I didn’t just lock the keys to the kingdom in the car, did I?

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” – Matthew 19.19 (ESV)

The keys to the kingdom that Jesus gives Peter in Matthew 16.19 is certainly a puzzling passage, but it is by no means a nail in the coffin for those who want to question the papacy. The strongest argument I have seen attached to it is that the keys are a reference back to Isaiah 22.15-25, in which Eliakim is given the keys to the house of David — but that’s a theologically creative stretch at best, no matter how emphatically the apologist says it.

Even supposing the keys do note succession (as the mantle of Eliakim supposedly does), they why the See of Rome? Peter also helped found the Church of Antioch, and his successors are still there as well.

If the keys are to be interpreted solely as denoting the power to bind and loose, then the other disciples were given those keys as well. See John 20.22-23:

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,  “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

On an aside: I like Pope Benedict XVI, for what that is worth, even if my heart does lie with Orthodoxy.

 

The last leg of my trip with Scott Hahn

A few final thoughts about Scott Hahn’s Answering Common Objections series, which I have been listening to on my .mp3 player for the last week-and-a-half while driving around for work. (The first part of this can be read here.)

In the last session, about the Eucharist, Hahn opens with a brief history of sacrifice types for which Christ is the antitype  from the Old Testament, and then plunges headfirst into an examination of passover images in St. John’s account of the crucifixion. I thought his connections there were interesting, if nothing else. In the second part of the session, he makes the standard case for real presence with the usual Roman flavor — nothing too striking, and he doesn’t really address Trent’s exact dogmatic definition.

The last part of the session is where he derails. It starts with the observation that Melchizedek presented Abram with bread and wine. From there, he attempts to build a case that the fact that the Eucharist is not explicitly mentioned in the epistle to the Hebrews demands that you should read the Eucharist into every mention of the word “covenant” in the epistle. I paraphrase, but he says in essence the once-for-all sacrifice that Christ made is the Eucharist, and it is because of the Eucharist that we can approach the throne of God with confidence. Sigh.

Hahn’s intended audience is those who are already Catholic, and he approaches them as those who are already convinced of what he is trying to teach.

He also uses a trick many Catholic apologists use that drives me bananas — he quotes a protestant scholar who agrees with his position, and then says, “Hey, even honest Protestants admit this!” But as a former protestant, he should know that evangelicals will shrug their shoulders and say, “Huh, how about that? Well, everyone is entitled to be wrong.” Non-Catholics don’t have the magisterium, and don’t treat scholars — or even protestant forefathers such as Luther and Calvin — as such. (Well, some Reformed folks treat the Westminster Confession like it’s scripture, or at least Holy Tradition, but I’ll leave that alone…)

Hahn’s a good public speaker, and he speaks as one who is honestly, truly convinced of what he is saying. But, alas, finesse is not enough. I give the entire thing a B for effort, B for presentation (I thought about a B-minus for the annoying theme music, but I let that slide) and a C-minus for actual content.

 

A week with Scott Hahn in my car

A few years ago, my roommate transitioned from Evangelicalism to full communion to Rome. In the process, he told me I should check out Scott Hahn, because Hahn was a Presbyterian convert and at the time I was a Presbyterian. I watched Hahn once on EWTN, and read two pages from his memoir Rome, Sweet Home, and swore him off. If you’re not aware, he’s the poster boy and apologist for Protestants-turned-Catholic.

Somewhere along the way, I swore I would have nothing to do with him because of the triumphalism with which Catholics paraded Hahn around, and for the last five years I held to that.

But I heard him speak on Radio Maria a few months ago, and when I recently found a free .mp3 copy of his five-part “Answering Common Objections” series (which normally runs about $35), I decided to listen to it. (You can listen to it in Real Audio here.)

The series looks at the papacy, purgatory, Mary, the Saints and the Eucharist. I’ve listened to all but the Eucharist sessions. The speeches were apparently delivered to a Catholic audience over the course of a number of days, and each session is broken into three 30-minute segments.

During the papacy session, Hahn does a decent job arguing for a Petrine supremacy, though I think his Peter-centric reading of Acts is a bit of a stretch. The question that lingered after this session — at least for me — is do the keys really denote succession?

The purgatory session was the best presentation of the idea that I’ve ever heard, and finally helped me understand just what is actually supposedly achieved by purgatory in the light of Christ’s finished work. Plusses include that Hahn admits that the idea purgatory can only be inferred from scripture with the support of Tradition, and minuses include when he gets a little distracted by trying to prove that the story of Lazarus and the rich man is about purgatory, an interpretation that I think is well beyond any kind of honest reading.

I’ll be honest: I have no idea what Hahn was driving at during the Mary presentation. Hahn mentions the traditional idea of Mary as the true Ark of the Covenant, and then spends far too long talking about ancient near east Queen Mother traditions and the roles they played in Israelite history. He talks a bit about the nativity and the rosary, tries to read Mary into Revelation 12, and recommends a bunch of books about the marian dogmas. FAIL.

The first two segments of the saints presentation was OK, very similar to an Orthodox apology for the cult of the saints, very heavy with proof-texts from Revelation. In the last segment, Hahn remembered that he didn’t really address many of the actual Marian objections, so he touches on them briefly in the context of Mary as a saint. I left this session with one question, the same question I have had for years — OK, so how do we know the saints hear us? Sure, everything that you’ve said may be true, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not talking to the air when I address anyone other than members of the Trinity.

So, has it answered many of my objections? It’s answered — though not necessarily assuaged — some, and perhaps opened a few more.

I’ll finish up with a few thoughts after I finish the Eucharist session.

 

I was a teenage iconoclast

The banner at the top of this page — at least until the end of the Great Lent — is from the Feast of Orthodoxy, and I think it is symbolic of just how far I have come in the last few years.

Way back when I was a Calvinist, I was a Calvinist. I wasn’t one of those wussy Reformed Baptists who likes TULIP but doesn’t adopt any of the rest of the Calvinist worldview. That meant — of course — that I was a hardline iconoclast.

Consider: when Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was released on DVD, one of the LC campus organizations used clips from it during a service. In response (to a service I did not attend, no less), I wrote an essay about how using images in worship is idolatry.

It’s a strong charge, but one that Reformed folks aren’t afraid to level.

My entire basis for this was from the second commandment — “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (ESV)”

The logic was that Christ is in heaven, so any depiction of him would be a violation of this commandment.

There a few problems with this though — the first being that just taking that verse at face value means that I can’t have a picture of my family, or a poster or the bust of a classical composer in my home, at least if I’m going to be consistent. Muslims think this way.

The second is that that understanding of the verse removes it from its context. The next verse goes on, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God…” (ESV)

So, the proper understanding of the second commandment is that you shall not make an image with the purpose of worshipping it, which is — ta-da! — idolatry. The image, in and of itself, is not bad.

My step in logic was to say, “Ok, that means that paintings and photos and statues are ok, but you can’t use them in worship.”

That’s a fine thought, but is biblically inconsistent.

The Israelite worship cultus was littered with the use of images, though the images themselves were just not worshipped. The real monkey wrench in all of this is that God Himself commanded that those images be constructed for use in His worship.

So my last line of defense was that even if images — graven or otherwise — were allowed, one could not create an image depicting Christ, because Christ is God and to create an image of God is to create an idol.

But that’s shoddy Christology — Christ is 100 percent God, but he is 100 percent man. To deny that he can be depicted is to deny Christ’s humanity, which is — oops! — heretical.

To quote St. John of Damascus:

Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was never depicted. Now, however, when God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that matter which works my salvation.

Some astute Protestant scholars have noted that Jesus still has a body, and thus specific features; that means that any picture of him is not, in fact, a picture of him that is perfectly accurate — in short, icons of Christ are not icons of Christ.

But the purpose of icons is to remind us of a spiritual reality, not to be an exact representation.

Peter Leithart has an interesting response to those iconoclastic critics, however.

Christ is in heaven, true, but he has also left us his body as both the Eucharist and as the Church as the body of Christ on earth.

If we are going to be considered as having done to Christ what we have done to “the least of these,” then when we minister to them by feeding, clothing them, visiting them, ect., then —Leithart argues — we see the face of Christ in them, and thus Leithart concludes that we can depict Jesus with the features of the faces we see around us.

(On second thought, it’s probably better if you read his own words. In case you missed the link the first time, you can read it here.)

When I write all of this, don’t get the wrong impression — I’m not going to wallpaper my house with icons, but I feel like I am free to have and appreciate them now.

This is probably a bigger deal to me than to a lot of folks, but let me assure you, it’s a big deal.

 

When covenant thinking and practice collide

I’m having a Westminster moment.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a birthday party for the child of some friends of ours. During the course of the party, the father took a moment to pray, thanking God for the four years he has given the family with the child and for the hope of more years to come. Then he prayed something that caught my attention: “Lord, we ask you that he will one day get saved.”

The child in question is two months older than my own son. Both children come from Christian homes, both can articulate a basic — let me emphasize basic here — understanding of the faith, and both have actually expressed in some way a love for Christ.

But I’ve been thinking about that prayer for the last couple of weeks, and tonight it hit me — I don’t pray that way.

Every night, when I put Micah into bed, I pray with him in part to teach him how to pray and in part because I believe in praying for and with my children; my prayer, however, is not that one day that he will have a crisis moment and be saved, but rather that he will continue to grow in wisdom and faith (yes, I actually pray for my child to receive wisdom), and that he will always know of his dependence on God for salvation and rest in Christ. If he has some kind of Damascus road experience, great, but as a covenant child my hope is that he will serve the Lord from childhood. Even if my four-year-old still acts like a sinner when he wakes up tomorrow, that doesn’t change my ultimate perspective — I believe him to be elect because of God’s promise that my household will be saved.

My prayers and the prayers of my friend are not all that different. We have the same goal. We will both continue to pray for our children and their salvation even as they can better and better articulate the faith. But I think we’re looking through different windows at that goal.