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Q u i c k Q u e s t i o n s
"PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP"?
Q: How can a baby be a Christian just because someone has baptized it? It doesn't have a personal relationship with God and Jesus!
A: Oh, yes it does. Consider the parallel relationship between a baby and its parents. This is very definitely a personal relationship, and one which the child has with its parents even before being able to conceptualize what the parents are.
The parents love and care for the child, providing for its needs, protecting it from danger, and comforting it when distressed, even before the child is able to reciprocate in the relationship or understand the nature of its parents.
The child has a very definite personal relationship with them-it is their child-even though it cannot yet conceptualize them the way it will when it is a little older.
It is the same with a baby who is a child of God. The baby has a personal relationship with God-an even stronger one than with its natural parents. Even though the baby cannot yet conceptualize God, God is loving the baby, caring for it, protecting it, and sending his blessings upon it.
The baby, because it is God's child, has a personal relationship with God-it is his child.
The mistake made by many non-Catholics is assuming that a personal relationship always involves the conscious interaction of both parties. It doesn't, as family situations at the beginning of life (and often at the end of life) reveal.
All who have become Christians and thus children of God have a personal relationship with him, even if they are not aware of it because of youth, mental or physical incapacity, or their own neglect and forgetfulness of this relationship. They remain God's children, just the same.
Q: Some people in my Church are part of the Charismatic Renewal and are very enthusiastic about it, telling me that I should join it and experience all of the many miracles and visions that they have. I am confused about what to do.
A: On the subject of the Charismatic Renewal, people tend to go to one of two excesses-either embracing every reported claim of charismatic phenomena without discernment, or else dismissing all charismatic phenomena entirely.
Supernatural gifts have always been given to the Church; but, throughout Christian history, such gifts have at times been counterfeited and reported as real: either the person believed he had a gift when he did not, or he was lying for some reason (such as to gain attention or money), or the manifestation was supernatural but had a diabolical source.
In evaluating reports of charismatic phenomena, one of the most important Bible passages is 1Thessalonians 5:19-22:
"Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil."
This strikes the balance between credulity and incredulity-the willingness to believe anything and the willingness to believe nothing.
Concerning such gifts, Vatican II stated: "Whether these charisms be very remarkable or more simple and widely diffused, they are to be received with thanksgiving and consolation since they are fitting and useful for the needs of the Church. Extraordinary gifts are not to be rashly desired, nor is it from them that the fruits of apostolic labors are to be presumptuously expected" (Lumen Gentium 12).
Q: What is the relationship of the altar in Catholic worship to "the table of the Lord" in both the Old Testament and the New Testament?
A: In both cases, the term "the table of the Lord" is a reference to God's altar-the Jewish altar in the case of the Old Testament and the Christian altar in the case of the New Testament.
This is brought out in a number of Scripture passages. The idea of an altar as a table is implicit in Psalm 50, for example, where sacrifices are pictured as divine food, though with the risk of being misunderstood as something God needs.
The idea of the altar as a table is also explicit in Ezekiel: "There was a wooden altar three cubits high and two cubits square; its corners, its base and its sides were of wood. The man said to me, 'This is the table that is before Yahweh'" (Ezek. 41:22)
In Malachi 1, God says: "'It is you, O priests, who show contempt for my name. But you ask, 'How have we shown contempt for your name?' You place defiled food on my altar. But you ask, 'How have we defiled it?' By saying that the table of the Lord is contemptible" (Malachi 1:6b-7).
Malachi then prophesies the shutting down of the Jerusalem Temple and the table of the Lord that was there, to be followed by the promulgation of the Christian sacrifice among the Gentiles at all places under the sun:
"Oh, that one of you would shut the temple doors, so that you would not light useless fires on my altar! I am not pleased with you, says the Lord Almighty, and I will accept no offering from your hands. My name will be great among the nations, from the rising to the setting of the sun. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to my name, because my name will be great among the nations, says the Lord Almighty. But you profane it by saying of the table of the Lord, 'It is defiled,' and of its food, 'It is contemptible.' And you say, 'What a burden!' and you sniff at it contemptuously" (Mal. 1:10-13a)
The idea of the altar as the table of the Lord is also contained in Paul's reference to the Eucharistic sacrifice in comparison to the Jewish and pagan sacrifices of his day.
It is through the Eucharist that Paul sees the fulfillment of Malachi's prophecy that "the table of the Lord" in Jerusalem will be superseded by the Christian sacrifice and thus the Christian "table of the Lord":
"Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry. Consider the people of Israel: Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? Do I mean then that a sacrifice offered to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the table of the Lord and the table of demons' (1 Cor. 10:14, 18-21)
Notice how in this passage Paul places the Jewish Temple sacrifices, the pagan sacrifices, and the Eucharist in the same category-as sacrificial tables in which the people participate by eating the sacrifices and thus holding table fellowship or communion with the divinity.
Q: What is the truth about Benny Hinn? A lot of Catholics in my area have been going to his seminars, but he is a Protestant and I don't know if they should do this.
A: Unfortunately, Benny Hinn is unorthodox even by Protestant standards. He is one of the major preachers of the Word-Faith movement that has caused so much scandal in Protestant circles.
Among his claims are the idea that each of the three Persons of the Trinity has a "spirit body" as well as another component. This was supposedly revealed to him by the Holy Spirit, and in a broadcast interview following this "revelation" he described the "contents" of the Trinity by saying "There's nine of them"- meaning three Persons who each have three internal components, something incompatible with God's attribute of simplicity, meaning that he has no parts.
Hinn has been called to task by Protestant groups for his doctrinal eccentricities a number of times and has issued more than one recantation of them, only to begin asserting strange doctrines again afterwards.
Q: Why did the Jews need the Romans' permission to put Christ to death, when in other parts of the Bible there are examples of them trying to put Jesus to death and of attempting, at least, to stone others to death'?
A: Rabbinical sources record that forty years prior to the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, the Romans forbade the Jewish authorities to administer the death penalty. This means this right was taken away around A.D. 30, shortly before the Crucifixion.
The reason the Sanhedrin (the Jewish governing body that sentenced Jesus to death) sought the Romans' sanction, whereas the mobs that tried to stone Jesus did not, is that the Sanhedrin was a formal court, located in Jerusalem; they would have been identifiable and answerable under Roman law. The mobs, on the other hand, were anonymous groups trying to dispense vigilante justice. Lynch mobs do not observe the legal requirements of administering the death penalty. If they did, they wouldn't be lynch mobs.
Even today in Israel, if you are alone in the country and run afoul of a local mob (be it Israeli, Arab, or other) you may get stoned (ultra-orthodox Jews are known for sometimes stoning cars that drive on the sabbath, and Fr. Mitchell Pacwa was once briefly stoned by a rural Arab mob until an Arab traveling companion put a stop to it).
If you are tried by an official court, the legal formalities are honored.
Q: I've always wondered about the significance of the Transfiguration. Why did Jesus reveal himself to the apostles in glory like this? Also, why were Moses and Elijah present, and how did the apostles recognize them?
A: The purpose of the Transfiguration was to strengthen the faith of the disciples as they prepared to witness Jesus' Crucifixion. It gave them a foretaste of the glory to come (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 554-556 and especially 568).
Moses and Elijah were present to represent the Law and the Prophets-the two component of the Jewish Scriptures. Moses represented the Law, and Elijah represented the Prophets. That is why God allowed these two Old Testament saints to appear with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.
The testimony of Moses and Elijah to Jesus as Messiah signifies the Law and the Prophets pointing to the Messiah and to his suffering and later glory.
The text does not tell us how the apostles recognized Moses and Elijah. It could be that they verbally identified themselves, that Jesus verbally identified them, or that an angel or a voice identified them.
It could also be that their names appeared over them, that they were recognized by symbols they were carrying (for example, Moses might have been holding two stone tablets and Elijah may have been wearing his mantle).
Or it may have simply been that the apostles supernaturally knew they were Moses and Elijah, similar to the way people sometimes just know who someone is, even though they have never seen him before.
Q: Do you know of any resources to show the problems with the enneagram? A nun in my parish is very big on it.
A: There are several works you might want to look at. One is Fr. Mitchell Pacwa's book, Catholics and the New Age; another is the booklet A Closer Look at the Enneagram, by Dorothy Garrote Ranaghan.
Q: Some Protestants I know are claiming that there were Protestants in the first few centuries and that the Catholic Church destroyed all of their writings and wrote history in such a way as to hide their existence.
A: This is clearly an unbelievable claim. We have all kinds of records from the early centuries of the Church, when the Fathers were combating various heresies. In the process of doing this they always mentioned the heretical beliefs so they could be rebutted.
Nowhere in the early Church do we find the Fathers rebutting early Protestants. We find the Fathers rebutting Gnostics, Marcionites, Sabellians, Arians, Nestorians, and many others, but nowhere do we find them rebutting people who believed what Protestants do.
If the Fathers wrote down the beliefs of every other early heretical sect so their teachings could be rebutted, why would they not have done the same for any early Protestants? Early Christians even safeguarded early pagan manuscripts from destruction. The Catholic Church has never feared truth in any form. If there had been proto-Protestants in the early Christian centuries, we would be able to read about them today.
Newman has a place at the beginning of his Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine in which he makes this point quite well, saying:
"So much must the Protestant grant, that if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed a in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge, suddenly, silently, and without memorial; by a deluge coming in the night, and utterly soaking, rotting, heaving up, and hurrying off every vestige of what it found in the Church, before cock-crowing: so that 'when they rose up in the morning' here true seed 'were all dead corpses'-Nay dead and buried-and without gravestone. . . .
"Let him take which of his doctrines he will, his peculiar view of self-righteousness, of formality, of superstition; his notion of faith, or of spirituality in religious worship; his denial of the virtue of the sacraments, or of the ministerial commission, or of the visible Church; or his doctrine of the divine efficacy of the Scriptures as the one appointed instrument of religious teaching; and let him consider how far antiquity, as it has come down to us, will countenance him in it. No; he must allow that the alleged deluge has done its work; yes, and has in turn disappeared itself; it has been swallowed up by the earth" (Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Introduction, 6).
In fact, many of the key doctrines of Protestantism (sola Scriptura, sola fide, etc.) were unheard-of before the sixteenth century. There is no trace of them before the Reformation, except in the limited sense of a few sects, such as the Waldenses, advocating one or two positions that later would be identified with proteestantism-that the bible should be in the vernacular, for example, or that children should not be baptized.
But as we work backward, into the Middle Ages, even these sects disappear. The best some Prtotestant commentators can do is to discover their theological lineage in the Albigensians and other bizarre groups.
The trouble is that these groups held positions that are rejected bty historical Protestantism. For instance, the Albigensaians were Manichaesan, believing that matter is evil and spirit good, and they practiced ritualized euthanasia.
The writers who find themselves forced to rely on the Albigensians as predecessors find themselves reduced to claiming that the real beliefs of the Albigensians have been misrepresented by the winning (Catholic) side, and that the horror stories told about the Albigensians have been concocted by Vatholics unwilling to reveal the truth about hteir opponents. In other words, it was all a great conspioracy-a weak basis for one's history, we think.
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