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Paul And The “Intermediate State” Between Death and Resurrection – Benedict XVI

April 19, 2013

For Paul, life in this world is “Christ,” but death is gain, since in the “dissolution” of all that is earthly, death means “being with Christ.” An inner freedom springs from this knowledge, a fearless openness in death’s regard and also an uncomplaining — no, more — a joyful readiness for further service. Raphael’s Paul Preaching in Athens, ca 1515 pictured above.

Taken from his 1988 classic, Eschatology, which remains a leading text on the “last things” — heaven and hell, purgatory and judgment, death and the immortality of the soul.

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Let us move on to the Pauline writings. It has become customary to distinguish two phases in the development of Paul’s eschatological thought: an early phase, in which he expects to experience the resurrection and the parousia personally, and a later phase, in which such expectations are gradually eliminated while the question of the intermediate state becomes all the more urgent and meaningful. There is much to be said in favor of such an evolution in Paul’s thinking.

However, Hoffmann has shown that Paul’s ideas about the intermediate state and the resurrection were not affected by it, but remained the same throughout. Because the image of sleep which appears in these texts crops up time and again from Luther to the Dutch Catechism, Hoff man’s analysis of the semantic field of the language of sleep is especially important. Sleep was a euphemism for dying, and for being dead.

Found in both the Jewish and the Hellenistic sphere, it was capacious enough a metaphor to find room for a variety of somewhat different contents. It comprised the idea of unconsciousness, as well as the more positive notion of the peace enjoyed by the just as distinct from sinners. So far as Paul is concerned, Hoffmann shows that his use of the word is uncommitted as between those various contents. So no inferences can be drawn about his views of the condition of the dead.

In his correspondence with the church at Thessalonica, the only eschatological issue Paul addresses is that of the future resurrection. In writing to Philippi, on the other hand, Paul, faced with imminent danger of death, looks steadily at his own destiny and at what will follow death. Yet Philippians is familiar with the same mode of thinking as that in First Thessalonians and, most importantly, both letters argue from the same foundational premise, namely, from Christ, who guarantees the life of those who belong to him.

A careful examination of the formula “the dead in Christ,” found in First Thessalonians 4, 16, leads Hoffman to the following judgment:

To me it seems by no means improbable that the idea of communion with Christ as the determining factor in the death of Christians, found in Philippians 1, 23, is already adumbrated here. Neither in Philippians nor in First Thessalonians are resurrection and intermediate state mutually exclusive. Judaism had bound both firmly together.”

It seems to me that the profound link between these two Pauline letters in this regard is even clearer in First Thessalonians 5, 10 where the apostle refers to Christ as he who died for us so that “whether we wake or sleep we might live with him.” Evidently, then, it is not “waking” or “sleeping,” earthly “life” or “death” which make the decisive difference but life in communion with Christ or in separation from him.

The hardest nut to crack among the texts debated in this context is 2 Corinthians 5: 1-10:

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage; we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith not by sight. We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.

None of the numerous interpretations can be called satisfactory in every respect. However, although a number of detailed points will probably always remain controversial, the meticulous textual analysis found in both Hoffmann’s work” and in Bultmann’s commentary on this Letter, agreeing as they do in all essentials, seems to offer a reliable guide to the general thrust of the text. These writers hold that Paul is not offering an express judgment of either a positive or a negative kind about the intermediate state. Rather is he emphasizing the Christian hope for salvation as such, a hope which lies in the Lord and has its focus in our own resurrection?

The foil to Paul’s remarks must be located in the “afflictions” suffered by the disciples and listed in chapter 4 of the Letter. What this means is that the text has nothing of direct relevance to contribute to our discussion. However, the scholars we are following also arrive at a second conclusion which is of indirect importance for us. Despite what a number of exegetes allege, Paul does not say that he is afraid of dying — afraid dying, that is, before the Parousia. It is true that he rejects the Gnostic idea that “nakedness” of soul is a salvific good, pushing it aside without a word of discussion as inhuman and untrue. But fear of the intermediate state as a time of nakedness is notable by its absence. As Bultmann puts it:

“Tharrein means we face death with confidence, and eudokomen mallon that we even welcome it! Nothing better could happen, us! … The intrepid zeal to serve the Lord not only knows more fear of death; there is even a touch of longing for death.”

How can such an attitude be explained without invoking Paul’s certitude, expressed in Philippians 1, 23, that even now, to die means to “be with Christ.” A profound isomorphism unites Second Corinthians 5, 6–10 to Philippians 1, 21-26, something especially clear if one concentrates in particular on v. 8 of the Corinthian text and v. 21 of the Philippian. In both cases, the truly desirable thing is being at home with the Lord: already, now, as soon as possible.

Yet in both cases, to speak in the accents of Bultmann, it is also clear that faith banishes not just fear of death, but its opposite, the growing yearning for death, as well. For faith can give even to the burden of “wasting away … daily” the radiance that belongs to being allowed to “please him.”

What makes all these texts, but notably Second Corinthians, so opaque from our viewpoint today is the fact that Paul makes no attempt to develop an anthropology which might clarify this hope in its diverse stages but simply argues from the side of references to Christ. It is Christ who is life: both now and at any point in the future. In the presence of such a certainty, the anthropological “substrate” of Paul’s thinking lies necessarily outside his focus of attention, in shadow. To Paul this must have been unproblematic, since he shared the common presuppositions of his fellow Jews. His task was simply that of formulating the novel element, the reality of Christ and relationship with him, in all its dramatic importance.

In consequence of these reflections, we can afford to be brief in dealing with Philippians 1, 23. For Paul, life in this world is “Christ,” but death is gain, since in the “dissolution” of all that is earthly, death means “being with Christ.” An inner freedom springs from this knowledge, a fearless openness in death’s regard and also an uncomplaining — no, more — a joyful readiness for further service.

In an earlier generation of scholars, it was believed that this text was inexplicable save by the intrusion of “Hellenisation” into the apostle’s thought processes. Today we understand that there is no break whatsoever vis-a-vis Paul’s earlier affirmations.

What he says in Philippians 1 he could already have proclaimed in First Thessalonians, had he seen an opportunity for doing so.’

What is happening before our very eyes is not that Hebrew “monism” is yielding to Greek “dualism,” but that a preexistent Jewish heritage is receiving its proper Christological center. The transformation went so far that it already reached the idea which John would express so graphically: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Posted in Pauline Letters, Pope Benedict XVI | Tagged 2 Corinthians 5:1-10, Death and Resurrection, life in communion with Christ, Paul's eschatological thought, the intermediate state and the resurrection | Leave a Comment »

The “Intermediate State” Between Death and Resurrection – Benedict XVI

April 18, 2013

The disciple who is to become the type of all faithful discipleship rests on the bosom of Jesus. The Christian, in his faith and love, finds shelter on the breast of Jesus and so, in the end, on the breast of the Father. “I am the resurrection”: what these words mean emerges here from a new angle.

Taken from his 1988 classic, Eschatology, which remains a leading text on the “last things” — heaven and hell, purgatory and judgment, death and the immortality of the soul.

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If the “Last Day” is not to be identified with the moment of individual death but is accepted as what it really is, the shared ending of all history, then the question naturally arises as to what happens “in-between.” In Catholic theology, as that received its systematic form in the high Middle Ages, this question received its answer in terms of the immortality of the soul.

To Luther, such a solution was unacceptable. For him it was a result of the infiltration of faith by philosophy. Yet his own enquiry into the matter produced an ambiguous report. In great majority, the relevant texts of Luther take up the biblical term for death, “sleep,” seeing in it a description of the content of the intermediate state. The soul sleeps in the peace of Christ. It is awakened, along with the body, on the last day.

Elsewhere one finds Luther in a different state of mind, for instance in his comments on the story of Lazarus. There he remarks that the distinction between body and soul whereby hitherto people had tried to explain Lazarus’ life “in the bosom of Abraham” was ein Dreck, “a load of rubbish.” As he explains: “We must say, totus Abraham, the whole man, is to live….”

The impression one takes away from this is that Luther’s concern was not so much with the denial of the life of the dead, but with an attack on the body-soul distinction. Luther does not succeed in replacing that distinction by any clear or even recognizable new conception. In our survey of the status quaestionis, we discovered that recent theology rules out an “intermediate state.” By doing so, it gives systematic expression to a point of view first developed by Luther.

1. Early Judaism
What does the Bible have to say? In the light of our investigation into the ideas of the New Testament about the resurrection we can already make one fairly general statement. To posit an interruption of life between death and the end of the world would not be in accord with Scripture. In fact, the texts permit a much more precise set of assertions than this, as the exemplary work of P. Hoffmann in particular has shown in careful detail.

The first point to notice is that both the primitive community and St. Paul belonged with the Jewish tradition of their time, just as had Jesus himself. Naturally, they situated themselves vis-a-vis the internal debate within that tradition by reference to the fundamental criterion found in Jesus’ own image of God. This produced in time a gradual transformation of the preexisting tradition, by way of its thorough-going assimilation to the demands of Christology. Our first task, therefore, is to get acquainted with the data of intertestamental Judaism — a complicated affair for which I must rely on Hoffmann’s study.

Let us look at some characteristic documents. The book of Enoch in its Ethiopian recension, datable to c. 150 B.C., offers in its twenty-second chapter an account of the abode of the spirits or souls of the departed. Here the ancient idea of Sheol, earlier taken as the realm of shadow-life, receives more articulated and differentiated description. Its “space” is characterized in greater detail. The world in which the dead are kept until the final judgment is no longer located simply in the earth’s interior, but, more specifically, in the West, the land of the setting sun, in a mountain where it occupies four different regions (pictured as caves). The just and the unjust are now separated.

The unjust await the judgment in darkness whereas the just, among whom the martyrs occupy a special position, dwell in light, being assembled around a life-giving spring of water. We already get a glimpse of how such “early Jewish” notions lived on in unbroken fashion in the early Church. The memento of the departed in the Roman Canon (now the “First Eucharistic Prayer”) prays that God may grant to those who have died marked with the sign of faith and now “sleep the sleep of peace” a place of light, “fresh water” (refrigerium) and repose.

The prayer thus identifies the three conditions which inhabitants of the Mediterranean world consider the proper expression of all good living. Patently, the idea coincides in all respects with the destiny of the just as described in Enoch.

A further stage of development can be observed in the Fourth Book of Ezra, written somewhere around the year 100 A.D. Here too the dead dwell in various “chambers,” their “souls” the bearers of a continuing life. As in Enoch, the just have already entered upon their reward. But whereas the author of Enoch defers the start of the punishment of sinners until the final judgment, in Ezra the pains of the Godless begin in the intermediate state, with the result that at a number of points their position seems to be that of a definitive Hell.

In Rabbinic Judaism, the dividing line between two kinds of human destiny is even more consistently observed. From the moment of judgment, which follows immediately upon death, two paths open up. One leads into the paradise garden of Eden, conceived either as lying in the East or as preserved in heaven. The other goes to the alley of Gehenna, the place of damnation.

But, besides the idea of paradise, the destiny of the just is represented by other images and motifs as well. Thus we hear of the “treasury of souls,” of waiting “beneath the throne of God,” and of the just — and especially martyrs — being received into Abraham’s bosom. Here again the continuity between Jewish and early Christian conceptions is striking. The idea of paradise, the image of the bosom of Abraham;’ the thought of the tarrying of souls beneath the throne of God: all these are present in the New Testament tradition.

But before we turn to the New Testament itself, something should be said about the writings bequeathed to us from Qumran. So long as the community represented under this name, the Essenes, were known only from Josephus, scholars were obliged to regard them as belonging to the Hellenizing strand within early Judaism, at any rate where our question in this present section was concerned. Josephus had summed up their views in the following words:

For their doctrine is this: that bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal, and continue forever, and that they come out of the most subtile air, and are united to their bodies as to prisons, into which they are drawn by a certain natural enticements but that when they are set free from the bands of the flesh, they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward.

But with the discovery of the original Qumran manuscripts, our image of the Covenanters has necessarily undergone revision. As K. Schubert, in his study of the Dead Sea community, commented on the text just cited:

In all probability, this description is nothing more than a concession by Josephus to his Greek readership…. The Essenes were not a Hellenistic-syncretistic group, but a Jewish apocalyptic movement.

However, we are dealing here with ideas of the afterlife conceived in markedly material terms, so much so that this same writer can say that the Essenes of Qumran “believed in a continuation of bodiliness, even though they accepted the passing-away of their bodies in the first instance. To this extent, Josephus’ description is perhaps not too far removed from the truth. He too ascribes to the sect a materialist understanding of the soul of the kind common in Stoic philosophy.

This shows how complex in this period the reciprocal interpenetration of the Hellenistic and Jewish worlds could be. The much favored dichotomy between “Greek” and “Hebrew” simply does not stand up to historical examination. The discussion of the Qumran texts also indicates that the mere maintaining of strictly material notions about the life to come does not in itself guarantee fidelity to the spiritual inheritance of the Old Testament. The heart of that option which entered history in Abraham’s faith cannot be grasped without finer differentiation than this. In this perspective, a number of contemporary contributions seem to belong to a continuing “Essene” tradition, in that the issue of materiality has overshadowed every other consideration.

2. The New Testament
It should be clear by now that the New Testament belongs to that Jewish world whose fundamental contours have been sketched in the preceding section. As a general methodological assumption, it is legitimate to suppose that Jesus and the earliest Church shared Israel’s faith in its (then) contemporary form. The acceptance of Jesus’ awareness of his own mission simply gave to this faith a new center, a nucleus by whose power the individual elements of the tradition were step by step transformed: first and foremost, the concept of God, but then following it, and in a graduated order of urgency, all the rest.

The Synoptic tradition preserved two sayings of Jesus the topic of the “intermediate state.” These are Luke 16:19-31 and Luke 23, 43, and they were briefly touched above. So far as the first, the story of Lazarus, is concerned, we may admit that the parable’s doctrinal content lies its moral, a warning against the dangers of wealth, rather than in the descriptions of Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom and Dives in Hell.

And yet, manifestly, the teller of the parable does regard these evocations of the afterlife as appropriate images of the real future of man. In this, the text clearly testifies to the fact that the earliest Christianity shared in the faith of contemporary Judaism about the beyond. So much we can say without even entering into the (quite independent) question of whether in the parable we are overhearing the ipsissima vox of Jesus himself.

Something along the same lines must be said about the second text, the dialogue of the Crucified with the good thief. Here too the Jewish background is palpable. Paradise is the place where the Messiah, concealed, awaits his hour, and whither he will return. But it is in this selfsame text that we begin to see the Christian transformation of the inherited Jewish tradition at work. That destiny reserved by Jewish tradition to the martyrs and the privileged “righteous ones” is now promised by the Condemned Man on the Cross to a fellow condemnee.

He possesses the authority to open wide the doors of paradise to the lost. His word is the key which unlocks them. And so the phrase “with me” takes on a transformative significance. It means that paradise is no longer seen as a place standing in permanent readiness for occupation and which happens to contain the Messiah along with a lot of other people. Instead, paradise opens in Jesus. It depends on his person. Joachim Jeremias was right, therefore, to find a connection between the prayer of the good thief and the petition of the dying Stephen: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”

With impressive unanimity, the New Testament presents the communion with Christ after death as the specifically Christian view of the inter-mediate state.

Here is the dawning realization that Jesus himself is paradise, light, fresh water, the secure peace toward which human longing and hope are directed. Perhaps we may remind ourselves in this connection of the new use of the image of “bosom” which we find in John’s Gospel. Jesus does not come from the bosom of Abraham, but from that of the Father himself.” The disciple who is to become the type of all faithful discipleship rests on the bosom of Jesus. The Christian, in his faith and love, finds shelter on the breast of Jesus and so, in the end, on the breast of the Father. “I am the resurrection”: what these words mean emerges here from a new angle.

Posted in Death, Pope Benedict XVI, The New Testament, The Resurrection, Theology | Tagged Christian view of the intermediate state, Death and Resurrection, First Eucharistic Prayer, Fourth Book of Ezra, The book of Enoch | 2 Comments »

The New Testament’s Teaching On Resurrection And Immortality – Benedict XVI

April 17, 2013

Faith in the resurrection is a central expression of the Christological confession of God. It follows, indeed, from the concept of God. Its emphasis is placed not on a particular anthropology, whether anti-Platonic or Platonic, but on a theology. This is why we may reasonably expect it to have the capacity to make a variety of anthropologies its own and find appropriate expression by means of them. Picture is the Basilica of San Francesco. The Papal Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi is the mother church of the Roman Catholic Order of Friars Minor — commonly known as the Franciscan Order — in Assisi, Italy, the city where St. Francis was born and died. A view of its Bacci Chapel, with fresco cycle Legend of the True Cross by our favorite Piero della Francesca

Taken from his 1988 book Eschatology, which remains a leading text on the “last things” — heaven and hell, purgatory and judgment, death and the immortality of the soul.

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The Resurrection from the Dead
In our reflections on the theology of death we have already considered the approach of Old Testament faith to the idea of resurrection. So we can begin here with the witness of the New Testament. The doctrine of the resurrection had not been generally accepted in intertestamental Judaism.

If we are looking for an explanation of why it became the fundamental confession of Christians we shall find it easily enough in the fact of Jesus’ resurrection as experienced and communicated by the witnesses. The risen Lord became, so to speak, the canon within the canon: the criterion in whose light tradition must be read. In the illumination which he brought, the internal struggles of the Old Testament were read as a single movement towards the One who suffered, was crucified and rose again. The travail of Old Testament faith became itself a testimony to the resurrection.

This new fact, which brought about the passage from the Old Testament to the New, was prepared for by the words of Jesus which interpreted it before it took place. Only because its intelligibility was prepared beforehand would the resurrection of Jesus gain any historical significance at all. Mere facts without words, without meaning, fall into nothingness as fully as do mere words to which no reality corresponds.

To this extent we can say with complete certainty that the origin of the Easter proclamation is unthinkable without some corresponding announcement by Jesus himself. In this context, the crucial text is Jesus’ discussion with the Sadducees about the resurrection as given in the gospel according to Mark.

In his debate with the Sadducees who argued in fundamentalistic fashion that only the Pentateuch might be acknowledged as Scripture, and took it as the exclusive rule of faith, Sola scriptura, Jesus is obliged to prove his thesis on the basis of the books of Moses. He does so in a way which is both exciting and wonderfully simple.

He points to the Mosaic concept of God, or more precisely to the divine self-presentation in the burning bush as reported by Moses: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” That means: those who have been called by God are themselves part of the concept of God. One would turn God into a God of the dead and thus stand the Old Testament concept of God on its head if one declared that those who belong to him who is Life are themselves dead.

This text shows that, in principle, Jesus adopted the Pharisaic over against the Sadduccean, variety of Jewish teaching which included, then, the confession of the resurrection. However, there is also something new in Jesus’ presentation. The resurrection moves into a central position in the expression of faith. It is no longer one tenet of faith among many others, but rather is identified with the concept of God itself.

Resurrection faith is contained in faith in God. The massive simplicity of Israel’s early faith is not obscured by the addition of other obligatory items but is deepened by a more acute seeing. Faith remains simple. It is simply faith in God. Yet it becomes both purer and richer by being thus deepened. All that business of demythologization is taken care of from the outset. Cosmological, anthropological, speculative, psychological and chronological aspects of religion: all these are set aside. What is affirmed is that God himself, and the communion he offers, are life. To belong to him, to be called him is to be rooted in life indestructible.

The nascent Church had the task of rethinking the earlier Pharisaic tradition, as applied to the words and actions of Jesus, in the light of the new fact of the Lord’s resurrection. On the basis of the original insights, this process would flow on in the stream of the Church’s faith through all succeeding generations. Within the limits of this book it would be impossible to catalogue every relevant text. We shall consider simply the two main witnesseses within the New Testament corpus, namely Paul and and John. In what follows we shall be looking at some characteristic texts in which the further development of the doctrine of the resurrection is already indicated.

Two Pauline texts especially important for our enquiry are Romans 6:1-14 and First Corinthians 15. In the letter to the Romans, baptism is interpreted as being engrafted onto the death of Christ. By baptism we enter on a common destiny with that of Jesus and so with the death which was his fate. But that death is ordered intrinsically to the resurrection. Of necessity, then, suffering and dying with Christ means at the same time a participation in the hope of the resurrection. One permits oneself to be inserted into the passion of Christ since that is the place at which resurrection breaks forth.

The theological concept of resurrection which we discovered in Mark 12 suddenly becomes quite concrete. It becomes, in fact, Theo-Christological in a suitable correspondence with the Christological extension of the concept of God which had taken place in the period between the historical ministry and Paul’s calling to the apostolate. Communion with God, which is the native place of life indestructible, finds its concrete form in sharing in the body of Christ. Through the sacramental dimension of this idea, the Church’s Liturgy and the Church herself as the bearer of the Liturgy become part of the same doctrine.

Theo-Christology also possesses an ecclesiological aspect. In comparison with the simple grandeur of the words of Jesus things may seem to have become rather complicated. It is more correct to say that they have become, rather, more concrete. What is now described in more detail is how the belonging to God that Jesus spoke of actually takes place. The fundamental structure of the doctrine is not impaired but remains fully intact. Faith in the resurrection is not part of some speculation in cosmology or the theology of history but is bound up with a person, with God in Christ. Thus the theologizing of resurrection faith is also its personalization.

In the other Pauline text, First Corinthians 15, we find the apostle engaged in controversy with spiritualizing re-interpretations of faith in the resurrection. In such re-interpretation, resurrection as a future bodily event touching both the cosmos and our own destiny is called into serious question. What precisely was being put in its place the text hardly permits us to say. But some light is thrown thereon by Second Timothy 2:18 where the author mentions a view of the Gospel for which “the resurrection has already happened.” Here the sacramental foretaste of the resurrection hope has been misconceived. The resurrection event is robbed of its futurist character, and identified with the event of becoming or being a Christian.

Resurrection thus undergoes a “mystical” or “existential” reduction. It is probably ideas of this kind which lie behind the Corinthian denial of the resurrection as well. In opposing them, the apostle has to emphasize that the resurrection is not simply a mystical or existential assurance to the Christian in the present. In the last analysis, this would mean nothing: your faith would be vain. Rather is the resurrection a pledge to the future of man and the cosmos, and in this sense a pledge to space, time and matter. History and cosmos are not realities alongside spirit, running on into a meaningless eternity or sinking down into an equally meaningless nothingness.

In the resurrection, God proves himself to be the God also of the cosmos and of history. To this extent, the temporal and cosmic elements in the Jewish belief in the resurrection take their places within Christian confession. Yet they are strictly related to the new theological and Christological structure, and in this way the inner simplicity of that structure remains untouched. The point is still the same. If the dead do not rise, then Christ has not arisen. The resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the dead are not two discrete realities but one single reality which in the end is simply the verification of faith in God before the eyes of history.

We should look as well at two monuments to Johannine theology: John 6 and John 11. The story of Lazarus in John 11 leads up to the affirmation, “I am the resurrection and the life.” The Theo-Christological conception of the resurrection met with in Paul finds here its purest and most consistent form.

The evangelist has found his way back to the utter simplicity of that vision in Mark 12. He has translated its theology into Christology in a systematic fashion. “He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” The bond with Jesus is, even now, resurrection. Where there is communion with him, the boundary of death is overshot here and now. It is in this perspective that we must understand the Discourse on the Eucharist

In John 6, feeding on Jesus’ word and on his flesh, that is, receiving him by both faith and sacrament, is described as bring nourished with the bread of immortality. The resurrection does not appear as a distant apocalyptic event but as an occurrence which takes place in the immediate present.

Whenever someone enters into the ‘I’ of Christ, he has entered straight away into the space of unconditional life. The evangelist does not raise the question of an intermediate state between death and resurrection, a rupture in life, precisely because Jesus is himself the resurrection.

Faith, which is the contact between Jesus and myself, vouchsafes here and now the crossing of death’s frontier. the entire Old Testament inheritance is thus presented in the new mode of Christological transformation. In the Old Testament, it had become clear that death is the absence of communication in the midst of life. Similarly, it had become evident that love is a promise of life. But now it becomes manifest that a love stronger than death actually exists. The borderline between Sheol and life runs through our very midst, and those who are in Christ are situated on the side of life, and that everlastingly.

Bultmann took this Johannine theology to be the perfect expression of authentic Christianity. As we know, this means for him that resurrection is to be interpreted exclusively and without remainder in an “existential” sense. He is obliged to treat St. John’s references to the Last Day” as the interpolations of a later ecclesiastical redactor, whose effect is to drag down the lofty insights of the evangelist to the crude level of the Church populace.

Yet in reality, when the work of the evangelist is thus snapped in two fragments, not even the aspect which Bultmann favors can survive. If the passage into the Christological sphere be not an entry into that unconditional life that abides even beyond earthly dying, then it is not a real passover at all. It is nothing more than a gyration in the inescapable futility of a private existence whose fundamental nothingness is not overcome but rather reconfirmed.

Just one more comment on the biblical data as a whole will be in order here. For the New Testament, the resurrection is a positive event, a message full of hope. By contras we know from the Old Testament, with its phenomenological analysis of “life” and “death,” that when human existence issues in opposition to God, in the nothingness of spiritual shipwreck, it cannot itself be called “life.”

On the contrary, such a fate is really the definitive presence of “death.” Even for resurrection faith this possibility-which of course must not be confused with the sheer annihilation of the human existent — still remains open. We will have to look at it in greater detail somewhat later.

Meanwhile, let us try to formulate a conclusion. Faith in the resurrection is a central expression of the Christological confession of God. It follows, indeed, from the concept of God. Its emphasis is placed not on a particular anthropology, whether anti-Platonic or Platonic, but on a theology. This is why we may reasonably expect it to have the capacity to make a variety of anthropologies its own and find appropriate expression by means of them.

But at the same , and equally, we must expect that this theology will confront all anthropologies with its own critical measuring rod. From its thought of God it draws forth a number of affirmations about man. On the one hand, the new life already begun and will nevermore be snuffed out. On the other hand, that vita nuova is ordered to the transformation of all life, to a future wholeness for man and for the world.

Posted in Pope Benedict XVI, The New Testament, The Resurrection, Theology | Tagged Faith in the resurrection, First Corinthians 15, Jesus' discussion with the Sadducees about the resurrection, John 11, John 6, Mark 12, Resurrection faith, Romans 6: 1-14, the fundamental confession of Christians, The Resurrection from the Dead | Leave a Comment »

The Transfiguration – Fr. Romano Guardini

April 1, 2013

The Transfiguration is the summer lightning of the coming Resurrection. Also of our own resurrection, for we too are to partake of that transfigured life. To be saved means to share in the life of Christ. We too shall rise again, and our bodies will be transformed by the spirit, which itself is transformed by God. In us mortals blissful immortality will once awaken; read the magnificent fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians.

The words with which Jesus informs his disciple more and more pressingly that he will have to suffer have something special about them. This is evident already earlier, when his enemies demand the great Messianic sign as proof of his identity. He retorts that he will give this unbelieving generation no sign other than that of the prophet Jonas. And there follows the mysterious hint: “For even as Jonas was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). And in three of the formal proclamations of his passion made on the final journey to Jerusalem he says that he will suffer and die and rise again

When Luke says that the apostles did not understand, that his meaning was hidden from them, he means that for them the idea of a dying Messiah was simply inconceivable; yet even less conceivable must have been the idea of his Resurrection. Clarity came only with Easter:

“And it carne to pass, while they were wondering what to make of this, that, behold, two men stood by them in raiment. And when the women were struck with fear and bowed their faces to the ground, they said to them, ^`Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. I remember how he spoke to you while he was yet in Galilee, saying Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men crucified, and on the third day rise.”
(Luke 24:5-8)_.

From words, as from the whole life of our Lord, one thing is evident: for Jesus there was no such thing as death alone. He accepted his death, spoke of it with increasing incisiveness, but always inseparably bound to to resurrection.

Did Jesus live our human existence? Certainly. Did he die our death? Most assuredly; our very salvation depends upon his being like us in all things, sin excepted (Hebrews 4:15). Yet there is something behind his living and dying that is more than life and death in the nearest meaning of the words. Something for which we really should have another name, unless we limit the word “life” to the special sense it has in John, inventing a new word, a pale reflection of this, for all other purposes. An illimitable abundance and holy invulnerability in Jesus’ person made it possible for him to be entirely one of us yet different from us all; not only to live our existence, but to transmute it, plucking the “sting” from both life and death (1 Corinthians: 15:56).

What a strange phenomenon this thing called life! It is the a priori of everything, foundation of existence which, when threatened, responds with that unqualified reaction known as self-defense, which has its own laws. It is a miracle so precious that at times the bliss of it is overwhelming. Life enjoys, abstains from, suffers, struggles, creates. It enfolds and permeates things, joins with other life resulting not in a mere sum, but in new and manifold vitality.

Foremost and fundamental, it is and remains an inexplicable enigma. For is it not strange that in order to possess one thing we must relinquish another? That in order to do anything of genuine value, we focus our attention on it and away from all else? That when we wish to do justice to one person we do injustice to all others, if only by not likewise accepting them into our range of heart, simply because there is not room enough for everyone? That when we experience any powerful sensation, then only in ignorance of what it is, the instant we try to understand it, the current is cut.

Wakefulness is wonderful but tiring, and we long to lose ourselves in sleep. Sleep is pleasant, but how terrible to sleep away half our lives! Life is unity. It demands containment of things; demands that we preserve our entity in the superabundance around us, and yet that we throw the fullness of that entity into our slightest act.

In all directions runs the cracks. Everywhere we look we are faced with an either-or, this-or-that. And woe to us if we do not choose, for from the clearcut choice of the one or the other, depends the decency of existence. The moment we attempt to grab everything, we have nothing properly. If we try to do justice to everyone, we are just to no one, only contemptible. As soon as we reach out to embrace the whole, our individuality dissolves into nothing.

Thus we are forced to make clear decisions, and by so doing — woe again! — to cut into our existence. Really, life has something impossible about it! It is forced to desire what it can never have. It is as though from the very start some fundamental mistake had been made, as evinced by everything we do. And then the dreadful transitoriness of it all. Is it possible things exist only through self-destruction? Doesn’t to live mean to pass over? The more intensively we live, the swifter the passing. Doesn’t death begin already in life?

With desperate truth a modern biologist has defined life as the movement towards death. Yet what a monstrosity to define life only as part of death! Is death then better ordered? Must we surrender our deepest instinct to Biology? Research has pointed out that early man experienced death differently from us. He by no means considered it something self-understood, as the necessary antipode of life. Instinctively he felt that death was not only unnecessary, but wrong. Where it occurred it came as the result of a particular cause, of a spiritual power of evil — even in cases of accident, old age, or death in battle. Let us wait a moment with our smile and with an open mind try to accept the possibility of the primitive’s being closer to the truth than the professor.

Is death self-understood? If it were, we should accept it with a sense, however heavy, of fulfillment. Where is there such a death? True, here or there we find someone who sacrifices his life for some great cause; or another who has grown weary of the burden of and accepts death with a sense of relief. But does the man exist who from the very essence of his vitality, consents to death? I have never ,met him, and what I have heard of him was poppycock. Man’s natural stand to death is one of defense and protest, both rooted deep in the core of his being. Death is not self-understood, and every attempt to make it so ends in immeasurable melancholy.

Nevertheless, this life and death of ours belong together. When the romanticists attempted to make them the opposite poles of existence, comparing them with light and dark, height and depth, ascent and decline, this was aesthetic thoughtlessness under which lay a demonic illusion. But on one point they were right: our present forms of living and dying do belong together. They are two sides of the same fact — a fact which did not exist in Jesus.

In him there was something that towered above our little life and death. He lived more deeply and purely than it is ever possible for us to live. It has been pointed out that Jesus’ life was poor and uneventful in comparison with that of Buddha through which streamed all the good things of earth, both material and spiritual: power, art, wisdom, family life, solitude, wealth and its renunciation, and above all, length of days, which enabled him to experience existence in all its breadth and depth. Strangely brief, almost fragmentary by contrast, Jesus’ life and work. Yet how could it have been otherwise in a life whose essence was not richness, but sacrifice?

Nevertheless, what Jesus did experience, every gesture, every act, every encounter, he experienced with an intensity that out-weighted mere number and multifariousness. There was more to his meeting a fisherman, a beggar, a captain than in Buddha’s acquaintance with all the strata of human existence. Jesus really lived our life and died our death, real death (its terrors were only the more terrible for the divine strength and sensitivity of his life) yet everything was different both in his living and in his dying.

What decides the essence of a human life? In St. Augustine we find a thought which at first strikes us as strange, but which, carefully weighed, leads deep into existence. Asked whether the souls of men and the spiritual beings of angels are immortal, he answers: No. Naturally, man’s soul, being spirit, and hence indestructible, cannot die as his body dies; it cannot disintegrate. Still this is not yet immortality as the Gospels know it, immortality that comes not from the soul, but directly from God. (Unlike that of ox or ass, man’s body receives its life from the soul; his essential vitality is carried over from his soul in an arc of flame.) The life of those souls who appear in Revelation, however, comes directly from God in the arc of flame known as grace. In that life, not only the soul, but also till body participates in grace, and the whole fervent being, body .and soul, draws its life from God. That final stage then is true, sacred immortality.

God has shaped human life mysteriously indeed. Man’s essence is meant to leap up to its God and return with the life it has taken from him. Man should live in a downward-sweeping movement that begins in heaven, not from earth upward, as animals do. His body should draw its sustenance from his spirit, his spirit from God; thus man’s whole being would be infused with ever-circulating vitality.

But sin has broken this entity; sin that was the will to autonomous existence, that desired “to be as Gods” (Genesis 3:5). And the arc of fire burned out; the ardent circle collapsed. True, man’s rational soul, being indestructible, remains, but its indestructibility has become a shadowy Ersatz. The body also remains, since it is the soul’s necessary covering, but it now covers a `dead’ soul, one no longer capable of transmitting to the body that life which God intended it to have. Thus life has become simultaneously real and unreal, ordered and chaotic, permanent and fleeting.

It is this that was different in Jesus. In him the flaming arc still burned divinely pure and strong, and not only as grace, but as Holy Spirit. His humanity lived from God in the fullness of the Holy Ghost, through whom he was made man, and in whom he lived to the end — and not only as a God-loving man lives, but as God and man.

There is still more to this: only he can possess humanity like Christ’s who not only clings to God, but who “is” God. Such humanity is alive in quite a different way from ours. The curve of fire ‘between’ the inseparable Son of God and Son of Man is that mystery behind Jesus’ life and death that enabled him to live our human life and die our human death more profoundly than we ourselves. With him life and death assume new dimensions.

Matthew reports on the wonderful incident which took place on the last trip to Jerusalem.

“Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James and his brother John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves, and was transfigured before them. And his face shone as the sun, and his garments became white as snow. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elias talking together with him. Then Peter addressed Jesus, saying, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here. If thou wilt, let us set up three tents here, one for thee, one for Moses, and one for Elias.’ As he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, `This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear him.’ And on hearing it the disciples fell on their faces and were exceedingly afraid. And Jesus came near and touched them, and said to them, `Arise, and do not be Afraid.’ But lifting up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.

“And as they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus cautioned them, saying, `Tell the vision to no one, till the Son of Man has risen from the dead’ “
Matthew 17:1-9

By “vision” here is meant the particular kind of vision outside the realm of hitherto known experience, with all the mysterious and disquieting traits of an act of heaven: light which comes from no natural source but belongs to the spheres of inner reality; likewise the “cloud,” which has nothing to do with the meteorologic forms we know, but is something for which there is no satisfactory word — brightness that conceals rather than reveals, heavenliness unveiled yet unapproachable.

Further visionary characteristic is the suddenness with which the figures appear and disappear, leaving behind them the emptiness of an earth abandoned by heaven. This vision then is nothing subjective, no suddenly projected inner picture, but response to a spiritual reality, as the senses daily respond to physical realities. The event does not merely descend upon Jesus, or take place within him; it also breaks from him, revelation of inmost being, arc of the live flame within him become apparent.

In the gloom of fallen creation the Logos blazes celestial light but the dark asserts itself; “… grasped it not …” as John says in the opening of his Gospel. Thus Christ’s truth and love, which long for nothing but the freedom to spend themselves, are forced back into his heart — sorrow God alone can measure and comprehend. Here, on the mountain though, for one moment, they break through in all their radiant clarity. This was the Light which had come into the world and was powerful enough to illuminate it completely. On the way to death the glory of what may be revealed only after death breaks out like a jet of flame, burning illustration of Christ’s own words on death and resurrection.

What is revealed here is not only the glory of pure, angelic spirit, but of the spirit through the body, glory of the spiritualized body of man. Not the glory of God alone, not a piece of disclosed heaven, not only the sheen of the Lord as it hovered over the ark of the covenant, but the glory of the God-Logos in the Son of Man. Life above life and death; life of the body, but issue of the spirit the spirit, but issue of the Logos; life of the man Jesus, but issue of the Son of God.

The Transfiguration is the summer lightning of the coming Resurrection. Also of our own resurrection, for we too are to partake of that transfigured life. To be saved means to share in the life of Christ. We too shall rise again, and our bodies will be transformed by the spirit, which itself is transformed by God. In us mortals blissful immortality will once awaken; read the magnificent fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians.

Such is the eternal life in which we believe. “Eternal” does mean merely endless; we are that as spiritual creatures of God anyway, “by nature.” But the general indestructibility of the soul is not yet the blissful, eternal life that Revelation describes. That comes to us from God. Actually, “eternal” life has nothing to do with the length that life; it is not the opposite of transitory life. Perhaps we come closest to the truth when we define it as life which participates in the life of God.

Such life has received from him its conclusiveness, its all-inclusivenes, its unity in diversity, its infiniteness and immanent oneness (things that our present life lacks, protest as we may and must for the sake of that dignity with which God himself endowed us).

In the new life such eternity exists for all, whether one is a great saint or the least “in the kingdom of heaven.” The differences exist within eternity itself, where, admittedly, they are as great as the differences in love. This eternal life does not wait till after death to begin. It already exists.

The essence of Christian consciousness is founded on its presence — through faith. The degrees of that consciousness are limitless and dependent on many factors: its clarity strength, and “tangibility” (the depth to which it is actually experienced and lived).

Whatever our measure, something of it is always behind our living and our dying, whether given by grace or seized by faith: something of that flaming arc which broke through for the first time on Tabor, to reveal itself victoriously in the Resurrection.

Posted in Fr. Romano Guardini, The Transfiguration | Tagged Eternal Life, life, life and grace, sacred immortality, self-understood death, Sin, the essence of a human life, The Holy Spirit, The transfiguration | Leave a Comment »

The Transfiguration – Fulton J. Sheen

March 29, 2013

The Transfiguration can not only be seen as foreshadowing of the glorification or the resurrection, but it is the promise that discipleship can bring both to this life and the life to come.

Three important scenes of Our Lord’s life took place on mountains. On one, He preached the Beatitudes, the practice of which would bring a Cross from the world; on the second, He showed the glory that lay beyond the Cross; and on the third, He offered Himself in death as a prelude to His glory and that of all who would believe in His name.

The second incident took place within a few weeks, at most, of Calvary, when He took with Him to a high mountain Peter, James, and John — Peter the Rock; James destined to be the first Apostle-martyr; and John the visionary of the future glory of the Apocalypse. These three were present when He raised from the dead the daughter of Jairus. All three needed to learn the lesson of the Cross and to rectify their false conceptions of the Messiahs. Peter had vehemently protested against the Cross, while James and John had been throne-seekers. All three would later on sleep in the Garden of Gethsemane during His agony. To believe in His Calvary, they must see the glory that shone beyond the scandal of the Cross.

On the mountaintop, after praying, He became transfigured before them as the glory of His Divinity flashed through the threads of His earthly raiment. It was not so much a light that was shining from without as the beauty of the Godhead that shone from within. It was not the full manifestation of Divinity which no man of earth could see; nor was His body glorified, for He had not risen from the dead, but it possessed a quality of glory. His crib, His carpenter trade, His bearing opprobrium from enemies were a humiliation; fittingly there should also be epiphanies of glory, as the angels’ song at His birth and the voice of the Father during the baptism.

Now as He nears Calvary, a new glory surrounds Him. The voice again invests Him in the robes of the priesthood, to offer sacrifice. The glory that shone around Him as the Temple of God was not something with which He was outwardly invested, but rather a natural expression of the inherent loveliness of “Him who came down from heaven.” The wonder was not this momentary radiance around Him; it was rather that at all other times it was repressed.

As Moses, after communing with God, put a veil over his face to hide it from the people of Israel, so Christ had veiled His glory in humanity. But for this brief moment, He turned it aside so that men might see it; the outgoing of these rays was the transitory proclamation to every human eye of the Son of Righteousness. As the Cross came nearer, His glory became greater. So it may be that the coming of the anti-Christ or the final crucifixion of the good will be preceded by an extraordinary glory of Christ in His members.

In man, the body is a kind of a cage of the soul. In Christ, the Body was the Temple of Divinity. In the Garden of Eden, we know that man and woman were naked but not ashamed. This is because the glory of the soul before sin shone through the body and became a kind of a raiment. Here too in the Transfiguration the Divinity shone through humanity. This was probably mud more natural than for Christ to be seen in any other pose namely, without that glory. It took restraint to hide the Divinity that was in Him.

And even as He prayed, the fashion of His face
Was altered, and His garments
Became white and dazzling;
And two men appeared conversing with Him,
Moses and Elias, seen now in glory;
And they spoke of the Death
which He was to achieve at Jerusalem.
Luke 9:30, 31

The Old Testament was coming to meet the New. Moses the publisher of the Law, Elias the chief of the Prophets — both of them were seen shining in the Light of Christ Himself Who, as the Son of God, gave the Law and sent the Prophets. The subject of conversation of Moses, Elias and Christ was not what He had taught, but His sacrificial death; it was His duty as Mediator which fulfilled the Law, the Prophets and the Eternal Decrees. Their work done, they pointed to Him to see the Redemption accomplished.

Thus did He keep before Him the goal of being “numbered with the transgressors,” as Isaias had foretold. Even in this moment of glory, the Cross is the theme of the discourse with the celestial visitors. But it was death conquered, sin atoned and the grave despoiled. The light of glory which enveloped the scene was joy like the “Now let me die,” which Jacob said on seeing Joseph, or like the Nunc Dimittis which Simeon uttered on seeing the Divine Babe. Aeschylus, in his Agamemnon, describes a soldier returning to his native land after the Trojan War and in his joy saying that he was willing to die. Shakespeare puts the same joyful words on the lips of Othello after the perils of voyage:

If it were now to die
‘Twere now to be most happy;
for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

But in the case of Our Lord, it was as St. Paul said, “Having joy set before Him, He endured the Cross.”

What the Apostles noticed as particularly beautiful and glorified were His face and His garments — the face which later would be splattered with blood flowing from a crown of thorns; and the garments, which would be a robe of scorn with which sneering Herod would dress Him. The gossamer of light which now surrounded Him would be exchanged for nakedness when He would be stripped on a hill.

While the Apostles were standing at what seemed to be the very vestibule of heaven, a cloud formed, overshadowing them:

And now, there was a voice which said
To them out of the cloud,
This is My beloved Son,
In whom I am well pleased;
To Him, then, listen.
Matthew 17:6

When God sets up a cloud it is a manifest sign that there are bonds which man dare not break. At His baptism, the heavens were opened; now at the Transfiguration they opened again to install Him in His office as Mediator, and to distinguish Him from Moses and the Prophets. It was heaven itself that was sending Him on His mission, not the perverse will of men. At the baptism, the voice from heaven was for Jesus Himself, on the Hill of the Transfiguration it was for the disciples.

The shouts of “Crucify” would be too much for their ears if they did not know that it behooved the Son to suffer. It was not Moses not Elias they were to hear, but Him who apparently would die like other teacher, but was more than a prophet. The voice was testified to the unbroken and undivided union of Father and Son; it recall also the words of Moses that in due time God would raise up from Israel One like Himself Whom they should hear.

The Apostles, awakening at the brilliance of what they had seen, found their spokesman, as almost always, in Peter.

And just as these were parting from Him,
Peter said to Jesus, Master
It is well that we should be here;
Let us make three booths in this place,
One for Thee, and one for Moses,
And one for Elias.
But he spoke at random.
Luke 9: 33, 34

A week before, Peter was trying to find a way to glory without the Cross. Now he thought the Transfiguration a good short cut to salvation by having a Mount of the Beatitudes or a Mount the Transfiguration without the Mount of Calvary. It was Peter’s second attempt to dissuade Our Lord from going to Jerusalem be crucified.

Before Calvary he was the spokesman for all the who would enter into glory without purchasing it by self-denial and sacrifice. Peter in his impetuosity here felt that the glory which God brought down from the heavens, and of which the angels sang at Bethlehem, could be tabernacled among men without a war against sin. Peter forgot that as the dove rested his foot only after the deluge, so true peace comes only after the Crucifixion.

Like a child, Peter tried to capitalize and make permanent this transient glory. To the Savior, it was an anticipation of what was reflected from the other side of the Cross; to Peter, it was a manifestation of an earthly Messianic glory that ought to housed. The Lord Who called Peter “Satan” because he would have a crown without a Cross now ignored his non-crucial humanism, for He knew that “he spoke at random.” But after the Resurrection, Peter would know. Then he would recall the scene, saying:

We had been eye-witnesses of His exaltation.
Such honor, such glory was bestowed on Him
By God the Father, that a voice came to Him
Out of the splendor which dazzles human eyes;
This, it said, is My beloved Son,
In Whom I am well pleased; to Him, then, listen.
We, his companions on the holy mountain,
Heard that Voice coming from heaven, and now
The word of the prophets gives us more
Confidence than ever. It is with good reason
That you are paying so much attention to that Word;
It will go on shining, like a lamp in
Some darkened room, until the dawn breaks,
And the day star rises in your hearts.
2 Peter 1:16-20

Posted in Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, The Transfiguration | Tagged The transfiguration | Leave a Comment »

Blessed are the Peacemakers; Blessed are You when Men Persecute You — Peter Kreeft

January 2, 2013

The peace that Christ blesses is the peace the world cannot give. It is peace with neighbor, self, and God; not with the world, the flesh, and the devil. It not a peace with greed, lust, and pride, but the peace that comes through poverty, chastity, and obedience, three most counter-cultural virtues.

The Seventh And Eighth Beatitudes
Seventh, Christ blesses not peace, but peacemakers. Peacemakers are not pacifists. Peacemakers are warriors, but they are spiritual warriors, warriors against war. Sometimes war can be conquered only by war. Everyone speaks highly of peacemaking. How, then, is that countercultural, except to terrorists? Because the peace that Christ blesses is the peace the world cannot give. It is peace with neighbor, self, and God; not with the world, the flesh, and the devil. It not a peace with greed, lust, and pride, but the peace that comes through poverty, chastity, and obedience, three most countercultural virtues. These two kinds of peace are in fact at war with each other.

Our world’s peacemakers will embrace Christ’s peace, but only if they do not have to give up the world’s peace and only if they do not have to fight for it. Thus, paradoxically, we lack true peace because we are reluctant to war against the enemies of peace, and also because we do not put the three ingredients of Christ’s peace in the proper order. We preach incessantly about peace with neighbor, but seldom about peace with God.

Thomas Merton reminds us of this necessary order in three wonderfully simple sentences when he says, “We are not at peace with each other because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” Christ does the same in putting the first table of the law first, as Moses did. We need to relearn lesson one.

Christ blesses peacemakers, but when you are at war, you can make peace only by waging and winning war. Christianity is judgmental and repressive and negative. For Christianity says to us that we are at war, ever since a certain incident in Eden, and war judges the enemy (that’s why a war is fought: because a judgment is made about an enemy) and represses the enemy (that is what defense is: repressing the enemy’s offense) and negates the enemy, destroys the enemy (that is what offense is, destroying the enemy’s defense). Our enemies are real, just as real as flesh and blood; they are principalities and powers. They are not men; they are demons. And they are also our own sins.

Our Lord told us that he came into the world to bring a sword to wage and win this war. The sword is a cross. Happiness does not consist in pacifism; happiness consists in peace, and peace can be obtained only by waging and winning a war to make peace. The cross is like a syringe; it gives us a blood transfusion. It is the opposite of a normal sword. What Christ does is exactly the opposite of what Dracula does. Dracula, like the demons, takes our blood, our life. Christ gives us a blood transfusion. We are on a battlefield between Christ and Dracula.

When Christ says that peacemakers are blessed because they “will be called the sons of God,” he does not mean that peacemaking is the cause and being a son of God is the effect. The other way around: only the sons of God can make God’s peace, do God’s work. Peacemaking is the effect. But peacemakers are called sons of God. They are known to be sons of God because we recognize the cause by the effect.

Blessed are You when Men Persecute You
The eighth beatitude blesses not just pain or suffering, but persecution, that is, suffering imposed by rejection and hatred. This is the only one of the beatitudes that Christ repeats, both to emphasize it as the final and most outrageous beatitude of all, and to emphasize that it is not merely the pain, but the rejection, the reviling, the slander, that is blessed.

But how can this be? Everyone wants to be loved. How can it be blessed to be hated? One possible explanation is utterly inconsistent with Christ: a kind of sneering superiority, as if it were blessed to say to those who hate us, “I wouldn’t want love from worthless fools like you.” Surely it is great grief that the persecutors are fools. Of course they are not worthless fools; if they were, there would be no reason for our grief for them. And therefore grief on our part that they are not blessed is real, if we love our persecutors as Christ does and commands us to: “Love your enemies.” Notice that he does not say, “Do not use the word enemy, it is not nice.” We have enemies, but we must love them.

The reward that makes persecution blessed is the same as the one that makes poverty blessed: the kingdom of Heaven. Persecution has the same blessing as poverty because persecution is a form of poverty, poverty not of money, but of love, that is, of being loved. Both money and love are blessed only when they are given: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

We desperately crave love from the world. But the world is not Christ. The world is fallen, fallen into the knowledge of good and evil. The world is therefore afraid of Christ as the cavity is afraid of the dentist or as the liar is afraid of the light. (I use the word world here in the scriptural sense: not as the planet (Gaea, matter), which God created good, but as the time word, eon, that designates the era of sin, the kingdom of the devil.

Persecution is not blessed in itself, but it becomes blessed if it is persecution “for righteousness’ sake”, for the sake of God, not only explicitly, but also implicitly, that is, if you are persecuted for being that which God is: for being Godlike, for being righteous. Thus the righteous pagan like Socrates is also blessed when he is misunderstood, hated, rejected, persecuted, and killed, like Christ.

Just as your peacemaking is a sign that you are a child of God, and thus blessed, so being persecuted for the sake of your righteousness is also a sign that you are a member of His kingdom and thus blessed. Blessing comes only from what is good, and persecution, poverty, etc. are not good in themselves. Christ is not a Stoic or a Hindu or a Buddhist; blessing does not come from not caring about the good things of this world, which God created, nor from seeing through this world as an illusion, as maya, nor from the clever device of spiritual euthanasia by which our desires for things are quenched so that we can avoid the suffering that they bring. No, the Christian knows something real and good in itself that the Stoic, the Hindu and the Buddhist do not know (even though they may implicitly long for it and even attain it in the end), and that something is, simply, Jesus Christ. He makes blessed even the nails in His cross. And only He makes them blessed.

He that Loses His Life for My Sake shall Find It
Our ninth desire is for life, and the ninth blessing is death. Death contains all the other paradoxes. Christ teaches us this blessing of death not in words only, but also in deed — by his cross, which sums up all the beatitudes.

And the cross reveals the hidden source of all eight beatitudes: the historical fact, not the abstract principle, that God, out of sheer love for us, became incarnate, died, and rose to save us from sin and death. As Dorothy Sayers said, “The dogma is the drama.” By this dramatic judo, death itself was turned into an instrument for life, as an earthen dam is overwhelmed by the waters of the flood that conquers it, and the dam is swept along and made into a part of the flood itself. So the flood of God’s infinite life, when it entered our world, not only conquered death but turned death itself into life’s most powerful instrument. In the words of the old anthem “Open our Eyes”, “Thou hast made death glorious and triumphant, for through its portals we enter into the presence of the Living God.”

Blessed are the Peacemakers
We anticipate that final death, and its final blessing, in all our little deaths now. Our participations in Christ’s eight beatitudes are those little deaths. We not only anticipate it, we actually participate in it, in these little deaths, the real little (or large) dyings that we do every day. And we also anticipate and actually participate in the final blessing, “the presence of the Living God,” every time we “open our eyes” and see who it is that is really present there. Where our eyes see only the most undramatic little wafer of bread, look who is present! How absurd that we find it easier to get up off our knees than to get down!

The secret of happiness is very simple. It is Jesus. Not just the philosophy of Jesus, but Jesus, his real presence. He actually comes to us in such unlikely vehicles as poverty, pain and persecution. He has weird taste in vehicles. He came to Jerusalem on a donkey. And when he comes, he acts with power, though usually also with subtlety and not bombast. He really works!

I am haunted by my memories of a few precious hours in the company of two happiest groups of people I have ever met in my life. In both cases I was supposed to speak to them. In both cases, they spoke to me — with very few words, like Mother Teresa, like Jesus. One group was in fact Mother Teresa’s nuns, in Boston’s worst slum. Another was a convent of contemplative Carmelites in Danvers, Massachusetts. What they said to me, simply by being who they were, was unmistakable: “See how happy I am; see how happy Jesus makes me!” This is how happiness happens: it is not so much taught, like math, but caught, like measles.

The Church is in the business of spreading the good infection, like in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, only this is a good infection. And that is “the new evangelism”. And it is also the old evangelism that won the world two thousand years ago. It will do it again, for there is no argument against real happiness. The smiles of the saints are the arguments that will win the world for Christ again. They are unarguable. Only one thing, then, is necessary to create a world of happiness from pole to pole. And it is not doing any of the many good things that Martha did, but doing the one thing that Mary did: just sit at Jesus’ feet; just be in his presence, know his love, all day. That is the scandalously simple secret of happiness.

Posted in Happiness, Jesus, Peter Kreeft, The Sermon on the Mount, Understanding the Beatitudes | Tagged Blessed are the peacemakers, Blessed are You when Men Persecute You | Leave a Comment »

Happiness: Blessed are Those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness — Peter Kreeft

December 31, 2012

Nothing more conspicuously distinguishes us than our lack of courage, our lack of passion. Courage is when there is no other option.

Christ’s fourth beatitude, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” cuts to the rotten flesh at the heart of the modern world.

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It shows a striking difference between our culture and all others, especially our own culture’s past. As Solzhenitsyn said in his great and shocking 1978 Harvard commencement address, nothing more conspicuously distinguishes us than our lack of courage, our lack of passion.

You see this strikingly when you live in another culture, or even when you read the writings of another culture, like the Middle Ages or ancient Israel. Kierkegaard says in Either/Or,

Let others complain that our age is wicked; my complaint is that it is wretched, for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace; they are themselves are pitiable like lace makers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God.

Even their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy. They do their duty, these shop-keeping souls, but they clip the coin a trifle. … They think that even if the Lord keeps a careful set of books, they may still cheat Him a little. Out upon them!

This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and Shakespeare. Those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate; they love; they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations; they sin.

The greatest good, according to our culture’s primary prophets, is self-esteem, self-satisfaction. Christ shocks us by blessing dissatisfaction, not the dissatisfaction with our place in the world, not worldly ambition, the profit motive, the American Dream, hunger for glory, honor, fame, power, wealth or success, but hunger and thirst for righteousness, for sanctity — dissatisfaction with our sins, passionate thirst for a sanctity we know we do not have, and know we must have.

There is one thing in the lives of all the saints that turns us off, and cuts of off, from perhaps the single most effective evangelistic weapon in the Church’s arsenal — using the lives of the saints — and that is the saints’ passionate insistence that they are great sinners, and their insistent passion for holiness. It’s not that we do not admire holiness; it’s that we do not admire the passion for holiness, the hunger and thirst for righteousness.

What Christ blesses, we curse as fanaticism, our soft, sophisticated culture’s worst insult. But this is Christ’s blessing. More than a blessing, it is a requirement. It is what our Lord requires us to be in order to be his, that is, to be a saint, that is, a fanatic, to love one thing infinitely, to put all our eggs in his basket. It contains only one pearl of great price. He uses a shocking word for our Laodicean [vocab: Lukewarm or halfhearted, esp. with respect to religion or politics] niceness: “Because you are neither hot nor cold I will spit you out of my mouth.” He is content with us only if we are discontent with ourselves.

Freud wrote that our civilization’s success in seeking contentment has produced instead greater discontent — a profound question, but he did not know the answer why. I think that was the profoundest thing he ever wrote, only one step from Augustine’s great answer, that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

Pascal, on the other hand, knew why, for his patient, unlike Freud’s, was himself, and his psychoanalyst, unlike Freud’s, was not himself, but Christ. And therefore he knew why we multiply our passions for little things, and decrease our passion for great thing, why we multiply diversions, and cultivate indifference, especially to death and our eternal destiny. He knew where this disease came from. He wrote,

The fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their whole being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature. With everything else they are quite different: they fear the most trifling things. They foresee them and feel them. The same man who spends many days and nights in fury and despair at losing some office, or some imaginary affront to his honor, is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death, but feels neither anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible spell, a supernatural torpor that points to a supernatural power as its cause.

Many thinkers have written sentences that begin like this: “There are only two kinds of people” or “There are only three kinds of people”. In fact, one version goes like this: “There are only two kinds of people, those who believe there are only two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” But Pascal’s version is the best I have ever heard. He writes, “There are only three kinds of people: those who seek God and have found Him — these are wise and happy; those who seek God and have not yet found Him — these are wise and unhappy; and those who live without either seeking God or finding Him — and these are both unwise and unhappy.” You see, it is the seeking, the hungering and thirsting, that makes all the difference, in fact, the eternal difference. Jesus said it even more succinctly than Pascal (Jesus spoke more succinctly than anyone ever): “Seek and you shall find,” implying that non-seekers do not find.

The Pharisees were non-seekers, like the pop psychologists, full of self-esteem. Therefore he said to them that he had come on earth to save everyone but them. He said, “Those who are sick need a physician, not those who are well. I came to call not the righteous, but sinners.”

Socrates said the same thing: on the intellectual level, there are only two kinds of people, fools who believe they are wise, and the wise who believe they are fools. Pascal says: “There are two kinds of people: sinners, who believe they are saints, and saints, who believe they are sinners.” Jesus says that the wise “fools” and the saints are right, and the clear empirical test for the difference between them is the hunger and thirst, the passion, the discontent.

When Christ says that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, that is, for sanctity, shall be satisfied, does he mean they shall be satisfied only in the next life? I think he means they will begin to be satisfied even in this one. Already in this life the saints have a peace and a joy that the world cannot give. They are at the same time dissatisfied and satisfied, like Romeo with Juliet, like you listening to a great symphony, or watching a great storm at sea.

By a wonderful paradox, the refusal to accept self-esteem turns out to be the highest self-esteem. To accept the title “sinner” means you are the King’s kid acting like an ape. To refuse that title and accept yourself as you are means that you are only a clever, successfully evolved ape, even when you act like a prince. What a privilege to sing, “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!” No ape, however evolved, can rise to the dignity of being a wretch. Only one destined for infinite, unending, and unimaginable ecstasy in spiritual marriage to God can bear the dignity of being a wretch. Only the betrothed is wretched until united with the Spouse.

Posted in Happiness, Peter Kreeft, Revelation, The New Testament, The Sermon on the Mount, Understanding the Beatitudes | Tagged 1978 Harvard commencement address, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Solzhenitsyn | Leave a Comment »

Happiness: The First Three Beatitudes — Peter Kreeft

December 28, 2012

As Chesterton said, “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ’s philosophy seems upside down.” We are looking at the earth and kicking up in rebellion against the heavens.

Christ proposes a vision of happiness which is the exact opposite of what everyone in the post-Christian West assumes to be the sources of the greatest happiness in life.

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Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
We say how blessed we are as individuals or as a nation when we have wealth. He says no, you are blessed when you are poor. Poor not only in your bank account, but even more than that, not less, poor down to the depths of your heart, poor in spirit, detached from riches, whether you are physically rich or poor.

When Harvard University invited Mother Teresa to give a commencement address, she shocked them by taking issue with the gracious invitation they sent to her, as “the most famous person in one of the world’s poorest nations, to address the world’s richest nation.” She said no, “India is not a poor nation; India is a very rich nation. She has a wealth of riches, true spiritual riches. And America is not a rich nation. She is a poor nation, in fact, a desperately poor nation. She slaughters her own unborn children.”

Why? Because the mother fears those children will be poor, or will make her poor. The mother fears that she will not be able to afford to have these children, as if children are like cars or computers, calculable items in the household’s economy, consumer goods rather than consumers, objects rather than subjects, part of the circle rather than the center of the circle.

The supposed insanity of Christ’s saying thus turns out to be an illusion of perspective. In a lunatic asylum, from the lunatics’ point of view, it is the sane outsider who is insane. How useful to have a continual supply of outsiders, the saints, to remind us of where we live: east of Eden, in a lunatic asylum. Christ gives us a map to show how far east of Eden we are. The poor in spirit, of course, are not the weak-spirited; they are exactly the opposite. They are strong enough to be detached from riches, that is, from the whole world. They are those who are strong enough not to be enslaved to their desires for the things of this world.

Blessed are Those who Mourn
Well, what could Christ possibly mean by his second beatitude? Weeping and mourning is certainly not an expression of contentment, of the painless state that we all long for as part of happiness. Yet Christ tells us that those who mourn are blessed. How ridiculous for some Bible translations to translate makarios by ‘happy’ in this verse, in a society that means by ‘happy’ simply subjectively satisfied or content. That translation would make Christ say, “Those who weep are content,” which is not a meaningful paradox, but a meaningless self-contradiction.

Mourning is the expression of inner discontent, of the gap between desire and satisfaction, that is, of suffering. Buddha founded an entire religion on the problem of suffering, or dukkha, and its cause, tanha, or greed, and its cure, the Noble Eightfold Path leading to nirvana, the abolition of both suffering and its source.

Unlike Buddha, Christ came not to free us from suffering, but to transform its meaning, to make it salvific. He came to save us from sin, and he did so precisely by embracing the suffering and death that are the result of sin. It must sound as absurd to a Buddhist to say that suffering is redemptive, as it would sound to a Christian to say that sin is redemptive. Each religion must accuse the other of the most radical practical error: confusing the problem with the solution.

The reason Christ gave for declaring mourners blessed is that they shall be comforted. For in hope this future is made present. It’s true that “one foot up and one foot down, that’s the way to London Town,” whether one is going to London to be crowned king or to be hanged on Traitor’s Gate. But the future destiny of the journey makes everything in the journey itself different, not just accidentally, but essentially, and not just extrinsically, but intrinsically. A journey to be hanged is tragic, even if it is in a comfortable coach. A journey to be crowned, even if it is in an uncomfortable wagon, is glorious.

St. Teresa said, “Looked at from the viewpoint of heaven, the most horribly painful earthly life will turn out to be no more than one night in an inconvenient hotel.” And Christ has the viewpoint of heaven. Christ is the viewpoint of heaven. Christ is heaven. In giving us himself, he gives us heaven, and its viewpoint, that is, his.

Blessed are the Meek
The meek who will inherit the earth, whom Christ calls blessed — who are they? They are not well-known. They do not thirst for honor, fame or glory, and do not usually have it.

We all want to be known. But God, who is supremely blessed, is anonymous. He works by nature most of the time. He hides instead of constantly showing his glory. He came as a baby, and died as an executed criminal, and lets himself be ignored. He lets himself be eaten daily, as what looks like a little piece of bread. He is utterly meek, and utterly blessed. If we are utterly meek, we will be utterly blessed. If we are half meek, we will be half blessed. If we are not meek, we will not be blessed, for God is the source of all blessedness, and God is meek. And the effect cannot be the opposite of the cause.

The meekness that Christ calls blessed in his third Beatitude is indeed in sharp contrast to the desire to conquer nature that Francis Bacon declared to be the new summum bonum, the new meaning of life on earth, and to the desire to conquer fortune that was Machiavelli’s new summum bonum. But it is not the contrast that the world thinks. It is not a blessing on wimps, sissies, dishrags, wallflowers, shrinking violets, worry-warts, Uriah Heeps, nebbishes, nerds or geeks. The meek are those who do not harm, who do not see life as competitive, because they understand the two premises from which this conclusion logically follows.

First, that the best things in life are spiritual things, not material things. That life’s meaning is to be found in wisdom and love and creativity, in understanding and sanctity and beauty, rather than in money or power or fame or land or military or athletic conquest.
And they understand the second principle, too, that spiritual things are not competitive. That they multiply when shared, while material things are divided when shared. Since happiness depends on understanding the best things in life, and since the best things in life are spiritual, and since spiritual things do not diminish when shared, and since what does not diminish when shared cannot be obtained by competition, and since competition is the alternative to meekness, therefore meekness makes for happiness.

We should not be surprised that Christ the Logos is at least as logical as Socrates. Or that we are not. That’s why his pure reason sounds outrageously paradoxical to us. As Chesterton said (it’s impossible to stop quoting Chesterton; that’s like stopping eating potato chips), “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ’s philosophy seems upside down.” We are looking at the earth and kicking up in rebellion against the heavens.

Posted in Happiness, Jesus, Moral Theology, The Sermon on the Mount, Understanding the Beatitudes | Tagged Blessed are the meek, Blessed are the poor in spirit, Blessed are Those who Mourn | Leave a Comment »

Ancient and Modern Concepts of Happiness – Peter Kreeft

December 26, 2012

We all seek happiness, and that we seek it as an end, not as a means. No one seeks happiness for any other reason.

Adapted from a lecture by Dr. Kreeft, who is a treasure of the Catholic Church:

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My topic today is Jesus’ concept of happiness. And we must begin with the dullest and most necessary preliminary: defining our term. Nearly everyone, from Aristotle to Freud, agrees that we all seek happiness, and that we seek it as an end, not as a means. No one seeks happiness for any other reason. We argue about other things, but not about happiness. We may say, “What good are riches if they don’t make you happy?” But we don’t say, “What good is happiness if it doesn’t make you rich?” This is clear, to both ancients like Aristotle and moderns like Freud.

But there is a very significant difference between the typically ancient and the typically modern meaning of happiness. Ancient words for happiness, like eudaimonia, or makarios in Greek or beatitudo in Latin, mean true, real blessedness, while the modern English word happiness usually means merely subjective satisfaction, or contentment, so that in modern English, if you feel happy, you’re happy. It makes no sense, in modern English, to tell someone, “You think you’re happy, but you’re not.”

But that is precisely the main point of the most famous book in the history of philosophy, Plato’s Republic: that justice, the all-inclusive virtue, is always profitable, that is, ‘happifying’. And injustice never is. Thus, that the just man, even if like Socrates, he has nothing else, is happy. And the unjust man is not, even if he has everything else, like Gyges, or Gollum, with his ring of power and invisibility. Thus, we should distinguish the ancient concept, which is really blessedness, from the modern, which is really contentment. I shall be talking about blessedness here.

Blessedness differs from contentment in four ways, all of which can be seen by analyzing the Greek word eudaimonia. First, it begins with the prefix eu, meaning good, thus implying that you have to be good, morally good, to be happy.
Second, daimon means spirit, thus implying that happiness is a matter of the soul, not the body and its external goods of fortune. The word happiness, by contrast, comes from the Old English word hap, meaning precisely fortune, luck or chance, which was the one Pagan thought category Christianity subtracted. In all other cases, Christianity added to Paganism. As Chesterton said, summing up all spiritual history in three sentences: “Paganism was the biggest thing in the world. Christianity was bigger, and everything since has been comparatively small.” If blessedness is spiritual, it is free. You are responsible for your eudaimonia, but happiness just happens.
Third, eudaimonia ends in ia, which means a lasting state, something permanent. Contentment is for a moment, blessedness for a lifetime. So much so that Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics could not make up his mind whether to agree or disagree with the saying “call no man happy ’til he is dead.” That is, wait for the end of the story to judge it.
Fourth, and most important of all, the state of eudaimonia is objective, whereas contentment is subjective. When we say happiness, we usually confuse these two meanings, the ancient and the modern. And that is not wholly unwise, because within the ancient concept of happiness, in a secondary way, there is also present the modern one: the need for some contentment, peace of mind, pleasure and at least a modicum of the gift of fortune. While within the modern concept of happiness, that is, within subjective contentment, there is also present, in a secondary way, a feeling for the need of something of the typically ancient ingredient, the need for at least some virtue and the feeling that the happiness, to be deep and lasting, ought to be real and earned and true happiness, whatever that may be.

We are about to explore Christ’s concept of happiness. It is typically ancient (blessedness) but it also includes the above ambiguity or doubleness of meaning: subjective satisfaction as well as objective perfection.

Our Concept of Happiness
Let’s look first at our concept of happiness. When I speak of our concept, who is us? I mean our culture, the mental landscape we all inhabit, even when we feel like aliens here, most generally the modern, post-Christian West, but most specifically contemporary America, as it would appear on opinion polls.

If an opinion poll were to ask Americans to list the nine most important ingredients in the happy life, they would probably give an answer pretty much like the following:

First, the most obvious, though not the profoundest ingredient, is probably wealth. If you notice your friend has a big smile on his face today, you most likely would say to him, “What happened to you? Did you just win the lottery?” If that’s what you’d say, it must be because that’s what would put the biggest smile on your face. And let’s face it; money can buy everything money can buy, which is a lot of stuff.
Second might be our culture’s most notable success, the conquest of nature and fortune by science and technology, allowing each of us to be an Alexander the Great, conqueror of the world.
Third would probably be freedom from pain. I think few of us would disagree that the single most valuable invention in the entire history of technology has been anesthetics.
Fourth would probably be self-esteem, the greatest good, according to nearly all of our culture’s new class of prophets, the secular psychologists — and secular psychologists are among the most secular of all classes in our society.
Fifth might be justice, securing one’s rights. Justice and peace summarize the social ideals of most Americans, the ideals they want for themselves and for the rest of the world.
Sixth, if we are candid, we have to include sex. To most Americans, this is the closest thing to heaven on Earth, that is ecstasy, mystical transcending of the ego — unless they’re surfers.
Seventh, we love to win, whether at war, at sports, at games of chance, in business, or even in our fantasies. Our positive self-esteem requires the belief that we are winners, not losers. We want to be successful, not failures.
Eighth, we want honor. We want to be honored, accepted, loved, and understood. In our modern egalitarian society, we are honored, not for being superior, but for being one of the crowd. In most ancient societies, one was honored for being different, better, superior, excellent. But we still crave to be honored. Some even want to be famous. All want to be accepted.
Ninth, we want life, a long life and a healthy life. Thomas Hobbes is surely right in saying that fear of violent death, especially painful and early death, is very, very powerful. Your life is not happy if it’s taken from you, obviously.

This all seems so obvious and so reasonable as to be beyond argument. Higher ideals than these are arguable. Some of us seek them and some of us do not. But these nine would seem to be firm and impregnable, universal and necessary. Whoever would deny that they form a part of happiness would be a fool. Whoever would affirm that happiness consisted in their opposites would be insane.

Christ’s Concept of Happiness
Let us now perform a fantastic thought experiment. Let us suppose that there was once a preacher who did teach precisely that insanity, point for point, deliberately and specifically. Perhaps you cannot stretch your imagination quite that far, but I’m going to ask you to stretch it even one step farther. Imagine this man becoming the most famous, beloved, revered, respected, and believed teacher in the history of the world. Imagine nearly everyone in the world, even those who did not classify themselves as his disciples, at least praising his wisdom, especially his moral wisdom, especially the single most famous and beloved sermon he ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, the summary of his moral wisdom, which begins with his 180 degree reversal of these truisms.

Perhaps you find this far too incredible to be imaginable. It would be a miracle harder to believe than God becoming a man. It is hard enough to believe that anyone would believe the strange Christian notion that a certain man who began his life as a baby, who had to learn to talk, and ended it as an executed criminal, who bled to death on a cross, and in between got tired and hungry and sorrowful, is God, eternal, beginningless, immortal, infinitely perfect, all-wise, all-powerful, the Creator.

But it is even harder to believe that anyone would believe his utterly shattering paradoxes about happiness. Perhaps we do not really believe them after all. Perhaps we only believe we believe them. Perhaps we have faith in our faith rather than faith in his teachings.

For, of course, I am referring to Christ’s eight beatitudes which opened his Sermon on the Mount, the most famous sermon ever preached, and the one part of the New Testament that is still held up as central and valid and true and good and beautiful even by dissenters, heretics, revisionists, demythologizers, skeptics, modernists, theological liberals, and anyone else who cannot bring himself to believe all the other claims in the New Testament or the teachings of the Church. These people strain at the gnats but swallow the camel. So let’s look at the camel that they swallow. Perhaps they only seem to swallow it. Perhaps they swallow only their own swallowing, gollumping like Gollum.

To our desire for wealth, Christ says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” To our desire for painlessness, he says, “Blessed are those who mourn.” To our desire for conquest, he says, “Blessed are the meek.” To our desire for contentment with ourselves, he says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” To our desire for justice, he says, “Blessed are the merciful.” To our desire for sex, he says, “Blessed are the pure in heart.” To our desire for conquest, he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” To our desire for acceptance, he says, “Blessed are the persecuted.” And to our desire for more life, he offers the Cross. And now this man carrying his cross to Calvary even dares to tell us, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Posted in Happiness, Jesus, Moral Theology, Peter Kreeft, The Sermon on the Mount, Understanding the Beatitudes | Tagged beatitudo, eudaimonia, happiness is a matter of the soul, Jesus' concept of happiness, makarios | Leave a Comment »

The Discipline of Suffering

December 18, 2012

Off again-On again image BS — click on the above and you will see what I am trying to relate to the following.

“In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as children — “My child, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, or lose heart when you are punished by him; for the Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child whom he accepts.”

Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline? If you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children. Moreover, we had human parents to discipline us, and we respected them. Should we not be even more willing to be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share his holiness.

Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.”
Hebrews 12:4-13

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Interpretation
A direct appeal to the readers’ experience of suffering leads off this section. Having exhorted them in the previous section to cast off the burden of sin, the author now acknowledges that they have been engaged in a struggle against sin — but it is the sin of others, who have imposed suffering on them. The reference recalls the earlier reference to their “struggle with sufferings” in 10:32-34. Whatever form the persecution took, it most likely involved some form of social dislocation or harassment. The readers may have been treated harshly in Rome in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. Thus the author can say that they had not resisted to the point of bloodshed. As they were exhorted to endurance in that previous section (Hebrews 10:36), so also here.

Their struggle is not necessarily explained, nor is it dismissed, but the author attempts to place it in the context of the tradition of discipline. Perhaps he feels that were the readers to understand their sufferings as discipline they would be more likely to endure them. To that end the citation of Scripture may help. The text from Proverbs 3:11-12 elevates ordinary parental discipline to the level of divine discipline in an effort to show that discipline does not preclude love. Rather, the fact that the readers suffer so is a manifestation of their status as children of God. To deny the importance of discipline or to escape it altogether would be tantamount to accepting the status of illegitimate children. This, of course, is not possible for the readers, who have already been joined in fictive kinship with one another as brothers and sisters of Christ (Wisdom2:11-17; Wisdom 13:1).

The argument is advanced in a way typical of the author’s style. Interweaving parental and divine discipline, he constructs an a fortiori argument to show the inherent worth of divine discipline. Even though he appeals to the readers’ former relationship to their parents, he does so in the past tense. They “had” parents and they “respected” them. It is as if they have left the natural parental relationship behind in order to enter into fictive kinship in the Christian community, where God now functions as the spiritual parent.

If natural children respect their parents because as children they are subjected to them, then the spiritual parent, God, is worthy of much more respect, as holiness is a goal superior to any object of mere parental discipline. The analogy between parental and divine discipline is designed to enhance the image of God in the readers’ minds as well as to encourage them to endure their sufferings for a greater good.

Parents may discipline their children at will and perhaps according to their own whim but God’s discipline is always for the person’s good in advancing the individual toward holiness. Were there a simple correspondence between parental and divine discipline, the readers’ sufferings might have beer trivialized as nothing more than what any child would have to endure it the normal course of his or her relationship with a parent. The author constructs the argument, however, to show God’s care for them, which exceeds the obligation of a parent to the extent that it is also an invitation to share in God’s holiness.

The argument regarding discipline concludes in verse 11 with an observation from human experience. It is a commonplace that discipline is painful at the time it is being administered. With hindsight, however, a lesson can be drawn and the hardship may be seen to have produced some good. As with the example of Jesus, who endured suffering for the sake of the joy that was set before him (Wisdom 12:2), the readers are encouraged to look forward to the goal of discipline, specified here as the peaceful fruit of righteousness. The author returns to the athletic metaphor by specifying that the ones who receive the peaceful fruit of righteousness are those who have trained for it. The blending of athletic training and discipline is natural in moral exhortation, since both require the endurance of hardship for the sake of a future goal.

This section of the chapter closes with further scriptural allusions to Isaiah 35:3 in verse 12 and to Proverbs 4:26 in verse 13. The image of drooping hands and weak knees suggests the picture of someone who has been worn down by an athletic contest (Koester, 540). “Straightening” in the LXX comes in the form of divine aid. Here, however, the readers are to straighten themselves, somehow to lift themselves out of their weakened state. They need also to straighten the paths on which they walk so as not to do further harm to their limbs, but rather to progress on the path of healing. There may be an allusion to the athletic metaphor in the image of keeping on the straight path to the goal (Koester, 540), but it is more likely that the author is shifting to images associated with righteousness and moral virtue at this point. As indicated in the Notes above, moral exhortation among Hellenistic philosophers employed medical metaphors of treatment, surgery, and healing in their efforts to help individuals advance in progress toward achieving their moral purpose.

The role of suffering in our lives is hard to understand, especially when the innocent suffer. This question was no less difficult to answer in Hellenistic Judaism in the post-exilic era (Job 2:11-13; 33:29-33). Like Judaism, Christianity found meaning in suffering based on noble examples, in the case of Christians the example of the suffering and death of Christ. Hebrews contributes to that tradition by presenting Jesus “who learned obedience through what he suffered” (Wisdom 5:8).

Alluding, then, to his example, the author engages the readers’ real sufferings so as not to trivialize them. Speaking of them as a form of “discipline,” he wants his audience to know that they are not the cause of what they have to suffer. Rather, he places their hardship in a wider context that was shared by Jesus as well. As suffering was constitutive of his sonship, so also it is a sign that the readers are sons and daughters of God. Knowing that one cannot explain another’s suffering, the author prefers to show how suffering is related to God and to Christ. The readers, then, are drawn to understand the meaning of their own suffering in view of a larger goal.

Posted in Hebrews, Understanding Affliction/Suffering | Tagged discipline, Endure, Hebrews 12:4-13, Suffering | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘The New Testament’ Category

Paul And The “Intermediate State” Between Death and Resurrection – Benedict XVI

The “Intermediate State” Between Death and Resurrection – Benedict XVI

The New Testament’s Teaching On Resurrection And Immortality – Benedict XVI

The Transfiguration – Fr. Romano Guardini

The Transfiguration – Fulton J. Sheen

Blessed are the Peacemakers; Blessed are You when Men Persecute You — Peter Kreeft

Happiness: Blessed are Those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness — Peter Kreeft

Happiness: The First Three Beatitudes — Peter Kreeft

Ancient and Modern Concepts of Happiness – Peter Kreeft

The Discipline of Suffering

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