Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 1:01pm

Who Do We Say That He Is?

 

My bride and I are teaching a CCD class of fifth and sixth graders.  The kids are a joy:  inquisitive and bright.  One of the topics last evening was the Trinity.  When we came to Jesus we described him as the Son of God.  One of our students later asked if Mary was the only human conceived without sin, what about Jesus.  I replied that Jesus was also conceived without sin, but that we could never encompass Jesus just among humans since he was both God and Man.  My bride then quoted Scripture:  “A Man like us in all things but sin.”  The great question for all of us remains that one posed by Jesus twenty centuries ago:  “Who do you say that I am?”  Christopher Johnson, a non-Catholic who has taken up the cudgels so frequently in defense of the Church that I have named him Defender of the Faith, at his blog, Midwest Conservative Journal, attacks one of the most common mistaken answers to that question by contemporary leftists:

 

You know what would be awesome, asks New York Times über-douche columnist Nick Kristof.  If Christians didn’t have to believe a bunch of stupid rules and stuff:

One puzzle of the world is that religions often don’t resemble their founders.

I now officially have a bad feeling about this.

Jesus never mentioned gays or abortion but focused on the sick and the poor, yet some Christian leaders have prospered by demonizing gays.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Slow WAY down there, cowboy.  “Demonizing gays?”  Really?  You really want to go there, Nick?  News flash.  For 2,000 years, Christians taught that homosexual activity was a sin.  There, I said it.  And if you think that telling someone that his alcoholism is destroying himself and his family or suggesting that maybe he might want to think about not doing his best friend’s really hot and quite underage daughter on a regular basis is “demonizing,” then yeah, guilty as charged, Nick.

It’s what actual Christians are supposed to do.

By the way, Nick, if you’re interested, here’s a partial list of other stuff that Jesus “never mentioned.”  Genocide, overdue library books, racism, recycling, fracking, using fossil fuels, running with scissors, Mohammed, nuclear war,  jaywalking, preventing global warming, preventing global cooling, preventing global lukewarming, the “human right” of men who claim that they’re women to use women’s rest rooms, Donald Trump, “Islamophobia,” Whole Foods’ criminally-excessive mark-up, why anyone anywhere thought Seinfeld was funny, gender pay equity, Hillary Clinton, the inanity of Twitter, the fact that über-airhead Maureen Dowd still has a New York Times column, “homophobia,” the fact that St. Louis doesn’t have an AHL team while Chicago, Toronto and San Jose do, suicide bombings, political corruption, “transphobia,” the University of Oregon’s football uniforms, driving while intoxicated, blogging while intoxicated, putting free tampons in men’s bathrooms, the NFL, etc.

Do you see where I’m going with this, Nick?  Of all the weak arguments in the leftist Christian arsenal, the “Jesus never said anything about it” dodge is pretty much the single weakest arrow in their quiver.  But Nick’s not worried.  Because he’s got some serious Christian firepower backing him up.

“Our religions often stand for the very opposite of what their founders stood for,” notes Brian D. McLaren, a former pastor, in a provocative and powerful new book, “The Great Spiritual Migration.”

“No wonder more and more of us who are Christians by birth, by choice, or both find ourselves shaking our heads and asking, ‘What happened to Christianity?’” McLaren writes. “We feel as if our founder has been kidnapped and held hostage by extremists. His captors parade him in front of cameras to say, under duress, things he obviously doesn’t believe. As their blank-faced puppet, he often comes across as anti-poor, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant and anti-science. That’s not the Jesus we met in the Gospels!”

McLaren is as much of a Christian as Oprah Winfrey.  Nick’s piece just gets dumber and dumber so I’m going to bail out now.  But I’ll leave you with the fact that while there are a lot of sins that Jesus never directly mentioned, there were quite a few sins that He did mention.  And none of that latter group of sins, Nick, will sit well with Millennials.

Take adultery.  According to Jesus, adultery is not just bumping uglies with that hot woman you’re not married to.  If you see a woman in the grocery store, say, and you think, “Boy, what I wouldn’t give to be able to hit that” then congratulations.  You’re officially an adulterer.

Murder is bad?  So is being angry with someone.

Just can’t keep your eyes off this really hot divorced chick one pew over?  Not such a hot idea.

And then there’s this.

But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man.  For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.

That’s the real Jesus, Nick.  Not the one that people like you and Bri-Bri invented to deaden your consciences.

Go here to read the comments.  CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters put the search for the “real” Jesus in its place:

You will find that a good many Christian-political writers think that Christianity began going wrong, and departing from the doctrine of its Founder, at a very early stage. Now this idea must be used by us to encourage once again the conception of a “historical Jesus” to be found by clearing away later “accretions and perversions” and then to be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition. In the last generation we promoted the construction of such a “historical Jesus” on liberal and humanitarian lines; we are now putting forward a new “historical Jesus” on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines. The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold.

 

In the first place they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each “historical Jesus” is unhistorical.  The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new “historical Jesus” therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort of guessing (brilliant is the adjective we teach humans to apply to it) on which no one would risk ten shillings in ordinary life, but which is enough to produce a crop of new Napoleans, new Shakespeares, and new Swifts, in every publisher’s autumn list.

In the second place, all such constructions place the importance of their Historical Jesus in some peculiar theory He is supposed to have promulgated. He has to be a “great man” in the modern sense of the word—one standing at the terminus of some centrifugal and unbalanced line of thought—a crank vending a panacea. We thus distract men’s minds from Who He is, and what He did. We first make Him solely a teacher, and then conceal the very substantial agreement between His teachings and those of all other great moral teachers. For humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them. We make the Sophists: He raises up a Socrates to answer them.

 

Our third aim is, by these constructions, to destroy the devotional life. For the real presence of the Enemy, otherwise experienced by men in prayer and sacrament, we substitute a merely probable, remote, shadowy, and uncouth figure, one who spoke a strange language and died a long time ago. Such an object cannot in fact be worshipped. Instead of the Creator adored by its creature, you soon have merely a leader acclaimed by a partisan, and finally a distinguished character approved by a judicious historian.

 

And fourthly, besides being unhistorical in the Jesus it depicts, religion of this kind is false to history in another sense. No nation, and few individuals, are really brought into the Enemy’s camp by the historical study of the biography of Jesus, simply as biography. Indeed materials for a full biography have been withheld from men.  The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had—and sin, not against some new fancy-dress law produced as a novelty by a “great man”, but against the old, platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been taught by their nurses and mothers. The “Gospels” come later and were written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made.

The “Historical Jesus” then, however dangerous he may seem to be to us at some particular point, is always to be encouraged….

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Philip
Philip
Thursday, September 8, AD 2016 4:25am

Sad, but the old deceiver never seems to run out of minions to do his work for him.
Worse yet, is that many a loon will buy into this haggis and sell it as prime rib.

On this Nativity of Mary, let us smile and thank God that he has chosen a little Jewish girl to thwart the proud activities of Lucifer and his followers. In the end, the little Mary will crush and defeat the pompous devil and his colleagues. In the end, She is victorious!

Christopher Johnson
Thursday, September 8, AD 2016 4:47am

Yeah, Philip? Going to have to call you on the haggis blast, buddy. I happen to like haggis. 🙂

Philip
Philip
Thursday, September 8, AD 2016 6:20am

CJ.

Oops….. I should of said tripe.

BobTanaka
Thursday, September 8, AD 2016 7:25am

Yes, I always love it when secularists try to lecture Christians on the ‘real’ Jesus, which is inevitably a confused blend of half-baked History channel specials, sappy greeting cards, and whatever prejudices and ideas they’ve been told they ought to hold this week.

Pinky
Pinky
Thursday, September 8, AD 2016 8:14am

God grant that I may never have to read a book that a NYT writer calls “provocative and powerful”.

Clinton
Clinton
Thursday, September 8, AD 2016 11:32am

Camille Paglia is a left-leaning intellectual who possesses a bracing honesty all
too rare among her ilk. While I often disagree with a number of things she has
to say, I feel she nailed it in her assessment of the New York Times: “Anyone
who still thinks the Times is ‘America’s paper of record’ hasn’t been paying
attention for the last twenty years”– and she said that over fifteen years ago.

Mr. Johnson’s takedown of Kristof’s bilge is right on target. The Times should be
embarrassed it printed such twaddle. It’s just sad.

Pinky
Pinky
Thursday, September 8, AD 2016 11:41am

…”Could Christians migrate from defining their faith as a system of beliefs to expressing it as a loving way of life?”

That would be a migration away from religious bureaucracy and back to the moral vision of the founder…

Says who? The Founder seemed to be interested in both. He was willing to lose followers over both doctrine and charity. He spent a lot of time with the crowd, but talked differently to the Twelve. Even among the Apostles there were three who were of obviously higher rank, and one of those was preeminent. The Founder would have lived to a ripe old age if He’d kept quiet about the doctrine of the Incarnation. He made it clear that love was the nature of God, which is a doctrinal position, and without that position, the charity within a religion inevitably falters.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Thursday, September 8, AD 2016 6:27pm

My term for the times, the New York Slimes, is more apropro as time goes on. The Slimes and the Compost, the East Coast Left Wing Tag Team, are garbage journalism. The people who believe everything they read in them are comfortable in their cocoons of ideology, because they can’t face the truth.

James
James
Friday, September 9, AD 2016 8:21am

Who do we say that He is, indeed. When your student asked about Mary being the only human conceived without sin, I believe your answer was too vague. Mary is the only human person conceived without sin. I tell my students (or anyone else who asks) that Jesus never was, is not now, and never will be a human person. Jesus is a Divine Person, and there is nothing at all human about Jesus’ personage. Your students are bright. Teach them the nuts and bolts of the dogma of the Hypostatic Union, which is the terror of Modernists. Once your students learn that Jesus the Person is Divine, and Divine only, not only will many other things fall into place for them, but they will also be more unlikely to be hoodwinked by some loonytune Jesuit telling them that Jesus was a naughty boy at the finding in the temple, or that the real miracle, was that everyone “shared” at the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. Jesus. True God and True Man, but the Person of Jesus is Divine, and Divine only.

Philip
Philip
Friday, September 9, AD 2016 10:23am

James.

Adam and Eve were human.
Prior to their fall they too we’re conceived without original sin….. just saying. ?

Pinky
Pinky
Friday, September 9, AD 2016 11:18am

Were Adam and Eve conceived?

Philip
Philip
Friday, September 9, AD 2016 2:28pm

What is conception?

Did God conceive an idea, man from dust spirit from breath life from nothing? Woman from rib if man? Is that not a type of conception yet not in the context of man/woman conception? I ask humbled, because I don’t know. Adam and Eve were spotless humans conceived from God’s heart and breath. They knew not sin. Not, of course, until they bought the lie.

Immaculately conceived, our first parents?

Why not?

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Friday, September 9, AD 2016 3:34pm

I tell my students (or anyone else who asks) that Jesus never was, is not now, and never will be a human person. Jesus is a Divine Person, and there is nothing at all human about Jesus’ personage.

Hypostatic Union anyone?

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Friday, September 9, AD 2016 3:57pm

Or maybe I’m not understanding James’ use of “personage,” since that “nothing at all human about Jesus'” reads Docetist and/or <a href=http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01615b.htm<Apollanarian to me. Also monophysite.

James
James
Sunday, September 11, AD 2016 5:16pm

There is nothing Docetist in my statement. I have read the dogma of the Hypostatic Union, and I believe it. A simple question that I will ask Ernst, and that I request the readers of this blog to ask at their parish churches of pewsitting Catholics. Five words. “Is Jesus a human person?”

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Sunday, September 11, AD 2016 10:40pm

Having a human intellect, will and rational soul as well as a human body. Alike us in all things except sin.
.
I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. It just happens that I’ve been rereading this book and, well, you triggered me, as all the smart kids are wont to say.
.
Also, respectfully, I think that’s the wrong way to phrase the question. Answer yes, and you risk denying or diminishing his divinity. Answer no, and you risk doing the same to his humanity. So it seems the better way to put the question is: “Does Jesus’s divinity take anything away from his humanity?”
.
And it wouldn’t surprise me if we need to more clearly define the terms of my rephrase if we want to avoid misunderstanding.

James
James
Monday, September 12, AD 2016 7:39pm

Ernst, in reading your earlier post, I got no vibe that you were trying to pick a fight, and I appreciate that, and neither am I. In your most recent post at 10:40 pm on the 11th, I completely disagree with your saying that is the wrong way to phrase the question. “Answer yes, and you risk denying or diminishing his divinity. Answer no, and you risk doing the same to his humanity.” I say that if you answer yes, yo are denying the dogma of the Hypostatic Union. Answer no, and you are answering correctly to the question. There is no diminishing of Jesus’ divinity or his humanity, in stating the truth, which is that Jesus is a divine person. The Hypostatic Union should be studied well and long by all Catholics, for in doing so, they can deepen their faith and understanding in in both Jesus’ divinity, and his humanity. I like to refer back to the article on the Incarnation at Catholic Encyclopedia on New Advent. It is a pretty fair refresher. I don’t much venture to the dark side, anymore, but when I used to associate with liberals, whether they were Catholic or not, they would vehemently deny to a man (or woman) any sort of divinity in connection with Jesus, be it his nature, or the very person of Jesus. That is to be expected. But what I find rather sad, is the frequency that I encounter among what I believe to be rather orthodox Catholics, who just cannot bring themselves to say that Jesus is a divine person. I know from experience (and yes, part of that is personal) that once a Catholic dives in and learns the person of Jesus and his natures and all that entails, then that Catholic has donned an armor shield with which to withstand the slings and arrows that are sure to come his way. A pleasure to converse with you

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