Musings Of An Indie WriterSunday, August 5, 2007
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: The Need For Exactitude
Imagine along with me, if you will. Brace yourself well, for the premise will be unpleasant.
Imagine that some calamity has wiped out the whole of the Christian clergy, down to the last man. Every priest, bishop, or minister of the Cross has been felled, perhaps by some exotic disease, but whatever the cause, it's spared everyone else on Earth. No one is left with any claim to the authority to celebrate Mass or administer the Sacraments. No one alive possesses a bishop's apostolic power to ordain a priest.
Years pass. All the world's confirmed Christians die off. No one alive retains any connection to an ordained priest of Christ, or a bishop empowered to confirm a new soul in the Christian faith.
Could there still be Christians after such a calamity?
My answer is yes, of course. For the Sacraments don't make a man a Christian. Christianity isn't the result of an external process, but an internal one. A man becomes a Christian by embracing the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and accepting the Gospels as an adequately faithful record of His teachings. If it were otherwise, the authority of some external power would be able to unmake a Christian. That would contradict much of what Christ said when He walked the Earth.
Here we see a major discriminant between religious faiths and all other varieties of creeds. A religious faith is a matter of individual adoption and conscience, just as the Curmudgeon wrote yesterday. It can neither be imposed upon a man, nor removed from him, by any external power. That's why I maintain that Islam is not a religion, but rather a political program; it claims the right, power, and duty to impose itself upon all men by force.
Christianity is inherently simple. Quoth Gilbert Keith Chesterton:
The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
This, too, is intuitively satisfying, for a law cannot be deemed fair if one cannot know when one is within its limits. The greatest of Laws clearly conforms to that dictate. But this has implications that many are not willing to accept.
I had a distressing encounter recently, with an acquaintance who works for the Church. This woman, whom I'll call...let's see, now...Miss Smith, asserted all the following in a conversation of a few minutes' length:
- There's no essential difference between a religion and a political movement.
- A church has a duty to be "inclusive," both in its practices and its preachments.
- The Gospels are essentially "social constructions:" fictional-but-useful tales largely borrowed from earlier mythologies.
- Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead.
Miss Smith claims to be a Christian. More, she buttressed the assertions above by claiming a graduate degree in theology. I forbore to ask her where she purchased it.
Does Miss Smith sound like a Christian to you, Gentle Reader? I didn't think so. She attends a Catholic Mass on occasion -- "It's the tradition I grew up in" -- but has little regard for the Church, which she deems insufficiently "progressive" and "inclusive."
There's no particular sin in not having faith. Faith comes very hard to many. God will not condemn a man for failing to attain it, as long as he has otherwise lived morally and worthily. Christ died for all of us, not just for those who embrace Him. All salvation is through Him, but He is everywhere, not merely in our houses of worship. But I maintain that there is fault, and serious fault at that, in claiming the label of a faith while dismissing its central precepts.
Dan Brown, author of the laughable DaVinci Code and other works of peripatetic irrationality, also claims to be a Christian. I wonder what he means by it.
Among Miss Smith's rhetorical thrusts at me was that, as a scientist, I'm "overly concerned about facts." If that's an insult, then I've been confused lifelong about the meaning of the word. But there you have another of my little fetishes: except in the composition of fiction, I insist that words be used according to their exact meanings. For each word has an exact meaning, a public meaning that makes it usable in communication. To employ a word in a fashion that distorts or destroys that meaning is to deceive, to undermine both communication and trust among men. Quoth Samuel Johnson:
Falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.
To call oneself a Christian when one denies its core precepts is to utter a "falsehood of vanity." I caught Miss Smith in such a falsehood, precisely because of her vanity. She simply had to layer her left-wing, gender-war-feminist views onto the Christian faith, after which she could no longer withstand examination about her true beliefs. She might otherwise conduct herself in an entirely honorable and admirable manner. But she's lost my trust, possibly for good, by her appropriation of a label to which her convictions don't entitle her. It's a loss for both of us -- for myself especially, as I expect to have to endure her company repeatedly in the future.
If my answer to the query, and the rationale for it, presented in the opening segment strikes you as sound, then we agree that Christianity has an exact meaning. There is that which is contradictory to Christianity, and there is that which conforms to it. That partition of convictions is infinitely more important than the statements of any man, be he a priest ordained or a mere mouthy layman such as myself.
The Christian creed stands above and apart from the words and deeds of men. It cannot be extended or abridged, ennobled or disgraced, by any worldly power. The Pope himself is unable to alter Christianity by the smallest particle. Benedict XVI, one of the loftiest intellectual figures of our time, would tell you so himself.
When a man who claims to be a Christian behaves in an unChristian manner -- when he assaults or abuses others, bears false witness, or allows himself to be moved by covetousness -- he is not staining Christianity; he is only staining himself. Similarly, when a man claims the Christian label but disavows the Resurrection or the authority of the Gospels, he is not altering Christianity; he is only revealing a desire for a status, and a degree of trust, that's not rightfully his.
If we must speak our convictions aloud, let's be exact about them. If you're not a Christian, don't be ashamed of your lack of faith; just live morally and worthily. Perhaps faith will come to you in time. If you are a Christian, remember that the creed is not hostage to your behavior; be humble about your sins and your limitations, and trust in the mercy of God.
May God bless and keep you all.
UPDATE: Tony at Catholic Pillow Fight disagrees. I contend that he's committed an error of circular reasoning. Decide for yourself!
