https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDz_uoJRUfU
Several years ago when Michael Coren left the Catholic Church to become an Anglican for collapsing on the issue of sodomy, he would talk about how he still respected the Catholic Church but had almost lost his faith so he had to become and Anglican. At times he actually said he was still a Catholic but worshipped in the Anglican communion. I actually believed that he still respected the Church. Shame on me.
Being back home, I’m catching up on a lot of stuff that happened when I was in the Ukraine, including current events. I knew about the Grand Jury report from Pennsylvania but couldn’t comment on it as I only had an iPad on me and all of my posts were pre-written and scheduled. I’d like to talk more about theological insights that I picked up in Eastern Europe but I can’t stand by and let Matt Walsh make the wrong argument on such a critical issue.
St. Andrew’s Orthodox Church in Kiev
I’m back from my vacation in the Ukraine and am still waiting for my schedule to adjust, hence I’m writing this in the early hours of the morning. Since I blog about religion, I want to give my perspective on how I observed religion in the Ukraine.
There is one more argument that is sometimes made about the Catholic Church being responsible for the Holocaust. Although the Vatican never called for and even opposed extermination, doesn’t the participation of individual Catholics make the Church at least partly responsible.
This post is a follow up to the last post where I dealt with the attempted slight of hand of David Kertzer to say that anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism are essentially the same thing. One popular charge leveled against the Church is that while it isn’t directly responsible for the holocaust, it played a role by it’s previous actions by spreading hatred and implementing the policies of segregation and other milder forms of persecution in past centuries.
As someone who studies Church history, the name David Kertzer has come up frequently. He’s a Jewish historian who writes about Jewish relations with the Catholic Church. The time period he mostly covers is from the fall of Napoleon to the Second World War. I used to think that he was of bad motive. Some Jews talk about Church history as solely a way for bashing the Church while completely ignoring the facts. Rabbi Tovia Singer comes to mind in this regard. I used to think that Kertzer was like this but I now no longer believer that he is.
In my last post, I examined how the Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea looked at the documents of the NT with a critical eye. He wasn’t just willing to accept what he had received before him. Catholicism has always encouraged critical thinking and looking at authoritative sources such as Scripture are no exception.
Eusebius of Caesarea
One witness to affirming Pauline authorship of the six disputed epistles is the early Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius wrote a history of the early church from the time of Christ to just before the Council of Nicaea. He’s a good witness to the fact that early Church fathers thought critically and weren’t a bunch of ignorant fundamentalists like modern liberals seem to think.
For those of my readers not familiar with apologetics, I will explain the situation regarding supposed Pseudo-Pauline authorship. In the NT, we have 13 epistles with St. Paul’s name on them. I’m going to be dividing them into three categories.
More intelligent enemies of the Christian Faith really cling on to the theory that St. Paul didn’t write half of the books described to him. Muslims really like this theory, not because they actually care what St. Paul wrote as most Muslims don’t much like St. Paul, but to discredit the New Testament. Why should we trust a document containing multiple forgeries? It’s a valid point. If I believed that the NT was full of forgeries, I wouldn’t trust it for theological purposes; historical purposes maybe but certainly not theological. I simply believe that the NT doesn’t contain forgeries.