Saturday Links 10/31/20

The church door in Wittenburg, Germany, where Luther nailed his 95 theses.

Happy holidays! Tonight begins the fall triduum of All Hallow’s Eve (Halloween), All Saints, and All Souls.

Today is also Reformation Day for my Protestant friends, so it seems timely to share this piece from Stanley Hauerwas, a Protestant professor of ethics at Duke Divinity School and an all-around rock star in world of Christian scholarship. Asked to comment on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, he wrote this:

Five hundred years after its inception, we are witnessing the end of the Reformation. The very name “Protestant” suggests a protest movement aimed at the reform of a church that now bears the name of Roman Catholicism. But the reality is that the Reformation worked. Most of the reforms Protestants wanted Catholics to make have been made.

I found this piece early on in my own conversion process a few months after he wrote it. Read the whole thing here. It’s worth your time!

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Big news for American Catholics this week as Pope Francis named Archbishop Wilton Gregory as one of 13 new cardinals. He’ll become the first Black cardinal from the United States, and one of the people who will elect the next pope.

Heck, as a cardinal, he might even be the next pope.

Mike Lewis at Where Peter Is has a nice reflection on the significance of the decision:

This is a historic appointment, not only because of Gregory’s tremendous history as a faithful shepherd, but because he will become the first Black cardinal in the history of the US Church in a year filled with racial tension and conflict. But this year has also seen many Catholics begin to wake up and realize the depth to which deep-seated racism and eurocentrism have corrupted our Church and our ability to share the Gospel.

When I visited D.C. last May for a friend’s wedding, I made sure to visit St. Augustine’s on Sunday morning, one of the more vibrant Black parishes in the United States. Surrounded by Black Catholics piously kneeling in the pews, singing gospel hymns, hearing a sermon from a Black priest serving under a Black archbishop . . . I figured I’m headed in a good direction.

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After the brouhaha over Pope Francis’ comments about same-sex unions in a recent documentary, many in the West argued about what it meant for LGBT folks here, both Catholic and not. But few considered just how significant Francis’ comments might be to LGBT people living in countries where homosexuality is taboo or illegal:

“It definitely will save lives, especially in countries where there is active persecution of L.G.B.T.Q. people,” added Father Massingale, who regularly speaks publicly in support of L.G.B.T. Catholics. He said the pope’s recently publicized comments were consistent with his pastoral approach, by “putting the focus on gay and lesbian persons, not seeing them as ‘walking sex acts.’”

For L.G.B.T. Catholics living in places where homosexuality is outlawed, hearing Pope Francis stand up for the rights of L.G.B.T. people in a new documentary is something of a Godsend.

Pope Francis is, I agree, a Godsend.

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Finally, I can’t help but mention the attack this week at the cathedral in Nice, France, where three people were killed. Here’s a decent article about it. Please pray for the victims, their families, and the perpetrator and his.

Peace, everyone, and enjoy the fun this weekend.

Cathedrals: Hagia Sophia

I’m really happy to be sharing today about a cathedral that I visited in person ten years ago, the Hagia Sophia (pronounced “Eye-yah Soaf-ya”, Greek for “Holy Wisdom”).

The building is 1,483 years old, if you can believe that, and she remains an absolute stunner. The scale of the building is impossible to describe. When I visited Istanbul in 2010 I stood under the central dome and just couldn’t believe how high up it was. This is one of those places where heaven and earth seem to brush fingertips.

Here’s a panorama looking up at the dome. If you’re looking on a computer, you can open this image in a new tab and zoom in to look up close:

I imagine that, back in the Byzantine days, the liturgy here—incense, altars, songs, icons—was heaven. The site was home to some of Christianity’s great saints (St. John Chrysostom) and heretics (hello, Nestorius!). It was here, also, that the tragic schism between East and West opened up in 1054, when papal ambassadors slapped a bull of excommunication on the altar, just before the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. To add injury to insult, Crusaders from the West sacked Constantinople and carried off many of the Hagia Sophia’s sacred objects during the Fourth Crusade in 1204.

So, that’s one reason many Orthodox aren’t big fans of the Romans.

Throughout this period, the building served as the cathedral of the East from its consecration in 537 until the fall of Constantinople to Ottoman (Turkish) forces in 1453. On May 29th of that year, Sultan Mehmet II performed Friday prayers in the Hagia Sophia, officially converting it to a mosque. The Turks immediately set about converting the building into a proper worship space for Muslims, destroying the church’s relics, covering its many icons in plaster, and adding (admittedly beautiful) calligraphy from the Qur’an.

Below you can see a floor-to-ceiling view of the eastern wall all the way up to the central dome. Check out the Islamic calligraphy around the top of the dome, the two round plaques on either side of the apse, and the Virgin Mary, Seat of Wisdom, between them:

Just layers and layers of history here.

When I toured the cathedral I was struck by the different tour groups walking around speaking many different languages. I managed to eavesdrop on a conversation between a few families of Gulf Arabs being led around by a European tour guide. They argued more or less amicably about the legitimacy of the Ottoman conquest and to whom the cathedral rightfully belongs.

You can see the competing claims in the very decor of the place.

Personally I think it obvious that the Ottomans put an Islamic overlay on top of a foundationally Christian building.

You can see here what I mean. The Byzantines built the cathedral so that worshippers facing the altar are also looking toward Jerusalem to the southeast. Muslim prayers, however, invariably face Mecca, nearly 1,000 miles south of Jerusalem. As a result, the worship space had to be awkwardly reoriented at a slight angle from the original. This picture gives you a good sense of it. You can see how the platform and mihrab (the ornate niche in the back) are a little “off”:

This is so Muslim worshippers could properly face Mecca in a building that was designed to look toward Jerusalem.

During the cathedral’s time as a museum, many of the old icons were uncovered and restored. Here’s Mary, Seat of Wisdom again in the apse, this time up close:

Another, of St. John Chrysostom:

Last thing: the Hagia Sophia made international news recently when the Turkish Prime Minister announced that the basilica would be converted back into a mosque. So this year marks the beginning of a new chapter in the building’s already dramatic history. Here’s a recent picture (you can really see the odd angle here):

If you ever find yourself in Istanbul, this is a place you have to see for yourself. The mosque, I’m told, will remain open to tourists outside of the usual prayer times.

RCIA Journal: Agreement, Unity and Eucharist

Pope Francis celebrates the weddings of 20 different couples in 2014. The event was significant in that many of the couples already had children, were living together, or had come from previous marriages.

These RCIA posts will be a little bit less refined than others, because I want to use this space as an opportunity to share my experience in RCIA and talk about what I’m learning. Although I’ve done a lot of reading before starting the official process, I’m by no means an expert, and I’m find that there’s a lot of things I still don’t understand—or worse, things I think I understand, but don’t.

(RCIA, by the way, stands for “Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults”. It’s the path into full communion with the Catholic Church for adult converts such as myself.)

As a former pastor told me, some of the most conservative Christians you’ll ever meet are Catholic, and so are some of the most liberal. This is a good thing! Catholicism is much bigger than any one person’s opinion.

But as someone from a Protestant background, that can be confusing.

We were discussing one of Catholicism’s more difficult teachings, one of those things that makes you say with the disciples, “This is a difficult teaching. Who can accept it?”

So I asked our RCIA leader about it, and she basically said, “Oh, nobody actually follows that one. You have to consult your conscience, pray and discern, and then go with that. One of the highest teachings in the Catholic Church is that the conscience is inviolable. You have to follow your conscience, even if it goes against church teaching.”

Whereas initially I had been scandalized by the difficulty of the Church’s teaching, now I was scandalized from the opposite direction. That seemed way too permissive! I was certain that wasn’t right. Hell, I’m in the middle of a series about the need for a teaching authority! I had simply never heard a Catholic dismiss a church teaching outright like that.

But what was I going to do, tell her, a lifelong Catholic, that she was wrong? That didn’t feel right either. Our RCIA director is a cradle Catholic. She has an M.Div. She participates in the sacramental life of the Church. I can’t say any of those things about myself.

So I just shut up and listened, even though I didn’t like it.

After several days of reflection, I realized that one of the reasons that the Catholic Church can be so enormous and hold such a diversity of opinion is that its unity doesn’t come from everyone believing the exact same things. Intellectual agreement is pretty paramount in the Protestant settings I come from, so sharp disagreement is scary and confusing, and often a cause of schism.

But Catholicism operates a little bit differently: unity rests not solely on agreement, but also in the hierarchical structure of bishops, priests, and deacons, and especially in the common celebration of the sacraments—the Eucharist in particular.

Having the three different dimensions of unity in the Church seems to allow for a little bit more dynamism and flexibility. Like, maybe I struggle with a certain doctrine or teaching. Maybe I disagree with the pope about a certain issue. Or maybe I’m not living (maybe I’m just not able to live) totally in line with the Church’s teachings.

In that case my obligation isn’t to pretend I agree when I don’t, or to hide the fact that I’m imperfect. It seems to me like if I’m engaging in an honest and transparent process, taking advantage of the sacramental life of the Church, going to reconciliation to talk things out, listening carefully to my conscience, reading and studying and praying—well, why should I not consider myself a Catholic and partake of Christ’s body and blood?

As Pope Francis loves to say, the Eucharist is not a reward for the righteous, but a medicine for the sick.

A Scene from Tobit

Here’s a scene from the book of Tobit, which is typically left out of Protestant Bibles. In it, the archangel Raphael heals a man of his blindness.

According to tradition, St. Raphael is the angel of healing, so I prayed for his intercession recently when my wife had an inexplicable and excruciating pain in her stomach 8 months into her pregnancy. (After a long night in the ER, everything turned out fine.)

Raphael shares a feast day (September 29th) with the other two archangels mentioned in Scripture, St. Michael and St. Gabriel.

They Seemed to Be Dead

Thinking more about the (so-called) apocrypha, perhaps one reason some branches of the Reformation were so eager to do away with these books is that they endorse the idea of an immortal soul.

The concept existed in earlier forms of Judaism but was refined by the Jewish world’s interaction with Greek philosophy and culture in the intertestamental period.

The book of Wisdom:

The souls of the just are in the hands of God, and no torment shall touch them.

They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead, and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction.

But they are in peace.

Luther, famously, rejected the idea that the soul continues in consciousness after death, and preferred the idea that the soul simply “fell asleep” until the day of resurrection. A good friend of mine, a Presbyterian minister and scholar, prefers that doctrine as well.

Part of what was at stake for Luther and other Reformers was the Catholic doctrine regarding purgatory. Simply put, Catholics believe that the soul of a person who dies in friendship with God, but who is not yet perfect, will go through a time of purgation (purification) before entering heaven. Purgatory loomed large in the late medieval imagination that Luther inherited, and there was a lot of controversy surrounding it, especially in the use of indulgences.

So, naturally, the Reformers went in search of other theories of the afterlife. Scriptures which seemed to support the idea, such as the one above, were suspect at best. So they were relegated to a secondary status, or eliminated altogether.

Merely to See Him is a Hardship for Us

One of the fun surprises of beginning to explore Catholicism was the extra books of the Bible you get—or rather, the recovery of the books that certain Protestant traditions cut out (thanks, Puritans!).

A lot of the readings from these books bridge the gap between the Old and New Testaments and illuminate both of them in a new way.

For example, this morning’s reading was from the book of Wisdom, probably written in the 1st century BC. In it, the author writes a passage from the perspective of the wicked. It’s as if he got into the heads of the Pharisees:

Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings,

He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the Lord.

Merely to see him is a hardship for us, because his life is not like other men’s, and different are his ways.

The wicked then conspire to kill the just one. The passage reads an awful lot like the Pharisees, Sadducees, temple authorities, and so on:

With revilement and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience.

Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.

The book of Wisdom thus gives us some insight into the psychology of the Pharisees. I particularly like the line, “merely to see him is a hardship for us.” Jesus’ very existence, his way of life, his compassion for the poor, his mercy, is an unspoken condemnation of their own ways and teachings.

This cannot be tolerated; this Jesus must be pushed out of their world.

Who’s in Charge Here? Part 4, Rabbinic Authority in Second Temple Judaism

(I was thinking of ending this series with my last post, but a friend pointed out it wasn’t really fair to critique other positions without offering up the Catholic position for critique, so here it is, as best I can understand it.)

In my last post I wrote about the need for a living authority who can (among other things) make tough calls on disputed issues and guarantee the unity of the community in times of conflict. Hiding underneath every question of interpretation is the question of authority. Who gets to decide?

I left off with the question that the temple authorities asked Jesus.

“Who gave you authority to do this?”

Having arrived at the need for an authoritative interpreter, the natural next question is just that. Where does authority come from? Believe it or not, I came around to the Catholic understanding of this while I was doing some research for a sermon I was giving at my previous church down in California.

The text was John 8, where Jesus sets free the woman caught in adultery. Doing my due diligence to understand the historical background, I learned about the significance of Jesus, as it says, sitting down to teach. Sitting and teaching in Jesus’ context, especially in the temple, was an astounding claim to rabbinic authority. Jesus is setting himself up as an authoritative teacher.

This was a shock and a scandal.

In those days, if you wanted to become a rabbi there were different schools of teaching to which you could apprentice yourself, and at the end of it you got to say that you studied under so-and-so, who learned at the feet of so-and-so, who learned at the feet of so-and-so, all the way back to some great teacher. All of the different competing factions of Jesus’ day—the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and so on—operated on this principle. Your authority to teach was derived from your rabbinic pedigree.

So when Jesus shows up in the temple—the holiest place in the Jewish world—with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever and sits down to teach, the authorities ask questions like, “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?” (John 7:15), or “By what authority are you doing these things?”, or “Who gave you this authority?” (Matthew 21:23, Mark 11:28, Luke 20:2), or “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?” (John 2:18).

These questions make perfect sense when we consider how authority was understood by Jesus’ contemporaries: as something handed down from teacher to teacher in a direct line, proceeding from the original source.

Keeping this concept in mind, we can better understand what Jesus is doing in other parts of the Gospels.

Take, for example, John 20:23:

He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

Here’s another example, from Matthew 18:

Amen I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

What is happening here? In both these passages (as elsewhere in the Gospels) Jesus is handing down his authority to his disciples, just as the other great rabbis of his day did. Just as the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins, so these disciples now have authority to do the same. Just as Jesus prohibited and permitted certain behaviors, so his disciples were now authorized to do the same.

It would have been implicitly understood that this same authority would be passed down by those disciples to the next generation.

This principle is called apostolic succession.

Apostolic succession is the way that all of the ancient Christian churches—Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, and so on—understand where they derive their authority. Authority to retain or forgive, and and to bind or to loose, has been passed down to them by Jesus through the original apostles.

It’s an ancient rabbinic tradition which is still alive in these churches today.

And that’s how the Catholic Church—among the other ancient churches—understands its own claim to authority. The Church is the authoritative interpreter because Jesus himself has given her that authority through the apostles.

In the next post, we’ll talk about the one claim that makes Catholicism unique even among the ancient churches, and the potential advantages of such a claim.

Part five is here.

Saturday Links 10/24/20

For more from The Atlantic’s fall photography feature, click the image above.

As often happens, there was a media firestorm this week about Pope Francis, who in a new documentary (re-)stated his support of civil unions for gay couples. This isn’t precisely news, but it did light up the internet, and (predictably) almost everyone misunderstood what was being said and its significance.

Mike Lewis at Where Peter Is has it right:

The words Francis spoke were neither unprecedented nor inconsistent with what he has said in the past. Those who were hoping that this was a watershed moment or change in Church teaching on human sexuality will be disappointed. Those who imagined that these words somehow meant that Pope Francis had crossed an integral doctrinal line are also terribly mistaken.

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Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology did a series this week about election-year politics, affective polarization, and Christian witness. Here’s a sample:

The reason heroism is connected to hostility is that people who espouse values different from our own threaten the validity of our hero project, calling into question the metrics of our meaning. This unsettles us, makes us anxious. And in the face of that anxiety we lash out at those people who hold different values and beliefs, the people who vote differently than we do.

The first post is here.

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This has little to do with theology, but The Seattle Times has a nice feature up about how friluftsliv—Norwegian for “outdoor life”—can help us get through the long COVID winter. It’s sort of the outdoor flip side of hygge: just as you can focus on making a cozy, comfortable indoor space during the long dark of winter, so too you can intentionally spend time outside, however bad the weather:

In Noway, friluftsliv is so deeply ingrained into daily life that it starts in kindergarten. “Norwegian kindergartens are famous for being outdoors,” said Meyer. “In all weather, you will go outside for recess, if not for a good portion of the day.”

Bekah, you should definitely read that one!

Cathedrals: Sant’Apollinare in Classe

I’ve gotten a wide range of responses to my conversion story, but one of my favorites was that of my brother-in-law, Tucker, a Calvary Chapel pastor, who was so happy for me that he gave me two books about cathedrals!

So in his honor, I’ll be working through one of the books and sharing photos of some cathedrals from around the world.

Today’s feature is Sant’Apollinare in Classe, consecrated in 549 in Ravenna, Italy. Here’s the interior:

A closer view:

The apse is a Byzantine mosaic depicting the Transfiguration of Jesus. The giant cross at the center contains a portrait of Christ (the blue field symbolizes the opening of the heavens). The cross is flanked by Moses and Elijah, and the three lambs represent the three disciples who accompanied Jesus up the mountain. It’s a very peaceful pastoral scene:

Thanks for this wonderful gift, Tucker!

Icons: John the Baptist Preaching in Hell

This icon, via Eclectic Orthodoxy, caught my attention this week.

The idea is that after his beheading, John the Baptist went down to hell, here not understood as a place of punishment but as Sheol or Gehenna: simply, the place of the dead.

There he encounters—who exactly? The prophets of the Old Testament, I imagine. That could be King David wearing a crown on the left. They could also be virtuous Gentiles (I’ve seen icons that include Plato and Aristotle, for example). But who is the woman on the bottom-right? And the figures not given any color? And what is the creature attempting to devour them?

I’m not sure.

I can say with some confidence that the icon anticipates the harrowing of hell that is coming in the time between Jesus’ death and Resurrection, when, as we say in the Apostles’ Creed, “he descended into hell.”

So here’s John the Baptist, preparing the souls of the dead for Jesus’ coming liberation.

Cool.