Painful Lives

I had to go to Waterstone's in the Arndale Centre the other day as a birthday present needed buying. While there, present in hand, I got thoroughly baffled at why Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, Clive James's fascinating collection of biographical meditations, had been shelved alongside dictionaries and books on the history of English. It's basically a biographic compendium, or a collection of autobiographical thoughts, or a survey of the cultural history of the twentieth century. Take a look at what James has to say about Sophie Scholl, that being a fair sample of the hundred essays that comprise this wonder, and then ask yourself whether that's the kind of book that belongs with style guides and lexicons.

Mind, the science of shelving clearly eludes me. I mean, take a look at this, the 'Painful Lives' part of the Biography section. Make you you scroll right down to the bottom. 

 Or, at least, the Bottom's sister. Painful lives indeed. And the Queen Mum? Seriously?

The Myth of Constantine

Today being the Solemnity of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, celebrated throughout the Catholic and Orthodox world, and in theory in the Anglican one too, it seems as good a day as any to start into my Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church.

Most of these myths, as I've said, are straightforward misrepresentations of doctrine and practice, but three are myths that simply fly in the face of all historical evidence.

The first myth, then, is the claim that the Catholic Church was created by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.

The basic thrust of the myth is that before Constantine Christianity was a simple, pure faith, and that the semi-pagan Constantine spoiled it by adding all manner of pagan elements to it, thereby creating the corrupt institution that is the Catholic Church. If you're drawn to New Age stuff, you'll follow the variant of this you'll read and see in the likes of The Da Vinci Code, arguing that before Constantine came along Jesus wasn't even seen as divine. If you're a Protestant, you'll basically claim that Jesus had always been seen as divine -- which is true -- but that before Constantine came along the Church was just like your church, whatever that may be, with Constantine having added pretty much everything you disagree with in historical Christianity.

This is all nonsense, I'm afraid, and played no small part in why Blessed John Henry Newman conceded, following an extensive and thorough investigation of early Christian history, that 'To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.' It wasn't long, of course, before he felt that to do other than to assent to the authority of the Catholic Church would have been hypocritical.

Arian and Pagan Emperors
The first clues to the absurdity of this broad hypothesis, in whatever form, lie in what we know of the major characters of the era, with particular reference to dates. During the fourth century, there was rarely just one emperor at any given time, but nonetheless, certain figures were dominant, and it's worth thinking about them for a minute. Constantine I was on the scene between 306 and 337, and while nobody really understands Constantine's religious views, it's clear that by the end of his reign he tended more towards Arianism than Catholicism, and the fact of his moving the seat of imperial power to a Constantinople is a rather broad hint that he thought of Rome as an obsolete backwater. His son Constantius II who was around between 337 and 361 was at the very least semi-Arian. Constantine's nephew Julian ruled between 361 and 363, and persecuted the Church as part of a campaign to restore the Empire's pagan identity. His successor Jovian was an orthodox Christian but ruled for just one year, and Jovian's successors Valens and Valentinian were divided in their views, one being Arian and the other being Catholic. It was only with the accession of Theodosius I to the imperial throne in 379 that the whole empire was ruled by a Catholic.

A good barometer for judging the Catholicity, for want of a better word, of Rome's emperors during the period is to look at the life of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius was the Church's greatest champion of the orthodox view of the Incarnation, and was the first person who we know of to have identified the 27 books of the New Testament that Christians regard as canonical, listing them in his Easter Letter of 367. Over the course of his life Athanasius was exiled from his see in Alexandria by Constantine, by Constantius (twice), by Julian, and by Valens. Think about it: if the Catholic Church was really the quasi-pagan creation of the Roman emperors, would four emperors have gone to so much trouble to silence its greatest spokesman?

A Dog that Doesn't Bark
That's the first point. The second is this: we have no evidence whatsoever of a rupture in mainstream Christian belief and practice during the period, other than that Christian worship ceased to be a furtive activity; it became possible to build large churches for large congregations that could now worship in the open. Neither Ambrose nor Augustine, for instance, give any indication that the essential teachings and practices of Christianity had changed in any way under Valentinian and Theodosius.

What of under Constantine? Even despite his late Arian tendencies and his sidelining of Rome as a seat of imperial power -- in truth, it hadn't even been the nominal capital of the west since 286 -- might he not have corrupted Christian beliefs and practices in other ways, introducing Pagan Roman customs and ideas and thus in some sense creating the Catholic Church? Well, in principle this might have happened, of course, but good luck finding evidence of it: there isn't any. Now, sure, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but given that this was an era where people would riot over disputed points of dogma, Catholics and Arians falling to blows with depressing regularity, you'd at least expect to find some traces of dissent or approval about new teachings and new forms of worship.

Same Beliefs, Same Practices, Same Faith
Perhaps most importantly, we have quite a bit of evidence for what the Church was like well before Constantine, and, putting it bluntly, it is essentially and recognisably the Church today. Think of what most people regard as the most distinctive features of Catholic Christianity:

• Sunday as a day specially set aside for worship, with the Mass as the central act of worship, the Mass being understood as a sacrifice, and Christ being believed present in the Mass under the appearances of bread and wine.
• An ordained priesthood, with priests serving under local bishops, each one of these bishops serving as a point of local unity and as a conduit to the universal Church, claiming a pedigree of orthodox episcopal succession going back to the Apostles.
• The Church in Rome as having a unique primacy and authority in the Church, with the bishop of Rome claiming an episcopal succession back to St Peter, and acting as a visible point of unity for the whole Church.
• Honour being paid to the saints, veneration of the physical remains of saints, the belief that the saints in heaven can hear our prayers and pray for us, and the usefulness of prayers for the dead.

Every single one of these practices and beliefs is attested in Christian writings from more than a century before Constantine legalised Christianity. Clement of Rome, the author of the Didache, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, the author of the Martydom of Polycarp, the author of the Shepherd of Hermas, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Tertullian among others collectively attest to the Church of the second century -- indeed, the Church of the late first century too -- as being in its essentials recognisably the same Church that still exists today.

That's not to say that the Church is right about what it teaches and does -- though I think it is -- just that it has neither invented what it teaches now nor abandoned what it taught in Antiquity. This is something that can be tested quite easily. Sure, the Didache and Clement's Letter to the Corinthians, almost certainly the two earliest extra-Biblical Christian texts, were only rediscovered in the nineteenth century, but I don't think this is an excuse for people pretending or acting as if Christians wrote the Bible in the first century and never wrote another word afterwards,  ignoring the Bible and doing their own thing for the next 1400 years.

Indeed, leaving aside the fact that it flies in the face of all historical evidence, the whole notion that the Church as a whole went off the rails in Antiquity or the Middle Ages is profoundly unbiblical. The Bible features Jesus saying he will be with the Church always, assuring the Apostles that who hears them hears him, and guaranteeing the Apostles that the Spirit will guide them; it shows the Apostles and the elders of the Church in Jerusalem claiming to speak with the authority of the Spirit, and it identifyies the Church with Christ himself; indeed, Paul calls the Church the pillar and bulwark of truth. 

If anyone's determined to argue -- honestly -- that the Catholic Church, which even now includes roughly half the world's Christians, was founded by Constantine and not by Christ, they need to be able to justify this both historically and theologically. Where do they think the Church described in the Bible was to be found in the centuries between John and Luther, if it was not that Church that Ignatius and Augustine called Catholic?

______________________________________________________________

And if you don't believe me, go and take a look at the relevant sections in J.N.D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines, Henry Chadwick's The Early Church, and perhaps most especially the ancient Christian texts themselves in H.S. Bettenson's Documents of the Christian Church, James Stevenson's A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrating the History of the Church to AD 337, or the Penguin collection called Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers.

More than eight weeks of Summer gone already...

This is ridiculous. Seemingly Met Éireann, the Irish meteorological agency, has taken to running with all the other eejits that think that Summer is the three months of June, July, and August. It takes the view that Summer is defined as the three warmest months of the year, based on data over a thirty-year period; so Summer is, as far as they're concerned, June, July, and August in a typical year. It has, rightly, no time for the nonsensical claim that the seasons begin on the Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, and Winter Solstice, ascribing the use of these astronomical dates as markers for when seasons begin purely to the needs of diary manufacturers and the like, but this doesn't change the fact that their basic thesis is clearly absurd.

Think about it. It was the Summer Solstice just a few days back. What else do we call the Summer Solstice? Yes, it's Midsummer's Day. Midsummer. That's the clue. It falls in the middle of Summer. It's not just a quarter of the way in, much less the day that launches the season. It's pretty much bang in the middle of the season. Go and read Shakespeare, if this doesn't ring any bells.

To have the Solstice fall in the middle of Summer, Summer needs to take up May, June, and July. It's common sense. Likewise with the Winter Solstice -- if it's Midwinter's Day, as it is, then Winter must be November, December, and January.

Despite the meteorological agencies' claims, the traditional European seasons have never been defined by weather. They're not about climate. They're not about fluctuating temperatures, not least because that leads to honest people such as Swedish meteorologists admitting that seasons begin at different times in different years and in different places. They're about light and darkness as experienced in the Northern Hemisphere -- obviously, the months are differnt in the Southern Hemisphere, but the principle's the same. Summer is the quarter of the year when we have the most hours of daylight, and Winter's the quarter when we have the fewest. 

For what it's worth, this means that Autumn is defined as August, September, and October, something the Irish calendar makes very clear, as the Irish names for September (Meán Fómhair) and October (Deireadh Fómhair) literally mean "middle of autumn" and "end of autumn".

And yes, I know it often rains a lot in May. So what? Do you remember June, July, and August of 2007 and 2008? Sodden, they were. Absolutely miserable. Dividing the seasons astronomically, so that the quarter of the year with the most daylight is called Summer and the one with the least is called Winter is meaningful, stable, objective, relevant through the hemisphere, and it's how this was traditionally worked out throughout history.

The Tale of One Bad Rat, or, thoughts on teaching adults to read comics

 I was talking to my housemate last night about Watchmen, raving about it as I tend to do, and following Pádraig Ó Méalóid in scorning the Zach Snyder film based on the book. I'd not say the film is a travesty, but I think Pádraig was almost exactly right to have said:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work. Alan Moore said it was unfilmable, and I have seen that he was completely right.'

Anyway, I wittered away about why I felt the film didn't work -- how it had fundamentally missed the point of the book, misunderstood the nature of the book's characters as created by Moore, seemed oblivious in all but the most cosmetic of ways to the how the fabric of the world of Watchmen differs from that of our own world, and been unable to play to the book's strength. It has strengths, to be fair -- the credit sequence was funny and clever, the casting was excellent, and every so often the sets were spot-on, but in the main I thought it missed the point and substituted brashness, gore, and gratuitous violence and nudity where Moore and Gibbons had been elegant, subtle, and often just matter-of-fact. 

At this my housemate pulled me up, as someone who had liked the film and never read the book, saying that he'd liked it and didn't agree with me, so I went and got the book and tried as best I could in a hasty way to point out how the book works, panel by panel. I wished I'd Gibbons and Kidd's Watching the Watchmen to hand, but I did my best.

My housemate's intrigued now, and is tempted to buy the book for himself, but I'm a bit wary of him reading it just yet. Watchmen, to be frank, isn't a book to start a new comic-reader on. It's too complex, too sophisticated, to dependent on familiarity with the form and its grammar. 

Years ago I went to a talk by Bryan Talbot, back when he'd just written The Tale of One Bad Rat, where he talked of how he'd been amazed in the aftermath of his avant-garde The Adventures of Luther Arkwright to learn that there were people who couldn't read comics, who found them complex and hard to follow. How does one read a page? How does one read a panel? What do you read first -- the picture or the speech balloons or the captions or the thought bubbles or a combination of them all? It was with this in mind that he wrote and drew The Tale of One Bad Rat the way he did.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is about as legible, and sad, as beautiful, and as hopeful a comic as one could ever hope to read, and it's become one of a handful of comics I like to show people who don't read comics if I want to show them how good work can be done in the medium, work as valid as anything in film or prose. Originally intending the book as a story of a girl obsessed with Beatrix Potter who runs away to the Lake District, Talbot needed to explain why she ran away, came up with the idea that she'd been abused, and then decided that if he was going to involve child abuse in the story then he'd better do it properly.

He did the work, and the result is a masterpiece, utterly nailing the distrust, the difficulty in forming relationships, the hatred of being touched, and the obsessional imagery that can so often haunt abuse survivors, while nonetheless showing paths to healing and being a beautiful and gentle ode to Beatrix Potter, the Lake District, art, and rats.

As a primer in what comics can be and what comics can do, it has very few rivals. I rather wish I had my copy here. It's something I'd like to show people so they can understand.

On Shaving the Roman Way

One of my occasional online haunts is the blog of Paul Gogarty, an old friend and until recently one of my home constituency's deputies to the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish parliament. About a month back he wrote a long and rather detailed post about the Eurovision and shaving. Now, the Eurovision I can take or leave, though I agree with the Brother that it's a better way of learning about geography than having a world war. Shaving, on the other hand, matters to me, and as Paul was clearly having ethical and practical issues with his blades, I wrote to give him my own thoughts on the subject.

I said something like the following...

As you'll know, I've been broke for years. What you'll not know is that I have sensitive skin, and that I like a close shave. These three factors pose a bit of a challenge, but over the last two years I have solved this problem.

The Blade

For the blade, I use the classic Wilkinson Sword double-edged razor, using the kind of blades teenage girls use to cut themselves. You know the ones.

Its very simple, very sharp, and very cheap. It takes a tiny bit of getting used to, as with a Mach 3, say, one uses pressure from the hand to effectively rip out one's bristles, whereas with this it's merely the weight of the head, combined with the angle at which one holds the blade, that slices away the hairs. I started using this as I found that shaving oil, which I used to use when I was travelling, as I so often was, tended to clog multi-blade razors. No matter how much I rinsed them, they'd get blocked up with a mass of oily bristles. Single blades can't clog.

For a while I experimented with a traditional straight razor, but the learning curve on it proved too demanding. I liked the idea of only ever having one blade, which I'd sharpen and re-sharpen, as it struck me as both cool and good for the environment, and so resolved to learn with a straight razor loaded with disposable blades, but found that I couldn't get it right. It wasn't the nicks that bothered me -- I'd expected them -- it was that after shaving my face would alternate between glassily-smooth patches and patches of horrible scurfy stuff, the latter having a tendency to appear overnight. I decided I couldn't be arsed with going through weeks of that, so turned to a more conventional handle and head arrangement.

(I've been shaved with a straight-razor, for what it's worth, one balmy night in Cappadocia last summer, with a young teenage boy drawing the blade over my face as his boss watched approving. Oddly, it wasn't as unnerving an experience as I'd feared beforehand.)

Oil

Secondly, I've stopped using foams, gels, soaps, and even creams when shaving, though I like the Palmolive shaving cream a lot, especially when applied with a brush which raises the hairs to make them easier to slice away. Instead, inspired by poverty and having run out of shaving oil one Christmas at home in Dublin, I've changed to Olive Oil.

Other oils are quite thin, and can clog one's pores, but Olive Oil, especially extra virgin oil, is viscous enough to form a layer that won't harm the skin and will actually enrich it, while providing lubrication and protection as you slice away the hairs.

I usually keep about an inch of oil in a mug, with a few drops of clove oil mixed in*, and leave my razor -- head down -- in that, as keeping the blade in the oil prolongs its life. The oil will get a bit dirty, in that some bristles will invariably find their way in, but I think that's a price worth paying.

So, when shaving in my neo-Roman way, I start by showering and then pressing a hot, wet flannel against my face; I then dab my fingers in the oil and smear it all over my face, rubbing it in especially where I intend to shave; I then set to work, shaving with the growth to begin with and against where necessary, judging by feel as I pull the skin and relubricating whenever I need to; once smooth, I use the hot wet flannel again to remove all oil and freshen the skin, and then use cold water to close up the pores. Mission accomplished.

(Then you must clean your sink, as you don't want oily rings and bristles around it, and your other half or your housemates certainly won't want that.)

People keep saying I have freakishly-young looking skin for someone my age. I don't know if this is true, or they're just being nice, but if they're right I reckon it's due to the olive oil.

Don't use oil with chilli in. That would be bad.

G.

* Clove oil acts as a very mild anaesthetic, which can be handy if you nick yourself while shaving.

Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church: A Taster

I wondered the other day whether somewhere out there in the world there's a Giant Bumper Book of Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church, annoyed as I was to see such respected Protestant preachers as John Stott and Don Carson perpetuating complete falsehoods about the Church, and someone soon told informed me that, in a sense, such a book exists. Roman Catholicism by Loraine Boettner, an American Presbyterian who worked for the Internal Revenue, was first published in 1962 and certainly looks like it fits the bill; while I doubt anyone I know has personally waded through Boettner's ranting, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if his ahistorical, unscriptural, and flat-out illogical claims have had indirect effects. Maybe people I know have read stuff or heard stuff by people who've heard what Boettner said, for instance, and who have passed on his gibberish on trust...

If you have a long spoon and fancy supping with the Devil, it seems you can read the whole thing here; I've had a glance, but am too busy to wallow in vitriol, bile, and hogwash. Still, if you want to waste your money you can squander it on Amazon.

With this in mind, I have a yen to write a series of short posts over the next couple of months -- an intermittent series, broken up by other things, as is my nature -- on Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church I've come across or been actively confronted with in the last few years. Offhand, I can think of about fifteen things I've stared or sighed upon hearing and then had to laboriously refute in conversations since moving to England. I'm sure if I thought harder I'd think of more, but just off the top of my head...

1. The Catholic Church was not created by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.
2. Catholics do not worship Mary, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
3. Catholics do not worship Saints and Relics, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
4. Catholics do not worship Statues and Pictures, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
5. Catholics do not only ever think of Jesus as being in the arms of Mary
6. Catholics do not only ever think of Jesus as being on the cross, and the Church does not teach that Jesus is sacrificed every single time the Mass is said.
7. Catholics do not believe the Pope is always right, and do not have to do whatever the Pope says.
8. Catholics do not believe the Pope can overrule the Bible, and the Church does not teach that he can do so.
9. Catholics do not believe we're saved by doing good works, and the Church doesn't teach that we are.
10. Catholics do not believe they can be forgiven their sins if they put money into a box by a statue of St Peter in Rome, and the Church doesn't ever offer forgiveness for money.
11. Catholics were not forbidden from reading the Bible in the Middle Ages, and translations of the Bible were not banned by the Church.
12. The sixteenth-century Catholic Church did not add books to the Bible at the Council of Trent.
13. The Catholic Church does not teach that only Christians can be married, or that Christians whose marriages weren't presided over by priests are living in sin.
14. The Catholic Church does not teach that all non-Catholics will go to Hell.
15. The Catholic Church does not teach that everybody will go to Heaven.

Three of these are historical points, but those aside, almost all of these, as far as I can see, come down to misunderstandings about terminology. A major part of the problem is that Catholics and Protestants use language differently, and so Protestants and Catholics can often agree completely on a subject while sounding as though they differ absolutely, purely due to how both groups use words. Protestants see Catholic practices or read things by Catholic writers, and often do so in a spirit of sincere curiosity, but misunderstand what they're looking at or reading, and make assumptions which are fundamentally wrong.This is why one of the first requirements of any honest debate is that terms should be defined; without properly defined terms, things get confused and the most well-meaning people wind up at loggerheads over things about which they essentially agree.

I'm not saying there aren't real differences between Catholics and Protestants. There are. They're just not the ones above.

Roger Olson had a good piece about a similar matter the other day, saying, in connection with debates between Arminian and Calvinist Protestants, but stressing that this applies to any honest discussions of any theology:

'We need to distinguish carefully between criticism and misrepresentation.  Fair criticism is valid; misrepresentation in order to criticize (straw man treatment) is invalid and should itself be criticized by everyone.'

So anyway, I reckon I'll give this a shot soon. Fifteen or so short* posts, spread out over a month or two, interspersed with witterings about work, life, drawing, cycling, books, films, and whatever. None of them will be apologetic, in the sense that they'll not be about proving 'why Catholics are right' or 'why Catholicism is Biblical' or anything like that. They'll just be about what Catholicism is, and what Catholicism most certainly isn't. Not just yet, though. I've something to finish first.

* No, really. That's the plan.

Joycean Turtles

Improbable though it may seem, oodles of episodes of the late 1980s and early 1990s cartoon Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles were made it Dublin, at Murakami Wolf which eventually became Fred Wolf Films; back then Dublin was a bit of a hotbed of animation talent, what with Sullivan Bluth making An American Tale and The Land Before Time there, and a brilliant animation school being set up at Ballyfermot Senior College.

Yes, I know, it's really Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, for so the original comic was called and so the cartoon was distributed in America. Still, my little brother watched it in Ireland, and for him it was called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles -- this was basically due to Ireland being lumped in with the UK for distribution purposes, and the Brits having an issue with ninjas. Back then, ninjas were seen as nasty. Now they're cool, from what I hear.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised the other day to learn that there was an episode of the series where the Turtles went to Dublin; I've managed to track it down, and found watching it an odd, and not unpleasant experience.

'The Irish Jig is Up', for so episode seven of series seven of the cartoon is entitled begins with a nice shot of Dublin, looking along the Liffey from the east, with the Four Courts easily recognisable, and what I think is a stylised version of the Liffey Bridge -- that's the Ha'Penny Bridge to most of us -- in the foreground. It's a nicely stylised take on the Quays too, for what it's worth, even if they can look more cartoonish in reality.

Anyway, the camera pans across the Liffey to where we can see the lads' van making its way along the south Quays, driving on the right, but, to be fair, given the eerie absence of any other vehicles on the Quays, they can probably get away with it. It's never made clear why things are so quiet -- I can only presume the Queen was visiting or something. Still, unperturbed by the Mary Celeste atmosphere afflicting Dublin, the lads decide they should pull over and walk around, so they take a corner at speed, hurtling past what appears to be an inexplicably-misplaced O'Connell Monument. 

In a convenient backstreet, the boys change into unobtrusive clothes so nobody will recognise them, clearly reckoning that Hawaiian shirts, shorts, sunglasses, and big hats are just the thing to help them blend in in sunny Dublin. April, sensibly, sticks with her yellow jumpsuit, and Splinter puts on a dirty mac and a false beard, presumably thinking that if he dresses as a random alco, nobody will notice that he's a rat. Frankly, I don't know why he's worried. It's not as if town is kicking. Off they stroll towards Stephen's Green, where just below a remarkably well-rendered Fusiliers' Arch Splinter says he'll tell them about Dublin's history.

It's good, isn't it? They even have Dublin's name right, as 'Eblana'. I've known people to fall at that hurdle in table quizzes back in the day. Anyway, they have a wander in the Green, strolling past a few stylised statues until they get to St Patrick, of whom there's no statue in the Green. No, really, there's not. I'm not sure if there's a public statue of him anywhere in Dublin, actually.

If there were, though, it'd probably not look like this.

Yes, that's Patrick, the Romano-Briton who spent years in slavery here, before escaping to Britain and training as a priest and then returning as a missionary to the Irish, here depicted on horseback, wielding two swords. Who needs a shamrock or a crozier when you can brandish two swords when astride a rearing stallion?

'Ireland,' explains Splinter, 'is a land of magical legends. One of the most famous is that of Saint Patrick. It is said he drove all the snakes and reptiles out of Ireland.'

'Bummer,' says Michelangelo, 'maybe I shoulda gotten us mammal disguises.'

'This is all very interesting, guys,' says April, who presumably has read her guidebook and doesn't believe a word Splinter says, not least because she may have noticed the bit about there being lizards in Ireland even now, 'but I'm supposed to do a report on the famous leprechauns of Ireland.'

'April, leprechauns are just mythical creatures,' retorts Donatello, scornfully adding, 'I can assure you that there are no such things as little green men.'

And with that the lads start throwing their hats around, clearly thinking that the complete absence of people in Stephen's Green gives them a golden opportunity to ditch their disguises and play frisbee, before heading off to their lodgings in the improbably well-preserved McGillicuddy's Castle, which looks rather more like Bodiam Castle in East Sussex than any castle in Ireland, and which is mysteriously dated by the gang to the sixteenth century*

I probably should have mentioned that this episode has a plot, shouldn't I? Basically, Shredder, or Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, has come up with a couple of gizmos, one of which enables him to lift up castles (yes, I know), and another of which can turn vicious animals into cuddly dwarfs and cuddly ones into savage monsters. Seemingly, Ireland has lots of cuddly animals, especially in Dublin Zoo, and so Shredder reckons that he can turn all the inhabitants of the Zoo's petting zoo into an army of monsters that will destroy Dublin. No, really.

I reckon from this shot that Shredder's up near the Magazine Fort operating his device -- it's certainly somewhere high, to judge by the topography, which gives us a view over Dublin and with the mountains in the background. He'd almost certainly need to be in the Phoenix Park to zap the Zoo with his machine, so I think the guys who did this should get marks for effort. Perhaps, given that they may well have been Irish they should have done better, but still. And no, I have no idea why Dublin has so many tall buildings in that shot, but, well, maybe the artists were feeling optimistic about the then embryonic Celtic Tiger.

Anyway, you can see the ray hitting the Zoo, and though this may seem unlikely, that's not a completely inaccurate stylisation of the old entrance to the Zoo. Sure, it's not thatched, and it is has a funny roof, and it says 'Dublin Zoo' rather than 'Zoological Gardens', but, well, it has a wide entrance in the middle and two small windows on each side of it.

The Zoo's interestingly rendered in the show. It has, at the very least, a rabbit, a chicken, a bull, and a lion -- which is a nice touch, as Dublin Zoo is famous for breeding lions, which it's done since 1857, with one of the MGM lions having been a Dublin lion. Perhaps most impressively, though, there's also a handful of people at the Zoo, which is a relief, as by this point, almost twelve minutes into the show, I was kind of expecting Cillian Murphy to show up in a nightgown.

Anyway, I won't spoil it for you. You should watch it for yourselves. Gripping stuff, I tell you. There is, however, one detail I want to draw your attention to, with the day that's in it. Remember how I'd told you about the lads putting on their incognito outfits just after they'd arrived? Well, it's worth looking just beyond Raphael.

Do you see the van? Do you see what's written on it? I'm not sure of the top word on the sign, but the other two, quite clearly, are 'James' and 'Joyce'.

Because it's Bloomsday.


* Note for potential tourists: McGillicuddy's Castle is made up. There are castles in Dublin, but they don't look like that. And if they did, they'd probably not be places you could just drive into in your van, there to kip in overnight while wondering at how the moat and drawbridge are so well-maintained in a place so otherwise neglected.

Tomorrow being Bloomsday...

Whilst strolling by Larry O'Rourke's pub on the corner of Eccles Street and Dorset Street on the morning of 16 June 1904, as detailed in the fourth chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom pondered how poor barmen could become wealthy proprietors in a city so festooned with pubs as Dublin.

'Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the county Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then think of the competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.'

It's would be a good puzzle, and if you think of crossing Dublin as taking you north-south over the Liffey and west-east across the city too, then it's not easy to do.

Anyway, this fella thinks he's got it all figured out.

It's not a bad attempt, and his thinking's pretty good, not least in his decision to use the canals as the city perimeters and to exclude hotel bars and restaurants that serve drinks. They're not pubs, and that should be the end of it.

Other than the fact that I think he should probably start his amble on Eccles Street, as Bloom would have had to do, the only concern I have is that Dublin now isn't the Dublin of 1904. Joyce, of course, famously boasted that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it'd be possible to rebuild the whole of it from his works -- his attention to topgraphic detail is astonishing, so surely to do this properly we'd want to be crossing Joyce's Dublin, not our own. We'd need a map of Dublin with only the pubs of 107 years ago on it. And, for that matter, you'd probably need to be crossing the river on one of the nine city bridges that existed 107 years ago, rather than one of the eight that've been built since.

Especially not on one built just eight years ago. Even if it is named after James Joyce.

A whistling sentinel...

When I heard Patrick Leigh Fermor had died, one of the first thoughts that struck me was to wonder who takes his place. If Paddy had been the greatest living Englishman, as I've long maintained, sometimes drunkenly, who now can lay claim to that title?

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, T.H. White, yet to become the author of the twentieth century's supreme reworking of the tale of Arthur, clearly had a similar thought, and addressed his pupils to tell them his conclusion.

Boys, he said, 'G.K. Chesterton died yesterday. P.G. Wodehouse is now the greatest living master of the English language.'

I like that.

It's been three quarters of a century since Gilbert died, and he keeps delighting people and changing lives. Terry Pratchett was surely right to say that small doses of Chesterton, taken regularly, are good for the soul -- and how I wish he could take his own advice now -- but great gulps of the Wild Knight of Battersea can transform us.

Just speaking for myself, I think I'd like semi-colons a lot less were it not for Gilbert, and I'd almost certainly not be a practicing Catholic -- or even the most lukewarm of theists -- were it not for him. Even now, whenever I revisit him, I return refreshed and thinking anew, always remembering that when you get down to it where faith is involved,

'It is not a question of Theology,
It is a question of whether, placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not.'

It's worth reading what Mark Shea has to say about him, as well as Sean Dailey, who points out that were GKC to be added to the canon of the saints amongst whom is surely already rejoicing, today would almost certainly be his feast day.

Breaking Bread or Sharing Sandwiches?

I resisted the urge, weak as it was, to go along to my friends' Evangelical church yesterday; I'm busy, after all, and I really think that no matter how ecumenical I may be feeling, I just don't have the time to be attending another service after Mass on Sundays at the minute.

It was for the best, I think, as having listened to the sermon online, I'd have gotten very exasperated. The first half of it was excellent, all about the idea of the Spirit as a purifying fire, existing both in a corporate and an individual way in the Church. Unfortunately, things fell apart in the second part of the sermon, commenting on Acts 2:42-47... 

'Secondly, 'devoted to the fellowship'... koinonia. 'Fellowship' is a weak word. It really means a 'partnership', a 'bonding together'. And in Acts 2 it has the effect in a practical way of our homes, our familes, and our money. It's very concrete. It spreads its umbrella down to 47. Verse 47. These are the things that it means to be devoted to the fellowship. You see they're together daily, and when they break bread it doesn't mean Communion; it means that they ate together in their homes. [...] They devoted themselves to one another and they met together.'

At which point the minister began recommending that the congregation should eat with each other, or even just meet up for coffee. Well, if you've read my post from the other day you'll see why I'm frustrated with this analysis of the passage. It's not just that it's banal; it's that it's wrong, and it seems to be wrong because the NIV translation is inaccurate.

Here's the NIV again, to remind you:

'They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.'

Now, the first thing is that yes, it's true that 'fellowship' is perhaps a weak word to render koinonia with, but 'partnership' seems even more so; curiously, if one wanted a technical term to translate koinonia, there'd be a very serious case for using 'communion'; I doubt this would have confused anybody, as in an Anglican context the term is often used to describe all Anglican churches in union together.

I'll get back to that later, but for now I want to focus on the perplexing question of why on earth the minister claimed that when the first Christians broke bread they weren't participating in Communion, by which he meant the Eucharist. The passage twice refers to the breaking of bread, the first time saying that the early Christians devoted themselves to the breaking of the bread, and the second that they broke bread every single day. Based on how the NIV renders this passage, one might well be tempted to assume that when it says 'they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,' it's simply describing the same activity in two ways, but again, the Greek doesn't say that. Rather, it clearly distinguishes between them.

Let's take a look at the Greek again, remembering what we know about 'te... kai...' constructions, which is that they're used to indicate a series of distinct points which are connected together. All told, then, this passage tells us that the daily activity of the early Church entailed four discrete things:

• kat hēmeran te proskarteroūntes homothumadon en tōi hierōi,
• klōntes te kat' oikon arton,
• metelambanon trophēs en agalliasei kai aphelotēti kardias,
• ainountes to Theon kai ekhontes kharin pros holon ton laon.

So, there are four separate elements here, each one clearly marked by its own 'te' or 'kai', and all four collectively governed by that opening 'kat hēmeran' which means 'every day'. Daily Christian activity for the Jerusalem Church consisted of:

• Continuing in their devotion at the Temple.
• Breaking bread in their homes.
• Partaking of food with glad and sincere hearts.
• Praising God and having goodwill towards the whole people.

Curiously, if you go back to the start of this section, you'll see that Acts 2:42 clearly states that these first Christians continued in their devotion -- yes, it's exactly the same verb later used for their continued Temple activity -- to the teaching of the apostles and to the fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers. I'm inclined to believe that this sentence refers to the same four points later detailed, in that the the breaking of bread and the prayers are clearly present in both sentences, the apostles evidently taught in the Temple, and fellowship certainly entailed eating together.

It's worth noting that there are a few definite articles in Acts 2:42, which shouldn't be ditched in the way the NIV ditches them: it doesn't just say 'to the breaking of bread and to prayer'; it specifically says 'to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers'. This matters, because such formal language points to formal activity; it's describing liturgy, not lunch.

That's not to say that the Jerusalem Christians didn't eat together too, in association with their Eucharistic celebration. They evidently did just this, and it'd be surprising if they did otherwise, given that the passage and Acts 4:32 onwards make clear that they did everything in common. 1 Corinthians 11:17-33 shows that twenty years later the Christians of Corinth continued to associate a common meal -- albeit one where social divisions were problematic -- with their Eucharistic feast. However, the fact that Acts and 1 Corinthians reveal that the early Christians broke bread together and ate meals together should never cause us to assume that 'breaking of bread' in early Christianity was just another way of saying 'having dinner'.

Look at Luke 24:35, which records how the two disciples who met the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus told the Apostles that Jesus 'was known to them in the breaking of the bread', the exact same words being used as at Acts 2:42. Look at 1 Corinthians 10:16-17, where Paul asked his Corinthian brethren,'the bread which we break -- is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.'

For what it's worth, the word we usually translate as 'participation' there is koinonia again, so we could well render it as 'fellowship' or even 'communion'. I'm inclined to go for the latter, myself. Anyway, it seems that however we slice this -- and I think with we'd need to look carefully at John 6:32-66 and the various Last Supper narratives even to begin to understand it -- the breaking of bread is absolutely essential to koinonia, and it's not simply a matter of meeting up for coffee or inviting people around for tea.

No, for Paul the breaking of bread was by definition a ritual activity, and we have no reason whatsoever to think that it was otherwise for the Jerusalem Church and the author of Acts.

The Life and Death of a Modern Hero

As I said earlier, I think the world was a richer place yesterday than it is today, as it seems we've been doubly impoverished. Patrick Leigh Fermor has died.

Whenever I've told people about Fermor they've tended to stop me, usually about halfway through, and ask whether I was talking about a real person. How could one person, they'd ask, have done so much?

I don't blame them. Walking from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople when he was eighteen back in 1933, staying in castles and barns along the way, drinking and dining with gypsies and aristocrats... fighting in a cavalry battle between Republicans and Royalists in northern Greece... falling in love with a Romanian princess and living with her in a watermill, her painting and him writing... joining the Irish Guards in the Second World War but being reassigned to SOE, stationed in Crete where we worked with the Cretan resistance and headed the mission to kidnap, hide, and bustle away the German commander of East Crete to Egypt... travelling in the Caribbean and writing a book about what he saw there that's cited in Live and Let Die as James Bond's perfect introduction to Haiti... his only novel, a slight yet beautiful work that's been turned into an opera... embracing the quiet rhythms of French monasteries and later beautifully evoking these rhythms in A Time to Keep Silence, published the same year that Dirk Bogarde played him in Ill Met by Moonlight... two marvellous books on travelling in northern and southern Greece, with his descriptions of the monasteries of the air in Meteora being second to none... and then, in 1977, perhaps the finest travel book of the last century, A Time of Gifts, beginning to tell the tale of his great teenage peregrination to Istanbul, this retelling only becoming possible after his teenage notebooks had been returned to him after being found in a Romanian castle... swimming the Hellespont when he was 69, with his wife Joan following behind him by boat... a second volume of his great epic, From the Woods to the Water, in 1986... another travel book, Three Letters from the Andes, in 1991... a translation and a lengthy introduction his friend and old comrade George Psychoundakis' The Cretan Runner in 1998... being knighted in 2004... being honoured by the Greek state as Commander of the Order of the Phoenix in 2007... a delightful and weighty collection of his letters to and from his old friend Deborah Devonshire, In Tearing Haste, in 2008...

He died today, 96 years old, after a long illness. I'd been a fan of his for years, quoting him at length once here and giving copies of A Time of Gifts to a friend as a birthday present only last month. I'd long wanted to meet him; indeed, I've envied a friend who was once in the same room as him. I got within a few miles of his home in Kardamyli last summer. Soon, I hope, his publishers will edit and publish the massive pile of pages that makes up the third and final volume of his great walk across Europe, the third volume that'll take us from the Iron Gates to the Golden Horn.

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE, Commander of the Order of the Phoenix -- may he rest in peace. We'll probably not see his like again, but maybe we should just rejoice that he graced us with his presence as long as he did. This blog, doubtless, will be the place to go for all manner of obituaries and articles celebrating his brilliance. It's been a fine site for a long time, but I think it'll come into its own now.

Brian Lenihan, Jr.

The world today is, I fear, a poorer place than it was yesterday.

I learned this morning that Brian Lenihan, until recently Ireland's Minister for Finance, had died. He'd not long turned 52, and had had pancreatic cancer since late 2009. Our Opposition has been weakened, and not just in numbers, but in quality too. We need good people on the Opposition benches as much as the Government ones, and today we've lost one of our very best.

I'll never forget the first time I met him. I was a new barman at the time, working in the local pub, and he was running as a candidate in the by-election to fill his father's seat. I'd read quite a bit about him, and had fairly high hopes, so it was interesting to see him. I know: I was young -- scarcely out of my teens -- and easily impressed. This was also going to be my first time voting too, and I was pretty sure I'd be voting for him. An odd choice, perhaps, given my normal Fine Gael leanings, but I wasn't impressed by the Fine Gael candidate at all, and Lenihan seemed to have serious ability, the kind the Dáil could surely do with.

He was surrounded by groupies, the typical tribal sorts who gather round political figures, and one of them, hastening to buy a drink -- 'For the candidate,' she said -- looked at my bemused expression and turned giggling to the others: 'He doesn't know who he is!'

Lenihan looked at me, noticed my querulous eyebrow, and grinned at me. I nodded, and finished the order. And I voted for him. It was my first time to vote to send anyone to the Dáil, and it was my first time to vote in an AV election, and my guy had got in. Joe Higgins, the other candidate to make it to the last round, got in later, and though I often disagree with him, I think he's a good man to have in the Dáil too. He asks good questions.

Despite being possible the most able TD Fianna Fáil had in their ranks -- or perhaps because of it -- Bertie kept him out of the cabinet for years, only seriously promoting him when he was on the way out himself. Once Bertie was gone he was appointed as Minister for Finance, there immediately to be handed the mess created by his predecessors and the global economic collapse. His guarantee of the Irish banks was seen by almost everyone at the time as the best possible response to the crisis of the day, though in hindsight it looks disastrous, as has his maintenance of the guarantee and the acceptance of the hugely expensive EU-IMF loans that we've all taken to calling a 'bailout'.

There seems something terribly ironic and deeply tragic in a politician of such ability and integrity, possibly the most gifted member of the last Dáil or two, having led the country into such a dire situation. I strongly suspect, though, that history shall judge him kindly, once the documents are all out in the open and we can see what really went on when the guarantee was decided, when its maintenance was agreed on, and when the bailout was accepted.

All who knew him seem to have loved him. I've no doubt he'll not be long for Purgatory.

One Liturgy, Two Locations

One of the things I discovered recently, in the aftermath of being lectured on a not-particularly tricky point of ancient Greek grammar, is that I did more Greek in the course of my master's degree than most undergraduates do in three years' work on the subject. Over coffee some weeks back a new student of the language, apparently unaware that I do this stuff for a living, began lecturing me at some length on a fairly straightforward bit of grammar, and feeling a bit patronised -- not to mention bemused -- I started to look at course outlines, realised just how much Greek I've done, and began to wonder that my semi-formal study might well be worth adding to my CV.

Anyway, I occasionally keep the rust off my language skills by looking at Classical writers and also at the far simpler New Testament authors. I gave an example of this the other day, talking of how I've just in the last week or so realised how ambiguous 2 Timothy 3:16 is, in that it can be rendered into English in two diverse ways with surprisingly different meanings.

Well, as I've mentioned, I often listen to sermons from the local Evangelical church when I can't make it along to attend services there; I think sincere listening is necessary if we're to reach any kind of understanding, and that that's the least we can do. I also think we should do together what we can do together, but right now time presses so joining my friends at their services isn't all that easy to do, especially given that Mass comes first.

However, I'm not looking forward to listening to this Sunday's sermons. There've been a series of talks on the meaning of 'church' as a concept, and this Sunday's sermon is to be based upon Acts 2:1-13  and 42-47. That's fine, of course, as the first passage is about Pentecost, that being the day that'll be in it, and the latter passage in particular is very important for this general topic, but I'm uneasy about the fact that the translation they'll use is the New International Version, as I think the NIV translation distorts the text of this passage.

Acts 2:46-47 contains a sentence with several clauses, which the NIV renders as two distinct sentences, as follows:

'Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people.'

What does this suggest to you? Doesn't it seem to say that the early Christians used to meet up at the temple on a daily basis, and that they broke bread and ate together in their own homes? Because that's how I'd read it. It's not, however, what the Greek says, and this is the kind of thing that makes me understand why one Evangelical friend of mine -- an Anglican curate now, as it happens -- has said that he's heard the NIV referred to as the New Inaccurate Version.

In the Greek original, this is one sentence, not two. What's more, it's a sentence which uses an extended 'te... kai...' construction, such constructions carrying the sense of 'not only... but also...'. It's a sentence with a series of distinct but related points, which are intended to be understood in conjunction with each other, not in isolation. There's no justification whatsoever for splitting this into two separate sentences, especially when the sentence can be eloquently rendered as a unity in English. The Revised Standard Version manages it admirably:

'And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favour with all the people. '

Obviously this flows well, but there's also quite a difference there, isn't there? In the RSV translation, the early Christians don't just rendezvous at the Temple, using it as a social venue, a convenient meeting point; on the contrary, they participate in worship there, before breaking bread in their homes. That's quite a shift, isn't it? Is that actually what it says, though?

Well, look at the Greek. The phrase the NIV renders as 'every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts' and which the RSV translates as 'and day by day, attending the temple together' is 'kat hēmeran te proskarteroūntes homothumadon en tōi hierōi'.

• If we break this down, we'll see that the sentence's opening phrase, 'kat hēmeran', means 'daily'.
• This is followed by our opening enclitic particle, 'te', which invites a 'kai' or another 'te' later on. The important thing is that it's setting up the idea of a series of related points. It's because of this that we know that the opening phrase governs the whole sentence, rather than just the clause immediate to it.
• This is followed by the phrase 'proskarteroūntes homothumadon', where 'homothumadon' means 'same passion' or 'of one accord', and where 'proskarteroūntes' means something along the lines of 'to persevere' or 'to remain constant'; together the two words convey the idea of a shared and continued devotion. 
• The final part of this clause, 'en tōi hierōi'' literally means 'in the holy', but given that it's referring to a location, and a singular rather than a plural location at that, it seems the best translation for this would be 'in the holy place', or, as it was in Jerusalem, 'in the Temple'.

Now, I happen to think the RSV translation for this is perhaps a little weak, but it's not wrong, which the NIV one certainly is. The NIV conjures up an image of the early Christians meeting up in the courts of the Temple, as though they're just using the Temple as a handy spot to get together, but the Greek text makes it clear that the Temple remained a place of worship for the early Church, something that's otherwise attested to at Luke 24:53 and Acts 3:1. How can this have been so, though? Hebrews, after all, makes clear that the Temple sacrifices are redundant, and the first Christians must have at least had some understanding of this! 

Well, that's where the next part of the sentence comes in -- and that's why it's important to pay attention when that little word 'te' appears in Greek, as it means there's going to be some kind of correlation between points. The earliest Christians regarded the Eucharistic breaking of bread as a sacrifice, following the pattern laid down by Melchizidek and given meaning by Jesus, and so it seems clear that they divided their daily worship into two acts, in two locations. They continued to regard the Temple as a divinely ordained place of prayer and proclamation, and so persevered in their worship there, but as they regarded the Temple's cultic activities as having been superseded by the Eucharist, they assembled for Communion in their own homes.

Broken into two distinct parts, contrary to the original text, and translated misleadingly, this passage tells us very little, other than that the early Christians used to meet up at the Temple, and that they broke bread in their homes, whatever that might mean! On the other hand, though, when viewed as one sentence this passage gives us a clear depiction of the pattern of daily worship in the Jerusalem Christian community in the earliest days of the Church.

In short: translations matter.

Texts without Contexts

I mentioned yesterday how I have huge difficulty understanding Evangelical thinking, but how I've been given a few pointers that I think will help me in the long run.

Well, I want to get one of these pointers down here now, while it's fresh and relevant to something I've been reading.

In Essentials, John Stott comments on Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, noting how nuanced and ambiguous it is in terms of what it says about how those who do not know or for whatever reason cannot hear the Gospel may yet be saved. However, he observes, there's no such ambiguity to be seen in Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II's first Papal encyclical, in which he said:

'Man -- every man without any exception whatever -- has been redeemed by Christ, and ... with man -- with each man without any exception whatever -- Christ is in a way united, even when man is unaware of it'

That kind of unconditional universalism, says Stott, must, however, be firmly rejected by those who look to Scripture for authoritative guidance.

I blinked a bit when I read that. JPII a universalist? Really? This was news to me, so I went and had a read of Redemptor Hominis, and rather quickly came to the conclusion that John Paul had been talking about our redemption as distinct from our salvation. That is, he was saying we've all been redeemed; he was not saying we'll all be saved. Insofar as as he said we're all united in Christ he didn't say anything that was in any sense outside the Christian mainstream. We need only look to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, for instance, where the Lutheran martyr said:

'The death of Jesus is the manifestation of God's righteousness, it is the place where God has given gracious proof of his own righteousness, the place where alone the righteousness of God will dwell. By sharing in this death we too become partakers of that righteousness. For it was our flesh Christ took upon him, and our sins which he bore in his body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24). What happened there to him happened to us all.'

How could so eminent a Christian teacher as John Stott, someone famed for his erudition and charitable spirit, have so misrepresented John Paul II? He may not see any difference between redemption and salvation, but surely he must realise that Catholic teaching carefully distinguishes between the two. He couldn't just be prooftexting, could he? Mining Catholic writings to take passages out of context and misinterpreing them in line with his own preconceptions?

The thing is, I've seen this happen before, and again in the case of someone who's admired as an Evangelical academic and pastor, that being Don Carson, he who's so famous for declaring that 'a text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text'. I went to a talk he gave some months ago, and was far from impressed by it, for a few reasons, and a couple of Protestant friends of mine who were there too were even less taken with what he said than I'd been -- they've hardly been back to that church since -- and this left me wondering why people think so much of him. I glanced about online to try to find out more about him, and I came across an article he'd written about marriage, in which he said the following:

'But it is important to see that, strictly speaking, marriage (despite the Roman Catholic Church), is not a sacrament to be reserved for Christians. It is a creation ordinance — that is, it is part of the plan of creation itself, something that God has ordained for man/woman pairs everywhere, not something that flows out of the life of the church and that belongs only to Christians.'

This astounded me. Carson is quite highly regarded, and apparently very well-read, supposedly reading 500 books a year, although he admits many of them he barely skims. And despite all his learning, he thinks that the Church says that marriage is a sacrament and is reserved for Christians. The Church says nothing of the sort. Sure, it says Christian marriage is a sacrament, and that Christian marriage is reserved for Christians, but it doesn't dispute for a moment the reality, the validity, or the legitimacy of other marriages. It's not as if this is an obscure point, either. It's openly explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and indeed is pretty clear even in the first paragraph of the section on marriage.

This isn't his only mention of the Church in the article, though, as he later says that there's no need for a marriage to take place in a religious context or in the presence of a religious minister:

'There does not have to be a minister in order to be “done” properly. We have no interest in preserving the vestiges of medieval Catholic theology of marriage.'

Again, this is utter nonsense. I did an essay on medieval marriage when I was an undergraduate history student, and -- for what it's worth -- an atheist, and one thing I learned was that to be deemed sacramental or even valid, medieval marriages didn't need to be public affairs, conducted in the presence of a priest or any other religious minister. No, despite numerous attempts to regularise the situation -- attempts dating right back to Ignatius of Antioch around 107 AD -- so-called 'clandestine' marriages without what we might describe as priestly supervision were very common, as medieval annulment and divorce records make clear; indeed, they were only definitively abolished under the 1563 Tametsi decree of the Council of Trent. They were abolished for pragmatic and pastoral reasons, not theological ones. To this day the Church retains its ancient theology of marriage, remaining utterly adamant that in Christian marriage, it is the spouses who are the ministers of Christ's grace, mutually conferring upon each other the sacrament of matrimony. Again, it's in the Catechism, and it's not all that obscure a point either, as when I was talking about this over coffee after Mass the other week, several of the ladies there pointed out that this had been clearly explained to them decades ago by the nuns who had taught them at school.

So what's going on? How can people as highly regarded and apparently as decent and as competent as Don Carson and John Stott get the Catholic Church so egregiously wrong? I don't believe they're stupid, dishonest, or lazy, and I don't believe they don't care about truth, so what's behind this?

Time and time again over recent years I've been astounded to be told things about the Catholic Church by Protestant friends, things which I either knew to be false, or subsequently looked into and discovered to be false. That's not to say that there weren't elements of truth in what they'd said, but what truth there was in them was invariably misunderstood and distorted, mingled with outright falsehood and magnified to a point where I occasionally am tempted to wonder whether there's a Giant Bumper Book of Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church out there. I could reel off examples, but I'd be here all day, and, well, my lunch break is only so long.

Still, I think I was given a clue to this some weeks ago. I'd had a few chats, and exhanged a few emails, with one of my newer Evangelical friends, with us talking about the Reformation period in sixteenth-century England, and I'd contested some  myths about the period. In replying he admitted that he had a predisposition to prefer the reformers because of what he knew of them, and the Protestant narrative as a whole, because of what he knew of the Catholic Church -- apparently oblivious to the fact that what he's heard of the reformers and the Church he's heard within the Protestant tradition. He conceded that this wasn't an academically rigorous approach, but said that this could hardly be helped as he didn't have the time to study history to a high level.

I can understand that approach up to a point at my friend's level, though even then it leaves me uneasy -- my instinct is always to find out why the other guy thinks what he does, and to do so by asking him and listening to him, rather than by listening to his opponents -- but I wonder if this mindset is in play at higher levels too. 

Is it simply that the likes of Carson have long made up their minds about what the Catholic Church teaches, having been taught a simplistic and largely false version of it long ago by people they trust, so that nowadays they think it has nothing of value to say, nothing worth engaging with? Is it that they've read books written by people who believe these myths, and that they simply trust them, without going to the sources? Is it that they'll read the odd passage from Church documents of one sort or another, and -- without understanding their context in the document and in the broader Church tradition -- will reach conclusions about them that they simply couldn't reach if they actually engaged with them in a meaningful way?

I don't know if that is the case, but I'm having trouble coming up with a more charitable explanation for their spreading falsehoods about the Church. And if it is true, I rather wish they'd try reading some proper grown-up Catholic books, and reading them slowly, not to find fault, just to understand.  We live in a world full of caricatures, and sometimes we should stop and listen to people on their own terms.

And Also...

One thing I've been trying to do over the last year or so is to understand Evangelican Protestantism, which I've wanted to do for a range of reasons, not the least of which being that many friends of mine are Evangelicals of one sort or another. I've read a lot, and attended a lot of Evangelical Anglican services, and listened to numerous sermons, and prayed with Evangelicals, and I've made lots of Evangelical friends, and I've talked openly and honestly and sometimes constructively about where we agree and where we differ. 

To be honest, though, while I know more than a did a year ago, I'm not sure I understand more. In ways I'm far more confused than I was.

That's not entirely true, I suppose; I've realised a few things that I think are probably quite important, but it'll take me time to internalise them so they'll bear fruit.

Anyway, recently I've been reading a book called Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue, which consists of a number of essays by an English liberal Anglican, David Edwards, with responses by the prominent Evangelical Anglican, John Stott. It's clearly a flawed book, in that I'd like Edwards to be able to reply to Stott's responses, and in that Stott's obviously suffering from the limited space he has in which to reply to Edwards: a typical Edwards chapter is about forty pages long, whereas Stott's responses usually clock in at about half that length. The brevity of Stott's responses may reflect the fact that Stott's heart clearly wasn't in the project, something he points out more than once.

There's much that Stott says that I agree with, as it happens -- I think Edwards has a tendency to make doctrine say what he would like it to, whereas Stott insists on its subordination to Scripture, or at least its harmony with Scripture. For all that, though, I have serious issues with Stott's basic approach to Scripture, and indeed was quite surprised to realise how problematic his approach is.

The classic Reformation cry of Sola Scriptura is, of course, little more than a banner slogan. Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli didn't really agree on what it meant, and yet their understandings of it differed in no small ways from those of their successors of even a generation or two later. If we're truly honest about this it's difficult to see, as Roger Olson points out, how it can be a viable concept: all else aside, we bring our preconceptions to the text when we read, and read through eyes that are trained to see some things, to gloss over others, and to interpret all in accord with our own traditions and assumption.

Predictably enough, given the nature of debate, Edwards weighs into the whole question of inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture, and homes in on what is surely the proof text for advocates of Sola Scriptura, that being 2 Timothy 3:14-17, which I tend to think of in its Revised Standard Version translation:

'But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work'

Now, Edwards doesn't get into the fact that this passage doesn't list the Scriptures -- the Bible doesn't include a divinely inspired contents page -- or into how, as a half-Greek Hellenistic Jew, Timothy would have been acquainted from childhood with a rather larger canon of Scripture than either Edwards or Stott would recognise as part of what we'd call the Old Testament. Neither does he focus on the fact that the passage merely says that Scripture is useful for the purposes Paul lists, not that it is in itself sufficient for those purposes. Edwards does, however, flag up a problem that had never struck me before, pointing out that this passage can be translated in a less exalted way, so that the part the RSV renders as 'All scripture is inspired by God and profitable...' could just as easily be rendered, as in the New English Bible, as 'every inspired scripture is useful...'

It should be obvious that this translation, if accurate, raises the possibility that not all Scriptures are inspired; the language of this translation may only be subtly different from that of the Revised Standard Version and the New International Version, the Evangelical translation of choice, but its meaning is radically different.

Well, Stott responds to this particular point, saying:

'Alternatively, I could underline the elaborate internal cross-attestation of Scripture and take you to task for accepting the NEB interpretation of 2 Timothy 3:16, that the word theopneustos ("God-breathed") applies only to some Scriptures. It is true, of course, that the Greek sentence has no main verb, but (according to the best reading) it includes the word kai ("and"), indicating that two assertions are being made, not one, namely that 'all Scripture is God-breathed and useful...'

I gawped when I read that, as Stott must surely realise that kai doesn't just mean 'and'. Kai can be an intensifier, like 'indeed', so that the relevant sentence could read 'all God-breathed scripture is indeed profitable for teaching...' What's more, it often simply means 'also', and could as such therefore be harking back to a previous point. Given that it can fairly be translated as 'also', then, it's as valid to render pasa graphē theopneustos kai ōphelismos as 'all God-breathed Scripture is also useful...', something which makes perfect sense when following on from the previous line, so that the passage could quite validly read:

'But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All God-breathed scripture is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work' 

In other words, in either of these alternative readings, both of which make sense in the context of Paul commissioning and advising Timothy on how to be a Christian teacher, Paul is reminding Timothy of how he has known the Scriptures all his life, these being able to instruct him for salvation, and being useful for the education of others. If either of these is the right reading, then Paul isn't saying that all Scripture is inspired by God, just that insofar as Scripture is inspired, so is it useful.

I'm not sure about this, of course. Until this week this interpretation had never occured to me. Still, it's got me thinking, not least about the wisdom of basing any doctrinal claims about the authority of Scripture upon a passage that can validly be translated in two such different ways.