Thursday, May 17, 2012

Asking for directions from Mother Church


Turn right–then head due south:

He probably wasn't at first, as these errors tend to get progressively worse over time. Even Hans Kung was fairly orthodox in his younger years. But at least in his later period, Brown was undeniably a dissident. This is all very old news on my blog and previous website, as I wrote about it over five years ago, in my paper, The Modernist, Secularist Historicism of Raymond Brown and Brian Tierney. But because certain dense, obscurantist, sophistical, fact-twisting opponents of the Church still don't get it, and appeal to Fr. Brown as supposedly the quintessential "Catholic scholar"


No, turn left–then head due north:

Well, gosh, it sounds like Hays’ is up to speed on modern Catholic scriptural studies. Yes, that’s right, I’ve read Raymond Brown’s “The Community of the Beloved Disciple;” Brown was both consistent with mainstream bible studies and a member of the Pontifical Bible Commission. So, he was hardly a crazy “modernist.”

11 comments:

  1. My goodness Steve! It's amazing that you would even want to keep track of Dave Armstrong's inconsistencies and self-contradictions.

    I could see keeping track of Roger Olson's self-contradictions because he's highly regarded in the Arminian community, but is Dave Armstrong even well-regarded among Catholics?

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  2. Strictly speaking, this is a contradiction between two different Catholic epologists.

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  3. "Strictly speaking, this is a contradiction between two different Catholic epologists."

    Looks like the Catholics are right; private judgement leads to confusion.

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  4. Clearly we need the uber-pope to step in and decide.

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  5. TUAD, you ask if Dave Armstrong is well regarded among Catholics. It depends who you're talking to. If you're talking about the Catholic Answer pop apologetics type of Catholics, he's held in very high regard. If you're talking about the Bob Sungenis we're serious about the traditional faith type of Catholic, we have no respect for him. We don't care for him for these reasons. We detest him for claiming that a belief in six-day creationism is simplistic literalism. We accept it as a literal historical fact. We detest him for his arrogent, hatefull attitude toward those who have the gall to disagree with him. I have been the target of his spitefull comments several times in the past, on his blog and other blogs. I just shrug them off, knowing they're the product of a petty juvenile mind, that seems to have a strong strain of paranoia and egomania in it. I can understand why he got banned from the BA Blog, his comments were personal insults, not serious apologetics. Some serious apologists tried to explain to him that his derogatory remarks and commentaries were not wise or needed. All he did was to insult or ignore the persons giving him the advice. So, it's no wonder he's gotten the nick-name 'Mark Shea with a brain' among people who know him for what he is.

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  6. Steve Dalton:

    "By the 1960s official church teaching affirmed that the Gospels were not necessarily literal accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus..."

    This is a quote from Raymond Brown's "Intro to New Testament Christology". He points to the Pontifical Biblical Commission's 1964 "Instruction on the Historical Truth of the Gospels". The substance of this instruction made it into Dei Verbum 5.19, he said.

    He also said "Yet this change of teaching has not been successfully communicated to the Catholic public at large, and so nonscholarly conservativism still prevails" within Catholicism."

    I don't know if that specifically refers to "six-day creationism" in "official Church teaching". But it is the case for the "historical truth" of the Gospels. So maybe Dave is on the right side of "official Church teaching".

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  7. it's no wonder he's gotten the nick-name 'Mark Shea with a brain' among people who know him for what he is.

    Implication being, he's smarter than Mark Shea?

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  8. John, Brown was a flaming liberal, who unfortunately influenced a lot of Catholic laity and clergy. He was imagining things if he believes Dei Verbum 5.19 backs up what the PBC, which was no longer an authorative teaching arm of the Church, says in it's 1964 "Instructions". Orthodox Catholics, such as myself, believe what the church has always taught about the historiality of the Gospels and the six-day creation. Dave Armstrong is not on the "right side" of historical Catholic teaching. A search of the Chrch Fathers shows very clearly they believed in the historical Gospel accounts and in six-day creationism. So when Dave says 'the Church' allows him to believe in theistic evolution, he's refering to the liberal theologians, not to the historical teachings of the Catholic Church.
    "he's smarter than Mark Shea?" DA is, IMO, better educated than Shea, but when it comes to dealing with anyone who differs in opinion or beliefs, they're both rude, snarky, intolerant intellectual bullies who have earned the scorn of folks on both sides of the Catholic/Protestant fence.

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  9. If Brown was a flaming liberal, then what does that say about the papacy? After all, the papacy promoted Brown. Made him more influential.

    Are you saying liberals like Brown duped Pope Paul VI and John-Paul II? If so, what does it say about the papacy if you think popes can be so easily bamboozled?

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  10. Likewise, what does it say about the papacy if "good" popes like Benedict XVI must save the papacy from "bad" popes like Paul V and John-Paul II? If one pope must rescue the papacy from another pope, the papacy is pretty untrustworthy. Which pope should you follow at any given time?

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