... is summed up in this cartoon.
The message is simple. Don't pay any attention to rules or judge behaviors in any way. Instead, love and love and love. Nothing you read in the Bible about sin matters compared to love.
Can you spot the glaring error?
The command to love comes from the text of the Bible. All I can think of is a dialog that goes something like this.
Me: Why should we love?
Progressive Deacon, Priest or Bishop: Because Jesus said so.
Me: What about the other things Jesus said?
Prog: Ignore them.
Me: Why?
Prog: (Pats me on the head gently) Just love. Let go of your rules and judgment. Just love.
Me: That's no answer at all!
Prog: (Laughs condescendingly) Just love and you will understand.
Elsewhere on this blog, I've suggested that Catholicism is a wholistic description of the world as it is. It includes science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, cosmology, purpose and theology. It is the result of thousands of years of accumulated genius where brilliant thinkers like G. K. Chesterton built upon the works of St. Thomas Aquinas who built on St. Augustine who built upon Jesus plus the Greeks, Romans and Jews.
All of that is thrown away by modern Christianity in favor of bland, flaccid niceness.
That niceness is built upon self-destruction. It derives its authority from the Bible whose authority it dismisses. It's like a mathematician who proves he doesn't exist and then, poof! he disappears.
We recently got a sermon from one of our deacons where he posited that God doesn't care about religion or rules, he only cares about love. He got that from Jesus' commandments to love. Jesus' assertion, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me," was disregarded for no reason whatsoever. So was Luke 22:36:
He said to them, “But now one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one."
Since swords aren't nice, we discard that part of the Bible.
Catholicism threads the needle between love, charity and forgiveness and the harsh realities of the world. It is muscular and confident because it is simply the best explanation of the Universe going. Modern, Christian theology has lost its nerve and cowers in the face of cultural pressures, collapsing into the fetal position, whimpering about love and niceness.
1 comment:
I think the fundamental problem is that the Catholic church has misunderstood why people are leaving the church. They have convinced themselves that the main reason people are leaving is because they don't want to follow a strict moral code. And based on this misunderstanding, they are doing the exact wrong things to try to reverse the trend. To the extent that it works, the people that return will not be the ones who will have the degree of committment to keep the church functioning. The people they need are the ones who left for . . . other reasons. And this approach is not going to get them back.
And on an unrelated note, I've been hearing that Southern California including San Diego has been kind of floody lately, and Windy.com is forecasting that you are likely to get another 4 inches of water in the next 3 days. When something similar happened up here a few years ago, it was kind of a disaster. How are things going down there?
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