go hang some balloons on the mailbox.” Johnny is no dummy and perceives that the balloons are intended to prevent people from missing the entrance to their house, which is wooded and hard to see from the road. However, Johnny doesn’t like parties and would prefer it if none of the guests arrived successfully. Therefore, Johnny takes some uninflated balloons and ties them to the mailbox. They are unnoticeable from the road. When Johnny’s mother discovers what he has done, will she regard him as having simply not obeyed her, or as having deliberately disobeyed her? For if he had done nothing, he still could have said, “I was about to do it.” But since he took definitive action, yet in such a way as to thwart his mother’s purpose, his action was in fact disobedient.

And indeed, when a husband and wife come together, they are obeying God’s divine purpose, for the love of a man and woman does not originate on its own, but “God brought Eve to the man.” Therefore, if a husband and wife have sex in such a way as to avoid his purposes, then they have positively disobeyed God. (This is the essential difference between natural family planning and contraception. Natural family planning simply “does not have sex,” but contraception has sex while thwarting its purpose.)

So, the question remains whether, indeed, the marriage act has this purpose from God, to create an instance of the potential for human life?

Each and Every?

No Christian will deny that one of God’s purposes for marriage as a whole (the sum of one’s marriage acts, if you will), is to be open to children. In Genesis 1-2, when God “made them male and female” and “brought Eve to the man” so that they “became one flesh,” their union was overshadowed by that great first commandment, to “be fruitful and increase in number.” Do not biology and common sense also affirm that sex was created for the producing of offspring?

But the tricky part is whether this openness to life applies only to a marriage as a whole (that is, to at least some marriage acts with that set), or to each and every marriage act with that set?

Let us discuss this is terms of a certain husband and wife. They know that God intends for the set of their marriage acts as a whole to be open to life. And they know that this means God may intend to create life through some particular instances of the marriage act. (After all, marriages do not create pregnancies. Sex does.) Therefore, on any given night when they approach each other, they do not know whether God might intend for that very marriage act to be one which results in a child (or, if they do an act of preemptive contraception or sterilization, whether he might have intended it otherwise).

Now I say that because they do not know how God’s general intention to create life through the set of their marriage acts applies to any particular instance (for God reserves the miracle for himself), their act against the possibility of life in any instance constitutes disobedience.

Consider a man who said to his wife, “I am going away, and I am going to come and stow something secretly in the house. I cannot tell you when I will come, except that it will be some night in December. Therefore, you must keep the doors of the house unlocked at night during the month of December.” If this wife, concerned for her safety or privacy, chooses to lock the doors even one night, then has she not violated the command of her husband as much as if she had kept the house locked the whole time? For who knows whether the messenger would come that very night?

But the reply will come, “God gives a married couple more agency, more right of determination in the conception of new life, than this woman in your analogy.” It is true, man and woman have been given an incredibly noble role in the way that they cooperate with God to create life. The analogy does little justice to that nobility.

But we must not forget who it is who really creates life. Do we view the marriage act as something where the human parents have been given the power and responsibility to create life of their own initiative and accord, and where God dutifully engenders life as an almost necessary consequence of their act? Or do we view the marriage act as something where God reserves the right to create life and gives to human parents the command to create the possibility for him to do so, not revealing when he will actualize that possibility?

The Christian must embrace the view which subjects man to God. As Humanae Vitae says,

But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source.

Only if humans have prime agency in the act of creating a new human life do they have the right to exclude certain sex acts from the possibility of doing so. But if it is God who creates life, and has ordained the marriage act as the instrument of possibility which he has commanded us to keep ready for his miracle, then to hamper the possibility is to usurp God.

Only by refraining from contraception in each and every marriage act can we retain the right spirit in our marriage, namely that God remains efficacious in our performance of the command he has given to us to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Mortal sins and the possibility of hell

References on which this reflection is based: Catholic Catechism | Catholic Answers Article

It seems that committing a mortal sin removes one’s soul from a state of grace—but only until he repents of it. Usually, for a Catholic, this would be through the Sacrament of Reconciliation (confession to a priest), or, if it is not possible to confess to a priest, and one is close to death or in danger of dying, (b) resolving with perfect contrition not to sin again, and to confess it as soon as possible. Perfect contrition means the perfect kind, not the perfect degree of contrition, namely, sorrow based on the charity of God, as opposed to sorrow for imperfect reasons such as fear of punishment; thankfully, the two kinds of contrition are not mutually exclusive. An Anglican, not holding the Sacrament of Reconciliation, would confess through the liturgy and through private prayer, yet, by the grace of God, this would be with the same spirit and to the same effect: contrite repentance arising from the work of God’s charity within the heart, restoring the state of grace. Therefore, we have this great consolation: No sin is mortal if it is repented of.

But what if a Christian who is generally devout commits a sort of impulsive mortal sin, and by terrible chance, suddenly dies during the act? Given that he has not repented at the moment of death, would he die outside a state of grace?

Firstly, the idea that someone would impulsively commit a mortal sin, is almost a self-contradiction. I was in on the jury of a murder trial a couple of years ago, and we had to distinguish the degree to which the murder was malicious (willful, deliberate, and premeditated), or whether it was in the “heat of passion.” Impulse is heat of passion, and it excludes an act from being malicious. In a similar way, the gravity of sin seems to be greater in proportion to the degree to which it is not a surprise to the person committing it. As the Catechism says, “the promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders. Sin committed through malice, by deliberate choice of evil, is the gravest” (1861). There is this desire to paint a picture of a devout Christian who does a grave sin randomly, impulsively, almost accidentally—such as being swept up in an adulterous moment—and then suddenly has a heart attack and dies during that moment. But to my understanding, to the degree it is truly impulsive, it is not deliberate, and therefore not mortal. Or at least less so—these hypothetical situations, which deal with human hearts, are gradients. But we can dispose of the idea that God treats as truly mortal any sin that has not reached its perfection in the will’s defiance of charity and the rejection of the Holy Spirit’s urging.

However, it is unfortunately apparent that devout Christians still do commit such truly mortal sins, exercising the “radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself” (CC 1861). And when a Christian commits that mortal sin in full knowledge and deliberation, there remains a moment, however brief, in which his soul will not and cannot turn from it, when the spirit which he has given authority over his soul is the same spirit of defiant rebellion as that of Satan, the spirit which blasphemes the Holy Spirit. In this moment the Christian will sense a great and terrible fear looming behind his other emotions. (This is the fear felt time and again in Flannery O’Conner’s stories.) How can it be excluded that this fear is the true fear of the possibility of hell, the soul’s sense that the abyss lies open before it in that moment?

I say “the possibility,” but not the certainty, for the Church urges us not to judge the state of a person’s soul. “Although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God” (CC 1861). And in cases such as suicide she urges us not to give up hope, for God, in ways known only to him, may yet lead the person’s soul to repentance.

Nevertheless, the possibility of hell lingers. What a terrifying tragedy it is, then, when a life ends in such a moment, when sorrow has not yet made open to it the forgiveness of God. What a harrowing, sobering thought for him who is in entangled in the throes of grave sin, that any moment could be our last! “For our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back” (CC 1861). After all, doesn’t it matter most how a story ends, rather than how it begins? Can’t a fairy-tale be turned into a tragedy by its last line?

The possibility of hell lingers, and disturbs us. Perhaps it is well that it does.

The root of faith is action

Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock. And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. And it collapsed and was completely ruined. (Matthew 7:24-28)

In a sermon on this passage that I heard last year, the pastor quoted a Biblical scholar who explained that, in ancient semitic house construction, it was necessary to dig down into the soil and lay a deeper foundation, or else the erosion of the sandy soil would make your house unstable. So the contrast here is not so much about where you build (although he did not exclude that as a possible element) as it is about whether you build deep or shallow. Whoever hears but doesn’t do is he who doesn’t lay a deep foundation. Building on sand is not laying a foundation. Doing is the foundation on rock.

So it’s not about two alternative things (building here or building over there) but about the presence or absence of one thing: the work of digging down to the rock before you start laying brick.

Many preachers of this passage make it out to be a question of whether you are building your life on Jesus (valuing him, obeying him, investing time and energy in him), or on superficial things. Ironically, this was the conclusion point of the pastor who delivered that sermon–he did not realize the implications of his own source!

In fact Jesus is not drawing a line between people who make him the basis of their life and those who make something else their basis, but between people who have Jesus as the superficial or supposed basis of their life (supposed, because they do not obey) and those who have Jesus as the real basis of their life because they obey. It is not about choosing and valuing God above all else, but about being sincere in your choice of God by acting on it. That is the climax of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a poignant image of the harmony between faith and works that challenges you and me to act on what we hear. May God give us grace and rouse our wills to such courage.

The bodiliness of Christ’s body

(This is a harmonization on my previous post on the Real Presence.)

When we eat the Communion meal, what does Christ offer to us? Is it his spirit, or his body? It is his body that he offers us.

But how shall we say he is present with us in this offering? On this Christians differ. Some say that he is bodily present, and others that he is only spiritually present.

But it is nonsense to say that his presence is merely spiritual, for a body is not present when it is present only in spirit. The nature of the spirit is incorporeal, and the nature of the body is corporeal. Therefore, The Spirit of Christ is present in us through that which is incorporeal, but the Body of Christ is present in us through that which is corporeal. A spirit can no more be present as body than multiplication can be covered with mud, and a body can no more be present as spirit than I can throw a baseball and hit bilingualism. We do not say, “Here is the Spirit of Christ in my hand,” nor “Here is the Body of Christ in my mind,” for his body cannot exist in our mind, but only the idea of his body. For “that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

When Christ offers us his body, then, we must realize what it is we hold: no mere thought of him, but Himself, Immanuel Incarnate, with us in body.

Some thoughts on purpose and evangelicalism

Most evangelical churches communicate their purpose in terms of a cycle: usually a salvation component, a discipleship component, and an envangelization component, like grow, serve, reach… win, equip, share… glorify God by making fully devoted disciples… etc. Other churches communicate it through their ethos in oft-repeated statements like, “We are blessed so that we can bless.”

There is one sort of organism which seems to possess this kind of cyclical process: a virus. They seem to exist only in order to spread. Biologists question whether to regard viruses as fully living organisms or not.

I do not deny that the purpose of God for man always includes a desire that he would go out, that he would bless others by his blessing. There is indeed something utterly outpouring, something outwardly oriented and abundant, in the nature of God’s love within the trinity. The most natural thing, the inevitable thing, when filled with this love is to move outward, to want to tell it and give it and dance in the streets with it.

But I wish this kind of love were articulated more often in terms of sonship and family, of abundant life rather than replicating machine. What I mean is: as a father I certainly and deeply want my daughter to bless others, and I want her to become the bearer of the truth and love that I am bestowing on her, in a world that will be hers after I am gone. I want her life shine for the glory of God. But I hesitate to frame this great desire as “her purpose” or the reason that I brought her into being. There is something much deeper, more ontological about her purpose–I want her to be simply because I love her and want her to be, because being is good (after all, God is pure being). She is a living being who, to the extent that she comes alive, will radiate life; but her purpose is not to spread life, so much as to be alive. She is an end in herself, because she is, in her very being, the expression of my joy and love. And that is the way I think that it is our purpose to evangelize: to use (hopefully correctly) Thomist language: it is an accidental, rather than substantial purpose, and thus not the most fundamentally descriptive of what our purpose is.

Keeping this distinction makes all the difference, because it is the difference between our approaching the modus operandi of our Christian life as fundamentally doers for God, or receivers of God. The Incarnation of Christ compels us to rejoice that we are indeed the means of God on the earth, but that is only because we are first and forever his ends.

The Church must have authority

The One True Church is anointed by God and speaks with authority. It is the solemn duty of The Church to overrule false teachers and scholars who twist the scriptures, and to preserve the deposit of faith entrusted to her once for all. However, false teachers cannot be overruled except by a higher authority. This authority cannot be man’s opinion or scholarship, which is of merely equal authority to that of the liars. There is no final authority in mere scholarship, for books cannot speak for themselves, and the minds of scholars are the minds of men. Mere men, I say, unless they are anointed by the Spirit of Christ. For the Church asserts, and must assert, an ultimate authority to interpret the Scripture and Tradition given to her by God. The Church must be able to answer a false teacher wearing the robes of her apostolic anointing, to pronounce a judgment that bears weight, so that the faithful will not be led astray.

Who is this Church? Protestants say it is all the true Christians in all the denominations of the world. But the voice of the ethereal “global church” is silent; the voice of “all baptized Christians” cannot speak, for they have no body. There is no courtroom in Protestantism, for no man submits to the judgment of another. There is no judge who can do more than ridicule the Joel Osteens and the Rob Bells, so they shout at one another like an unruly parliament, each with his piece of the truth.

The voice of the Church comes from a body incarnate, for it is the voice of the Incarnate Christ. She speaks as one with authority, saying, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” She asserts the exclusive authority to proclaim doctrine, not because her exegesis is based on good reasons, but because the Spirit of the Lord is upon her. She speaks “not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,so that her faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”

Where is the Church who speaks with such a voice? Where is she who proclaims with the prophetic zeal, “I will not share my glory”? She stands in tattered robes of bloody history, but it is a history that leads all the way back to the Cross, and the Fire of Jesus is still in her eyes.

The perpetual virginity of Mary

Growing up as a Baptist, I always assumed that Mary the mother of Jesus ceased to be a virgin after she gave birth to Jesus. This was because there were several references in the Bible to “Jesus’ brothers,” most notably James, the early church leader and author of the book of James. There’s also that passage where it says that Joseph “knew her not until she gave birth to a son,” which I always assumed to imply that, afterwards, he did “know” her. But to be honest, all of this was just assumption because, to my recollection, the idea that Mary could have or should have been perpetually a virgin never entered my mind as a distinct thought, nor was it ever brought up as a topic for direct discussion. Nevertheless, I always found it somehow weird to think about Jesus having half-brothers. Imagine my surprise to discover that the early church commonly held the view that Mary remained a virgin, and even refuted suggestions to the contrary (Jerome v. Helvidius, for example). Indeed, even the Protestant Reformers, including Calvin and Luther, believed that Mary remained a virgin!

Thanks to Matt Fradd at Pints with Aquinas for bringing this topic up, and presenting most of the points I summarize in this post. He shares in particular St. Thomas Aquinas’ statement on the matter, which, he points out, is quite strong given Aquinas’ precise and non-emotional style.

Without any hesitation we must abhor the error of Helvidius, who dared to assert that Christ’s Mother, after His Birth, was carnally known by Joseph, and bore other children. For, in the first place, this is derogatory to Christ’s perfection: for as He is in His Godhead the Only-Begotten of the Father, being thus His Son in every respect perfect, so it was becoming that He should be the Only-begotten son of His Mother, as being her perfect offspring.

Secondly, this error is an insult to the Holy Ghost, whose “shrine” was the virginal womb [“Sacrarium Spiritus Sancti” (Office of B. M. V., Ant. ad Benedictus, T. P.), wherein He had formed the flesh of Christ: wherefore it was unbecoming that it should be desecrated by intercourse with man.

Thirdly, this is derogatory to the dignity and holiness of God’s Mother: for thus she would seem to be most ungrateful, were she not content with such a Son; and were she, of her own accord, by carnal intercourse to forfeit that virginity which had been miraculously preserved in her.

Fourthly, it would be tantamount to an imputation of extreme presumption in Joseph, to assume that he attempted to violate her whom by the angel’s revelation he knew to have conceived by the Holy Ghost.

We must therefore simply assert that the Mother of God, as she was a virgin in conceiving Him and a virgin in giving Him birth, did she remain a virgin ever afterwards.

ST III Q. 28, A. 3.

Very well, then, it seems that the historical church opinion on the matter is clear, and it simply never made it into the partitioned historical context of my Evangelical world. But what of the references to Jesus’ brothers?

It is important to point out first that the term “brother” was used at that time in a more general sense, and could easily have included cousins or other relations, a fact that makes sense to me after witnessing the strong extended-family bonds of Arab culture while living in Saudi Arabia.

A commonly held view is that those brothers were not Jesus’s half-brothers, but his step-brothers, the sons of Joseph and his late wife (it is known even in evangelical scholarship that Joseph was probably much older than Mary). This is born out by the observation that, at the Cross, Jesus bequeaths care of Mary to John, something that would have been both unnecessary and inappropriate if Mary had other sons. Another connection from Arab culture: the protective duty of sons for their mother is so strong that it was not uncommon for me to hear about a youngest son being discouraged or delayed from leaving home so that the mother will not be without a caretaker and comforter. (I don’t know why the husband is insufficient, but nevertheless it underscores the cultural sentiment.)

An apocryphal but nevertheless important book from the early 2nd century, the Protoevangelium of James, narrates in detail that Mary was a consecrated virgin at the temple, and Joseph was an old widower who agreed to marry her in order to be her guardian, to house her during her monthly uncleanness. Even without digging into the validity of the book in the early church, (which I have not), it presents an interesting, scholastically viable, and Biblically compatible alternative.

As for the assumption that, because Mary was a virgin until she gave birth to Jesus, she must not have remained so afterwards, even Calvin decries the assumption as unsubstantiated, and indeed, it does not bear out from the use of the word “until” in the Greek.

So it is not obvious from the Bible that Jesus had uterine brothers, nor that Joseph knew her; and the church has long resisted and abhorred the idea. Why then would we try to argue the contrary?

The word of God and the Bible

In my post from last year, I claimed that the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, which forms the epistemological basis for all of Protestant thought, does not have a scriptural basis. I concluded that it is contradictory to its own standard, and therefore must be false. The claim that the Bible does not support sola scriptura will seem a foreign, if not hostile, thought to many who like me were raised in Evangelical Christianity, and so I would like to elaborate and substantiate my claim here.

If we look for the doctrine of sola scriptura in the Bible, it is quickly apparent that nothing close to an explicit declaration of such an idea exists anywhere within it. Rather most attempts to establish biblical precedent for the doctrine do so by equating it with the word of God; indeed, in my own Protestant mind the Bible and the word of God were pure synonyms. This works to justify sola scriptura because the Bible establishes the word of God in various places and in various ways as the authoritative impetus that brought the Church into being, which also continually defines and sustains it; thus, a strong case can be made that it is appropriate to attribute to the word of God alone the position of prime authority in matters of doctrine. Therefore, if the word of God could be understood to refer specifically and exclusively to the Bible, then sola scriptura could be established. However, despite the widespread assumption among Protestants that the scriptural references to “the word of God” refer precisely to the Bible, it is impossible to draw the equivalency.

1) The Bible never calls any book of the New Testament “the word of God.”

It is true that there are many places in the Old Testament where the phrase “the word of God” refers to the Old Testament scriptures, and two places in the New Testament as well: Jesus refers to the Ten Commandments as “the word of God” in Matthew 15:6 (with its parallel in Mark) and uses the phrase again in John 10:35 in reference to a Psalm. However, it is not enough to establish the Old Testament as the word of God: the Christian claims the New Testament as well, and it cannot be argued that the New Testament asserts itself to be the word of God simply because it accepts the Old Testament as the word of God. So, does the Bible establish the books of the New Testament as the word of God? According to my research of the Bible, there is no place therein where the phrase “the word of God” is used to refer to any written document that would later become canonized in the New Testament.

2) The Bible never even implies that most of the New Testament, including the Gospels, are “the word of God.”

Despite the fact above, we can call the New Testament scriptures “the word of God” if we can only establish them as scripture, because 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all scripture is breathed out by God. Very well, but in only one case does the New Testament confer scriptural status to any part of itself (2 Peter 3:16), and then only the writings of Paul are affirmed, leaving the Four Gospels (the core of the Bible!), Acts, Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, and Revelation without any Biblical affirmation of their status as scripture, and therefore, without even being able to be inferred as the “word of God.” It cannot be argued that, simply because Peter acknowledged Paul’s writings as scripture, he must have also meant those of James, Jude, and the rest.

3) New Testament references to the “word of God” are almost always to things apart from its own contents.

Instead, what we find throughout the New Testament is that the phrase “the word of God” almost exclusively refers to the Gospel, without any indication of its medium, and that where clues are given as to whether the phrase refers to something spoken or written, they point exclusively to something spoken. The phrase is used to refer to the prophecies of John the Baptist, to the oral teachings of Christ (at Gennesaret, for example), to the message of the apostles at Pentecost, to the message carried by Paul’s evangelistic journeys and delivered to Timothy, etc. In all of these passages, the words that constituted “the word” are not recorded. (For example, we don’t know exactly what words Timothy learned as a child.) It is important to realize that when the authors of the New Testament writings refer to “the word of God” in these passages, they are not referring to their own writings, nor the writings of any contemporary New Testament authors, nor explicitly including in their writings the word of God to which they refer. Rather, they are referring to something outside the texts, something that they expected their audience to know.

Thus, even having accepted that the word of God is the supreme authority in the life of the church, we see that the Bible does not include all of itself in the phrase, and includes other things apart from itself. Therefore, we cannot draw the equivalence from the supreme authority of the word of God to the supreme authority of the Bible. The only legitimate hermeneutical path to biblically justify the concept of sola scriptura fails. It is ironic that the Protestant, in embracing sola scriptura, must doubt whether the Bible is the word of God, while the Catholic, embracing the Bible as the word of God on the testimony of the Magisterium and Tradition of the Church, can justify the belief, and rightly say when the Scriptures are read, “The Word of the Lord, thanks be to God.”

The Real Presence of Christ

Many Protestant denominations, such as the Anglican church, hold that in the Eucharist we experience the “Real Presence of Christ,” desiring for Christ to be really and truly present with us when we do this act of utmost communion with him, yet rejecting the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, that Christ is physically present in the elements. They maintain the doctrine that, in the words of the Anglican 39 Articles, “The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is [only] Faith.” However, I believe this to be contradictory to the belief that Christ is really present in the Eucharistic meal. Let me explain:

We all know that the real presence of a human person is necessarily both spiritual and physical.

On one hand, a person cannot be said to be really present when their body is present, but their spirit absent. Thus we say to ourselves when we kiss a loved one who has deceased moments before, “They are not really here”: for their body is present, yet their spirit is not. And when two lovers are together, if one senses that, even though the other be physically present, their heart is with another, or their mind daydreaming or preoccupied, they will say to them, “You are not really here.”

Neither can a person be said to be really present when their spirit is present, but their body absent. Thus, when we excuse someone for not really being with us at a gathering, we say that they are “with us in spirit.” And when a lover off at war writes home to his beloved, or sings “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams,” he feels bittersweet longing because his spirit is with those he loves, yet his body is away, so the reality of his presence is unfulfilled. We Christians especially know this because because of our longing while we are separated from our Lord Jesus while he prepares a place for us, for “we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:6), even though his Spirit is with us, whom he has sent as a comforter. Therefore, regarding a human person, where either the spirit or the flesh is lacking, there is not the real presence of the person.

Now, we believe that Christ is a human person, for “he came down from heaven and was incarnate and was made man.” From the moment of his incarnation, the person of Christ has possessed a human nature, inextricably joined to his divine nature in hypostatic union; and having resurrected and ascended into heaven, he reigns there now as both God and man, no less incarnate than he was when he was on earth.

Therefore, how can the Real Presence of the Person of Christ be with us in the Eucharist, if this presence is not physical as well as spiritual in nature? If he does not come down into the bread, as much as we ascend into heaven, then in what sense do we call this presence “real”?

I would go even further, and suggest that this Real Presence of Christ is necessary for true Christian life–a life of longing in the absence of Christ’s Real Presence, albeit comforted by his Spiritual presence as a sign, leaves one alone in the bodily work of life; and what what one does alone, one can only do by one’s own power. The failure to have Christ bodily with us leads us into a subtle self-dependence, as God ceases to invigorate our flesh and blood, remaining merely as our inspiration. Christ came as spirit and body so that the whole man, body and soul, might be united to him in faith.