RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible -- part 6

“TRADITION! (Cue the sound of klezmer music, as in Fiddler on the Roof ) TRADITION!”

So, the question becomes, “If the Bible is not a self interpreting book, but a library full of poetry and history and a host of other literary forms, how do we know what it’s really saying?” The answer: Tradition!

Tradition is a dirty word among some Christians. They quote texts like “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition..... rather than on Christ.” (Col 2:8), or Mark 7:3 “For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, don't eat unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders.” They never seem to quote passages like, 2 Thess. 2:15 “Hold on to the traditions which you have been taught,” and 2Thess 3:6 “Keep away from every brother that behaves in a disorderly way and not after the tradition which he received from us.”

St. Paul seems to differentiate between human tradition and the tradition that he had received in his instruction in the faith. Remember that he had not been an eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus, but was in that sense, a second generation Christian. He received a tradition given him by the first disciples of the Lord.

Perhaps you have read that Paul was taught directly by Christ, as Galatians 1:12 would seem to indicate. “For I neither received it of man neither was I taught it but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” If you look closely at the passage, St. Paul is saying that he received good news, (the Gospel) and this Gospel is very simple: “We have been reconciled to God by the physical death of Jesus the Messiah!” (Colossians 1:22-23) Paul received amazing mystical revelations it seems, but he also got to know Peter. Cf. Galatians 1:18 “Then after three years I (Paul) went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and stayed with him fifteen days.”

The word “see” in the text is an interesting one. In Greek it is “historesai” from which our word “history” comes. Its primary meaning is “to inquire.” In other words, he went to learn a few things from Peter. He may have received the good news of redemption on the Damascus road, but he was humble enough to want to know what Peter had to say. What he received from the Lord seems to have included the idea of the Eucharist which he handed on to the Corinthians. (1 Cor 11:23) “For I have received from the Lord that which also I handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus the same night on which he was betrayed took bread.....” The very word “hand on” is the verb form of the noun “paradosis” “tradition.”

Since the first days of the Church we have believed that just as God instructed Moses and the elders of Israel with an oral tradition, (which became the Mishnah), so too, Jesus instructed His disciples in the meaning of what He had said and made them the guardians of the correct meaning of His words. The Catholic concept of sacred tradition simply means that the Church, in particular, the pope and bishops, guarantee that there are no novel interpretations of what Jesus said and did. We don’t add to the Scriptures, we just guard the consistent and universal explanation of what these things mean. Here is an example:

The word “epiousion” is almost impossible to translate. It appears in the phrase usually accepted as “daily bread” but we aren’t quite sure what the word actually means. For almost 2,000 years there has been no other known example of the use of the word other than it’s one time use in the Our Father. It appears no where else in all of ancient Greek literature, only in the Our Father. People get very mystical over it, deciding it must have been a very unique and theologically significant word. I suspect that the opposite is true. Copyists preserve fancy stuff like Cicero or Shakespeare. It may be that it appears no where else because it is such a common word, like "ain't it" or "gotcha!"

In the twentieth century, an archaeologist claimed that he had found the word in a 5th century AD shopping list found in ancient Egyptian garbage dump. The word is written next to the names of several grocery items. It had the sense of "enough for today," or “necessary.” The shopping list is now at the Yale Beinecke Library, but it seems that the word epiousion isn’t there, so we are back to the problem of having no other example of the word. (My personal suspicion is that this particular scholar, like many scholars I have known, couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. He probably put the scrap with epiousion in his right coat pocket instead of his left pocket and it ended up on the floor of some Cairo laundry).

Back to “epiousion.” Epiousion derives from Epi and Ousia which mean “Upon” and “Essence” (sort of? The word doesn’t appear in the form ousion as far as I can tell) So, how can we possibly understand what we are saying in the “Our Father” if there is no other reference to the word we normally assume to mean “daily”????

Well, you are just going to have to wait for next week to find out!

(To be continued......)

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 5

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S “GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE.” Part 5

“KEEPING IT ALL IN THE FAMILY or CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME”

So now I come to the moment, dear Eve, of actually answering your question. Whom did the children of Adam and Eve marry? There are a number of theories.

(Genesis 5:4) “The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years; and he had other sons and daughters.” Adam and Eve had bunches of kids, of both genders, so we are presented with the most obvious answer, to which I can hear you responding “Yuuuuuck......”

The Jewish Sages are very creative about the whole thing. According to the always useful “32 rules of Rabbi Eliezer”: The particles "et"(direct object marker that has absolutely no translatable meaning”), "gam"(literally “also”), and "af" (“even” and a hundred other possible things), indicate that something not mentioned is included in a given text. The great commentator Rashi looks at the “gam”s, “et”s and “af”s in the story“ of Genesis to mean that Cain had a twin sister and Abel had two twin sisters. If that doesn’t confuse you nothing will (Merci bien, mon ami Pierre!) Isn’t this wonderfully obscure?

Let us look at other possible answers. Perhaps God created spouses for the children of Adam and Eve, but no one I know who espouses this theory because Genesis says that Eve was the mother of all the living. There are some commentators who claim that the children of Adam and Eve married other kinds of beings, but again that would be problematic since Eve is the mother of all the living and what kinds of creatures could they have married? That could really increase the yuck factor.

The other and most usual answer is that they married, you guessed it, their siblings!!! But I thought that wasn’t allowed. It is forbidden in the book of Leviticus, but it is clear that before the Exodus and the law of Moses there were some interesting incidents of sibling marriages, such as Abraham and Sarah, who were half siblings! In Genesis 20:12 we read that Abraham’s wife Sarah is also his half-sister, on his father's side. In the rabbinic literature, Sarah is only considered his niece. (Once again, yuuuuck!)

The whole topic is very disturbing. I will never forget once, when my mother was reading the Bible, and found the story of Lot and his daughters. She called me to ask if I was aware of what was in this book!!! This is my point! The Bible is the great narrative of real people whom God loves. I personally don’t find many of them that appealing. They do some really outrageous things. I can hear you say , “If it was alright for Abraham or Lot, it must be alright for me.” Not so fast. God is always smiting people in the Bible, and if you read the fine print you realize that they deserved a good smiting now and then. The Bible relates stories of dishonesty and violence and other goings on that we won’t mention in a family column. That’s because the Bible really is history about real people. And those real people are sometimes their own worst enemies. The bible points out their foibles, not for our imitation, but for our instruction.

It is interesting to look at modern genetic studies of the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa. They seem to indicate that between all humans now living had common ancestors between 100,00 and 45,000 years ago. This in no way corroborates the story as told in Genesis, but it does agree with some of the important points of Genesis. We are all descended from one man and one woman. Geneticists don’t say this man and this woman necessarily lived at the same time, though the Bible and the Church say they did. Still, this refutes the pseudo science of the racists of the nineteenth century who claimed that there were inferior races of human beings. We are all one race; the human race. I may look pretty odd to you, but I am still your cousin. The Bible taught this long before scientists caught up with the Church.

Another point on which geneticist and the Bible agree, is that we are descended from a remarkably small group of people who live not so very long ago, perhaps as recently as 5000 years ago. “All humans alive today share a surprisingly recent common ancestor, perhaps even within the last 5,000 years, even for people born on different continents.” (Rohde, DL; Olson, S; Chang, JT, Nature, September 2004, "Modeling the recent common ancestry of all living humans") I figure I had better footnote that point.

Do not think for a minute that genetic science is corroborating Bishop Ussher, but my point in referring to genetic research is that Genesis and genetics agree that there must have been some really close family ties, if you catch my drift. Abel and Cain and Seth couldn’t marry the girl next door, because there was no next door. Which theory is right? Scientists are absolutely sure of something until they change their mind upon receiving new information. And then they are absolutely convinced until a new theory comes along. University comes from a very ancient Latin word meaning “Fog bound scholars arguing with each other.” It’s true. I know because I actually taught in a university for a very long time. The Bible is interested in teaching the principles of the Kingdom of God. Science is mostly interested in getting grant money. (I’m only kidding. Scientists are interested in truth. In order to argue with each other, which is their means for arriving at truth, they need buckets of grant money.)

So, carefully analyzing the Scriptural texts and the current scientific data, I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THE SONS OF ADAM MARRIED BECAUSE THE HOLY SPIRIT DID NOT DECIDE TO TELL ME EITHER THROUGH THE TEXT OF SCRIPTURE NOR THE TRADITION OF THE FAITH!!!!!

Jesus once said to the disciples, “No one knows the day or hour when these things will happen, not even the angels in heaven or the Son himself. Only the Father knows.” (Matthew 24:36) Jesus, the Son of God, was content to remain ignorant about certain things because His perfection as the Son of god consisted in trusting and loving His Fatter completely. I however have to know everything right know.

He also said, “I have much to tell you that you cannot bear now.” (John 16:12) Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) was a Dutch woman who helped Jews escape the Nazis during World War II and was eventually imprisoned herself. In 1970, she wrote her autobiography, The Hiding Place, a book that believe is a “must read” for every serious Christian. She tells a story from her childhood that relates to our present problem. When she was a little girl, she would accompany her father, Kaspar, on his trips to the big city when he went to buy supplies for his watch repair business. On one of these train rides, she asked her father what “sex” was. She had heard some older girls discussing it on the playground at school. Her father looked at her and then looked out the window and said nothing. When the train stopped, he asked the little girl to pick up his tool bag. Corrie tried and couldn’t. She said, “Papa it’s too heavy.” Then Kaspar said, “There are some things that are too heavy for you to carry right now. When you are older I will tell you what sex is. Until then you are going to have to trust me.” So it is with our heavenly Father. He wants us to trust Him.

The Holy Spirit also tells us that, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) In other words the Bible doesn’t exist to tell us everything we want to know.

So here is Biblical principle #6:

THE BIBLE DOESN’T EXIST TO TELL US THE FUTURE, OR GIVE US STOCK TIPS OR SATISFY OUR SCIENTIFIC CURIOSITY. IT EXISTS TO EQUIP US WITH THOSE THINGS NECESSARY FOR OUR SALVATION AND REDEMPTION.

Whoever Cain and Abel and Seth and the rest of them married, I am sure that they were lovely brides, though they probably came from a disreputable family: the human family.

Next week: GIVE US THIS DAY OUR WHOLE WHEAT, LOW FAT, GLUTEN FREE BREAD.

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible -- part 4

First a note to my dear friends in cyberspace. Until very recently, I was working with goose quill pens and carrier pigeons. Until recently, I didn’t even know how to turn on a computer. I write these fulminations for the parish bulletin. I really have nothing to do with my blog spot and not a lot to do with my website. Some very unbalanced people, who actually read what I write, have taken it on themselves to create these spaces, and, though I suspect that their doctors should increase their medications, I am very grateful to them.

Some people have asked why I don’t respond to bloggers. I have tried but I can’t seem to figure out how to do it. I read the comments and am very grateful for them, most of them. I try to answer all the E-mails I get from the column and the radio show, but sometimes I just get a sinking feeling and start humming “Nearer My God to Thee.” By the way, if you are really a glutton for punishment, you can hear my sermons at the St. Lambert’s Parish, (Skokie) web site and one can hear any “Go Ask Your Father” show at the archives of Relevant Radio. Just google in Relevant Radio, click on the archives at the home page, then click on Go Ask Your Father. A calendar will pop up. Then you click on the show you want to hear. You can also hear Fr. Rocky and Monsignor Swetland who are both truly smart people and who, unlike your friend, the Rev. Know it all, don’t have to make things up. While you’re at the Relevant Radio Web site, you might as well listen to the whole bunch like Sean and Drew and Sheila and Wendy. They are an amazing bunch.

Humor aside, I cannot tell you how grateful I am to those who make these columns so widely available, especially the webmaster, Jim Frommeyer. He’s the only one whose name I actually know. May it be for the glory of God, the salvation of souls and the up building of the Church.

You are in my prayers,
Fr. S

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S “GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE.”
Part 4

“NUMBERS DON’T LIE! (THOUGH THEY DO SOMETIMES GET CREATIVE)”

There are some very troubling numbers in the Bible. First of all we have the ages of the patriarchs: Adam 930; Seth 912; Enosh 905; Kenan 910; Mahalalel 895; Jared 962; Enoch did not even die, but, like our Blessed Mother and the Prophet Elijah was assumed into Heaven) Methuselah 969; Lamech 777; Noah 950; Abraham 175; Isaac 180; Jacob 147 ;Moses 120.

James Ussher , the Protestant Archbishop of Ireland in 1625, published a chronology that established the date of the creation as the night preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC, by making creative use of the ages of the patriarchs and the Julian calendar. I suppose October 22nd/23rd is as good a date as any to have a happy birthday party for the planet.

Another problem is that 6,000,000 Jews left Egypt in the Exodus, according to some estimates 2,000,000.) The estimated population of Egypt at the time was between 2 and 5 million. Certainly 6,000,000 people, even 2,000,000 people would not have had to worry about Pharaoh and his chariots. They would have simply walked over them. So what’s with all the numbers? Are you expecting me to believe that at a certain point in history, numbers just settled down and behaved? Or before that, did people just do things in a bigger way?

Calm down. Have you ever heard of gematria? Of course not. (Unless you are the pop singer Madonna or are a Jewish Kabballist.) Gematria is the Hebrew system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase. This comes from the fact that words can have numerical value in certain languages such as Greek and Hebrew. Those languages didn’t have numerals. They used letters instead of numbers, a =1, b=2 c=3, d=4 and so on.

Were we to do this in English, the word “dad” would add up to 9 (4+1+4). So, if I wrote my mother that I had 9 worries, it might be a poetic way to say that I was worried about my father. Or it might just mean I was worried about nine things. A common Jewish example of gematria is the Hebrew word “Khai” (life), which is composed of two letters which add up to 18. This has made 18 a special number among Jews, and gifts in multiples of 18 are very common among Jews.

The Greek Language can do the same thing, though I don’t know that the Greeks themselves did this sort of thing. We get our tedious scientific attitude from them and I suspect that for them a number was just a number. Greek speaking Jews, of whom the early Church was in large part composed, would have been aware of gematria meanings.

The most famous New Testament gematria comes from the book of Revelation, 13:18 “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” The Hebrew letters that spell out the Greek name Nero Caesar add up to 666!!! Hollywood has made a fortune with 666 and no one wants that number as part of their address or telephone number or anything else for that matter. It was probably just a coded reference to the emperor Nero. Big deal. So, from all of this we can gather that Bible numbers can have literal or symbolic meanings.

So what do all the old geezers in the beginning of the Bible mean? It would seem that longevity declined the farther away we get from humanity’s original state of perfection in the Eden. Things just got worse and worse until God finally smacked us with a flood “ Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years." (Genesis 6:3) Moses, Abraham, Sarah and a few others got a longevity pass, because they were good enough to be numbered among the patriarchs, but that was it. My point here is that the ages of the patriarchs may be symbols of their virtue and/or importance in the divine plan. I remember a modern day example of a symbolic number value.

When I was a boy, we did not eat yogurt, unless we came from Greenwich Village in New York and were communists. Mother would have said “Throw that milk out it’s spoiled. Just smell it!” There was no market for yogurt in the United States. So some clever entrepreneurs decided to create a market for the stuff and make a fortune.

They aired these wonderful commercials about old people from some place in the Caucasus mountains called Reelibadistan or something like that. These were people claiming to be older than dirt, and they looked the part. They were 150 years old and still climbing trees. And they gave all the credit to the fact they ate yogurt about 12 times a day. Americans who think of themselves as hard bitten realists all ran out and bought yogurt. A much appreciated Christmas gift during those heady times was a home yogurt making kit. I am amazed more people did not poison themselves. Frozen yogurt, low fat yogurt, fruit flavored yogurt, yogurt coated peanuts, yogurt granola bars, yogurt and wood chips. We are still eating yogurt and pretending to like it. Why? Because all those folks in Reelibadistan could climb tree at the age of 150. America -- a nation of clear and objective thinkers.

Where was I? Oh yes. A few years back, some researchers made the trek back to Reelibadistan to see what had become of those 150 year-old tree climbers. They were all as dead as stones by that time and the locals had no idea what the researchers were talking about. The researchers researched and found that the original yogurt eaters had never been older than a hundred. In fact they most of them were 60 or 70. They looked as old as rocks, because life in Reelibadistan is, in fact, really bad. No one there, back in the late sixties, knew how old anybody was. They didn’t bother to keep records.

So why had they claimed to be ancient? Because old age was considered honorable. To say that someone was 150 years old was, in effect, to say that they were old enough to have gained that much wisdom and virtue. This is nonsense to people like us who treasure immaturity and where 50 year old men sometimes wear baseball caps backwards. The Reelibadistanians had no idea what was going on. They just knew that these weirdos from America were taking their picture and paying them to eat yogurt. What’s not to like?

So here is Biblical principal #5:

DON’T WORRY ABOUT SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE NUMBERS. HEAVEN HAS AN ARITHMETIC MORE MEANINGFUL THAN EARTH’S.

Maybe Methuselah was just very, very holy or maybe he actually lived to be 969 years old. It doesn’t matter to the story. That’s one of those questions that I am going to ask when I get to heaven. I am planning to go visit Methuselah a few days after the resurrection. First I am planning to visit the Blessed Mother and ask about the brothers and sisters of Jesus. I am sure she is a really good cook. You are welcome to join me.

In the Bible you are reading history from the perspective of 4000 years ago, and they told stories differently than we do. The point is to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying by means of the story. Perhaps you have heard me say that some of us have the souls of poets and others have the souls of appliance repairmen. If you are not satisfied with this answer and you want the Biblical historical perspective to be more scientific, more modern, more American, well just go eat some yogurt and climb a tree. (What a shame that Methuselah didn’t make an even thousand. We were all hoping)

Next Week: Mrs. CAIN AND ABEL . A REALLY, REALLY CLOSE FAMILY

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 3

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S “GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE.” Part 3

COULDN’T ST. MATTHEW ADD? I THOUGHT HE WORKED FOR THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE BEFORE JESUS RECRUITED HIM.

In the Gospel of Matthew 1st chapter, 17th verse we read: “Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.”

Wait a minute -- In verse 6, King David is counted twice! That’s cheating, and if you compare the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew to that in Luke, something is screwy . In Luke, Levi is Joseph’s great grandfather, Matthat his grandfather and Heli his father. In the Gospel of Matthew it’s Eleazar, Matthan and Jacob who comprise the generations preceding Joseph. They can’t both be right!

If you are treating the Bible like a high school text book written for 21st century illiterates, well, I guess the bible is wrong. If however you understand that the Bible is a collection of books written in the idiom of a middle eastern people over the course of two thousand years, and removed from us by yet another two thousand years, maybe they can both be right after all. As for the three sets of fourteen generations, there is a symbolic meaning involved. Ancient Israel had no numbers. The used letters, a=1, b=2, g=3 and so on. Numbers had word meanings. 14 is a special number. It is twice 7, which is the number that stands for perfection and for covenant oaths. It is written as “y-d” (14). If you read it as four and ten (d and y) it means fulfillment. Jesus is the fulfillment of the three epochs of the history of Israel, the law, the prophets and the writings. The Gospel of Matthew is constantly talking about thing done to fulfill a prophecy. That’s point of that Gospel. Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise. When you see numbers in the Bible, they have a lot more than numerical value.

Scholars have spilled a lot of ink over the problem of the divergent genealogies of Jesus. Some insist that Luke really gives us the blessed Mother’s genealogy. I don’t see how this can be since the genealogies themselves both clearly say that they are Joseph’s lineage. My personal opinion is that Sextus Julius Africanus got it right. He was a Christian historian born around 160 AD, probably in the area of Jerusalem. He asked some of the same questions that we ask and living where Jesus had lived a little more than a century before, Africanus was able to ask the answers from the descendants of Jesus’ relatives. He tells us that Joseph was descended from a number of Levirate marriages, in which a man married the widow of his relative, if the relative died childless. That way, no family line in Israel would be extinguished.

The royal family of David probably intermarried regularly and Eusebius of Caesarea, who quotes Africanus regarding the genealogies of Jesus, goes on to say that Mary was a close relative of Joseph as was the custom, and still is in much of the Middle East, so their genealogies are essentially the same. This may be the answer to that particular question. It may not be.

My point is this: THE BIBLE IS NOT A SELF INTERPRETING BOOK. Remember, it isn’t a book at all, it is a library. One needs a competent authority if one is going to find their way around it. There are other discrepancies in the Bible and rather than detract from the trustworthiness of the Bible, they add to it.

The Church is always accused of trying to cover things up or smooth things over. No one smoothed out the Gospels. They were kept just as they were received because they contain eye witness accounts. The apparent contradictions only make this more clearly true. For instance, Matthew and Mark seem to say there is only one angel at Jesus’ empty tomb. Luke and John seem to mention two. As for where Jesus met the disciples after the resurrection in Matthew, He seems to meet them in Galilee. In Mark, Luke and John, He seems to appear first in Jerusalem. In John, He meets them at different times in both places. I suspect that He met them in both places. The accounts in Matthew and Mark seem to be summaries. I often talk about my grandfather when I really mean great-grandfather, but in telling family stories, the great grandfather-ness would only confuse my hearers and I do that enough already. Unless you are getting a doctorate in history, one may sometimes leave out extraneous detail for the sake of the point, and as for the angels at the tomb, I have never seen an angel, but people who have say the experience is quite overwhelming and you are not counting or taking names and addresses. Again, my point here is not to reconcile the Scriptures but to point out that the Books of the Bible are true to the principle of the Incarnation. They contain historical facts, but are not meant to be histories, their authors used details that they had seen in order to make their point about their faith. The Holy Spirit filled their words with what was necessary for our growth in the knowledge of God’s love for us. Nothing more and nothing less.

Most Christians say they believe in the Incarnation, the idea that Jesus is both fully God and fully man, but most of us really have a hard time with the concept. We find it hard to believe that, if Jesus was really God, eternal and equal to the Father, how could he say something like, “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), or “the time is known to the Father alone.” (Matt 24:36 and Mark 13:32). Read a little further in St. Paul’s letter to the Phillipians 2:5-7 “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave.” It is as if Jesus took off the powers of His divinity and without ceasing to be that perfect love which is God, left the heavenly throne for love of us.

That means that the word of God learned to speak Aramaic and Hebrew and probably some Greek in the carpenter’s shop. The hand that shaped the galaxies learned how to make tables and chairs from Joseph. He was a little boy who ran to his mother when frightened or hurt. Because He had submitted Himself to our human limitations, He knew only what His Heavenly Father was pleased to tell Him by means of their Holy Spirit, and the day and the hour were not among these things. In this sense, the Father was greater than Jesus, but Jesus was no less divine, no less eternal and no less perfect in that reality which constitutes divinity: perfect Love.

We who believe He was truly God, have a hard time believing that God could be humble, http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifyet He was. It is perhaps the most amazing thing about our faith that we say the All-powerful became powerless for love of sinners like you and me. It is a very hard thing to believe, and there are principally two ways not to believe. One is Arianism, the other is Monophysitism.

An Alexandrian priest named Arius (250–336) denied that Jesus could be fully God. One, after all, is not three. The Arian concept of Christ is that the Son of God did not always exist, but was created by God the Father and though adopted and divinized, by the Father, He was less than the Father. It seems that the Emperor Constantine favored Arainism, (Roman emperors liked things tidy and tended to favor Arian Christianity) but when he convened the Council of Nicea, the bishops told him “Nope. We’ve always believed that God is a trinity Father, Son and Holy spirit. The oneness of God is the unity of Love; solidarity, not solitude.” Constantine, the most powerful man in the world at them time said “Oh well, I guess I’m wrong. I’m just the emperor. You guys are the pope and the bishops.”

Despite what you may have heard, Constantine believed that the state shouldn’t control the Church. Some of his successors thought otherwise and ever since then the Church has struggled to maintain her independence from the state. The Church has struggled with emperors and kings and currently is struggling with the ruler of the United States: King Popular Opinion (as interpreted by the Mediacracy) this is a government of, by and for the people. Shouldn’t the people, whose voice is "Entertainment Tonight" and whose art is "Dancing With the Stars", shouldn’t the sovereign people run the Church in America? I digress. Governments, whether popular or monarchical, are much more comfortable with a Christ who is slightly less than divine, because after all, the state, whether popular or monarchical, really should be god. Those who humanize Jesus excessively have an odd tendency to divinize the power of the world. Arianism has devolved in our times into the belief among many that Jesus was just a really nice guy.

Monophysitism is the reaction to Arianism. Many Christians, especially in Egypt and Syria, two of the three centers of the Christian world, the other being Rome, reacted to Arius by going to the other extreme, denying that Jesus was one person as did Nestorius, the Archbishop of Constantinople (for whom Nestorianism is named) or by saying He had no human nature, or at least humanity being so much less than divinity was "dissolved like a drop of honey in the sea" as Eutyches, an Archimandrate in Constantinople insisted. So, Monophysitism is the belief that either there was no human nature in Jesus or it was so inconsequential as to be unimportant. The Bishop of Rome firmly maintained what today is the position of most Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox Christians, the Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine, and as I have said, this a hard thing to get your mind around, but it is the truth. And we call it the Incarnation.

I think the doctrine has further implications. Just as Jesus was God in the flesh, so too we are incarnate spirits, not just spirits trapped in flesh. That is why Jesus promises us resurrection. Going to heaven when we die isn’t enough. God promises to raise us from the dead because our bodies are really us. I would stretch it even farther to say that just as our Lord was truly God and man, so too, I am really spirit and flesh. Similarly, the Bible is fully human and completely inspired.

Orthodox Jews believe the Torah is not simply the inspired word of God. It is God’s verbatim dictation. In the same way Muslims believe that the Qur’an is word for word written by God. We believe that the entire Bible is written by the Holy Spirit of God, using human beings to do it. In other words there’s a lot of human-ness in the Bible. The stories and prophecies and visions and poetry and laws of the Bible are “God-breathed” though written as seen by human eyes, heard by human ears and touched by human hands. It speaks in words that humans can hear. It’s meaning is made clear by those to whom Jesus gave authority, but it is wonderfully human as well as perfectly divine. It is as hard to believe this as it is to believe that Jesus is fully God and fully man. We want the Bible to be only divine, but it tells the amazing story of the meeting of God and humanity. It is full of sin and sainthood, weakness and strength, all sometimes in the same people.

So here is principle number #4: THE BIBLE IS NOT A SELF INTERPRETING HISTORY BOOK. IT IS A COLLECTION OF BOOKS WRITTEN BY GOD FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO HELP US TO KNOW, LOVE AND SERVE GOD IN THIS WORLD AND TO BE HAPPY WITH HIM FOREVER.

Next week: MORE ABOUT THOSE PESKY NUMBERS.

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 2

YOU SHOULDN’T JUDGE A BIBLE BY ITS COVER!

Many years ago my mother, one of the finest, kindest and wisest people I have ever known, decided to read the Bible cover to cover. Somewhere around the story of Lot and his daughters, she called me and asked, “Have you any idea what’s in this book!?!!”

Never try to read the bible cover to cover. If you do, it will make less sense than before you started the project. That’s because the Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library. How often have you heard people say that the Bible isn’t true? To say the Bible isn’t true is like walking into the lobby of a library and shouting, “This library is wrong!” Which section is wrong? The history section? The science section? The poetry section? The Bible is a library of 73 books - only 66 if you’re a Protestant. It contains poetry, ancient history, law, prophecy, and much, much more! If you go into the poetry section of a library and say that this isn’t very good science, you would be right, but by the same token if you go into the science section you wouldn’t expect much poetry. Therein lies the problem with treating the Bible like a book. If you think it is somehow a continuous narrative whose purpose is primarily historical you are going to be very confused.

In the Books of the Bible, the Holy Spirit tells us the truth about God and the way He has related to humanity over a 2000-year period from about 2000 BC to about 65AD. How can you tell what’s poetry and what’s history and what’s prophecy? Simple. Listen to those that God has made authoritative teachers, namely the apostles. But the Apostles are dead, aren’t they? Some are, some aren’t.

First of all what do we mean by “apostle?” If you think apostles are those twelve guys who followed Jesus around you are only partly right. Luke 6:13 “When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles”. The noun apostle” is used just short of a hundred times in the new Testament. It has a verb form also that is used almost 200 times. (PAY ATTENTION! GRAMMAR IS IMPORTANT, YOU MIND-NUMBED COUCH POTATO!)

The noun in Greek is “apostolos,” which means missionary or delegate, someone who is sent out with authority to represent the sender) the verb is “apostello” which means “I delegate,” “I send out.” The phrase “twelve apostles” appears only a few times. More commonly, one sees the phrase “the twelve.” Whenever you see the word “twelve” in the Bible you can bet your lunch money that it refers to government. The Bible has lots of numbers that repeat and have a special meaning, 3 (Divinity or heavenly perfection), 7 (covenant), 12 (government), 40 (testing) and so on.

That Jesus named twelve special disciples (a word which itself means “students”) shows He intended to form a government for His followers. The first Christians insisted that Jesus had commanded His followers to continue the government that He Himself had established. In about 80AD,Clement of Rome who had most probably known Peter and Paul said, “Through countryside and city (the apostles) preached, and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers."

Nor was this a novelty, for bishops and deacons had been written about a long time earlier...

Our apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry. (St. Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians)

A century later, Irenaeus was the bishop of Lyon in France. He was a Greek who had been taught by Polycarp, who himself had been a disciple of John the Evangelist, one of the twelve. He wrote around 180 AD what he had learned from the students of the first apostles themselves.

It is possible, then, for everyone in every church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the apostles which has been made known to us throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the apostles and their successors down to our own times, men who neither knew nor taught anything like what these heretics rave about....Since, however, it would be tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; (we do this, I say,) by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul; as also (by pointing out) the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those (faithful men) who exist everywhere. (Against Heresies )

Okay, this is unpleasant. But it seems that the first Christians believed in what we now call apostolic succession. In other words, when someone comes up and says the end of the world is next Saturday, we have the perfect right, nay, we have the duty, to ask them where they got the authority to say that. They will answer, “From the Bible. I added up all the dates and the genealogies and this is surely the exact day!!!” “Well,” you might counter, “have you read the numbers in the poetic books, or just the historical books or just the prophetic books? Or have you just mixed them up like a stew of leftovers in a cheap restaurant?”

How can one tell what is poetry, or prophesy or history? That is precisely my point! You can’t, unless you have an unbroken connection to the people who first chose those books to be part of the library that we call the Bible. Just because you read it and it seems to mean something perfectly clear to you, doesn’t mean you’ve gotten it right. If you take it on yourself to interpret the books, or worse, leave it to some loon with a Swiss bank account and a mail order doctorate to do the interpreting, you are going to end up selling all your stuff, writing a big check to some weirdo who tells you to climb a hill and wait for the Lord who is surely going to show up next Saturday at 6PM. It’s certainly going to happen because he read it in the Bible.

We’ve been reading the Bible very carefully for two thousand years, guided by the delegates (apostles) who received their delegation from those whom the Lord Himself delegated, not some self appointed loon. It’s a free country. You can say to the Lord that you don’t care if He established legitimate authority in the Church. You’re going to read and interpret the Bible the way you want to. Who cares what that old Bavarian in the Vatican says? The first Christians certainly seemed to. I just hope you get a hill with a nice view, because you’re probably going to be there for a long time.

So here are principles 2 and 3

2) THE BIBLE IS NOT A BOOK. IT’S A LIBRARY.(I stole that idea from Fr. Bob Barron)

3) YOU CANNOT BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF THE BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY WITHOUT A COMPETENT TEACHING AUTHORITY TO HELP YOU.

Next Week 14+14+14 EQUALS HOW MUCH? (The Bible is not a self interpreting book. It isn’t a book at all! Haven’t you been paying attention?

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 1

Dear Rev. Know it all,

Who did the sons of Adam and Eve marry?

Patiently yours,
Eve Anne Gellikal

Dear Eve,

They married their wives.

Sincerely,
the Rev. Know it all

PS I imagine you would like a more detailed answer than that. This will take some time, and so I have to decide to answer your question with a long harangue of which this is the first installment.

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE. Part 1

Let me begin by quoting my favorite theologian, the Rev. Billy Bob. “God hates method. He loves principle.” Do not misread the preceding. God hates method, not Methodists. God loves Methodists very much. No one can put on a church supper like Methodists.

What is the Rev. Billy Bob trying to say? An example: You go to the Thursday prayer meeting and that Thursday you are in charge of the prayer ministry. You are wearing your favorite bowling shirt, your red feedlot cap and your St. Christopher medal. Before you sit, an afflicted soul who has come for healing prayer with the worst case of athlete’s foot in medical history enters the room. You anoint him with holy water, praying in tongues all the while with the laying on of hands and conclude with three Hail Mary’s. And much to your shock he is instantly healed!

You now know how to heal the sick. You wear your favorite bowling shirt, your red feedlot cap and your St. Christopher medal. You anoint with holy water, praying in tongues with the laying on of hands and conclude with three Hail Mary’s. So you do the same thing next week, now that you have the gift of healing, and nothing happens. The minute you think you’ve got God down to a method He does things a different way. God hates method. He loves principle.

This is the point that St. Paul is trying to make when he talks about works of the law. “...a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ...” Galatians 2:16. There is only one place other than the New Testament in all of ancient literature where the phrase “works of the law” appears. It is in the Dead Sea Scroll 4QMMT: “Miqtsat Ma’asei ha Torah” (“Precepts of the Works of the Law”). It seems to be written by Essenes to Pharisees about ritual purity. In the scroll 4QMMT we read in ruling 16 “Concerning streams of liquid; we have determined that they are not intrinsically pure. Indeed, streams of liquid do not form a barrier between the pure and the impure for the liquid that is in the stream and that in its receptacle become as one liquid.” So there! Take that, you loose and liberal Pharisees!

(What the heck is this guy talking about????)Simply this: If a clay bowl is unclean and you pour water from a clay pitcher into the bowl, the uncleanness leaps up the stream of water and pollutes the pitcher and both must broken! Surely you remember this from you reading of Leviticus? The scroll ends with “Now we have written you some of the works of the law which we determined would be beneficial to you.”

When Paul talks about works of the law, he is saying that we are not saved by this ritual nonsense, but by conversion of heart and mind. 500 years ago Luther decided that Paul was saying that we don’t have to do anything to go to heaven. Paul would have been a bit surprised at that conclusion (Romans 2:24), as would Jesus (Matt7:23) In fact, St. James says that it is clear we are not saved by faith alone, but by works also (James 2:24)

If Luther had understood that the phrase “works of the law” was about ritual purity and not about kindness and mercy, and that Paul simply wanted to explain that these external rituals of kosher law don’t save, he would have spared the world a lot of trouble. It is always intriguing to me that people who talk loudly about dead works and salvation by faith alone constantly try to get people who were baptized as infants by the pouring of water to be re-baptized by a very specific formula as adults and only by immersion. They believe in method, not in principle. Whether they admit it or not they are professing salvation by a work of law.

We want to reduce the Bible to a set of rules. It is a book of principles, the principles of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is not to say that rules are unimportant. On the Contrary! For children, good rules are essential and we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless we are like little children. These rules however, depend on love and trust and a desire to obey the Father who loves us. They are rules that teach the principles of the Kingdom. They are not rules that we can get around, rules that enable us to do as little as possible. They are instructions in the very character of God.

The prayer of the pagan is “God, give me what I want.” the prayer of the Christian is “Lord, teach me your ways.” (Psalm 25:4, 86:11,27,11 and the whole rest of the Bible.) The Bible is not a science text, it is not a history text, it is not a rule book. It has all these things in it, but it is primarily a collection of books that deal with the way God has loved us since the beginning of time.

So here is principle #1 THE BIBLE EXISTS TO TEACH US GOD’S WAY OF DOING THINGS, HIS CHARACTER, HIS PRINCIPLES AND HIS PROMISES.

Next week: the Bible is not a book

Atlas Shrugged... I just shake my head

Dear Rev. Know it all,

Who is John Galt?

Sincerely,
Al Truhyzm


Dear Al,

John Galt is Alisa Rosenblum’s imaginary boyfriend.

Yours,
the Rev. Know it all.

P.S. You may have heard of Alisa Rosenblum by a name she made up for herself, Ayn Rand. A lot of people are talking about her these days. Her book, Atlas Shrugged of which John Galt is the fictional hero, is finally being made into a movie.

John Galt doesn’t show up in the book until the story is almost finished, but everyone in the book keeps asking, “Who is John Galt?” He is a revolutionary capitalist who convinces all the other big capitalists to hide out in the mountain until the world collapses and they are finally recognized as the best people in the world, proving that selfishness is the highest of virtues.

Why should we care about Alisa Rosenblum/Ayn Rand and her boyfriend John Galt at all? Because Ayn Rand is one of the most influential authors in American culture. Such luminaries as Glenn Beck a former Roman Catholic, current Mormon, and Representative Paul Ryan, current Roman Catholic of Wisconsin are great fans of hers. In fact Paul Ryan requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. Perhaps her most famous disciple is Alan Greenspan, whose “laissez les bons temps rouler” (that’s French for “Whoopee!!!”) economic policies have recently crashed and burned. Greenspan was one of Rand’s inner circle and his opposition to financial regulation is pure Atlas Shrugged.

This is an important book. With the movie coming out soon, Ayn/Alisa is about to raise a new generation of followers because she appeals to the selfish acquisitive streak that occasionally appears in the otherwise generous American spirit. So let me tell you about little Alisa and how she clawed her way to fame.

Alisa Rosenblum was born in Russia in 1905 in St. Petersburg in a prosperous non-observant Jewish family. She didn’t quite fit in with her Russian schoolmates who were devoutly Russian Orthodox and devoutly anti-Semitic. She seems to have suffered from “I’ll show you all someday when I’m rich and famous” syndrome. She was a remarkably smart child who loved to read romantic heroic novels, imagining handsome heroes who would recognize her inherent superiority and sweep her off her feet. No such luck.

The Russian revolution interrupted her life when she was twelve and thus she added intense hatred of Socialism to her intense hatred of Russian Orthodox Christianity. She really came close to starving in the revolution. She perceived a connection between Russian Christianity and Socialism: collectivism. At the age of thirteen she decided she was an atheist and began to develop her philosophy of rational egoism, which became objective realism, or simply objectivism. Her literary work was always at the service of her philosophy in which selfishness was a positive virtue and altruism the greatest vice.

She survived the worst of the revolution and studied in the state schools where she became interested in film and writing and there she adopted her pen name, Ayn Rand. In 1926 the family managed to scrape enough money together to get her out of Russia. She went to live with relatives in Chicago who owned a movie theater where she spent the days watching free movies. Though she had fallen in love with New York upon seeing all those big tall buildings, she knew that a true realist could only flourish in that Mecca of truth, Hollywood.

The Chicago relatives scraped together enough money to send her to California, and to fame. Needless to say they never saw a dime of their investment returned and they were happy to tell you about their disappointment. She struggled in Hollywood, but was clever enough to stalk director Cecil B. De Mille who gave work as an extra in The King of Kings, and then as a junior screenwriter. There she met Frank O’Connor, another extra who, in toga and sandals, looked just like the handsome hero of whom she had always dreamed. They got married in 1929. Rand became an American citizen in 1931. Taking various jobs during the 1930’s, her lucky break came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn to Universal Studios in 1932.

People were looking for stuff on the Russian Revolution written by someone who had actually been there. Long story short, Alisa had arrived. Her book The Fountainhead (1943) made her famous. It’s hero is a maverick architect, Howard Roark who is supposedly modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright, but with rippling muscles and a penchant for rape and long speeches. (Rand thought that, under the right circumstances, rape was a moral, indeed obligatory act. If it happened at the hands of a superior man. Rand seems to have thought the superior woman revolved around the superior man. She seems to have had some very interesting personal issues. She was delighted to have once been called the most courageous man in America. You figure it out. I can’t.)

Next she moved on to Atlas Shrugged in 1957, whose dashing superior male lead is John Galt who gets all the movers and shakers in America to go on strike and then the world comes to a crashing halt because the takers would no longer have the producers to kick around. After the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand became depressed and would mutter "John Galt wouldn’t feel this!” So much for the realist.

In 1950, at age 45, Alisa/Ayn met a special friend, 19-year-old Nathan Blumenthal. He and his girl friend, later wife, met Frank and Ayn and soon all were fast friends. Blumenthal changed his name to Branden, a Hebrew acronym for Ben Rand, son of Rand, and he called her his true father.(!?!) Soon father and son were in the sack together. Ayn/Alisa and Nathan/Nathaniel explained to their respective spouses that since they were both superior people, their liaison was really the only moral thing to do and Barbara and Frank would just have to put up with it. Which they did.

For years. Ayn/Alisa decided that Blumenthal/Branden was her intellectual heir, the only one capable of receiving her insights fully, the Messiah and the best thing since sliced bread. Frank went on to become a painter, a gardener, an alcoholic and a chain smoker. Barbara just put up with it.

Finally, Branden/Blumenthal was let off the hook when Rand/Rosenblum went into a heavy depression. He promptly became interested in a young Hollywood starlet, and then Ayn/Alisa snapped out of it. Branden was otherwise involved and tried the “It’s not you; It’s me” routine but finally he leveled with her. She had a meltdown. Branden, the standard bearer of the Objectivist Movement was thrown out of the Objectivist Movement. Ayn frequently held counseling and group sessions in which she critiqued people and occasionally her followers gathered to excommunicate heretics. Branden was now a heretic. He, his wife, and his girlfriend were sent packing and he went on to make a tidy living as the founder of the self esteem movement.

Ayn Rand/Alisa Rosenblum was a nasty, ill-tempered tyrant and sexual predator. She lived much of her life high on amphetamines. Her personal hygiene was deplorable and she destroyed the lives of those who came into close contact with her, from her one aborted child on to the disciples who didn’t agree with her totally.

The most telling illustration of who Ayn Rand was came toward the end of her life. One of her disciples came to visit her in the hospital and Ayn commented on how odd that she could see a tree in her window on such a high floor of the hospital. The disciple said that it only the reflection of the IV pole in the window. Rand/Rosenblum flew into a rage. It was a TREE!!! To say that she had perceived external reality incorrectly was to strike at the heart of who she was.

This is the woman who so many believe distills the true American spirit. God help us! Ayn Rand believed that she could perceive reality objectively. Christians were dreamers with imaginary friends like God and Christ and the saints. She was a realist, a realist who lived her life strung out on amphetamines, dominating a much younger person in a sexual relationship, believing in her imaginary, heroic lover, forcing poor, drunk, handsome Frank O’Connor to play the bit part of her consort. This is realism? Give me Jesus. You can have John Galt and his delusional girlfriend.

Yours,
the Rev. Know it all

P.P.S. Why, you may ask do I insist on using Alisa Rosenblum instead of Ayn Rand? I do so because the woman was so delusional that she wouldn’t even use her own name or acknowledge her own heritage. If this is what you call realism then you are as delusional as she was.