Wednesday 13 January 2016

Half a correspondence on Catholic Church and Bible

I was replying to an article on the site Risen Jesus, not at all sure if it was this one I just linked to* or another.

I seem to have in my initial response said sth about Catholic Tradition being why we know the authors (apart from genuine or forged claims by real author to be such and such a person, most authors are known in such a way as would make the category pseudepigrapha - wrong attribution - at least possible, except for the fact a tradition is there attributing the book to such and such an author**. So, I might have asked why he believed Catholic tradition about Gospel attributions, but not about ... "Catholicism" ... as in the parts of Catholicism rejected by Protestants.

Now, my original latter is so far still lost somewhere on their computers, and I therefore start with a belated reply and give mine to it. Labelling the reply II, in case the I should reemerge.

II
Nick Peters to me
07/01/16 à 21h20
Risen Jesus
Hi Hans. Thanks for writing. Please accept our apologies for the delay in our response. We just discovered a glitch in the contact area of our website which resulted in us not receiving about 500 messages. The issue has now been resolved and we are working diligently to respond to those messages that were not received. Mike's a busy guy, so he has me, his son-in-law and apologetics colleague Nick Peters to help him with these questions. I'd answer that we have textual evidence that is there independent of the Catholic Church. The transmission of the manuscripts is not dependent on the doctrines derived from those manuscripts or traditions. Hope this helps! Sorry about the delay! In Christ, Nick Peters

III
Me to Nick Peters
1/8/16 at 4:22 PM
re: Risen Jesus
I'd love to respond to this, but I cannot find my earlier message.

So, if you find it, please forward it again back to me. But to my new mail, hgl@dr.com, please, since this one will close.***

Meanwhile, here:

1) "I'd answer that we have textual evidence that is there independent of the Catholic Church."

As for OT, you have Jews who rejected Christ. But as for Gospels, you have precisely Catholic Church plus its clearly non-Protestant rivals about position of being THE apostolic Church.

There was a time before Chalcedonians split around 1053 into Catholic and Orthodox, but neither is Protestant, nor were their positions before that date so.

There was a time before Nestorians and Monophysites diverged from each other and from Chalcedonians, like before 451 and before 431. But Nestorians and Monophysites (or Armenians plus Copts, since there are two groups) also have clearly non-Protestant positions clearly reminding of Catholic ones, shared with Catholics and Orthodox, and so had the Christian people before that split.

You do NOT have a text tradition by the way of Donatists, Montanists, Novatians. These left too little records of their own, apart from Tertullian who was a Montanist.°

2) "The transmission of the manuscripts is not dependent on the doctrines derived from those manuscripts or traditions."

If we can presume God has given full preservation for the salvation relevant portions of the text, why should He not also have preserved His own CHurch in Her fulness in one of the five non-Protestant groups? These being, as said, Catholics, Orthodox, Cops and Armenians, Nestorians. And finding out which of them is the true Church is NOT like looking for a needle in a haystack, since there are only five of them.

Now, I do not think doctrines of the true Church, especially as proposed under penalty of excommunication for those not believing it (the doctrines that are dogmas), can be merely DERIVED from texts and traditions and not be included IN them.

Since the promise was, precisely, to preserve His Church, and to preserve Revelation as a whole ("my word"/"His word"), not to preserve a specific collection of texts.

Also, without a doctrinal community, where do you find a decision even on what texts BELONG TO the Word of God?°°

No, the transmission of manuscripts can very well go on humanly speaking as usual without all conclusions draw from them remaining the same. But the transmission of manuscripts of the Gospel can also not, independently of the Church, establish they are history rather than fiction. We know this from the community that received them, precisely as we know from the community that received Lord of the Rings, in the reverse case, that it is fiction and not history.

Anyway, whether you bother to reply to this, or not, please do send my original message to other adress, and thank you for sending me this reply!

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Holy Martyrs Lucian (priest) and
Maximian and Julian of Beauvais
8-I-2016


Notes:

* Risen Jesus : Review of Bart Ehrman’s book “Forged: Writing in the Name of God”… http://www.risenjesus.com/review-of-bart-ehrmans-book-forged-writing-in-the-name-of-god

** The tradition I have heard about the name "J. R. R. Tolkien" on covers of Lord of the Rings is that he wrote it. And that the claim of his having translated it from a very ancient Adunaic book (a claim stated in the book) is a literary joke. Precisely as Umberto Eco joked about having found a manuscript by Adso of Melk containing a story in which a Brother Jorge obsessed with apocalypse etc. commits murders of any readers of a certain manuscript, simply by poisoning the pages, because he found the treatise by Aristotle on Comedy a poisonous reading. This story is of course from a very XXth C. view on what fanaticism entails, and among other things it is there to claim Catholicism in Middle Ages was very like Stalinism in this respect. We have no such story from the known manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The Name of the Rose is a novel, not a reedition of an autobiographical manuscript. This I believe on the tradition I have from when the books were published. I was sixteen for the latter book, not yet born for the former (actually my mother was eighteen when it was completed in 1955 : the chronological distance is like the distance between us), but for either of them, I believe tradition about who wrote and what kind of book it was meant to be taken for.

*** This is a notification to readers wishing to correspond to me, that this has already happened. Will change on "if you wish to correspond with me" page too.

° And even he doesn't give you complete Bibles, just confirmation by way of heresy early separated from Catholic Church that even before that separation Catholic Church accepted such and such a book. Which Tertullian quoted. °° Tertullian's doctrinal unity is no longer extant and isn't helpful for all that many books even for his quotes.

Tuesday 5 January 2016

Was Dwight Ever Outright Heretic? If So, it is Here I Blamed him


1) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Fable and Allegory, 2) Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : With Dwight on Definition of Fundies, 3) Dwight Longenecker Not Knowing What Computers Are, and Not Answering a Challenge On It, 4) With Dwight on Fundies, Again, 5) One item on Dwight, related to Teen Marriages, 6) Was Dwight Ever Outright Heretic? If So, it is Here I Blamed him, 7) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica (again) : Dwight Longenecker and Bildungsroman

Me to Dwight
13/05/15 à 10h37
This one too, Modernist Heretic!
Here* is a piece of utter blasphemous heresy, worthy of the once well known Dean Inge of sad memory:

"Instead, we should think of it like this: God is good, beautiful and true and it his nature to pour his graces into the world at all times. His goodness, truth and beauty radiates in and through his creation as the sunlight radiates into the world bring light and life to all things. This radiation of goodness, truth and beauty is never ending, all present and all powerful.

"Prayer is the means by which we join our will with His will. If you like we become the channels and directors of that goodness, truth and beauty in the world.

...

"We’ve all experimented with a magnifying glass to make a fire. The magnifying glass harnesses and focusses the existing sunlight for a particular purpose: to light a fire. I believe prayer works like that magnifying glass: it concentrates, focusses and magnifies God’s great power for a particular application.

"That works: Then I remember that in the Magnificat the Blessed Mother sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord…” and I wonder if this other deeper meaning is part of the mystery of her who’s whole life was a prayer."


This makes:

  • 1) God impersonal, like pantheism does, unless one prefers to say your rubbish IS pantheism;
  • 2) bypasses and in a quiet way actually does away with God's being all knowing.


Bruce Almighty might be bad, but not half as bad as your text.

Repent or go to Hell.

THIS rubbish is certainly NOT what I intended to convert to when leaving Swedish Church for Catholicism, indeed, it is kind of what I hated about Modernist Lutherans even while technically being one myself.

If you want a debate, that is fine, and if you want to be "mature", do that not by fudging theology, but by defending or recanting your theses. Feel free to suspend my warning (which is btw not an ecclesiastic superior one, I am not pretending to be your bishop or pope) until debate is over, when I hope you might be doing sth better than chosing the Hellfire.

Your "other deeper meaning" is heresy and adding heresy to a word with Marian connexion, especially one by Herself, is also insulting to Our Lady.

Hans Georg Lundahl
from Nanterre University Library
on St Robert Bellarmine
(and Our Lady of Fatima, by now?)
13-V-2015

* How Does God Answer Prayer?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/how-does-god-answer-prayer


So, if above is heresy, where is truth? Here:
God grants prayers as He wishes. How pleasing a person is to Him is certainly part of why He wishes or not to do so. But any event He is perfectly free to grant even the worst prayer, as to the quality of soul praying and of attitude in prayer, and to deny any prayer, even the best, except He will not do that to prayers of His Blessed Mother. God wants us, but does not need us, to prepare the arrival of His goodness by praying and by praying well and by being in the state of grace while praying.

One item on Dwight, related to Teen Marriages


1) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Fable and Allegory, 2) Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : With Dwight on Definition of Fundies, 3) Dwight Longenecker Not Knowing What Computers Are, and Not Answering a Challenge On It, 4) With Dwight on Fundies, Again, 5) One item on Dwight, related to Teen Marriages, 6) Was Dwight Ever Outright Heretic? If So, it is Here I Blamed him, 7) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica (again) : Dwight Longenecker and Bildungsroman

Me to Dwight
13/05/15 à 10h19
If you answer, count on getting published ...
Main peeve I have with your text* is this one:

Another example is universal sex education. The sex educators think that teen pregnancy, STDs and abortion will be reduced if only more young people were educated about contraceptive techniques, safe sex techniques and varied sexual practices. Of course when this happens there are more young people having sex so there are more STDs, teen pregnancies and abortions. The sex educators look at the results, scratch their heads and say, “I guess we need MORE sex education at a younger age.” So they start telling first graders about X rated stuff.


Teen pregnancy is of course lower if pregnancies are prevented or shortened by contraceptives or abortion.

BUT you seem to be OK with teen pregnancies being targetted as sth which should not be there?

You see, what a Catholic wants to avoid is UNWED teen pregnancies. And you seem to be NOT proposing the cures for that:

  • 1) change legislations back so that the 14 v / 12 m age limit of the Catholic Church over centuries gets to be civil law again;
  • 2) change regulations, school system, taxes so that not only rare genius teens-fit-to-be-employers (there was one in GB in the news), but also someone just wanting to have a regular job with an employer shall be able to support a family while still in teens;
  • 3) ban co-ed after puberty (see Divini Illius Magistri) and any school concerts involving rock or disco and dancing, so that unfortunate teens who cannot yet afford to marry shall be less tempted.**


Subsidiary peeve:

A good example of this is left wing economics. Every experiment in socialism and communism has been a social, economic, human and political disaster of gigantic proportions. Nevertheless, left wingers continue to believe that what is needed is not to get rid of socialism forever, but to have MORE socialism.


  • 1) I agree that socialism, socialising what could and should be private property, is bad;
  • 2) I do not agree that every experiment in communism was bad : Benedictines, kibbutzniks and hippies on voluntarily communist collective farms seem to be doing fine and dandy;
  • 3) and there are of course other restrictions on private property while it remains private than socialist taxing, some of which are good: max prices (steles with the decree of Diocletian will still stand in Greek villages and the text will be preserved from eradication by erosion by Greek Orthodox clergy or the men doing their work), minim wages, antitrust laws.


The main problem with Fiscal Socialism (which means a bloated Public Sector providing more and more of the livelihoods and including those that do bad things, like abortion, psychiatry, child protective services doing statenappings, public school teaching evolutionist or heliocentric lies ... while banning or plotting to ban home schooling ...) is that it is so close to a trust. With post offices, I don't see*** how it could be done otherwise, but the general observation stands.

Meaning of course that Big Business has a moral problem pretty similar to Socialism.

Still want your adress not shown, as usual?

Hans Georg Lundahl
ESI St Martin
27 ter Bd de St Martin
75003 Paris

* Modernism is Madness
May 12, 2015 by Fr. Dwight Longenecker
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2015/05/modernism-is-madness.html


Only peeve on "continue reading" is you are not identifying Bergoglio as an Antipope proning what you rightly call madness. At least in the broader sense of the word.

** To recommend starting fasting in teens, even if Catholic Church requires it only from 21, is of course also a bonus for chastity.

*** I could make a try, but I am not sure how to get it together in all respects. Contracted local businessmen known for honesty and integrity (i e preferrably no bankers or stockmarket brokers!) - is such a contract really all that different from the post office systems we have? Don't know, but that was the system when post offices started.