Words mean things (1)

In a recent blog article by the economist Gary Becker, entitled “The Behavior of Catholics and Contraceptive Use,” Becker, an old guy, used the words “rhythm method” and predictably, a Roman Catholic commented that “rhythm method” has been supplanted by “natural family planning” (NFP). I’m guessing that the Roman Catholics who read this are knowledgeable to know the difference between these two terms.

I don’t plan to get into a discussion of those things; but it is interesting that Roman Catholics who would take offense over a usage like this one are oblivious to the misuse of much more serious language (the language of Scripture) when used by their own denomination.

In the comments to my previous post, this quickly became evident. So I want to address “TheDen,” a Roman Catholic writer who finds my work “amusing.” He says, “Reading this blog does not make me want to leave the Church but rather to cleave to her ever the more strongly.” Meanwhile, I think he has said a few things that need to be addressed.

“TheDen” said: Your goal is not to steer people to the Truth. Your goal is to claim that the Church is wrong. Your mission is not to evangelize and lead people to Christ but rather to tear apart and rent asunder. This is shameful.

On the contrary, we do quite extensively point out truths and falsehoods here. We make all kinds of fine distinctions that many people seem not to understand. But if people have falsely become “cleaved” to the Roman church the way a broken bone heals wrongly, then sometimes the better thing to do is to re-break the bone so it can heal properly.

“TheDen” said: As you have pointed out, the Roman Church has not fallen. It has not eroded (albeit some people in it have been and may still be corrupt). The beauty of the Church is that it protects the message of Jesus Christ as it was given to her by Christ Himself. Not a reinvention of Christ by using His Scripture but the actual message that Christ gave.

What I said was, “Roman Catholics ask us all the time, “when did the Roman church fall?” It was not necessarily a “fall,” but more like an erosion. Constant erosion, at greater and lesser rates of erosion. But it was an erosion of the Gospel message. It was the erosion of the core apostolic message, at the expense of the constant aggrandization of the bishops of Rome, and the constant aggrandization of Rome itself.” This is not at all the happy situation you have posited.

“When you say “the actual message that Christ gave,” the actual message that He gave was from the Scriptures. Generations of “oral tradition” had caused the Scriptures to become widely misunderstood; Christ did not give a new message; he reiterated the old message:

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

In fact, the Roman church did not “protect” the message of Christ but allowed it to be changed and corrupted over time, just in the manner I described, by making its own self greater and making Christ the lesser.

“TheDen” said: Marriage is not a sacrament because of Ephesians 5. Marriage precedes Christ and He elevates it to a sacrament (per Mark 10:9). There are numerous passages that point to the importance of marriage in God’s plan. To believe that marriage is a sacrament only because of the word sacramentum in Ephesians 5 is ignorance of Scripture and Christ’s teachings.

Let’s look at that process of “making a sacrament”, according to Rome:

Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”

“What did Moses command you?” he replied.

They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”

“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”

This is something that, for “TheDen”, qualifies as “elevation to a sacrament”. But in reality, Jesus was reiterating the Scriptures, while clarifying in the face of the way that some “oral traditions” had obscured them. Is the whole Sermon on the Mount elevating things to sacraments?

A Foundational ‘Sacrament’ Built on and Reinforced by a Mistranslation

“TheDen” said: Penance: The Vulgate does not say "Do Penance" it says, “Poenitentiam” which means “Repent” which also means “do penance.” It is not referring to the Sacrament of Penance and it is not a mistranslation.

Actually, “TheDen,” you omitted a very important little word, and in fact, by adding that word, Jerome did change the sense of the entire passage. Here’s a link to A Concise Dictionary to the Vulgate New Testament with an introduction by G.C. Richards who lists, on page 16, some of the same effects on the text that McGrath noted. Specifically, the words paenitentiam agere which “inevitably suggested ‘acts’ and that it no doubt led to the development of the penitential system, by which ‘penance’ became something [to be] done.”

He gives other examples that you can read for yourself, and the inevitable conclusion is: “thus the language of the Vulgate affected in no small degree the life of the Church”.

Diarmaid MacCulloch in his History of the Reformation also summarizes the effects of the Latin Vulgate on the church:

An examination of the New Testament [of Jerome’s mistranslations in the Vulgate] had even more profound consequences [than his mistranslations of the Old Testament]: Jerome had chosen certain Latin words in his translation of the original Greek, which formed a rather shaky foundation for very considerable theological constructions by the later Western Church.

It was not simply that Jerome gave misleading impressions of the Greek text: the mere fact that for a thousand years the Latin Church had based its authority on a translation [with many errors in it] was significant when scholars heard for the first time the unmediated urgency of the angular street-Greek poured out by … Paul of Tarsus as he wrestled with the problem of how Jesus represented God. The struggle sounded so much less decorous in the original than in Latin: the shock was bound to stir up new movements in the Church and suggest that it was not so authoritative or normative an interpreter of Scripture as it claimed.(82-83)

Again, regarding the translation of “metanoiea”:

Most notorious was Erasmus's retranslation of Gospel passages (especially Matthew 3.2 [and and also 4:17]) where John the Baptist [and Jesus] is presented in the Greek as crying out to his listeners in the wilderness: “metanoeite”. Jerome had translated this as “poenitentiam agite,” “do penance”, and the medieval Church had pointed to the Baptist’s cry as biblical support for its theology of the sacrament of penance. Erasmus said that what John had told his listeners to do was to come to their senses, or repent, and he translated the command into Latin as “resipiscite.” Much turned on one word.(99-100)

Craig Keener has provided an excellent study of what the word “repentance” meant in the New Testament-era literature, and says (primary source references omitted):

“Repentance” in the Gospels recalls not the “change of mind” earlier etymological interpreters sometimes supposed, but the biblical concept of “turning” or “returning” to God (Is 31:6; 45:22; 55:7; Jer 3:7, 10, 14, 22; 4:1; 8:5; 18:11; 24:7; 25:5; 26:3; 35:15; 36:7; 44:5; Lam 3:40; Ezek 13:22; 14:6; 18:23, 30; 33:9, 11; Hos 11:5; 12:6; 14:1-2; Joel 2:12-13; Zech 1:3-4; Mal 3:6).

[I’ve listed all these Scriptural citations to show that the idea of “repentance” espoused here did have a great deal of consistency through the OT.]

The idea of repentance as returning to God was pervasive in early Judaism but foreign to Greek religion. Sages extolled repentance, some later rabbis even claiming its preexistence or its association with the Messiah’s mission. It is efficacious, though in rabbinic tradition it merely suspends judgment until the Day of Atonement may remove it (and beyond a certain limit it is not efficacious for the person who premeditates sin in hopes of repenting afterward [Sounds a lot like Roman Catholics who think it’s ok to sin, because you can then just go to confession]).

Yet John’s call is more radical; his “repentance” refers not to a regular turning from sin after a specific act, but to a once-for-all repentance, the kind of turning from an old way of life to a new that Judaism associated with Gentiles converting to Judaism, here in view of the impending day of judgment (cf. MT 4:17; 11:20; 12:41; Acts 17:30-31; Rom 2:4). His call to repentance recalls a familiar summons in the biblical prophets. In various ways John warns his hearers against depending on the special privileges of their heritage. Craig Keener (“The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary” Grand Rapids, MI, Cambridge, UK, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, ©2009, pg 120)

Since this is already long I’ll break here and pick up some of the other comments in another post.

The Faith that was Once for All Delivered to the Saints, Roman Style

In an earlier version of this post, I mis-attributed this chart. It originally appeared, in various forms, in James McCarthy's "The Gospel According to Rome," Eugene Oregon: Harvest House Publishing (c)1995. One of the elders in my church reproduced this chart for an educational seminar he was giving on the need for the Reformation. In an earlier version of this post, I mis-attributed it to him. I apologize for reporting the genesis of this chart incorrectly. I have re-drawn the chart on my own system, and I've made some small changes to the text which I think help it to better reflect actual Roman Catholic doctrines.

I've noticed that more than a few Protestants don't quite understand what the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification is all about. Well, here it is folks, "the fullness of the faith," or rather, the full process of the Roman Catholic Doctrine of Justification, "once for all delivered to the saints."

This graphical representation of Roman teaching will, I think, be very helpful to Protestants in understanding how justification (and the whole process of salvation) works in the Roman Catholic system. My hope, over time, Lord willing, is to use the various graphical portions of this chart and talk about the history of the various components of this doctrine.

Effectively, given that Rome has officially defined justification this way, by this process, you can rest assured that every portion of this is to be found, implicitly or explicitly, within the pages of the Holy ["properly interpreted"] Scriptures. Because this is the way that it works: Rome's authority right now is what assures us that this is what the church has always believed about justification. (It's just been believed in "seed form" or some other nonsense like that.)

While I may be joking about this, it is a very good picture of the official doctrine. It gives a picture of what I've called "the Sacramental Treadmill." We can go into more detail about this at a future time, but I wanted to post this now so that we can refer back to it on future occasions.

[Click on the image to bring up a larger, printable chart].

I want to point out something again:

"The Reformers' forensic understanding of justification ... the idea of an immediate divine imputation [of righteousness] renders superfluous the entire Catholic system of the priestly mediation of grace by the Church." (Bruce McCormack,What's at Stake in the Current Debates over Justification, from Husbands and Treier's Justification, pg 82.)

When McCormack notes that "the entire Catholic system of the priestly mediation of grace by the Church" is rendered "superfluous" by forensic justification, it's this entire contraption that is made "superfluous".

(This is one main reason why the "infusion vs imputation" discussion is not mundane, but it is vitally important. The "infusion" keeps this alive; "imputation" gets rid of this monstrosity.)