I wanted to just blog briefly about a passage of scripture which I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, 2 Samuel 24:18-24:
That day Gad came to David and said to him, “Go up and build an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.”
So David went up to do what the Lord had commanded him. When Araunah saw the king and his men coming toward him, he came and bowed before the king with his face to the ground. “Why have you come, my lord the king?” Araunah asked.
David replied, “I have come to buy your threshing floor and to build an altar to the Lord there, so that he will stop the plague.”
“Take it, my lord the king, and use it as you wish,” Araunah said to David. “Here are oxen for the burnt offering, and you can use the threshing boards and ox yokes for wood to build a fire on the altar. I will give it all to you, Your Majesty, and may the Lord your God accept your sacrifice.”
But the king replied to Araunah, “No, I insist on buying it, for I will not present burnt offerings to the Lord my God that have cost me nothing.” So David paid him fifty pieces of silver for the threshing floor and the oxen.
I few years ago I came across this passage only minutes before I was about to do something I really did not want to do. The part that stuck out to me was that David refused to offer to God the free gifts from Araunah:
“I will not [make a sacrifice that] cost me nothing“
This Scripture passage showed me what makes a sacrifice…a sacrifice. The very nature of a sacrifice is that it costs us something. It reminded me that living a life which gives glory to God sometimes requires us to do what we would rather avoid.
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart.” – Psalm 51:7
In this episode of “Theology With An English Accent” (TEA) is the second talk I gave at the Southern Kansas Young Adult Conference last week. If there was one of my talks that I’d like every Catholic to hear, this is probably in top three and is based on the my acceptance speech for the FIAT Award last December:
We are all called to ministry : Doing what you love for Jesus (Download)
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As you may have noticed, as the chapters of the Qur’an have got longer, I’ve pretty much resorted to only doing only one a day. Yesterday, I went back and recaculated when I’m going to finish the Qur’an. I’ve concluded that, if I stay at a rate of about one hundred verses a day, I should be finishing the Qur’an at the end of January.
Here are today’s verses:
Surah 11 – “Hud” (Hud) The first few pages of this chapter are filled with very standard stuff:
Worship Allah alone
Seek forgiveness, there will be punishment for the disbeliever on the Day of Judgement
Allah is all-knowing
Allah created the heavens and the earth
Those who disbelieve in the Messengers claim magic is at work
Mankind is ungrateful for the mercies of Allah
The disbelievers ask why Muhammad doesn’t come with some heavenly treasure or an angel
Muhammad is told to challenge those who say he invented the Qur’an, by demanding that they “bring ten surahs like it”
Those who believed in the former revelations (e.g. the Torah) believe in the Qur’an.
A few days ago I published a post which contained an MP3 recording of a “Manvotional” recently published on The Art of Manliness. I’ve been trying to contact the owners of the website with the suggestion that they should offer these posts in MP3 form. So far I’ve had no response, but I’ve decided I’ll keep on recording them until I hear from them. Today’s “Manvotional” concerns the slave who famously rebelled against the might of the Roman Empire, Spartacus.
Continuing my notes on The Four Loves, in this chapter Jack examines the likings/loves we have for things things which are not human (which he calls “subhuman”). In particular, he focuses in on love of nature and love of country. We will not deal with these in this post. Due to the length of the chapter, these will be dealt with in subsequent posts.
Notes and Quotes
1. Before we get to loves, we need to look at likes, which means we need to look at pleasures
…there is a continuity between our elementary likings for things and our loves for people. Since “the highest does not stand without the lowest”* we had better begin at the bottom, with mere likings; and, since to “like” anything means to take some sort of pleasure in it, we must begin with pleasure.
* This is a quotation from “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas a Kempis
2. We may divide pleasures into two kinds
Now it is a very old discovery that pleasures can be divided into two classes…
(a) Need Pleasures
…those [pleasures] which would not be pleasures at all unless they were preceded by desire… An example… would be a drink of water. This is a pleasure if you are thirsty and a great one if you are very thirsty. But probably no one in the world… ever poured himself out a glass of water and drank it just for the fun of the thing.
(b) Appreciative Pleasures
…[the other kind are] those which are pleasures in their own right and need no such preparation [of desire]. An example… would be the unsought and unexpected pleasures of smell – the breath from a bean-field or a row of sweet-peas meeting you on your morning walk. You were in want of nothing, completely contented, before it; the pleasure, which may be very great, is an unsolicited, super-added gift.
3. There can be complications with dividing up pleasures in this way
(a) You can have both pleasures at the same time
If you are given a coffee or beer where you expect (and would have been satisfied with) water, then of course you get a pleasure of the first kind (allaying of thirst) and one of the second (a nice taste) at the same time.
(b) Addiction can turn pleasure from appreciative-pleasure to need-pleasure
For the temperate man an occasional glass of wine is a treat like the smell of the bean-field. But to the alcoholic…no liquor gives any pleasure except that of relief from an unbearable craving.
We’ve had quite a lot of episodes recently, but we didn’t want to not post anything this Tuesday morning, so I thought I’d share the talk I gave after the conference at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Charlotte.
S2E40: “C.S. Lewis, Apostle to the skeptics” (Download)
I could tell I was tired this morning… During the Divine Liturgy I went into autopilot as we sung the Creed, which unfortunately meant that I sang loudly “I believe in the Holy Spirit…who proceeds from the Father and the Son“. Oops!
In case you are unaware, in Eastern Christianity, the last part of that sentence is not included in the Nicene Creed. This creed was the product of two Ecumenical Councils, Nicaea and Constantinople, so technically we should call it the Nicene-Constantinoplean Creed.
The argument surrounding the clause “and the Son” is known as the “Filioque Controversy”, since “Filioque” is the Latin word which was added to the Creed in the West. This controversy dates back to the Great Schism of 1054. The history surrounding it is a little complicated, but the long and the short of it is that one of the reasons much of the Eastern Church broke communion with Rome was due to the addition of this word to the Creed in the West.
However, my purpose in this post isn’t so much to speak about the Filioque, but to talk about another slip up I made today when I sang “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…”
More changes?!
Back when I lived in San Diego, I often attended the San Diego Orthodox Young Adults Group. Once when I was hanging out with them, one of my Eastern Orthodox friends asked me why the Catholic Church made so many changes to the Creed. What did he mean? There were changes in addition to the Filioque?! That was news to me! However, he then pointed out that in the West we say:
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
In the East, however, the phrase in bold, “God from God”, does not appear!
Creedal Variations
I spent a little bit of time digging into this issue and I was rather surprised to find out that there were actually quite a few creedal variations in the ancient Church. In fact, you could go as far as to say that all the ancient versions differ at least to some degree from the official text given at Nicaea and Constantinople.
For example, the Councils used the first person plural throughout: “We believe… We confess… We await…”. However, the Byzantine Churches changed it to the first person singular: “I believe… I confess… I await”. Historically, the Latin Church did the same, although until relatively recently, English-speaking Catholics would say “We”. However, following the liturgical reforms of 2011 and retranslation of the Roman Missal to represent more faithfully the Latin text, all Catholics now say “I” instead.
Another textual variation in the Latin text is the one mentioned by my Eastern Orthodox friend. It is true that, in addition to the Filioque clause, the Latin liturgical text has another difference. In the Latin, it reads “Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero”, which translates as “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”. It turns out that the clause, “God from God”, although not found in the Creed from Constantinople, is actually found in the earlier creed from Nicaea. For some reason, this was retained in the Latin. The Armenian text includes this and other variations as well.
Conclusions?
So what should we conclude? I’m not really sure, but I think we can acknowledge two things. The first is simply that there is more variation in the “Nicene Creed” than we commonly think, and the second is that I need to make sure I have a nice cup of tea before I attempt to sing any complex theology in the mornings.
UPDATE: Michael Lofton just recorded a livestream with even more details on this subject:
