Is John 6 about the eucharist?

         As one of the chief Biblical sources for believing that the actual body and blood of Christ are literally, physically, present in the Eucharist, Roman Catholics (and others) often cite John 6: 22 ff., commonly known as the Bread of Life discourse.  To do so, however, seems to me to ignore the context of Jesus' words and to misunderstand his meaning, as the following explanation will demonstrate.  The text is not Eucharistic.

         I invite, indeed strongly encourage, you to read each portion of the text identified before reading the explanation offered below.

Context and setting (22-25)   

         Geographically, this conversation between Jesus and those around Him occurred primarily, though not exclusively, in the synagogue of Capernaum (v. 59).  Those to whom He spoke were a mixed audience that included his disciples and other followers, his Jewish opponents, and countless unbelieving hangers on, eager to fill their bellies.  Nearly all had seen Him multiply fish and bread in order to feed 5,000 hungry persons at once (John 6: 1-15).  Many of them followed Him to Capernaum to get more free food, if they could, apparently missing the profound theological significance of the miracle they had witnessed and from which they had benefited.

         They did not understand that just as their forebears had been fed by the God-sent manna (also not Eucharistic) from Heaven centuries earlier in order to sustain their lives while they sojourned in the wilderness, even so had God now sent his Son from Heaven in order to feed their souls while on their sojourn through the wilderness of life in a fallen world.  By feeding the crowd with miraculously multiplied fish and bread, Jesus was demonstrating that He was to his audience (and to the world) something like what the manna was to the ancient Israelites.  But his audience did not understand the point, so many of them followed Him to Capernaum not for spiritual sustenance from God, which He came to supply, but simply for more food.  Some among them apparently had an inkling that his miracle showed he was the Messiah, but they wanted more proof.

         The context for this discourse, then, is not the Passover meal, during which Jesus instituted for his small band of disciples the ritual breaking of bread and the drinking of wine, by which they were to remember Him until He returned (Matt. 26: 26 ff.).  While near in time (v. 4), the Passover meal is still seven chapters away -- seven chapters.  The discussion here between Jesus and this mixed multitude is something quite different from the Last Supper and his exclusive instructions to his few followers.  To read this discussion as if Jesus were speaking of a distinctly Christian sacrament to a largely unbelieving Jewish crowd, and obliquely introducing to them without any explanation the concept of transubstantiation, is blatantly to disregard both the textual context and the audience, who first address Jesus, not about the Passover meal, but about how He managed to get to Capernaum without taking the last boat available, the one in which his disciples had departed (v. 25).

Jesus' first statement (26, 27)

         As is sometimes the case with Jesus, He does not answer the question posed to Him, but instead goes directly to the issue at hand, in this case the crowd's shallow motivation for following Him to Capernaum:  the food.  In order to meet them where their minds and hearts actually were at that moment, Jesus employs metaphorical language about food and advises them to work for the food that does not perish, food unlike the ancient manna or the recent fish and bread, both of which eventually rot.  Rather than physical food that perishes, He directs them toward a very different kind of food, a food that lasts, and that yields eternal life.  Physical food is not the sort of food He has in mind in this regard, and physical eating is not what He recommends, though that is the sort of food and consumption they now seek.  The soul nourishment He has in mind was something that He, the Son of Man, had been appointed and approved ("sealed") to give them by God Himself.  That nourishment of soul is not subject to decay the way physical food is.  Jesus is clearly distinguishing between physical food and food for the soul, and focusing their attention on the latter. 

         The metaphor of eating and drinking that Jesus employs here was common enough among ancient Jewish teachers and writers, and normally stood for appropriation -- in this case appropriating Jesus.

The people speak (28)

         The people respond to Jesus' admonition to work for the imperishable food that yields eternal life by asking Him what works they ought to perform in order to get this imperishable food.  Though we might well understand that their question was sincere, in light of what follows it was ill-conceived and misguided.

Jesus' second statement (29)

         As directly as possible, Jesus tells them that, in order to have eternal life, they must believe -- not eat and drink -- believe.  No mention, metaphorical or otherwise, is made here of food or of eating.  Believing in the One Whom God sent is the key that unlocks the door to eternal life, not the mastication of body or swallowing of blood.  Jesus is plainly and simply instructing them to move their attention away from food to something far more important and enduring, namely the well being of their souls through faith in Him.  Physical food and physical eating are simply not in view here.  Faith, not food; believing, not eating; is the issue

The people speak (30, 31)

         Perhaps some of his listeners understood that His point pertained to faith and not to eating because, in response to his instruction that they believe in Him, they asked him for additional signs as a basis for their belief -- as if the healings (v. 2) and the feeding of the 5,000 (v. 11-14) they had recently witnessed somehow were not enough. Others, just as apparently, still thought He was talking about normal food and drink.  To them, He responds.

Jesus' third statement (32, 33)

         As He did in verse 26, Jesus responds to the people on his own basis, not theirs.  Though they are thinking still about the physical food from Heaven that sustained their ancestors in the wilderness, He responds by directing them to the metaphorical bread that comes from God and that gives eternal life to the world -- and not merely to the Israelites in the desert.  Surely his reference to bread here is a figure of speech, for no combination of flour, salt, herbs and yeast yields eternal life for the world.  Bakers create many wonderful things in their ovens, but salvation is not one of them.  By speaking this way, Jesus is trying to move his listeners away from their crassly self-indulgent and materialistic view of the Messiah and his reign.  He tells them about a higher, a more ideal (so to speak) kind of bread.  He wants them to know that the manna from Heaven was prophetic, or indicative, or predictive, of the Incarnation, of Him and his entry into the world so that by faith the world  might be saved.

The people speak (34)

         His reference to the bread that gives eternal life evokes from them a strong and direct response, even demand:  "Give us this bread always!"

         It is difficult to know for certain if they understand to what Jesus is referring, but it seems that they do not.  They do not ask for help to aid their belief in Him.  They ask for a bread that is to be given, not a day at a time, or only for a while (as was the manna), or for a one-time feast of fish and bread such as they just experienced from the power and largesse of Christ.  They ask instead for bread to be given them always, apparently thinking that if they were given it  -- and were given it always -- it would yield eternal life for them simply because the giving of that physical bread continued.

        

Jesus fourth statement (35-40)

         Again, Jesus makes plain for them that the bread He has in mind is figurative bread, not literal bread, and that He Himself is the bread of which He speaks.  He tells them that they must come to Him and believe in Him because He is the bread of life.  If they believe in Him, they will not hunger and they will not thirst.  Again, in keeping with the figurative language He has been using, the eating and drinking to which He refers are not physical.  They are used in reference to believing.  Neither are the hunger and thirst they assuage physical.  He is not saying that if they believe in Him they will never again need to eat or drink, which would be the case if He were speaking of literal bread.  Of course they will grow physically hungry and thirsty again.  One does not cease to be physically hungry or physically thirsty simply because one is now a believer.  That is not the sort of eating and drinking, or the sort of hunger and thirst, He has in mind.  But, if they believe in Him, they will find enduring spiritual satisfaction because faith in Him is nourishment for the soul.  Once they turn to Him in faith, once they believe, their souls will have found the food on which their souls were meant to feed, food that yields not mere physical satisfaction, but eternal life.  They already had eaten physical food on the other side of the lake.  But that sort of eating did not keep them physically satisfied.  Nor did it redeem them.  The sort of satisfaction Jesus has in mind does not emerge from literal eating and drinking, but from believing.  Believing in Him, He boldly states, is the very will of God.  Because it is, if they believe in Him, God will deliver them on the day of resurrection. 

The people speak (41, 42)

         Jesus' insistence that He came down from Heaven stirs up dissent and debate among them because they know that He comes from Nazareth.  They know his parents.  Knowing his parents and his hometown, they figure they know and understand his origins.  They do not.

Jesus' fifth statement (43-51)

In order to put right the false objections they entertained about his Heavenly origins, Jesus reminds those who have been drawn to Him that they were drawn to Him by the very will and power of God, and He quotes from the Scriptures to that effect.   Once again He urges them to believe in Him because belief (not eating) is the path to eternal life (v. 47).  In explanation of his admonition to believe in Him, he reiterates the analogy He employed earlier by telling them again that, just as their ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, they themselves should eat his flesh and drink his blood -- startling and graphic language that compares the Israelites eating manna in the wilderness with his audience believing in Him.  That is, just as the ancient Israelites ate manna in the wilderness and thereby found sustenance for their bodies, they themselves should believe in Him and find sustenance for their souls -- eternal life -- a process that He graphically and memorably figures forth as eating his body and drinking his blood, a figure of speech He explicitly employed earlier (v. 35) when He clearly and overtly identified believing in Him with eternal life itself.  His point here is to urge them onward to belief, not urge them literally to gnaw on his body and to drink his blood.  In other words, because their minds seem so firmly fixed on the pursuit of physical food, He makes a shockingly graphic reference to physical food, and to eating and drinking it, as a verbal means by which to catch their attention, and thereby to re-direct their thoughts from food for their bodies to food for their souls, namely the eternal life that is the blessed consequence of believing in Him.  So that they, in their craving for food and drink, might turn to Him in faith, He refers to Himself as food and to believing in Him as eating and drinking.

Notice carefully that in verses 35, 40, and 47 Jesus clearly indicates that believing in Him yields eternal life.  When, therefore, He indicates in other verses that eating his flesh and drinking his blood also yield eternal life, He clearly is drawing a connection between believing, on the one hand, and what He calls eating and drinking, on the other.  In this figure of speech, the latter symbolizes the former, not the other way round.  The believing is literal; the eating and drinking of his actual body and blood are not.  To take his words literally, as if He were linking their eternal salvation to some kind of grotesque cannibalistic ritual, is abhorrent.  To imagine that He is directing them literally to feast on his body and to drink his blood is a notion any ancient Jew would have found both wicked and disgusting -- and clearly against the quite specific injunction of God Himself against any such practice (Gen. 9:4).  That is not what Jesus intends.

By calling Himself "the living bread" in v. 51, He puts beyond all doubt that his language here is metaphorical.  Babies and goats, for example, are alive. Loaves of bread in an oven or stored in plastic bags on a grocery store shelf are not.  Wafers, crackers and loaves are not alive.  Jesus is referring to Himself as the living bread, and his use of the word “bread” here is unquestionably metaphorical.  Bread is not alive.  Jesus is.  He cannot be speaking literally about Himself as "living bread."  He is a man, not a loaf.  Bread is not alive; He is.  It must be a metaphor.  It cannot be literal.  Nor, in keeping with his non-literal language, does He mean for us literally to eat His body and drink his blood.  Chewing Him up and swallowing Him down are not what He has in mind.   

The people speak (52)

         Still not properly understanding Jesus' metaphorical language, the crowd was shocked and grew deeply puzzled: How could they possibly eat his body or drink his blood?   It was unthinkable.  Had they understood his words in the non-literal way in which He meant them, their befuddlement and disgust would have quickly disappeared.  Their befuddlement is rooted in their misunderstanding Jesus as speaking literally. 

Jesus' sixth statement (53-59)

         Jesus continues to press home the startling metaphor He is employing, apparently intending by its cannibalistic absurdity to shock His hearers out of their preoccupation with physical food and with physical eating and drinking.  So He repeats and amplifies His point, which is expressed in the aorist tense (v. 53), which denotes a once-for-all action, a grammatical choice thoroughly unsuited to the repeated participation required in the RC Eucharist, were the Roman reading here to be followed.

The disciples speak (60)

         Some of Jesus' disciples were among those who mistakenly thought He was speaking literally.  Because they did, they too found His words deeply offensive, and (as one translation aptly puts it) "hard to stomach."  Because of their misunderstanding, and the shock and offense to which it led, He provides His own explanation of the teaching He has just articulated.

Jesus' seventh statement (61-67)

         As He sometimes does after He speaks figuratively and non-literally (cp. for example, Luke 8: 11ff), Jesus explains carefully to His disciples exactly what He meant.  He tells them that He is not speaking about actual flesh.  He tells them that the flesh yields no benefit, none.  As in the King James translation, "the flesh profits nothing."  The word "nothing" could hardly be more absolute.  Any benefit He has been talking about up until now is not related to flesh or to eating it.  Flesh profits nothing.  By contrast, what He has been talking about up until now yields unimaginable profit -- namely eternal life.  If  flesh profits nothing, and if what He has been talking about yields the unimaginable profit and benefit of eternal life, then He cannot have been talking about flesh.  By explaining Himself in this way, Jesus was correcting the error of some of his disciples, an error they shared with the crowds that also had mistook his meaning by interpreting Him literally.  His words are spiritual, He tells them, and it is His words, His message, that brings eternal life, and which He puts forward for their acceptance and beleif, not his flesh and blood for their physical consumption.  Those fleshly things profit nothing, He insists.

         The RCC, it seems to me, falls into the exact error Jesus worked so carefully to correct throughout this discussion.  The RCC insists that Jesus is speaking literally about eating human flesh and drinking human blood, and that He is doing so in agreement with their transubstantiationist view of the Eucharist.  But you could hardly insist that Jesus is telling you to eat His flesh and drink His blood in order to obtain salvation if He tells you that the flesh you eat profits precisely nothing.  Salvation is very far from nothing.  If the RCC is intent upon understanding Jesus literally, then the word "nothing" ought to be literally understood as well.  In short, by misreading Him as they do, Catholics are ripping the Bread of Life discourse out of its historical setting and planting it foursquare into the upper room and the Passover, and by doing so they thereby insist that Jesus was, without any overt explanation at all, incorporating for a disparate Jewish audience in Capernaum the Greek philosophical notions we call "substance" and "accidents," as well as the distinctions between them.   No one in Capernaum at that moment -- not Jesus, not his disciples, not his Jewish opponents, and not the food-seeking multitude -- says anything explicitly about the Passover meal or about the Eucharist, much less about the later RC doctrine of transubstantiation or any of its theological corollaries and Greek philosophical underpinnings.  By insisting what it does, the RCC is reading enormous amounts of its own theology back into the text.  As the next few verses indicate, Peter, whom they follow, does not. 

Peter speaks (68-70)

         While some of Jesus' followers left Him at that time, Peter did not.  Once Peter heard and understood Jesus' explanation of the connection between eternal life and believing in Him, he stood firm.  Indeed, rather than following the deserters, Peter rose to the theological and spiritual profundity of which he is sometimes so capable.  Though others might go away, Peter knows that the words -- not the flesh -- of eternal life come from Jesus because Jesus is the Son of the living God.  In John 6, Jesus Himself makes plain repeatedly and
 precisely how He expects people to obtain the gift of 
eternal life -- by believing.  Peter gets it: 
"we believe," Peter says, not "we eat, drink, or swallow" (v. 69). 

Salvation is appropriated by faith, by belief, not by the
 gastro-intestinal system.  The eating and drinking are 
figurative of belief.  Belief is not figurative of
 chewing, drinking, or swallowing.

         What we have in the bread is symbolic of his flesh.  The flesh He gave for the world was real.  It was crucified and has ascended into Heaven, which is where it remains until now, and will remain until the Second Coming.  That flesh is not on earth.  We know where that flesh is.  We know where his body now resides.  His disciples themselves told us so.  They watched it ascend to Heaven.  They told us about the event.  They told us exactly where his body now is.  It is not where some traditions insist it is.

         Perhaps long exposure has inured us to how shocking the Roman way of interpreting Jesus really is.  In order to feel it again, we ought to interpret a parallel passage from the same text.  In John 15: 5, Jesus says, "I am the vine and you are the branches." 

I quote the words of a Catholic fellow discussant words regarding John 6 here:  "No matter how much you deny it, those words are unambiguous.  They are clear, direct statements and *by definition* are not the [sic] figures of speech."  If I applied his bold words and bolder hermeneutic to the passage in John 15, then Jesus' words are both literal and true, and the only reason that He and all Christians don't appear to have bark for skin and leaves for hair is because while the substance of both His body and ours has changed from body to bush and from hair to leaf, we still look like we did before because the accidents remain the same.  Despite all appearances to the contrary, Jesus really is a vine and we really are branches.  He really is a door (John 10: 7, 9); He really is a shepherd, and, by extension, we really are sheep (John 10: 7-16).  The only reason He doesn't look like a door and we don't look like sheep is because, while the substances have changed, the accidents have not.  It's a miracle.  How we can have the substance of branch and of sheep simultaneously must be a miracle too.

         

Edith Schaeffer, RIP

(from Udo Middelmann)

Edith Rachel Merritt Seville Schaeffer died on March 30, 2013 in her home in Gryon, Switzerland, where she had moved 13 years ago to be surrounded by memories, her music, her son’s paintings and the detailed care organized daily by her daughter Deborah Middelmann. She was born on November 3, 1914 as the third daughter of Dr. George Hugh and Jessie Maude Seville in Wenchau, China, where her parents ran a school for girls and taught the Bible in Mandarin.

Edith Schaeffer marked her life with the expression of rich ideas, often rebellious against the staid and superficial life she saw among Christians. The oldest sister became a communist in New York of the 30ies, the second eloped.  Edith Seville married Francis August Schaeffer in 1935 and in no way was she the typical pastor’s or missionary wife. She turned her active mind to work with her husband, teaching first seminary wives to think and to question, to create and make of life something of integrity, as her husband so wanted her to do.  

To put her husband through 3 years of seminary she tailored men’s suits, made ball room gowns and wedding dresses for private clients. From whole cow skins she made belts sold in New York stores. With very little money she prepared tasteful and varied meals. She painted a fresco on the ceiling of the vestibule in the little church her husband pastored in Grove City, while he attached a steeple to it with the elders’ help. They lectured together and encouraged many to use their minds to understand what they believed and how to respond to the intellectual and cultural ideas around them. Together they travelled and taught in churches and university halls from Finland to Portugal, helping people understand Christianity as the truth of the universe, not a personal faith, and pointing out the cultural and philosophical pitfalls in everyone’s way.

She lived her life as a work of art, an exhibition of true significance and a portrait of a generous, stunning and creative personality. She always sought ways to draw on life’s opportunities to show that human beings are made for the enrichment of everyone’s life, for the encouragement of people. This was a central part of the work she and her husband engaged in from the very start of their life together. She was in all things generous. When books provided royalties she used all of it to give her four children and their families annual reunions for the cousins to know each other.

When she left the work of L’Abri after her husband’s death she started the Francis A Schaeffer Foundation with Udo and Deborah Middelmann to safeguard his papers and the ideas that underline their life, to make them available for a wider audience. She found people interesting anywhere, engaged in conversation and so met the most amazing individuals. She talked, for instance, with the author Andre Aciman, standing in line for tickets to Carnegie Hall in NY and found out that he had had our village doctor, Dr. Gandur, as his pediatrician in Alexandria, Egypt. He was so grateful to be in touch through her with his old doctor.

She enjoyed people in the streets, in airplanes and over the phone, wherever she found them or when they could reach her. She stayed up nights to help someone out of their distress or need. With much imagination she served her meals with stunning decorations made from twigs and moss, field flowers and stones. Duncan from Kenya once remarked: “This is the first place where I see the beauty of the truth of the Bible consistently carried over into all areas of life.”

After the death of her husband in 1984 Edith Schaeffer added a whole new chapter to her life. She continued to write books, lectured widely and returned twice to her place of birth in China. She investigated the making the Baby Grand Piano she had received as a gift at the Steinway factory in New York and presented “Forever Music” in a concert at Alice Tully Hall in New York with the Guarneri Quartet. Through Franz Mohr, the chief piano voicer at Steinway she came to know musicians like Rostropovich, the pianists Horowitz and Rudoph Serkin, the Cellists YoYo Ma and Ya Ya Ling, and also the guitarist Christopher Parkening. She organized concerts and elaborate receptions for musicians and friends in her home in Rochester, MN. When she met B. B. King at the International Jazz Festival in Montreux he gave her his pass to the evening’s concert. Once on vacations on the island of Elba, Sonny Rollins noticed her beauty and rhythm in the audience as she danced during his concert, came off the stage and danced with her.

Today she “slipped into the nearer presence of Jesus”, her Lord, from whom she awaits the promised resurrection to continue her life on earth and to dance once again with a body restored to wholeness.

If you wish to honor Edith Schaeffer’s life you can support her intense commitment to the work of the Francis Schaeffer Foundation, Jermintin 3, CH -1882 Gryon, Switzerland

A Non-religious Case Against Same Sex Marriage

 

You might recall the awful option faced by the title character in “Sophie’s Choice:” Pick one child or the other.  It’s not a choice any mother wants to make.  No matter what she chooses, her loss is unutterable.

Nor would any child want to make the same choice in reverse:  “Mommy or Daddy, Sally.  Pick one.”

But that is the ugly position into which same-sex marriage plunges children, except that the children themselves do not get to choose.  Someone else chooses for them.

No matter what you might think about same-sex marriage, we know this:  Any child raised under a same-sex union faces a tremendous loss -- either no Mommy or no Daddy.  In a union where two men or two women are involved, that’s always the outcome.  When Mommy picks a woman or Daddy picks a man as a life partner, the children always lose something enormously valuable and irreplaceable:  a mother or a father. 

That loss often has tragic consequences for a child.  If, for example, you are raised in a home with no father around, the odds that you will drop out of school, that you will take or sell drugs, that you will go to prison, that you will be poor, and that your children will suffer the same fate you did all skyrocket.  That same cycle of hopelessness and crime follows upon the absence of a mother.

When Mommy has sex with another woman, it doesn’t make that other woman a Daddy.  Having sex with Mommy doesn’t make you a Daddy any more than drinking milk makes you a calf.

The point here is not remotely homophobic.  The point here is not that Mommy and her lover, or Daddy and his, are to be shunned, much less hated.  The point here is that mothers and fathers are fundamentally important to the development of children, and therefore to the future of the nation, which depends upon the development and maturation of the next generation.  That works best when children have both a father and a mother.

         I say so because, according to a recent groundbreaking study by University of Texas scholar Mark Regnerus, we discover this (as summarized by The Family research Council):

         Compared to children who were raised in intact homes with both the biological father and mother present to raise them, the children of homosexual parents grow up to:
• Be Much more likely to receive welfare
• Have lower educational attainment
• Report more ongoing "negative impact" from their family of origin
• Be more likely to suffer from depression
• Have been arrested more often
• (If they are female) Have had more sexual partners--both male and female
 
         If they were the children of lesbian mothers, they are
 
• More likely to be currently cohabiting
• Almost 4 times more likely to be currently on public assistance
• Less likely to be currently employed full-time
• More than 3 times more likely to be unemployed
• Nearly 4 times more likely to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual
• Three times as likely to have had an affair while married or cohabiting
• An astonishing 10 times more likely to have been "touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver."
• Nearly 4 times as likely to have been "physically forced" to have sex against their will
• More likely to have "attachment" problems related to the ability to depend on others
• Use marijuana more frequently
• Smoke more frequently
• Have more often pled guilty to a non-minor offense

        None of these dire statistics seem to have much weight with the same sex marriage crowd.  Rather, they argue that marriage equality is rooted in human equality.  But that bogus argument does not work.  It moves illogically from one kind of equality to another.  The equality of all persons does not equal the equality of all lifestyles or all relationships.  For example, the mere fact that all persons are created equal does not mean that polygamy or incestual marriage ought therefore to be made legal.  You cannot move logically from the equality of persons to the equality of actions, choices, lifestyles, or relationships.  It simply does not follow.

        Same sex marriage advocates also argue that it is wrong to make value judgment about marriage.  Yet they allow themselves to make value judgments about who should get to marry.  Here again they fail logically.  By insisting that same sex unions ought to be considered marriages on a par with heterosexual marriages, they make a value judgment about marriages, both their own marriages and those of others.  If they are against making value judgments about marriage, then they have to stop saying what they say.  But of course they won't.  Rather, they press their judgments on others while, at the same time, refusing to permit others to make judgments.
        Let me clarify a point often misunderstood:  I am not saying that marriages without children are not marriages.  I never once said that or meant that.  I am saying that marriage and family go usually together.  I am talking about a common connection between marriage and family, not a necessary pre-condition for marriage.  Marriage and family are simply the usual mechanism of creating and nurturing the next generation.  But in the case of a homosexual union, that is naturally impossible.  And if you try to grant them by some other means the children nature denies them, then the children are statistically more likely to suffer bad consequences as a result, which is not the case with a heterosexual marriage.  Or, put differently, my wife and I have no children as yet.   I obviously do not argue that we have no marriage.  If we had children, it wouldn't as likely damage the children involved as would being raised by two men or two women, a situation that entails the significant loss of either mommy or daddy.  In short, wise governments and wise citizens do well always to remember that important and basic fact of life and to avoid making laws that undermine the traditional family and traditional family roles, which serve us and our offspring best. 
      The next time you consider the wisdom and propriety of same sex marriage, ask yourself this:  Which parent ought children do without, mommy or daddy?

The Bible and Church Authority: Tracing the Circle

 

            I think that the Roman Catholic Church's (RCC's) claims regarding its authority and the Bible are circular.  Here's what I mean:  The RCC asserts that its authority is based in Scripture and in things said and done by Christ and the apostles in Scripture, in places like Matthew 16 for instance, which Catholics often quote in this regard.  The RCC also says that the Bible itself, and a proper interpretation and application of the Bible, are rooted in, and dependent upon, the church's authority.  Without the church, it says, we'd have no Bible and no authoritative interpretation of it.  But if the church's authority is rooted in the Bible, and if both the Bible's very existence and a reliable interpretation of the Bible are rooted in the church's authority, then we are arguing in a circle.  We are arguing that the church's authority arises from the church's authority.  To say that A comes from B, and at the same time to insist that B comes from A, is a failed explanation -- especially if A and B turn out to be identical.

             Circularity also undermines the assertion that the RCC's authority comes from the Holy Spirit, a claim that depends for its authentication, at least according to common Catholic argument, upon the Bible, which, because we supposedly owe the Bible to the church, is to base the church's authority on the church's authority.  In other words, we are still arguing in a circle.  If the RCC wants to invoke the Holy Spirit as the Guarantor of its authority, it cannot base that invocation, as it does, upon the Bible and upon the church's own allegedly authoritative interpretation and application of the Bible because that would be to base the church's authority upon itself and then to label the entire circular enterprise the work of the Spirit.

            The RCC's claim to apostolic succession and, therefore, to apostolic teaching authority and reliability fares no better because the church rests the authentication of its claim to apostolic teaching authority and reliability upon the Bible in places like Matthew 16, John 16, and 1 Timothy 3.  The church also asserts that the Bible, to which it appeals here in order to authenticate the church's authority, arises from the church's authority.   By rooting its claim to apostolic authority and reliability in things said and done in the Bible, and by employing its own alleged authority to interpret and apply those passages reliably and authoritatively, the church is already assuming and employing what it seeks to prove.  By arguing this way, the church is already employing its alleged apostolic authority to teach reliably on the issue of its alleged apostolic authority to teach reliably.  In other words, the church is presuming to teach reliably and authoritatively before it has proved that it has the apostolic authority and reliability by which to teach reliably and authoritatively on apostolic authority and reliability.  By the same token, when the RCC insists that the very promise given to the apostles to be led into "all truth," devolves upon the RCC, it is already employing the church's alleged authority to establish the Bible and to interpret and apply the Bible authoritatively and reliably in order to establish the church's authority to teach the Bible authoritatively and reliably, all of which it then calls "apostolic."  If they say that one does not require the church's authority in order to read the Bible correctly, then the church is arguing that the Protestant principle of interpretation and the Protestant principle of the perspicuity of Scripture are correct.  (I shall argue in the next chapter that the RCC's interpretation of the passages at issue here is incorrect, not simply an example of circular reasoning.)

            If the RCC wishes to escape this conundrum by appealing to a tradition outside the Bible in order to establish the church's authority, it cannot establish the authority, the existence, the boundaries, the theological content, or the truthfulness of that tradition by any means other than its own self-referral, or self-authentication.  According to the RCC, we can know what constitutes that authoritative extra-biblical tradition, how to weigh the various parts of that tradition against each other and against things outside it, and whether or not the tradition thus identified and thus interpreted were authoritative, only if we assumed the RCC's authority to identify, preserve, and interpret that tradition for us -- an authoritative tradition the RCC claims authoritatively to say establishes its authority. 

            If, to try a completely different tack (as some Catholics do), one were to argue that we could go to, say, the gospel of Matthew, in which the relevant words of Jesus and Peter are found, and establish the authenticity, historical reliability, and proper meaning of that book without recourse to ecclesiastical authority, that argument would fail because it would show that indeed we do not need an authoritative RCC in order to establish a reliable, believable, and properly understood Biblical text, a proposition which the RCC strongly denies -- but a proposition which, as a Protestant, I myself strongly support, and which Protestants have asserted for centuries.  We can, indeed, determine such things, and we do not require the pronouncements of Rome in order to determine them.

            Notice that I am making an argument from reason, not from my own alleged authority.  To refute it, therefore, requires not an argument against me myself, or against my alleged authority -- I have none -- but rather a better, and non-circular, argument for RCC authority, an argument based upon something other than that authority.

            Each of the arguments cited above comes from one or more Catholic apologists.  Interestingly, however, I have heard from other Catholic apologists that these arguments are not really what the church teaches -- which brings us back to the issue of the elusive monolith, mentioned earlier.

            To approach this issue from a completely different angle:  The entire argument proffered here by the RCC goes astray because it is wrongly conceived, wrongly based.  The point is not whether the Bible gives rise to the church or the church gives rise to the Bible.  The point is that the gospel gives rise to the church, and that the church is, and always must be, subject to the gospel, never vice versa.  If ever the gospel is subjected to the church, then the church must be changed, reformed, in order to preserve the gospel.  In that light the Reformation was not about repudiating the church but about preserving the gospel and calling the church back to it, back to the message of grace that had given the church its very life and which the church was intended to preserve and to propagate, but which, instead, it had suppressed for centuries.

Government Goes to College -- and Makes it Worse

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama declared his intention to cut federal funding for colleges and universities where tuition rises too much.

His plan makes plain three things:  (1) He thinks rising tuition is caused by colleges; (2) He thinks government is the solution to the problem, not one of its chief causes; and (3) He thinks he knows how much tuition all colleges and universities ought to charge and, therefore, which ones are charging too much.

He is trebly wrong:

(1) As everyone who ever studied economics ought to know, all other things being equal, when the demand for a good or a service rises, its price rises as well.  By providing grants and low interest loans to millions of students, the government has driven up the demand for college enrollment dramatically, thereby driving up the price as well.  When colleges must educate more students, they must build new classrooms in which to teach them, new dormitories in which to house them, new dining halls in which to feed them, new health facilities in which to care for them, new athletic facilities in which to keep them fit and entertained, and new parking lots for their cars.

Colleges also must hire new admissions counselors to handle their applications, new campus police to keep them safe, and new maintenance crews to keep them comfortable.

They also must hire new faculty members.  Those faculty members require not only competitive salaries, but also health insurance, retirement funds, research sabbaticals, offices, parking lots, and secretarial staff.  The secretarial staff requires salaries, retirement funds, insurance, vacations, offices, and equipment.

Did I mention bigger libraries, more books, and more librarians?

What colleges cannot get from donors to cover these crushing new expenses, they must get from students.

Government intervention drives up college costs. 
Of course, government intervention and the rising costs it entails are not limited to the demands of expanding enrollment.  Government intervention also includes government regulations that tell colleges and universities whom to hire, whom to enroll, and what to teach.  If colleges do not comply, federal funds are cut off.  To avoid that cut off, institutions of higher learning must hire whole departments full of educational bureaucrats to implement, to assess, and to enforce government mandates.  Those departments of compliance must be housed and supplied.  The bureaucrats who administer them require salaries, retirement funds, insurance, and vacations.  If colleges opt out of hiring teams of bureaucratic overlords to manage compliance, they run the risk of falling afoul of the law, in which case they invite not only the loss of government funds but also possible lawsuits, the costs of which are rising along with everything else. 

The heavy expense associated with meeting the needs of more and more students -- and the heavy cost of government mandates on colleges and universities -- can exceed many millions of dollars per campus, depending upon the size of the school.  The aggregate costs to colleges and universities nationwide are perhaps incalculable.  In order to meet these rapidly expanding financial burdens, colleges must raise tuition, sometimes quite dramatically.

In other words, government itself has done things that drive college costs into the stratosphere.  And now that it has, the Obama administration wants to punish colleges for the soaring prices it helped produce.

I am not saying that by opening up access to college for millions of service men and women via the GI bill that the government did wrong.  I am saying that doing so costs colleges and universities enormous amounts of money.

(2) Expensive as those forms of government intervention are for colleges, they are not alone, and they are perhaps not the worst.  By printing many trillions of dollars in fiat money, and thereby shrinking the value of every American dollar on the planet as a result, the government makes it necessary for colleges and universities to charge ever greater amounts of money for the services they provide just to break even.  Because it takes more of the newly shrunken dollars to buy what old dollars used to, more dollars are needed.  Even if all colleges and universities decided against raising tuition in order to cover the costs involved in servicing more and more students, the government’s monetarist chicanery still drives up prices dramatically over time.

(3) Finally, I cannot imagine upon what possible basis Barack Obama thinks he knows how much tuition every college and university in America ought to be charging, or how much that tuition ought to go up each year.  But if he plans to punish colleges whose tuition rises too quickly or too much, then know it he must.
Suffice it to say that I am continually amazed at how much community organizers know, or think they do.

Finally, to ask the obvious question:  Where in the Constitution does the president have either the power or the responsibility to control college tuition?  

Doctor Detroit and Uncle Sam

        

         I want to talk about Detroit and about the federal government.  I do so because they share a disease.  It's called liberal politics.  It masquerades as "balance" and "compromise.”

         Suppose you were sick and needed a doctor desperately.

         Suppose your doctor prescribed a mixture of real curatives and of deadly poison, say a mixture of penicillin and curare.

        Suppose your doctor defended this approach to medicine as “balanced” and a “compromise.”

         From such a deadly and incompetent doctor you doubtless would flee for your life.  One does not “balance” penicillin with curare, or vice versa.  If you do, nothing is “compromised” but your survival. 

         As hideous, bizarre, or unimaginable as that medical scenario seems, its political equivalent works itself all out around us every day, on both the local and national level.  I am sorry to say that this deadly doctor’s political cousins live and work not only in Washington, but also in Detroit, where they have been in business for decades.  For anything that ails us, whether it has a political cure or not (and most human problems have no political cure), they prescribe poison and defend doing so as a “balanced” approach and a suitable “compromise.”  They want to “balance” the curative of deficit reduction with the double curare of higher taxes and greater spending.  They've tried it all, from the "Model Cities" program, to Head Start, to welfare, to state and federal subsidies.  It doesn't work.

             It will never do; it never has.  For Detroit in particular, nothing works.  After more than 60 straight years under a Democratic mayor, it's all been tried.  It's failed.  But Detroit voters keep voting the same pack of reckless, incompetent losers back into office regardless of their desperately dismal record, losers who think that "compromise" solutions work.  

        Electing them makes as much sense as hiring a football coach who calls a lot of plays sure to lose ground because he wants a “balanced” offense and wants to “compromise” with the other side.  You wouldn’t accept that nonsense from your football program.  Don’t accept it from your government.

         But intellectual times have gotten so bad that if you refuse to accept nonsense like this from your government, those who work in that government will denigrate you publicly and then banish you to Middle Earth, as if you, and not they, were the devotees of fiction, fable, and myth.  It never occurs to them to notice that the cities of Dresden and Hiroshima both are better off today after being completely destroyed by the Allies in WWII than is Detroit after 60 years of peace time rule under an unbroken sequence of Democratic regimes.

         Please do not miss my point:  As a city, you have a better future if you are destroyed by Allied forces in a time of war than if you are run for decades by Democratic mayors in a time of peace.

         It’s as if we've all gone mad.  Because wisdom is irreplaceable; and because stupidity has consequences, contemporary politicians need to be reminded that two opposite ideas cannot both be right at the same time and in the same way.  They might both be wrong, but they cannot both be right.  In such a situation, if you wish to find a balance between those opposite prescriptions, then you know for certain that you are mixing poison into your cure.  Why anyone would wish to prescribe political and economic poison is simply beyond the pale of prudence.

             For example, all but the most conceptually benighted (i.e., Harvard trained) among us understand that raising taxes in a time of severe economic hardship is a fool’s prescription.  It’s poison.  It kills.  It sucks away venture capital so that new businesses are not begun and old businesses are not expanded.  It creates a climate of uncertainty and economic oppression such that prudent investors either hold their money in reserve or else send it elsewhere, where policies are more sensible and predictable, where investment can actually pay off, and where the payoff won’t be confiscated to fund even more “balanced” poisoning.

            In other words, sucking blood from the successful by raising their taxes (1) drives up unemployment to ever higher and higher levels; (2) higher unemployment levels create more poor; whom our political witch doctors (3) try to help by sucking even more blood from the successful, which (4) keeps the poor coming back to the witch doctors again and again, generation after generation, which (5) keeps the witch doctors in business and in power.  You can't fix what's wrong by raising taxes.  And you can't do it with more casinos.  

         The political witch doctors and economic blood letters now in charge of the federal government, and in charge of Detroit, addicted as they are to their own pencillin/poison intravenous cocktails, cannot help themselves.  They cannot stop.  They habitually prescribe economic poison -- higher taxes -- and they relentlessly apply their leeches, both to the veins of the successful (via taxes) nationally, and the soon-to-be-unsuccessful (gamblers via casinos), locally.  In southeastern Michigan, it's the only prescription they know:  Suck blood from some; turn it into an addictive; give that addictive to others; and keep them coming back for more.  From Detroit, the wealthy have left.  Precious few remain.  They are tired of being clay pigeons in the local political skeet shoot.  

           In other words, imagine your horrid fate if your doctor were your pusher.

        My point is this:  Not all the political quacks and charlatans operate out of Washington.  We should be so lucky.  We are not.  The witch doctors, the quacks, and the charlatans live and work in Detroit too.  We’ve been going to them for more than 60 years in a row, and they have tried to "balance" every proposed curative with old poison.  The unbalanced devastation is everywhere to be seen.

         Call your doctor “Democrat,” and call yourself “Detroit.”

         The Flying Wallendas were a "balancing" act, too.  You might recall what happened to them -- in Detroit.