Word 'contains' meaning?

Honestly, help me out here. Is 'meaning' a thing contained in a word? Even if you think this is a silly question, I'd still appreciate your honest answer. Are words containers of meaning?

If you don't like the expression, can you suggest an alternative way of describing the relationship between word and meaning?

Sentence meaning

Searle's approach to sentence meaning is pretty helpful, I think. Above, for example, you can see that he posits a sentence meaning independent of any authorial intent. It's the conventional or systematic ('semantic' or 'grammatical') meaning.

You think the distinction's obvious, but I'm not so sure. When I get the time, for example, I'd like to discuss a few instances in The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church where the distinction might add some much needed clarity.

'Catholic' interpretation and Lewis

Real appreciation demands [that we not] let loose our own subjectivity upon the pictures [ikons, ie, any representational object] and make them its vehicle. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests, and associations. We must make room for Botticelli's Mars and Venus, or Cimabue's Crucifixion, by emptying out our own. After the negative start, the positive. We must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand that any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

It is not only our own 'ideas' about, say, Mars and Venus which must be set aside. That will make room only for Botticelli's 'ideas', in the same sense of the word. We shall thus receive only those elements in his invention which he shares with the poet. And since he is after all a painter and not a poet, this is inadequate. What we must receive is his specifically pictorial invention: that which makes out of many masses, colours, and lines the complex harmony of the whole canvas.

—CS Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961)

The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church—written by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1994—outlines interpretive strategies. I've already blogged about it, and don't mean to bore you, but I'm still mulling it over and have more to say about it. There's a lot to think about. Much to do.

Here's an interesting exercise: What do you think CS Lewis would make of the Pontifical Biblical Commission's report?

I like that quotation of his (above) a lot. I'm not sure how practical it is to ask people to lay aside their "own preconceptions, interests, and associations" as "completely" as possible; on the other hand, I can't help wondering if Lewis meant that 'laying aside' in quite the way we might automatically assume today, more than 40 years after Derrida's Of Grammatology.

He missed the linguistic turn, Lewis. Maybe not entirely—right?—but mostly. Just enough to make him irrelevant for most. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, Ten more years of Lewis: if only we could have had ten more years of the guy, but then I wonder who I think I'm kidding. The truth is, I wish he were still smoking his pipe at us and writing today. Which would make him 110 years old.

Anyway... Lewis: Would he find the pontifical report familiar or alien?

Unwind yourself... or else.

They seem entirely unrelated, yes, but when I ran into the old French proverb,

Tant grate la chevre que mal gist

I thought about King Louis' advice to Mowgli, "Cool it, boy."

Skeat quotes from Cotgrave's early seventeenth century dictionary when he says the proverb applies "to such as cannot be quiet when they are well" ([source], see entry for 'Grater').

To better understand the proverb, however, you need the proverb's gloss that appears under Cotgrave's entry for 'Chevre' [here].

In short, the operose goat scratches and scrapes at the ground to make a soft spot to lie down ('gist' = 'gésir')—and in the process unearths a knife that is used, later, to cut her throat in a sacrifice.

Moral of the story: Cool it, boy – unwind yourself.

Seriously, I sometimes think everything we need in life is taught in Disney's Jungle Book.

On appearance and absence...

Now, as I see it, the language in which we express our religious beliefs and other religious experiences, is not a special language, but something that ranges between the Ordinary and the Poetical. But even when it begins by being Ordinary, it can usually, under dialectical pressure, be found to become either Theological or Poetical... I think the words 'I believe in God' are Ordinary language. If you press us by asking what we mean... we might say 'I believe in incorporeal entity, personal in the sense that it can be the subject and object of love, on which all other entities are unilaterally dependent.' That is what I call Theological language... In it we are attempting, as far as is possible, to state religious matter in a form more like that we use for scientific matter. This is often necessary, for purposes of instruction, clarification, controversy and the like. But it is not the language religion naturally speaks. We are applying precise, and therefore abstract, terms to what for us is the supreme example of the concrete.If we do not always feel this fully, that, I think, is because nearly all who say or read such sentences (including unbelievers) really put into them much that they know from other sources—tradition, literature, etc. But for that, it would hardly be more information than 'There are 15 degrees of frost' would be to those who had never experienced frost.

And this is one of the great disadvantages under which the Christian apologist labours. Apologetics is controversy. You cannot conduct a controversy in those poetical expressions which alone convey the concrete: you must use terms as definable and univocal as possible, and these are always abstract. And this means that the thing we are really talking about can never appear in the discussion at all. —CS Lewis, The Language of Religion

What's your approach?

What’s your approach to reading the Bible?

It’s more rare than it used to be, but you still run into the idea that there are two ways to read the Bible: either you simply read it, right there, in black and white (a transmission theory of reading especially popular 1800-1890 [source]), or you read into it, over-complicate or ruin it with a bunch of rhetorical-critical mumbo jumbo.

But there’s no way around it: all reading is methodological. Even ‘plain reading’ of the sort that claims to ‘listen’ to what the Bible 'says' can’t keep—despite the change of verbs—from describing a way it’s done, a course to follow, which implies the rules of rhetoric and a critical organ to effect them.

There’s the Bible: to encounter it we have to ‘approach’ with everything that word implies.

Of course, it’s possible to not know your reading approach and manage, nevertheless, to read with much satisfaction. In the same way, I’m sure mid flight I could take over the stick and fly the plane with the kind of thrill only ignorance can provide. But imagine, for a moment, you’re on the plane with me and we’ve got to land.

The same thing's true for language. Talking on the phone or typing a twitter, we haven't got a clue what a participle is or the rules that govern the clause it makes. Everyone uses the if- and what-cleft locution, though only one in a hundred can name and explain it. Still, it's the grammar that makes the phone call and the twitter comprehensible. Nobody would suggest that some of us communicate and some of us junk up our communication with grammar.

To read: it means, then, exercising particular methods or approaches. The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church—compiled by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1994 (henceforth simply Interpretation)—is a general survey (and evaluation) of Bible-reading approaches. Is your approach among those discussed? An important claim of Interpretation is that theoretical/critical approaches to reading the Bible—ie, 'scientific' approaches—have been incredibly helpful for opening our eyes to what's really there in the text.

I can believe it. But I wonder... once I admit that scientific exegesis really provides indispensable data for reading and interpreting the Bible, have I (at least) implied that the scientist, the professional, the hoary academic, is more qualified to read it? Is the Bible in some sense a specialist's book likely to be misunderstood by anyone trying simply to read it? Interpretation tries to answer this, but I'm not sure it succeeds. I'd like to know what you think.

Before you teach...

We are so familiar with the erotic tradition of modern Europe that we mistake it for something natural and universal and therefore do not inquire into its origins: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for ‘nature’ is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence. (CS Lewis, The Allegory of Love, Oxford, 1970 reprint from 1936; page 2)

The erotic tradition to which Lewis refers is the courtly love sentiment of the late middle ages, the so-called religion of love characterized by humility, courtesy, and adultery—the “dishonorable” love dismissed (but not overcome) by the Victorians. Much of this courtly love tradition seems perfectly natural to us because it’s deeply impressed in the development of literature and art in Western culture and remains an integral component of love stories today. In his Allegory of Love, Lewis makes the point that courtly love isn’t a natural component of the human condition despite its feeling so familiar to us, so matter-of-course. People aren't born with it. People learn it.

Lewis traces the development of courtly love, breaks down its ethics, describes the tension between the world of the courtly lover and the other world, the one it so often parodies—the Christian world. Now, setting aside all the details of his argument, the fascinating survey of medieval authors and texts, the only point I’d like to make is this: although Lewis shows that courtly love isn’t a natural state of affairs for humanity, he never suggests that love, in the end, is an empty word, an interchangeable textual cipher, mere schrift.

Lewis argues that love—as it comes to us through the courtly tradition—isn't natural, but this in no way means that Lewis thinks any true nature of love is unknowable; nor does Lewis promote the idea that love is merely a "social construction" without any positive content. No, indeed: despite all the twists and turns of language—and Lewis knows much about them—despite also the very real difficulties of representation, the confusion and misunderstanding embedded in cultural concepts (eg, the “Ovid misunderstood” formula described at page 7), despite all that and more, Lewis believes in real love. It really exists. It can be reliably known and not in spite of language but in it, with it. He's pretty conventional like that.

Now it could be that Lewis is deceived; maybe he’s just naive. There is a critical approach to texts that would say just that: whether deceived or naive, Lewis is flat wrong. Love—this critical approach would say—is only understandable as a term by comparison with what it is not. And not only love, either, but all words, all signs, are differential like that, which shouldn't inspire a lot of confidence in language's ability to bring us together around the truth. So we have two incompatible positions here: Lewis is writing about love and believes that he's writing about something real, something knowable, something capable of being articulated as truth in language; for others, though, things known in language—things like love—can't be appreciated for their truth value. For them, language isn't about truth at all. Language is about power.

Granted, from this other position—this critical perspective so deeply suspicious of language—it might still be interesting and worthwhile to study different conceptions of love, how they have emerged over time, how they inform current love ideals in Tokyo or Bergen. But no one should be trusted who suggests, as Lewis does, that there is some final reality, natural or universal, to which the word love points referentially and with reliability. Language is a differential system; language is always, ultimately, about language and not about any real world.

Behold: Poststructuralism.

It's only an opinion, but I think poststructuralism is the single most devastating threat to Christian faith. When you lose language—if you lose language—you've lost everything despite your air-tight syllogisms and your arguments from design. Whatever you've got that counts as foundation—whatever structure or system that holds your faith together—is a smoldering flake if language is as poststructuralism says, a differential system wherein meaning must necessarily be postponed, perpetually deferred back into more and yet more language. If poststructuralism's critique of language is permitted—indeed, if it isn't refuted—then faith doesn't stand a chance.

If I worked for Catholic High School X and were responsible for interviewing teaching candidates for positions in history or literature or religion, I'd make time to ask, What do you know about poststructuralism (or what might be called deconstruction)? What's wrong with the poststructural approach? What's a legitimate linguistic alternative to it?

Which is why I'm not teaching though I've wanted to for a number of years. I don't believe I'll be qualified to teach the disciplines I know and love until I can answer those questions. But... I'm writing this post to put myself on notice: I'm finally—finally!—getting very close. Please pray for me. I have so much to learn.

Truth and representation

The application of [the historical-critical] method to the Bible necessarily led to discussion. Everything that helps us better to understand the truth and to appropriate its representations is helpful and worthwhile for theology. —Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Preface to The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church

What is the difference between "truth" and "its representations"?

I'm asking sincerely. Anyone?

Knights of Columbus set new records

Go Knights!

Economic Crisis Spurs Knights of Columbus Charity

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, JUNE 12, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The Knights of Columbus set new records for charitable donations and volunteer service hours last year, despite the economic crisis.

Today, Supreme Knight Carl Anderson, also a ZENIT weekly columnist, released the information of the past year's activities in a meeting at the group's international headquarters.

He reported that charitable contributions by the knights amounted to over $150 million, which is $5.1 million higher than the previous year.

The data, compiled from an annual survey of all the local chapters, showed some 68.8 million volunteer service hours by knights to charitable causes.

The organization noted some 413,000 blood donations collected by the knights, and 156,295 service hours given specifically to Habitat for Humanity.

The Knights of Columbus has some 1.75 million members in North and Central America, the Philippines, Guam, the Caribbean islands and Poland. It was started in 1882 by the Servant of God, Father Michael McGivney.

Pray for Peace in Iraq

With my friend, BC, before his return overseas.

Please pray for peace in Iraq, the great constitutional republic that continues to struggle against terror from within and the calculated interference of lesser governments like Iran.

May God fill you with His peace, BC, protect you, and use you as a minister of His grace to your wife and children, your family and friends, and all those you encounter overseas. You are ever in our thoughts and prayers. What a privilege it is to be your friend.

Dogmatic foundations

When the earliest Christians argued passionately in favor of what Catholics call the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they were often responding to and correcting heresies like docetism. I think that’s fascinating and hugely under appreciated.

The point? Church dogma is structural, architectural, which is why (at least for the early Christians) any loss of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist weakened the reality of everything else. If your take on the Real Presence goes wobbly, so wobbles your Incarnation.

For many of us, Christianity can’t survive the pure abstraction. It becomes something else. Precisionist legalism or secularism. Political activism. Agnosticism. Denominationalism. Mysticism. Fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-ism. You’ve got what you think are good reasons for making the break with all that Catholic dogma, but the more you break, the less you have—or the less precisely—and the Church Fathers seemed to have understood that clearly.

I've been thinking about this in relation to a paper by Guy Mansini, OSB, of the Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Indiana.

It is a commonplace to say that Christian prayer is scriptural, that it is based on the Bible or that it is informed by Scripture, or some such phrase. I wish in this essay to defend this commonplace, but in a quite precise form: Christian prayer is scriptural, where Scripture is understood and appreciated dogmatically, that is, according to the Church's understanding of the nature, authorship, and unity of the Bible. [Abstract here]

That's huge. Heavy implications.

Rosary

So what's the big deal about rosary anyway?

In a word, meditation, which for the Catholic refers to the application of soul, memory, imagination, intellect, and will in prayer. It begins as a curiosity, a what is this formulaic babel, anyway? But it becomes a truly beautiful thing you can't stay away from very long. Not Babel but Pentecost.

Despite the discipline it requires—the formula—praying the rosary means giving up neither the immediate creative impulses of spontaneous prayer nor the intimacy of prayer directly addressed to Christ. After a decade of Ave Maria, for example, I often find myself praying, suddenly, for people I haven't seen since high school—the Grunden and Miller families, Lankford, Dorris, Inglett and more, many more. Here we are, Christ: have mercy on us and fill us with your peace.

Memorizing the formula, the prayers, allows you to concentrate on the content, the feeling, the meaning of the prayers you're praying. You apply all that—the images and meanings, the petitions, praises and invocations—to the people (and circumstances) for whom you're praying. It's not "Hail Mary, mother of God, pray for us"—I mean, it is, but that little "us" usually expands into specific and concrete spontaneous prayer for people like Victoria Dulay and her family; Dad and Bill and Brenda and Mary; Sylvia Shy and her family; DanZan; Chris and Dana; Joseph and Shawna; Saegaerts—beautiful Saegaerts; the Settle, Willis, and Bennett clans; Nathan and Celest; Justin and Shelley; Phil and Jeannine; Scott and Leatherwoods; Tiff and Rich; the Beck family; Michael and Gina; the Peveys; Collins, Rostad, and Adkins families; Deacon Omar, and too many more to list.

And the mysteries: When I'm meditating on the Glorious Mysteries, for example, and praying for my son (or the Slatter children; or Lucy and her unborn sister; or Kelci, Cam, or Connor; Elizabeth, Isabelle, or Ian; little Mia Jay, or Ethan, or any one of a dozen others), The Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost becomes an occasion to pray for and imagine the Holy Spirit becoming a deep and abiding reality in his life. I'm praying for his Pentecost. I'm recalled to my own. Pentecost becomes less a thing that happened to the Apostles so long ago and more a present reality to which we are all called. Today. All of us.

Your clumsy first rosary becomes, with time, a real investment.

I often introduce other elements to the rosary: the Nicene Creed instead of the Apostles', for example, and sometimes in the Latin I'm trying to memorize; halfway through a decade I'll often sing the Sanctus; after each decade I'll run a companion decade of the Jesus Prayer, and so on, through the end; sometimes I break out in spontaneous prayer after any given decade—sometimes in the middle—invoking the cloud of witnesses (Saints like Elizabeth Ann Seton, St. James, St. Augustine, St. Stephen, St. Christopher, St. Brendan, and so many others): pray for us.

And they do. And often I think about what heaven will be like, when we arrive, finally, and discover who it was that prayed for us. Prayer is not anonymous, and the rosary is a great reminder of that.

Apostolic succession

Dave Armstrong on apostolic succession:

...this belief of the Catholic Church [in apostolic succession] ...is also grounded in Scripture: St. Paul teaches us (Ephesians 2:20) that the Church is built on the foundation of the apostles, whom Christ Himself chose (John 6:70, Acts 1:2,13; cf. Matthew 16:18). In Mark 6:30 the twelve original disciples of Jesus are called apostles, and Matthew 10:1-5 and Revelation 21:14 speak of the twelve apostles. After Judas defected, the remaining eleven Apostles appointed his successor, Matthias (Acts 1:20-26). Since Judas is called a bishop (episkopos) in this passage(1:20), then by logical extension all the Apostles can be considered bishops (albeit of an extraordinary sort).

If the Apostles are bishops, and one of them was replaced by another, after the death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ, then we have an explicit example of apostolic succession in the Bible, taking place before 35 A.D. In like fashion, St. Paul appears to be passing on his office to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:1-6), shortly before his death, around 65 A.D. This succession shows an authoritative equivalency between Apostles and bishops, who are the successors of the Apostles. As a corollary, we are also informed in Scripture that the Church itself is perpetual, infallible, and indefectible (Matthew 16:18, John 14:26, 16:18). Why should the early Church be set up in one form and the later Church in another?

All of this biblical data is harmonious with the ecclesiological views of the Catholic Church. There has been some development over the centuries, but in all essentials, the biblical Church and clergy and the Catholic Church and clergy are one and the same.

The historical evidence of the earliest Christians after the Apostles and the Church Fathers is quite compelling as well: there exists virtually unanimous consent as to the episcopal, hierarchical, visible nature of the Church, which proceeds authoritatively down through history by virtue of Apostolic Succession.

St. Clement, bishop of Rome (d.c.101), teaches apostolic succession, around 80 A.D. (Epistle to Corinthians, 42:4-5, 44:1-3), and St. Irenaeus is a very strong witness to, and advocate of this tradition in the last two decades of the 2nd century (Against Heresies, 3:3:1,4, 4:26:2, 5:20:1, 33:8). Eusebius, the first historian of the Church, in his History of the Church, c. 325, begins by saying that one of the "chief matters" to be dealt with in his work is "the lines of succession from the holy apostles..." {tr. G.A. Williamson, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965, p.31}

With regard to the threefold ministry of bishop, priest (elder/presbyteros), and deacon, St. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, offers remarkable testimony, around 110 (Letter to the Magnesians, 2, 6:1, 13:1-2, Letter to the Trallians, 2:1-3, 3:1-2, 7:2, Letter to the Philadelphians, 7:1-2, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8:1-2—the last also being the first reference to the "Catholic Church"). St. Clement of Rome refers to the "high priest" and "priests" of Christians around 96 (1 Clement, 40). Other prominent early witnesses include St. Hippolytus (Apostolic Tradition, 9) and St. Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis, 6:13:107:2), both in the early third century.

[Source]

Murder is not pro-Life

Someone shot and killed a celebrated abortionist. At his Lutheran church, no less.

[here's the story]

Christians everywhere should condemn the doctor's murder, pray for him and his family, along with the shooter.

There is no possible justification for killing abortionists. None.

As a committed pro-Life Catholic, I abhor this twisted, evil, despicable crime.

What happened after Notre Dame?

Here's the Catholic University of America panel discussion, via CNN.

Couple of things that struck me:

Kmiec is asked 'what Obama has actually done to limit abortions in any meaningful way that might justify a Catholic voting for him' (my paraphrase). Kmiec provides the purely gestural 'Obama is helping poor people improve their financial situations' (also my paraphrase) ...

...

...because the McCain/Palin team would have worked tirelessly to keep poor people impoverished? I honestly do not understand what point Kmiec is trying to make with that one. It seems too easy, too sloppy, too desperate a reason to choose Obama over McCain. Especially for someone of Kmiec's stature.

The Left and the Right disagree about how best to achieve the end goal of economic prosperity: but it is a fact that both the Left and the Right want to see poor people's economic lives improve. Thus, it's strange and not a little bit confusing that Kmiec included that bit in his answer.

Kmiec also cited the NIH's position on stem cell research, which seems to me a completely worthless answer to the question he was posed. The reason everyone on both the Left and the Right made note of the NIH position on stem cell research is because that position represented a reversal of Obama's stated campaign goals and objectives.

In other words, Obama in campaign-mode made it perfectly clear he wanted federal funding for the kind of stem cell research entirely at odds with Life and the Church's settled opinion. So I'm completely confused why Kmiec thinks the current NIH position—which is not Obama's position and certainly not reflective of Obama's campaign—is evidence that helps justify a Catholic's vote for Obama.

How does Kmiec fare in this discussion? I was surprised at the weakness of his positions. His opening statement seemed full of Obama campaign rhetoric—the giant, bold, flourishing, inspiring announcements of what Obama is going to do to save the world, which seemed incredibly shallow for this (or any other) substantive discussion. Everyone agrees that brand Obama is first-in-class when it comes to inspiring giant hope. I tried but didn't hear Kmiec name any actual evidence or specific administration appointment or any program or presidential initiative that actually supports the Life cause in any measurable way. Not one.

Compare that to George's very specific lists of presidential appointments and initiatives that are antithetical to the Life cause. George makes the very credible case that Obama's position on Life precludes any hope for common ground on all of the key Life issues—from care for those born alive after attempted abortions to partial-birth abortion, late-term abortions, parental notification, conscience protections, in short, everything.

Though calling for cooperation, Obama's specific actions and appointments in every instance undermine the Life cause. All Kmiec could say, in response, was something like 'my Catholic vote for Obama was still a legitimate vote because Obama wants to improve healthcare, save the environment, end war, and help the poor.' I don't mean to be controversial or disrespectful, but when I place that on a scale opposite the 50 million actually lost in the United States, the soaring campaign slogans look despairingly light and fluffy.

Kmiec's is a position that just seems so surprisingly weak, particularly on the human rights and justice fronts that George articulated so effectively. Have I missed something?

Robert George on what divides us

President Obama knows that an unborn baby is human. He knows that the blood shed by the abortionist’s knife is human blood, that the bones broken are human bones. He does not deny that the baby whom nurse Jill Stanek discovered gasping for breath in a soiled linen bin after a failed attempt to end her life by abortion, was a human baby. Even in opposing the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which was designed to assure that such babies were rescued if possible or at least given comfort care while they died, Barack Obama did not deny the humanity of the child. What he denied, and continues to deny, is the fundamental equality of that child–equality with those of us who are safely born and accepted into the human community.

During his campaign for the Presidency, then-Senator Obama was asked by Rick Warren: When does a baby acquire human rights? In reply, the future president did not say, “well it depends on when a baby (or a “fetus”) comes to life, or becomes a human being.” He knows that an unborn baby is alive and human, and he did not pretend not to know. His response to Pastor Warren did seem to express doubt of as to when rights begin, saying that the question was “above his pay grade.”

But Obama’s record as an activist, legislator, and now as President makes clear his view that an unborn baby, or even a baby outside the womb like the one discovered in that soiled linen bin by Jill Stanek, possesses no rights that others are bound to respect or that the law should in any way honor. Throughout his political career, Obama has consistently and fervently rejected every form of legislation that would provide unborn babies or children who survive abortions with meaningful protection against being killed. Indeed, he has opposed even efforts short of prohibiting abortion that would discourage the practice, limit its availability, or directly favor childbirth over abortion.

His belief, and his policy, is that abortion, if a woman chooses it, is not wrong. That is why he is not personally opposed to it. There is no wrong there to oppose. Indeed, the President made crystal clear his view that abortion can be an entirely legitimate and even desirable option, when he said that if one of his daughters made a mistake and became pregnant, he would not want her to be “punished with a baby.” In such a case, he saw abortion as the right solution to a problem—a solution that we should be happy is available, and that we should make available if it happens not yet to be available. Without it, a young woman would be “punished.”

Read the entire piece for it's full impact: Source.

Praying for vocations

This is an old-school friend of mine—now a Greek Orthodox monk, Father Parthenios. He's a fixture in our vocational prayer, along with so many others. As Catholic converts, we have the luxury of not knowing exactly, precisely, how to do everything Catholic: I don't know, for example, if "praying for vocations" is supposed to mean prayer for new vocations only—ie, asking God to move in the hearts of young men to pursue ordination. That's certainly what we pray for, but we also pray for all the active clergy and religious we know. We feel so honored and so blessed to know them, and we love them very much.

If you're praying for vocations, will you consider adding Father Parthenios to your prayers? Here is my friend and my brother—a spiritual father—with a life consecrated to our Lord Jesus Christ: pray for him.

I also want to recommend a book he encouraged me to read which has had a profound impact on my life:The 'Jesus prayer' ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner," read the book and see 2616 in the CCC) pops up in my mouth and in my mind all the time now. Reading the book also gave me the opportunity to review prayer in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which blew me away (as the Catechism always does). I figured a great way to thank Father Parthenios would be to pass along his recommendation to everyone who comes here (all three of you). Thank you, Father Parthenios, and may God richly bless you and fill you with His peace. You are such an encouragement to me.

Why I'm not a Rob Bell enthusiast...

...the Bible is open-ended. It has to be interpreted... (via Velvet Elvis)

Rob Bell is spot on: reading is a very complicated activity. Reading always involves interpretation, and any ten people might come up with ten interpretations of a given Biblical issue. More, if they're creative. You might get twenty interpretations from only five English majors, for example. Thirty from two lawyers. The Bible is open-ended. Got it.

I like Bell on the problem of interpretation. What I object to is his response to it. For example, Velvet Elvis appeals to what Bell calls ancient rabbinical understanding in a discussion of Jesus' identity. Want to really understand Jesus? You'll have to ask the ancient Jews—they'll know best since Jesus was, after all, an ancient Jew.

But ancient rabbinical understanding is neither uniform nor univocal. Witherington says as much, pointing out that the rabbinical understanding to which Bell appeals is neither ancient nor contemporary with the time of Christ but a later development. If that's true—and Witherington is qualified, I suspect, to settle the question—then Bell's approach is anachronistic. It's wrong. Will it matter to his fans? Probably not. Should it?

There's also the matter of skipping over at least 1,500 years of Christian understanding. Rabbinical understanding is certainly important, but would the average reader of Rob Bell feel at all encouraged to seek out what the Apostolic Church Fathers thought of Jesus? Do Bell's fans even notice the leap over ancient Christian history and ancient Christian writings?

In some ways, I think Bell and his supporters haven't appreciated the full impact of the Bible's open-endedness. If it's truly open-ended, then I want to know how open-ended. Is there a scale? Is the open-endedness measurable? Is the Bible like a bit of Homi Bhabha, for example, like a poem or a flick of impressionistic paints, a 12 on a scale 0-10 where 10 = textual carnival?

You get that impression, I think, when Bell announces the problem—the Bible is open-ended—then appeals to ancient Jewish practice (to really ground and shore up his interpretation of Jesus) only to be informed by Witherington that his appeal is factually invalid. Doh! Where does it end? What else in Bell's velvety book is wrong?

Don't you wish, sometimes that Paul were here to weigh in on questions like these? In 2 Timothy 2:15 Paul says, "stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter," but this must look a little naive to a lot of people today. Stand firm? On what? We've recognized that the Bible is open-ended: now we have to admit, in turn, that Christian "tradition" is a competitive landscape—everyone standing firm on his and her own interpretive traditions of sometimes more and sometimes less merit (some of them stretching back to the sixteenth century, some of them to last week). The truth of Paul's Traditions has given way to my truths and my traditions today, at this moment.

Of course, the real issue behind Biblical interpretation is authority: Who has the authority to govern or temper or constrain the almost limitless possibilities of textual interpretation?

Or to ask it another way: Did Jesus know that textual interpretation is so open-ended—would cause such massive disagreement, schism, denomination—yet give us nothing to mitigate it?

The Catholic Church's response to this is solid, Biblical, and unequivocal.

Porn

Sheesh: this blog of mine has no sense of humor.

This post is no exception: I'm simply suggesting you read the Fathers for Good article on porn, which ends with

“Where there is a spiritual component to the recovery, we have seen great success,” he says. “The Lord doesn’t want this darkness to interfere with the great sacrament of marriage.”

American Principles Project calls for renewed attention to the porn issue, concluding that

What does not seem plausible to me is that anyone who is informed can insist that the pornography all around us contributes to human liberation rather than degradation, nor that those who are involved in its production, purveyance, or even its defense are the friends of freedom.

New Testament Church

The pomp and pageantry of the Catholic Church is sometimes used as evidence of the Church's fall from 'New Testament' grace. The early Church, they say, wouldn't recognize in the Catholic Church's gilt and gloss the simple Christian faith of the Bible, and I think this longing for authentic New Testament origins is a good thing.

I have a friend (like a brother) who loves his (Protestant) 'New Testament' church precisely because it offers an alternative to denominationalism. I'm not a denomination, he says, but a Christian attending a church that follows the New Testament model. Get back to the basics is the idea. Dig down to the roots. I like it and think it's healthy.

The Catholic Church does glitter. I love Gregorian chant—the Miserere mei—the slow and deliberate way that individual syllables are teased out for all their beauty and significance. But is it bad, necessarily? Is there something inherently suspicious about an ornamental liturgy, a sometimes dazzling iconography, an elaborate institutional polish?

There is a powerful argument in favor of the Catholic Church's pageantry: as with Gregorian chant, we ornament what we love so deeply; we lavish and luster all that glorifies God, contributes to our Faith, inspires us to worship, to kneel and bow and awe: venite adoremus!

The Church is much more than a gathering of sinners, though it is certainly that as well. Lest we forget the price that bought us, the Spirit that sanctifies us, the Covenant that transforms us: Let us acknowledge that the Church has her very being in Christ, is His body, is the force and movement of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Furthermore, if the early Christians might not recognize the splendor of the Catholic Church today, I think we have to admit that they'd certainly recognize the content of the Faith. Where, in the Protestant 'New Testament' church is confession and penance? What happened to Mary? Where have all the Saints and Martyrs gone? Why is Eucharist (and Baptism) celebrated as an intellectual or doctrinal gesture? Where is the bishop? Why no Confirmation?

The paradox of the 'New Testament' church is that it doesn't square with what is known, historically, about the early Church's Faith and Liturgy. The attitude today is that we can understand how to create a proper church from reading the New Testament, but the early Church wasn't made that way—there was no New Testament for hundreds of years. In fact, the letters that would eventually comprise the New Testament were read and venerated in an already established, stable, concrete network of Churches.

It had to come from somewhere, that Church. To understand where it came from and how it operated, you'll need to read the Didache, the Letter to the Corinthians, the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch, St Polycarp, and so on, in addition to the New Testament. You'll have to immerse yourself in early Christian history, which will likely lead you to an astonishing conclusion. The Church of the New Testament doesn't have to be recreated because it's still around today—to the praise and glory of Christ Jesus.