During a conclave with reporters, the NYT reports, the Pope gave a “direct condemnation” of “the sexual abuse crisis.” Playing its own Devil’s Advocate, the article immediately refutes itself, showing how the Pope issued nothing but non-sequitur. Raising the Christian persecution complex to new institutional levels, Ratzinger portrayed “the church” as a victim. Indeed, the Church is attacked “not only from outside,” but also from inside. That is to say, the anti-Catholic media and the clergy who molest children share a common victim: “the church.” Ratzinger thinks the church must “relearn” “conversion, prayer, penance.”

What is so obnoxious about these statements is that they amount to changing the subject. The object of public outrage is divided into a couple of areas: (1) the disturbingly frequent occurrence of child molestation and rape even at very high levels and (2) the cover-ups, transfers, and delays issued in response to the crimes when they were first brought to supposed spiritual authorities, including Ratzinger, now the “Vicar of Christ on Earth.” Will he ever address those topics with anything other than obscurantist generality? Notice that everything he says about this scandal would be true without it. When does the Church not need to relearn “conversion, prayer, penance”? Such fluffy theological language always applies. When is there not sin in the Church? Etc.

There are of course extra theological embarrassments, e.g. that Ratzinger is Pope partly due to getting some of the child rapist vote. In general, claims that the Catholic Church makes for itself and its Pope are so inflated that perhaps this scandal is what will put wavering Catholics over the edge. But lucky for Catholicism, much of its inflated membership is constituted by cultural Catholics, Catholics who show up once or twice a year, and so on.

I will end by stating the morally obvious: There are indeed identifiable victims; they are children who have been molested, raped, and psychologically damaged for the rest of their lives by Catholic clergy, including at the highest levels. Victim status actually can be shared by some outside parties – namely, the parents of the children. The Catholic institutions of authority and humans who populate them are the opposite of victims. Some of them are direct molesters and rapists, others are culpable for protecting and advocating for molesters and rapists (for the good of the “church”), others are culpable for looking the other way, others were ignorant of the whole affair, and the last group includes those who tried and failed to do something about the issue. Ratzinger, an accomplishment of whose is forgiving child rape (on behalf of …? did someone molest the church?), now says that “justice” is important. Therefore, he should take everyone in the first three groups above, including himself, and submit to civil authorities in the relevant domains. This ultimate fate, common for poor offenders, for cults, etc., will not befall Catholic officials.

The issue here is not some general spiritual combat involving the church. The problem is very particular, involving identifiable individuals and events. The only broad or general implication is that these individuals and events were supported and protected within the Catholic institutional structure. But unless you think that the church and its authorities are magical, it doesn’t strictly matter that it is the church. The same issues and objections would arise for any other institution founded and sustained by humans (say, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts of America, or the United Nations). But the Catholic Church and its leadership, who are now making morally grotesque public statements with regularity, are so colossally arrogant that they can’t think of themselves in this lowly way.

Characteristically, the “Declaration” has a preoccupation with contemporary hot topics that rotate around sexual reproduction – marriage, homosexuality, abortion, and “embryo-destructive research,” all of which inspire disparate but genuinely “Christian” viewpoints. How far we’ve fallen from real declarations.

Foster addresses various conceptual problems in the post linked above. One sentence I find problematic is this one: “We believe [marriage] is divinely ordained, the only context for sexual intercourse, and the most important unit for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all.” First, if the relationship some people describe with the term “marriage” is divinely ordained, is state-sponsorship of that relationship divinely ordained? Are legal definitions divinely ordained? I’d strongly doubt both propositions. Second, the idea that a marriage is “the most important unit” for sustaining “welfare for all” is a little ridiculous. As far as I know, marriage has been present and culturally pervasive in virtually ever modern society, from the most oppressive to the most virtuous. I’m much happier with other sources of welfare, such as just laws, democratic institutions, etc. Moreover, in contemporary societies of apparently high levels of wellbeing, particularly in Western Europe, marriage rates are declining, and allegedly evil scourges like cohabitation are on the rise.

In any case, I can’t better Foster’s post; here’s the link again.

Chapter 7.1: Pseudonymity in the Bible

In this chapter Loftus discusses issues surrounding the authorship of biblical texts. Loftus’ targets are evidently his Christian readers who have traditional (Protestant) views about the authorship and the general literary nature of the Bible.

Those who have some familiarity with biblical criticism will not be surprised by the couple of other people’s scholarly views cited in this chapter. In some cases, such as the so-called first five books of Moses, there is significant scholarly consensus, religious and secular, that Moses is probably not the author (that is, not even a principal or original author). Loftus spends considerable time going over similar issues, such as the theoretical division of the book of Isaiah into two or three authors. He moves on to New Testament territory, discussing such scholarly trinkets as Jude’s citation of 1 Enoch. Loftus is at least hazily aware of divisions in intellectual history regarding these points. For example, he says regarding Isaiah:

The main reason why the unity of Isaiah was accepted for so long despite the problems with the different historical contexts was because of a predisposition to believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible as a whole, modeled on the prophetic paradigm. But eventually, with the rise of historical consciousness, scholars challenged this assumption with the facts of Isaiah itself (Loftus, 169).

Loftus does his readers a disservice by leaving out of his intellectual histories what early Christians and Jews themselves took Scripture to be. Scholars, e.g. William Abraham, have done excellent work demonstrating the diversity of scriptural views present in the days of early Christianity. Aside from taking some shots at particular Protestant and American Evangelical anachronistic understandings of  the Bible, it is difficult to discern a main point in this chapter. Loftus appears to think it is a problem that “not even the inspired writers themselves knew what a true prophetic voice from God was!” He presumably has in mind differences of opinion expressed within the Bible, and the presence in the Bible of extra-Biblical Jewish traditions, again for some reason assuming a Protestant or American Evangelical understanding. But there is some scholarly consensus on another matter as well – that the process of “canonization” was much more organic than we popularly believe. The texts that are canonical usually are so because that’s how they were already being used. Canonization was probably a matter of affirming, just as much or more than a matter of deciding. Furthermore, from a theological point of view, it seems to me that the function of much of scripture is not figuring out who is a prophet, but proclaiming something about God. Indeed much of the pseudepigraphal literature evidences disputes about those matters. Theologically-inclined readers are encouraged to comment on this point.

As I’ve said elsewhere, of course the importance of these issues will be partly proportional to how “high” a view of scripture the reader has (note: few Christians with “low” views of scripture are happy with the choice of spatial metaphors). Verbal inspiration is one issue, but another is what inspiration even means, how we should read an inspired text anyway, and so on. I suspect that Christians similar to the younger John Loftus (by his own description) are especially in trouble in light of biblical scholarship. For example, young Loftus took the creation account to be in the same literary genre and mode as Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which resulted in one of the three pillars of his de-conversion. But if Loftus really aspires to be the “undoing of Christianity” he will have to stop thinking about his young self, focus on less idiosyncratic opposing views, and stop presenting Christian positions at their weakest.

This philosophy has the dignity of being an honest expression of an impossible existence. And its author [Sartre] merits the respect that must be paid to one who has vicariously taken upon himself for many the fate of nihilistic involvement and been courageous enough to slough off the bourgeois veneer.

Here – as well as in the case of many expressions of modern art, abstract, non-objective, and surrealist art – we must conclude that there is a “loss of the center.” But we may do this only if we say at the same time that its author represents a higher ethical dignity than do the painful conservatives who will not dare to make such an honest confession, but rather, by trying to restore the classical, go on telling lies with the help of an illegitimate, stolen beauty. Even the confession that one is confronted with Nothingness has about it the luster of honesty which will not remain without blessing; for it has to do with that willingness to be stripped of illusions and be defeated that must be suffered wherever one takes life and death really seriously. And perhaps Jesus Christ would include this philosophy of the empty hands and this art of the lost center in that mysteriously honored domain which he described as spiritual poverty and emptiness before God, but which nevertheless was full of promise: Blessed are these – far more blessed in any case than the rich fools and other “possessors,” than the real or seeming “beati possidenti.”

We may venture to express it this way: No man will ever come to the truth and thus to a trustworthy bridge over the abyss of Nothingness who has not faced doubt, despair, and shipwreck. This is the virtue of the great Descartes, to whose spirit everyone who is intellectually alive and responsible should devote a lock of hair. He knew that one comes to the truth only through doubt. And we would be doing him an injustice if we were to assume that he used doubt merely as a dodge, as a heuristic principle, as it were, knowing all the time that in the next moment a brilliant, self-evident proof of God would emerge.

He who really doubts never employs a trick of method; rather he exposes himself to despair and shipwreck. He who wants to die “in order” to become has not really died at all. In such cases theology speaks of temptation (Anfechtung). Not until a man is in the fiery furnace of utter bewilderment and despair does he see what is really genuine. This is what Luther meant when he said that “tentatio facit theologum” (temptation makes the theologian). He who simply cultivates and preserves the sheltered garden of his childhood faith and the ideals of Western Civilization, always fending off the destructive onslaughts of doubt, can never really experience the miracle of grace. For at best he puts his faith in his own faith, perhaps only in the faith of former generations. He never believes, however, in the God who seeks him with his grace.

He who knows what faith is must also have stood beneath the baleful eye of that demonic power against which we fling our faith. Faith is a struggle or it is nothing.

He who, for fear of falling victim to nihilistic self-destruction, hysterically seeks to hold on to what was once holy to him, to the higher goods of humanity that mean something to him, falls victim to hysteria and loses his intellectual inegrity. He who wants to believe must go through death.

But let him beware of a teleology of dying, of dying as a trick. Let him not dare to play with nihilism, as some youngsters perhaps do. The poor in spirit is not a snob.

Anybody who has ever been snatched away from nihilism knows that this does not happen by way of a harmless process of growth and becoming; he knows that he has been laid hold of by a higher hand and drawn across the saving border (Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism, 175-177).