“You have the words of eternal
life. We have come to believe and are
convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
Peter’s response to Jesus in today’s Gospel reading (John 6:60-69)
encapsulates the central teaching of our Catholic Christian faith.
As
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America recently voted to allow individual parishes
to decide whether to call non-celibate homosexuals to the pulpit, Michael Perry
asks “What does the ELCA get that, say, the magisterium doesn’t? Or vice versa?”
I'll leave it to others to more directly address the theology of the body that underlies the Magisterium’s
teaching on sexual morality. Instead, I wonder whether one possible answer lies in the Catholic Church's general integrity in proclaiming the
Deposit of the Faith left by Christ By “integrity”
here, I mean not not so much soundness and candor (although those are vital as well) but a sense of cohesion and
completeness. When the Catholic Church teaches
about morality, including a proper attitude toward the body and the gift of
sexuality, that teaching cannot be divorced from the Church’s robust theology and
understanding of Christ.
Might
a departure from traditional Christian teaching on sexual morality set the stage
for a broader dis-integration, not only of church structure and world-wide
communion, but of basic Christian doctrine?
In this regard, the example of the Episcopal Church in the United States
should be sobering. Others have written widely about how the Episcopal Church has lost nearly half of its membership and now risks being separated from the larger Anglican communion, especially in Africa and Asia. But I mean to emphasize something different here, the attendant dilution and adulteration of Christian doctrine. As a former
Episcopalian, I speak from personal experience about how something that was portrayed as
but a single issue that could be discretely addressed instead proved to be the first step on an ever longer
journey away from that Deposit of Faith. It remains to be seen whether the ELCA will follow that same path.
In
the general news media, and often for the typical Episcopalian in the pews, the
great debate inside the Episcopal Church has been understood as a focused division about
homosexuality among a group of fellow believers who otherwise stand largely in agreement on the basic theology and canons of the Episcopal Church. That simply was not and is not the case. Perhaps in theory, and certainly in the minds
of some Episcopalians, a person could be orthodox in Christian faith generally
and yet support recognition of committed same-sex unions. But the active vanguard of the liberal
movement in the Episcopal Church has hardly been limited to the matter of gay rights in its general
desire to remake and redefine that denomination.
Within the Episcopal Church, those who took the leading role in challenging traditional church teaching on homosexuality tended to be quite liberal, even
radical, in their thinking about moral questions and theology generally.
Leading gay priests have published books, not only advocating the full inclusion
of gays in the church, but further insisting that monogamy was unrealistic and should not
be expected of gays. Indeed, monogamy in general
gets little respect in the Episcopal Church today. Divorced and remarried priests are common. In fact, multiple divorces and
remarriages, even for a bishop, are no bar to leadership in liberal
Episcopal dioceses and parishes. In effect, a form of serial
polygamy enjoys growing tolerance in the Episcopal Church. Having retreated from expectations of fidelity to monogamy among adults, the Episcopal Church not surprisingly has been in no
a position to teach sexual morality to young people. Instead, church leaders often trot out the “safe
sex” canard that dominates non-religious discussions, largely defaulting to secularized approaches to the matter.
In addition, while there are exceptions, support
for embracing same-sex sexuality has tended to go hand-in-hand
with support for abortion. Reversing traditional
Episcopal positions on legal protection of unborn human life, the formal
General Convention resolution in place today expresses “unequivocal opposition”
to any executive, legislative, or judicial limitation on access to
abortion. The division in voting among the delegates on abortion and gay rights resolutions tend to be parallel. The new Dean of the Episcopal
Divinity School, a lesbian and leader in the gay rights movement, is also a
board member of NARAL Pro-Choice and most notoriously has described “abortion as a
blessing.”
Importantly, along
with moral teaching, Christian theology is being subjected to ongoing post-modern revision inside the Episcopal Church (or at least those dioceses most aligned with the national church). In liberal Episcopal venues, the death of
Christ on the cross as a propitiation for our sins often is seen as
an embarrassment to be quietly neglected or openly denigrated as retrograde. Liberal Episcopal seminary teachers, priests, and
bishops regard the
resurrection of Christ as nothing more than a mythical message of hope, not as a
factual description of an empty tomb. The Nicene Creed is re-interpreted, so that its statements of the faith are watered-down into allegory and symbol, bearing little of their traditional meaning.
In
liberal Episcopalian re-imaging, Jesus is left to molder in an abandoned grave,
while Peter’s response to Jesus in today’s Gospel – that Jesus has “the words
of eternal life” and is“the Holy One of God” – becomes unthinkable. Even if Jesus was touched by holiness, he is
demoted to one spiritual guru among many from many different religions and cultures, all of which
are equally viable paths to God. And with the most recent 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, that liberal wing plainly is in the driver's seat. No
wonder that many fear the Episcopal Church could be moving into a Post-Christian Era.
Will the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America be able to avoid the same fate as the Episcopal
Church, not only by averting a break-up of the
denomination, but by resisting the disintegration of Christian teaching? Is it possible to pluck out one thread from millennia of Christian teaching on sexual morality without starting to unravel
the entire doctrinal garment?
Greg Sisk
I had the pleasure, yesterday, of welcoming the incoming first-years to Notre Dame Law School. The experience reminded me of just how exciting those first few days of law school were (and, I hope, still are). And, to prepare, I re-read our own Patrick Brennan's essay, which appeared in First Things a few years ago, "To Beginning Law Students." Check it out.
Douglas Linder
University of Missouri at Kansas City - School of Law
2007
Abstract:
No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949. Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed. What is shocking about Nuremberg is the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to animals, even unassuming - yet who committed unspeakable crimes. Years later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil. Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants never aspired to be villains. Rather, they over-identified with an ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they couldn't fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions.
Twelve trials, involving over a hundred defendants and several different courts, took place in Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949. By far the most attention - not surprisingly, given the figures involved - has focused on the first Nuremberg trial of twenty-one major war criminals. Several of the eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials, however, involved conduct no less troubling - and issues at least as interesting - as the Major War Criminals Trial. For example, the trial of sixteen German judges and officials of the Reich Ministry (The Justice Trial) considered the criminal responsibility of judges who enforce immoral laws. (The Justice Trial became the inspiration for the acclaimed Hollywood movie, Judgment at Nuremberg.) Other subsequent trials, such as the Doctors Trial and the Einsatzgruppen Trial, are especially compelling because of the horrific events described by prosecution witnesses.
HT: Kevin Lee
