How Bart Ehrman Misframes Discussions Of Jesus' Resurrection

He was recently on Ross Douthat's Interesting Times podcast, and there was some discussion of the historicity of the gospels, the resurrection, and other issues related to Easter. There are too many problems with Ehrman's claims for me to address all of them here, but I want to talk about some of them.

Consciousness in split-brain patients

Striking finding on consciousness:https://t.co/ZMY7gGuyRd pic.twitter.com/0cFCn8PlYP

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 4, 2020

The afterlife

Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier. Exhibit A: What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals. https://t.co/ppo2bwiVGn

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) May 21, 2020

Evangelicals believe that we will one day have to give an account of our "actual lives" to the Judge of all the earth and that the decisions we make in our "actual lives" can have eternal consequences.

Atheists like Professor Pinker believe otherwise.

You do the math. https://t.co/LFVtF47FhD

— James Anderson (@proginosko) May 21, 2020

Rather than dunk on the latest Steven Pinker tweet I'll just say that I've always wanted to hear more about his wife's paranormal experience and how she (in her words) reasoned it away:https://t.co/cGSxVsfYpE pic.twitter.com/YVHQDYOp2j

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) May 21, 2020

It's an incomplete entry in my file of nonconversion stories:https://t.co/HRskv5KDQJ

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) May 21, 2020

Correcting Catholic revisionism

https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1186274501237055488

Ross Douthat on the death penalty vis-a-vis Francis

Ross Douthat 
@DouthatNYT
And life imprisonment under many penal conditions seems more contrary to human dignity than the death penalty.

But the bottom line is that this is another example of how Pope Francis has consistently exposed the tensions in the post-Vatican II conservative position, and pushed the JPII synthesis into intellectual crisis.

Now Francis is going further, doing something dramatic enough to be described as "development of doctrine" or a "new paradigm" -- but still preserving a touch of deniability on the definitiveness of the change, in which continuitarians can take refuge.

Another way to see this is that on both the death penalty and divorce, the JPII synthesis stretched the claim of continuity -- with a prudential anti-death penalty arg that *sounded* absolute, and a liberal annulment policy -- without making a formal break.

Which is also the effective pattern in other arenas -- like divorce -- where Francis has sought to shift a teaching without formally using the language of reversal. You can argue that constant teaching remains constant, but no normal person listening to popes would think that.

But anyone arguing for continuity has to recognize that at the very least this kind of shift turns the traditional teaching into a sort of hermetic secret, available to ppl who read extremely carefully but invisible in the normal public teaching of the church.

So you could argue -- and some will -- that we're still stopping sort of reversal, that the church is still emphasizing modern conditions to make a prudential argument rather than an absolute one -- even though some of its language is absolutizing.

Now we have new language that seems to go further, describing the death penalty as "inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person," and urging its worldwide abolition.

A deliberate strategy of ambiguity

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ross-douthat-book-to-change-the-church-pope-francis/

Not your father's Catholic church

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKo6o64zYA

The future of Catholicism

I was not born a Roman Catholic, but neither did I join the Catholic Church as an adult. My family was Episcopalian in the beginning, and as a child I received a certain amount of religious information–distinctively strange formation, in some cases–in various Protestant circles, Mainline and evangelical and Pentecostalist. Then I became a Catholic as a teenager, along with my family, in a shift that I welcome but that was impelled more by mother's spiritual journey than my own. So in the world of cradle Catholics and adult converts, groups that are often contrasted with one another and occasionally find themselves at odds, I belong to the little-known third category in between. 

As a result I share something with each group, while lacking something each enjoys. Like other converts i did not recite Hail Marys as a child or experience the church as a deep ancestral inheritance, bound up with blood and class and ethnic patrimony. Instead, I made an intellectualized religious choice, reading the books that converts tend to read and deciding the things that they decide, choosing Catholicism because its claims were more convincing than the Protestant churches of my youth.

But I did so while I was still half a kid, under strong maternal influence. Which meant that I also had elements of the cradle Catholic experience–a devout Catholic mother, confirmation classes with other teens rather than the adult-oriented conversion program, an after-school job manning the desk in my parish's priory, a hormonal adolescence and the attendant Catholic guilt. And it meant that like all cradle Catholics I have no way of knowing for certain if I would have chosen the church simply on my initiative, independently of family influence. My intellect says yes, but my self-awareness raises an eyebrow–because I have a strong interest in religious questions but relatively little natural piety. I can imagine myself lingering in the antechamber of a conversion, hesitating to pass inside.

When I went out into the world, to college and then into journalism, where my identity as a Catholic become important to my writing, this in-between feeling took on a new cast. In the secular world, my faith made me a curiosity and sometimes an extremist: I was a real live Catholic, not the lapsed or collapsed or Christmas-and-Easter sort that populate so many campuses and newsrooms, and what's more I had actually chosen to join the faith, deliberately signed on to all the strange dogmas and strict moral rules. And even if my friends and colleagues noticed that I didn't always live by them, I at least went to mass every Sunday and spoke up for something called "orthodoxy" in my writing, which was enough to make me seem like a zealot–the friendly sort, the kind you could have a beer and enjoy an argument with, but a guy with pretty strange ideas all the same.

But then if I went among my fellow true believers, both those who had converted and those cradle Catholics who were committed theologically as well as tribally, I was always conscious that my secular friends were wrong, that I wasn't much of a zealot after all, that I lacked something required for the part that I had been assigned in my professional life. My fellow serious Catholics seemed to have sincerity and certainty where I had irony and doubt. They went on retreats and knew whose feast day it was and had special devotions and prayed novenas; I was always forgetting basic prayers and Holy Days of Obligation. They seemed to approach the dogmas and rules as a gift, a source of freedom, a ladder up to God; I wrested with them, doubted them, disobeyed them, constantly ran variations on Pascal's Wager in my head. They joined Opus Dei or attended Latin Masses; I was often at a 5PM guitar mass, hating the aesthetics but preferring the schedule because it fit my spiritual sloth.

Sometimes I felt as though my conversion was incomplete, awaiting some further grace or transformation. At others I felt that I belonged to a category of Catholics that used to be common in Catholic novels and Catholic sociology, but had been abolished somewhere in the 1970s–the good bad Catholic or the bad good Catholic, whose loyalty was stronger than his faith and whose faith was stronger than his practice, but who didn't want the church to change all the rules to make his practice easier because then what would really be the point? 

This meant that, unlike many Catholics I known who were loyal to the church as a community but doubtful of its doctrines, I did not want this tension to be smoothed away by understanding priests and broad-minded theologians; indeed, the conflict between what I professed and how badly I fell short was part of what made the profession seem plausible, because a religion that just confirmed me in my early-twenty-first-century way of life couldn't possibly be divinely revealed. No, I wanted the church to be the church, to vindicate its claim to be supernaturally founded by resisting the tides and fashions of the age–

–but at the same time I didn't want that resistance to go too far, and actually forge the smaller, purer, Benedictine-monastery church that the most traditional and countercultural sometimes envisioned as Catholicism's future. Because I wasn't sure that such a church would have room for a Catholic as doubtful and slothful and erring as myself.

There is a tendency to see conservative Catholics, especially the sort who convert from more loosey-goosey faiths, as rigid people craving stability, traumatized by Protestantism's disorders or fear of modernity's pace of change. No doubt I have some touch of this condition; I am, for instance, a child and grandchild of divorce, with views on the sexual revolution colored by watching multiple layers of my family peel apart. But in many ways my experience is almost the opposite. I am temperamentally quite comfortable with the ways of modern life, and like my transcendentalist New England ancestors I think I would do pretty well at weaving together a personalized form of faith. So I have always appreciated Catholicism because it doesn't fit my personality, because it unsettles and discomfits and destabilizes the also-rigid-in-their-way patterns of secular existence, because without it I would be too self-confident in my ability to run my own life, too disinclined to pursue works of charity or mercy when there are works of ambition to pursue instead.

My temptation is not to imagine myself some perfect saint passing judgment on erring sinners and brazen heretics. Rather it's to romanticize my feelings, like a character in a Graham Greene novel, as some sort of existential wrestling match, rather than the rather ordinary and squalid sinfulness they are.

Most accounts of recent Catholic history suffer from a kind of inevitabilism. When they're written from a secular or liberal perspective, there is a sense that, of course, eventually the church will simply have to make all the reforms that recent popes have resisted, that those Catholics who believe some teachings simply cannot change are on the wrong side of religious history, that a kind of liberal Christianity is the destination to which Catholicism will sooner or later arrive. When written by conservative Catholics–and this was especially true during the heyday of John Paul II–there is a sense that wherever Rome has spoken, the argument is sound, the case is closed, and all the apparent tensions and contradictions within the global church will be resolved by the operation of the Holy Spirit, and smoothly, without the kind of chaos that has engulfed Catholicism in some of its ancient and  medieval crisis. 

This book is not inevitabilist. It is conservative, in the sense that it assumes the church needs a settled core of doctrine, a clear unbroken link to the New Testament and the early church, for Catholicism's claims and structure and demands to make any sense at all. If the church is just a religious tribe with constantly evolving views, a spiritual party in which the party line changes with the views of the  ecclesiastical nomenklatura, then for all the good works and lovely paintings and clever arguments the whole thing seems like a high-minded fraud, a trick upon the masses of believers, Philip Larkin's "Moth-eaten musical brocade". 

But at the same time, more than many conservative Catholics I think the recent history of the church should instill a certain amount of doubt about what exactly constitutes the Catholic core, where the bright lines lie and where they might be blurry, and what the church can do without touching doctrine and dogma to accommodate the modern world. And more than many, my doubts encourage me to envision scenarios–schisms and ruptures and striking transformations–that a certain kind of Catholic tends to rule out as impossible.

"To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant," wrote John Henry Newman, the nineteeth-century Catholic theologian turned Catholic convert and then cardinal, who will make further appearances in these pages. I believed this when I became Catholic, and I believe it still. But to go deep in church history, I have found, in trying to wrestle with this era of Catholic division  and debate, is to find reasons to doubt all of Francis era's competing visions for the church: the conservatives' because the church has changed in the past more than they are often ready to admit, the traditionalists' because the church has needed to change more than they seem ready to allow,  and the liberals' because it is hard to see how the church can change in the ways that they envision without cutting itself off from its own history and abandoning its claim to carry a divine message of unchanging truth. 

So where does this leave us? With uncertainty…This is a hinged moment in the history of Catholicism, a period of theological crisis that's larger than just the Francis pontificate…

Finally, there are Catholic readers who will find this book's critical portrait of a sitting pope to be in appropriate, impious, disloyal….But the major duty I assumed wasn't to the pope, it was to the truth the papacy exists to preach, to preserve, and to defend. I became Catholic because I thought that Catholicism had the most compelling claim to being the true church founded by Jesus of Nazareth…Here is a story about my church, my half-chosen and half-inherited faith, a story that has added to my always ample doubts… Ross Douthat, Changing the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (Simon & Schuster 2018), "A Personal Preface".

“Leaving Doctrinal Truth Untouched”

Rorate Caeli used this photo
with this article

The folks at the Rorate Caeli blog (“Traditionalists” who still maintain “communion with the successor of Peter”) are looking forward to the publication of Ross Douthat’s book on Pope Bergoglio:

Mr. Douthat had a column in the Sunday New York Times (largely an excerpt from his forthcoming book) exposing the myth that Francis would grow the Church (Mass attendance has been down under this pontificate), and examining how calling for a "truce" on hot-button issues has been part of a stealth agenda of incremental liberalization.

This paragraph is perhaps the most eloquent we have seen in a while, unmasking the tactics of Bergoglio:

The papal plan for a truce is either ingenious or deceptive, depending on your point of view. Instead of formally changing the church’s teaching on divorce and remarriage, same-sex marriage, euthanasia — changes that are officially impossible, beyond the powers of his office — the Vatican under Francis is making a twofold move. First, a distinction is being drawn between doctrine and pastoral practice that claims that merely pastoral change can leave doctrinal truth untouched. So a remarried Catholic might take communion without having his first union declared null, a Catholic planning assisted suicide might still receive last rites beforehand, and perhaps eventually a gay Catholic can have her same-sex union blessed — and yet supposedly none of this changes the church’s teaching that marriage is indissoluble and suicide a mortal sin and same-sex wedlock an impossibility, so long as it’s always treated as an exception rather than a rule.

These are folks who operate with the understanding that “the Church” can operate with one or two bad popes, and still be ontologically “the same Church” (structurally) that was supposedly instituted in seed form at Matt 16:18.

They operate (as Douthat may not) with the understanding that this one bad pope won’t harm the underlying structure.

Catholicism in crisis

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456074/pope-francis-ross-douthat-massimo-faggioli-debate-catholic-church-future

http://saltandlighttv.org/francisatfive/

Expect the Bergoglio papacy to lead to more inquisition and less discussion

The Bergoglio Inquisition is coming

Ross Douthat, who considers himself to be among the conservative Roman Catholics, has a pretty good take on what’s happening in the Bergoglio papacy. The down side for Douthat is that his “only serious” solution to what’s happening may only exacerbate the problem that he sees.

“Expect the Inquisition” is a headline that probably some editor gave to the column, but the real heart and soul of the Roman Catholic Church is on display, and it shows why this editor is right and Douthat is probably wrong.

In his opening statement, Douthat himself has noticed “In the Catholic Church of Pope Francis, it is dangerous to be too conservative.” He then recounts the story of “a distinguished Catholic philosopher” who was removed from his university position for having “raised questions about ‘Amoris Laetitia’”.

The sniping goes the other way, too. “Meanwhile, in the Catholic Church of Pope Francis it is also dangerous to be too liberal.” He recounts the travails of “Father James Martin”, author of “Building a Bridge” (from the Roman Catholic Church to “the LGBT community”) who was not only disinvited from giving a speech at the “Theological College of the Catholic University of America”, here’s the key: “after an internet campaign by traditionalist priests and laypeople”.

Pope Bergoglio Pulls On Thread; “Seamless Garment” Falls Apart

Bergoglio-appointed Bishop
Robert McElroy of San Diego
openly permits divorced-and
civilly-remarried-Roman Catholics
to take communion

Here’s a headline that caught my eye this morning:

New Appeal to the Pope. The Catholic Doubts of
“The New York Times”

by Sandro Magister

Then the first paragraph sent off some warning signs:

In California the bishop of San Diego, a favorite of Bergoglio, admits de facto divorces and remarriages, as in any Protestant church. From the news arises the question: Can “Amoris Laetitia” be interpreted this way, too?

It turns out that “the news” in this first paragraph (Magister’s “first paragraphs” are always summaries of his articles) is the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a “Catholic Convert” along the lines of Richard John Neuhaus of First Things, who is “mostly convinced that Roman Catholicism is the expression of Christianity that has kept faith most fully with the early church and the words of Jesus of Nazareth himself”. These are folks claim to know more than popes and bishops together, as has been noted elsewhere. So he is able to compartmentalize history somewhere, and forget it and then ignore that he has forgotten it. But anyway….

The new Catholic truce

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/opinion/sunday/the-new-catholic-truce.html

Jerry Coyne, as big as an ox and almost as smart

"The Confidence of Jerry Coyne" by Ross Douthat.