Isn't the Bible self-contradictory? part 1

Warning! This is a treatise about important theological distinctions over which wars have been fought. It will be fairly complex and boring but will have a few salacious details about Roman emperors Nero and Claudius. Sorry.

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

The Bible makes me crazy. It is always contradicting itself. In particular how do I get to heaven? St. Paul says one is saved by faith. St. James says we are saved by works.  Which is it?

Yours sincerely,

Fidel Labrador

Dear Fidel,

You are doubtless referring to St. Paul’s letter to the Romans Chapter 4 and the letter of St. James chapter 2:

What does Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness. Under what circumstances was it credited? Was it after he was circumcised, or before? It was not after, but before! So then, he is the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised, in order that righteousness might be credited to them.  And he is then also the father of the circumcised who not only are circumcised but who also follow in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised…. So where then is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. (Romans 4:3 and following)

And then there is St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the third chapter: Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?  So also, Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

Contrast this with St. James’ letter chapter 2:

And the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called a friend of God. As you can see, a man is justified by his works and not by faith alone.

It certainly seems that St. James and St. Paul are disagreeing with each other. Your first problem is that you are assuming that the Bible is a book. It is not a book. It is a collection of books each of which has its own context and vocabulary.

Let’s start with the letter of St. James. Around 46 AD Paul and Barnabas are collecting funds in Antioch for famine relief of the Jerusalem poor. In 52 AD they are still collecting funds in Corinth for the relief of the Jerusalem community. I believe that the same famine is also the context for the letter of James. Scholars used to dismiss the letter of James as a rather late addition to the New Testament canon, but much scholarly opinion now recognizes that James is actually a very early letter.  It certainly reflects the conditions of poverty about which Paul; and Barnabas are also concerned. Jerusalem is not very well situated for commercial success. Caesarea on the coast was on the road to everywhere. Jerusalem up in the hills is on the road to nowhere. It’s only function then as now is religious pilgrimage. 

Modern Jews are always being schmoozed to maintain poor Torah students in Jerusalem. So it was in the past. The first Christians in Jerusalem seem to have been very poor and dependent on the kindness of strangers. Being considered heretical by most of the Jewish population, they weren’t very well positioned for financial success. James is writing to the diaspora and why is he doing so? I am of the theory that it he is writing a fund-raising letter. He is after all, a bishop. For example; What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith, but not works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and in lack of daily food, and one of you say to them, “Go in peace, be warm and well fed” and yet do not give them the things needful to the body; what does it profit? Even so faith, if it has not works, is dead in itself.

St. James is saying that good works are essential if we are going to be just. This idea of justification that seems so important in the scriptures is hard for us moderns to understand. We think of justice as purely a matter of civil law. This would not be the way the first Christians who were mostly Jewish thought of it. To be just is to be godly. It is above all to be generous because God is generous. The theological virtue of justice is to be rightly related to God and man, to render to God what is His due and to render to our neighbor what is his due. Scripture is clear. We are to be generous to our fellow man, to love our neighbor as ourselves, to see the common humanity that we share and to see the divine image in those around us. We are fooling ourselves if we claim to be just without being generous. 

For anyone who hears the word but does not carry it out is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror, and after observing himself goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and continues to do so—not being a forgetful hearer, but an effective doer—he will be blessed in what he does.…  (James 1:23) 

If St. James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, is schmoozing for shekels to feed his starving community back in the old country his emphasis on generosity makes perfect sense. He may even be correcting a mistaken understanding of what Paul is saying. If the letter of James is written about the same concerns and the same time as Paul is writing, they certainly knew each other and would have been in communication. So, what was Paul saying? More about this thrilling topic next week and the promised gossip about the ancient Romans.

To Be Continued….

Isn't religion the cause of all wars?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all;

I was shocked to discover that most of the wars in the world today are religious wars. Religion is the source of everything bad. War, the Crusades, the Inquisition, overpopulation, persecution, prejudice; it’s all religious. I have no idea whether or not there is a God, but if religious people would just leave the rest of us alone, we would all be fine.

Respectlessly,

Bella Koes

Dear Bella,

Let us first define our terms. We read in James 1:27 that, “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”

The Greek term, (remember them, the Greeks, precise to the point of tediousness?) is “threskeia”, which means “worship, religion, especially expressed in (religious) cult, that is, ritual.” Translating the text into Latin, the word is religio, whence comes our word religion. Religio meant holding scrupulously to the ceremonies due the gods. There is no clear agreement among scholars as to the origin of the word. It seems to come from “re” and “ligare” thus would have something to do with holding back or tying down.

In the Church, we talk about the virtue of religion, which is a dimension of the virtue of justice. Justice is that virtue which gives to each his due. It is impossible to give God what He is owed, but our attempt to do so is called religion. In the common understanding religion is “...all that God stuff, do unto others etc.” It can be thus argued, that Christianity, and especially Catholic Christianity, is not itself a religion, but a faith and a fellowship that has a necessary religious component. (Boy is this boring. What is he talking about?) Just this: you’re assuming that you know what religion is, and you don’t. “It’s all that God stuff, no?”

We need to define our terms. There are lots of religions. In the above-mentioned passage, St. James says that some religion can be foolish. You are making the claim that religion is the source of human suffering. Which religions? Let’s look at the question of war and religion in tedious detail. The United Nations seems most interested in wars that involve a thousand or more fatalities a year, so we’ll start there. In this list are included:

1.  the Arab-Israeli Conflict with a grand total of 50,000 - 90,000 fatalities since its inception, then
2.    the Somali Civil War, 300,000 - 400,000 fatalities, then
3.  the Afghan Civil War 1,500,000–2,000,000 fatalities, a war into which we have recently jumped with both feet and a patriotic smile, though it was originally a Muslim vs. Communist war, then
4. the civil war in Darfur, Sudan, 450,000 (+/-) fatalities, then
5.  the Iraq War, 500,000 - 1,500,000, then
6. the war in North-West Pakistan 13,900 dead and, finally,
7.  the Mexican Drug War 10,000 fatalities or so.

 There are many other smaller-scale armed conflicts that are currently causing a smaller number of violent fatalities each year, but still worth an honorable mention.

 8)       The Colombian drug war 50,000 to 200,000 fatalities, 

9)       the Communist/ Islamic Insurgency in the Philippines about 120,000 dead, then

10)   the Kashmiri Insurgency in India, perhaps 60,000 gone, then

11)   the Niger Delta and

12)   Baluchistan conflicts, (who knows how many dead?) and finally in India,

13)   Naxalite Maoist insurgency whatever that may be!

I have not mentioned the Northern Irish situation, because at the time it seems to be over, but the famous conflict between Protestants and Catholics was not what it seemed. Many of the so-called Catholics were actually Maoist Communists. The conflict seems to be ending because the combatants are just getting too old to continue. You can only do so much damage from a wheel chair.

So, of the twelve wars listed above, 10 involve Muslims, 1 involves Communists, and two involve drug dealers, admittedly in Catholic countries, though I suspect the drug lords don’t attend church that often. In the above list there is not one Vatican paid Swiss Guard mentioned. So those miseries cannot be directly pinned on the Pope.

I mentioned above that the word “religion” may actually mean to restrain or tie back. I would venture that some religions, like Islam, make war a positive virtue. Remember that Mohammed was himself a general who mandated beheadings. Other religions seem to restrain the impulse to kill. Jesus and Buddha seem downright opposed to war, though their followers occasionally ignore them. Still, I would venture that Christian/Catholic religion performs the function of restraining what seems to be the favorite pastime of humanity: murder on the grand scale. Where Catholicism has been practiced, war, though not eliminated, has been held back. Have you ever heard of the Peace of God and the Truce of God?

The Peace of God was the protection from military violence won by special groups in medieval society. These included the clergy and their possessions; the poor; women; peasants along with their tools, animals, mills, vineyards, and labor; and later pilgrims and merchants: in short, the vast majority of the medieval population who neither bore arms, nor were entitled to bear them.

The Truce of God, while often confused and later merged with the Peace, protected certain times of the week and year from the violence of the feudal class: no private or public wars were to be waged from Wednesday evening until Monday morning, during certain Saints’ days, during Advent, Lent, and Rogation days, also Holy Week, Easter Week and the 12 Days of Christmas, with its partridges and pear trees. This peace, though often broken, extended from the 800's until the Reformation in the 1500's. The Pope could excommunicate violators and people actually worried about such censures for almost 700 years.

The History Channel and Hollywood have convinced you of the myth of the scheming evil popes bent on world domination who were overthrown by the glorious Reformation and the still more wonderful Enlightenment. Look at the numbers. If conducted by the rules, medieval wars were not much more violent than modern English soccer matches. (I’m joking, but not by much.) Remember you could only kill other knights and the technology of killing had not yet benefitted from the Enlightenment of the 1700's and the wonderful scientific revolution which has made our lives so much richer and our war so much more deadly. Medieval wars just didn’t kill as many people as modern wars do.

War in Europe really came into its own when the papal domination of western Christianity was overthrown. That’s when the “wars of religion,” really got rolling, principally in France, Germany and England. These probably killed 10,000,000 (ten million) over the course of a century, certainly an inspiring achievement, but nothing compared to the progress we’ve made as we gradually shake off Christianity altogether. Take away the pope, and ten million die. Let’s see what happens when we take away Christianity all together. 

There is an interesting little book about the death toll caused by Communism. The introduction, by editor Stéphane Courtois, himself a former Maoist/Communist, asserts that “...Communist regimes... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.” He cites a death toll which totals 94 million, give or take, not counting the “excess deaths” (decrease of the population due to lower than the expected birth rate). The breakdown of the number of deaths is as follows:

• ·         65 million in the Peoples Republic of China
• ·         20 million in the Soviet Union
• ·         2 million in Cambodia
• ·         2 million in North Korea
• ·         1.7 million in Africa
• ·         1.5 million in Afghanistan
• ·         1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
• ·         1 million in Vietnam
• ·         150,000 in Latin America
• ·         10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international communist movement and communist parties not in power."

Courtois claims that Communists are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including Nazism. Let us remember that both Communism and Nazism are socialist systems that deny the claims of God on humanity. The state is supreme, not God. Communism has killed about 100,000,000 (One hundred million) for political reasons. We’re not talking war here, just political ideology. Nazism “only” killed 25,000,000 (twenty-five million) for political reasons, 6 million of them being Jews. This does not include the 40,000,000 killed because of combat in the Second World War.

So, take away the pope, ten million dead. Take away God, two hundred million dead, counting war. There are a lot more wars and religions we could go into, but enough is enough. I think you get the picture. Still, it is worth mentioning a religion that incorporates war as a divine mandate, such as Islam. Communism has been responsible for the deaths of maybe 100 million people. Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam says, “Approximately 270 million nonbelievers died over the last 1,400 years for the glory of political Islam.” If he is correct, Hitler comes in third, a mere piker, a veritable camp fire girl.

"Wait a minute! You papists can’t get off that easy! What about the Crusades, the Inquisition and the conquest of the Americas?"

Aren’t I always warning you not to get your religion from the Discovery Channel? The Inquisition, though not something to be proud of, really didn’t give it everything they had. The Vatican has opened meticulous records kept over the 400 years of the Inquisition’s heyday and in Spain and Portugal perhaps 2,000 - 3,000 were killed.

How about the Crusades? In the course of two centuries perhaps one or two million died and let us remember these were defensive wars. A very political religion burst out of the Arabian Peninsula with the express intention of taking over the world, a hope still warmly cherished by many Muslims. Christian lands were conquered, and Christians killed. Remember that the Middle East was solidly Christian at the time. Around 1000 AD, Caliph Hakim of Cairo killed the entire Christian population of Jerusalem, burned every Christian shrine in the Holy Land, and hacked the tomb of Christ to pieces. Imagine what would happen in today if a Christian tried to destroy the Ka’aba in Mecca! For us the Tomb of Christ is comparable to the Ka’aba, the central shrine of Islam.

Those assaults started the Crusades. If not for the Crusades, the slaughter of Christians would have continued unabated, until the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, the Prince of Peace, were either dead or converted to the banners of the armies of Islam. As for the conquest of the Americas, true, there were atrocities on the part of gold crazed conquistadors, but the rights of the native Americans were defended by the priests and friars who followed in the wake of the conquerors. Most of the dead were killed by microbes, and that encounter between the microbes of the old world and the people of the Americas was inevitable.

So, there you have it. Where Catholic Christianity has been practiced, the murderous human spirit has been restrained. Where secularism and warrior religions are practiced, the deaths are counted in the hundreds of millions. Once again, I would like to remind you, don’t believe everything you see on television.

Rev. Know-it-all