The American Spectator

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4.11.05 @ 12:01AM

REREFORMATION
Re: Wlady Pleszczynski's Everyone's Pope and Patrick O'Hannigan's The Question of Motivation:

I was surprised at the disgusting Catholic chauvinism, witnessed in the Spectator recently, apparently brought on by the death of John Paul II. Since there has been some speculation on what Protestants think, I'll throw in my two cents.

I was amused by the assertion by Wlady P, "Among Christian religions, only one is the genuine article, and it's known as Roman Catholicism." The Pope that sat by and let children be sexually abused in an attempt to either avoid institutional embarrassment or mitigate his priest shortage is not a person who I would associate with the genuine article. Your average Protestant church would have solved this problem in short order and the solution would have involved the police not a series of out-of-court settlements. The person I associate with the genuine article is Jesus Christ. He had some interesting comments on those that abuse little ones. Will the "good" Catholics that enabled this abuse for the sake of their church meet the same fate? The Roman Catholic church looks like a typical human institution highlighted by the corruptions of power and wealth. When the institution is worshipped and not what it imperfectly represents the corruption is complete.

Concerning the free country that I was blessed to be born into, I trace the history of that freedom to a country that divorced itself of Catholicism. Our "founding fathers" seem obviously to be informed by Protestant Christianity. If Catholicism wants to associate itself with political government it would be better to associate itself with divine right monarchies and the corrupt patron governments of Central and South America. I suppose you could make the case that eventually those things would evolve into representative democracies but in the 1900s not the 1600s. I believe that Protestants won this race because they never tried to imagine infallible men other than Jesus.

My explanation of why the pope bravely confronted communism is not that he was a Catholic but that he was a Pole. He seemed less interested in Iraqi's for instance. Recognize him for his accomplishments but please don't try to deify him to me. He had great responsibilities and came up very short in many of them.

Finally we Protestants don't have Pope envy. A study of the history of Popes will inform you that you may soon have something to fret over again because I believe you could do far worse that your last Pope.
-- Clif Briner

DEFANGED ENLIGHTENMENT
Re: Mark Goldblatt's Fear and Fanaticism at the Times:

Your characterization of the Jewish thought has having been "defanged" by the enlightenment is historically inaccurate. It rests on the ignorant assumption that Jewish law and tradition are accurately reflected in literalist and tendentious Christian interpretations of the written Torah. These interpretations derive from Christian polemics and post-Enlightenment American Jewish ignorance of our own traditions. The Christians like to highlight the imaginary distinction between a merciful tender New Testament Christianity and a legalistic, tribal and vengeful God of the "Old Testament." The Jews just don't know any better.

As any one minimally familiar with Jewish history and law will know, in ancient Judah, in pre-Christian and pre-Roman times, Jewish authorities rarely imposed the death penalty for any crime. A Sanhedrin (court) that executed one man in seventy years was disapprovingly characterized in the Talmud as the "bloody" Sanhedrin. Rabbi Akiba declared that had he served on that Sanhedrin, not even that one would have been executed. With respect to the death penalty for homosexuality or anything else, the Enlightenment came more than 2,000 years after the fact and gets no credit whatsoever.

I would have expected Mark Goldblatt to know this, were I not sadly familiar with the pathetic state of Jewish education today.
-- Joe Vass
Maplewood, Minnesota

Mr. Goldblatt is mistaken about his assessment that the Enlightenment has somehow "de-fanged" the Bible so that it is no longer taken literally. It is the New Testament not the Enlightenment that reorganizes the truths of the Old Testament and sends these truths to the nations as the gospel. The New Testament denounces homosexuality (Romans 1) but removes the power of death from the Church (Romans 13). The New Testament Church has spiritual authority and can excommunicate (1 Corinthians 5), but does not have the authority of the state to execute. Instead the Church is commanded in the Great Commission to convert the nations -- not kill them. And these New Testament truths are to be taken "literally." In fact it could be argued that the Enlightenment has worked its man-centered ideas out in our culture through liberalism, not the Church.
-- Jim Whittle
Douglasville, Georgia

The article "Fear and Fanaticism at the Times" by Mark Goldblatt betrays an astonishing lack of historical information. It is not the case that homosexuals are no longer put to death "because Jews and Christians have incorporated the Enlightenment into their understanding of their respective religious traditions. The Bible might be the alpha and omega of their moral selves, but fatal literalism of the kind that would kill homosexuals is off the table.... The Enlightenment has, in effect, defanged the Bible."

In fact, sodomy has rarely, if ever, been capitally punished in any Christian society. Although recognized as a mortal sin, which excludes the sinner from heaven (1 Corinthians 6:9-10), this vice is to be corrected by repentance. For example, Richard the Lionhearted twice underwent public penance (whipping) for sodomy in the 12th century.

Mr. Goldblatt would do better to credit Christianity with having, in his graceless words, "defanged the Bible." Christian doctrine is that God intended the severity of many aspects of the Old Law to be pedagogic, to inculcate the awareness in fallen humanity that moral conduct matters gravely; the coming of the Redeemer brought mitigation of this severity as an encouragement to acceptance of the proffered grace "for my yoke is easy and my burden light" (Matthew 11:30).
-- G.W. McKenna

"Enlightened" Mark Goldblatt's article is flawed in so many ways that it is possible to completely miss its principal failing. That is, that his article conspires in the unequal treatment of Terri Schiavo. According to him and his fellow journalists at the NYT, Terri's defenders were only allowed to stand by weeping and wailing while she was besieged to death by an armed force. What concerns the journalists at the NYT, however, is that such violence should not be extended to superior liberals, for then the force of the law would be required to come to the rescue and repel violence with violence. Hence the fact that "enlightened" Judge George Greer was given an armed guard and not an entourage of "defanged Christians."
-- Kevin O'Neill
London, England

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