Comments on JimmyAkin.com
This is a most ambitious topic, but your look at Benedict is too cursory and your skim of Judges deploys way too attenuated logic and no heart-felt clarity. I think the most important beginning point is Jesus of Nazareth, who, unlike us, had no new testament to fall back on. He knew all too well the hard-hearted portions of scripture and knew how the pharisees of his day who, if allowed, would attempt to write their own additions to scripture under dualistic, punitive, vengeful and triumphant themes. Time and time again, Jesus repeats a phrase found frequently in Hebrew scripture when someone encounters the Father: "Be not afraid." Jesus is the one who refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery, he offers the father of the prodigal son as a likeness for his Father, and he, in the middle of torture and death, pleads for persecutors to be forgiven. Let us anchor ourselves there before venturing into the seemingly petty and punitive creator described in the Great Flood, or in 1 Samuel, Chapter 15, or in Exodus 32:25-29 (none of which can be explained away by the principle of voice). Since Jesus is so thoroughly devoted to the Father, we must summon the grace to suspend our human logic and endure the apparent incongruity of these "dark" passages.
So this is how you show respect to fellow Christians who fail to embrace your learned views -- you label their beliefs nonsense and you judge them to be crushed and humiliated. Jimmy, do you think the risen Christ is just waiting to Hi-Five you on this self-declared, ego-centered victory lap? Do you suppose He sees the love you profess for Him as superior to the love from those Christians you deem crushed? I withdraw the supportive comment I offered when you introduced this topic.
Prayers are on their way.
If your calling in life includes double vision, you could resort to a pirate's eye patch -- and you could really mess up associates by switching from one side to the other on alternate days. Plus there's the prospect of having a parrott and talking like a pirate as optional accessories.
Jimmy, the loaves and fishes post at ncregister is excellent work on your part.
This topic is a great improvement over the Bereans, but it stops way too short. We should explore the depth of relationship those early Christians had with the risen Christ. How is it that they could watch their wives and children join them in being painted with blood and be torn apart by lions? How did they resist temptations for a Maccabees style armed rebellion? And how is it that their grace under enormous duress led to a bloodless conversion of the entire empire? Further, after the persecution was gone, what happened to the grace and the non-violence? Compare the non-violent Solidarity movement under duress in communist Poland, and now the challenge to faith by rampant hedonism in free Poland.
Granted, this is a new way of looking at sola scriptura -- but the piece holds us Catholics back in that age old inner quest to confirm that our faith prevails over protestant faith. That is so beyond the point. Scholars in all the major denominations lament the misuse of scripture and hardly seek to defend the "sola" notion. There is so much common ground to be shared with other denominations in just grasping what the words written for early Christians meant in the context of their time and culture. Frankly Jimmy, I'm disappointed that your writing doesn't get past dualistic undertones like "us versus them." You are way too gifted to be stuck there.
I have loved golf all my life. One of the great privileges I've had is to walk the grounds of Augusta National during Masters week. Yet I harbor a substantial private embarrassment over the excessive and exclusive comforts associated with the game. I choose to live with that tension and I think it aids my imagination. For example one of the amazing things about pro golf tournaments is the elaborate tent city erected for the event. I've often wondered why the Pope, and bishops everywhere, have not used these tent cities to temporarily move their administrations into the neediest communities. The bishop and his staff can be more present to the poor and draw more economic activity into that community. Imagine a year or two in Calcutta, a year in Camden, New Jersey, a year or more in Oaxaca, Mexico. Jimmy, does your love of authority enfeeble you too much to suggest challenges of this nature to your episcopal friends?
Jimmy, this post and the later one about helping the poor misses the mark rather badly. That nagging conscience telling us that there are still people in need MUST NOT BE MOLLIFIED or swept under the rug with some self-justifying rationalization. Everything we have is held in stewardship subject to a claim of hospitality from the neighbors and sojourners in our midst. By all means be grateful for what one has, and be mindful that our beloved wives and children and elderly not only need a home, they have valid needs of safety and security. Yet those practicalities struggle with the calling to be present and hospitable to those in need. We are called to hold ourselves in that tension and remain there. Matthew Chapter 25 never lets us off the hook. A dualistic mind sees Mt 25 as separating the good and charitable Christians from the badly inattentive ones -- yet no matter how much charity we do, each of us will remain partly responsible for inattentiveness and unmet needs. This is a humility (as in "always walk humbly with thy God") -- but a mind locked in right and wrong, virtue and sin, righteousness and punishment, will desperately seek to pose himself as righteous, which is the opposite of humility. Charity is not about being righteous; the charity we do is hopefully meaningful to those we meet, but it can never be sufficient. In our life review, we will have no choice but to humbly surrender to the Grace of God for all the unmet needs in our communities.
This is a very humbling post and I commend your disclosure. One has to wonder why a person with such a gifted mind and with writings that tend to be firmly grounded in black and white, dualistic thinking, is afflicted (or gifted) with vision of increasingly diminished clarity. I am amazed at your developing gift for discerning nuanced visual cues as part of your love for square dance calling. Of course I will pray for a comprehensive healing with your upcoming cataract surgeries -- but there is no need to abandon the budding gift for nuance and the budding ability to discern outside the certainty paradigm of black and white, right and wrong dualism.
As I read the post and the comments, and ponder comments from Rome authorities, I can't help wonder how much time and effort our Jesus of Nazareth would have spent on questions like this. How about we put an equal effort in pondering the prospect of actually following him and reaching out to the outcasts around us. God gives us these minds and hearts to begin to understand "The Way" and our egos prefer intensely tedious debate over veiling our sisters in faith.
I would have preferred to learn that our bishops have multiple and robust lines of succession. A 91% bottleneck implies an oppressive group think that tolerated only a single point of view. After all, there were twelve apostles, why are so many lines snuffed out? Yet the underlying facts do not support a grand conspiracy to muzzle and control. Pope Benedict XIII (of the Rebiba line) preferred to consecrate bishops himself. His new bishops from the early 1700s were disbursed out to new frontiers all over the world, and those frontiers had explosive growth. These new bishops consecrated their own successors because of logistics -- there was no British Airways service for other apostle lines to pop in and out for frontier area ordinations.
The undocumented status of Rebiba's consecration means we cannot be sure that our lines of succession to the apostles are intact -- this is clearly the Holy Spirit's doing. Doubt diminishes ego driven certainty, and requires constant communion with God to monitor the steps we take. Thus, I think we can expect our episcopacy to overtly manifest charism and grace to re-assure us that they really are successors of the apostles.
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