Hi friends,

I just added the Google Friend Connect widget to the blog’s sidebar (by adding a Wordpress Text Widget and just pasting in the code that Google gave me).

I am not exactly sure what benefits you get from following the blog via Friend Connect, but other people have it so we do, too.    Perhaps one of our readers can explain what all you can do with it.  Anyways, it looks pathetic right now with the only friend being myself, so please join if only out of pity.

…no answer for how a Protestant can know that their (66-book) Biblical canon is inerrant.

I’m speaking of this post on Called to Communion that I linked to in a previous post.  There have been 337 comments made, but so far no answer for how one can know that the [Protestant] canon is inerrant, that is, that the 66 books of their Bible are all inspired by God and that those are the only inspired books.

This situation is what I and many others who have become Catholic through Protestantism discovered again and again: There is no good Protestant answer for this most fundamental question concerning our Christian Faith.

Because Protestants claim that the Bible alone is the highest authority, knowing which books, exactly, make up the Bible is of crucial importance.  Yet, because the Bible’s table of contents does not exist in any book of the Bible nor was it given by God out of the sky to us in a numbered list, we are left with the historical reality of the canon being discerned by the Catholic Church through a process over hundreds of years which was all too human and therefore full of questions, confusions, disputations, and differing canons until around 400 AD when the canon solidified into the 73 books in the Catholic Bible today.

Even at that time it was not dogmatically defined as closed with those 73 books comprising it, though the Apostolic Tradition was that public revelation (and therefore the canon) was closed at the death of St. John, the last Apostle.  (Incidentally, the Bible nowhere says that it will end with the last book written by the last Apostle and then after that there can be no more inspired books, but Protestants believe the same as Catholics on this because they accept this piece of Apostolic Tradition; side digression, Mormons (knowingly or unknowingly) reject this Apostolic Tradition because they claim that public revelation was given by God to Joseph Smith in the 1800s in the Book of Mormon (side-side digression: the Mormon claim that the books were actually written in Old Testament times and then shown to Joseph Smith for transcription does not materially alter my point).)

An interesting thought experiment for our Protestant readers is to ask themselves on what basis they believe that public revelation was closed at the death of the last Apostle.

A thought experiment for our Mormon readers is to ask themselves on what basis they accept the [Protestant] canon of Scripture, that is, the 66-book Bible and reject the 7 deuterocanonicals.  To do so requires the strange logic that, during the Great Apostasy (that is, during the time when allegedly Christ’s Church had apostasized) in 400 AD the bishops of the Catholic Church mostly got the Bible right then 1100 years later in the 1500s, still during the Great Apostasy, the Protestant Reformers then corrected the (pre-Book of Mormon) Bible to the accurate 66 books.  During the Great Apostasy, Mormons believe that the priesthood–the authority–had left Christ’s Church, so by what authority did the Catholic bishops and Protestant Reformers discern which books were inspired and which were not, and why should any Mormon believe them?

Devin and I are back from a Colorado vacation, rested and very refreshed.  We spent the week visiting family in Colorado Springs, as well as traveling to a few area farms to get ideas for out future farm.  This was the sight that greeted us each morning:

The majestic Pikes Peak, though it was dressed with a little less snow during our visit

We enjoyed temperatures in the 60s during the morning and evening and mid-80s during the height of the day.  It was splendid for us, considering that we can’t hope for those sorts of temperatures in Austin until October.

We visited Larga Vista Ranch in Pueblo, as well as Quintana Farms in tiny San Pablo, whose nearest town is San Luis.  Our favorite farm was the Quintana’s, and we enjoyed a tour of their lovely 180 acres, where they raise Navajo churro sheep, goats, Arabian pinto horses, Jersey cows, and chickens.  This is the view from their farm of nearby Culebra Peak:

I am smitten with the mountains and climate of Colorado and look forward to the day when we move there to begin our farming adventure.

The Internet Monk posted about an ongoing kerfuffle regarding a popular and controversial Evangelical pastor named Mark Driscoll.  Should the “elders” of his church be calling him into account and repentance for various edgy sermons he has apparently given?

One problem seems to be that Mr. Driscoll’s “elders” are men he himself has chosen (this is based on the comments made on the Internet Monk’s site), but even if they weren’t chosen by him, he is the most popular by far over any of them; if he were to be called into account by them and didn’t want to submit to them, what would stop him from just leaving and taking his enormous following with him to another “church” of his own where he was the elder?

This situation is another manifestation of the problem of “obeying church elders” in Protestant communities that I blogged about previously.

The Catholic Church has tremendous respect for the mystery of God and His truth, a mystery which here on this earth can only be glimpsed at.

In particular, she is extremely conservative when it comes to declaring something as true about God.  In fact, throughout history it is most often the case that she is forced to define what is truth and what is heresy because she is challenged by someone who teaches heresy as truth.  So it is in a defensive posture that the Church works with regard to defining truth and heresy; she does not proclaim in a positive way every single thing that is true about God (as if that were possible for us finite creatures) but rather proclaims that, whatever you want to believe about God, there are certain things that are not true and so should not be believed.

So, even though the truths of the Faith do not change, we come to understand them better over time by the Holy Spirit’s working in the Church.  One example:  Jesus and the Father are one in being, consubstantial.  How do we know?  When was this dogmatically decreed by the Church?  The Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.  What provoked the Pope and the bishops of the Church to convene this Council and decide on this matter?  The teachings of Arius (hence the Arian heresy) that said that Jesus was not the same substance of the Father but rather only of like substance, along the way demoting Jesus to more of a demigod.

First Council of Nicaea

The Bible (the books of which had not even been formally canonized at this time) does not explicitly say they are of the same substance (let alone whether the Holy Spirit is one being with the Father and the Son), and the Arians had an interpretation for every passage of Scripture that seemed opposed to their teaching, so how did the bishops discern the truth?  They did it through the power of the Holy Spirit given to them as the leaders of Christ’s Church and by tapping into the deposit of the Faith entrusted to them through the sacred Scriptures and through the sacred (or Apostolic) Tradition.

One neat thing is that, though a particular teaching may only be declared as true dogmatically at some late time, that belief has always been true, and there is always evidence of it being believed in the history of the Church.  For example, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.  This was dogmatically declared as true in 1854 AD, but when you read the Fathers of the Church, Popes, bishops, faithful Kings, monks, etc. down through the centuries, you hear them speaking of the “immaculate Mother of God” over and over again.  You see art devoted to Immaculate Mary centuries before this dogma was declared dogmatically.

My friend Tom at Ecumenicity posted a few months back about an example of this with regard to praying for the dead.

Oftentimes when a Protestant hears that the Catholic Church declared some dogma in X century their idea is that the teaching was invented at that time or shortly before, when in truth it has been believed since the beginning of Christ’s Church.

I thought of this today when I saw the painting at the back of the latest issue of the Magnificat, Tobiah and the Angel by Verrocchio:

Tobias' namesake! From the Book of Tobit

When was this painted?  How about after the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s when the Catholic Church, in defense against the Protestant Reformers’ assertions, declared that the Book of Tobit was inspired by God and therefore belonged in the canon of Scripture?  No, it was about 100 years prior to Trent before Martin Luther was even conceived!

Does the fact that someone did a painting of a scene from the Book of Tobit mean that it is canonical Scripture?  Of course not; painters can paint scenes from any book they want, inspired by God or not inspired, but obviously over the centuries the great works of art we have are often of scenes from our Christian faith’s history: Christ, the Apostles, the Virgin Mary, Old Testament persons and events (like this one), and so on.  It gives us a glimpse into the beliefs of Christians at different points in time throughout history and helps us to understand better what was believed to be true.

The Church did not have to dogmatically declare what books made up the canon until the 1500s because up until then there had been general agreement on the canon within the Church for over 1,000 years; not until the Protestant Reformers declared that the 7 deuterocanonical books were not inspired did the Church have to act to protect God’s truth from corruption or subtraction.

The deuterocanonicals, like Tobit for instance, contain beautiful stories of God’s providence and love, wisdom complementary to Proverbs, and history that is referenced by Christ in the Gospels!  The sad irony is that our Protestant brothers and sisters, who ostensibly reverence Scripture above every other authority, are missing out on this part of Scripture.

Hopefully these ideas will help you understand that the gift of infallibility to the Church is a negative protection, that is, a protection against teaching error, rather than a command that the Pope and the Church through Ecumenical Councils will always proactively teach every thing which is true about God and the Faith.  That list would be inexhaustible because God Himself, the Source of all truth, can never be fully described by us creatures through any set of teachings.  Rather, God protects the Church from teaching error as truth.  She is the servant of the Truth, not its master.

Three years ago, I broke my addiction to “The Bachelor/Bacholerette” series.  I was, before that, a weekly viewer who cleared my calendar so that nothing would interview with my show.  I loved those shows and enjoyed watching them with friends, enjoying a social event where we would sit on our psychologist’s couches, analyzing each contestant and making predictions about romantic matches.  But, I got clean three years ago.

The problem is, this week, a friend of ours (one wonders what sort of a friend would do this to us) told Devin about the delight of watching TV online; we don’t have a TV in our home and sometimes wish for something to watch on Friday night.  So, Devin convinced me to watch an episode of “The Bacholerette”.  I struggled, really I did, and made various protestations about the cheesiness of Chris, the host, and the danger of objectifying the show’s participants and the immoral behavior displayed at times on the show.  But, it was to no avail.  Because, we watched another show last night, and now I find myself thinking about next week’s show and suddenly I feel myself sinking back into my old bondage.

So, I confess that I am probably going to become a Bachelor/Bachelorette fan again.  I will close my eyes at the smutty parts and shake my head in disgust but continue watching religiously.

With that said, what do you think will happen with Wes?  Hee hee.

Because we’re friends.

BFF

Mrs. Bean holding Leo

Seriously, we got to meet Danielle Bean today!

You all remember this post from 4 years ago where I became the world record holder for owning the most Danielle Bean books (out of all 20-something-year-old young men).

Danielle is speaking at the Catholic New Media conference this weekend in San Antonio, so we picked her up from the airport, welcomed her to Texas (her first time here), and then ate lunch together on the (nationally famous) San Antonio Riverwalk.

She graciously held our sons even when they had soaked through their diapers, and she put up with my antics for 3 hours (if that isn’t heroic virtue then I don’t know what is.)  We had a great time!

We had a strange encounter today in an elevator.  As I wheeled the stroller into the elevator, I was greeted by two elderly African-American women who immediately said, “Those babies look more like us than they do like you.”  I smiled and said hello.  I made sure I was heading for the right floor.  It was a short elevator flight, just one story up, but before the doors opened, one of the women said to the boys, “How did you get over to their side of town?”  I was so surprised by this that all I could manage was a simple, “These boys are certainly gifts from God to us.”

I was not mentally prepared for this encounter today, even though I’ve heard of similar incidents from pink-peach parents who’ve adopted brown children.  Devin and I have only ever received warm welcomes and smiles from people who see the boys in our arms.  Most often, I forget that the twins don’t look like I do and am surprised at times to see a little brown hand pressed against my pink arm and remember that these are not children of my womb.

I grew up in a culture which told me that different skin colors are a cause for celebration and pride, not distance.  I confess that I do not consider the boys of a different “race”; they are an amalgam of Native American (tribe unknown), African (tribe unknown), and some mixture of European, just like I am an amalgam of European descent.  We are both Americans, children of a melting pot that has erased our ethnic roots and given us a shared heritage as Americans.

That is my experience.  Yet, I can only imagine the experience of those two women with whom I shared the elevator today.
They most likely grew up in a world of separate everything–bathroom, high schools, movie theater entrances.  They probably feel pride in their struggle for civil rights and feel as if they have a heritage to preserve and pass on, a story that cannot be lost.  And, it must feel like something of an ethnic betrayal for them, to see “white” parents raising these brown babies, as if we will raise them without the history that is theirs.

Yet, Devin and I feel that we will raise them with the patrimony that is their right.  We will form them in classical virtues and the rich Catholic tradition.  We will pass on to them the treasures of human culture through education and introduce them to the wonders of creation in the outdoors.  And, if ever they have interest, we will encourage them to seek their ancestral roots and support them in tracing their bloodlines; they come from ancient cultures, and that is honorable.

I think it’s safe to say that much of what passes for African-American culture today is negative–gangster rap, absentee fatherhood, the degradation of the English language–and we will not teach them to appreciate those things, but we will teach them about their heritage and heroes like Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and Harriet Tubman.  These dear elderly women must have a longing and a loss that I cannot comprehend.  Our world has changed much during their lifetimes, and I am glad that it is now a world which celebrates adoption and families of many skin colors.

I'm loving it.

I ran across this quote yesterday and thought is was good enough to share:

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith

“And I can’t believe it’s coming true!”
– Goo Goo Dolls, Big Machine

This post is about what I thought of the Catholic Church as a Protestant.

Specifically, the Catholic Church made the outlandish claim that all her teachings on faith and morals are true–that not one of them is in error.

When I learned that this claim was made, as a Protestant I smelled blood in the water, for I knew that there was no possible way that it was true, and so all I had to do was find one example of it being false, and the whole house of Catholic cards would come tumbling down.  My reaction and effort to sink this iniquitous “Church” had been shared (and is shared today) by many Protestants, including my Evangelical friend John, who has sprayed round after round of shotgun shells at every possible error he has read the Catholic Church has made, no matter how spurious the charge.  He, like me years ago, knows that this claim is false, and if he can just show one teaching to be an error, the Catholic Church is discredited and is exposed for its pyramid of human (and therefore false) traditions.

Why was I so sure that the Catholic Church’s claim was false?  Simple: look at human experience.  Every person (except Jesus) and every institution is corrupted.

With regard to people, we sin and do evil, and as the Bible says, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” because “there is none righteous, no not one”, with the exception of course of Jesus who was righteous and never sinned.

Every organization and institution, including the Catholic Church, is full of people who sin, and these sins corrupt the organizations.  Look at our country’s government: How many scandals were there this year and last year alone?  I can think of several off the top of my head, of marital infidelity, of corruption, and our country is one of the better ones!

St. Peter's Basilica

Companies make defective products and people die from them; courts issue false rulings that imprison or even execute innocent persons while the guilty walk free; our country said “all people are created equal” with the right to life and yet we enslaved African persons and now execute babies in their mothers’ wombs.

And the Christian “churches” aren’t much better.  How many pastors have been found doing evil things: bribery, infidelity, or worse?  And supposedly Christianity is the truth, yet all these different “churches” contradict each other in their teachings!  I may have been going to a church affiliated with the Baptists, but I didn’t call myself a Baptist–though I thought what they taught was mostly true, I surely didn’t necessarily agree with everything my pastor said.  Why should I?  He is just another sinful, fallible human being like me.

Further, the Bible taught (see above) that we are not righteous; in fact, Christ’s righteousness was imputed to us by the Father such that we appear holy because He only sees His perfect Son when He looks at us.  But we are sinful and corrupted and it is only that God declares us holy; we are not truly made holy.  (This is the Protestant belief not the Catholic one just to be clear.)

So with that backdrop, what gall for the Catholic Church to claim that she teaches no error!  It is unconscionable and must be a lie.  Protestant churches are at least truthful in that, though they contradict each other in many ways, none of them claim that everything they teach is true; at best they claim that the Bible is true and that they try to teach off the Bible.

And so I continued growing in my faith and sought to refute this wild claim, but as I did so, I was bothered by the lack of Christian unity, clearly against Christ’s command and Paul’s.  It led me to investigate where we got the books of the Bible in the first place, among other things.  It led me to investigate moral issues like using contraception, something I had always assumed was a good thing.

And as I investigated, I believe that the Holy Spirit started opening up my eyes, already blinded by a decent amount of anti-Catholicism, to at least consider challenges to beliefs that I had accepted implicitly from my (Evangelical Protestant) Christian friends as well as from the world during my long years as an atheist.

By what authority did I accept the 66-book Bible I had been given (first at 10 years of age by my aunt and uncle and then at 20 years of age by my Evangelical friends)?  Why did I believe that baptism was symbolic only?  Why did I believe that contraception was good?

Along the way, my friend Gerardo gave me a copy of The Story of a Soul, the autobiography of St. Therese, a French nun who lived about 100 years ago. I was astounded: This woman was brilliant and holy, and I had never heard of her before.  And she was Catholic?  Well, maybe a blind squirrel finds a acorn every once in a while, but it turns out there were more like her, e.g. St. Francis of Assisi, whom my dad was named after, and who followed Christ more radically than any Protestant brother of mine I knew, for he gave everything away and followed God as a celibate man!

I began to be convinced as each belief I held that contradicted the Catholic Church’s teaching had a reasonable answer to it, often more reasonable and faith-supported than my own belief’s support.  I learned about why the Catholic Church said contraception was immoral.  I challenged my Evangelical friends with the arguments, which to them I am sure was like a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky, for “no one thinks contraception is wrong”, but their responses were unconvincing.  I challenged them on other beliefs; they did not have good answers nor refutations.

Fr. Steele, the Anglican priest who just became Catholic, said:

No, I don’t check my brain in at the door of the Vatican. But, my personal brain doesn’t have the last word either. Where is the beauty in truth? I can now say to my wonderful six children, ‘we don’t do this or that because the Church says that is not true and in the best interest of God’s people. And now my children don’t respond, ‘then why do some who lead the church do this or that if it is wrong?’ In an age of disbelief, the truth of the Church is a magnet not only for me but for my family. Previously I, much like Chesterton, pulled against the Church out of fear; now I find myself being pulled towards it all the more. (emphasis mine)

I remember one day realizing that the Catholic Church’s claim might just be true.  It was similar to the day when I began to believe that Jesus Christ might really be who He said He was.  It was exhilirating!  It meant that God had not left us alone to wallow in the corruption of error that plagued every institution.  It meant that, though “all” sinned and fell short of God’s glory, Jesus did not, which meant that we, too, could live in the true freedom from the slavery of sin.  Similarly, though “all” institutions, including churches, are corrupt and none teach truth without error, the Church Christ built Himself did not teach error because Christ would not let her.  Even though she was and is made up of sinful human beings, God gave us the gift of His Church so that we could know the truth, be set free by it, and live the truth by the power of the Holy Spirit.

St. Peter's statue

Two Parallel Protestant Objections

1. Protestants reject the Catholic claim that the Virgin Mary never committed a sin during her entire life.
2. Protestants reject the Catholic claim that she never errs when she teaches on matters of faith and morals.

The second one has been the subject of this post, but the first objection is a parallel one to it.  Even though Christ said “be perfect therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect”, if you ask most Protestants about this verse, you will probably get an answer like “well, it is hypothetically possible to live perfectly, but in practice ‘all have sinned’ and no one actually lives perfectly except Jesus”.  Funny though that Jesus didn’t say “be perfect but I already know that not one of you will be”; instead, he told everyone to do it and did not give any exceptions.  So why then couldn’t someone live perfectly, by the power of the Holy Spirit?  And if that someone was the Virgin Mary, why would we begrudge her that?  It wouldn’t have been done on her own but by cooperating with God.

In each of the two claims, a stupendous statement is made, not of human power and greatness, but of God’s power and greatness in spite of our human weakness and failings.  How terrific if both of them are true, and further, there is tremendous evidence that they are true, though you have to look with the eyes of faith and not of cynicism.  Faith says we can be perfect and the Holy Spirit can accomplish this in us humans; cynicism says no one has been nor will ever be perfect.  Faith says that the Church is Christ’s bride and will be spotless, the pillar and bulwark of the truth; cynicism sees only a bunch of men and women like any other, many doing evil things while claiming to be Christian.

I would say, ask yourself–whether Protestant or Catholic–what your problems are with the Catholic Church, and then I challenge you to take the issue most important to you and explore it; see what the Catholic answer is to your question and read the arguments made for and against.  Pray about it as well and discern where the Holy Spirit leads you.

May Christ graciously guide you to the truth!

I was reading the daily Scripture verses today for the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, and the second one brought to my mind one error that I think we (modern Christians) make when interpreting Biblical passages.  Here are the verses that caught my attention from Acts 13:22-26:

In those days Paul said: “God raised up David as king; of him God testified, I have found David, son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will carry out my every wish.”

Now, we all know that David lusted after Bathsheba, committed adultery with her, and sent her husband to die on the front lines of his army!  So, is God a liar when He says that David is a man after his own heart and that carried out God’s “every wish”?

The short answer of course is No, God is not a liar but always tells the truth, as Christ said, and so it is an error of interpretation if we take these words in their “scientific” sense, where the word “every” has no exception and must mean that David never sinned and always did what God willed.  Clearly, God condemned David’s sin and he (or his children) were punished for them.  David repented and was forgiven.  So just as David’s evil deeds were certainly not conforming him to God’s own heart, all the same David was a man after the heart of God.

Similarly, we read that Jesus died and “three days later” rose from the dead.  What always comes to my mind is 3 days = 72 hours, but in fact Jesus did not stay in the tomb for 72 hours, since they were accounting days in a less “scientific” manner–an atheist trying to disprove Christianity would have (and many have had) a field day with such “contradictions” as the two just described, yet we understand that they are not contradictions but rather errors of interpretation that we modern men easily make.

Mary, Mother of God

Another, more controversial example is Matthew 1:24,25: “When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home.  He had no relations with her until she bore a son, and he named him Jesus.”

Well, it seems obvious to our ears, due to the word “until”, that Joseph had sexual relations with his wife, Mary, after Jesus was born.  Coupled with other Gospel passages mentioning Jesus’ “brothers and sisters”, it confirms the (seemingly) clear fact that Joseph and Mary actually had quite a few children after Jesus.

But in fact this is not the case.  The word “until” in the Greek does not have the exact same meaning as in English.  Examples abound in the Bible, but I read one just today in the Gospel reading (Luke 1:80 about St. John the Baptist): “…and he was in the desert until the day of his manifestation to Israel.”

If we interpreted this in the normal English way, it would mean St. John was in the desert until the day he was revealed to Israel, at which point he left the desert and perhaps entered the cities.  But we know that this is not the case; John was in the desert baptizing for repentance and rebuking Herod for his immorality and eating locusts and wild honey up until the time he was captured, imprisoned, and ultimately murdered.

With regard to Mary and Joseph, sacred Tradition tells us that they never had sexual relations; they both remained celibate (hence a “Josephite” marriage).  The “brethren of the Lord” has a clear explanation.  You can read about it and Mary’s perpetual virginity here and here.

The witness of the Apostolic Tradition is so universal that Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Zwingli all affirmed as true Mary’s perpetual virginity! (Incidentally, they also affirmed her as “Mother of God” as decreed in the Council of Ephesus in 430 AD.) But many Protestants today are oblivious (often through no fault of their own) to sacred Tradition and even the beliefs of the Reformers, and so when they read the Bible, its “plain” meaning in these passages leads them astray.  I can understand how this is so because I thought the same thing as a Protestant.

When you hear someone make this error, ask them if they know that Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all believed in this teaching.  If you see a Protestant apologist make this error (James White is a good example of someone who persists in it), examine the arguments made and decide whether you will believe him or the universal witness of Christ’s Church through the centuries (and including all of the most important Reformers).

One of the newbies just laid her first egg yesterday.  Can you guess which is the pullet egg?

Called Neighbor, a real-time strategy (RTS) game like Starcraft but for the web and much smaller in scope.  A screenshot in its very nascent stage:

Won't You Be My Neighbor (So I Can Blow You Up)?

The game area is on the left, with vertical and horizontal scroll bars around it; the controls area is on the right, with currently only a slider control for zooming the game area.

What do I envision for the game?  A web-based RTS written in Silverlight that takes its inspiration from a particular Warcraft II “pud” (or game map) called Neighbor.  In that game, you started with a small area for your base, surrounded by trees, with your opponents just on the other side of the trees.  The game progressed by you and your neighbor both building up your armies within sight of each other, while your lumberjacks chopped through the trees, eventually opening up a pathway through which your armies battled; there were up to 8 players on such a map, and different strategies were employed to win: Some players wouldn’t chop through their trees at all in order to use projectile attacks from archers and towers to shoot the enemies over the trees; others would try to bring their ground army to bear immediately.

This game is more difficult than the tower defense one, which took me long enough to finish as it was, so I am not 100% committed to completing this game.  However, I am going to start on it and see how much progress I can make with my idea as-is; then if it is too big in scope I can revise downward.

One goal I am making for this game is for its screen size to be 480 x 320.  Silverlight is being ported to work on mobile platforms that run on cell phones, so my hope is that if I finish this game one day I could not only have it on the web but also it would be runnable on a mobile device.  I would love to see it on the iPhone but Apple is not a fan of having other companies’ technologies running on their proprietary system, so as far as I know they would rather drop dead before seeing Silverlight run on the iPhone.  There are specific challenges to making that work, but proof of concepts have actually been done to run Silverlight games on it–whether it would ever be sanctioned (and say, purchasable through the app store) is a different story.

Nonetheless, there are many other phones that will run Silverlight, so it would be cool to get the game on it.

Unfortunately, having such a small area for the game constrains how much I can do with it, especially for an RTS, which typically have sprawling maps.  But, with Silverlight, in just a few hours I used it render features to make the game area zoomable, such that, when zoomed out fully, yes the game is too small to manipulate individual creatures, but you can zoom in to a region of the map and then scroll around at that zoomed in level to see the whole thing; this feature allows me to put a critical mass of “stuff” (trees, lumberjacks, bases, rock minerals, etc.) on the screen which will make the game interesting.

Happy first Father’s Day, my love.  How blessed are our sons to have a Papa like you, one who reads to them and changes their diapers and teaches them virtue and makes them laugh.  You are truly a father in the image of God the Father, for whom every family on earth is named.

I don’t watch the show (though I did see part of an episode one time where they went to a restaurant), but it’s impossible to avoid Jon and Kate plus 8 the past few weeks: They’ve been on the cover of magazines at the doctor’s office, in the news headlines, and everywhere else.

Now they are separating in preparation for divorce, which they announce on the TV show?

Okay, if your marriage is having problems, the first thing to do is to say “to Hell with this TV show” because having those stupid cameras in your home everyday is anything but good.

Jon says: “I don’t hate Kate, but, you know, I have to do what’s best for me and my kids. Them first.”
Kate says: “Our goals are different now….We’ve always done the show for the kids — to provide for them.”

Huh?  If you are putting the children first, then you quit letting people come into your home to film you before the gawking world, removing the temptations to vanity which such a thing inevitably brings; then, what is best for your children is that you and your wife remain married and renew your love for one another through prayer, serving, and self-sacrifice.

Kate thinks that they have been “doing the show for the kids”.  She may believe that, but if this show has been influencing the negative forces and tendencies in their marriage, which I think it has, then the show hurts the children.

I recall hearing this couple is Christian.  Where is their pastor?  Where are the people from their faith community coming to them and telling them to stop the insanity of this TV show and advising them to get good help from a faithful and wise counselor?

I hope that this family throws the cameras out and brings God back in; He can protect their family and begin to heal their wounds, showing them anew how to love one another and to give themselves for the other.  May St. Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer, Protector of the Holy Family and of the Church, pray for this family.

Pope Benedict has declared this the Year of the Priest, beginning on the Feast of the Sacred Heart which was last Friday.  (I am four days behind schedule here.)  The Pope explains, ”
This Year, meant to deepen the commitment of all priests to interior renewal for the sake of a more forceful and incisive witness to the Gospel in today’s world, will conclude on the same Solemnity in 2010.”  He wrote a beautiful letter to every priest, focusing heavily on the life and witness of St. John Vianney, patron of priests.  The text of the letter is here.

The following is one of my favorite lines from Pope Benedict’s letter: “In this context of a spirituality nourished by the practice of the evangelical counsels, I would like to invite all priests, during this Year dedicated to them, to welcome the new springtime which the Spirit is now bringing about in the Church, not least through the ecclesial movements and the new communities.”  First, the Year of St. Paul, now the Year of the Priest.  It sounds like our Holy Father is on a mission to revitalize the proclamation of the Gospel within the Church.

I was thinking today about something my (Evangelical Protestant) friend John wrote in an email recently: “I have to believe that God miraculously preserved his word.”

By this he means that God, through certain (fallible) human beings, miraculously showed them (somehow) which books He had inspired and which He had not.  His statement is a fideistic assertion and gives us no clue, for instance, how to know which books, exactly, make up “God’s word” and which do not.

Nonetheless, ignore those problems with it temporarily because I want to point something out.  If my friend John believes that God worked infallibly through fallible human beings, in particular those Catholic bishops, theologians, and priests who discerned within the Church what the canon was and then 1100 years later through the fallible Protestant Reformers in their dismissal of the 7 deuterocanonicals, then why not also believe that “God miraculously preserved His Church, made up of fallible human beings, from error in her teachings?”  If God did the first thing, He very well could have and probably did do the second thing!

It is an ad hoc decision to believe that God preserved from error the Church’s selection of the canon while disbelieving that He preserved her other teachings on the faith from error.

The immediate question becomes: How does one determine on which teachings God preserved the Church from error and when He did not?

If you answer “the Bible”, what that means in practice is how you (as influenced by your particular Christian tradition) interpret the Bible.  As we have seen from Protestantism, there as many different interpretations of different Biblical passages as there are ants in an ant mound.  Surely this was not the way God intended us to know His Truth.

I propose that God, knowing how faulty, frail, and easily-confused we humans are, knew that the only way we could know the truth from falsehood in our Christian Faith was by graciously and powerfully working through these faulty humans in such a way as to both honor their free will and at the same time to guide His Church in the truth through the narrow path between perilous heresies on all sides.  This protection includes guiding His Church with regard to the canon of Scripture.  How did the Catholic clergy decide this?  By reliance on this protection of the Holy Spirit and by the application of the living Apostolic Tradition handed down to them by the Apostles.

A few weeks ago, one of the authors of Called to Communion wrote a blog post exploring John Calvin’s statements with regard to knowing the canon of Scripture (e.g. which books comprise the Bible).  There are now over 200 comments on this post, mainly a Reformed Protestant named Andrew M. going back and forth with two of the Called to Communion authors: Tim and Bryan, both formerly Reformed Protestants, though Yours Truly also weighed in a few times with some commentary.

Calvin’s arguments on this question are not the strongest, which at least one of the Protestant commenters sought to defend by saying that Calvin in this passage was perhaps not attempting to refute the Catholic Church’s arguments directly but just laying out his ideas for how a Christian can know what books should be in the Bible “in general”.

Here is an excerpt from Calvin:

It is utterly vain, then, to pretend that the power of judging Scripture so lies with the church and that its certainty depends upon churchly assent….Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.

Let this point therefore stand: those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated…

In other words, a true Christian does not need the Church or any church to tell him what makes up Scripture because the true Scriptural books themselves so clearly testify to their God-inspired truth that the Christian, with the Holy Spirit, can easily discern what is Scripture and what is not, as easily as discerning white from black, sweet from bitter.

John Calvin

Note for our readers: “Reformed” Protestants are those whom most closely associate themselves with John Calvin’s teachings (and Martin Luther’s), as opposed to, for instance, Zwingli or the “radical” Reformers (e.g. Anabaptists and others).  I think that most Reformed Christians go to some type of Presbyterian church.  “Reformed” can be contrasted with “Evangelical” Protestants, who are typically Baptist, Fundamentalist, non-denominational, or Bible-church Christians.  Evangelicals take their Protestant heritage more from the so-called “radical Reformers”, like the Anabaptists, who rejected many things that even Calvin and Luther held as true, causing enmity between these sets of Reformers.

In the comments, Reformed Protestant Andrew M. is arguing that he knows the canon “infallibly” or “inerrantly”, that is, he knows with 100% confidence which books comprise the Bible, and those books are the 66 which make up the Protestant Bible, as opposed to the 73 which make up the Catholic Bible.  Catholics Bryan and Tim challenged Andrew to demonstrate how he knows that the Protestant canon was inerrant, which Andrew so far has failed to do.

Andrew’s main arguments thus far have been 1) the 7 deutero-canonical (DC) books included in the Catholic Bible were not accepted by various specific Catholic theologians and Fathers over the centuries leading up to the Reformation, and 2) The fact that the Bible tells us that the Scriptures are “God-breathed” means that God both inspired men to write these books and also that, inseparably connected with their inspiration, God also infallibly “oversaw” the collection of these precise books by “the Church”.

Presbyterianism

Bryan and Tim have rightly demonstrated that Andrew’s arguments don’t actually give assurance that the 66-book Protestant canon is inerrant.  His arguments can certainly be discussed on their own grounds, but they do not provide an answer to the question of how a Protestant can know his canon is inerrant.

The problem with Andrew’s second argument, as I see it, is that it ignores the historical reality of how the canon was selected.  It was not an easy, clear process without debate that ended in the 2nd century.  If that were the case, all Christians would agree on whatever canon was chosen then.  Rather, the laborious process took hundreds of years after the Apostles’ deaths for the canon to slowly emerge, with differing canons being proposed by different Fathers and bishops during these centuries.  The canon agreed upon by the Church around 400 AD, though not yet dogmatically, was comprised of the 27 New Testament books and the 46 Old Testament books, including the 7 deutero-canonicals.  However, there were Catholic theologians over the centuries who debated whether the deuteros (and others) should be included, and ultimately, over 1100 years later, the Reformers decided that the 7 deuteros were not as well attested as inspired, and so though they included them in their Bible, they were not to be regarded with the same weight as the other 66.  (Ultimately, as the centuries passed these 7 books were removed entirely from Protestant Bibles.)  During this time of the Reformation, in the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church dogmatically stated that the canon was comprised of the 73 books and that the canon was closed.

So the very fact that varying degrees of disputation and discussion occurred within the Church for the first 400 years of Christianity and then again 1100 years later by the Reformers repudiates Andrew’s assertion that the inspiration of the Scriptural books and their collection into the canon were one “God-breathed” process.  They were not.  As is the ordinary way with God, He chose to work through his very fallible, sinful yet redeemed human disciples in guiding them to discern which books He had inspired and which He had not.  That God oversaw the process and guided it, Catholics completely agree, but the reason Catholics can know that the 73 book canon is inerrant is because God, by His awesome power and grace, has divinely protected His Church from error on matters of the faith from Pentecost when she was born up to and including the present day.

Protestants are not able to appeal to the same belief, though in practice they cherry-pick certain teachings the Church discerned as true over the centuries.  If Protestants hold that God had divinely protected the Church from error in selecting the canon, several problems arise for them:

1. Why then didn’t He also protect other teachings from error (baptismal regeneration, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, intercession of saints, Purgatory, and so on, which were all already taught by the 400s)?

2. Where in the Bible does it say that God will protect His Church from error when selecting the canon but not in other matters?  (And since it doesn’t say this, how is this belief not an extra-biblical and therefore human tradition which Jesus condemned?)

3. Since Protestants reject 7 books that the Church discerned were inspired, it means they also have to believe that the Catholic Church was mostly protected from error in the 400s when selecting the canon but then for 1100 years the error of the deuteros was taught before the Reformers (also infallibly guided by God?) removed those 7 books.

Painting of a scene from the book of Tobit, one of the 7 deutero-canonicals

That is why the two other options for Protestants are those which, in my experience, are most often taken in practice:

1. The canon is a “fallible collection of infallible books” coined by R.C. Sproul–this belief admits that the canon of the very Bible itself, which Protestants hold as the highest authority (sola Scriptura), very possibly contains books which were not inspired by God and others which were inspired but which have been left out!  A dissatisfying proposition to say the least.

2. Ignore history and just assert “I believe that God ‘miraculously’ protected the canon from error and that the canon is the 66 books of the Protestant Bible.  I KNOW this because the Bible has meant so much to me in changing my life.”

This second option eshews the use of reason and just makes a fideistic assertion without any basis except in the private feelings and intuition of the individual Christian.  It cannot be discussed or debated because it is not an actual argument.

Why didn’t God make the canon obvious?  I don’t know.  He certainly could have done so, such that, as Calvin implied, any true Christian could just read a particular book and “tell” that the book was inspired.  But God did not do that, as is clear from the fact that faithful Christians have disagreed about the canon for centuries and that we have two sets of canons today, the Catholic one and the Protestant one.

Ultimately, for me it is yet another reason to believe that God has protected His Church from error and led her into all truth, not by the piety nor brilliance alone of these very fallible human beings, but rather by His unmerited grace and love; He did not and does not want His children to be led astray by falsehood, which is why He inspired books to be written in the first place!  He wants us to know the truth and to be able to know truth from falsehood, which is why He not only inspired a certain number of books to be written, but also then guided His Church, which is the Bride of Christ, in correctly discerning which of the hundreds of letters being circulated were divinely inspired and which were not.  And if He guided the Church inerrantly on this matter, then we have every reason to believe He did it on other matters, like the divinity and humanity of Christ (both attacked), the nature of the Trinity and the relationship of the Father to the Son (one in being with each other, also attacked (by Arius)), whether Gentile converts need to be circumcised, and so on.

Thank you for reading this post.  I know that many of my family and friends who read this blog are Protestant, and I do not intend this as an attack on you personally but rather hope you read this and are challenged to learn and study the history of the canon of Scripture and to discern how and why you came to believe what you did about it.

It’s amazing.  Tobias is more kinesthetic, more introverted; Leo is more relational and extroverted.

Tobias spent 5 minutes today concentrating on his 4 square blocks, carefully stacking one on top of another to form a 2-block tower, then trying to put the third on the top, eventually succeeding after several failures, and finally managed to add the fourth!  He starts clapping to himself when the tower gets 3-high.

Leo has just started putting one block on top of another, and even that is something that is difficult for him, because he gets frustrated more easily and doesn’t stick with it as long.  Also, whatever toy Tobias has, Leo wants, and he wants Tobias to play with him, while Tobias is more content with playing by himself.

Joel Salatin is one of the leaders of the sustainable farming/beyond organic/pastured animal/local foods movement (we have to condense all those down to some acronym one of these days), and he was selected by his Senator to go to Washington and take part in the “Green Jobs Leadership Summit” (each Senator got to select only one person to go):

I received an invitation from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to paticipate in the Green Jobs Leadership Summit hosted by the Senate Democratic Caucus in the Russell Senate Office Building. His invitation read: “This half-day event will feature discussions focused on creating clean energy jobs and supporting the new green economy. Because of your company’s leadership in the clean energy and green manufacturing industries,  Senator Webb [Va. Senator Jim Webb] has nominated you to represent Virginia at the Green Jobs Leadership Summit.”

I contacted Sen. Webb’s office for clarification and was assured that I might even have five minutes with Vice President Joe Biden, but surely I would have plenty of face time with senators. Each senator was allowed one nominee, and I was Webb’s representative. That was kind of cool, and with a total potential of 100 people from across the U.S., this sounded like indeed it might be something where I could get my message to some high levels.

But instead of being a forum where ideas could be exchanged and where Salatin’s wisdom could be voiced to the Senators and other Green leaders:

The front table was cordoned off and guarded by security until VP Joe Biden came. He spoke about the wonderful things the stimulus package was doing, then shook hands with about 8 senators in a reserved section, then was quickly whisked away. So much for face time.

What followed were two panels, primarily senators, simply giddy over how they were rescuing the country. The senators would flow in for their 1 minute of clapping praise from the industry audience, then gave 3 minutes of Democratic salvation exuberance, then quickly left for more important matters. Once each panel finished their preramble (Ha!) monologues, just a few minutes were left for the lucky few who could navigate to the microphone in a nearly unreachable corner to ask questions and make comments to the panel.

Salatin managed to get to the microphone and say his piece but Democrat Sen. Mark Udall from Colorado interrupted him and told him “he has plenty of friends in the USDA” (which is sadly ironic since Salatin has written an entire book about how government agencies have tried shutting down his farm time and time again).  When Salatin responded that he had looked and had not found any friends there, the senators cut off his microphone, and he was sent back home to Virginia.

Joel Salatin

Salatin is not the kind of change that Obama and his administration have been looking for.  He is the “wrong kind of Green”, someone with ideas that are truly different and would actually help our country, I believe.  But the Senators (and I include Republicans in this, too, though I don’t know if any were at this summit) don’t know what to do with him nor how to even process what he is telling them.  Instead of more regulation, he advocates less regulation!  This kind of talk is off their radars.

This beautified my day.  I listened to “Pavane” in the car, so I did not have the benefit of the Monet paintings added in this video, which I hope makes your listening experience even better.  Much as I don’t love Impressionism, I do like this little dreamy piece by Faure.

The wearing of long tank tops, to cover the growing gap between the top of my skirt and the bottom of my shirt.  I am not yet in the cute-pregnant-tummy phase, simply in the I-have-a-lazy-belly phase.  Sort of like this:

Hee hee. I guess all I need is a hammer.

I just read this story about the United States bishops’ apparently collective decision to not impose sanctions against Notre Dame.  A weary sigh echoes in my heart as it seems like our shepherds are back to business as usual.  I had hoped…Well, let’s just say I’m ready for some excommunications to start flying in our country.  I’m ready for some colleges to lose the privilege of including “Catholic” in their name and for some politicians to lose the same privilege and for some bishops to become bold enough to do just that.

O Sacred Heart of Jesus, whose feast we celebrate tomorrow, please help me to see as You see and to be more merciful.

Our backyard garden continues to flourish, with the following developments.

1.  Our Ambrose hive is bursting with honey and bees, so Devin prepared and installed another box atop their hive today, giving them more room to build comb for honey.  The nectar is flowing in central Texas right now, and we are hearing that a strong hive can fill an entire box with honey in just two weeks–that’s 30 pounds of honey.  We’re hoping for a great year.

2.  Our burgeoning grape clusters were stripped by an enterprising bird this weekend.  I think it was one of the cheeky bluejays that hang around our yard; they also eat bees and steal tomatoes.  Rascals!

3.  Our berries are ripening fast but not fast enough to beat the birds.  We tried picking them before they’re fully ripe, with the hope that they will ripen indoors but have learned that berries don’t ripen much after picking.  Our other option is to cover our bushes with screening, but we have not yet made that a priority.

4.  Our squash are producing the proverbial overabundance.  We have at least 4 large Tatume currently sitting on our counter; the Tatume is a hard-shelled Mexican squash, almost like a small pumpkin, so I am going to steam two of them and see how they mash with butter.  And, of course, we have one enormous zucchini that escaped our notice until it was HUGE.  Here is a photo of the squash that got away:

I’m thinking zucchini bread and zucchini bread and zucchini bread; I will probably have to remove the seeds of this monster because they could be pretty woody, so we’ll see how much zucchini I actually end up with.

5.  Our hot weather plants are starting to really flourish.  Our basil is growing beautifully and recently supplied us with tasty marinara for lasagna and tasty pesto for pasta.  Our tomatoes are loaded and ripening fast, though we are bringing orange tomatoes indoors to ripen on the windowsill, in view of the ongoing battle with the bluejays.  Our cucumber vine has given us two beauties now and is working on many others.

6.  No pullet eggs yet, though Penelope is back to laying.

This appears to be our best garden ever, and I know it is due to the efforts of my valiant husband, who invested effort into starting our seeds in a tray under a grow light and who also installed a drip irrigationt system in our garden.  Thanks, darling.

Who doesn’t get a kick out of putting a basket over one’s head and walking around?

Here’s a picture of us at our friends’ baptism reception:

One of us is posing for the camera; the Other is holding BOTH boys (27 lbs each)

We had a photographer, who happens to be a friend of ours, come to the house and take some photos of the boys this past weekend:

Our friend Dee sent me an article demonstrating many errors in Pres. Obama’s historical references made over the past year.

Here was my favorite Obama double-think:

Mr. Obama also insisted that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.” Yet the Spanish Inquisition began in 1478; by then, Cordoba had long been reconquered by Spanish Christians and was governed as a staunchly Christian city.

Hmm, Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance?  And then he mentions Muslims in Spain?  Apparently Obama received some of the history education I did and didn’t realize that the Muslims were in Spain for 770 years because they had invaded and conquered it in the early 700s!  Tolerance my foot.  Over the ensuing centuries the Muslims tried again and again to eradicate the Christians in the Asturias, but they were beaten back again and again by heroic and faithful men.

This one was good, too:

Much of what Mr. Obama said to thousands of Germans during his Victory Column speech in Berlin last summer also was ahistorical. He began, “I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” He apparently forgot that for the previous eight years, the official faces of American foreign policy in Germany had been Secretaries of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice – both black.

Oh yeah, oops–they were black, too, weren’t they?

And another history lesson for Obama about his Cairo speech a week or two ago:

And yes, Jefferson did own a copy of the Koran as President Obama stated in his speech today. But the reason he read it when he was serving as our ambassador in Paris was to see if it could really be true–as Arab diplomats were telling him–that the Koran gave them the right to attack and enslave Americans and all other “infidels.” Jefferson concluded from his reading that America must fight–not pay tribute–to protect her citizens.

So at least Obama was right about Jefferson owning a Koran!

Remember how Pres. Obama was hailed during the election?

He’s our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence…

Our all-knowing quantum intelligence field apparently just isn’t what it used to be.

Yesterday I noticed a new light of understanding in our sons’ eyes.

They would do something that they knew was wrong (in their 14-month old baby way) and then look at us with a mischievous grin.  They are growing deeper in knowledge and awareness everyday, and it is amazing to watch!

They can use objects to reach other objects, climb into and out of baskets, grab books off the bookshelf, play chase games with each other, flip through books (right-side-up or upside-down), open cabinets and pull everything out, stack blocks 3 high, say “cuckoo”, and make train sounds.  They also love to push chairs all around the house (we have tile floors which makes this possible).