The State of Catholicism from a US Perspective
John Allen Jr. gives an interesting overview of the state of Catholicism from a US perspective.
Prophetic Texts
I want to put some thoughts down on the concept of prophecy in the sense of predictions made about future events. I had written several paragraphs before I discovered the term ‘postdiction’ and its accompanying Wikipedia entry. It sums up well the concepts I had previously written so I’ve integrated its content into my article.
The problems I have with the candidates that I have seen put forward as examples of ‘prophecy’ can be summarised as:
- Vagueness: The predictions contain language that is vague, meaning that reasonable people can come to divergent conclusions on whether the prophecy has come true. Independent observers should be able to agree in advance what constitutes the fulfilment of the prophecy. The most important elements I can think of are time and place.
- Unlikelihood: The predictions describe events that, when fully considered, are not as unlikely as they seem. The fall of a city in a time and place where war is common is one example.
- Hit-to-miss ratio: A text that is said to be prophetic should successfully predict future events at a greater rate than other non-prophetic documents. This requires that predictions and non-predictions be clearly identified and their success or failure readily determined at the time of assessment.
The Wikipedia article adds several other frequent features of prophetic statements. They are: open ended, recycled, catch-all, shotgunning, unfalsifiable, unavailable until after the fact, allegory and moving the goalposts.
Faith and God
I suppose I’ve never really properly understood the concept of faith as it is used within Christianity. I’m sure there are sophisticated definitions of the term but here I’m focusing on what I understand some to be saying. This may or may not be representative of the ‘correct’ understanding.
I’ll describe a scenario. A person goes before a preacher and says that they want their broken toe healed. The preacher claims that if they have ‘faith’ that God will work a miracle then their toe could be healed. Others in the room are encouraged to have faith as well. The problem I have is determining who exactly these individuals have ‘faith’ in. Is it faith in themselves that they have properly determined the prescriptions for a miracle and satisfied those prescriptions? If so then that appears to me to be nothing but false confidence. They are essentially saying “I don’t know if a miracle will occur but I will chose to conclude with confidence (‘great faith’) that one will occur.”
Figure One
I’ve summarised this in Figure One. I’ve diagrammed the other possibility in Figure Two.
Figure Two
In Figure Two I’ve shown another understanding of the term ‘faith’, faith that God’s will will be done. It seems unusual to suggest that people require faith that a perfectly powerful being has the power to achieve it’s desired end. Another possibility is that faith is being used to mean faith that God has chosen to desire a given outcome, and outcome you also desire, but then it’s not at all clear how that could affect the outcome. If God desires it, it will be done regardless of the faith that humans have in it.
I am not saying that I have thought of all the possibilities, rather that I cannot see how some people who claim to have faith in God for a given miracle are not simply having faith that they’ve determined what they need to do in order for God to make a miracle and faith that they’ve done it or that they greatly desire an outcome and are to remain confident of it occurring in spite of the fact that they are really not sure.
I believe that some elements of Roman Catholicism (Thomism) have a different concept of faith and I’m sure that within Orthodoxy and Protestantism there are similarly sophisticated definitions that may make more sense.
Secular and Ecclesiastical Conceptions of Authority
I’ve long been interested in the concept of authority. Why do we obey one command but ignore another? Where does legitimate authority begin and end? What forms can authority take? I have found that this article from the The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition) gives an excellent account of secular authority.
I recently attempted to interact with Tim Enloe, an intelligent guy with an academic background in religion, by posting a response to this post. My comment can be found here. Unfortunately he appears to have ignored my comment and claims to be too busy to respond to the various comments his post produced. I believe that much needless frustration occurs when participants in a discussion fail to define their terms. It is senseless to bring up a discussion then refuse to explain what you mean when you use key terms.
I reproduce my comment in full here:
“Tim, like you I’m interested in political theory and in particular the concept of ‘authority’. Unlike you, though, I no longer believe in God (I’m agnostic, not atheist; at this point I find the arguments for and against God’s existence equally plausible).
I have read a number of your posts and several of your articles and I note that you often use the word ‘authority’ in them. You also criticise your Roman Catholic opponents for failing to give a coherent account of the concept. In particular I note these examples:
- “To be honest, I find it nearly universally true that the louder modern Catholics shout about papal authority vs. Protestant rebellion, the less they’ve done much meaningful study on what authority is and within what sorts of limitations it is constrained.”
- “”Luther was a rebel against authority.” Highly debatable, depending on definitions of rebel and authority which have to be rationally justified, not merely assumed.”
- “Again, highly debatable depending on definitions of authority which have to be rationally justified, not merely assumed.”
My question is this. How do you define authority? Give a specific definition of the word itself. In particular, what is it’s source, scope and nature? How do you distinguish secular from ecclesiastical authority, especially in regard to their sources? What is the nature of the duty that each imposes, or indeed are any duties imposed at all? How are disputes in jurisdiction to be resolved? More practically (and if you only answer one question, please let it be this one), what is the ‘test’ that a given subject must apply in order to determine if an authority is legitimate or if a particular command from a legitimate authority is binding?
There is more that I’d like to know about your idea of authority but I’ll leave it there for the moment.”
Addition:
I’ve given up with this guy. Here is my last comment:
“I’ll probably get banned for this, but who cares. I’ve removed this site from my reader because it has become a joke.
Tim, I really don’t think you know what you are talking about. You frequently use the word ‘authority’ but you seem unwilling, or incapable, of actually defining the term. This makes you look particularly hypocritical when you viciously criticise Roman Catholics for failing to do the very same thing.
Have you noticed that your comments sections have become nothing but cheer squads? Jonathan Bronomo, Mary Louise, St Worm, Josh S, and a man that appears to have lost all grip on reality, the hate filled Kevin Johnson?
Sound scholarship has as much to do with the temperament of an author as it does his qualifications. If you are incapable of keeping your emotions in check you will remain the very thing you criticise – a cheap Internet polemicist.”
His reply:
”Bye Tysen. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”
This guy has some potential but I doubt he will ever reach it. Most humans, and scholars in particular, are intolerant of hypocrisy. Tim paints a picture of the sixteenth century that is so bleak that it is not possible to account for the thousands of people that remained Roman Catholic, let alone some dying for it, without turning them into Jack Chick-esque caricatures of human beings. All this and he chastises others for simplifying history. There is a strange pride that some Protestants feel when they buy into the rhetoric of sixteenth century polemicists, rhetoric that even some illiterate peasants of the day could see through. And by keeping company with people like Kevin Johnson, someone I see as nothing more than a hate filled bigot, he and his co-authors do their reputations among fair minded observers serious harm.
A Simplified Representation of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Authority
Look here for a brief summary of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. In many ways the Church hierarchy is to the Catholic Church what Parliament and the Courts are to civil society. They provide a means of establishing and enforcing norms. There have been various symbolic conceptions of the Catholic Church expressed over time but the practice of a hierarchical authority structure of some kind is not widely disputed. Most debate seems centred on the most appropriate scope and power of various ‘layers’ of the hierarchy, not on whether or not they should exist at all.
Often people talk of “the Vatican”, “the Catholic Church”, “the bishops” and “the hierarchy”. At times it is clear from the context of a claim what particular person or people the speaker is referring to but at other times the terms end up as a vague sort of place-holder, a generalisation that is far too broad for descriptive purposes.
Diversity in Roman Catholicism
I have created a diagram that represents as best I can (given my time constraints) the way in which a number of organisations fit within the scope of Roman Catholic belief. I have drawn an arrow up top to show increasing ‘conservatism’ from left to right. I have not used a precise definition of conservatism in this case and the organisations on the far right are not conservative as the term is normally used because they actually want change, just in the opposite direct to those on the left. The centre represents the current hierarchy and the arrows on the bottom of the diagram represent the direction of change that the organisations advocate – either liberalisation of doctrine or ‘reversion’ to previous doctrine and practice.
I have put each organisation into it’s place based upon my general understanding of each one, their public comments and their own professed beliefs. I may have gotten some of them wrong but I only intend to paint a general picture or trend. I am not trying to convey whether each organisation is right or wrong but merely where they sit in relation to the current hierarchy. The organisations are displayed in relation to the present hierarchy in the Vatican rather than the bishops as a whole worldwide or most of the laity. Some are lobby groups, some are support groups, some are educational groups and some are religious ministries.
It’s probably most informative to see the organisations as broadly fitting into three categories: change in the direction of further liberalisation, acceptance of the status quo, and change in reverse direction to the pre-Vatican II state of Catholicism.
