Catholicism in the dock, part 3

Continuing my review of Thomas Joseph White's The Light of Christ:

The Catholic church teaches that there are seven sacraments, each instituted by Christ either during his earthly life or after his resurrection during the apostolic age. We can find references to all of them in the NT (187). 

Notice the assumptions: 

i) They were instituted by Christ

ii) The NT refers to all seven

iii) They are "sacraments"

Let's consider these assumptions:

i) There's no evidence that Christ instituted last rites. In a footnote, White cites Mk 6:12-13. That, however, isn't about people on their deadbed but sick people generally. Many don't have life-threatening conditions. Moreover, the people in Mk 6:12-13 are actually healed, whereas last rites is typically for the dying. It's not to heal the sick but to ensure (insofar as that's possible) that they will die in a state of grace. Very different function.

ii) The fact that the NT mentions a rite doesn't ipso facto imply that this is when the rite was first instituted. For instance, in what respect did Christ institute matrimony? In fact, Jesus traces marriage back to Adam and Eve (Mt 19:4-6). So it's grossly anachronistic to say that Jesus, in the 1C, instituted the sacrament of marriage.

iii) Perhaps what White means is that while matrimony preexisted the ministry of Jesus, he elevated marriage to a sacrament. But his prooftexts don't say or imply that.

iv) "Sacrament" has a specialized meaning in Catholic theology.  White provides a definition:

The sacraments of the new covenant are sacred signs or symbols which are of divine origin and that act as "instrumental causes," or channels of grace" (187).  

To classify matrimony or anointing the sick as a "sacrament" in that sense can't be derived from White's prooftexts. 

v) His prooftexts for confirmation are Jn 20:22, Acts 2:1-4; 8:15-17; 10:38; 19:5-6. There's no attempt to exegete these passages in context. 

vi) He says:

The sacrament of holy orders is contained implicitly in the eucharistic institution narratives: "Do this in memory of me" (187n17). 

By itself, his inference is entirely opaque. But he later says:

It is because of the priesthood that there can be an enduring presence of Christ in the Church: in the Eucharist, in penance, and in the graces of confirmation and anointing of the sick. All of these sacraments depend immediately upon that of holy orders… (193).

The priest standing there in the place of Christ says these words ["This is my body"]…and these words transform what lies before him (194).

Problem is:

i) In the NT it's not the priest who takes the place of Christ but the Holy Spirit (Jn 14-16).

ii) The NT doesn't reserve administration of the eucharist for a priest, or even an elder. 

iii) The NT doesn't say the words of institution are transformative. 

Catholic theology builds on layers of false premises. 

The resurrection is not merely a return of Jesus to an ordinary human life. It is a mystery of the radical transformation and glorification of our human state…In one set of apparitions, such as with Mary Magdalene in the garden of the tomb in Jn 20, Jesus appears as an ordinary human being…In another set of apparitions, particularly in Christ's appearances to Saul of Tarsus and to John, the seer at Patmos receiving the apocalyptic vision of Revelation, Christ appears in his unhindered glory, and is overwhelming. Here the emphasis is on the transformed character of Christ's glorified flesh… (173).

An obvious problem with White's dichotomy is how he overlooks the Transfiguration. Christ appears to Paul on the Damascus road and John on Patmos with the same luminous way he appeared to the disciples at the Transfiguration, before his crucifixion and resurrection. So that's not a property of the glorified body, in contrast to an ordinary mortal body. 

Medieval theologians spoke about four properties of the resurrected body of Christ…Impassibility is a characteristic denoted negatively: in his risen body Jesus is now incapable of being subject to suffering or death. The transformed state of his risen flesh is one in which he can die no more (174).

Actually, there's no reason to think the glorified body is indestructible. It's no longer subject to senescence or certain diseases. However, it's a mistake to attribute immortality entirely to the nature of the glorified body, as if we're like mutants in a superhero movie. Rather, some of that is due to providential protection from exposure to natural harms. 

The physical body of Jesus is still material, but the matter of his body is so transformed by the glory of the resurrections to be perfectly subject to the influence of the spiritual soul and the movements of the spiritual life. From this, there follows agility: we see in the Gospels that Christ can make himself present where he wills: to the apostles on the  road to Emmaus, in the cloister of the Upper Room, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. There is a mysterious power of the risen Lord to manifest himself to us as one who is no longer of this physical world…In his glorified life of the resurrection, Jesus is no longer a part of this physical cosmos, if by that we would mean that he would be somewhere "in" the physical world or contiguous with other physical realities. The glorified bodies of Christ and of the saints (such as that of the Virgin Mary) are of another order (175-78).

i) As an omnipotent being, Jesus can perform nature miracles. He did that prior to the crucifixion and resurrection. So there's no reason to attribute his supernatural "agility" to a property of the glorified body rather than his omnipotence. In other words, that's a property of his divine nature rather than his human nature. 

ii) Why insist that Jesus isn't somewhere in the universe? According to biblical eschatology, Jesus will physically return to the earth. Likewise, the saints will live on planet earth. 

At a given time, then, we can postulate that due to a new initiative of God, animals were elevated to a higher level. God began to create spiritual souls in human animals, and so the human adventure began. There was a passage from the "merely animal" world of homo sapiens to the specifically spiritual world of the human person. This is the passage where God initiated the new project of humanity, by creating the spiritual soul, and infusing it as the "form of the body" in what constituted the first human beings (103).

That's a makeshift explanation which labors to amalgamate Gen 1-3 with the theory of biological evolution. But that's not something we can derive from Genesis, the fossil record, the theory of evolution. It's a pastiche that arbitrarily selects and redefines elements from independent sources into a papier-mâché composite. A wholly artificial construct that isn't consistently biblical or scientific.  

You have to wonder how people like White can work themselves into the mindset that makes so much of what he confidently says remotely plausible. He's like the stereotype of the geeky twenty-something who plays video games in his mom's basement. Not having a normal social life, not having to assume the adult responsibilities of a husband, father, and breadwinner, while living in a self-reinforcing community of like-minded monks, may explain how he can be carried away with these vapories. Like a cult where things are credible inside the hothouse environment of the compound–that lose all plausibility once you leave the compound, and wonder how you could ever be taken in.