by Jonathan Ekene Ifeanyi
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| Christ being buried |
Adultery-supporting-Jesuit Superior General, Father Arturo
Sosa, said recently that when it comes to Jesus’ words on the indissolubility
of marriage, “There would have to be a
lot of reflection on what Jesus really said. At that time, no one had a recorder
to take down his words.”
Precisely, what Sosa is unambiguously saying here is that
it’s quite stupid to believe anything
we read in the gospels as being the word of God. So how can such a one believe in the
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the gospels? How, for instance, do we reconcile his statement
above with Augustine’s position that “Every
single word in every single sentence (in the Bible) was put there by the Holy
Spirit for a reason, to reveal on at least one level—and possibly many others—the
Creator’s will for his people”? (See: Francis and his gang of heretics pushing for women ordination).
Some nominal Catholics have expressed surprise at Sosa’s poison. But of course, Sosa is never
alone in making this kind of statement. It simply became normal at least since Vatican II. In the prevailing climate of
subjectivism and relativism the affirmation of the gospel as public truth is
greeted with scepticism: “What do you
mean by ‘gospel’? A great variety of religious ideas have been—at sundry times
and places—offered under this title. Has not this been so from the beginning?
The abstruse metaphysics of the early Church Fathers was something very
different from the apocalyptic teaching of the New Testament. All religion,
including Christianity, is an ever changing affair, and it is futile to appeal
to something which lies behind the Christian religion as we now have it—‘the
gospel.’”
What we call “the gospel”, they go on, is simply a confused
record of a variety of human religious experiences. What is accessible to us is
not what really happened but the
faith of the disciples cast into the form of narrative. The inaccessible to us
of what really happened is made
more certain by two factors: one, the culture of first century Palestine is so
remote from ours that we cannot expect to understand what they were trying to
say; and two, it was customary in those days to tell stories to authorise or
validate current projects or practices, and everyone understood that these
stories were not “history” in the sense that we now understand it.
In addressing these “arguments”, where do we just start? The
first objection—the “culture objection”—reminds me of an argument with those
who see classical studies, my discipline, as outdated and irrelevant (really
because they are angry that they can’t understand Greek and Latin languages or
the arguments of Greek philosophers!). I wrote in response in an article on the
question of Classics relevance:
“People may question the relevance of Classics to the modern world,
after all, everything did happen a very long time ago, and a lot of significant
events have happened since, but as Lord Greene so eloquently puts it, ‘the
traditions of Greece and Rome have been woven during succeeding ages into the
pattern of new and glittering fabrics. It is for us to carry on the pattern
that has been handed to us.’ The influence of Greece and Rome stretches far
beyond the fall of the Roman Empire; the great artists, architects, authors and
philosophers of the ancient world have influenced our ancestors throughout the
centuries, and continue to influence us today. In the words of Frank Fletcher,
‘the sound of the living voice is lost for us: but everything else remains: it
is no dead language in which these writers speak. The words and thoughts are
alive.’ The ability of the ancient writers to speak to us across the ages is
part of what makes Classics such a well-loved subject; these authors may have
lived in a time very different from our own, but they are not so very different
from ourselves.”
The Bible, of course, apart from
being the word of God, is also classical. In fact, the argument about cultural
remoteness is really a sharp denial of the fundamental unity of the human race.
Pre-colonial African village farmers with whom the European missionaries shared
the gospel are at least as culturally remote from the Europeans as are New
Testament writers. Yet they were—and are still—perfectly able to understand and
rejoice in the gospel, although many of them are bastardising it now because of
the influence of modernism and Vatican II apostasy.
As for the other allegation—that
of ancient historical (or anti-historical) codes of practice—it is, as late Lesslie
Newbigin rightly puts it, “surely rather absurd.” “Ancient writers show
themselves capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction,” he writes. “In
any case, fiction is useful only in a truth-telling society. If it is
understood that the alleged facts are normally fictions, fiction loses its
usefulness. And finally, the acceptance of this myth would wipe out our claim
to know anything reliable about ancient history. Many famous university
departments would have to close”. (Truth
To Tell, p.8).
The assertion that what is
accessible to us is not what really happened but the faith of the disciples cast into the form of
narrative is really a serious one. The historian E. H. Carr defined history as
a continuous conversation between the present and the past. It is only in this
way that history becomes part of an intelligible and purposeful life. Citing Carr, Newbigin—a Protestant theologian
and an opponent of modernism and radical ecumenism—writes:
“This view carries weight because it corresponds to a key element in
contemporary western culture, namely a false concept of objectivity—of a kind
of knowledge from which the human subject has been removed. When it is proposed
that a sharp distinction be made between the faith of the first disciples and
“what really happened,” it is implied that E. H. Carr’s continuing conversation
should now stop. Of course what we have in the New Testament represents the
faith of the disciples, namely their faith about “what really happened.” It would be a remarkable example of cultural
chauvinism if we supposed that our faith about what really happened, shaped as
it is by our own cultural perspectives, must necessarily displace that of the
immediate witnesses. The conversation between the present and the past must go
on, and will go on, until the end of the world, and the perception of the first
witnesses must have the premier role in the conversation. ...This line of
thinking is obviously applicable to the telling of all history and not only to
the telling of the history with which the New Testament deals. Why, then, does
it become such a vexing problem when we are dealing with the happenings which
form the content of the gospel?”
Of course, the reason is because
many contemporary scripture scholars and theologians are—in
reality—unbelievers. Unlike the early Christian writers and theologians, they
are not Christian converts. Today even a freethinker can “study” Christian
theology and become a Christian theologian, teach in a Catholic seminary even
while still perfectly remaining a freethinker. I personally know so many of
them, and also know many priest-theologians who are even worse than them. Hence
as non-converts, as unbelievers, often what these men read in the Bible doesn’t
make sense to them so they question it. They are like men who, through dubious
means, have forced themselves to occupy positions which they are not qualified
to occupy—Sosa is just a typical example.
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| Sosa & Francis. |
The early Christian scholars and
theologians understood perfectly well that to be Jesus’ follower or a Christian
theologian just one thing is required: REPENTANCE. Hence St. Augustine was
originally a professor of rhetoric in the imperial university but only became a
Christian theologian after his radical conversion—after his repentance. At the
very beginning of Jesus’ ministry we hear this very word: metanoete (repent). We are warned that to understand what follows
will require nothing less than a radical conversion of the mind. Thus the
problem of making sense of the gospel is that it calls for a change of mind
which is as radical as is the action of God in becoming man and dying on a
cross. Of course, it is always possible to take note of this without allowing it
to change our minds in any radical way. Our theologians can give lengthy
lectures on Jesus’ preaching of metanoia
even though the idea of repentance doesn’t really make sense to them, just as Tacitus
could record that someone called “Christus” had been crucified but had given
rise to a pestilential sect without this information changing his mind. The two
disciples on the way to Emmaus knew that Jesus had been crucified but that had
not changed their belief that the Messiah, when he came, would be a successful
practitioner of liberation theology. The crucifixion was just a disappointment.
What changed their minds, what brought metanoia,
was the fact that Jesus was alive. And that meant that the crucifixion was a
fact of a different kind. As Einstein used to say—quoted by Newbigin in his Truth To Tell—“what you call a fact
depends on the theory you bring to it.” (Ibid. pp 9-10).
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| Resurrection |
Of course, the question, “what really happened?” becomes most
pressing at the point of the resurrection. Do the majority of today’s church
leaders actually believe that Jesus died on the cross, was buried, but rose
from the dead on the third day? Does someone like Sosa really believe that?
I sharply doubt that they do
precisely because to believe that the crucified Jesus rose from the dead, left
an empty tomb, and regrouped His scattered followers for their world mission
can only be the result of a radical change of mind—which of course is lacking in our theologians and church leaders. Without
that change of mind, the story is too implausible to be regarded as part of
real history. The simple truth is
that the resurrection cannot be accommodated in any way of understanding the
world except one of which it is the starting point. I am talking about the resurrection of Jesus and not of fable, and I am contending that
if it is true, it has to be the starting point of a wholly new way of
understanding the cosmos and the human situation in the cosmos—just as it was
the starting point in the time of St. Augustine, in the time of St. Thomas
Aquinas, and in the whole of the medieval period when the resurrection was
rightly understood as the beginning of a new creation and hence when the
Catholic Church of Jesus Christ ruled the world.
A
lot of factors show that most current “Catholic leaders”, particularly those currently
in Rome—while hypocritically pretending to be otherwise in order to have the
money of the faithful—really don’t believe in Christ’s crucifixion, death, and
resurrection, chief among which is their radically different view of Jesus Christ
Himself. Hence the reason why they champion radical ecumenism unanimously
condemned by pre-Vatican II popes—a radical ecumenism in which Jesus is often
being presented as a mere religious leader who, like Mohammed, was just human
like us. If Jesus is a religious leader just like other religious leaders
then what would be the point of a Christian trying to convert a non-Christian? As
late Cardinal Martini once explained, in a homily,
the meaning of Jesus’ injunction to His followers to “Go therefore and make
disciples of all the nations.” (Matt.28:18-20):
“...We
all have a great need to learn how to live together amid our differences,
respecting rather than destroying one another, not isolating one another, not
despising one another and not simply tolerating each other, because tolerance
would be too little. But I would say that
this also means not attempting right away to bring about conversions, because
this word raises insurmountable barriers in certain situations and among
certain people. It means, instead, 'fermenting' each other in such a way that
each person is brought to a deeper realization of his own authenticity, his own
truth before the mystery of God.”
(The complete text of the "homily" on May 8, 2005, by Carlo
Cardinal Maria Martini, on the website of the archdiocese of Milan: “Desidero
esprimere la mia più viva gratitudine...”)
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