Last week I introduced the notion of “theological deal-killers,” hypothetical events which, if they happened in the real world, would cause one to question his faith. While a few readers thought it impious that I was willing even to entertain the idea, most chimed in helpfully with their own list of teachings so central, traditions so sacrosanct, that if some imaginary “reformist” pope or council did away with them, they would consider the Church’s claim to infallibility contradicted. Most of those offered by readers echoed my own, so I have little to add here on that score.
It’s important to think such questions through, since while our Church is, in eternity, the Mystical Bride of Christ, it also has one foot sunk in the squishy earth. It’s a real institution — the oldest one on the planet, after the fall of the Chinese monarchy in 1905 — taking part in the messy business of history, making intransigent claims to doing something almost impossibly difficult: proclaiming a single, consistent message about the nature of God, creation, sin, redemption, and the proper ordering of human society, through every culture on earth and every century that passes.
It’s a miracle — a literal one, eclipsing all the cast-off crutches at Lourdes and the dancing sun at Fatima — that the Church has stayed “on message” and fought off the heresies that surged in every age, corrupting or quashing every merely human institution. To the Pharisees, she preached the Incarnation; to the pagans, the one true God; to the Gnostics, the goodness of Creation; to the Stoics, the sacraments; to the neo-Platonists, God’s freedom and transcendence; to the Muslims, the Trinity; to the Albigensians, the holiness of matter and of marriage; to the Latin Averroists, the unity of Truth; to the Nominalists, the crucial “analogy” between God’s goodness and our own; to the Humanists, the role of Christ in raising man above the animals; to the Protestants, the incoherence of scripture without Tradition; to the Philosophes, the toxic futility of reason stripped of faith; to the Socialists, the evil of compelling the Corporal Works of Mercy; to the eugenicists, the sanctity of every flawed and helpless human life; to the racists, the unity of the human race; to the feminists, the supremacy of the family over the individual.
I could go on — and history will go on, firing flaming bags of dog waste at the Faith like shots from a tennis-ball machine possessed by a poltergeist. It is only with mysterious aid from the Holy Spirit that our popes will continue to whack them away, standing unstained in their white mantle of simplicity and truth. Their success is a witness to the truthfulness of the Faith second only to the Resurrection itself. Fail either of these, and we are the greatest of fools.
This staggering, incalculable consistency is the central miracle that makes the Church worth believing in, and the only one that you and I can test out for ourselves — by studying history. We can’t go back and meet the risen Christ. As my high school religion teacher sneered, biochemists can’t verify transubstantiation. (Since modern science only looks at accidents, not substance, the correct response to this was, “Duh!”) But we can look at the stunning fact of a single, once-simple gospel exfoliating through history like a many-foiled flower, rising to the Sun of truth and growing from the seed Christ planted 20 centuries ago. Through hailstorms, herbicides, and against all the forces of hell, it still grows straight and true.
This, for me, is the reason to believe. If I could not even imagine the plant mutated or dead, I could not be stunned with gratitude at its holiness and health. St. Paul allowed himself to wonder what it would mean if Christ had not been raised from the dead; we likewise must ponder what we would make of a faith that trimmed its creed with every diktat from the zeitgeist. To save time, of course, we could simply consult the history of the Anglicans, a church that has pursued with admirable consistency its founding mission: to kneel before the world.
Few other faiths even make claims that can be confirmed or refuted by events. Imagine, if you will, an empirical test for the truth of Buddhism. Is there anything that could happen, any argument one could offer, to dissuade someone who believed the entire universe a morbid illusion? How about Hinduism? Do Hindus even believe, in the same sense we do in Christ, in the divinity of elephant god Ganesh? Or is their paganism of the sort that G. K. Chesterton depicted in his timeless The Everlasting Man: a flight of fancy that toys with, more than it stakes, metaphysical claims? The Scientologists, for their part, do assert that we humans once lived on the planet Teegeeack and were kidnapped from our home by the evil overlord Xenu . . . so it’s theoretically possible that a space probe could find the truth — if only the Scientologists would give us the coordinates for Teegeeack. And the Mormons . . . well, bless their hearts! I’ll leave their assertions about Israelites in North America to the tender mercies of anthropologists.
There are three, and only three, historical faiths that make claims worth taking seriously, and it would need a wiser, more learned man with the time to write thousands of pages to lay out the competing arguments of these faiths.
Put briefly and brutally: Jews claim that they are chosen, blessed and burdened as the sole witnesses of the one true God, granted a certain protection, and waiting for the Messiah. The consistency of their witness stands as starkly impressive as our own and points to the fact that the Jewish people still serve as a mystical “sign” of God’s operation in history. As Walker Percy famously asked, “Where are the Hittites?” Why did so many larger, more powerful peoples simply vanish with all their gods, while a tiny tribe of sinful and persecuted nebbishes still clings to its ancient faith?
The Nazis, Percy said, saw the Jews as a divine fingerprint they wished to wipe away, the better to divinize Man. Christian anti-Judaists argued that, by rejecting Christ, the Jews had forfeited all their claims, becoming in essence Samaritans — while the “saving remnant” of truly faithful Jews accepted Christ and disappeared into the Church. There’s a logic there, but how do we explain the still-miraculous survival of those who insist that they are the saving remnant — except by saying they have a role to play, however mysterious, in the drama of salvation?
Few Jews will ever convert, but those who do add a leaven to us poor gentiles for which we should be grateful. And even the vast majority who cling to their single Testament deserve our thanks; without these people, we Celts and Slavs would still be worshipping trees. Whenever I see an identifiably pious Jew, I feel a surge of affection and mutter a simple prayer for his well-being in this world and the next. We prodigal sons will tussle with our older brothers over the meaning of the Old Testament until the consummation of the world — when the Messiah comes (or comes again) to prove which of us was right. You don’t get much more historical, or empirical, than that.
Islam is a subject too large for me to handle here, though it does display a consistency similar to our own. It has no central authority, and it makes no claim to infallible authority on the part of a single institution, so the only way that history could disconfirm its central claim would be for the religion to disappear. It is true that Islam promises to dominate the world, so the era of its decline and subjugation to European powers provoked for many a crisis of faith. Its current resurgence, fueled solely by fertility and petroleum, will not outlast the rise of alternative fuels and the decline of Islamic birthrates. One hopes.
The potential deal-killer for Islam comes not in some prospective heresy but in the central claim it makes: that Mohammed, as the prophet of God, is the perfect human being — the model for all human behavior in every culture and country to come. Studying his life, and meditating on how plausible is that claim, is something every thinking Westerner ought to undertake nowadays. Islam asserts that an angel came to Mohammed and guided him throughout his prophetic career. Let’s take him at his word, and wonder: Which angel was it?
Our faith alone, and only in its fullest, Catholic form, has taken upon itself the awful challenge of institutional continuity and perfect intellectual consistency. From a purely human point of view, it’s a high-wire act performed with no net above the abyss. Yet the beautiful lady still dances on the wire, almost 20 centuries later.
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Oh, this is so right on. When you stop to think about this, it’s spooky.
Beautifully written.
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” Matthew 16:18.
Were more empowering words ever spoken to man? We would be hard-pressed to find them. As this beautiful article shows, history proves them to be “truth and life.”
Amen.
Thank you for article!
The Catholic faith is beautiful, with a rich history spanning 2,000 years. I love the fact that wherever I am in the world, there is always a Catholic Church I can go to and be welcomed home by my brothers and sisters in Christ.
What I love about our Catholic faith is the truth that She speaks which is old and at the same time always new.
Could you please elaborate on
“to the Nominalists, the crucial “analogy” between God’s goodness and our own”
since I do not understand about Nominalists.
Sorry if there was so much dense material packed in a tiny space! I have only an amateur’s understanding, but here goes: Among other things, the Nominalists denied that concepts such as “justice” and “goodness” as applied to God were even ANALOGOUS to what these concepts meant as we apply them on earth. St. Thomas maintained that there IS some analogy, although the difference is greater than the likeness. But God’s justice cannot be the OPPOSITE of our justice, as the Nominalists maintained might very well be the case. Why does this matter? Well, if the Nominalists were right, God could deem it “just” to damn any soul for Original Sin alone; He might equally deem it “just” to send sinners to Heaven and saints to Hell. The Muslims (as Robert Reilly points out in his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind) maintain precisely this. Pope Benedict pointed out at Regensburg that such a position is also inherent in Calvinism. What Nominalism does everywhere is to unhinge reason from faith; in the Muslim world, it mostly suppressed reason. In the Protestant world, that thankfully did not happen. With the help of Cartesian science, the Nominalist impulse redirected the energy of reason away from consideration of eternal things, toward the practical problems of technology and economics. We made great progress as a result, but we are even now paying the price… in the form of inhuman “bioethics,” abortion, and all the other fruits that come of placing God inside a black box that reason cannot penetrate.
For a much more learned treatment, see the Catholic Encyclopedia on the subject:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11090c.htm
Thanks, again, Dr. Z. An upbeat message!
Your piece brought to mind a comment by William F. Buckley to the point that if the Resurrection were definitively proven to be untrue, he would have to become a Jew. (I don’t have the exact wording.)
I, like you, feel a deep respect for pious Jews. I find that they and I have far more to discuss in common with me than to many self-proclaimied Catholics. The world (and other-world) view of the Orthodox Jew, while more law-bound than mine, is one with which I feel nearly completely at home.
Nobody could have put it more eloquently and elegantly. This is a truly wonderful essay that deserves to be widely disseminated.
Breathtaking article. What you articulated is a very large part of the reason I became Catholic. I hope you’ve read Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz? It displays, in fictional form, what you share in your essay.
Thanks for sharing this, an article deserving of anthologizing in a Catholic “best of” collection. I think I’ll be sharing this URL with some friends.
I too have always been interested in Orthodox Judaism, although what little I know comes from the fiction of I.B. Singer. Mr. Palmer perhaps you might know when the Orthodox began to have reincarnation as part of their beliefs? Not too many Orthodox in my neck of the woods to ask.
As for the other subject matters, I always learn a lot, and painlessly so, from Dr. Zmirak’s writings . May we have an ETA update on the newest book? I’m hoping within the next few weeks?
“Where are the Hittites?” Aren’t they called Turks now, or has they changed?
The Miracle of History has been an understanding of mine that has jarred me within the past couple of years. I have tried to explain this to my family and friends, pointing out that whole civilizations, nations, cultures, governments, and institutions of all sorts have arisen, thrived and faded away, many to extinction, even within the 2000-year span of the history of the Church. Yet, the Church endures. This despite persecutions, wars, heresies, mockers and the sins of the members, and the constant demand of mankind that the Church must change the Faith to go along with the times, and to accomodate and bless the latest faddish stupidity formerly considered a sin. Yet, even with the attacks and pressures, the Faith as given by Jesus and handed on through Apostolic Succession has remained the same. The proof is literally everywhere most of us look, if we but knew history, and the Scriptures.
That said, this article has so forcefully and beautifully articulated this same understanding in a way I never have, and which I have never heard or read before in my life. This is a masterpiece.
Thank you and please forgive me for giving this to others.
…just, “Wow!”
“and history will go on, firing flaming bags of dog waste at the Faith like shots from a tennis-ball machine possessed by a poltergeist.”:
I don’t think Augustine, Aquinas, or Chesterton could have said it any better!
Benedict XVI has respeatedly referred to the Jews as “our older brothers in faith”, and this phrase captures it all. If Muslims were able to see themselves as our younger brothers, and by implication also as heirs to the Jews, much would be gained.
another great article Dr. Zmirak
I enjoy Mr. Zmirak’s articles. As a convert, I appreciate his well-articulated summary of the the historical continuity and contributions of the Catholic Church.
Just as an historical tidbit, the only presently-existing institution that I readily think of that is older than the Catholic Church is the Japanese monarchy, with its single imperial dynasty that traces its origin to before the birth of Christ. The Chinese monarchy, in the form of the Qing Dynasty of the Manchus, fell in 1912, not 1905, but that dynasty was the last of a number that had established themselves through conquest.
For the corrections! I should have checked the dates. An interesting point about the Japanese monarchy. Of course, in 1945, the Shinto monarchy was forced, at atomic gunpoint, to renounce its claim to divinity–which arguably breaks its continuity as thoroughly as any of the “deal-killers” I envisioned for various other faiths!
Indeed, that does seem to be a “deal-killer” for the historic religious claims of the Japanese monarchy, despite its continued existence as a national institution in Japan.
Examine Mohammed’s life and wonder which angel it was. Which angel, indeed. In my own history classes, I was taught that Mohammed, in his travels, observed both Christians and Jews and admired their faith and practices. He thus took what he considered the best of both faiths and merged them to form Islam. A tale I heard many years later tells how his first version of the Koran was rejected by the people to whom he brought it, because they couldn’t accept the changes in the treatment of their women it would bring about, so he modified it to suit their beliefs. How true this is, I don’t know; to paraphrase your own statement, we can’t go back, meet Mohammed, and find out. But this brings me to my own point.
Most of us are familiar with the theological theory that holds that, if Adam and Eve had not sinned, Christ still would have become man and walked among us, but he would not have had to suffer and die. This theory also posits that, at the very dawn of Creation, when God made known to His angels that he would create Mary, and that she was to be set over even them, this simple fact is what sparked Lucifer’s rebellion: He refused to accept the primacy of a mere fleshly creature. It carries this further, to point out that it is because of this that Lucifer utterly despises purity of any form. For instance, it is why pederasty exists, because, by its very nature, it is the corruption of the innocent. Further, there is one thing he hates even worse than purity, and that is women, because every woman who walks the Earth is a reminder of the one Woman against whom he rebelled. Like the rebel in most of us that wants to deface the posters of people we don’t like, the devil wants to see all women subjugated, tormented, and, most importantly to him, corrupted. Because of this, I often wonder if the name of Mohammed’s “angel,” if there was one, wasn’t Lucifer.