The Forerunners of the Reformation - with Dr Scott Hahn

the topic that I've been given for this evenings presentation is entitled forerunners of the Reformation forerunners of the Reformation that title was given to me usually I get to come up with a title and it's a word player up on of sorts I kind of felt funny driving up here from Steubenville in a Toyota 4runner so I hope I don't in any way contribute to the errors of the Reformation but tonight we're going to be looking at how many many Christians who meant well got lost on their way and it's something that is not hard to do you know Marcus has already referred to the driving habits of certain humans the mail in particular and how easy it is to get lost and how hard it is to get directions and I think it's a reminder that it's harder to get it right than it is to get it wrong because to get it wrong all you got to do is make one mistake but to get it right you've got to really not have any and in the spiritual life it reminds us of how much we need help and assistance not just from the holy spirit that's so hard to distinguish from other spirits and not just from Sacred Scripture which is hard to interpret especially when you lack the expertise of those scripture scholars who surround us and kind of try to create a kind of monopoly but just because we are God's family he has given to us the assistance we need in the Holy Spirit through the Sacred Scripture but also in the living tradition and the Magisterium and the angels the Saints and the doctors of the church Saints like the one we celebrate today st. Charles Borromeo now when it came down to outlining this particular talk on the forerunners of the Reformation I decided to look at three key figures three forerunners and all of them have been mentioned by Marcus in the opening talk I kind of felt grateful and relieved so that none of you could say to me I never heard of any of those guys the first one is Maher Silius of Padua the second one is William of Occam and the third one is the famous writer Machiavelli the author of the prince but before we look at those three forerunners of the Reformation I would like to take note of three forerunners of the forerunners I would like to back up a millennium and take a look at where we got lost by looking at how in the first thousand years in spite of our weakness and sin we seem to get it right I would like to look at three four runners of medieval Catholicism in st. Athanasius in st. Augustine and in st. Thomas Aquinas so Athanasius Augusta and Aquinas you can think of the Triple A and how they get you out of trouble and every year pulled over the side of the road because what we really have in losing our way is a historical framework that is divided up into two parts the first one is known as the ancient way in fact in the 14th and 15th centuries they spoke of the Via Antiqua the ancient or antique way and it was embodied by thinkers such as Athanasius Augustine and Aquinas but in the 14th and 15th centuries a whole new way of thinking known as the via Madonna was born and celebrated and it spread like wildfire and so I want to look at the modern way the Via moderna that was really pioneered by Maher Silius by William of Occam and also by Machiavelli but first I want to show what it is they departed from how it is we lost the way we've got to remind ourselves of that original way the Via Antiqua the ancient way I can't do any of this justice all we can do is a kind of panoramic survey but I think we need to do that even if it risks over generalization because we find ourselves in a very difficult situation today as Marcus described in the talk this past hour and we you know he used the example of the balloon once let go I used to I use the example of squeezing toothpaste you know back into the tube I mean it's it's really hard for us today to figure out where we went wrong and how we got to where we are today as GK Chesterton once said of moderns we don't know what we're doing because we don't know what we're undoing and it's an ancient way that began to unravel and was the undoing of the via Antiqua that was advanced by these forerunners of the reformation these proponents of the Via Madonna the modern way but what was the Via Antiqua what was the ancient way what was the Catholic way well of course we could look in the New Testament we could look in the Apostolic fathers but the finest expression of it is found in the writings the teachings of st. Athanasius as it comes to us in such a nicely distilled form in what we recite every Sunday in the Nicene Creed because the Nicene Creed is what really crystallized the proper way of reading the Gospels because the heart of the Gospel message is that God the Father sent his son to give us the Holy Spirit to make us one to make us one family sons and daughters to redeem us and so the question that was really on the minds of many intellectuals in the third and fourth centuries leading up to the Nicene council which was held as you know in 325 was is the language of the Gospels figurative or real is it metaphorical or is it metaphysical when Jesus refers to himself as the Son of God we know that in many world religions you have the language of son of God sons of God divine sonship and it's always used figuratively whether it's speaking of the Pharaoh or the Caesar or any other figure in world religion but in the Gospels Jesus seemed to take it beyond the figurative of the real he seemed to speak of God as his father and himself as the son in a way that was more than metaphorical it almost seemed to be metaphysical I and the father are one and such language as this and so understandably a lot of intellectuals were wrestling with this especially a leading figure by the name of arias the father of the Arian heresy and that's what mark is referred to in Jerome's famous comment that the church awoke and grown to find itself Aryan and why because it's a natural conclusion that's easy to draw because when we think of God we can think of Mazza creator an architect a physician a father a shepherd and all of those things are only figurative except for one and that is father God is not an eternal creator because the creation is an eternal only God is but God is an eternal father because he's eternally fathering the son and that is why Jesus Christ is true God from True God because he's eternally begotten of the Father God from God light from light true God from True God because he is eternally begotten that's why the Sun isn't younger than the father the son isn't smaller than the father he is Co eternal with the father in which case the one eternal principle that applies to God is he's an eternal father who's eternally fathering it's more than a name it's more than a noun it's a verb and the result of eternally fathering is the eternal son and that son images the father from all eternity by returning that gift of love and that gift of love from the father to the son and from the son of the father is the Holy Spirit the bond of their interpersonal love that's Athanasius teaching in a nutshell you can see why it wasn't easy to overcome the Aryan heresy because if you've got nicer things to do with your time better things to do with your leisure then study Scripture and try to submit your reason the natural light of reason to the greater supernatural light of faith then it's going to be easy to conclude that Jesus sonship is just figurative it's not real God's fatherhood is metaphorical like architect lawgiver physician Shepherd as opposed to it being a metaphysical truth and a reality that is eternally real so athenais shoshone us that fatherhood sonship interpersonal love these are eternally applicable of God these are not merely figurative descriptions we project onto the deity suddenly divine power is not just some unbridled force as we recite in the Creed I believe in God the Father Almighty he's not just an Almighty God all that power all that might all that knowledge is expressed always in a fatherly way that's why we always feel safe with God's power which is wisdom because it's always expressed in a way that's involved in fathering us as his family and each and every one of us as beloved sons and daughters this is the teaching of the New Testament but it's the theological legacy left by st. Athanasius and it represents the cornerstone of the Via Antiqua because it's a whole new way back then of looking at power at looking at law at looking at judgment and authority why because as a nation taught us God knows us better than we know ourselves but he also loves us more than we love ourselves so when he gives us the law it isn't a threat to our freedom it is a prescription for our health it's a description of our need it is a path to our happiness and fulfillment for God the Father knows what his children need better than they do it was a whole new way of thinking of power of law of freedom and fulfillment but it's soon became the ancient way because it became the living legacy of the church handed down through the ages by the time you get to st. Augusta he advances this he shows how it works in everyday life not just in eternity most especially he does so by teaching us about the sacraments Augustine is the second proponent of the Via Antiqua and he had more than one heresy of the Aryans to fight he had three heresies that he had to overcome that's why his writings take up so much shelf space in my library you see the mannequins argued that anything that is matter is inferior to spirit that which is spiritual is good that which is material is evil and so sacraments aren't even possible so he had to overcome the mannequin heresy to show that the incarnation of Christ is when God became man when the eternal pure spirit of God has assumed human flesh this is what makes it possible for the sacraments to convey divine life by human means invisible power through visible signs and the Manicheans were defeated and then he faced the powerful heresy of the Donatists who argued that okay yes sacraments are possible but they're only effective when they're administered by holy priests and so if you've got corrupt ones or if you find out later that you were baptized by one who was secretly corrupt that baptism didn't work you've got to find another one and you got to get it again and so Agustin had to overcome not only the Manicheans and showing the sacraments are possible but the Donatists in showing that they're intrinsically powerful because the sacraments are not primarily what we do for God but what God primarily does for us and so the priest is not speaking in his own name on his own behalf and he doesn't say this is your body looking up or this is his body looking out he says this is my body because he has loaned his lungs his whole life is consecrated to our Lord and so over against the Donatists Augustine showed let God be true and every man a liar even the priests he quoted Paul in Romans the the sacraments of the Catholic faith are intrinsically powerful and not only possible and then along came the Pelagians and they agreed that sacraments are possible sacraments are powerful but they're not absolutely necessary except for the weaklings but if you're really serious you ought to be able to kind of pick yourself up by the your own spiritual bootstraps and for the wayward and the weak and the wounded okay it's supernatural divine grace but ordinarily natural effort is all that we need in order to become Saints and he aimed and fired a Gustin did and uprooted he exposed he overturned he refuted the Pelagian heresy because the sacraments are just useful for some they're absolutely necessary for all because of the incarnation of the father's son that Athanasius taught us all about Augustine was able to say that that same Incarnate Lord comes to us through the Eucharist and gives us life through the other sacraments and those sacraments are possible against the Manicheans they are powerful against the Donatists no matter who administers them and they're absolutely necessary against the Pelagians because we can't make ourselves partakers of the divine nature we can't climb to the heaven we can't reach God but we can accept the gift that has come to us since God condescended and stooped down to our level in His mercy and through his power raises us up to his own this was a gustin's theological legacy and it advanced the Via Antiqua and through writings such as the City of God he really took the cornerstone of Athanasius and built a foundation on which Christian culture Catholic civilization could be built we might call it Christendom whatever name you give it you have many men and women in many parts of Europe advancing a christ-centered vision of what it means to live everyday life natural existence by supernatural grace and by the time you get to st. Thomas Aquinas you reach the height of the great medieval synthesis and in the 13th century up until about the Year 1274 when Saint Thomas Aquinas died the same year Saint Bonaventure did they they both taught at the university of paris the dominican angelic doctors st. thomas aquinas the Franciscans seraphic doctors st. Bonaventure both expressed and embody this great medieval synthesis it's a kind of intellectual marriage through the intellect we discover that God is united a man that heaven and earth are united that through the sacraments invisible divine life comes to us through visible human signs the marriage metaphor is the most frequently used image to express the via Antiqua that through Christ and the Virgin Mary God and men are united in a new covenant it is a marital bond and this marital covenant is what makes it possible for humans to experience divine life for God to become man for heaven and earth for eternity and time for church and state to be united marriage is the principle model it is the image and remember you know marriage doesn't make it easy it only makes it possible to be united to someone very different in a fruitful way it doesn't make it easy it makes it possible and really only because it too is a sacrament but this was the image used to describe the via Antiqua that if God is a father from all eternity then what it means to express divine power is to make your life a gift of love from all eternity and that is why the son is co eternal with the father everything that he has he gave to the son and everything the son receives he returns the father and that life that gift that love that power is the person of the Holy Spirit and through the sacraments we who are members of a human family on earth are raised up and elevated transformed and enabled to share in the heavenly life of these three divine persons for all eternity so after 80 or 90 years of family life on earth we'll have 80 or 90 trillion years of divine life in heaven and that is what we were really made for and that is why Christ became man and gave us the sacraments and for st. Thomas Aquinas this marriage is expressed intellectually faith does not abolish reason faith presupposes human reason and same act it heals human reason of the errors that sinful thinkers commit faith also perfects human reason silligan reason more clearly more accurately but faith also elevates human reasons so we can know things by faith that we never knew by reason that God is a father that his son became a man in the womb of an immaculate virgin and through the resurrection by faith we know that he's truly present in the sacraments especially the Eucharist so faith doesn't dissolve reason faith does not diminish reason if anything we can reason more reasonably in the light of faith than we can without it and so there's a marriage of heaven and earth of God and man of the soul in the body of the church in the state and it's expressed in the monasteries and the universities through the sacraments and the liturgy and the society that tries to make that liturgy central and through a vision that we find in st. Thomas and st. Bonaventure of a marriage a fruitful union of faith and reason and another thing that st. Thomas taught drawing from Athanasius and Agustin especially was that in God we have a father and not only a God whose father in the human race but a God who was fathering each and every single one of us as individuals as sons and daughters God the Father sent the son to assume our nature in order to communicate his own and so it is for st. Thomas Aquinas that when we look at God's law because he was famous for his treatise on law in his most important work the Summa Theologica in it he says that God's law is derived from his intellect and his will his intellect and his will why both coordinated because God's intellect knows his creatures he knows our natures he knows our need and so with his intellect he understands who we are and what we need and with his will he only legislates those laws that will meet our needs and fulfill the fundamental purpose he had in creating us so divine power divine law is no threat to freedom it is the condition of possibility to be truly free and really fulfilled freedom in the via Antiqua is understood primarily in positive and maximal terms it's not freedom from but freedom for freedom for virtue freedom for holiness freedom for communion and unity in the body of Christ and then along comes the via Madonna you have a sort of intellectual revolution I don't know exactly why it is Marcus described many of the different historical and social and psychological and spiritual conditions that prevailed at the end of this great period of the 13th century and we find corruption we find the plague we find all sorts of crises in the 14th century but the 1300s uh sure in a whole new way of thinking a sort of intellectual revolution occurred now you might think an intellectual revolution will that sound safe because you know what difference to intellectuals really make well you know sometimes they seem to be off in their ivory tower you know just reasoning in abstractions that don't seem to really have much practical bearing on everyday life for ordinary people but the fact is intellectuals rule the world but they usually do so from the grave because it takes wild takes time for their ideas to catch on in fact it takes several generations for people to really work out the implications of these novel ideas in fact the novel ideas have to reach a point where they no longer seem novel they have to reach a point where people think that way without even having to think about it so an intellectual revolution is not a trivial matter as Richard Weaver wrote many years ago a classic book that I hope all of you read especially the younger ones here the book is entitled ideas have consequences ideas have consequences he wrote it back in the 50s and he traced the ideas that have such great consequence all the way back to the 1300s there was one figure named Marcy Lisa Padua ironically he was the rector at the University of Paris serving there shortly after st. Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas had died in 1274 and this rector of the University of Paris had a really new idea and that was you have faith and you have reason and some things you know by faith like the Creed other things you know by reason science and everything else that really matters and so we have not only two sources of truth but we have two truths he developed the duplex veritas approach the double truth that we know some things by faith that we know aren't true by reason and yet through a kind of intellectual schizophrenia you could keep going to church and you continue continue reciting the Creed because these are articles of faith these are interior private matters of religious belief whereas the articles of reason are public they are demonstrable and these are the things that really matter most and so it was that through Marcy Lisa's influence you have the split-level kind of existence it isn't just reason now over faith it's reason being assigned the public sector and faith being given over more and more to the private and the interior part of life as a result of Maher Silius he wrote a book that is not well known today but it was extraordinarily influential in its time in the 1300s he wrote defense ER Pacis defender of the peace that was a title that had been given in the past to the Pope's and the bishops for the peace of Christ but this book is arguing that oh no if we have two sources of true two sources of knowledge and one is more public and demonstrable then it's the prince it is the ruler it is the state not the church that really has to guarantee the peace that has to determine when to fight the wars it has to determine what Truths are going to be the wellspring for certain laws and so with the naturalization of knowledge came the D super naturalization of the mysteries of faith they became increasingly privatized it was very subtle at first that's always the key because you know that reality is complex and all you've got to do to get it wrong is just to get it a little bit out of order you know I remember as a Protestant pastor just a year or two of marriage counseling was enough to convince me that the problem emerges not at the end but typically in the beginning and in the beginning you're usually looking at a person who might be you know unfaithful emotionally or a little dishonest and they say hey you know we we got married because we were friends it's a legal agreement it's a piece of paper it's a contract well all of those things are true but their lesser truths it's a sacrament it's a covenant it's a it's a vocation to heaven and holiness when you hear someone talking that way you got to figure out quickly what they're doing you know she used to understand me she doesn't unsane that is it doesn't matter whether she understands me or not I am bound by a covenant till death do us part in sickness and in health for richer for poorer but what he really probably means is my secretary does understand me that's the way it works it's an unconscious strategy we adopt it's often labeled plausible deniability we say something it's a piece of paper it's an agreement I agree it's it's a binding contract well contracts you could get out of covenants are binding for life so to affirm the lower truths is just a kind of strategy because then when somebody says wait a second do you hear what you you're trying to devise a way to get out of this oh no what are you talking about all I said was I'm just talking about friendship an agreement the law and so down through the history of ideas you have the strategy apply deniability Marcee leus never said i'm out the top of the pope i'm out to over turn the church i'm out to get rid of bishops he didn't say those things he probably wasn't even consciously thinking them he was simply sowing the intellectual ideas that were shortly thereafter picked up by a man named William of Occam the great Franciscan ironically both of these men ended up fleeing per safety to a prince Prince Louis of Bavaria a politician who wanted to protect them because they were so useful to his political cause because both Marr Silius and William of Occam were condemning the Pope as a heretic and telling princes that they had more power than the bishop telling all of the people that if you really want peace and welfare look not to the church but the state politicians always love intellectuals who put the accent mark on those syllables so it was that William of Ockham in the work of ninety days and other works as well I have here William of Occam on divine freedom this was really where he began to do a sort of excavation because he was out to question the via Antiqua not to deny it you'll never see this franciscan William of Occam actually denying any of the articles of the Creed actually telling Catholics that the sacraments Pope's and bishops are really false he just said they're not necessary in the same way the Pope's say they are why well here's the theory that he developed it's often referred to as volunteerism or nominalism but he only began the development he didn't advance it very far he didn't need to but he also didn't have the time too at the time I suppose he would have also had a strategy of plausible deniability I'm not out to topple the church or the Pope's and the bishops or to eradicate the sacraments all I want to say is I want to question the via Antiqua this idea that God knows us better than we know ourselves He loves us more than we love ourselves and so all of us laws are only legislated to make us happy and to fulfill us isn't that nice isn't that sweet isn't that tidy you've got a God in a box your God is in your hip pocket in other words this god of yours would only pass laws that fulfill you and make you happy well Arkham said divine freedom divine power all of it is greater than that and all I did was just to make one adjustment that God's laws are not originating from his intellect and will but from his will alone why because the Creator is not bound by the creature and in our ears that has a certain ring I mean who thinks they can bind the Creator but Saint Thomas would say what if the Creator by a covenant has bound himself to his creatures that's a different matter oh no that's just a human projection God is all-powerful and his potentia absoluta his absolute power is utterly free so God could have crucified a donkey to atone for our sins unquote God could have made murder a meritorious act God could have made martyrdom mortal sin why because God is God and you're not and he can legislate whatsoever he pleases it's completely up to his freedom and his freedom is arbitrary his will is not bound by any intellect and at first it sounds like wow this is a loftier conception of God and who doesn't want that but in fact it's an exchange of one sort of God Abba for another sort of God well-known in many parts of the world as Allah by intellectuals like Aveiro ease and Avicenna there were Arab philosophers who were working overtime to try to get Catholics to think in less Trinitarian terms and more strictly monotheistic terms and for many reasons it took Ockham's view created a whole new way of thinking a whole new way of living the via moderna seem to be liberating because suddenly it made sense out of these corrupt Pope's and bishops and politicians because if it's true for God that God's laws and God's power all of these things are expressions of his own freedom God coulda crucified a donkey to atone for sin he could have made murder meritorious and martyred a mortal sin and he had many other examples then suddenly how do you feel when you find yourself under God's power bound by his laws that don't necessarily fit your nature or fulfill your longings they just simply bind you because they're imposed by a superior power whose will is over yours the via and the via moderna introduced a modern way of thinking that power and law is a threat to freedom and fulfillment and that when God exercises his power and passes his laws it's arbitrary and so our freedom is diminished our fulfillment is greatly restricted and as a result of this whole new way of thinking you have a Cultural Revolution as you move from the 1300s of the 1400s the 14th century is a intellectual revolution that paved the way for a cultural revolution in the 1400s though the 15th century you have universities split and divided you have faculties at war you have in Cologne Germany in Paris Cambridge Oxford the moderna as they're called that's the label the moderns the acha masti was another nickname that they took on and they were accusing the Antique we the ancients the antiques who were also known as the Thomas T the thomas of a kind of backwards retrograde thinking that didn't recognize power and freedom and as a result these universities are like ropes in a tug of war going back and forth paris back and forth cologne and the universities have usurped the monasteries the princes have usurped the bishops the intellectuals have in a certain sense begun to kind of naturalize ie D supernatural eyes ordinary life now today we call it the Renaissance why because it's the rebirth of classical paganism we're kind of getting over this you know this one-sided preoccupation with the supernatural and all of our music and all of our art and all of our architecture it doesn't always have to be liturgical or sacramental religious and biblical it can be nature it can be Greek it can be Roman and you know what it can be and there's nothing wrong with that so long as the natural is subordinated the supernatural but when you advance the natural at the expense of the supernatural you've got an agenda you're hiding ulterior motives you're devising a strategy of plausible deniability what all I'm saying is creation is good all I'm saying is is sex is good I wouldn't say anything bad about celibacy or sacraments I'm just advancing what the Greeks and the Romans in classical pagan sources had and again it's very hard to pin down because it's still an early stage but in 1469 in the midst of this culture evolution an architect was born by the name of niccolo machiavelli and he was born in a corrupt family and he had a lot of corrupt connections but he was a brilliant thinker but he was a lousy colleague he found himself unemployed a lot that gave him more time to write and he worked on one book that became the most influential masterpiece at the time it didn't come out until the 1500s it's called the prince there's one phrase that all of you know that's traceable back to Machiavelli's classic work the prince and that is the ends justify the means so if you have a certain goal mr. prince then whatever it takes to get there is right for you why because it's that way for God if God is the Prince of the universe and his power is wielded arbitrarily and he can legislate whatsoever he pleases and he can change the law as it will then we ought to continue on the path of being imitators of God only we shouldn't be stuck in this fatherly mold we should see divine power and divine freedom as a whole new source of Liberty for the Prince to pass laws to wage wars and to depose enemies to dispose of all potential foes why because the ends justify the means and the one in power decides the ends this culture evolution found its Apogee in this work just in time you talk about catching the wave if you're a surfer the intellectual revolution of the 1300s paved the way for the culture evolution of the 1400s but Machiavelli's writings were just in time for Luther because frankly Luther would not have been able to succeed if he didn't have the help of the German princes and the German princes wouldn't have loaned him their help if they hadn't seen the advantages they would gain over the bishops and the Pope's so Luther grows up in an intellectual environment where he says and I quote this is from a Protestant author lest you accused me of bias Martin Luther studied under the nominalist teachers at effort and at one point called William of Occam my dear master he said on another occasion I'm nothing if I'm not a knock amidst and so when it came to his spiritual youth as an Augustinian monk why was it that he had such a terror when it came to God am i in a right relationship with God what does it take what must I do and he just seemed to be going from day to day living an uncertainty in terror how can you play Kate this all wholly inscrutable God how can you predict what he's going to demand tomorrow and a lot of people trace this back to a psychological aberration but I would like to propose that its source could just as easily be a theologic aberration because if God wills is power in an absolutely arbitrary way and his law can be anything he wants he can he can condemn murder one day and then he could legislate it another then how do you know whether you're in a right relationship with that sort of despotic deity and if God in fact can legislate anything he wants then why can he just simply save by arbitrarily stipulating all you need is not love or holiness all you need is faith alone so as an alchemist Augustinian reading Saint Paul in Romans one the just are saved by faith ah he could have said that the only way can we be saved is by becoming martyrs or for that matter mass murderers but he arbitrarily stipulated one condition and that his faith and faith alone as a NACA masti sees God just dealing arbitrarily with us but thank God it's that easy because he isn't a father who is raising his children he is a creator he's a lawgiver he's a judge who wields his power with total freedom and you can see it isn't that far of a step from Luther to Calvin and from Calvin's notion of double predestination but this kind of God is just as glorified and damning a soul to hell and predestined to be damned as he is in bringing a soul to glory why because it's all arbitrary freedom and power to begin with and so Luther's notion of salvation Calvin's notion of predestination where ideas whose time had come I mean if they hadn't been born somebody else would have come along and devised those same ideas and caught the same cultural theological wave and rode it to success ideas have consequences the intellectuals rule the world from the grave but they still rule it nonetheless and intellectually it get complicated and personally a lot of us are lazy we never made the connections in high score college we had dis connections from many of our professors and so we've just given up but the fact is a lot of Catholics even still today think of the law in terms of the via madonna that is why do I do these things because I don't want to go to hell because you know God calls a mortal sins and there's no intrinsic connection necessarily between you know what I need what I want what I long for word to be fulfilled in what God legislate she just he says its mortal sin and so it's mortal sin and so we can often enter into this covenant family called the Catholic Church and live like slaves our fundamental fear sometimes is not the fear of a loving child who's afraid of offending his father but the fear of a disobedience slave who's just scared of getting caught and punished that's the key to the Via moderna it's what pope john paul ii described at the end of his book crossing the threshold of hope he said the more we sin the more sin affects the way we think and the way sin affects our intellect is not by transforming us into atheists but by exchanging the vision of God as our Father and we as his children to God as a master and we're merely his workers his slaves and so we live our lives out of fear of getting caught and punished and going to hell you can do the right thing in the wrong way so you can hear I hope in these three forerunners Mar Silius William of Occam and Machiavelli how it is that things have begun to kind of unfold or unravel if you will in our own day I would like to indicate a sequence because once you see power wielded in this arbitrary way you can sense that the inferiors freedom is diminished by the superior power of the lawgiver it wasn't that way in the Via Antiqua if the lawgiver is a father who again knows us better than we know ourselves loves us more than we love ourselves we can have a certain peace and confidence that in his laws we find true liberty as well as personal fulfillment but if that power and if those laws are simply arbitrary then suddenly where there was harmony before there's a kind of deep and profound tension then God's power diminishes our freedom then as then his laws in a certain sense threaten our own personal fulfillment and not only God as the lawgiver but Prince's Pope's bishops presidents governor's justices we all now think this way without even thinking about it because what is law but the arbitrary dictates of the one in power and the only hope we have is to get enough individuals to form a majority to overturn that arbitrary law giver and set up one of our own you know when I explained this to my undergraduates and show them how for over a thousand years people thought about divine power and law and human power in law in reflection and imitation of God in terms of fatherhood so that his laws are the condition of possibility for true freedom and fulfillment you can see their eyebrows they shoot up two inches Wow I never thought about it that way but that was how they thought about it without thinking about it now we've got to think long and hard and then if we stop we lose track of that and we fall back into old patterns just at the risk of oversimplifying and over generalizing I want to propose that in the 1300s there was an intellectual revolution that we see the forerunners of the Reformation in the 1400s it's a cultural revolution that we see in the universities we see among the politicians as well but in the 1500s it's a theological revolution now it is the theologian who is over the bishop it is the individual who is over the church and it's also the king over the bishop just go across the English Channel to King Henry the eighth and he now makes himself a head of the church why because he's got more power it almost anticipates the Russian tyrant Joseph Stalin's quip when he heard that the Pope might speak out against communism he said remind me how many divisions does the Pope have it's a cynical view that ultimately law is nothing but the imposition of the will of the one who has the power and the possibility to inflict harm and there are always more than enough rulers to kind of reinforce that misconception to deepen that sort of misunderstanding so in the in the 1600s we have a philosophical revolution why because now Catholic Christianity is no longer the glue or the cement of society now suddenly the Pope and the sacraments and the Creed these things aren't what we all need to become the family of God and to grow up as sons and daughters these are just the arbitrary dictates of Pope's and bishops these are just the sort of the private truth claims of those who have faith whereas we have reason so reason now Trump's faith in the philosophical revolution the philosopher replaces the theologian the University does away with the monastery all the church is left with our seminaries where you go to study this view that you privately hold and these doctrines that you only know by faith whereas the universities it's mostly all about reason that sort of philosophical revolution that occurs in the 1600s leads to the political revolutions of the 1700s what is our battle cry we will serve no sovereign that's what our founding fathers said referring to King George but you apply that to God or any other monarchical father figure and you're in trouble and so it is in the French Revolution you have a bunch worse form of this where you have literally tens of thousands of priests and nuns who are imprisoned who are tortured who are raped or beheaded why because it's now reason over faith it's the state over church it's history over eternity it isn't salvation history so much as it is inflict political strife this is how the superior advances his will and at the same time individuals feel vulnerable because our freedom is threatened and diminished by those in power so we have to top of them when we can in the via antico it was a sacred covenant in the via madonna it's a social contract and nothing more and it's an utterly sacred thing no it's an utterly secular affair religion has been privatized by the 1700s setting the stage for the 1800s if we move from an intellectual revolution to a culture Ellucian to a theological revolution the time of the Reformation we have a philosophical revolution in the 1600s the political revolution in the 1700 the Scientific Revolution in the 1800s you have Marx who applies this theory of power and conflict in the survival of the fittest and the strongest to all of biological history you have Marx applying that same view of conflict and power and freedom to social history and you have Freud applying that same principle of power to our own psychological history the Oedipus complex it's the absolute uprooting of the father figure where are all of our hang-ups and inhibitions rooted in father figures and so we have to uproot paternity we have to deconstruct fatherhood in order to really be freed from all of the inhibitions so these social sciences of Darwin Marx and Freud they're catching the wave they're going far beyond Luther and Calvin Zwingli and Knox but they're also picking up on the same fundamental principles of the ideas that are having long reaching far-reaching consequences in the 20th century all the chickens come home to roost and what we now call the sexual revolution because if the model of the world is no longer a marital Union of God and man heaven and earth spirit and matter if it is no longer church and state in a kind of marital Union again marriage doesn't make it easy it only makes it possible to be fruitful and loving but if that marriage is now overturned as just a piece of paper or really just a legalistic contract invented by men and patriarchal ist's in order to foist it upon unsuspecting feminine partners then what is freedom but the right to abortion the right to choose this just follows with a certain inexorable logic even though it's nothing about what Marr Silius or William of Occam or Machiavelli or Luther or Calvin are ringly but they've been caught up in something that they never really understood but I would say if you look at the sex revolution the breakdown of marriage widespread no-fault divorce zero population growth population decline cohabitation homosexuality abortion rights and all of the other issues that we're dealing with we don't even understand the logic of sexual Union being life-giving now we're hard pressed to explain why homosexuals don't have the right to get married and call it marriage because after all laws are just the arbitrary expressions of power and freedom of individuals who must find freedom in strict individualism and so we find ourselves centuries into this and some of you thought it started in the 1960s no it didn't in a sense it started in the Garden of Eden but it really kicked up again in the 14th century and we have got to really understand this sort of conflictual outlook if we're going to launch the kind of spiritual and intellectual counter-revolution that our young people need that we ourselves need it's interesting I've just been reading some Protestant writers and thinkers for example for Sen was describing how the sacraments of the medieval church rover turned he writes as a Protestant while we usually think of the Reformation as a rejection of ritual we need to see that it was actually the substitution of one ritual system for another why because it's all about freedom and power and it's arbitrary in any case Ellen cherry of Princeton writes this perhaps the most daring feminist suggestion is the elimination of God the Father she said at stake is nothing less than the Nicene faith of historic Christianity she continues Patra phobia is what she calls it the fear of the Father because it's the intellectual theological and social repression of father as nothing but a mask fatherhood is just a mask that disguises one's own brute will to power Patra phobia extends beyond sacramental liturgies and church traditions if mentioned the fathers and the fatherhood is so offensive that the word itself must be excised from public usage this appears to be a negative judgment about the concept of fatherhood itself she writes on a human level disdain for fathers and the concept of fatherhood cannot be good for children or their mothers especially at a time when fathers are vanishing from their children's lives at an alarming rate all in the name of freedom and women are deserting from marriage and from motherhood and we don't even know why well perhaps we might understand it a little better the more we look at the natural crises in the supernatural light of our faith because our faith is rooted in God the Father Almighty in the the Catechism of the Catholic Church there's a wonderful section in paragraphs to 70 and 71 I don't usually find a lot of philosophy in the Catechism but I was very interested by the fact that in this one section paragraph 2 70 and 71 you have a little bit of philosophical language listen mostly in 270 we read God as the Father Almighty and father is italicized whose fatherhood and power shed light on one another God reveals his fatherly omnipotence by the way he takes care of our needs by adopting us as his children that he gives us finally by His infinite mercy for displays his power at its height by freely forgiving his forgiving us of her sins God's almighty power therefore is in no way arbitrary in God quoting st. Thomas Aquinas power will intellect are all identical nothing can be in God's power which could not be in his just will or his wise intellect you're like whoa what is that talking about the via moderna the whole point the cornerstone of the Via moderna is God's intellect is not the source of law it isn't just that God has to know what we need and then it can only legislate to meet our needs it is God's absolutely sovereign will not as intellect and his will can legislate anything he wants it can impose his power as he chooses in an absolutely arbitrary and despotic fashion that is the cornerstone that is laid barm our Silius and William of Occam Machiavelli erect the foundation and modern society that is steeped and soaked in blood all in the name of freedom that is nothing but a sequence of revolutions leading up to the sexual revolution which defines freedom as freedom from marital covenant love this is why paragraph 271 is in there despite the fact that in teaching the Catechism graduate and undergraduate students I don't usually find a single one who gets it the first second or third time because paragraph 271 is targeted at an enemy that is far removed by about six or seven centuries but if we could only understand the very opening of the Creed I believe in God Almighty no I'm sorry it is I believe in God the Father Almighty his fatherhood precedes his power and his wisdom and his goodness are all reflected in the fatherly acts whereby he creates us he regenerates us he forgives us he heals us and he raises us more than any earthly father does raising us all the way to heaven to share in his own divine nature this is why in a certain sense we don't have to overturn seven centuries in order to overcome the via moderna the counter-revolution of the via Antiqua is what is going on all around us under our noses every time we get up on Sunday morning and go to Mass and we say I believe in God the Father Almighty our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come but it's a family kingdom he's a royal father and so it is that he sent his son to make us his children in the spirit that we receive in baptism in the flesh and blood that binds us in the Holy Eucharist the fact is whether we know it or not God is fathering us in the church as his family through the sacraments that are possible that are powerful and are absolutely necessary and there is the marriage supper of the Lamb the union of heaven and earth of divinity and humanity of eternity and time because the good news for us Catholics is we don't have to we don't have to die to go to heaven we all want to get there we just don't want to die right oh we've got to do is go to Mass in heaven is where we are and the angels and saints are who were with whether we know it or not and it's wonderful because knowing it doesn't make it more real but not knowing it makes it less fruitful and knowing it makes it very powerful for us and for our loved ones and all of God's loved ones this is the great adventure for us to understand what we have been saying all our lives what the church has been teaching throughout salvation history and it's something that is coming slowly but surely I want to give you some other examples besides Allan Chari and and Frank sent I want to I want to read to you from an amazing article by a very well-known Protestant theologian Stephen long he wrote the several months back in late spring after John Paul died and when Pope Benedict was was brought into the papal office the articles entitled in need of a pope question mark and he writes I'm just going to read a few brief excerpts Protestants find ourselves in the odd situation of seeing a need for the papacy for the first time our fate seems to be linked with it three reasons in particular the first reason is negative Protestants need the papacy because we have to have something to protest against he said after all for 500 years Protestantism is an old tradition of protesting against tradition and then he goes on to the other two reasons Protestants need the papacy for the sake of church unity and for the sake of a truth that is grounded in love and not merely power when it comes to visible unity it is time for us Protestants to admit that we've failed we are dis united beyond repair and cannot solve our divisions through our traditional protestant resources perhaps it is time to look to the papacy for the necessary visible manifestation of Christian unity perhaps it alone provides the necessary unity of the church and it continues he said could we ever see in our own churches the transnational multicultural universal expression of love and joy we witnessed on st. Peter's Square if not then how can we refuse to acknowledge the beauty of the papacy he said don't get me wrong I have no romantic illusions about the papacy I understand its historical legacy and the legitimate reasons why Protestants separated at one point in history though to be a Protestant was explicitly to will an end to the papacy I think many Protestants can now confess that was a mistaken view both the church and the world would sorely lack a necessary witness if there were no papacy if being a Protestant means willing the end to the papacy then I find myself no longer capable of willing such an act and he's not alone though he's still a Protestant Reinhold hooter down at Duke Russy Russell Russell RINO out in Creighton Douglas Farrow up in McGill an unprecedented number not just of pastors and missionaries like Marcus and father Ray and Kimberly and I have seen now for well over a decade hundreds and hundreds of pastors and missionaries have come into the church but for the first time we're seeing established Protestant theologians church historians like Robert Wilkin biblical scholars as well recognizing that in the Catholic Church do we find the biblical faith the faith of history and the one force that comes from God's love and his fatherhood that can reunite us and overturn the tide of secularism that they too are now tracing back to the birth of the via moderna back in the three 1300s this is a sign of hope but as Marcus pointed out we can't do it on our own and we can't do it just with the aid of convert pastors missionaries theologians and scholars we need the help of God the Virgin Mary and all the saints but I want to also say this that that help is right there at our fingertips just a month ago a new president was elected in Notre Dame Father Jenkins and I don't know what the outcome will be all I know is that through the work of John Cavatina the chair of the theology department a lot of neat changes are occurring there but I read with interest his presidential address when he was installed last month and he concluded with a story that I found very inspiring and I want to share it with you because in late 1842 this French priest father Soren and his company arrived in the woods of Northern Virginia with $300 and 24 months to build Notre Dame and they did and then after years of growth on the morning of April 23rd 1879 the worst fire ever destruct the campus broke out on the roof of the East Wing of the main building in the in those days the main building contained classrooms dorm rooms the dining hall the library the laboratory the museum the administrative offices it was really the whole College itself it seemed to many that notre-dame was finished the story of what happened next has been handed down through the generations Father sworn was seen by faculty and students walking through the ruins while still smoking he felt the devastation and signaled to everyone to enter the church where he stood on the altar steps and spoke the following words I came here as a young man and dreamed of building a great university in honor of our lady and then he added but I must have built it too small she had to burn it to the ground to make the point so tomorrow morning as soon as the bricks cool we will rebuild it bigger and better than ever and the next morning students saw father sorne than 65 years old walking among the smoldering bricks with a wheelbarrow 300 laborers work 16 hours a day to rebuild the main building in time for classes that fall they rebuilt it from the ground up and when they got to the top and came to the place where the dome had built the dome had been they built one taller and wider than the one before and this time for the first time they covered it with gold he said the father Jenkins concluded this is our goal we've got to build it bigger and better than ever let no one ever again say that we dreamed too small I believe that right now we are witnessing the deconstruction of European civilization of Christendom as we've known it we have the opportunity now to learn from the mistakes of those who've come before us and to figure out not only what they did wrong but what those before them did right because that right is still being done today in the Holy Eucharist through all the seven sacraments God is fathering us as his family through his son we are given the spirit of sonship and made part takers of the divine nature this is what's going on all around us every day especially Sunday and it's our privilege our opportunity our challenge to go out and build it bigger and better than ever let's ask our Heavenly Father for help in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit amen

Channel: The Coming Home Network International

Views: 139,505

Rating: 4.8413396 out of 5

Keywords: Augustine, Augustine of Hippo, Church History, deep in history, deep in history conference, faith and reason, former protestant pastor, Reformation, Saint Augustine, Scott Hahn, sola fide, The Holy Trinity, trinity

Id: CTMX4C169bg

Length: 65min 18sec (3918 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2016