Catholic Catechism on Married Love

Catholics have a lot of things going for them, despite what some may think. Sometimes they even say really beautiful things, like this bit from the Catechism, the authoritative book of Catholic teaching:

It can seem difficult, even impossible, to bind oneself for life to another human being. This makes it all the more important to proclaim the Good News that God loves us with a definitive and irrevocable love, that married couples share in this love, that it supports and sustains them, and that by their own faithfulness they can be witnesses to God's faithful love. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1648)

Derrida's Interpretive Police

Derrida is amazingly difficult to understand at points, at others less so. What has become clear (!) to me is that Derrida is not for an unconstrained, undetermined free-play of meanings, but simply has a more-complicated-than-usual view of the context of meaning-making. An important role is played by what he calls the language police:

But there are, first of all, several ways of invoking or of specifying the rules. There are ‘theoretical’ grammarians, linguists, and jurists who state, describe, explain the norm without insisting upon its application, at least is immediate application, by force (physical or symbolic). Other functions consist in eliciting respect for the law and in disposing of a force deemed legitimate to this end. These two types of function, these two ways of ‘fixing’ rules and also, to take up your expression again, of ‘fixing’ the ‘contexts of utterances,’ bring together in a single person the theoretician of right [droit], the legislator (the inventor or first signatory of a constitution himself, or those in whose name he claims to act), and the executive power. (Limited Inc, 134-135)

There are, thus, interpretive police for all language, constraining its meaning. Derrida even goes on to provide a concrete example!

But every institution destined to enforce the law is a police. An academy is a police, whether in the sense of a university of the Académie Française, whose essential task is to enforce respect for and obedience to [faire respecter] the French language, to decide what ought to be considered ‘good’ French, etc. (135)

So at last, I continue to be persuaded that Derrida is not an obscurantist terrorist, but simply a critical idealist of a deeply Enlightenment sort, even where or especially when he is calling this tradition into question.

Hauerwas on Grad School

Hauerwas, my theologian of choice, has a peculiar talent for being able to reflect theologically on almost anything. There's an essay, for instance, in the book of his I am now reading (“A Better Hope”) on whether pacifists should read murder mysteries. But considering my current place in life, I'm glad he took the time—and he does seem to have impossible amounts of it—to write an essay on (religious ethics in) graduate school:

. . .I want to share with you an insight I had during a retreat of the theology department at Notre Dame. We were having our usual discussion on the same old topic—namely, what does it mean to be “an ecumenical department in a Catholic context”? Some of my colleagues described how they understood what it meant to do systematic theology in the Catholic tradition, or what difference being a Calvinist made for how pastoral theology was done, or how being a Lutheran shaped one's work in historical theology. The discussion made me very uncomfortable since I could not think how being a Methodist made a difference for how I did Christian ethics. I suddenly thought, I am not a Methodist, I went to Yale! Accordingly I do not represent any identifiable religious tradition, but rather I do ethics, or better, I am concerned about the kinds of problems we were taught to think of as ethics at Yale.

I think this insight not unimportant to help understand that any attempt to account for the past and future direction of religious ethics turns on where we went to graduate school. You need only to add the qualification that our graduate school agendas may be modified by where we end up teaching. Yet it is the graduate school, rather than identifiable religious traditions, that determines the way most of us understand or do ethics. If we are what we eat, then insofar as any of us are ethicists, we are where we went. (“A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy and Postmodernity,” 58-59.)

Now, while Hauerwas speaks specifically of ethics, while I want to do something between systematic and philosophical theology, the same rule applies: graduate schools are likely to suffer from the same detachment from ecclesial traditions that guarantee that one is more determined by a university than by the Church. In the development of religious ethics as a field, Hauerwas marks a definitive shift from training in seminaries to training in graduate schools. Only, however, by immersion in a community of saints (anticipated in a seminary in certain important ways) with practices sufficient to shape the posing of questions and the sources for answers can one resist the fundamentally secular, liberal formation of graduate schools. Like Hauerwas writes in his “The State of the University”: “The question is not whether a university might be open to a knowledge shaped by the practice of the church, but rather whether a church exists to produce a knowledge that is formed by the Gospel” (8).

Hamann on Kant and Enlightenment Philosophy

The great pretension of modern philosophy is shucking the whole tradition—from the early Greeks all the way up through (and especially!) medieval Christianity—and starting afresh, on truly “scientific” grounds. Hamann, a philosopher writing at the same time as Immanuel Kant, at the height of the Enlightenment, exposes this pretension, noting the ways in which the tradition is (necessarily) smuggled into Kant's philosophy:

. . .in general Hamann accuses the tradition of modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, of blatant hypocrisy: it claims to be laying a new foundation for the sciences, but it does so disingenuously, building with the materials of the philosophies that preceded it. And herein, Hamann suggests (with his crass use of the word Gemächte, which refers to genitalia), one can see the embarrassing pudenda of “pure reason” and of the Critique in general: the dark, shameful parts, i.e., the unacknowledged dependence upon tradition, which Kant has covered up. Thus, once again we see the importance of shame as a topos of Hamann’s authorship: at almost every turn he is embarrassing the Aufklärer about what they would rather hide, exposing their secret reliance upon the contingencies of history and tradition even as they speak of reason’s virginal purity, necessity, and universality. This is why he cannot help but view the Enlightenment as an extravagant charade: the Aufklärer parade reason like a shrine through the streets, even as they attempt to cover up its secret poverty, limitations, and nakedness. (John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary, 240.)

2 Timothy 3:16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in justice.

Many trying to figure out just what Scripture is understandably plant their feet here. But a bit strangely, they then turn to formal definitions of the qualities of Scripture: as inerrant, infallible, perspicuous, etc. For instance, the “Chicago Statement” states, “the Bible expresses God's truth in propositional statements, and we declare that biblical truth is both objective and absolute,” (VI) and, “the meaning expressed in each biblical text is single, definite and fixed” (VII). This seems awfully far from the full context in which Paul is writing. Paul is imprisoned in Rome, and, as he appears to understand, is about to be martyred. To Timothy he writes:

You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus be persecuted, while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in justice, so that all God's people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:10-17)

Paul is about to die and writes with great heart and urgency to one of his closest workers. Paul attempts to persuade Timothy to remain loyal to their common cause of the gospel in the middle of suffering and to “continue in what he has learned” from “the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation.” But right here, Paul inserts an important clause: “because you know those from whom you learned it.” The Scriptures are always given to the Church, to “all God's people,” making wise and being useful for those who continue in witnessing to the gospel together. This is no individual mission. We always receive the Scriptures' true teaching in the company of those called likewise to a faithful witness to the gospel with the whole of our lives.

Finally, there is the question of what exactly “God-breathed” means. For all the finagling over definitions, the resonances with creation should have been obvious: “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). The Scriptures are about something far more serious than truth and error, especially in any narrow sense—they're about life and death. But they're only about life and death because they point always with outstretched finger to the crucified God in whom alone is the breath of being carried up into resurrection even beyond the cruelty of death, particularly death on a cross. So:

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. (2 Timothy 4:1-2)

Evangelicals and Catholics on the Virgin Mary

The ecumenical group, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” have recently released a joint statement on the Virgin Mary, called “Do Whatever He Tells You,” a quote from the Cana wedding in John 2. Certainly a statement from evangelicals and Catholics on the Virgin Mary would say some interesting things, like this from the Catholics:

In drawing closer to Mary, we are drawn closer to Christ, for the entirety of her being is devoted to Christ, and her one will for his disciples is “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). Devotion to Mary, the fully redeemed creature, is directed to the adoration of Christ, true God and true man.

And this from the evangelicals:

For Luther, Mary is the workshop (fabrica) in which God operates to bring about the salvation of the world. Mary is the person and place where God has chosen to enter most deeply into the human story. She is the one who hears the Word of God (fides ex auditu), the one who responds in faith and thus is justified by faith alone (WA 7, 573). The Reformed tradition is more reticent, yet both Zwingli and Bullinger joined in the “Hail Mary, full of grace” not as a prayer to Mary but as an expression of praise in honour of her. Calvin too referred to Mary as “the treasurer of grace” and spoke of how Christ “chose for himself the virgin’s womb as a temple in which to dwell” (Institutes 2.14.1).

A hopeful sign, certainly.