Well, my blog has been one big pity-party today! I just want to write one last post—about my Latin mass—and then I’ll stop blogging for the day.
I’m not sure what to call the priest we’ve had for the past couple of weeks. I guess I’ll call him “bald Tom Bosley” priest, since he’s bald, and he talks like Tom Bosley.
The priest made some interesting points:
1. He defended pre-Vatican II Catholicism against charges that it focused on worshipping God to the exclusion of helping humanity, contending that pre-Vatican II Catholicism did more to help humanity than Catholicism does today. Back then, he said, there were hospitals that offered free health care to the poor. Now, imagine a poor person going to a Catholic hospital and saying he can’t pay!
But could that be because those pre-Vatican II hospitals hadn’t been hit with escalating health care costs, at the level that exists now? Or is there another reason that they could offer free health care to the poor—such as the doctors not being as greedy?
Of course, conservatives will say that emergency rooms must treat everyone, even those who can’t pay. That may be true in a lot of cases. But hospital bills can sure be back-breaking to people who can’t afford it.
2. The priest appeared to say that the Jews of Jesus’ day expected the Messiah to be divine. A friend of mine knows someone who converted from Christianity to orthodox Judaism. When this guy was in the process of leaving the Christian faith, he used the typical Jewish counter-missionary arguments—such as the one claiming that the Hebrew Bible doesn’t predict a Messiah who would be God. But, after this guy was in orthodox Judaism for a while, he told my friend that Jews believe the Messiah would be a divine sort of figure.
Maybe. But divine doesn’t necessarily mean God, or second person of the Trinity, right? If Jews say that the Messiah would be divine, do they mean the same thing that Christians mean?
3. The priest said that we need to love God in order to love others, and to love others in order to properly love God. That reminds me of things that I’ve read this week. In an essay in Against the Tide, “Is It God’s Business?”, theologian Miroslav Volf said that we actually sin against God when we hurt others, for we’re more than God’s teddy bears; we’re his creation, and he’s intimately involved with us. In Who Needs God?, Harold Kushner acknowledged that non-theists could be moral, but he said that God and our faith in God empower us when we are weary of doing good; his implication seemed to be that atheists lack this resource, as long as they remain in their state of non-belief. Kushner also said that God needs to exist for right to be right and for wrong to be wrong. He acknowledged that wrong could still be harmful even if God did not exist, but he didn’t seem to think that one could legitimately call something “wrong” apart from the existence of God. (At least that’s how I interpreted him.)
I’m not sure if Kushner is endorsing the divine-command view—the notion that something is right or wrong simply because God says so. Critics of this view would maintain that something is not right or wrong because God says so; rather, God says so because it’s right or wrong. God’s influenced by morality, meaning he does not create it.
Along these lines, I appreciated something Volf said in another of his essays, “Can We Be Good Without God?” Volf referred to a book by John Hare, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College, entitled Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in Moral Life. According to Hare, an atheist could be good, but morality makes more sense against a theological background, when there is a good God working in the world, accomplishing his goodness in the lives of men and women. For Hare, that can motivate us when morality is too hard, or doesn’t make us happy.
This overlaps with Kushner’s view that God can motivate us to be good when the going gets tough. It also overlaps with another point that Kushner made: that God has created a world in which things turn out all right. Theists have contended that God created the world according to morality. But that doesn’t necessarily work, for there’s plenty in the world—in both the natural and the interpersonal realms—that hurts innocent people, as Kushner stresses in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Things don’t always turn out all right. But, like Kushner and Hare, I’d like to believe there’s a God who empowers us with hope even in dismal circumstances.