Peter Gomes and being human

I said a while ago that I wished everyone could have the privilege of hearing Peter Gomes, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, speak. Well, today is your lucky day. The website big think now has 19 videos of nothing but Gomes talking.

One of them is particularly relevant to my last post, so I'll share it. (It's less than two minutes long, so go ahead and watch it.)



Key quote: "It seems to me that science can never explain such things as joy, or happiness, or sorrow, even though they try to find the little nodes in the brain in which these emotions are alleged to reside."

Contrast Gomes's thoughts with another quote from Pinker:

"I don’t believe there’s such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost in the machine, a spirit or soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There’s no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, there is a vast amount of complexity that means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that have impinged on it beforehand."

Elevating rhetoric.

Of course, if you conceptualize the soul as an anthropomorphic creature pushing buttons and pulling levers (which Pinker helpfully mimes in the video), the idea of the soul or of free will is going to sound silly and nonsensical. But an argument from parody isn't very convincing or, as Pinker would say, rational.

Does Pinker really believe that saying "there is a vast amount of complexity that means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that have impinged on it beforehand" really gets to the heart of what it means to be human? When you start talking like that with respect to one of the fundamental mysteries of human existence, I've got to wonder whether Pinker is human.

I don't wish to denigrate scientific advances or the mind-boggling complexity of the human brain. Science is a wonderful tool for understanding the natural world, and the human brain is without a doubt the most amazing physical specimen our universe has to offer. But all the scientists in all the world could study the human brain for the rest of time, until they had discovered literally everything there was to know about the brain, and they would still be no closer to understanding love, or laughter, or mourning, or mercy -- in short, all the things that make us human. You can trot out all the evolutionary, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and neuroscientific explanations you want, and they may be quite rational, but they're also always going to fall just a bit short, because they're always going to sound, to the normal person, just a little bit inhuman.

Say all our "behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain," which are simply the result of external stimuli. Say free will is an illusion. Fine. But everyone (with the exception of university professors) knows that we have free will. You don't have to have a Ph.D. to know it. You don't have to do laboratory studies to prove it. It's what we live, every moment of our lives. We know that there is more to us than our physical bodies. We know that we are not just parcels of matter unfolding inevitably in time. We know that we have souls.

And to miss that, because you're too caught up in your own materialistic explanations of human behavior, is to miss the whole point of what it means to be human.

Reason VS. Faith: The Ultimate Showdown!

There's a relatively new website called big think that styles itself as a sort of "YouTube for intellectuals." It consists largely of brief videos in which people talk about their views on a wide range of important topics. There are a decent number of entries from some rather prominent politicians, professors, and other public figures. These are supplemented by a multitude of videos featuring obscure writers, chefs, and (seriously) yoga masters.

I was interested to see that there were contributions from a number of familiar (to me, at least) Harvard professors, including Steven Pinker, Daniel Gilbert, Michael Sandel, and Peter Gomes. Now, when it comes to the latter two, I'll listen to pretty much anything they have to say. Sandel teaches one of the most popular courses in the history of Harvard -- Justice -- which I took as a freshman; and Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, is one of the most strangely captivating speakers I've ever heard. Pinker, an experimental psychologist, is one of the superstars of the Harvard faculty, and has written several bestselling books, including and The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works; and Gilbert, also a professor of psychology, recently wrote a bestseller of his own, Stumbling on Happiness.

So I started watching some of Pinker's and Gilbert's videos, and I found -- somewhat to my dismay, but certainly not to my surprise -- that they were both saying some pretty ridiculous things about the relationship between reason and faith, as so often happens when otherwise intelligent people start talking about the relationship between reason and faith. For example, here are Pinker's opening words from his discussion of the topic:

"I think my own personal philosophy -- one that I think offers a sounder basis for knowledge and wisdom than religion -- is based on reason. Now, as soon as soon as we’re having this conversation, as long as we are trying to persuade one another of why you should do something or should believe something, you are already committed to reason. We're not engaged in a fistfight. We’re not bribing each other to believe something. We’re trying to provide reasons. We’re trying to persuade, to convince. As long as you’re doing that in the first place, you’re not hitting someone with a chair, or putting a gun to their head, or bribing them to believe something, you’ve lost any argument you have against reason. You’ve already signed on to reason whether you like it or not. So the fact that we’re having this conversation shows that we are committed to reason."

I'm not sure to whom, exactly, this valiant defense of reason is addressed. I don't know who these people are that Pinker thinks are trying to put forth "argument[s] . . . against reason." I've never heard anyone disparage, deny, or downplay the importance of reason. And yet Pinker speaks as if all religious people were an angry mob mindlessly chanting "Down with reason! Down with reason!"

Pinker's logic makes sense, however, once he explains his definition of faith:

"I think that the alternative [to reason] that many people appeal to, namely faith, is . . . immediately refutes itself. Faith means believing something with no good reason to do it."

Pinker's thinking is entirely self-consistent. Unfortunately, it's completely divorced from reality. I don't know a single person of faith who would say that there is no good reason for their beliefs. Of course, Pinker might interject with some definition of what constitutes a "good reason," but then he'd be verging on dogmatism, another thing that Pinker is adamantly against. (Of course, Pinker is just like everyone else who speaks out against dogmatism. It's not really dogmas that he hates, just other people's dogmas.)

Gilbert also chimes in with his explanation of what religion is:

"By religion we usually mean deism. We mean belief in something we absolutely can't see for which there's no evidence."

(Let's set aside the fact that, in reality, when we talk about religion these days we generally mean theism, not deism.)

Now, I subscribe to the Catholic Christian faith because I think that there are good reasons to do so. I think there is good reason to believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead three days after dying on a cross, thereby giving pretty good evidence that His claims of divinity were true. I can't rationally explain why His tomb was empty, or why His apostles would suddenly be willing to die proclaiming Jesus' Resurrection and divinity, unless Jesus really rose from the dead. So I rationally deduce that Jesus did rise from the dead, and based on that rationally arrived-upon conclusion, I put my faith in Him as the Lord and Savior of the world. If someone claims to be God, and is willing to undergo an incredibly painful and humiliating execution rather than recant that claim, and then rises from the dead to back that claim up, I'm going to take that claim, and that person, pretty seriously. It would be entirely irrational not to.

Faith and reason are not, as Pinker and Gilbert suggest, competing "alternatives." They are, as Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Fides et ratio, "like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth." Without reason, faith would be just groping in the dark, and without faith (say, in the legitimacy of reason), reason itself would never get off the ground.

Satisfied

A post by Jennifer on the blog "Et tu?" inspired me to think about our never-ending search for satisfaction and the purpose of the season of Lent. She writes:

"I'd forgotten about this until now, but up until a few years ago, almost every time something exciting or good happened I would feel a tinge of depression. No matter how great or exciting the situation, for some reason I could never quite feel fully happy about it. Just as my happiness would be about to reach a crescendo, something would make it fall flat, like when a singer just barely misses the high note. I didn't generally struggle with depression in this time in my life; it was just that for some odd reason whenever something particularly good occurred, it would trigger a vague sensation of despair somewhere deep down inside."

When I was at Harvard, I was in a Christian a cappella group called Under Construction, and as part of our semesterly concerts, we always put on a little skit, divided up into four scenes, that was intended to provoke thought about some aspect of the Christian faith. In the spring of my junior year, we wanted to explore the thought experiment, What would it be like if you got everything you wanted?

The skit centered around a person named Kevin (played, conveniently, by me) who dreamed of being a boxing champion. It followed him through his training to his gold medal victory in the Olympics and subsequent celebrity. In the final scene, Kevin, who has now turned pro, wins a bout to become the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world. After all the celebration, Kevin sits alone in the middle of the stage, looking at the ground. His coach enters, beaming with pride.

"Congratulations, Kid," he says. "You did it. You're the undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world. You're the best there ever was. You worked hard -- you should be proud of yourself. You've got everything you ever dreamed of."

Kevin, who hasn't looked up through all this, turns his head and asks, quietly, "So . . . what do I do next, Coach?" Fade to black.

This seems to be the position we always end up in whenever we finally get whatever it is that we are sure will finally make us happy, content, fulfilled, satisfied. Whether it's a good education, a good job, a good family, wealth, fame, prestige, security -- it always leaves us wondering, Is this really all there is? Why do these things never satisfy us like we hope they will? Is there anything that can perfectly fulfill these deepest desires of our hearts?

The things of this world cannot finally satisfy us because we are not made for this world. God created us, and only God can satisfy us. As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions, addressing God, "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Only in God can we find the fulfillment of all our desires. And that is part of what Lent is all about. It's a time to remember that all our attempts to find fulfillment apart from God are ultimately futile, a time to turn to God and to turn away from all the things that keep us from Him and His perfect, infinite, intimate love. Lent is a time to really take to heart Jesus' words from the Sermon on the Mount:

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also." (Matthew 6:19-21)

More on Peter J. Gomes

Perhaps the highlight of my college career was the time when, during a Wednesday afternoon tea (yes, tea), Peter J. Gomes, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, said to me, in reference to my thirty-plus-year-old pastel striped necktie, "I like your tie."

The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus

Peter J. Gomes, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, has a new book out entitled The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good About the Good News? I haven't read it yet, but I can tell you already what the book's main weakness is -- that you can't hear Gomes speak it.

Gomes was one of my favorite professors at Harvard, largely because he was just such a joy to listen to. The best way I can explain his speaking skill is that my parents went to hear him give a talk during a parents' weekend at Harvard, after which my dad told me, "He talked for an hour and a half, and it felt like five minutes!"

I enjoyed Gomes's lectures so much that, after taking a course of his during the fall semester of my junior year, I audited his spring term course despite the fact that I had no interest in the subject matter. (The name of the course, just to give you an idea of how disgusting Harvard can be, was -- I'm not kidding -- The History of Harvard and Its Presidents.) Gomes is an old-school lecturer, and he speaks in what I've often called an affected (and inimitable) pseudo-British accent.

Now, I don't agree with all of Gomes's theology, but I have a great deal of respect for him, so I was very interested when I saw his new book the other day. Here's what the dust jacket had to say:

"Jesus came preaching, but the church wound up preaching Jesus. Why does the church insist upon making Jesus the object of its attention rather than heeding his message? Esteemed Harvard minister Peter J. Gomes believes that excessive focus on the Bible and doctrines about Jesus have led the Christian church astray. 'What did Jesus preach?' asks Gomes. To recover the transformative power of the gospel—'the good news'—Gomes says we must go beyond the Bible and rediscover how to live out Jesus' original revolutionary message of hope:

"'Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against cheap grace, and I warn now against cheap hope. Hope is not merely the optimistic view that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end if everyone just does as we do. Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don't turn out all right and aren't all right, we endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us.'

"This gospel is offensive and always overturns the status quo, Gomes tells us. It's not good news for those who wish not to be disturbed, and today our churches resound with shrill speeches of fear and exclusivity or tepid retellings of a health-and-wealth gospel. With his unique blend of eloquence and insight, Gomes invites us to hear anew the radical nature of Jesus' message of hope and change. Using examples from ancient times as well as from modern pop culture, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus shows us why the good news is every bit as relevant today as when it was first preached."

Obviously, I can't extrapolate the whole message of Gomes's book from this brief summary, but I have a few thoughts on what this blurb suggests (keeping in mind that the blurb may just reflect the publisher's over-sensationalized spin). It's true that many Christians would do well to pay more attention to the radical nature of Jesus' teachings. We should always be trying to better understand and live out all that Jesus taught. But I don't like the suggestion that there must be some trade-off between focus on Jesus' message and Jesus Himself. Because Jesus was more than a teacher; He was God incarnate. He didn't come just to teach us the way; He is the way, and the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him. That's a pretty important aspect of Jesus' message, if you ask me.

Beowulf

I had high hopes for Robert Zemeckis's "digitally enhanced live-action" film adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, which is set to be released next Friday. I read Seamus Heaney's wonderful verse translation of the poem in high school, and I got to study it in the original Anglo-Saxon at Harvard. Beowulf has a reputation for being unbearably boring -- and it is, at times -- but I found it absolutely fascinating for the most part, mainly because Beowulf is such a captivatingly cocky character, and he's got the goods to back up his numerous boasts. There's also the poem's strange mix of pagan and Christian worldviews, not to mention the pulsing power of Anglo-Saxon poetry itself. The one passage that sticks in my mind whenever I think of Beowulf is the introduction of Beowulf's primary foe, Grendel, in which the monster's biblical genealogy is explained. Here it is in Heaney's translation:

So times were pleasant for the people there
until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain's clan, whom the Creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
the Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
because the Almighty made him anathema
and out of the curse of his exile there sprang
ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with God
time and again until he gave them their reward.

Just fascinating, at least to me! I also have to include one of Beowulf's fantastic boasts:

"When it comes to fighting, I count myself
as dangerous any day as Grendel.
So it won't be a cutting edge I'll wield
to mow him down, easily as I might.
He has no idea of the arts of war,
of shield or sword-play, although he does possess
a wild strength. No weapons, therefore,
for either this night: unarmed he shall face me
if face me he dares. And may the Divine Lord
in His wisdom grant the glory of victory
to whichever side He sees fit."

Grendel, by the way, had earlier "grabbed thirty men" and dragged their "butchered corpses" back to his lair, just to give you an idea of what Beowulf was up against. What a great story.

So I had high hopes, as I say, for the film adaptation of Beowulf, but I'm a little bit nervous after seeing the trailers, which look, in my opinion, silly. Fidelity to the original text certainly doesn't seem to have been a high priority for the filmmakers. I can't make heads or tails of what many of the plot differences are between the poem and the movie, but I'm fairly certain, for example, that Grendel's mother is not portrayed in the poem as looking anything like Angelina Jolie. I tried to embed one of the TV spot videos here, but it was way too big and it looked silly, so here's a link to the movie trailers and such.

The "historical" Jesus

Scholarship about the so-called "historical Jesus" wouldn't be so bad if it weren't quite so ridiculous.

I say this as someone who has just a bit of experience with the field: at Harvard, I took a course called Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospels which was taught by Helmut Koester, who himself was taught by Rudolf Bultmann, the famous demythologizer of Christianity. That course gave me the strong impression that the field of historical Jesus scholarship consists largely in proving that the miracle stories in the Gospels must have been made up, by starting with the assumption that miracles are impossible.

It's not this brand of airtight logic that I take issue with, however. I do think it's a valid intellectual position to believe that miracles do not occur. Now, to prove that they didn't by assuming that they can't doesn't seem like the most intellectually satisfying undertaking to me, but that's really none of my business.

But here's what got me going today. I stumbled across the lecture audio for a Stanford University course called Historical Jesus on the relatively new iTunes U service and started listening to the first lecture (Call Me Yeshua). For whatever reason, the professor, Thomas Sheehan, conveys the unmistakable impression of having a major ax to grind with orthodox Christianity, which seems to lead him, at times, to go a little bit overboard in trying to shock the faith out of anyone in his audience who might have any. At 37:15 into the lecture he says this:

"Here's the point: over the last four decades -- I said that the real turning point is 1800 -- but since World War II, historical scholarship on Yeshua and on his times -- and it doesn't matter who conducts the historical scholarship -- whether Jews, or Christians, or Muslims, or non-believers -- has arrived at a strong scientific consensus about what this undeniably historical figure said and did -- how he presented himself and his message to his Jewish audience."

Alright, fair enough, so far. But then he drops -- in a very pompous and self-satisfied voice -- what you can tell he thinks is a real bombshell:

"Jesus had nooo intention of being a Christian."

Oh, really? Jesus had no intention of being a follower of Himself? I'm positively scandalized!

But he's not done. He pauses dramatically for a couple of seconds and then adds, snidely:

"Not even a Catholic."

Come on! Who is this clown? A very bitter man, apparently, whose bitterness is clearly coloring his scholarship to the extent that, for some reason, he's insinuating in an academic environment that Catholicism isn't Christian.

Now that is ridiculous.

UPDATE: In fairness to Sheehan, I will acknowledge that his "Not even a Catholic" quip is sufficiently vague to support a number of interpretations, not all of which would imply that Catholicism is not Christian. All the other possible meanings of his remark are, however, equally obnoxious.

Why I am a Catholic, part 4 - Authority

I got to thinking about the need for authority when I read the other day that Mark Driscoll, the often controversial pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, had caused a stir recently by accusing several prominent figures in the Emerging Church movement -- namely, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell -- of espousing heretical beliefs. (You can listen to Driscoll's talk from the Southeast Baptist Theological Seminary's Convergent Conference here.) My question is this: Heretical by whose standards?

The point of this post is not to agree or disagree with Driscoll's specific conclusions about the hereticalness of certain individuals; rather, I will argue that, apart from the teaching authority conferred upon the Catholic Church by God, there is no solid ground on which to base a meaningful, objective understanding of what theological orthodoxy and heresy even are.

Many non-Catholic Christian readers are probably ready to call me a heretic right about now. "What's he talking about, 'no solid ground'?" they're thinking. "There's the Bible, and don't forget, 'All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness'!" To which I, as a Catholic, reply, "Amen!" But that's not the end of the story.

It's a little-known fact that the Catholic Church has quite a high opinion of Scripture. Consider these two passages from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which might be reassuring to other Christians:

"God is the author of Sacred Scripture. 'The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.'" (CCC 105, quoting Dei Verbum)

"The inspired books teach the truth. 'Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.'" (CCC 107, quoting Dei Verbum)

The Catholic Church strongly believes, has always believed, and will always believe that the Bible contains the inspired, inerrant Word of God. Thus, she takes it seriously when the Bible gives us a word of warning, as it does in this verse written by Peter concerning the letters of Paul: "There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures" (2 Peter 3:16). Interpreting the Bible is serious business.

One of my favorite professors at Harvard was the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, a Baptist minister who claimed the distinction of having the longest title in the University ("Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church"). The recurring theme of his course The Christian Bible and Its Interpretation, which he repeated again and again in his inimitable, affected pseudo-British accent was this: "To read is to interpret."

We cannot help but interpret the Bible when we read it, and the Catholic Church is concerned that we interpret it correctly and not twist it (even inadvertently, in good faith) to our own destruction. The Catechism states:

"'The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone. Its authority in this matter is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ.' This means that the task of interpretation has been entrusted to the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome. 'Yet this Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant. It teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith.' Mindful of Christ's words to his apostles: 'He who hears you, hears me,' the faithful receive with docility the teachings and directives that their pastors give them in different forms." (CCC 85-87, quoting Dei Verbum)

It continues:

"It is the task of exegetes to work . . . toward a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture in order that their research may help the Church to form a firmer judgment. For, of course, all that has been said about the manner of interpreting Scripture is ultimately subject to the judgment of the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God." (CCC 119, quoting Dei Verbum)

It may seem the height of arrogance and presumption for the Catholic Church to claim the exclusive authority and ability to interpret Scripture authoritatively, but its position is actually one of supreme humility. The Church understands that by human ability alone no one could ever plumb the depths of the meaning of Scripture -- the Bible itself says that "no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation" (2 Peter 1:20) -- but that true understanding can only be achieved through the power of the "the Spirit of truth," who Jesus promised would guide the Church "into all the truth" (John 16:13). Indeed, Paul referred to "the church of the living God" as "the pillar and bulwark of truth" (1 Timothy 3:14-15).

The Church's divinely conferred ability to authoritatively interpret the Bible is necessary because the Bible's meaning is not always as crystal clear to us as most would like. The texts of Scripture can be subjected to a variety of interpretive methods which lead to a multitude of conclusions (sometimes diametrically opposed to each other) on a number of important issues. It is almost a cliche to note that in the 19th century American slaveholders used their interpretation of the Bible to defend the institution of slavery, while abolitionists used their own interpretation of the Bible to condemn it. Similar scenarios continue to the present day.

It seems to me that, apart from the interpretive authority of the Catholic Church, most issues of biblical interpretation boil down either to personal opinions, preferences, and presuppositions or to the temporary consensus of the majority. And that's fine, if all you care about is feeling good on a superficial level. If you are so inclined, you can artfully interpret Scripture such that it seems to affirm pretty much any personal belief you hold or practice you engage in. It's really not that hard, and it also means you never have to change your life, unless you decide you want to, at which point you can also change your interpretation of Scripture.

But if you believe that there is such a thing as Truth, and you believe that God has truly spoken to us in the words of Scripture, then it would seem logical that you would want to have the true understanding of Scripture as God meant us to have it, and not just your own fallible interpretation.

Now, it seems pretty clear to me that, for whatever reason, God has not chosen to guide each individual person who reads the Bible to a full and correct independent interpretation of it. This is obvious from the fact that when two honest, faithful people sit down to read the Bible, they often come to wildly divergent (and sometimes mutually exclusive) conclusions about what it means. Now, if we believe in the existence of objective Truth, we must conclude that at least one of these people is mistaken in their interpretation; and if we don't believe in objective Truth, then what are we wasting our time talking about the Bible for?

The fact that there is such a thing as objective Truth, and that the Bible is concerned with that Truth, is the reason that an authoritative interpretation of the Bible is so essential. The Bible deals with the most important subjects imaginable: who we are, who God is, and how we can know Him and share eternal life with Him. Those are questions we don't want to screw up on, and God doesn't want us to screw them up either. That's why He's given us a Church that He has promised to guide into all truth and to protect from error.

It may seem inconceivable to some that God would give the Catholic Church the ability to infallibly interpret Scripture. But why? Most Christians readily accept that God protected His chosen authors of Scripture from error in their writing; why should He not also protect His Church from error in its interpreting? Is the reading, interpreting, and living of God's Word really that much less important than the writing of God's Word?

There are about two billion Christians in the world, and if every one of them sat down with a Bible and tried to interpret it on their own, they would come up with about two billion different interpretations of it. The Bible is far too complex, far too rich, far too divine for man to solidly grasp on his own. Through our own private reading and prayer, we can indeed come to understand much of what God would have us understand in the Bible, but our interpretations will always differ somewhat from those of our neighbors, and it is an historical fact that those differences of interpretation lead to division, and that is not what Christ wants for His Church. The Catholic Church does not wish to stifle individual thought and personal study of the Bible; rather, the Catechism refers to the riches of the Bible as "inexhaustible" (CCC 129) and "forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful . . . to learn 'the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ,' by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures" (CCC 133, quoting Dei Verbum). The Church merely seeks to carry out the responsibility God has conferred upon her and prays that Jesus' vision for a united Church in John 17:20-21 will one day be realized: "I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me."

Eucharistic humor?

If you're looking for some very light and very funny reading, I might suggest Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations, which was published earlier this year by Random House and is written by Simon Rich, the son of New York Times columnist Frank Rich. (He was also one of my classmates at Harvard.)

The book consists of 57 little vignettes, each about a page or two long. In my opinion, the pieces are hit and miss as far as humor goes, but the hits are well worth the price tag, and they get funnier with repeated reading.

One interesting piece is entitled, simply, "Jesus." It's not one of the funnier pieces in the book, but I like it because Rich, though he is not a Catholic, at least understands the radically literal meaning of Jesus' discourse in chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, even if he doesn't believe it. Here's the piece, in its entirety:

JESUS: Love each other, for love conquers all.
THOMAS: Praise the Lord!
JESUS: If someone attacks you, turn the other cheek.
THOMAS: Praise the Lord!
JESUS: Eat my body and my blood.
THOMAS: Praise the-- Wait. What was that last thing?
JESUS: Eat my body and my blood.
THOMAS: You mean ... symbolically?
JESUS: No.
THOMAS: Oh.
JESUS: Honor thy father and thy mother.
THOMAS: Wait, hold on. Can we talk about that other thing for a second?
JESUS: What other thing? Turning the other cheek?
THOMAS: No, the thing you said after. About eating your body ... and ... your blood.
JESUS: What's there to talk about?

An unexpected lesson from my Alma Mater

"Veritas, Christo et Ecclesiae," I am told by people who know more about Latin than I, means "Truth, for Christ and the Church." It may surprise you to find out that such a quaint and outdated phrase is the official motto of Harvard University to this day (no matter how much most people there would like to pretend it isn't). The motto was adopted in 1692, and although you usually only see the truncated form "Veritas" these days, I guess Harvard still hasn't quite shed all its religious history, because "Christo et Ecclesiae" is still there on all the university's official documents, even its diplomas.

It's a common misconception that Harvard was founded solely as a school for preachers. It wasn't -- it was simply founded as a school that understood the immense importance of the Christian faith and believed -- rightly, in my opinion -- that truth without a foundation in the One Who is Truth is incomplete truth, at best.

Here's a passage from Harvard's College Laws of 1642:

"Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3)."

Interesting, no? A Harvard professor would probably get fired for suggesting something like that these days, but that's the school's history and, judging from the unlikely endurance of its motto, I guess it's not so easy to shake.

Anyway, I like "Veritas, Christo et Ecclesiae," almost as much as I like another of Harvard's early mottos, "In Christi Gloriam" (To the Glory of Christ), and I'll try to write this blog (and live my life) with both those mottos in mind.

Shameless self-promotion (sort of)

If you have any interest in good a cappella music, you should check out this CD by my old a cappella group, Harvard's Under Construction (the virtues of which I extolled in my last post). I had a large hand in recording and producing this CD, so I can (and will) vouch for its quality. Just go here and click on "media" if you're curious. You can even listen to a sample of my solo on the first track.

The tale continues . . .

So, to pick up where I left off in my last post (which, incidentally, was also my first post), as I started out at Harvard in the fall of 2003 I was looking forward to deepening my Christian faith in a decidedly non-Catholic context. When my parents dropped me off at school, they visited the Harvard Catholic Student Center and reported back to me that it was very nice. They also gave me several fliers they had picked up about the Catholic Student Association, which I quickly made a point of losing.

I decided to try out Christian Impact (Harvard's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ) basically because they were the first Christian group I saw at the Freshman Activities Fair and because they hosted a barbecue, which seemed promising. After a few Bible studies and a large group meeting, however, I didn't really feel like I fit in there, and so I quietly stopped attending and slipped into a semester-long period of total spiritual apathy. I didn't go to church, I didn't really pray, and I sometimes had to actually speak or write the words "I AM A CHRISTIAN" just to try to reassure myself.

I am firmly convinced that God came to my rescue at the beginning of my second semester of college by leading me to audition for Under Construction, Harvard's Christian a cappella group, which really ended up defining my college career. In UC, I found a loving and dynamic group of incredibly faithful, thoughtful, intelligent Christians for whom the call to follow Christ was a constant reality. My time in UC strengthened my faith and my desire to spend my life serving God more than any other single experience in my life thus far.

Through the members of UC, I was also introduced to the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship and Highrock Church, both of which helped me to grow in love and knowledge of God.

Between UC, HRCF, and Highrock, I was fairly well entrenched in the Evangelical Protestant Christian culture and mindset. I attended Catholic Mass only very rarely, and I wouldn't have identified myself as really a Catholic if you had asked me. And yet I never totally disbelieved many of the Catholic teachings that Protestants traditionally reject. With respect to Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist, for instance, I could say to myself, Why couldn't He be there if He wanted to be? Though I still didn't come close to fully understanding many Catholic teachings, I never rejected them outright.

Nor, for some reason, was I ever able to formally renounce my Catholicism. While some of my friends were becoming members of Highrock, a church that I loved, something inside of me always held me back, telling me not to give up my Catholic identity so easily. Though at the time this little voice seemed to be nothing but a nuisance, today I am deeply grateful that it was there.

It wasn't until the spring of my senior year that I felt any serious tug back towards the Catholic Church. I don't remember precisely when it started, but God tugged hard! All of a sudden, I felt strongly convicted that the Catholic Church was where I belonged. I started going to Mass on weekday mornings, stopping in St. Paul's Catholic Church in the afternoons to pray, listening to Catholic radio, and reading Catholic books. During Lent I made my first confession since the eighth grade. I was back in full force, as they say.

I suppose this is still just the beginning of my story. Ever since God pulled me firmly back into the Catholic Church, I've had a strong desire to help others to experience the incredible depths of truth and beauty that I've found here. Perhaps that's what this blog is about. I'm quite sure that's what my life is about, and it's just getting started.

In the beginning . . .

I suppose it's obligatory for every new blog to start off with an inaugural post in which the blogger awkwardly introduces himself to the rest of the blogging world (or to no one, as the case may be). In any case, here's my awkward introduction. (I'm off to a strong start, I think, using three forms of the word blog in my first sentence.)

Just to cover the basics, my name is Kevin Birnbaum, I'm 23 years old, and I just moved to Seattle with my wonderful fiancee, Jeanette. I'm originally from the suburbs of Chicago, but I spent the last four years at Harvard, from which I graduated in June with a degree in English and a minor (or "secondary field," in elitist-speak) in religion.

At this point, I'm not sure exactly what this blog will become. (Dormant, quite possibly, after I use up my entire store of thoughts in the first week.) But I felt compelled to at least start writing a blog about Catholicism and being Catholic because 1) I like to write and 2) I love Catholicism and being Catholic.

I didn't always love Catholicism. I was born and raised a Catholic, but I'd say my position with respect to the Church for most of my early life was characterized largely by ignorance and indifference. I attended CCD classes all through grade school and junior high, but I don't think they really took. The two things I remember most about my years of religious education are:

1) getting caught cheating on a test about the Ten Commandments, and

2) not being permitted to read aloud for the class a story I had written about cannibalism, and subsequently standing up and yelling "You're all gonna burn!" repeatedly for the remainder of the hour. (This got big laughs for the first twenty minutes.) (Sorry, Mrs. Kilker!)

I'm sure I believed in God back then, but He never seemed all that important, at least compared to the Chicago Bulls. And I certainly didn't have anything resembling a personal relationship with Him.

This started to change during my freshman year of high school, when I became involved with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a non-denominational group that emphasizes fellowship, praise, Bible study, and prayer. For the first time, being a Christian began to seem real, immediate, and exciting. (I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it was around this time that the Bulls stopped winning NBA championships.) I finally had, as they say, a faith that was my own.

As my Christian faith was growing, however, my patience with the Catholic Church was wearing thin. By the end of high school, I had a mental list of grievances against the Church, almost all of which I can no longer remember. One major issue I do remember was my disenchantment with certain elements of the Catholic liturgy, especially the following exchange:

PRIEST: Lift up your hearts!
PEOPLE: (In a dull drone, usually.) We lift them up to the Lord.
PRIEST: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God!
PEOPLE: (Even more zombie-like.) It is right to give Him thanks and praise.

To me this seemed almost scary, like something out of a dystopian novel where everyone had been brainwashed by some totalitarian theocracy. No one even knew what they were saying, let alone cared! Stuff like this convinced me that something was seriously wrong with the Catholic Church.

So when I left for college I decided that I would no longer be bound up with the Catholic Church, and that's basically how things stood for about three-and-a-half years. Anyway, I think that's more than enough for no one to read right now, so I'll save the rest of my life story for a little later.