Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Truth, Divine Inspiration, and the Catholic Church

In the last post, I wrote about two important concepts, "truth" and "reality." Like I said, those concepts have been discussed for thousands of years, and they began with the teachings of Gorgias and Plato. From a rhetorical point of view, these are important concepts because they define the world around us, and, through communication, we are able to confront and deal with our world. Language is built upon these philosophies, as it should be, because it was during this time when the Western Civilization became literate. An important point to remember is that language and communication is the vehicle that we depend upon to live and thrive, and it is the most important component of our lives, no matter how advanced our civilization is.

But I am not here to talk about ancient Greek rhetorical tradition. I am more interested in something else: the Christian Church. I became a Catholic after being raised a Baptist. I made the "conversion" because I felt God's call to His original Church, and I have been happy ever since. The word "Catholic" simply means Universal, and this is the original word applied to the universal Christian church as it grew from Jerusalem to Greece to Rome and throughout the world.

The history of the Church is very interesting, and I believe that most Christians today do not know the history of their own religion. That is a shame. I believe if most Evangelical/Protestant Christians were to read about the beginning of the Church, from Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and the Apostles, they would realize that God's intention was to create a universal or "Catholic" Church, and He would not be happy with all of the factions and splintered sects that we see today professing Christianity.

Indeed, Saint Peter and Saint Paul fought very hard to prevent this from happening. During their time, all over the world, there were churches springing up that had different viewpoints and different opinions. Some of those differences were as simple as taking communion only once a week, and some were as major as stating that Christ was just a good man. In fact, should one do the research, the Muslim faith was seeded from a sect of Christians who believed that Christ was a good man and a prophet, but not the Messiah as predicted by the Jewish tradition. This sect was called Arianism, and it later propagated Mohammed's rise to fame.

In the attempt to join Christians together all over the world, Saint Peter and the early Church Fathers met at many councils to decide how to preach the gospel of Christ and how to worship. Their goal was to celebrate Christ in one uniform way, under one uniform teaching. The seat of this Church was in Rome because that is where Peter and Paul both lived, and they both oversaw the Church in Rome. This is why the Papacy is seated in Rome, among other historical reasons that I am not going to get into right now.

Interestingly enough, the early Church Fathers (those who founded the Christian Church) saw the Greek philosophers as having had revelations from God. In other words, God gave them a wisdom, even though they were pagans and worshipped other gods. The early Church Fathers believed that the Greeks were not sinners because Christ had not been revealed to them, and that God spoke through their words as timely wisdom for humankind. Plato was one of the philosophers who the early Church Fathers recognized as having received divine revelation. Gorgias, as you may imagine, was not considered by the Church Fathers to have received God's revelations. Perhaps this is why such a schism and hatred existed between the two and why Plato felt so strongly that Gorgias was evil. Many scholars have wondered why Plato hated Gorgias so much, and, perhaps, it was through God's whispers to him.

As the early Church grew, there became a need to meet in churches instead of homes, and the Apostles and Bishops of the early Church adopted the Roman government building as the basis of the Church, not the Roman Temple as many people have tried to suggest. The Roman government building was where the Emperor sat to oversee government business, and it was identical to the first Church, and many documents prove that the layout was exact and purposeful because it needed to hold hundreds, if not thousands of worshippers. The Roman Temple, on the other hand, was only large enough to hold a priest and an altar.

Early Christian doctrine was based upon the teachings of those who knew Christ (the Apostles) and those who were converted directly by Christ after His death (Paul). After these men died or were martyred, the Church leaders (the Church Fathers) were those who knew these men, and they are the ones who actually formed the Catholic Church as we know it today. They were able to build this Church due to Rome's eventual acceptance and conversion to Christianity.

At that time, there was no Bible per se. The teachings of the Church were based upon the writings of the Apostles and Paul who were responsible for writing the books of the New Testament under God's hand. The problem was, most of the New Testament was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. In addition to that, the vast majority of Christian converts in the early Church were Jews, and the Old Testament (Torah) was considered a necessary element to the Christian Church because the entire Old Testament was based upon the coming of the Messiah, and this book, or collection of books, was considered to be part of the Christian faith as well, especially by those Jewish converts in Jerusalem. By the way, the Church in Jerusalem was the first Church in Christianity. This Church was destroyed a long time ago, and since then, a Jewish Temple was built upon it and destroyed, and now a Muslim Mosque sits on that site. This is the site that John spoke about in Revelations, and it is the site that was spoken about in the Old Testament. Both John and the Old Testament authors viewed this site as the most holy ground where the final conflict would begin.

As time moved on, the Church grew and grew, and it was mostly because of the organization of the Church as outlined by the Apostles, Paul, and the early Church Fathers. This was when the Catholic Church began to take on the properties that we now know as the Catholic Church: Priests were ordained to lead congregations, Bishops were elected to oversee regions, and eventually, a Pope was put in place to lead the Church -- not as a descendant of the previous Pope, but as a successor to Peter whom the Church was built upon as revealed by Christ.

During this time of infancy, God placed His hand upon certain individuals who would eventually make decisions and write documents that were divinely inspired. The most critical person in this period was Saint Jerome. Saint Jerome was a priest, and eventually a Cardinal, within the Church who took the documents that professed the Christian faith -- the writings of the Apostles and Paul, and the writings of the Old Testament, and translated them into a language that all people in the Roman-dominated world could understand -- Latin. In other words, he took the core component of the Christian tradition, and under God's divine intervention, recorded the Bible from many languages into one language. This gave the Church the ability to spread and grow.

How difficult a task is this, and why is it considered divinely intervened? First of all, translation of any kind is difficult, especially when you are dealing with many languages, some of which had evolved over time. Words and phrases change, and there are multiple options for choosing meaning when translating. During the translation, one thing that was said in the original document could have been completely altered from its original intention due to a mis-interpretation of that original language and due to the subsequent reinterpretation and transformation into Latin. We know that God had his hand on Jerome during this process because, for one, his translation withstood the test of time and was considered by thousands of scholars for over 1500 years as the best translation ever created, and we know that he was divinely inspired because God would never have let the early Church go astray during such a crucial period of its development. There were no political or social questions to deal with. Jerome was working to preserve the written word solely for preserving the written word. He had no ulterior motive. In addition, his life was full of opened doors and special acquaintances that gave him access to all of the original documents of the authors of the Bible. He was the only one who had such access to those documents, and he was the only one who had the calling from God to perform such a tremendous task that took many years and much study to complete. Saint Jerome devoted his life to God to do this, and he, himself, felt God's gentle hand throughout the process.

Jerome's translation of the Holy Bible was the Bible that built the Church, and it was the Bible that had been questioned and examined by the brightest minds over a 1,500 year period, and no one could find it fallible as a translation in any way. It was the essence of Christianity. As such, Jerome is considered to be a Saint of the Church, and he is also one of 33 Doctors of the Church. His contributions were, and are, unparalleled to the growth and spread of Christianity. His work, through God, is what created the great spread of the Christian faith. He was a holy man who loved Christ and loved literature, and his entire life from childhood was one continual preparation for such a task.

Around 350AD, we had a unified Catholic Church, we had a complete translation of the Bible that everyone could read and understand, and we had an organized priesthood and Liturgy that was based upon that which Peter and Paul built and created. That was the original Christian/Catholic Church, and it flourished.

Here's where Plato comes in. Remember, now, that Plato was considered by the founding Church Fathers as divinely inspired by God, and his philosophy was based upon God's teachings (this concept was dropped by the Church during the Middle Ages, by the way, when the Church led astray from worshipping Christ to worshipping itself). If you remember in the last post, Plato taught that there was one single Truth in this world. He taught that copies of that Truth were further removed from that Truth, and that copies did not completely exemplify the original Truth. This was the primary teaching of his life, and, again, was accepted as revealed to him by God by the original Church Fathers, as well as the Apostles and Paul.

Where am I going with this, you may ask?. Well, if we understand Plato, then we must look at Truth where it begins. Truth began with God through Christ. If the writers of both the Old and New Testament were divinely inspired by God as they wrote their books, then Truth begins there through their writing. Being in multiple languages, and not being able to create a situation where the Church could grow, Saint Jerome, too, was divinely inspired by God to create a translation of the Bible that would allow the Church to grow, so we have to believe that Truth existed there as well. If you believe in the Christian faith, then you must believe in these things because you would believe that God led and guided the development of the Church itself so that the message of Christ could be taught, conversions could be made, and growth in the faith could occur. According to Plato, anything divinely inspired would be the essence of Truth.

That is where I am going to leave it for now. This is a lot to chew on, and I want you to think about these things if you are so inclined. During the next post, I am going to elaborate upon the movement away from Truth from Plato's perspective as it relates to the Church and the Bible. Again, I believe in my Catholic faith, but I am a Catholic of the original Church. This does not mean that I profess Protestant beliefs. I do not. I believe in the Catholic Church, I believe in its organization, and I believe in its Liturgy. But I also believe in that which I will discuss in the next post.

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