Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
1. If Christianity is true, why are all Christians not obviously nicer than all non-Christians?
(a) Part of this question is very reasonable
“If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions… I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary…”
(i) Jesus told us to judge by results
“Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better; just as in an illness ‘feeling better’ is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up… Christ told us to judge by results”
(ii) When we fail to live up to our calling, we make Christianity harder to believe for others
“When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world… Our careless lives set the outer world talking; and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself”
(b) Part of this question is very unreasonable
But there is another way of demanding results in which the outer world may be quite illogical…. they should see the whole world neatly divided into two camps -Christian and non-Christian – and that all the people in the first camp at any given moment should be obviously nicer than all the people in the second.
There are several flaws with this kind of thinking…
Our penultimate chapter of Book I of “Mere Christianity” is Chapter 4 and is entitled “What lies behind the Law”. In this episode, Jack digs into the consequences of the Moral Law and, in particular, what we can know about the universe in which we live.
Unfortunately, there were some small issues in this episode with my microphone, a bit of a crackle, but hopefully I’ll have it sorted out by the next time Matt and I record agin.
If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe using iTunes or Google Play. As always, if you have any objections, comments or questions, please send us an email through my website or tweet us @pintswithjack.
In this week’s episode, we return to the Early Church and discuss the successors to the Apostles, known as the Early Church Fathers. Somehow Nessa manages to talk about relationships… :-/
* I mentioned my article I’ve written called “Before 300” where I outline 21 documented beliefs of Christians prior to the rise of the Emperor Constantine:
Part #1: The Church
1. The Church is Catholic
2. The Church has a three-fold structure of leadership
3. There is unity through episcopal authority and schism is evil
4. Sacred Tradition is authoritative
5. Worship is liturgical
6. There is Apostolic Succession
7. Peter has Primacy
Part #2: Salvation & Sacraments
1. The Eucharist is a Sacrifice
2. Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist
3. The Eucharist is taken to the sick
4. Infants are to be baptized
5. Baptism actually washes away sin
6. Priests forgive sins
7. Works are involved in salvation
Part #3: The Saints and Our Lady
1. Prayers are said for the dead
2. There is purgation after death
3. Relics are venerated and Saints are celebrated
4. Mary is the New Eve
5. Mary was a perpetual virgin
6. Mary is the Mother of God
7. Prayers are made and songs are sung to Mary
1. Antiquity Did this person live sometime between the time of Christ and the end of the 8th Century? This span of time is called the “Patristic Era” (“Patristic” simply means relating to the Early Church Fathers).
2. Sanctity Did this person live a life of outstanding holiness? Is this person a canonized Saint?
3. Orthodoxy
Did this person hold heretical views? Tertullian and Origen are two early Christians who are typically disqualified here due to some of their erroneous beliefs. We therefore instead give them the title of “Early Ecclesiastical Writers”.
4. Church Recognition and Approval Has the Church and Christians throughout history generally referred to this person as a Father of the Church?
* There were about one hundred Early Church Fathers.
* The Early Church Fathers of the 1st and 2nd Centuries are usually called the “Apostolic Fathers” since they were born during the era of the Apostles.
* We then briefly spoke about three Apostolic Fathers:
1. St. Clement of Rome
* A successor to St. Peter as Bishop of Rome
* He wrote a letter to the Church at Corinth (AD ~96) in response to the ejection of their clergy
* In the letter he gives many Old Testament examples of those who flaunted God-given authority and who suffered the consequences
* In a particularly beautiful passage reminiscent of 1 Corinthians 13, Clement exhorts the Corinthians to love. I had a small rant about 1 Corinthians 13, pointing out that Paul is speaking of “agape” love rather than “eros” love.
2. St. Ignatius of Antioch
* A successor to St. Peter as Bishop of Antioch
* Taken to Rome in chains (AD ~107) to be thrown to wild animals
* Wrote seven letters, one to St. Polycarp (see below), several to nearby Churches and one to the Church in Rome
* In his letter to the Roman Church he begs them to not interfere with his coming martyrdom: “I beseech of you not to show an unseasonable goodwill towards me. Suffer me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of God”
* In the account of his martyrdom, the Governor tells Polycarp to say “Caesar is Lord”, but Polycarp knew that “Christ/Jesus is Lord”. He was told to “revile Christ”, but he responded: “Eighty-six years have I served Him, and He never did me any wrong: how then dare I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?”
* Prior to being burned alive, Polycarp gives a prayer which sounds an awful lot like a Eucharistic Prayer.
* As he was burned, people reported the smell of baking bread.
* Some Jews claimed that the Christians might start worshipping Polycarp after his death. The author of the Martyrdom account says the following: “They did not realize that we could never abandon Christ, He who suffered for our salvation – the blameless one for sinners! – or worship any other. Him we worship as being the Son of God, the martyrs we love as being disciples and imitators of the Lord; and deservedly so, because of their unsurpassable devotion to their King and Teacher. May it be our good fortune, too, to be their companions and fellow disciples!”
* After his death, the Christians gathered Polycarp’s relics and and interred them in a fitting place: “There the Lord will permit us, as far as possible, to assemble in rapturous joy and celebrate his martyrdom – his birthday – both in order to commemorate the heroes that have gone before, and to train the heroes yet to come…”
* In last week’s episode, we spoke about another Early Church Father, St. Basil of Caesarea.
* If you would like to read what the different Fathers wrote about the Sunday Gospel, you can look it up using the Catena Aurea (“Golden Chain”), a collection of patristic commentary which was assembled by St. Thomas Aquinas. You can also get it on your mobile!
Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
1. “Be ye perfect” does not mean that God isn’t going to help us until we get our act together
“Some people seem to think this means ‘Unless you are perfect, I will not help you’; and as we cannot be perfect…our position is hopeless. But I do not think He did mean that. I think He meant ‘The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less'”
(a) Jack wouldn’t go to his mother with a toothache because he knew he’d get something else in addition to the relief from immediate pain…
(i) He’d wait until the pain got really bad
“When I was a child I often had toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go to my mother – at least, not till the pain became very bad…”
(ii) …because he knew he’d also get a trip to the dentist…
“I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want…”
(iii) …and the dentist wouldn’t restrict himself just to that tooth…
And I knew those dentists; I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache… if you gave them an inch they took an ell”
(b) God is like a dentist
“Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of (like masturbation or physical cowardice) or which is obviously spoiling daily life (like bad temper or drunkenness). Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment”
Moving on to Chapter 3 of “Mere Christianity”, Jack speaks further to “The reality of the Law”. Do we imagine a Moral Law because it is convenient to us? Or does it arise due to its good for society? In today’s episode, together with some help from C.S. Lewis, we tackle these and other questions…
If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe using iTunes or Google Play. As always, if you have any objections, comments or questions, please send us an email through my website or tweet us @pintswithjack.
Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
1. Becoming a “son of God” is the entire point of Christianity
What I want to make clear is that this is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all.
2. Becoming a “son of God” is not the same thing as “being good”
And I should like to point out how it differs from ordinary ideas of “morality” and “being good.”
(a) A person typically begins by recognizing the demands of the Moral Law upon his desires
We take as starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else call it “morality”… has claims on this self: claims which interfere with its own desires… Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be what we call “wrong”: well, we must give them up. Other things…turn out to be what we call “right”: well, we shall have to do them.
(b) We secretly hope that once we have met these demands, the natural self will be free to do what it wants
But we are hoping all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some chance, and some time, to get on with its own life and do what it likes.
(c) However, this will not work
…if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier.
In this week’s episode, Nessa and I talk about one of the most essential of Christian activities, prayer. In particular, we will be talking about the Liturgy of the Hours, which is part of the formal prayer of the Church and prayed by monks and nuns throughout the world
* At the beginning of the show I talked about my trip to Medieval Times. If you like watching jousting, give it a visit!
* Nessa and I briefly spoke about Novenas. My favourite is this one to Pierre Giorgio Frassati. If you’d like to explore more Novenas, check out Devin Rose’s app.
* I shared the Latin phrase “Quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur” which means “Anything said in Latin sounds profound”.
* The different Hours in the Liturgy of the Hours are: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. The Second Vatican Council reformed this.
* The Liturgy of the Hours grew out of Judaism: “Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous laws” – Psalm 119:164
* Nessa mentioned the different Rites of the Catholic Church. We will do a future episode on this topic in the future, but if you would like to know more, I describe my initial visit to a Byzantine Rite parish here.
* The book used to pray the Liturgy of the Hours is known as a breviary. You can buy the multi-volume set, but I would personally recommend getting The Shorter Christian Prayer Book.
* If you would like help praying the Liturgy of the Hours, I would recommend the website Universalis. For your cell phone, I would recommend the Laudate app, but especially the iBrievery. If you would like to listen to the prayers being prayed, check out the podcast Praystation Portable by SQPN. However, the most important suggestion when starting is to pray it with a friend!
* When prayed in groups, the Liturgy of the Hours has an antiphonal form, a back-and-forth, a call-and-response between the two groups.
