Protestant Mysticism: "Jesus is my Girlfriend" Music

Tonight I was listening to a Christian radio station on the way back from my quite traditional Catholic liturgy.  I had prayed my daily Rosary on the way to Mass, and I wanted to continue my religious approach to travel on the way back in a different way.

About halfway back home, I was struck by one song that reminded me of the trope of Christian pop songs in which the name "Jesus" could easily be replace by the name of the girlfriend or desired girlfriend of the singer without changing the tone of the song in the slightest.

I'm sure that I'm not the only former Protestant-turned-Catholic who has laughed about that trope, but it was my heart that was convicted as I listened to the singer croon the lyrics...these lyrics that could have easily been a young man's prayer that he be allowed to have as a girlfriend the lovely young woman that had caught his eye recently.

I understood in that moment that in these quite generic pop songs that sound a lot like Jesus is similar to a girlfriend for which a man has the sappiest of feelings of being in puppy love, there is a genuine longing for the kind of profound of intimate union with the divine that mystics speak of so eloquently.

These post-Reformation brothers and sisters of mine know intuitively that their hearts will be restless until they rest in the Lord.  With the ancient Psalmist, they feel keenly that their soul desires communion with the God of Abraham, and their bodies long for the Lord of the resurrection which returns them to the innocence and glory which belonged to Adam and Eve in the primordial Garden of Eden.

Like the early Christian mystics of the Apostolic Age, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and the medieval Saints who spoke of a nuptial union with Christ, they are trying to find an anthropological language powerful enough to express their longing for that which transcends the anthropological and fulfills its potential for glory.

These beloved children of God are unfortunate to live in a place and time of such impoverished anthropology, a place and time in which the highest common language of love has been reduced to a mere vaguely sentimental romanticism.

As Catholics, we should not look down on our post-Reformation brothers and sisters for using this language, which is the best that the popular culture of our time and place can offer when speaking of love.  Instead, we should recognize that they are searching for a language of love that can express the inexpressible groanings of the spirit...and help them find it.

This is a language we Catholic mystics and ascetics, rooted in the early Church, conversant with the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and familiar with the medieval Saints, have to give.  We ought to give it generously.

Note:  Above is a picture of Martin Luther's edited Bible translated into German.

Fair Questions: Why is post-Reformation Biblical literalism a dead letter?

Before I start, I want to emphasize that I think the literal sense of Sacred Scripture is very important.  It's been considered very important throughout the long history of Catholic scholarship on the Bible, from the early Church through the medieval era and into the modern era.

This hasn't changed.  What has changed is that a reductively literalistic view of Biblical interpretation has gotten more popular in some circles.  It is this reductively literalistic view with which I take issue.

For a Catholic perspective on how to understand Sacred Scripture (which some non-Catholics are largely in agreement with), start with the Catechism, and then read this piece on addressing contradictions, and this piece on skepticism related to the Bible.

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I was recently asked a question that inspired me to dig a little deeper into the question of Biblical literalism.  What I mean by Biblical literalism in this case is a particular view of the Bible which stipulates that the Bible has the following characteristics:

1.  The Bible is the inerrant Word of God.
2.  Thou shalt not take away or add to the Bible; it is the sole rule of faith.
3.  Reading the Bible literally is the only tenable interpretative approach.

This view ends up committing the Biblical literalist to some other propositions as a consequence of their view:

• Any apparent contradictions have to be resolved literally.
• Any apparent contradictions cannot be resolved by inserting additional information into the text from tradition or speculation.
• Any apparent contradictions cannot be resolved by removing information from the text.

There are many lists on many websites laying out these alleged contradictions in the Bible.  Now, most of what folks refer to as contradictions in the Bible aren't actually contradictions in a logical sense that matters for literal interpretation.  They just reflect a lack of knowledge on the part of the reader, or confirmation bias that sees contradictions everywhere.

That said, there are certainly passages in the Gospels that read as flat-out contradictions.  And Christians who take what I described above as a Biblical literalist view are going to have a hard time explaining those within the constraints that their position requires of them.

One example of this relates to the narrative of Jesus' resurrection from the dead in the Bible.  In the Gospel of Matthew's narrative, Mary kneels down and clings to Jesus' feet right after the Resurrection.  In the Gospel of John's narrative, Jesus explicitly tells her she's not allowed to touch him before she even tries.

How can we reconcile that the Gospels claim these both to be true?

A.  Jesus' feet were touched at the time of greeting Mary after he was resurrected
B.  Jesus refused to allow Mary to touch him when she turned towards him after he was resurrected

Well, we could suppose that Scripture is missing some information.  Maybe the Gospel of John just left out the fact that Jesus specifically told her not to touch him because she had already knelt down and touched his feet?  Maybe it's not a different narrative at all?

But John's account actually proposes something different, that Mary did not recognize him at first, and when she did recognize him, that Jesus instructed her not to touch him as she was turning towards him (read the verse in context here).  In Matthew's account, it's not just Mary, but the women as a group, who recognize him and kneel before him to grab his feet (read the verse in context here).

Now, this can be resolved by merging the texts.  We can take the part from Matthew about it being a group of women and them recognizing Jesus and grabbing his feet, and then he tells them all not to touch him because he hasn't ascended to the Father yet.

We could make a single narrative out of it in a variety of ways.  But there are going to be multiple places where we have to remove some parts of one Gospel account in order to make room for the other, or add interpolations to the Gospel account in order to get a single non-contradictory literal account of the events.

Creating a harmony of the gospel accounts is a not uncommon project of Christians who are very interested in synthesizing Biblical teaching.  And there's a very simple reason that there are so many attempts create a single Gospel account that manages to include all the account of Jesus' life:  it's very, very difficult to do so.

Narrative contradictions make it especially difficult for Biblical literalists, but it's difficult even for those of us who read the Bible keeping in mind the literal, moral, anagogical, and allegorical senses of Scripture.  If it were easy to do, it would have already been done well before the 1st millennium of Christianity had ended, and most Christians would simply be referencing that text.

Clearly, that is not what has happened.  The closest thing I've found is the Catena Aurea, and it's well worth reading, but it is not an attempt to harmonize the Gospel accounts into one narrative.  However, it does contain some useful explanation as to why the Gospel authors chose to tell those narratives differently, and it's mostly an explanation from the perspective of early Christian thinkers and writers.

Most early Christian thinkers and writers, because the canon of Scripture wasn't a settled question for several hundred years, didn't see themselves as part of a text-based religion that looked to the Bible as the sole rule of faith (a view designated by the Latin phrase Sola Scriptura today).

It's likely that most early Christians would see the Protestant idea of Sola Scriptura as weirdly incomplete as compared to their own view of the Church as providing the rule of faith.  For example, Irenaeus of Lyons was a big fan of using the Bible to make his case, but he saw the Holy Scriptures as being part of the Apostolic Tradition, not as the sole rule of faith.

The view that the literal sense of Scripture is not just necessary (its necessity being the Catholic view), but indeed all-sufficient as the rule of faith (which is the view of some post-Reformation Christian groups), is a strange new idea.  It's not the sort of thing that the early Christian community that compiled the Biblical texts would likely have thought very intelligible.

This strangely reductive literalism, for them, would have been what the Catechism calls a dead letter, the product of viewing Christianity as a "religion of the Book" like Islam.  The Church, on the other hand, is a living authority, a transmission of the Apostolic Tradition from generation to generation.

It is only in light of the Tradition, shaped by the various Apostolic oral traditions of the early Church, that we can understand the Gospels aright.  They are representative of the orally transmitted teachings of the Apostles, inspired by their encounter with the Living God and transmitted in a shockingly faithful way despite the many imperfections of the human beings involved in the process.

Related: Will reading the Bible make people atheists?

The

Fair Questions: Why are many Catholics in the U.S. so Protestant in their thinking?

This question was posed recently in a group I'm a part of, and I thought it was worth answering from my perspective because I'm a former Protestant who only very gradually became Catholic in his thinking.

One thing to note is that this is an issue that is not specific to Catholics.  Members of Eastern Orthodox or Coptic Orthodox congregations who grew up primarily in the U.S. often have the same struggle of trying to reconcile their deeply-ingrained and culturally-acquired assumptions that stem from Protestant thinking with the ancient Christian religious tradition which predates such thinking and is different from it at a paradigmatic level.

This is not even an issue that is specific to members of Christian groups.  Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, people who are part of various Indian traditions under the umbrella of Hinduism, and so on are often afflicted with this difficulty as well.  That said, I'm going to examine the situation of Christianity in particular.

We who were raised in America generally inherit a set of intuitions about the meaning of the word "worship" and the word "pray", the nature of human social hierarchies, the nature of our relationship with religion, the place of the Bible in Christian life, the nature of the Church, what it means to be a Christian, and so on.

Because the United States was heavily influenced by Protestant Christians in its culture, its theological language, its popular ecclesiology, its view of the Bible, and its view of human nature, these intuitions are often Protestant intuitions.

I wrote a fairly lengthy series about my own journey to re-examining and ultimately rejecting those intuitions, and that was not an easy process, given how basic many of them are to someone raised in the United States.

Hypocrisy and Truth - Necessity and Tradition - Scripture and Reason

For example, it took me quite a long time to shake the intuition that the Bible is the basis for Christian theological claims and truly understand that the Bible is a written record of early Christian theological claims.  I thought that the Bible was what gave Christianity the authority.  It turns out that Christian authority vested in the Church gave us the Bible.

It also took me many years to understand why my intuition that Mary's role as Queen of Heaven need not be emphasized was wrong, and to unpack the ways in which my American understanding of social hierarchy had unfairly prejudiced my view of the divine hierarchy.

I also had a defective understanding of my relationship to the Church.  I viewed the Church as something I could accept or reject on intellectual grounds, not as the Body of Christ in its earthly fullness to be loved as I love my own body, just as Christ loves the Church.

This intuition that turned out to be false isn't something I developed on my own.  I inherited it from an American culture that has largely agreed that attending churches is just a matter of individual preference in practice, even if in theory some of the congregations assent to the traditional ecclesiological view of the 1st-millennium Church that there is one true Church, and outside the one true Church of Christ there is no salvation.

In a similar way, there are many people in the United States who are raised Catholic and nonetheless take the typical post-Reformation view that leaving the Catholic Church to attend services with another congregation is just their personal choice.  It's not a schism or anything serious like that.  It's just a matter of doing what their conscience tells them.

And given this, it's not surprising that Americans don't see the Catholic Church as an authority to be obeyed, but rather an advisor on morality whose advice can be ignored, because the individual is the final arbiter of what is best for the individual.  The Church can't really be an authority over an individual, because the individual is the ultimate authority.

This American individualism is so deeply rooted in the psyche of most Americans that even the most traditional Catholics who strive for obedience to the Church can struggle with it, sometimes going so far as to set themselves against the Church for not living up to their individual standards.

While some might focus on the problem with Protestant theological language flattening the definitions of the words "pray" and "worship" (for good reasons), I am more concerned about the more deeply-rooted intuitions which make it easy for us to rationalize leaving the Church or rejecting Her teaching while still being attached to the Church for other reasons.

Intuitions like these are doing real damage to the Corpus Christi, as they motivate an increasing number to leave, many to dissent, and some to grumble against the Church for not doing more to strike against those who dissent.

Though it's interesting to consider how American culture tends to make even Catholics and members of other ancient religious groups accept intuitions at odds with how their religious traditions understand the world, it's mostly just sad to watch the Body of Christ breaking again.

Ut unum sint.

Related: The Protestant Intuition: Divine Gifts & Human Works

Note:  Above is a picture of Martin Luther's edited Bible translated into German.

The Letter of Bahá'u'lláh to Pope Pius IX

Recently, I was finally able to get a decent copy of an English translation of some of the writings of the Bahá'í faith.  I realize that it's not common for Americans to order a book of Bahá'í writing, and folks may wonder, "Why would I do that?"

I haven't studied the Bahá'í faith is an much depth as Buddhism or Islam or various traditions under the umbrella of Hinduism, and I had a desire to at least lessen my ignorance about it.

I opened it up and quickly learned a few things.  First, I learned that Bahá'u'lláh wrote a fair number of letters to people of prominence.  He wrote to Pope Pius IX, Tsar Alexander II, Napoleon III, Queen Victoria, and the famous Sultan of Persia, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar.

I was a little surprised to see how prominently Bahá'u'lláh's letter to the Pope at the time was featured in the volume.  I wasn't sure why the Pope would head up that list in a Bahá'í collection, and I wasn't sure why the Pope was included among a list of very powerful secular rulers of empires.

"O POPE! Rend the veils asunder! He who is the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings, hath come overshadowed with clouds (Rev. 1:7) – the prophecy hath been fulfilled on the part of God, the Almighty, the Unconstrained. It is incumbent upon thee, therefore to dispel the clouds and proclaim Baha'u'llah, the splendor of the Authority of thy Lord; then ascend into the Kingdom of His names and attributes. Thus hath the Supreme Pen command thee, on the part of thy Lord, the Mighty, the Most Powerful.

Verily, He hath come again from heaven another time, even as He came down from it the first time (Jn. 3:13 KJV); beware lest thou oppose Him even as the Pharisees opposed Him the first time without evidence or proof. On His right hand floweth the living waters of grace and on His left hand the choice sweet Wine of Justice; whilst before Him march the angels of Paradise bearing the Divine Standard of His signs (Is. 11:11). Beware lest any name debar thee from God, the Creator of the earth and heaven. Leave thou the creatures and the world behind thee, and turn towards thy Lord, through Whom all the horizons of the earth hath been illumined. We have adorned the Kingdom with the ornament of Our name, El-Abha – The Brightest of Lights (Jn. 3:19-21); thus hath the matter been decided on the part of God, the Creator of all things. Beware lest your theologies and vain imaginations withhold thee after the Sun of Truth hath shone forth above the horizon of the Explanation of thy Lord, the Mighty, the Beneficent. Dost thou dwell in palaces, while the King of Revelation (Rev. 6:16) liveth in the most desolate of abodes? Leave palaces to those who desire them behind, then advance to the Kingdom with spirituality and fragrance."

A little historical context helped me in that regard.  It seems that Bahá'u'lláh or someone close to him was at least somewhat familiar with the political troubles in Europe at the time, given the people he chose to write to with warnings and exhortations.

It might look like Bahá'u'lláh was seeing the future in some supernatural way, given that an important part of his warning to the Pope Pius IX turned out to be prophetic-sounding after the events in Rome.  He advises the Pope to leave behind his palaces, which would have seemed like very good advice to many people, given that the Pope's armies and city were conquered not too long after the letter was written.

But there were decades of problems leading up to Italy's conquest of the Papal territory, and it would have taken little insight from any non-prophet to predict that getting out of town was a good move for the Pope who prized his own safety first.

I also think it's unlikely that Bahá'u'lláh was actually concerned about giving such advice anyway.  His purpose seemed to be primarily theological, given that Bahá'u'lláh opens his letter by exhorting the Pope to abandon his Christian theology and accept the Bahá'í faith.  He goes on more in that vein later in the letter:

"Beware lest theologies of men prevent thee from accepting the King of the known, or the world distract thee from Him who created it and set it upon its course. Arise in the name of thy Lord, the God of Mercy, amidst the peoples of the earth, and seize thou the Cup of life with the hands of confidence. First drink thou therefrom, and proffer it then to such as turn toward it amongst the peoples of all faiths. Thus hath the Moon of Explanation shone forth from the horizon of wisdom and evidence.

Rend asunder the veils of man-made theology lest they prevent thee from the court of Him Who is My Name, the Everlasting, the Self-Subsistent. Call thou to remembrance Him Who was the Spirit - Jesus - Who, when He came, the most learned of His age pronounced judgement against Him in His own country, whilst he who was only a fisherman believed in Him. Take heed, then, ye men of understanding heart! Thou, in truth, art one of the suns of the heaven of His names. Guard thyself, lest darkness spread its veils over thee, and fold thee away from His light. Look at that which has been sent down in the Bible on the part of thy Lord, the Almighty, the Generous.

Say: O assembly of learned men, withhold your pens, for the sound of the Supreme Pen hath been raised between the earth and the heaven. Set aside that which ye have and accept what We have explained unto thee with power and authority. That Hour which was hidden in the knowledge of God hath come, whereupon all the atoms of the earth have proclaimed: “The Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:9-10, 22) is Come seated upon David's throne! Hasten unto Him with submissiveness and penitence. O people of the earth!” Say: Lo, I made Myself your ransom for the sake of your lives (1 Tim. 2:5, 6), but when I come unto you another time (Heb. 9:28) I see you fleeing from Me (Rev. 6:16); therefore doth the eye of My compassion weep over My people; fear God, O ye people of observation."

Like those in the Islamic tradition before him, Bahá'u'lláh viewed Christian theology as corrupted by men, but based on a genuine revelation from Allah.  Also like them, he wanted those who had been granted access to the corrupted theologies to leave behind what they had been taught and to proclaim the pure and true revelation.

Bahá'u'lláh continues, as he goes on in the letter, to warn that Christian worship is actually a barrier between the Christian and Allah, and that being well-educated has not kept them from falling into error.

"Consider those who opposed the Son, when He came unto them with sovereignty and power. How many the Pharisees who were waiting to behold Him, and were lamenting over their separation from Him! And yet, when the fragrance of His coming was wafted over them, and His beauty was unveiled, they turned aside from Him and disputed with Him. Thus have we expounded unto thee that which was written in the Bible and Holy Scriptures. None save a very few, who were destitute of any power amongst men, turned towards His face. And yet today every man endowed with power and invested with sovereignty prideth himself on His Name! In like manner, consider how numerous, in these days, are the monks who, in My Name, have secluded themselves in their churches, and who, when the appointed time was fulfilled, and We unveiled Our beauty, knew Us not, though they call upon Me at eventide and at dawn. We see them clinging to My Name—Jesus—yet veiled from Myself. Verily, this is a strange marvel (2 Thess. 2:11 KJV). Say: Beware lest your devotions preventeth you from meeting the One to Whom you are Devoted, and your worship debar you from the One Who is the Object of all Worship.

Rend asunder the veils of vain-imaginings and false expectation. Verily this is your Lord the Omnipotent, the Omniscient! He hath come for the life of the world, life abundantly, and to unite all who dwell upon the whole surface of the earth. Come ye, O people, to the Rising-place of Revelation and tarry not even for a moment. Do ye read the Gospel of the New Testament and yet still do not acknowledge the All-Glorious Lord? This beseemeth you not, O concourse of learned men!

Say: Should ye deny this Revelation, by what proof have ye believed in God? Produce it! Thus the matter hath been revealed (2 Thess. 2:3 KJV) by the Supreme Pen on the part of your Lord El-Abha, in this Epistle from whose horizon the Light has shone. How many servants are there whose actions and deeds (Rev. 20:12,13; 22:12) became veils for themselves whereby they were withheld (Rev. 21:27) from coming nearer to God, the Sender of Breath."

This passage might make it seem like Bahá'u'lláh was claiming to be Jesus Himself, God's Son who was to return at the end of time, but it's important to remember that in Bahá'í cosmology, religion is renewed periodically by Manifestations of God, people who are sent by God precisely for that purpose.

While Bahá'u'lláh seemed to view himself as one of the Manifestations of God, there were many others who were also viewed that way in his religious tradition, including Krishna, Zoroaster, Jesus, and the Buddha.  He did not view any religion's revelatory claims as final, though they might be legitimately a partial revelation from Allah in terms of their moral content and theology.

Bahá'u'lláh expected that there would be more people like him to come, that Allah would send more messengers to humanity in other times and places.  He was exhorting the Pope and all those he led to abandon their attachments to their current way of understanding religion and accept the latest revelation that he was providing as Bahá'u'lláh.

"O concourse of monks! The fragrances of the All-Merciful have wafted over all creation. Happy the man that hath forsaken his desires, and taken fast hold of guidance. Verily he is one of those who have attained unto the presence of God in this Day and gazing upon all the inhabitants of the earth seeth them frightened and terrorized (Isaiah 2:10, 19) save those chosen by God, He who layeth low the necks of men.

Do ye adorn your bodies while the garment of God is intensely red with the blood of hatred by that which came upon Him on the part of the people of willful blindness? Come out of your abodes and bid the people to enter into the Kingdom of God, the King of the Day of Judgment. The Word which the Son concealed is made manifest. It hath been sent down in the form of the human temple in this day. Blessed be the Lord Who is the Father! (Is. 9:6, 7) He, verily, is come unto the nations in His Most Great Majesty. Turn your faces towards Him, O concourse of the righteous!

O people of all religions! We see you are wandering erringly in the waterless desert of loss; ye are the fish of this Sea, why do ye withhold yourselves from your Sustainer? Verily, the Sea is surging before your faces; hasten unto Him from all regions. This is the day whereon the Rock (Peter) crieth out and shouteth, and celebrateth the praise of its Lord, the All-Possessing, the Most High, saying: “Lo! The Father is come, and that which ye were promised in the Kingdom is fulfilled!” This is the Word which was preserved behind the veil of might, and when the promised time came, it shone forth from the horizon of the Primal Will with manifest signs."

The renunciation of wealth, even of rich garments, continues to be emphasized as the letter continues.  Bahá'u'lláh tells the members of religious orders to leave their cloisters, monasteries, abbeys, and priories so that they can proclaim the Kingdom of God to all the people.

As before, he sees their religious attachments as keeping them from God, and abandoning their current religion as the means to begin reaching God.

"My body hath borne imprisonment that your souls may be released from bondage, and We have consented to be abased that ye may be exalted. Follow the Lord of glory and dominion, and not every ungodly oppressor. My body longeth for the cross, and Mine head awaiteth the thrust of the spear, in the path of the All-Merciful, that the world may be purged from its transgressions. Thus the Sun of Wisdom hath shone forth from the horizon of the command of Him Who is the King of all names and attributes.

The people of the Qur'án have risen against Us, and tormented Us with such a torment that the Holy Spirit lamented, and the thunder roared out, and the eyes of the clouds wept over Us. From amongst the unbelievers some imagined that afflictions could withholdeth Baha from fulfilling that which God the Creator of All Things hath Willed. Say unto them: No, by Him who causeth the rains to fall, nothing withholdeth Him from the mention of His Lord.

By the Righteousness of God! Even though they burn Him on the earth, verily He will lift up His head in the midst of the sea, and will cry: “Verily, He is God of whatsoever is in the heaven and the earth!” And if they cast Him into a darksome pit, they will find Him seated on earth's loftiest heights calling aloud to all mankind: ''Lo, the Desire of the World is come in His majesty, His sovereignty, His transcendent dominion!'' And if He be buried beneath the depths of the earth, His Spirit soaring to the apex of heaven shall peal the summons: ''Behold ye the coming of Baha with the Kingdom of God, the Most Holy, the Gracious, the All-Powerful!'' And though they shed His blood, every drop thereof shall cry out and invoke God by this Name, whereby the perfume of His raiment is diffused throughout all regions."

This portion of the letter seems to be referring to both the persecutions faced by the fledgling Bahá'í community and Bahá'u'lláh himself, who was imprisoned in Tehran.  Being a religious leader has its risks, and facing capture and imprisonment and harsh treatment is certainly something that Bahá'u'lláh shares in common with Jesus, which may be why he uses the imagery of the crucifixion throughout this passage.

It's really a beautifully-written passage, and while it's not the most poetic religious work I've read, it does have a nice poetic element to it.  We really see this poetry as we get into the direct appeal to the Pope as the Supreme Pontiff.

"Though while threatened under the swords of the enemies, We call the people unto God, the Creator of the earth and heaven, and We assist Him so greatly that We could not be hindered either by the hosts of the oppressors nor the influence of the liars. Say, O people of the earth: Crush to pieces the idols of imagination, by the name of your Lord, the Mighty, the Benevolent, then advance unto Him in this Day, which God hath made the King of Days.

O Supreme Pontiff! Incline thine ear unto that which the Fashioner of mouldering bones counselleth thee, as voiced by Him Who is His Most Great Name. Sell all the embellished ornaments thou dost possess, and expend them in the path of God, Who causeth the night to return upon the day, and the day to return upon the night. Abandon thy kingdom unto the kings, and emerge from thy habitation, with thy face set towards the Kingdom, and, detached from the world, then speak forth the praises of thy Lord betwixt earth and heaven. Thus hath bidden thee He Who is the Possessor of Names, on the part of thy Lord, the Almighty, the All-Knowing. Exhort thou the kings and say: ''Deal equitably with men. Beware lest ye transgress the bounds fixed in the Book.'' This indeed becometh thee. Beware lest thou appropriate unto thyself the things of the world and the riches thereof. Leave them unto such as desire them, and cleave unto that which hath been enjoined upon thee by Him Who is the Lord of creation. Should any one come unto thee with the whole treasures of the earth, be as thy Lord hath been: turn not thy sight toward them. Thus hath the Tongue of Revelation uttered that which God hath made the ornament of the Book of Renovation.

Consider the pearl! Verily, its luster is in itself, but if thou coverest it with silk it assuredly veileth the beauty and qualities thereof. Such is man, his nobility is in his virtues, and not in that which covereth him, and not in toys and childish things (1 Cor. 13:11). Know, then, that thy true adornment is the Love of God and thy devotion to naught else save Him, and not to the allurements and luxuries of the world which thou hast in thy possession: leave them to those who desire them and come to God, who causeth the rivers to flow."

The exhortation to sell all the property and liturgical garments in the Papal State and live a life of personal asceticism as a public figure would not be out of place in any Protestant's letter to any Pope, but it is Bahá'u'lláh who is making it this time.

That said, Bahá'u'lláh tries to differentiate himself from the average person who writes the Pope to advise the Pontiff as to the best course of action.

"All that was said by the tongue of the Son was spoken in proverbs (parables and figures), whereas He who speaketh today speaks plainly and does not use them (Jn. 16:25 KJV). Beware not to take hold of the cord of vain-imagination and withhold thyself from the plain truth of what was ordained in the Kingdom of God, the Mighty, the Bounteous. Should the inebriation of the wine of My verses seize thee, and thou determinest to present thyself before the throne of thy Lord, the Creator of earth and heaven, make My love thy vesture, and thy shield remembrance of Me, and thy provision reliance upon God, the Revealer of all power.

O people of the Son! We have sent unto you once again John the Baptist (in the person of the Bab as My precursor). Verily, He crieth in the wilderness of the Bayan: “O Peoples of the world! Clear your eyes, for the day of vision and meeting the Promised One is now!” “O people of the Gospel, prepare the way, for the Day whereon the Glory of the Lord (Baha'u'llah) shall come (Mk. 8:38), hath drawn nigh. Prepare yourselves to enter His Kingdom.” Thus was the matter decreed on the part of God, Who causes Dawn to Break.

Hearken unto the strains which the Dove of Eternity hath sung upon the Branches of the Divine Lote Tree and which is vocal with the melody: “O peoples of the earth, We have sent unto you Him who was named John to baptize you with water that your bodies might be purified for the Appearance of the Messiah, the Christ. He in turn hath purified you with the Fire of Love and with the Water of the Spirit in preparation for These Days whereon the All-Merciful hath willed to cleanse your bodies with the Water of Life, by the hands of His loving-kindness. This is indeed the Father, whereof Isaiah gave you tidings (Isaiah 9:6, 7 and ch. 2 and 11), and the Comforter (John 16:7-15 KJV) from whom Jesus hath received His Covenant.” O concourse of learned people! Open your eyes that you may see your Lord sitting on the Throne (1 Chon. 29:23) in Glory and Might."

Bahá'u'lláh makes the claim that his predecessor the Bab is John the Baptist returned to the Earth, once again preparing the way for a Manifestation of God.  His frequent references to the New Testament and the Old Testament of the Bible may be meant to persuade the Pope, but I am very doubtful that it did anything to persuade.

I suspect that the Pope would be very suspicious indeed of anyone from Persia claiming that he was providing a new revelation from Allah and acting as though he were equal to Jesus in authority.

"Say, O people of all Religions! Be not of those who followed the Pharisees and thus they were veiled from the Messiah, the Christ. Verily, they are in forgetfulness and error. The Ancient Beauty hath come in the Most Great Name and hath desired to admit all the people into His Most Holy Kingdom, that the pure in heart may see the Kingdom of God before His Face (Mt. 5:8). Hasten unto Him and follow not every denying infidel. And if the eye of any one oppose him in this, it behooveth him to pluck it out (Mk. 9:47). Thus was it written by the Pen of the Ancient of Days as bidden by Him Who is the Lord of all creation. He hath verily come again a second time for your deliverance and salvation (Heb. 9:28). O people of creation, will ye kill Him yet once more, He Who desireth to grant you eternal Life? Fear God, O people of discernment.

O people! Hearken unto that which is revealed to you on the part of thy Lord in El-Abha. Turn unto God, the Lord of this life, and the life to come. Thus commandeth you the Rising-place of the Sun of Inspiration on the part of the Creator of all human kind. We have created you for the light, and We do not like to leave you for the fire. Come out, O people, therefore from darkness through this Sun of Reality which has shone forth from the horizon of the grace of God. Then advance unto Him with purified hearts and assured souls, seeing eyes and bright faces. This is that whereby the King of Fate admonisheth you, from the region of the Most Great Outlook, that ye may be attracted by the Voice to the Kingdom of His Names.

Blessed is he who remains under the provisions of the Covenant, and woe unto him who breaketh the promise and denieth God, the Knower of secrets. Say: Lo! This is the Day of Grace! Come ye that I may make you kings of the realm of My Kingdom (Rev. 1:6). If ye obey Me, you will see that which We have promised you, and I will make you the friends of My Soul in the realm of My Majesty (Is. ch. 35) and the Companions of My Beauty in the heaven of My Power forevermore. And if ye disobey Me (Deut. ch. 28), I will be patient through My Mercy, perchance that ye will awake and arise from the couch of heedlessness. Thus hath My forbearance preceded you. Fear God and follow not those who have turned away from the Face while they invoke His Name at the dawn-tide and in the night season too."

Oddly for a letter to the Pope, Bahá'u'lláh addresses people of all religions and follows it with very specific religious language that Christians and Jews would readily understand, but might be rather obscure to the average Hindu, Buddhist, or even a devout Muslim who had not read the Bible.

You may notice that many of the exhortations of Bahá'u'lláh are reiterations of passages from the Tanakh, the Christian New Testament writings, or the Qur'an.  In this case, the part about remaining under the Covenant reminded me of a Quranic passage regarding the Jews as covenant-breakers.

"Verily, the Harvest Day hath come and all things are separated one from another. That which was chosen is stored in the vessels of justice, and into the fire was cast what was fitted for it. Thus hath decided thy Lord, the Mighty, the Beloved, in this Promised Day. Verily He ordaineth whatsoever He pleaseth. There is no God but He, the Mighty, the Subduer! The Sifter did not wish but to store every good thing for Myself. He did not speak but to inform you of My Cause and guide you into the Path of Him by whose mention all the sacred Books of the world are adorned.

Say: O concourse of Christians! We have, on a previous occasion, revealed Ourself unto you, and ye recognized Me not. This is yet another occasion vouchsafed unto you. This is the Day of God; turn ye unto Him. Verily He hath come down from heaven as He came down from heaven the first time (Jn. 3:13 KJV) and desired to shelter you under the shadow of His Mercy. Verily, He is the Exalted, the Mighty, the Defender. The Beloved One loveth not that ye be consumed with the fire of your desires. Were ye to be shut out as by a veil from Him, this would be for no other reason than your own waywardness and ignorance. Ye make mention of Me, and know Me not. Ye call upon Me, and are heedless of My Revelation and of My Appearance, after I have come unto you from the heaven of prophecy with My Most Great Glory. Burn away the veils in My Name through the Power of My Dominion that ye may find a way to the Lord.

The King of Glory continually proclaims from the horizon of the Pavilion of Might and Greatness saying: “O people of the Gospel! They who were not in the Kingdom have now entered it, whilst We behold you, in this day, tarrying at the gate. Rend the veils asunder by the power of your Lord, the Almighty, the All-Bounteous, and enter, then, in My Name My Kingdom. Thus biddeth you He Who desireth for you everlasting life. Verily, He is powerful over all things. Blessed are they who have known the light and hastened toward it. Behold! They are in the Kingdom, they eat and drink with the elect."

The various titles which Bahá'u'lláh gives to Christians throughout the letter are interesting.  From "People of the Son" to "People of the Gospel" he emphasizes the continuity of his proclamations with the existing Christian religious traditions while calling the faithful Christians out of them.

Then he goes on to give them another title, which is "Children of the Kingdom."  He tells Christians that they are in darkness, and they need to return to the Light.

"We behold you, O children of the Kingdom, in darkness. This, verily, beseemeth you not. Are ye, in the face of the Light (Jn. 3:19-21), fearful because of your deeds? Direct yourselves towards Him. Verily, thy Glorious Lord hath honored His country by His coming, blessed His lands with His footsteps. Thus We teach you plainly the path to Him (Jn.14:6) whereof Jesus hath prophesied. I, verily, bear witness for him even as he hath borne witness unto Me. Verily, He said: "Come ye after Me, and I will make you to become fishers of men." In this day, however, We say: “Come ye after Me, that We may make you to become quickeners of mankind.” Thus has the decree been ordained in this Epistle written by the Pen of Command."

Finally, Bahá'u'lláh gets to the crux of the matter.  He makes it clear that the new revelation has priority, and that he is the new authority.  His letter to the Pope was, from the perspective of Bahá'u'lláh, a letter to a leader of the Church whose deposit of faith had been emptied, a guardian of a flame that had long since been snuffed out by error and corruption.

Bahá'u'lláh saw himself as a Manifestation of God writing an epistle to the lowly Servant of the Servants of God.  He understood himself as the Pen of Command, made by the Creator's hand to send these messages.

I'm not sure what Pope Pius IX thought of the letter, or if he even had the chance to read it.  He was rather busy at the time with many problems.  Nonetheless, I think that he might have been more interested by Bahá'u'lláh's account of his vision of the Maid of Heaven.

That might have been a more compelling place to start the letter to a Pope famous for his Mariology.

The above is a picture of my copy of The Summons of the Lord of Hosts.

Waking Up Half-Asleep: Scientific Racism and Sam Harris

The latest controversy surrounding Sam Harris has been generated by his willingness to admit that he was wrong about Charles Murray, who earned great notoriety for his book The Bell Curve.  Others disagree, and continue to claim that racism is either Murray's motivation for the research and the policies he supports or something he conveniently ignores.

I think the question of Murray's views on race have been beaten to death, re-animated, and beaten to death again so many times that it's largely a futile effort to address it again.

What interested me more was the subject of scientific racism, and Harris' response to Ezra Klein's points about it.  You can see the transcript here at Vox if you prefer not to listen to the podcast version.



I want to look at a portion of the conversation and quote the transcript to address the issue of scientific racism:

Ezra Klein: Something you brought up a couple times is something I wrote in my piece, and I am actually very happy to talk about this. I say that the belief that African-Americans are genetically less intelligent than whites, and then also inferior in other ways, which I’m not saying you guys said, is our oldest, most ancient justification for racial inequality and bigotry. Do you disagree with that? When you look at American history, when you look at what we said at the dawn of this country and all the way through the 1950, the 60s, when I say that, am I wrong?

Sam Harris: In a sense you’re wrong. I agree with the spirit of it. I think you could say the Bible is just as much of a justification, the notion that the race of Ham came under a curse and that these races have a separate theological stature. You had Bible-thumping racist maniacs defending slavery and without any reference to science. That’s a great American tradition.

I think tribalism is at the bottom of it and perceiving other people who look different and sound different from yourself as ineradicably different. I think that is a problem we must outgrow, and I fully agree with the social concerns that follow from noticing how far we have to go in outgrowing that.

Ezra Klein: One of the things I detect in this conversation, this maybe gets to something we discussed that we would talk about later and maybe we’ve hit that point. Something I detect here is the idea that, and I want to think about how to phrase this carefully, because I want to do it without making you defensive, is that ideas can only fit into this lineage if they are being said with racial animus, if they are being said by someone who doesn’t like the people they’re talking about.

I think an important thing when we study the history of racism in this country is that it has always had a scientific wrapper. It has always been not something people thought they were doing because they were hateful, it was something they thought they were doing, because it was true.

This is the area where I think Sam Harris' tribalism (which Ezra Klein accused him of ignoring) is actually a factor.  Sam Harris has a fundamental commitment to science and scientific values.  He's a neuroscientist himself.  He's part of the tribe of scientists and pro-science public intellectuals.  He's gone so far as to claim that morality can be grounded in a scientific framework.

My sense is that Harris's self-perception is that he's taken his tendencies toward tribalism into account and mitigated those already.  Also, he doesn't pretend that no one has ever used science to support racist ideas.  He acknowledges this, albeit briefly.

I don't think the tribalism is a problem for him here in a straightforward and obvious way.  It's more roundabout, and by way of his views on religion.

Even very rigorous philosophers who regularly take into account their own biases, when they happen to be religious, can easily tilt the way they interpret the strength of the arguments against their religious views to avoid dealing with the full strength of those arguments.  I'm sure Harris is familiar with this process from long experience.

What I would suggest is that the same tilting of the way the strength of the arguments is interpreted is happening here.  The strength of the arguments regarding the extent to which the Bible was used to rationalize slavery in the U.S. is given a bit greater weight because Harris is committed to opposing religions generally and for that reason the various religious tribes (who generally oppose him).

At the same time, he is unlikely to weight the strength of the arguments regarding the extent to which scientific research was used to rationalize slavery and eugenics and so on in the U.S. so heavily because his view of science is that it is helping us leave those ideas behind rather than keeping us in those ideas as he believes religion does.

My view of the issue is that religious views rather than scientific views played a larger role in maintaining slavery, and that religious views rather than scientific views played a larger role in ending slavery (and the Jim Crow laws and segregation which followed) in the U.S.

It was much more the American moral sense formed by Christianity that motivated the change in views on the issue of slavery and the issues of Jim Crow laws and segregation.  The scientific evidence we have now does indeed support the view that traditional racial categories are not very accurate as a description of intra-species differences in humans, but this evidence was not yet well-established and popularized during the colonial era or the Civil War era.

What was well-established at that point were the Christian moral arguments for slavery and the Christian moral arguments against slavery.  And it was those religiously-motivated moral arguments that carried the day, and still inoculate us against a return to slavery.

Scientific research doesn't, by itself, produce moral progress in a society.  It's typically used in a self-serving way by both sides of any given controversial moral issue, but it's not what motivates societies to change.  And that's for a very simple reason: science is generally not what motivates people to change (religion is much more motivating), and it's the people who need to do the changing for societies to change.

Now, I would feel safe betting that Sam Harris would agree with me that people ought to be more motivated by scientific findings.  He and I would likely reach an accord quickly on that point. 

Certainly more quickly than an accord could be reached by Harris and Klein on the question of whether or not Klein's publishing of articles contra Murray and Harris poisons the space for debate on important issues.

I think it's probably true that Klein's behavior has contributed to poisoning the space for public debate on the policy implications of IQ score differentials, but only ever so slightly.  It was a poisonous space for debate long before Klein was involved, and I don't see his contribution being a very large one.

I would also say that Klein is dead wrong about the most ancient justification for racial inequality and bigotry being the belief that folks with dark skin are less intelligent than those with light skin.  The roots are deeper than that.  Bigotry based on physical characteristics is much older than any of the recorded history for the colonial era (or even the medieval era), and likely much older than any recorded history...period.

We need to look deeper for the roots of bigotry, and even slavery, which is older than any of the religious traditions or scientific findings that have recently been used to rationalize its continuance.  We can and should do this while still guarding against future uses of moral reasoning grounded in those religious traditions and scientific findings to bring slavery back or to continue other kinds of ongoing injustices.

I think Klein is exactly right, however, that racism in the United States has consistently had a scientific wrapper.  And that we ought to be skeptical of our ability to claim today that we can be reasonably sure that the scientific data showing differences in average IQ scores among populations represents a real innate difference in IQ due to heritable traits.

I can acknowledge that the data exists while remaining agnostic as to the exact causes and their implications (which I do).  This curious agnosticism with regard to the question would probably have been a better approach for many people who used scientific research to prop up their racism in the past or the people who continue to use it that way today.

I think we need to make sure that we are not waking up to the problem of racism, still half-asleep and stumbling around while unable to see that the same old pitfalls are still there.

It is probably better to give ourselves a chance to wake up fully before we attempt to leave our resting place too boldly, and then we can make our way more safely while avoiding those old pitfalls.

Sadly, I'm not sure any of us are fully awake at this point.

Fair Questions: Why charismatic worship?

In Catholic circles, charismatic worship styles are not always approved of, either by laypeople or clergy.  Of course, the Catholic Church as an institution has approved of it in some fashion, and indeed has even encouraged it as part of the life of the Church.

We can see this in the video below:




How did you react to the charismatic worship in the video?

There are at least a couple of obvious dangers when watching charismatic worship. It is easy, if your intuitions about how worship ought to be done are that this is a wrong way of worshiping, to write it off and assume bad faith or spiritual or emotional immaturity on the part of both participants and leaders.

It is also easy, if your intuitions about how worship ought to be done is that this is a great way of worshiping, to ignore the concerns of those who think it is not and go on about how wonderful and energizing it is without asking whether or not it's spiritually healthy.

As a former Pentecostal, I am aware of both the value and the risks of charismatic styles of worship. We ought to be able to loudly and with deep emotion express our longing for God. Charismatic worship is a way to do that., a way to fulfill this potent emotional need for freely expressing our joy to our Creator and Savior.

The big danger is that a reliance on this emotionally powerful form of worship can unbalance us spiritually. We can begin to rely on the swell of feelings as a way of buoying up our faith life, and that's a real problem, because then our faith begins to fail once the big swell of feelings is gone and the hard work of ordinary spiritual growth through suffering sets in.

Each type of worship is prone to become unhealthy for us in different ways.  Liturgical prayer, for example, can easily become a ritualistic practice disconnected from the heart, a purely mechanical process in which we simply repeat the words without integrating their spiritual significance into our lives through the heart, the intellect, the will, and ultimately the soul.

This must be vigilantly guarded against, of course.  And fortunately, the beauty of the ancient Christian liturgies tends to draw us out of purely rote and mechanical recitation anyway.  This helps to keep us from falling into the pitfall of empty worship.  Similarly, we need something to keep us from falling into the pit of mere emotional exuberance for its own sake, an emotional high that has the same basic function as a chemical high and is primarily selfish.

My advice to any Catholic community engaging in charismatic worship is to make sure that it doesn't begin to take the place of the solemn Mass or change the way we celebrate Mass (via ignoring or flouting the rubrics by adding things to the Mass), and that it remains a supplement to the spiritual life of the community rather than becoming its daily bread.

There's real value in charismatic worship.  As with all things of real value, the key is to keep it in right order with the other valuable parts of our spiritual lives.

Love it to Death: The Vestments of Love

Our clothing, as Americans today, is primarily a representation of who we are as individuals.  We might have a uniform we wear to work or in the military as a secondary matter, but the first and most fundamental way we have of understanding clothing is as a matter of personal expression.

In the scope of human history, personal expression has probably always been a factor in clothing choices.  But it was probably very much a secondary factor much of the time.  For the ancients, clothing was much more likely to be primarily a representation of that to which they owed some allegiance, whether it be their tribe, their king, or their family.

When the ancients wore clothing which was a representation of that to which they owed allegiance, it was an act of self-effacement.  Even the messenger of a wealthy king, who would have been dressed quite richly, wasn't dressed richly because he himself was the king, but because he was acting as the representative of the king, and therefore needed to show quite obviously whom it was that he was representing.

That said, it was also understood that how one treats the king's messenger is indicative of how much one respects the king.  If you treat the king's messenger well, and send him back to the king with gifts and provisions, then the king knows that you are communicating your high respect for him, or at least for his position.

On the other hand, if you snub the king's messenger by refusing to feast with him, and then send the messenger back home with harsh words, the king will notice that you do not have much respect for him.  In short, it was generally wise to treat the messenger dressed in the king's colors almost as well as you would treat the king himself.

The Founders of the United States probably understood all this at least somewhat.  Many of them had some close ties to the countries of their forebears in which kings and their messengers were well-known.  We who live in these United States 250 years later, however, are unlikely to ever have known a king, or even lived for long in a country whose king had exercised any immediate authority over us.

I consciously realized today (Palm Sunday) at Mass, that our parish priest was dressed in very fine vestments.  I recognized that these must be fairly expensive garments, and that they were extraordinarily beautiful.  These vestments wouldn't make sense in any other context than representing a king.

Here in the U.S. we have no earthly king.  Perhaps this is why we Americans can find rich vestments on our clergy a bit off-putting.  Having no king, we no longer have an easy cultural touchstone to function as a way to arrive at the understanding that ornate priestly vestments are less a matter of personal expression and more a matter of representation.

It is easy for us to imagine that the priest thinks that he's all high and mighty because of his fine robes as he celebrates the liturgy, and difficult for us to imagine that he dresses in these vestments because he is representing the King of kings and Lord of lords when he celebrates the memorial feast of the King of Heaven.

It's easy for us to imagine that the priest simply has a personal preference for frilly, fanciful garments.  And based on what I've seen of gossip in these sexuality-obsessed days, it's even easier to suggest with a wink to others that the priest likes such things because he's secretly attracted to other men.

It's more difficult for us to imagine that the priest finds them difficult to wear because of the heat and the weight of them, and to sympathize with him.  And it's more difficult to imagine that he actually finds those fancy vestments difficult to wear because he knows how the gossip will play out, but he wears them out of obedience to the Church anyway.

This is an act of the obedience of Love.  To turn over our choice of clothing to the King as an act of representing our King is, in a small way, to show our love for Him by obedience, and thus to love to death a part of our ego.

The childish ego we carry with us wants to keep the focus on our clothing as a matter of personal expression, so that we can get compliments from the people we prefer them from, and perhaps so that those we prefer to offend will be bothered by our clothing.

Christ the King asks us to turn everything over to Him, and to live every part of our lives representing Him who is eternal Love rather than the transient desires of our egos.  This naturally includes how we clothe ourselves, and in a special way it includes those who are designated to act as the King's messenger before the community.

And so the priest wears the vestments of Love, the rich kingly garments that show us vibrantly that it is the King of Kings for whom he delivers a message.

The above is a picture I took of an icon I purchased from legacyicons.com, and it is one part of a diptych depicting both Mary and Christ.  It shows Christ in liturgical vestments, crowned and enthroned in glory with the symbols of the four Evangelists surrounding Him.

Fair Questions: Should Christians take yoga classes?

It's been a while since I've read any articles from Matt Walsh, but this one was shared with me recently, and it has created quite a controversy, as much of his writing does.  In this one, he makes the argument that Christians should not, generally speaking, participate in yoga.

I'll be very candid about my own situation with yoga:  I have never taken a yoga class, and don't see much point in starting now.  I have a very nice stretching routine of my own that leaves me loose and limber and strengthens the muscles.  That said, I have studied it from a religious perspective and have a basic understanding of its spiritual implications and its relationship to Hinduism.

See Related Podcast and Post: The Yoga of Krishna

Based on my familiarity with the religious side of yoga and my traditionally-minded Catholic faith (which I share with Matt Walsh), you might understandably assume that I agree with him that Christians should avoid yoga in general.

But I don't.  That said, I do think he makes a better argument than most Christians who take an anti-yoga stance, and that Christians should take this argument seriously.  Also, he correctly points out the poor reasoning for participating in yoga that is commonly utilized by Christians to justify their choice, and that's worthwhile.

First, let's examine some of the bad arguments made by Christians against yoga.

1.  Performing yoga poses is inherently a Hindu spiritual practice regardless of your intentions, and regardless of your spiritual state it will draw you into contact with demonic activity and/or cause you to be worshiping pagan gods.
2.  Yoga is a practice of a pagan religion and participating in it is risky because it could lead you to explore pagan religions and eventually convert to one of them.

Argument #1 is, to put it mildly, patently absurd.  If that were true, any child playing around performing odd animal poses after being inspired by visiting a zoo would accidentally fall into the worship of pagan gods/exposure to demonic activity when they happened to be in a pose used in yoga classes.  This is not an argument that, on its face, has any real merit to it.

Argument #2 has some merit to it, but within limits.  It's certainly true that exposure to Indian religions, whether via yoga classes that emphasize Indian spirituality or visiting a Buddhist temple, can lead people to grow interested in those religions and move away from Christianity.  That is a good point to make.  On the other hand, many yoga classes are so secularized and stripped of traditional Indian spiritual meaning that this risk becomes very, very low.  A devout Christian attending these highly secularized kinds of yoga classes probably has basically zero risk of converting to an ancient Indian yogic tradition.

Matt Walsh makes a slightly different argument.  He asks us to consider that, if it's the case that there are other forms of exercise that give us the same benefits and aren't embedded with or drawn from Indian yogic traditions, why not just do those forms of exercise instead?

My guess is that most Christians who do yoga do so for a couple of reasons.  For one, it's very popular right now and classes are widely available.  Pilates classes are just not offered as often as yoga these days.  Exercise classes that are widely available will get more people attending, so if Matt Walsh wants Christians to do other exercises, probably one of the most useful things he can do is take concrete steps to make alternatives to yoga classes widely available.

For two, many people seem to find it genuinely therapeutic and physically healthy once they try it, or they do "hot yoga" because it's a fitness challenge.

For three, some people do it because they are interested in exploring other religious traditions.  These folks are probably the ones that Matt Walsh and other Christians who speak out against yoga are most worried about, and that's completely fair.  Those are the folks they should be most worried about.

But he and others are not just worried about the folks who are interested in exploring other religious traditions.  He makes an additional argument to support the claim that performing yoga poses is inherently a Hindu spiritual practice regardless of your intentions.

It's a pretty good prima facie argument, and I want to address it.  Walsh claims that:

"The whole point of yoga is that you can't sever its physicality from its spirituality. That's literally the definition of yoga. It would seem that a "non-spiritual yoga" is a contradiction in terms. It's like trying to make G-rated porn. Either its G-rated or its porn. It can't really be both. Either it's yoga or its non-spiritual. It can't really be both."

To his credit, this was true at one point.  In fact, for most of recorded human history, it was true.  That's because for most of human history, what people meant by the word "yoga" is the general category of the kind of spiritual practice Walsh is describing (albeit somewhat overly simplistically).

But in comes our consumeristic American culture with its ability to de-sacralize and de-spiritualize almost anything to make it palatable to as many people as will pay for it.

Does anyone really imagine that people who wear rosaries as a fashion statement are participating in a Roman Catholic contemplative spiritual practice whether they intend to or not?  Does anyone really imagine that people who have Byzantine icons of Our Lady (solely because they think it's a nice painting to hang on the wall that matches the decor) are necessarily participating in Eastern Christian veneration of icons?

Does anyone take seriously the idea that Western atheists who practice forms of Buddhist meditation strictly for its therapeutic benefits are actually attaining enlightenment via non-clinging as the Buddha instructed?

I certainly hope not.  The challenge here is understanding that there are multiple meanings of these words.  What a practicing Buddhist monk in the Theravada tradition means by "meditation" and what a Western atheist means by "meditation" are two different things.

When someone who wears rosary beads as a fashion statement says the word, "rosary" what they're referring to is a bunch of beads and a cross or crucifix in a particular configuration.  When devout Catholics say the word, "Rosary" what they're referring to is a contemplative form of prayer that they practice regularly in which they use beads to help count the prayers.

In the same way, when people who are focused on yoga as a spiritual exercise use the term "yoga" what they mean is not all the same thing as those who only know of "yoga" as extra-challenging stretching techniques.

So when Matt Walsh claims that the definition of "yoga" is such that it's an inherently spiritual practice, that's true for the traditional definition of yoga, but not for the new consumeristic American definition of yoga.  And so his argument there really doesn't apply to the latter.

All that said, I would not encourage Christians to take yoga classes.  I would, however, encourage Christians who do take yoga classes to consider Walsh's question about why we don't just use alternative exercises.

If it's just because the yoga classes are all that's available and you value the group exercise, then that's fair enough.  If you as a Christian have an attachment to Eastern religious traditions and want to do it for that reason, then it's probably best to do some soul-searching and prayer to discern God's will.

The above is a depiction of Krishna dancing.

The Protestant Intuition: Other Religions & Obvious Assumptions

In this follow-up to a previous post on some basic intuitions of Protestant thought, I will be examining some additional intuitions with which I was brought up and have now rejected.

One of the intuitions which those of us who were/are heirs of the Reformation have inherited from our Protestant forebears is that other religions are obviously wrong.  We inherited the intuition that Islam is obviously wrong, that Buddhism and various older Indian religious traditions are obviously wrong, that the religions of ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt are obviously wrong.

These religions are generally not what William James would call "live options" for the average American Christian who is formed in a culture shaped by Protestant assumptions.  And in much the same way, it's equally obvious that the Catholic Church is obviously wrong.  The only question to be answered is, "Why are they wrong?"  These background assumptions were just part of the environment I was initially raised.

I am not offended, even now that I'm a devout Catholic, when folks who come from that same environment assume that the Catholic Church is the wrong religion.  They typically know about as much about the Catholic Church as they do about Theravada Buddhism, which is to say, close to nothing and probably more misconceptions than anything.  The best they generally have is an oversimplification or two.

I've read a fair amount of Truth Magazine over the years, because it's the magazine of the Churches of Christ, the loosely affiliated set of congregations that much of my mother's side of the family belongs to.  The best article they have available on Buddhism is very much in the vein of oversimplifications, and of imposing a modern American way of understanding things upon ancient Buddhism.

For example, the Theravada tradition is described as the "conservative" group and the Mahayana tradition as the more "liberal" group.  That's sort of like calling Mussolini "conservative" and Hitler "liberal" in their views.  Sure, you could find a way to justify that somehow, but it's really not a good framework to use in order to understand the important differences between them.  In order to understand their differences, you need a deeper understanding of what they agreed on and how they understood their own views on political economy.

And that's the same way one would need to get a better understanding of Buddhism as well.  You would need a deeper understanding of the kernel of the Dharma in order to understand the flowering of the Theravada and Mahayana traditions. 

I've written quite a bit about Buddhism and Catholicism, and I can say from experience that understanding both (and this is probably true for any religion) requires an ability to set aside the frameworks through which we typically evaluate everything we encounter and take on for a time the mindset of those who practice the religion seriously, who study it deeply, and who see the world through the lens of that religion's teachings.

For example, the average American Christian will struggle to understand why ancient Christians viewed Mary as the Queen of Heaven, because they have not yet taken on the mindset of those for whom the Davidic monarchy of Judaism or the many monarchies of Christendom were the normal way of relating to their societies.

Anyone steeped in the assumptions of an egalitarian, democratic society is going to have a hard time understanding the ancient perspective, which is that the human and angelic worlds were composed of a multiplicity of ranks and hierarchies.  Those egalitarian assumptions which seem obvious truths to us as normal American Christians would have seemed outlandish, perhaps even heretical, to early Christians who were awaiting the return of Christ the King and believed in the ranks of angelic beings and lived in societies rich with multi-layered hierarchies.

We American Christians won't be able to understand other religions, or even the history of our own religion, unless we relinquish some of our obvious assumptions long enough to appreciate the obvious assumptions of those Christians who came before us and the obvious assumptions of other religions that are held close to our neighbors' hearts.


Related: The Protestant Intuition: Divine Gifts & Human Works

Note:  Above is a picture of Martin Luther's edited Bible translated into German.

Fair Questions: What are the Biblical alternatives to the perpetual virginity of Mary?

Recently, a friend of mine referred me to this article at the Christian Courier.  Like many other articles on the topic, it sets out to demonstrate that the most plausible reading of the Bible (specifically the Gospels) regarding Jesus' relatives is the one that upholds the claim that Jesus had brothers and sisters who were "out of the same womb" in the sense that Mary gave birth to them.

These articles generally take the stance that the Roman Catholic Church (sometimes they remember to include the Eastern churches as well) is wrong to claim that Mary was not sexually active after the birth of Christ just as she was not prior to the birth of Christ.  Also, they reject the suggestions of the ancient churches that those persons referred to as "brothers" or "sisters" as related to Jesus were either half-brothers and half-sisters from Joseph's previous marriage or cousins of Our Lord.

The article begins with a mention of an ossuary inscribed with "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.", and I will come back to that shortly.  Immediately thereafter, the article veers off into a set of assertions about Christian history that would be laughable if they weren't supported by no less a luminary than Edward Gibbon, a famous historian who happened to be anti-Catholic in his views and polemical and speculative in many of his commentaries on the historical evidence.

I could get bogged down in the historiography, but in the spirit of ecumenical dialogue with my brothers and sisters who believe in the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, I will keep the discussion centered on Sacred Scripture and what we can learn from it.

Let's consider the ossuary again, the one which was discovered to bear an inscription reading "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus".  In the Bible, there are two Apostles which we call in the English-speaking world by the name "James" for various reasons.  One of them is referred to as the "Brother of the Lord" by Paul in Chapter 1 of the Letter to the Galatians.

We know from the Bible exactly who the fathers of both Apostles named James were.  One had a father named Zebedee, and the other a father named Alpheus (or perhaps Cleophas), which means that the explanation that either James was "out of the same womb" as Jesus would force us to come up with an explanation as to why Jesus' mother Mary was having kids fathered by someone other than Joseph.

In the spirit of charity, let's consider what possible explanations there might be for such a situation.

• Hypothetical A: Joseph died some number of years after Jesus was born and Mary then was taken in marriage by his relative (perhaps Alpheus), and then she bore more children by him.  
• Hypothetical B: Mary had several children by Joseph after Jesus' birth and they (including James) were later adopted by Alpheus because Joseph had died.
• Hypothetical C: James was the "Brother of the Lord" because Mary committed adultery with Alpheus while she was married to Joseph, though she may or may not have married him after the fact.

Hypothetical A is plausible, but there's no more Biblical evidence of it than the view that Mary was perpetually a virgin.  Hypothetical B is also plausible, but suffers from the same problem of missing Biblical evidence for it being true.

Hypothetical C is probably going to be an unappealing explanation for most committed Christians, but on its face isn't any less plausible than A and B.  And the lack of Biblical evidence for this view is still a problem.

On top of that, all of these hypotheticals make it extremely difficult to explain why Jesus felt it necessary to designate the Apostle John to care for his mother Mary as a son (see John Chapter 19).  If in fact Mary had given birth to other sons (including James) or she had been remarried after Joseph's death, there would be no good reason to do that, as she would already have a son and/or husband to rely on in Jesus' absence.

So unless these hypotheticals (or something very like them) are where we want to go, and we're willing to create some even less plausible non-Biblical explanation for Jesus charging the Apostle John with acting as a son to His mother, then the claim in the Christian Courier article that we must read "adelphos" as being "out of the same womb" in all cases is a dead letter.

Note:  The above is an icon of the Apostle James the Just, known as the "Brother of the Lord" in the ancient churches.

Fair Questions: What's the difference between ancient and modern ecclesiology?

A friend asked me recently to articulate what I believe to be the primary difference between ancient and modern Christianity, which I argue is the matter of what it means to be the Church.  By the Church, I mean the mystical and visible Body of Christ, the understanding of which is the pursuit of ecclesiology as a field of study.

All analogies have limits, and I propose the following analogy with that in mind.  I use it to illustrate an important set of distinctions, not to create a new ecclesiology based on an analogy that's moderately useful.  That's how too many people get into the barren and boring fields of heresy with Trinitarian doctrines, after all.

It occurs to me that the key differences between the ancient and modern Christian understandings of ecclesiology are similar to the key differences between ancient Christian and modern secular understandings of marriage.

One of the differences between the ancient Christian understanding of marriage and the modern secular understanding of marriage is that the ancient Christians understood marriage as being truly an exclusive matter.  There was one person who was truly a person's spouse, and that fact didn't change because one of them left and took another lover and they were recognized as married by the local officials.

In the same way, the ancient Christian understanding of the Church was that there is one true Church which is exclusive.  Just as you're either in a marriage to someone or you're not, they believed that you were either in the Church or not.  Large numbers of people saying that they too believed the Apostles' Creed, all the while teaching what was heretical, did not dissuade them from their belief.

This does not mean that they lacked nuance in their thinking about who might be in the Church, but it does mean that they didn't reduce it to a matter of superficial doctrinal agreement alone, or a matter of mystical participation alone, or a Neo-Pelagian sort of insistence that people who act virtuously in the classical sense are somehow in the Church by virtue of those virtues.

And there is another, related difference between the ancient and modern ecclesiology, at least in a fair number of cases (albeit not in all cases).  It too has an analogous situation in the modern understanding of marriage.

Let's consider an example.  Let's suppose that two people get married, and then get divorced.  They both then marry different people, and after a while divorce their respective 2nd spouses.  And then they marry one another again.  This does happen on a rare occasion, at least in the United States.

And it can happen because the modern conception of marriage is that it is something that can be dissolved, and then a new marriage can arise in its place, and then that can be dissolved as well, and then the old marriage can be re-established.  Marriage is no longer understood as a lifetime commitment by common cultural definition, though it may be an aspiration for some.

In much the same way, the modern conception of the Church is no longer one of a lifetime commitment.  The modern ecclesiology does not insist that we need to remain faithful to the one true Church (whatever we believe it is) throughout our lives, but rather that we need to find a church community that suits our preferences, and that we can leave and move to another one as we find it convenient to leave or find it appealing to go to the one we prefer more.

There is a third difference between the ancient and modern ecclesiology that I want to mention, and the marriage analogy can also work to explain it.

The ancient understanding of marriage was that it was explicitly hierarchical.  Whether that hierarchy was based on clan, rank, or gender, there was generally some sort of explicit hierarchy in marriage, just as there were generally explicit hierarchies in most areas of life in the ancient world.

Modern marriage, on the other hand, is increasingly without any explicit hierarchy.  That doesn't mean that there are no hierarchies in practice, or that implicit hierarchies don't form anyway based on power imbalances in the relationship, of course.  It just means that there's no common recognition of a particular hierarchy as culturally normative.  And often that's because there's a contemporary cultural imperative to eschew hierarchies.

In the same way, modern ecclesiology attempts to eschew (or at least minimize) hierarchies.  Many newer Christian communities are run democratically by the members in some form or another.  Pastors sometimes even dress down relative to the formal standards of attire, de-emphasizing their powerful role in the hierarchy that's inescapably implied by having a pastor in the first place.

As with marriage, this don't actually eliminate the hierarchies.  It simply neglects to formalize them while allowing the pretense of a non-hierarchical relationship between those who take on the role of shepherd and the rest of the flock.

Of course, the ancient ecclesiology has an explicitly defined formal hierarchy.  There are bishops who are the shepherds, and they delegate to priests, who must then faithfully implement the bishop's instructions for the parish.  And there is a Pope who functions as the primus inter pares (first among equals) for the college of bishops.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I point out these differences not in a triumphalist way, but rather in a philosophical way.  Though I'm a Roman Catholic and I adhere to the ancient ecclesiology, I'm well aware that many other (and some newer) Christian groups also agree with the ecclesiology I described, either in whole or in part.

Some have an ecclesiology that is almost the same as mine (e.g. Eastern Orthodox), others have an ecclesiology that has some strong similarities, but also important differences (e.g. Anglican Continuum), and yet others only have a small though important part of the ancient ecclesiology.

Regardless of these distinctions, and their importance as a barrier to unity among all Christians, I still pray after the example of Christ and Pope John Paul II that we may all be one.
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By User:Julian Mendez - User:Julian Mendez, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2547972

Fair Questions: What are the implications of God's presence to all Christians?

Recently, it was pointed out to me that God is not limited to a specific group of Christians, and that God moves very powerfully even among those who may be, shall we say, doctrinally off-base.

Whoever one thinks that doctrinally off-base group of Christians is, the ancient Church, modern Post-Reformation denominations, or just everyone who isn't in our tiny house church down the lane, most Christians would agree that God is not limited to moving in the hearts of only orthodox Christians.

Indeed, I think we would all agree that the Good Shepherd seeks out all the lost sheep so that they might be healed and returned to His flock.  One implication of this is that there is indeed a flock to which we ought to return with Christ.

The question, then, is what it means for us that God moves very powerfully among Christians, even those we think have the wrong doctrines, the wrong practices, or terrible music for worship.

But before we answer that, I think it's valuable to take a broader perspective.  Is God limited to those who explicitly profess Christ as their Lord and Savior?  Does God not move powerfully in the hearts even of non-Christians?

If your answer to that question is yes (before or after reading this atheist's conversion story and this Muslim's conversion story, not to mention the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch by Phillip the Apostle), then I think we're ready to begin examining some of the implications of this.

Does God moving powerfully even in the hearts of non-Christians mean that we shouldn't bother inviting them to become Christians?  If you believe that there's no reason to ask anyone to become a Christian, or that you have no obligation to become a Christian because God moves outside Christian communities, and you also think that there's no reason to change one's beliefs as a Christian, this is a consistent position to hold.

If, on the other hand, you believe that it is important for non-Christians to become Christians even though God moves powerfully in the hearts of non-Christians, then it makes sense to also believe that it is important to be so completely a follower of Christ that our minds, hearts, bodies, and wills be fully conformed to Him.

After all, if it's important to abandon the wrong beliefs about who God is and become a Christian, why isn't it important to continue to abandon wrong beliefs about God after becoming a Christian?  If a child believes that God gives them teddy bears in exchange for being nice, do we not rightly try to get them to a more mature understanding of who God is once they can better understand Him?

If we love someone passionately, we want to know everything we can about them.  And while we never know absolutely everything about someone, we who love rightly want to know as much as we can.  We desire to know our beloved as fully as we possibly can.  We do not stop learning once we know the basics about them.

The same ought to be true of our relationship with God.  The truth of His being should be something we seek for our entire lives, growing through knowing into an appreciation for the profound mystery of God just as we grow into a deeper appreciation of the mystery of a spouse through knowing them a little bit more as we live with them in love.

One of the implications of God's presence to all Christians might be that we ought to never think that God hates them all if they don't agree with us on doctrinal matters.  Another might be that we should always pray for other Christians and treat them as if God's presence is with them...because it is.

That said, one implication I think it would be very difficult to draw from the fact that God moves powerfully in the hearts of all Christians is that we don't need to continue to abandon our wrong beliefs about God, that we can settle into our current understanding and call it good enough.

I never plan to stop abandoning my wrong beliefs about God, His revelation, and His Church.  That may mean changing my religious tradition once again, and I'm entirely willing to do that.  Indeed, I long to abandon anything that keeps me from understanding the Way, the Truth, and the Life inasmuch as I am capable of doing so.

Note: The above is an icon of Christ depicted as the Good Shepherd which I purchased as a gift from orthodoxmonasteryicons.com.