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Reflections of a Lay Catholic

Reflections of a Lay Catholic

Monthly Archives: January 2016

Listen to Your Mother!

18 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Jerry Robinson in Bible Reflections, Grace, Love, Mary, Scripture

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Grace, Love, Mary, Prayer, Wedding Feast at Cana

Wedding Feast at Cana Large

Wedding Feast at Cana – Bartolome’ Esteban Murillo, circa 1675

How many of you remember hearing the words, “Listen to your mother!” from your dad or other adult when you were growing up? Most of you, I’m sure. They were words of sound advice based on experience. My mother, and the moms of the kids I hung around with, seemed to possess an uncanny sixth sense. They knew when we were about to do wrong or make a bone-head mistake that would cost us down the road. It hurt to heed that advice but we usually knew it was in our best interest.

We know very little about the early life of Jesus Christ, those years before He began His public ministry. We know He probably gave His mother and father fits from time to time, such as hanging around the temple and missing His ride home. I can imagine Him bristling up, perhaps not wanting to do His chores. And, I can imagine Joseph saying, “Son, listen to your mother and do as she says!”

Throughout the New Testament the Scripture hints that Jesus had a respectful and loving relationship with His mother, Mary. We know that she was a disciple and stayed close to Him throughout His adult life. The first account of this is the story of the wedding at Cana, which was yesterday’s Gospel reading:

1On the third day there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding. 3When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4Jesus said to her, “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.” 5His mother said to the servers, “Do whatever he tells you.” (John 2:1-5, NAB)

I’m imagining standing there near Jesus and listening to this conversation. Mary, in her foresight, sees that running out of wine will be an embarrassing social disaster for the bride and groom and, in her kindness, wants to prevent it. She turns to her son, whom I’m sure she knows is more than an ordinary young man, and subtly suggests he do something about it. Jesus alludes that He may not be ready to start performing miracles. Not quite yet.

Then, in my mind’s eye, I imagine her leaning over and whispering to Jesus, “Son, you have to start sometime and it might as well be now.” And, then, without further discussion, she tells the server to, “Do whatever he tells you.”

In my imagination I see Jesus is in a predicament. It’s either put up or make his mother look bad. Even though He may roll His eyes, He listens to His mother:

6Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding twenty to thirty gallons. 7Jesus told them “Fill the jars with water.” So they filled them to the brim. 8Then he told them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.” So they took it. 9And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine, without knowing where it came from (although the servers who had drawn the water knew), the headwaiter called the bridegroom 10and said to him, “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.” 11Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him. (John 2:6-11, NAB)

Jesus listened to His mother because of His great love for her, a love so great that He created a place for her in Heaven next to Him. And, He still loves and listens to her. That is why I often ask Mary, our Blessed Mother, to intercede for me and personally deliver my most sincere prayers to her son, Jesus. What better way can there be to have my prayers heard and obtain God’s grace?

 

(Listen to Your Mother! was first published on the blog Reflections of a Lay Catholic)

©2016 Reflections of a Lay Catholic. Reposting and sharing of material in its full and original content is permitted, provided that full and clear credit is given to the author(s) and Reflections of a Lay Catholic.

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The Protestant Achilles’ Heel

16 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by richbrewers in Bible, Scripture, Uncategorized

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Reposted from Catholic Answers, by Tim Staples, I thought this was a good reflection on Sola Scriptura.

sola scripturaIII

According to ancient Greek legend, the great warrior, Achilles, was invulnerable against attack, except for one area of weakness—his heel. That weakness would be exploited near the end of the Trojan War by Paris. As the story goes, he shot Achilles in the heel with an arrow, killing his seemingly undefeatable foe.

Okay, so referring to Sola Scriptura as the Protestant Achilles’s Heelis not a perfect analogy. There are many weak spots in Protestant theology. But the use of the image of “Achilles’s Heel” in prose today is employed not only to accentuate a singular weakness in an otherwise impenetrable person or institution, but a particularly acute weakness. It is in that sense that I think the analogy fits.

Sola Scriptura was the central doctrine and foundation for all I believed when I was Protestant. On a popular level, it simply meant, “If a teaching isn’t explicit in the Bible, then we don’t accept it as doctrine!” And it seemed so simple. Unassailable. And yet, I do not recall ever hearing a detailed teaching explicating it. It was always a given. Unchallenged. Diving deeper into its meaning, especially when I was challenged to defend my Protestant faith against Catholicism, I found there to be no book specifically on the topic and no uniform understanding of this teaching among Protestant pastors.

Once I got past the superficial, I had to try to answer real questions like, what role does tradition play? How explicit does a doctrine have to be in Scripture before it can be called doctrine? How many times does it have to be mentioned in Scripture before it would be dogmatic? Where does Scripture tell us what is absolutely essential for us to believe as Christians? How do we know what the canon of Scripture is using the principle of sola scriptura? Who is authorized to write Scripture in the first place? When was the canon closed? Or, the best question of all: where is sola scriptura taught in the Bible? These questions and more were left virtually unanswered or left to the varying opinions of various Bible teachers.

The Protestant Response

In answer to this last question, “Where is sola scriptura taught in the Bible?” most Protestants will immediately respond as I did, by simply citing II Tm. 3:16:

All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

“How can it get any plainer than that? Doesn’t that say the Bible is all we need?” Question answered.

The fact is: II Timothy 3—or any other text of Scripture—does not even hint at sola scriptura. It says Scripture is inspired and necessary to equip “the man of God,” but never does it say Scripture alone is all anyone needs. We’ll come back to this text in particular later. But in my experience as a Protestant, it was my attempt to defend this bedrock teaching of Protestantism that led me to conclude: sola scriptura is 1) unreasonable 2) unbiblical and 3) unworkable.

Sola Scriptura is Unreasonable

When defending sola scriptura, the Protestant will predictably appeal to his sole authority—Scripture. This is a textbook example of the logical fallacy of circular reasoning which betrays an essential problem with the doctrine itself. One cannot prove the inspiration of a text from the text itself. The Book of Mormon, the Hindu Vedas, writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the Koran, and other books claim inspiration. This does not make them inspired. One must prove the point outside of the text itself to avoid the fallacy of circular reasoning.

Thus, the question remains: how do we know the various books of the Bible are inspired and therefore canonical? And remember: the Protestant must use the principle of sola scriptura in the process.

II Tim. 3:16 is not a valid response to the question. The problems are manifold. Beyond the fact of circular reasoning, for example, I would point out the fact that this verse says all Scripture is inspired tells us nothing of what the canon consists. Just recently, I was speaking with a Protestant inquirer about this issue and he saw my point. He then said words to the effect of, “I believe the Holy Spirit guides us into all truth as Jesus said in Jn. 16:13. The Holy Spirit guided the early Christians and helped them to gather the canon of Scripture and declare it to be the inspired word of God. God would not leave us without his word to guide us.”

That answer is much more Catholic than Protestant! Yes, Jn. 16:13 does say the Spirit will lead the apostles—and by allusion, the Church—into all truth. But this verse has nothing to say about sola scriptura. Nor does it say a word about the nature or number of books in the canon. Catholics certainly agree that the Holy Spirit guided the early Christians to canonize the Scriptures because the Catholic Church teaches that there is an authoritative Church guided by the Holy Spirit. The obvious problem is my Protestant friend did not use sola scriptura as his guiding principle to arrive at his conclusion. How does, for example, Jn. 16:13 tell us that Hebrews was written by an apostolic writer and that it is inspired of God? We would ultimately have to rely on the infallibility of whoever “the Holy Spirit” is guiding to canonize the Bible so that they could not mishear what the Spirit was saying about which books of the Bible are truly inspired.

In order to put this argument of my friend into perspective, can you imagine if a Catholic made a similar claim to demonstrate, say, Mary to be the Mother of God? “We believe the Holy Spirit guides us into all truth and guided the early Christians to declare this truth.” I can almost hear the response. “Show me in the Bible where Mary is the Mother of God! I don’t want to hear about God guiding the Church!” Wouldn’t the same question remain for the Protestant concerning the canon? “Show me in the Bible where the canon of Scripture is, what the criterion for the canon is, who can and cannot write Scripture, etc.”

Will the Circle be Unbroken?

The Protestant response at this point is often an attempt to use the same argument against the Catholic. “How do you know the Scriptures are inspired? Your reasoning is just as circular because you say the Church is infallible because the inspired Scriptures say so and then say the Scriptures are inspired and infallible because the Church says so!”

The Catholic Church’s position on inspiration is not circular. We do not say “the Church is infallible because the inspired Scriptures say so, and the Scriptures are inspired because the infallible Church says so.” That would be a kind of circular reasoning. The Church was established historically and functioned as the infallible spokesperson for the Lord decades before the New Testament was written. The Church is infallible because Jesus said so.

Having said that, it is true that we know the Scriptures to be inspired because the Church has told us so. That is also an historical fact. However, this is not circular reasoning. When the Catholic approaches Scripture, he or she begins with the Bible as an historical document, not as inspired. As any reputable historian will tell you, the New Testament is the most accurate and verifiable historical document in all of ancient history. To deny the substance of the historical documents recorded therein would be absurd. However, one cannot deduce from this that they are inspired. There are many accurate historical documents that are not inspired. However, the Scriptures do give us accurate historical information whether one holds to their inspiration or not. Further, this testimony of the Bible is backed up by hundreds of works by early Christians and non-Christian writers like Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Josephus, and more. It is on this basis that we can say it is an historical fact that Jesus lived, died, and was reported to be resurrected from the dead by over 500 eyewitnesses. Many of these eyewitnesses went to their deaths testifying to the veracity of the Christ-event (see Lk. 1:1-4, Jn. 21:18-19, 24-25, Acts 1:1-11, I Cr. 15:1-8).

Now, what do we find when we examine the historical record? Jesus Christ—as a matter of history–established a Church, not a book, to be the foundation of the Christian Faith (see Mt. 16:15-18; 18:15-18. Cf. Eph. 2:20; 3:10,20-21; 4:11-15; I Tm. 3:15; Hb. 13:7,17, etc.). He said of his Church, “He who hears you hears me and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Lk. 10:16). The many books that comprise what we call the Bible never tell us crucial truths such as the fact that they are inspired, who can and cannot be the human authors of them, who authored them at all, or, as I said before, what the canon of Scripture is in the first place. And this is just to name a few examples. What is very clear historically is that Jesus established a kingdom with a hierarchy and authority to speak for him (see Lk. 20:29-32, Mt. 10:40, 28:18-20). It was members of this Kingdom—the Church—that would write the Scripture, preserve its many texts and eventually canonize it. The Scriptures cannot write or canonize themselves. To put it simply, reason clearly rejects sola scriptura as a self-refuting principle because one cannot determine what the “scriptura” is using the principle of sola scriptura.

Sola Scriptura is Unbiblical

Let us now consider the most common text used by Protestants to “prove” sola scriptura, II Tm. 3:16, which I quoted above:

All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

The problem with using this text as such is threefold: 1. Strictly speaking, it does not speak of the New Testament at all. 2. It does not claim Scripture to be the sole rule of faith for Christians. 3. The Bible teaches oral Tradition to be on a par with and just as necessary as the written Tradition, or Scripture.

1. What’s Old is Not New

Let us examine the context of the passage by reading the two preceding verses:

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood (italics added) you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

In context, this passage does not refer to the New Testament at all. None of the New Testament books had been written when St. Timothy was a child! To claim this verse in order to authenticate a book, say, the book of Revelation, when it had most likely not even been written yet, is more than a stretch. That is going far beyond what the text actually claims.

2. The Trouble With Sola

As a Protestant, I was guilty of seeing more than one sola in Scripture that simply did not exist. The Bible clearly teaches justification by faith. And we Catholics believe it. However, we do not believe in justification by faith alone because, among many other reasons, the Bible says, we are “justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24, emphasis added). Analogously, when the Bible says Scripture is inspired and profitable for “the man of God,” to be “equipped for every good work,” we Catholics believe it. However, the text of II Tim. 3:16 never says Scripture alone. There is no sola to be found here either! Even if we granted II Tm. 3:16 was talking about all of Scripture, it never claims Scripture to be the sole rule of faith. A rule of faith, to be sure! But not the sole rule of faith.

James 1:4 illustrates clearly the problem with Protestant exegesis of II Tim. 3:16:

And let steadfastness (patience) have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

If we apply the same principle of exegesis to this text that the Protestant does to II Tm. 3:16 we would have to say that all we need is patience to be perfected. We don’t need faith, hope, charity, the Church, baptism, etc.

Of course, any Christian would immediately say this is absurd. And of course it is. But James’s emphasis on the central importance of patience is even stronger than St. Paul’s emphasis on Scripture. The key is to see that there is not a sola to be found in either text. Sola patientia would be just as much an error as is sola scriptura.

3. The Tradition of God is the Word of God

Not only is the Bible silent when it comes to sola scriptura, but Scripture is remarkably plain in teaching oral Tradition to be just as much the word of God as is Scripture. In what most scholars believe was the first book written in the New Testament, St. Paul said:

And we also thank God… that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God… (I Thess. 2:13)

II Thess. 2:15 adds:

So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions you have been taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.

According to St. Paul, the spoken word from the apostles was just as much the word of God as was the later written word.

Sola Scriptura is Unworkable

When it comes to the tradition of Protestantism—sola scriptura—the silence of the text of Scripture is deafening. When it comes to the true authority of Scripture and Tradition, the Scriptures are clear. And when it comes to the teaching and governing authority of the Church, the biblical text is equally as clear:

If your brother sins against you go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone … But if he does not listen, take one or two others with you … If he refuses to listen … tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. (Mt. 18:15-17)

According to Scripture, the Church—not the Bible alone—is the final court of appeal for the people of God in matters of faith and discipline. But isn’t it also telling that since the Reformation of just ca. 480 years ago—a reformation claiming sola scriptura as its formal principle—there are now over 33,000 denominations that have derived from it?

For 1,500 years, Christianity saw just a few enduring schisms (the Monophysites, Nestorians, the Orthodox, and a very few others). Now in just 480 years we have this? I hardly think that when Jesus prophesied there would be “one shepherd and one fold” in Jn. 10:16, this is what he had in mind. It seems quite clear to me that not only is sola scriptura unreasonable and unbiblical, but it is unworkable. The proof is in the puddin’!

If you liked this post and you would like to dive deeper into this topic and more, click here.


Tim Staples is Director of Apologetics and Evangelization here at Catholic Answers

Source: The Protestant Achilles’ Heel

“Psst, Hey You, Don’t Forget How Much I Love You!”

12 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by Jerry Robinson in Faith, Grace, Love

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Faith, God-moments, Love

Baptism-of-Jesus-305x350About a year ago I posted Put Your Faith Where Your Prayer Is. In that post I related the events around the birth of my grandson, John Charles (Jack), on 5 January; and how three days later he stopped breathing and wound up back in the hospital for several weeks. But, the story wasn’t so much about Jack as it was about the life-changing experience I had because of it. It told of the series of signs (God-moments) that brought me, through fear and desperation, to “give it up to God”, and to proclaim and pray, “Jesus, I trust in You” with every ounce of faith within me; and how He revealed to me that Jack would be fine.

In March I posted Laetare (Joyful) Sunday in which I reflected on and compared my love for my family with the Lord’s love for me. Through the scripture readings for that day, and with help from the priest’s homily, this still relatively new Catholic finally understood just how much God loves us. But, that Sunday, 15 March, was more than just an enlightening experience for me, and it was more than a “Joyful Sunday” for my family – it was the day Jack was baptized.

Fast forward through 2015. After a few weeks in the hospital, Jack came home on medication. By the end of spring he was weaned from his medication and hasn’t had a symptom in the last nine months.  He’s grown into a healthy, happy and normal little boy.

This past weekend we converged on Kansas City to celebrate Jack’s first birthday. It was a beautiful party with many family and friends attending. Jack thoroughly enjoyed the attention and the birthday gifts.

As the little man crawled to me, pulled himself to standing in front of my lap, and, with a smile from ear to ear, offered his new toy to me, I couldn’t help but utter a silent prayer of Thanksgiving to the One Who was ultimately responsible.

As we usually do when we visit them, we go to Mass at Prince of Peace Catholic Church in Olathe, Kansas. As Mass began I realized that this Sunday happened to be the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. It made me think back to last March and Laetare Sunday when this same priest, Fr. John Charles Reynolds, celebrated Jack’s Sacrament of Baptism. When I realized the two shared the same first and middle names I looked up to the crucifix hanging above the altar and I smiled a knowing smile.

I should have been paying attention during the Liturgy of the Eucharist but my mind drifted back to last winter and I further realized the day’s date was the one year anniversary of me consciously placing my total trust in Jesus – not just to heal my grandson – but in all things.

Momentarily oblivious to the ritual happening at the altar, and with leaking eyes, I offered thanks once again for all of life’s blessings, especially for the way He reveals Himself to me: by reminding me of the conversation we had precisely one year ago; by recalling to my mind Jack’s baptism through the celebration of His Own baptism; and even in the small, seemingly coincidental, sign of Jack and the priest sharing the same name. It was as though I could hear God’s whispered laugh and reminder, “Psst, hey you, don’t forget how much I love you!”

“Heavenly Father, thank You for the many ways You make Yourself present to me and thank You for giving me the insight to recognize them for what they are. I pray I always find a way to feel You working in my life. Amen.”

(The post, “Psst, Hey You, Don’t Forget How Much I Love You!”, was first published on the blog Reflections of a Lay Catholic)

©2016 Reflections of a Lay Catholic. Reposting and sharing of material in its full and original content is permitted, provided that full and clear credit is given to the author(s) and Reflections of a Lay Catholic.

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