It isn't that this guy is a lunatic who is out of touch with current events.

Rather, he is totally in touch with current events and knows that his form of liberal, deracinated Christianity is most threatened by Christians who actually believe their religion.

Christian theologian: “Radical Bible groups” are “much bigger problem than Islamists”

“Protestant Theologian: ‘Radical Bible Groups’ A Bigger Threat To Teens Than Islamism,” by Victoria Friedman, Breitbart, July 22, 2016: A German protestant theologian said that ‘radical’ bible groups are a bigger radicalisation threat to adolescents than Islamists, and downplayed the number of minors who have converted and left Germany to fight for Islamic State. Harald Lamprecht, Christian theologian and sect commissioner for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saxony, in an interview with Der Morgenpost claims that “radical bible groups” are more of a risk to the youths of Saxony than Islamism. During the interview, in which the theologian was asked to advise parents of how to look out for signs of Islamic radicalisation, he told parents “not to panic” and advised them, rather, to be more prepared to keep watch for warning signs of Christian radicalisation: “As for the threat of Saxon youths, be prepared for radical Bible groups. They are a much bigger problem than Islamists.” Downplaying the significance of the 810 young people nationally who have been radicalised by Salafists and Islamist propaganda online and have proceeded to leave Germany to join Islamic State, he pointed to the figures of radicalised youths in Saxony being in “low, single digits”. Mr. Lamprecht, who speaks to the regional church’s three-quarters of a million members across 719 congregations, advised that interest in the Quran does not equate radicalisation and urged parents to teach their children “the difference between Islam and Islamism”. Speaking to the German Evangelical News Agency after the Der Morgenpost interview, Mr. Lamprecht attempted to clarify his comments, stating that he did not mean to “equate the terrorist organisation with Christian fundamentalists”, but rather draw a comparison of how Bible study groups outside of mainstream Christianity “radically distort the Bible” with how Salafist groups “twist the Quran”.

The liberal Christian prayer....

"God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector"....or ignorant, close-minded, homophobic or other bad stuff like ALL THOSE OTHER CHRISTIANS!!!

And then they levitated into Heaven, powered by the power of their own smugness.

Compare and contrast...

...Progressive Christianity:

//Under the People of God model, the Church, apart from faith in Jesus, is essentially nothing at all. Dogmas, creeds, and doctrines, together with structures, hierarchies, and authorities, are merely ways by which the faithful articulate and organize their beliefs—constructs employed to express how the faith has been integrated into various moments of history. The foregoing is an example of “process theology.”

The People of God model is generally favored by Catholics who consider themselves liberal or progressive and is rejected by those who consider themselves orthodox , traditionalist, or conservative.//

Anthony J. Sciolino (2014-04-07). The Holocaust, the Church, and the Law of Unintended Consequences: How Christian Anti-Judaism Spawned Nazi Anti-Semitism, A Judge’s Verdict (Kindle Locations 3922-3927). iUniverse. Kindle Edition.

with Fascism:

//If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.//

Benito Mussolini.

So, go construct those beliefs appropriate for this "moment of time."

You are in the best of company!

Amazon Review.


Please go here and give me a helpful vote.

				The Historical Credibility of Hans Kung: An Inquiry and Commentary by Joseph F. Costanzo Edition: Hardcover		8 used & new from $6.89
Dialectically engaging and a superb resource for Catholic historical study, January 16, 2013 Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: The Historical Credibility of Hans Kung: An Inquiry and Commentary (Hardcover) Dialectics is an honorable but somewhat lapsed form of Catholic intellectual practice. The strength of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, arises from the Scholastic method which proposed a question, marshaled the best arguments for (or against) the proposition, proposed an answer by rigorous analysis, and then responded to each of the objections that had been raised. The virtue of that style was that it isolated the real problems of a proposition and required that those problems be dealt with. Likewise, Scholastic masters would subject themselves to "disputations" following that Scholastic dialectical style, which ensured that they stayed current, sharp and accountable for what they taught. Joseph Costanzo's "the Historical Credibility of Hans Kung" ("Historical Credibility") recreates the spirit and form - to a limited extent - of the dialectical process of the Scholastics. Father Costanzo's approach is to follow Hans Kung's argument in the format that Kung presents those arguments in Kung's 1971 work "Infallible? An Inquiry" ("Inquiry"). In other words, Costanzo is, in essence, reading Kung's book and providing a response to Kung's claims and arguments in the order that the claims and arguments come up in Kung's book. A strength of this approach is that it directly "clashes" with the points that Kung makes, so that Kung's points, great or small, are given attention, correction or response as necessary. Further, for a person who is reading, or has just read, Kung's "Infallible?," the book is laid out so that the reader can cross-reference Kung's and Costanzo's arguments seriatim. The weakness in this approach is that it can lead to some choppiness and some redundancy. Although this does happen in Costanzo's book, it is kept to a minimum. Another weakness is that in some ways this is only half a book; Kung's book - to which Costanzo is responding is the other part of the book. Costanzo does keep track of Kung's book by page numbers, which gave me an urge to look up the corresponding page in Kung's book to check out Kung's arguments. I haven't read Kung's "Infallible?," although I suspect that I now will in order to compare what Costanzo said about Kung with what Kung actually said. However, even without reference to Kung's book, Costanzo's work is a strong and engaging piece of scholarship from a perspective that we don't often see, i.e., from the anti-anti-ultramontane side. Books by anti-ultramontane Catholics are almost a dime a dozen. These books, which seek to locate the worm in the apple of modern faith and culture at the doorstep of "Rome" or "the Pope" or "the Vatican" or even "Catholicism," are a minor industry. Such books include John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope and Cullen Murphy's God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, but they all run with the theme that power-hungry popes were a uniquely malignant historical force. All such books are noteworthy for using rhetorical devices like "uprooting history" from the concrete historical situation by cherry-picking facts unfavorable to Catholicism or the Papacy (such as Cornwell does by blaming Pius XII for the demise of the Catholic Center Party without ever mentioning the Reichstag Fire or the Enabling Acts, which occurred long before the Concordat) and the Papacy or by linking unrelated and anachronistic historical events (such Murphy does by linking "the Inquisition" to George W. Bush's war on terror). I have read a number of these books, and found myself reviewing them in necessarily long reviews, because it only takes a sentence to provide an "uprooted" smear, but it takes pages to provide the "sitz im leben." Kung seems to have been the granddaddy of the Cornwells and Murphys. Father Costanzo solidly documents Kung's penchant for providing bumper sticker statements of history which misrepresent the actual historical context. Kung's style is even more worthy of condemnation because it is clear that Kung - unlike Murphy and Cornwell - knows better since he wrote books, published only a half-decade earlier that set forth the true facts. The discrepancy between the Kung of 1964 and 1967 and the Kung of 1971 is well-established by Father Costanzo's gambit of doing nothing more than quoting the Kung of 1967 - who saw nothing suspicious or innovative or unhistorical about the claim of Papal infallibility - against the Kung of 1971 - for whom Papal infallibility has no support whatsoever. The contrast is so startling that a recurring theme of Father Costanzo is "what was it that changed Kung's mind?" Did Kung learn some new fact that changed everything? If he did, Kung does not share it with the reader. Further, unlike others who have had a sea-change in their faith - such as Cardinal Newman - and who have felt an obligation to explain what happened, Kung feels no such obligation. This is a fair point that got me thinking about "motions for reconsideration" in the practice of law. In California, where I practice, before someone can bring a motion to reconsider something a judge has already decided, they have to provide new facts or law and an explanation about why those facts weren't available the last time. The underlying premise of this rule, which hadn't occurred to me until I read "Historical Credibility" is that the rule is a way of respecting intellectual decisions - if an issue was important enough to bring before a judge - or to write a book on - then the person who made the motion - or wrote the book repudiating their old position - ought to have the integrity to at least answer the questions, "what's new and why didn't you know it before?" This goes to the heart of Costanzo's argument that Kung's credibility is suspect. Reading a book, or deciding a motion, is an investment of time and effort by a third party. The reader or judge starts with the premise that the movant or author is worth listening to, that the movant or author ought to at least be given the benefit of the doubt in favor of giving him a fair hearing with an open mind. When that person comes back with the argument "never mind that, this is what I really meant," a judge or reader has the right to say, "just how serious were you?" and "why did you have me waste my time?" That's a question that deserves an answer. Costanzo speculates that the reason for Kung's volte-face was Paul VI's encyclical on contraception, Humani Generis, which confirmed two millennia of Catholic teaching but made Hans Kung concerned about papal tyranny. Kung doesn't explain that this is the fact that changed his mind, but it does turn up on his list of grievances against the papacy. Costanzo also speculates that Kung may have found himself hoping for more ecumenism than he found possible so long as someone somewhere believed that there is such a thing as objective theological truth and that this truth is knowable in some preliminary way by human beings. Costanzo offers the quip - often made, but since this book was published in 1979, it may be original with Costanzo - that "[f]or some the `spirit' of the Second Vatican Council consists in ignoring its explicit teaching and undeniable meaning in favor of some futurible Vatican III or IV." (p. 116.) Kung therefore takes the questionable intellectual path - which we see in the likes of Bart Erhman - of loudly proclaiming that knowledge is always doubtful and uncertain before he starts dogmatizing without any doubt or uncertainty. As Costanzo observes of Kung (in a vein similar to my observation of Bart Erhman's dogmatism in my review of Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth): "Not only is the Catholic Church projected against Kung's own ecclesial authority, of popes, bishops, priests, theologians, the Curia, canon law, of the whole course of ecclesiastical history. Indeed, his judgments given without any self-awareness of "fundamental ambiguity" constitute at the same time norms of rectitude in every area of Church life. His judgments betray none of the "problematic inherent in propositions as such." (Inquiry, p. 159). His judgments apparently are above the five limitations that render them necessarily open to error. (p. 158 - 161) and wholly free from the general rule of Kung's own theory of cognition that "every proposition can be true and false" (Inquiry, p. 172). In Truthfulness (and in Inquiry) we are in the presence of the most absolutist evaluatory judgment. (p. 271.) As I've said, I haven't read Kung, but based on my experience with the "uprooting history/shotgun slander" approach of anti-Catholic/anti-ultramontane polemics, I suspect that while Kung may be superficially engaging for those who share his anti-Catholic/anti-ultamontanist presuppositions, when his arguments are deconstructed, they will be a cat's breakfast of self-contradiction. However, for me, the best part of Costanzo's book was its review of the history of Papal infallibility. Costanzo devotes large chunks of his book to explaining the various threads in such classic anti-Catholic tropes as Pope Honorius, the false decretals and the origin of papal infallibility. Pope Honorius, for example, is the classic "go-to" argument for those who want to claim that a pope taught heresy. Usually, all that disputants know is that Honorius was condemned for monothelitism, the doctrine that there was only "one will, the divine will, in Jesus. Costanzo theme is that Kung's "Inquiry" deliberately obfuscates the "sitz im leben" - the concrete historical situation - in order to score points. Costanzo therefore takes the time to explain the confusing situation confronting Honorius and to quote from Honorius' letters. Costanzo's argument is that the two wills that Honorius was referring to were two wills within the human nature of Jesus - the will to the flesh and the will to love God - and that Jesus did not have the former, also known as concupiscence, thus, there was only one will within the human nature of Jesus, albeit there were two wills, a divine will and a human will, within the hypostatic union of human and divine natures. One can well see the complexity of the issues involved in this concrete situation. Moreover, if Costanzo is right, then that would explain why his successors - who were adamantly opposed to monothelitism - defended Honorius as orthodox. Honorius may not have been orthodox, but the case is far from settled, and, yet, Kung treats it as settled against Catholicism, in complete contradiction to the position that he took four years previously. Likewise, Costanzo provides a wonderful section describing all the occasions when the Bishop of Rome acted as if he were the head of the Church, which conducted was accepted by his contemporaries. Thus, the Bishops of Rome received homage from Emperors as the head of the Church and the successor of Peter, successfully claimed immunity from review or prosecution as the head of the church, deposed the Patriarchs of Constantinople on two separate occasions, heard appeals from throughout the Empire, defined membership in the Catholic Church as communion with the Bishop of Rome, and were acclaimed as speaking with the authority of Peter, on two separate occasions, throughout the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. This is a history that was essentially news to me. Although I study this area, most historians don't take the time to get into the weeds on the "minor" popes of this period who were, apparently, very aware of the living tradition that the Bishop of Rome was the successor of Peter and his office was invested with some definite claims and charism. Costanzo also has a lengthy discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas and the "false decretals of the Pseudo-Isidore." (p. 161 - 169.) This is another topic much beloved of anti-Catholic apologists - or anti-ultramontane apologists such as Kung - whose thesis is that papal infallibility emerged only after Aquinas gullibly accepted a forged document containing expansive claims of papal authority (p. 209). As Costanzo explains, the problem with this are the following: (a) not everything in Pseudo-Isidore was forged, most of it is accurate (p. 166.); (b) Aquinas was not vetting the false decretals for history; he was examining some of its propositions for orthodoxy, which he determined by comparing them to the scripture (p. 212 - 213); and (c) Aquinas may have suspected the provenance of the decretals because he drops them as a source for his Summa Theologica. The most historically bizarre thing about Kung's citation to the false decretals as the fountain-head of papal claims is that Kung apparently believes that Pelagius II - who was pope from 579 to 591 relied on the false decretals in order to claim that only the pope could call a council. Since the False Decretals were forged in 847 or 853, this is a very misguided claim. (p. 216.) To the contrary, one of the bases of papal infallibility was the pope's authority to convene a council, and that right was undisputed since the Sixth Century. (p. 166.) In this section, these kinds of gaffes cause Father Costanzo to wonder whether Kung actually read the sources he cites. (I have had my own experience at a popular internet level with this particular area, and my experience is that the charge is often the only thing that people really know. Search for peterseanesq (dot) blogspot.com/2011/12/use-of-forgeries-in-protestantism (dot) html.) Reading Costanzo's book is challenging. Costanzo liberally sprinkles untranslated Latin throughout his text. He is also fond of archaic words, such as indisponible. Be prepared to use the internet for translation programs and dictionaries, but look at it as an opportunity to learn, which is always a good thing. I recommend this book for those willing to tackle a serious subject in a serious way without reservation. Comment | Permalink

Might it be that people are wired to worship?

Lutheran church that pushed the envelope on "casual" by ripping out pews and putting in coffee tables and easy chairs closes.

In the phrase "Liberal Catholic," the term "liberal" determines the content of "Catholic."

Jonah Goldberg observes:

Let’s be clear: Anti-poverty programs, environmental regulations, and tax increases are impositions too. Refuse to abide by any of them and the government will either force you to comply or put you in jail. If your Catholic (or Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or pagan) faith drives you to pass regulations that shut down a coal mine, you’ll have imposed a lot of people right out of a job.

I strongly doubt that Gopnik and the rest of the faith-fearing liberals mind when progressive figures insist their policies are motivated by religion. President Obama routinely waxes biblical in his view of government: “I am my brother’s keeper,” he has said repeatedly. It is, to be sure, an odd recasting of the Bible, since Cain’s question to God — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — was simply an attempt to dodge a murder rap. But he is invoking his faith nonetheless. And Nancy Pelosi says her Catholic faith “compels” her to support gay marriage. Really.

It might be that secular liberals aren’t offended by all this because they think Catholic Democrats are simply lying. That’s probably true in some cases, but it’s surely unfair in others. Biden seems sincere when he says he’s a faithful liberal Catholic. And that’s forgivable so long as he remembers that the “liberal” comes first in “liberal Catholic.”

Of course, there can be "conservative Catholics" who have an identical problem. However, we haven't heard recently, a conservative Catholic arguing in principle that they can simply ignore church teachings where those teachings are inconvenient to their political ambitions.

It works better if "Catholic" determines the content of "liberal" and "conservative.

Elizabeth Scalia makes a pertinent point:

Just as coastal conceit can devalue what comes out of “flyover country,” our First-world conceit can blind us to what is happening in the church “out there” among the “thems.” Upon learning that in 2004 Hungarian Archbishop Csaba Ternyakny reported such a worldwide increase in seminarians that the number bested the Catholic heyday of 1961, my friend was stopped in mid-snort. No provincial, he, the notion that third-world priests would be missioning the church in America nevertheless left him discomfited. We wouldn’t need to be missioned-to, he argued, if the church would just be reasonable, do its social duty and either allow priests to marry, ordain women, or both.

His harangue hasn’t changed in our twenty-year acquaintance, but this time it occurred to me that there was a tinge of conceit to it—that he resented the idea of being ministered to by people who, in all likelihood, were too inclined toward curial-obedience and therefore couldn’t possibly have much to say to his finely tuned sensibilities. When I said so, things erupted into a predictable donnybrook, with each of us accusing the other of being narrow-minded in how we defined the universality of the church.

There exists an undeniable tension between left-leaning “social justice” Catholics and the right-leaning “pro-life” side; they share a conceit of primacy—one side sees itself as more compassionate; the other as more obedient. I personally know “social justice” Catholics who will pretend pro-lifers care nothing for the poor. And I certainly know pro-lifers who think the “social justice” side pays only reluctant lip-service to church teachings on abortion and euthanasia.

That we do not wholly respect each other is inarguable; I credit “nun on the bus” Sister Simone Campbell for speaking with refreshing honesty when she said, “I have allowed a very narrow perspective on what is life . . . I don’t want to be thought of as in [the pro-life] camp. Because of my pride, as opposed to my faith.”

I wait in joyful hope for the day a pro-lifer can admit that, while she cares deeply for the plight of the poor, she just can’t stand the idea of being associated with that “kumbaya hippie remnant.”

Our unwillingness to charitably credit each other with being truly concerned about both “life” and “justice” issues—to see them as shared burdens differentiated only by their weight of emphasis and theoretical “solutions”—is tearing us apart.

Tribalism poisons everything.

And, as long as I'm on the subject, Dennis Prager offers this:

Why is Mr. Biden completely comfortable with policies that “impose on others” what he understands as Catholic “social doctrine”? He will use the government to forcefully take people’s money away and impose whatever policies he thinks Cathol ic social doctrine favors. Why, then, will he not impose on others his church’s definition of the worth of human life from conception?

There are three possible answers. One is that he doesn’t really believe in his church’s position on abortion. A second is that he does believe in it, but would have to leave the Democratic party if he tried to implement that policy. The third is that he believes that the Church’s views on abortion pertain only to Catholics — and even then, only on a “personal” basis.

If we are to take him at his word, that latter is what he believes: that his church’s view on abortion applies only to him personally: “Life begins at conception. That’s the Church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life.” But if that is his opinion, his religiosity is not morally meaningful. If an act is moral or immoral only for him, then it is not moral or immoral. Either something is immoral for everyone (in the same circumstance) or it is not immoral.

Which is why the Church’s teaching is that abortion is morally wrong for everyone, just as neglecting the needy is morally wrong for everyone.

But Joe Biden would never say that the Catholic Church’s social doctrine is only valid “in my personal life.” So, what does Joe Biden, the Catholic, believe about abortion?

Speaking of Protestants losing control of their churches long before they lost control of the country...

...Check out this sermon from Harvard's new Pusey Minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church, Jonathon Walton, asserting that “It does not matter if Christianity is true, but rather can we, as those informed by the teachings of Jesus, make it true."

Recently Walton delivered the “Freshman Sunday” sermon, his inaugural sermon, and the Harvard Gazette reports on his articulation of the Epistle of James:

“Faith as defined in this epistle is not a mere cognitive assent to a belief in a divine being,” said Walton, who succeeded the late Rev. Peter J. Gomes in the influential pulpit. “Nor should faith be conceived as blind allegiance to a perceived sacred yet illusive reality. No, … such conceptions of faith are as morally vacuous as they are ethically inept. Rather, James is referring to faith in a sacred reality that reveals itself in human activity.”

Belief is revealed by action, Walter said. “It does not matter if Christianity is true, but rather can we, as those informed by the teachings of Jesus, make it true. Hence at the end of the day, our faith is not something to be professed, as talk is cheap, but something primarily to be done.”

If I were not a man of conscience, I would take the soundbite — “It does not matter if Christianity is true” — and exploit it to make all the usual points about Harvard’s abandonment of its ancient and original Christian commitments and its obeisance to postmodern relativities.

Timothy Dalyrimple offers a nuanced perspective:

The Christian faith, in Walton’s teaching, is “faith in a sacred reality,” so there is an assertion of the reality of some sacred other. This sacred reality “reveals itself in human activity,” and so “faith is not something to be professed, as talk is cheap,” but faith is instead “something primarily to be done.”

This is not necessarily the denial of truth, but is at least its displacement. It’s one thing to say that we experience the truth of God in Christ when we live the life of Christ. It’s another to say that the only “truth” that matters is found in serving others. It’s one thing to say that we come to the truth through participation in the life of Christ. It’s another to say that there is no truth of Christianity apart from what we make true. The truth is the truth, whether or not anyone believes it or acts upon it. Christians historically have understood that they make the truth known through their deeds. But they do not make the truth true through their deeds.

And when Walton denigrates the importance of profession, he’s departing not only from Christian tradition, in which the proclamation of the Word and the confession of the gospel are paramount, but he’s departing from the tradition of Christ, who spent an awful lot of time “professing” as well as “doing.” Christ’s talk was not cheap. The Word is not cheap — and the Word was true eternally, long before there were people to “make it true.”

Walton’s sermon was consistent with the general trend of reducing Christianity to a social justice program, and justifying the presence of churches at secular universities by framing them as community organizers.

The Democrats must have decided the "optics" of looking like unhinged, extremist lunatics wasn't going to work...

...because they reversed themselves and have invited Cardinal Dolan to give the closing blessing at their convention.

Well, that was bold and transgressive, and counter to "The Nine Reasons to have the Blessing given by a transexual, pro-choice, Baal-worshipping 'Catholic'" according to Sarah Posner.

DaTech Guy suggests this is what the "optics" were looking like:

This:

Or this:

The Catholic Church should ordain married and women and gay priests so it can be just like the Episcopal Church...

...which has suffered a 23% decline in membership during the last decade.

The decline of mainstream liberal Protestantism is reaching a point where it can't be covered up.

The word for this definition of "Catholic" is "Protestant."

Feminist Catholic Mary Hunt is apparently interested in a kind of copyright infringement by appropriating the name Catholic:

The crux of the matter, as it were, is that most of the nuns, like many Catholics, have matured beyond the Vatican’s imaginings. The notion that postmodern Catholics assent to “the doctrine of the faith that has been revealed by God in Jesus Christ, presented in written form in the divinely inspired Scriptures, and handed on in the Apostolic Tradition under the guidance of the Church’s Magisterium,” (or, simply, the fathers know best) is simply ludicrous. As one observer asked me, “What Bible do they read?”

The truth is, most Catholics no longer look to Rome for guidance on our personal lives, or anyone else’s. Nor do we live within the narrow confines of a cultic Christianity, or, as women, accept male leadership and priestly ministry as if theirs were God-given and ours were not. We appreciate the complexity of these matters and strive to create forums in which to listen, discuss, discern, and pray.

In short, our ways of being are as different from the Vatican’s as are our views.

If hierarchy and tradition and truth revealed in the Scriptures and from Apostolic Tradition is so offensive, there are lots of churches that don't have those things.

Bad Religion.

Fr. Neri points out the departure from Catholic doctrine that has been embraced by the LCWR:

Just in case anyone out there is unclear about the reasons for the CDF's assessment of the LCWR's theological sanity, here's an excerpt from their 2012 assembly keynote speaker:

Although we may never know what really happened, we do know that the story told in the Gospels is that Jesus’ resurrection was a first demonstration of what I call the post-human universal person. We are told that he did not die. He made his transition, released his animal body, and reappeared in a new body at the next level of physicality to tell all of us that we would do what he did. The new person that he became had continuity of consciousness with his life as Jesus of Nazareth, an earthly life in which he had become fully human and fully divine. Jesus’ life stands as a model of the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo universalis.

Read the rest of the post for Fr. Neri's "fisking" of this bit of theological drool.

I have an image of this Anglican priest's congregation sitting in stunned silence with their jaws dropped as he preached a Good Friday sermon on how Jesus was gay...

...except it was a liberal congregation, so they probably liked how the priest's sermon stuck it those dunderheaded conservatives.

Nothing says Christian humility than a liberal's smug, self-satisfaction about being superior to non-liberals.

Actually, my image of the stunned congregation comes from a true story I was told while I was defending a dissident UMC church about a Methodist Bishop who guest-preached an Easter sermon about how "It really doesn't matter if Jesus rose from the dead."

Anyhow, Alternet is featuring the speculation of a New Zealand Anglican priest who preached the Good Friday sermon on "was Jesus gay?"

His answer is "probably yes," and his evidence is the relationship between Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, because in the hyper-sexualized 21st Century, "love" means "having sex" and two men cannot "love" each other without "having sex" with each other.

After much reflection and with certainly no wish to shock, I felt I was left with no option but to suggest, for the first time in half a century of my Anglican priesthood, that Jesus may well have been homosexual. Had he been devoid of sexuality, he would not have been truly human. To believe that would be heretical.

Heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual: Jesus could have been any of these. There can be no certainty which. The homosexual option simply seems the most likely. The intimate relationship with the beloved disciple points in that direction. It would be so interpreted in any person today. Although there is no rabbinic tradition of celibacy, Jesus could well have chosen to refrain from sexual activity, whether he was gay or not. Many Christians will wish to assume it, but I see no theological need to. The physical expression of faithful love is godly. To suggest otherwise is to buy into a kind of puritanism that has long tainted the churches.

All that, I felt deeply, had to be addressed on Good Friday. I saw it as an act of penitence for the suffering and persecution of homosexual people that still persists in many parts of the church. Few readers of this column are likely to be outraged any more than the liberal congregation to whom I was preaching, yet I am only too aware how hurtful these reflections will be to most theologically conservative or simply traditional Christians. The essential question for me is: what does love demand? For my critics it is more often: what does scripture say? In this case, both point in the same direction.

Well, that's transgressive and threatening.

*Yawn*

You know what would really be transgressive and threatening to this congregation?

How about a sermon from Matthew 19:

1 When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. 2 Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.
3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’[b]? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”

11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

You want to challenge a liberal congregation about its feelings of smug superiority? Tell them that they get to be married once, that remarriage after divorce is adultery, and that those who surrender sex for God are more blessed than they are.

Nah, that would be too "transgressive" for this guy's congregation to sit still for.

As for the "gay Jesus" meme, this guy's a theological moron.

Is God really indifferent to the sexuality of human beings? Is there no meaning to the fact that the perpetuation of the good of the species occurs through sex and requires the cooperation of the two sexes? Is that just an accident, or is it the case that the normative condition of human beings is to be heterosexual? And if it is true, as this guy says, that sexuality was a necessary aspect of Jesus sharing in humanity, then why wouldn't we expect that Jesus would reflect the normative condition of humanity?

Like I said, this guy is theological moron.

A Modest Proposal...

...let's bring back the Index of Forbidden Books.

God and the Machine provides "Exhibit 'A'" to the argument for cracking down on various graying religious women. If you check out the link, you will the typical gassy, pretentious, faux-intellectual pablum passing itself off as Deep Thinking For Those Who Want To Feel Like They Are Deep Thinkers. Tossing the whole thing on a bonfire is an act of mercy and self-defence.

Here's a sign that the '60s may end during my lifetime.

Vatican begins to reform American nuns.

The spirit of "Goddess-worshipping" craziness that has gone mainstream in a lot of mainstream Protestant denominations has been circling the Catholic women's religious community for years.

Addresses at the LCWR Assemblies. Addresses given during LCWR annual Assemblies manifest problematic statements and serious theological, even doctrinal errors. The Cardinal offered as an example specific passages of Sr. Laurie Brink’s address about some Religious “moving beyond the Church” or even beyond Jesus. This is a challenge not only to core Catholic beliefs; such a rejection of faith is also a serious source of scandal and is incompatible with religious life. Such unacceptable positions routinely go unchallenged by the LCWR, which should provide resources for member Congregations to foster an ecclesial vision of religious life, thus helping to correct an erroneous vision of the Catholic faith as an important exercise of charity. Some might see in Sr. Brink’s analysis a phenomenological snapshot of religious life today. But Pastors of the Church should also see in it a cry for help.

And:

The Cardinal noted a prevalence of certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith in some of the programs and presentations sponsored by the LCWR, including theological interpretations that risk distorting faith in Jesus and his loving Father who sent his Son for the salvation of the world. Moreover, some commentaries on “patriarchy” distort the way in which Jesus has structured sacramental life in the Church; others even undermine the revealed doctrines of the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the inspiration of Sacred Scripture.

Spot On.

Jim Geraghty observes:

Much of the stir comes from Anita Dunn's telling author Ron Suskind that the Obama White House "actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women." Then she denied she said that, and then Suskind played a tape of her saying that, so that's pretty much all you need to know about Anita Dunn, along with her fondness for Mao.


Now, if the White House really was a hostile environment for women, that's terrible. But I'm going to go out on a limb and offer the insane theory that if you had to pick the group of people most prone to complaining that they're being ignored and disrespected, you would probably pick a bunch of Democratic political staffers, lawyers, academics, apparatchiks, and wonks. No? If you had gone to the staffers who were African-American, or Jewish, or gay, or not from Chicago, or some other demographic distinction, and asked them, "Does the president listen enough to you and people like yourself, or are you sometimes snubbed?" it wouldn't be that hard to generate some tales of indignation and woe. For a bunch of these folks, their entire worldview is based upon the patriarchy and the establishment keeping them down, and they can't suppress those instincts of victimization just because they voted for the new boss. I suspect that upon entering the White House, a lot of folks find that their egos simultaneously swell and get more fragile. Then they're put in a high-stress environment, where any error reflects badly on the munificent Sun King, and they're working extraordinarily long hours, convinced that the future of the country and/or liberalism depends on every move they make. Throw in a walking harassment lawsuit waiting to happen such as Rahm Emanuel, and you have the single most combustible working environment since the Hindenberg.

And now for something completely different.

Liberal Theology meets Star Trek.



Honestly, you could take lessons in impersonating William Shatner from this clip.

Mormon Feminists says "Dammit! Catholics worship Mary and my crazy, liberal friend is proof."

Feminist Mormon Joanna Brooks is like those Catholics who are eternally loyal to the "spirit of Vatican III," which remains perpetually just around the corner and is perpetually receding from vision as the '60s generation ages and dies.  Because she is dreaming of a Mormonism that embraces Goddess worship and homosexual ministers, she wants people like herself - people who don't believe in what their religion teaches - to be as authoritative as, you know, 2,000 years of tradition, the entire historic magisterium and 99% of the members of the tradition. 

This time, though, she takes her shot at the Mormon canard that Catholics worship Mary:

Mattingly, an Antiochan Orthodox religion journalist whose Get Religion blog “work[s] with the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life and a philanthropist... with the byline Roberta Green,” has made the criticism of minor usage errors a major concern as of late (Roberta Green is Roberta Green Ahmanson, who, along with her husband Howard Jr., is a significant donor to conservative Christian political causes). For their “sins” in using the term “worship” in place of the orthodox term venerate, Mattingly criticized Edmunds and the Guardian’s copy editors, calling them “ridiculous.”


But Mattingly’s piece reminded me of the day I sat in the back pew of a Catholic church on the eastside of Austin, Texas, with my friend Rose, who is Tejana and Catholic. Pointing to a gorgeous mural of a dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe that spanned the cathedral chancel, Rose smiled at me conspiratorially and said, “I bring my kids here to see God as a big, brown-skinned woman.”

Don’t tell Rose that she doesn’t worship Mary, or that she doesn’t “get” Catholicism, as heretical as her feminist Tejana take on it might be.

It’s worth asking the question of what it really means to “get religion.” Religion scholars long ago acknowledged two valid perspectives on religious experience: one that focuses on religious institutions, their policies, their projects, and the “official” story, and another that focuses on the way religion is lived everyday in “unofficial” yet very real ways by common people of faith

Get it?  Because Brooks knows some crazy feminist who wants to make Mary the fourth member of the Trinity, that must, somehow, be a "real Catholic" position.

News flash for Brooks, it doesn't.  Her friend is formally but not materially Catholic.  If she believes what Brooks says she does, she is both formally and materially a heretic and should get educated and go to confession.

Of course, Brooks hit and run effort of smearing Catholicism with the "Catholics worship Mary" canard is really about Brooks' unhappiness with Mormonism:

A few weeks ago, Mattingly criticized RD for running my story on a recently-installed, openly-gay Mormon congregational leader in San Francisco. Get Religion insisted that this story on Mitch Mayne wasn’t really news, and that it was bad journalism to claim that Mayne’s call to serve indicated “evolving” views of homosexuality in Mormonism, because only orthodox institutional statements from high-ranking Church leaders count as evidence.


But as someone who’s been writing about Mormonism and homosexuality for 20 years, since I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, I stand by my observation that Mormon views on homosexuality are changing.

I'll leave it for Mormons to define their own religion, but Brooks should but out from telling Catholics what constitutes Catholicism.

Book Review: A distant mirror - Liberals versus Catholics in 19th Century Germany

The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)

Go here and vote for my review.

I read The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)as part of my project to explore the relationship of Adolf Hitler and Nazism to Catholicism and Christianity. The project has resulted in me going deeper into German religious history.


My reading started with The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 by Richard Steigman-Gall, which discussed the Nazis attempt to draw German Protestantism into the Nazi system. The Nazis originally had a great deal of hope that this effort would work in that Protestantism and German Nationalism were not inherently at odds with each other. It was the Nazi view that to be a good German meant being a good Protestant, and vice versa. In order to accomplish this, the Nazis made efforts to remake Protestant Christianity in the image of Nazi anti-semitism by removing the Old Testament and reconstructing the image of Jesus as the original anti-semite. In their efforts, the Nazis were amazingly successful in that a majority of Protestant German churches joined the German Christian movement and agreed to Nazi theological concepts such as removing the Old Testament from the Christian canon and segregating Christians of Jewish ancestry from Christians of non-Jewish ancestry. [See also The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.] On the other hand, a minority of Christians were motivated by this fundamental betrayal of Christian tradition into opposing the Nazi's German Christian movement by forming the Confessing Church. At this time - in the mid-to-late 1930s - Hitler's religious attitudes were not Christian in any sense of the word in that his theology ripped the Jewish context out of Christianity. Further, as it became apparent that a large number of Christians were opposing the Nazi reconstruction of Christianity, Hitler soured on his belief that Protestantism and German Nationalism were complementary elements of the German identity. Steigman-Gall leaves no doubt that during this period, when the Nazis were in power, National Socialism was antithetical to Catholicism and that Nazi leaders and members who had come from a Catholic background were apostates and often bitterly opposed to Catholicism. By the time that the Nazis were in power, it was clear to them that institutional Catholicism was opposed to the National Socialism and that being a loyal Catholic meant being loyal to a power that was not German. This attitude contrasted with Nazis from a Protestant background who often remained members in good standing of their church.

Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism by Derek Hastings was the next in order. Hastings covered an earlier period of Nazi history, the brief moment before National Socialism became a truly national moment. During that short period of time - approximately 1919 to 1923 - National Socialism was a Catholic political party that had its origin in Catholic Bavaria. However, although it was a Catholic political party, it was not the Catholic political party. Bavarian Catholicism divided between Catholics who were "ultramontane," or whose self-identity involved an allegiance to the papacy, and non-ultramontane, or anti-ultramontane, Catholics, whose self-identity involved emphasizing their loyalty to Germany at the expense of the papacy. The source of National Socialism in its earl stage was not with the ultramontanes, but with those Catholics who were looking for a way to accommodate their Catholic identity with their German identity. National Socialism promised such an accommodation until Hitler decided to take his movement nation-wide in an alliance with the virulent Anti-Catholic former general Ludendorff.

The problem that bedeviled German politics for Hitler was how to negotiate around the fact that Germany was split between a majority Protestant population and a minority Catholic population that had a long history of antagonism. Hitler's attempted answer to that was the establishment of "Positive Christianity" - an initially vague notion that promised a way that Catholics and Protestants could cooperate in the reconstruction of German identity.

To anyone acquainted with the current moment, it seems pretty apparent that the Christian opponents of National Socialism would be what we today call "conservative," in their institutional allegiance to the papacy, in the case of Catholics, or to the traditional understanding of Jesus and the canon of the Bible, in the case of Protestants. On the other hand, the Christian supporters of Hitler were those who were willing to resist the papacy in favor of `local control' or radically reconstruct Christian theology in favor of a currently popular academic theory. In short, one can't help but notice that the Protestant and Catholic supporters of Hitler were those who came out of a liberal tradition of Christianity, which will surely come a surprise to those who take Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, with its fable that it was the "conservative" Pius XII who was responsible for Hitler's rise to power, as gospel truth.

Gross' The War against Catholicism is the next installment in this archeological approach to the issues presented by the history of the 1920s and 1930s. Gross' book is an analysis of the Kulturkampf, a period immediately after the formation of the German Empire in 1870 when the German state attempted to liquidate Catholicism. Gross' thesis is that the Kulturkampf was a project of German liberalism and represented a principled application of liberal principles as understood by mid-Nineteenth Century German liberals, rather than, as often asserted, a betrayal of those principles.

The Kulturkampf is a period that is often unjustly neglected by people who approach the issues of German religious identity under the Nazis. One might speculate that this fact is evidence of Gross' thesis concerning the antipathy of liberalism for religion in general and Catholicism in particular, in that most scholars view themselves as liberals, and don't seem to have much sympathy for Catholicism, and, therefore, haven't much interest in a period when Catholics were persecuted by liberals. The persecution was very real and included a number of moves that were typical of anti-clerical efforts before and after the Kulturkampf, including prohibiting Catholic religious orders from teaching, depriving the Catholic Church of title to its property, exiling foreign Catholic priests and brothers, and requiring the Catholic church to submit to state control with respect to the appointment of priests and bishops. By the end of the Kulturkampf vast sections of Germany had been deprived of Catholic priests, large numbers of Catholics had been arrested and virtually every bishop in Protestant areas of Germany had been forced into exile. Given that the Kulturkampf was something experienced by the parents and grandparents of Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s, one might think that the Catholic reaction to National Socialism, which raised the specter of a new Kulturkampf, might be of some interest to historians.

Gross points out that the Kulturkampf resulted from a coming together of a variety of cultural development during the Nineteenth Century. One of the important influences was the revival of Catholic culture and its re-orientation in an ultramontane direction by an energetic campaign of preaching and revivals, which began after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848, and which were led by various religious orders including the Jesuits. The revival of Catholicism, particularly a papally oriented Catholicism, stirred a Protestant anti-Catholic backlash, which traded in conventional tropes about Catholic superstition and ignorance. The backlash also promoted the idea of the Jesuits as a conspiring threat to Germany. Often times in reading liberal descriptions of the Jesuits, I was put in mind of Hitler's descriptions of the Jews. [Gross points out that while the Nineteenth Century represented a zenith of anti-Catholic agitation and persecution in Germany, Jews were being freed from the traditional restrictions on their civil rights.] Interestingly, this anti-Jesuit attitude was rampant in America during essentially the same period. This was not entirely an accident when one considers that the famous Anti-Catholic picture of the "American Ganges" was drawn by the Protestant German-immigrant, Thomas Nast, who used tropes and images that would have been familiar to readers of German liberal magazines and newspapers.

Gross also argues that another cultural phenomenon that inspired the Kulturkampf was the involvement of Catholic women in public affairs. Gross spends a chapter discussing the issue of the "Women's Question." In Nineteenth Century Germany, the women's question was answered by liberals with the response that "a woman's place was in the home." Women - and men - were expected to respect the distinction between the public and the private. However, Catholic religious orders and lay movement gave women a prominent place in public, which upset liberal Germans. Further, liberal Germans identified Catholicism, and Catholic priests in particular, with "womanly traits," which further played into liberal Anti-Catholic propaganda.

As Gross documents in the writings of liberal politicians and liberal newspapers, liberals viewed the liquidation of Catholicism as a duty imposed on liberals in order to advance the health of German society by removing what liberals believed to be a retarding, regressive force for superstition and ignorance. Because liberals viewed Catholics as being superstitious and ignorant, and Catholicism as being an institution that fostered superstition and ignorance, liberals justified the persecution of Catholics on the grounds that Catholics were not entitled to the benefits of tolerance. Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst (who was the nephew of the Catholic faction leader, Ludwig Windthorst) that "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.)

The result of the Kulturkampf was to energize ultramontane Catholics to support the Catholic political party, which became the Catholic Center Party. For the next 50 years, until it disbanded itself under pressure from Hitler, the Catholic Center Party would invariably be one of the larger parties in the German parliament. It would outlast the liberal parties who had persecuted the Catholic Church. The existence of the Center Party confronted Catholics with a fundamental question as to whether they were primarily Catholic or primarily German. As Hastings points out, Hitler would run an effective campaign against "political Catholicism" and argue for the retirement of the Catholic Church from German politics. This was a theme that appealed to many Catholics who felt torn between their Catholic and German identities. Ultimately, the Concordat between Germany and the Vatican, so condemned by John Cornwell, was an effort to achieve this "liberal" goal.

I am glad that I came at Gross' book in the order I did. As with many academic books of this sort, including the books by Steigman-Gall and Hastings, there are a lot of unfamiliar names to keep track of. Gross' writing is clear and his thesis is engaging and well-supported. One of the interesting take-aways for me was the origin of the "Old Catholic Church." I knew that it had formed in opposition to Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility, but I did not understand why such an apparently "conservative" church should be so liberal in its modern form. The answer is that it was formed as a "liberal" reaction to the conservative or ultramontane direction that Catholicism took in the 19th Century.

This book is well worth the price and time spent in reading it for that kind of insight. Too often, we read the past through our modern lenses. This is the reason that people like John Cornwell and his readers can so misunderstand the history of National Socialism and the Catholic Church and draw the wrong lesson from their misunderstanding. John Cornwell would have been well served if he had had - and attempted to understand - the history set forth in this very worthwhile book.

Concerning the continuing decline of mainline Protestantism in America.

There are no Protestants on the Supreme Court, and there are no mainline Protestants running for the GOP nomination.

That could change, but it is certainly evidence of two things: (a) mainline Protestantism has become essentially a liberal project and (b) mainline Protestantism no longer carries the essential cultural influence it once did.

The two are probably related.

Coexist.

A poster deconstructs that smarmy "Coexist" bumper stcker.