Chesterton on creeds
by James V. Schall, S.J.
February 8, 2019
Chesterton thought that probably people were “intensely interested in theology — if possible more than in religion.” Why would he say this? It is, I think, because
theology means precisely word or thought about God, the attempt to unravel and clarify what we mean by or know of the highest Being.
The knowledge of whether God exists is one thing, interesting enough as it is.
But the real interest comes when, once knowing of the existence of a beginning source or cause, we commence our wondering about what sort of a being or reality this origin or end might be. So we try to formulate what we think, what we conclude, what we articulate. When we begin to do this articulating, we are in the creed-making business, whatever we call it.
“A creed means what anybody believes, and generally lends something of its definite character even to what he disbelieves. That the Creator is indifferent to creed is itself a creed. Even that the Creator does not exist at all is in essence a creed.”
This is why it is important especially for those who claim that they are free of odious creeds to identify their own creed so that we can examine them for their validity. We can in fact state in creedal form any claim to deny the need of a creed. No one is more pitiful or more dangerous than the “creedless” professor or parson. Chesterton had the uncanny ability to perceive and articulate
the hidden creeds of those who had no creeds.
What might also sound strange to us on first reading is Chesterton’s insistence that morality is not very interesting. We hear a lot about the notion that
we should not bother about the differing creeds or statements of what people believe but look to their deeds.
Samuel Johnson, I believe, once quipped that
if a man denies in theory the validity of private property while he is visiting our house, we should count the silver after he leaves.
It is true that by their fruits you shall know them. What is not true is that these fruits come from some sort of mindlessness that has no relation to a thought that might have caused them.
- If we really only were interested in actions with no perception of the thoughts that caused then, “the result would be a torrent of tedium, a howling wilderness of boredom.”
- We would eliminate “mysticism” and the consciousness of our inner lives.
- The attention to deeds without to the thought behind them would be only moralising, something men find “the dreariest experience on earth.”
By eliminating any discussion of creed, creeds of even those who claim not to have any, we would at the same time get rid of what men “find really interesting,” namely, “the disputes about dogmas and creeds.” That is to say,
we would rid ourselves of serious discussions about what is true.
At which point, one might ask: What is the 'creed' that Jorge Bergoglio professes??? Does he not profane the Credo he must recite at daily Mass by his anti-Catholic beliefs - borne out in word and deed - that are alien to it??? The present Vicar of Christ on earth is living a big lie which he obviously thinks is not, so certain is he that he alone knows best, better than Jesus whose Gospel he freely edits and manipulates as he pleases, and whose Church he has been wreckovating into his image and likeness.
On the same day, another TCT writer also wrote about creeds...
A new Creed?
by David Carlin
February 8, 2019
It is an interesting fact that Christianity’s three most famous creedal statements, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, contain no moral doctrines. They contain metaphysical doctrines, e.g. the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement; and what I suppose may be called historical-miraculous doctrines, e.g., the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension. But no moral doctrines: nothing about the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, the two great commandments – love God, love your neighbor.
Is this because early Christianity was not concerned with morality? Far from it. The four Gospels and the other parts of the New Testament, if we may take these as indicators of early Christianity, are replete with concerns about morality.
But the morality of early Christianity was pretty much noncontroversial, whereas the doctrinal parts of Christianity were highly controversial.
The creeds were created to draw bright lines between orthodox and non-orthodox beliefs. The Church was saying, “This is what we believe, and that is what we don’t believe. There’s the line between the two. If you’re on this side of the line, you are inside the Church. If you’re on that side, you are outside the Church.”
That this is what was going on is very clear in the case of the Nicene Creed, created by the first Ecumenical Council held at Nicea (325 AD) and somewhat modified at the First Council of Constantinople (381). The point of the Nicene Creed, while reaffirming and clarifying the doctrines expressed in the earlier Apostles Creed, was to draw a bright line between Catholic/Orthodox beliefs and Arian beliefs.
The Arians held that the Son was very like God the Father – but not quite. The Son is a great God so to speak, but not equal to the greatest of all Gods, God the Father. The Son, who had created the world, had himself been created by the Father. The Son was the first and greatest of all creatures, but inferior to the Father and subordinate to him. By implication, then, Jesus, who was the human incarnation of the Son, was not the highest God.
The Council of Nicea having clarified that Jesus was both true God and true man, there remained the great question of the relationship between the divinity of Jesus and his humanity. Subsequent Councils dealt with that vexed question, ruling out the Monophysite solution (Jesus was one person with a single divine nature) and the Nestorian solution (Jesus is two persons, one human, the other divine), and settling finally on
the Catholic/Orthodox solution (Jesus has two natures, human and divine, yet is one person, a divine person).
The Church was only loosely organized in those days. The bishop of Rome (the pope) was generally acknowledged to be Church’s number one bishop, but he did not possess supreme administrative authority; he could not, for example, hire and fire bishops in Egypt and Greece and Syria. Hence [DIM=132t]
the Church was not held together by being answerable to a central administrative headquarters. It was held together above all by a doctrinal consensus.
And so it was important to find just the right formulations of doctrine. Every time a doctrinal disagreement arose, this disagreement threatened to destroy the unity of the Church. It became important to call the bishops together in yet one more ecumenical council that would re-state the Catholic/Orthodox doctrine.
The results were mixed.
On the one hand, orthodoxy became more and more precisely defined. On the other, not all parts of the Christian world obeyed the doctrinal dictates of the ecumenical councils. As a consequence, Christianity, ideally a unified thing, split into a number of large sections: the Catholic/Orthodox section, the Arian section, the Monophysite section, the Nestorian section.
Eventually (in the 11thcentury) the Catholic/Orthodox section split in two. Then the Catholic section split into Catholic and Protestant sections. And, finally, the Protestant section split into a thousand subsections.
But throughout these many centuries and these many splits and re-splits, there were no notable disagreements about moral issues. All Christians, with only a few insignificant exceptions, agreed on the importance of the Ten Commandments (even if they might not agree on how to number them), of the Beatitudes, of the two great commandments (love God, love your neighbor); and they agreed that the ideal Christian life was a life done in imitation of Christ.
And they all also agreed that the rules of morality were God-based and therefore unchangeable; they were not man-made and therefore amendable when we happened to think of something that seemed to us better.
I am not saying of course that all Christians lived according to their Christian moral beliefs. Far from it. But they did at least hold these beliefs, no matter how often they violated them.
Christian adulterers, for instance, did not deny that adultery is very sinful. Nor did crooked Christian politicians deny that bribery is wrong. No, with regard to adultery, bribery, etc., they made special exceptions for themselves.
Today, however, all this has changed, a change that took place beginning in the 20th century.
Today many Christians, including many Catholics, hold that certain ancient Christian sins – including for example fornication, adultery, abortion, homosexual sodomy, suicide, and euthanasia – are no longer sinful.
Do we, then, need a new creed, a moral creed that will draw bright lines between true Christian morality and the bogus Christian morality that has infected much of the Protestant world and is beginning to infect the Catholic world? I say, definitely YES.
And do we, therefore, need a new ecumenical council that will draw up this moral creed? No, for I fear the “soft-on-orthodoxy” bishops, especially German bishops, could perhaps dominate such a council.
So, we face a two-fold challenge:
- Rome would first need to be vigilant in appointing a whole new generation of bishops who are truly and fully Catholic in their views on faith and morals.
- And those bishops would also need the courage to directly confront our culture, including many of today’s self-described “Christians.”
Likely? Let us pray.
Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi... The way we pray is the way we believe and the way we live... How each of us tries to live up to this Christian ideal is the subject of the following reflection.
What has become of
‘the soldiers of Christ’?
Translated from
February 8, 2019
Since political correctness became the guideline for the world’s dominant thought, the Catholic Church no longer uses expressions inspired by the idea of war and combat. For instance, she no longer speaks of souls to ‘conquer’ and has abandoned the expression ‘soldiers of Christ’.
And yet, with Scriptures in hand,
it is difficult not to see that the life of faith is combat. St. Augustine, in his treatise De agone christiano, explains very well why, for the Christian, there can be no perfect peace in his life on earth.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church in speaking of the Sacrament of Confirmation, uses many beautiful expressions: It speaks of the growth and deepening of baptismal grace, of a firmer union with Christ and the Church, but
it no longer says that with Confirmation, one becomes a ‘soldier of Christ’, as St. Pius X’s Catechism says.
An interesting reflection on this comes from Fr. Louis Sentagne of the FSSPX in an editorial in
La tradizione cattolica, No. 108. I reproduce part of it here.
One must keep in mind a doctrinal and historical truth: We don’t yet belong to the Church Triumphant. We hope, with the supernatural theological virtue of hope, to belong one day, passing through the Church Penitent in purgatory. But for now, we belong to the Church Militant. And what does that mean? The Catechism of the Council of Trent tells us: “It is called militant because her members must always do combat against those terrible enemies which are the world, the flesh and the devil”.
If we look at history, when was the Church ever at peace?
- During the three centuries of Roman persecution at its inception? - After the persecutions, barely ten years after, began the worst of the heresies at the time – Arianism – which one can compare for its breadth and damage only with the Protestant heresy (not to mention the present).
- Was the Church at peace when pagan barbarians from the north invaded, and Muslims attempted to from the south?
- Or during the eternal attempts by secular powers to usurp her, whether their names were Frederick Barbarossa, Philip the Beautiful, Joseph II or Napoleon?
- During the 11th century, with the Great Schism, or the 16th with the Protestant schism, or the 18th with the French Revolution and all its European consequences?
No, the Church Militant is not meant to live in peace with the world. Does that mean that Christians are evil sowers of war? No. The Christian must be a peacemaker, but of peace with God, and therefore at war against ‘the world, the flesh and the devil”. What does the Sacrament of Confirmation mean that we receive? If we go back to the Catechism of St. Pius X, Question number 304 says:
Q. What is Confirmation?
A. Confirmation is the sacrament which makes us perfect Christians and soldiers of Jesus Christ, and imprints our character.
Therefore, we become ‘perfect ChristiThe role of a soldier is to fight for as long as there are enemies. And there will be enemies till the end of the world and the definitive triumph of Christ the King.
The kingdom of Christ is primarily spiritual. Therefore, our field of battle is principally to win souls to Christ. Especially our own – because yes, the first battle has to be for our own soul.
To be ‘perfect Christians and soldiers of Jesus Christ” is the exact opposite of making a pact with the world and its ways, of always living on the edge between mortal sin and a state of grace, or swinging between one and the other. “Be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect!” That is our ideal. But is it really? Yet it is the ideal at our Confirmation and FirstCommunion, or have we forgotten?
“Because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth” (Rev 3,16). If we do not want to hear this reproach that the angel had for the Church of Laodicea, we must commit ourselves to a true Christian life founded on the truths of the faith that we should increasingly live in depth, a faith lived in charity, a faith lived in prayer.
Such a living faith will ignite apostolic fire in us. If we understand and try to live the difference between Paradise and Hell, between living in a state of grace and in mortal sin, how could we be indifferent to the fate of so many souls who descend to hell like snowflakes, to use an expression from Our Lady at Fatima?
We have received the treasure of Tradition and we must consider it ours. But the Gospel says: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house” (Mt 5,14-15).
- Fr. Louis Sentagne, FSSPX
La tradizione cattolica, n. 3 (108), 2018
One who was certainly a magnificent example of a soldier of Christ - and so near to us in time - was the Venerable Fulton Sheen whose many charisms also included that of prophecy. On his blog at National Catholic Register, Joseph Pronechen examines statements made by the man who was the world's first and most spiritually successful 'televangelist' long before the term was coined, and how prophetic he was of the times we live in today...
Did Fulton Sheen prophesy about our times?
In a talk 72 years ago, he was as visionary as prophets of old.
by Joseph Pronechen
“We are at the end of Christendom.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen said during a talk in 1947. Making clear he didn’t mean Christianity or the Church, he said,
“Christendom is economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles. That is ending — we’ve seen it die. Look at the symptoms: the breakup of the family, divorce, abortion, immorality, general dishonesty.”
Prophetic then, he was already a visionary and forewarning in the Jan. 26, 1947 radio broadcast. “Why is it that so few realize the seriousness of our present crisis?” he asked 72 years ago. Then gave the answer:
"Partly because men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation, and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times… Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world. The great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on."
Certainly seems a snapshot of the usual suspects — the headlines and stories of today. To highlight his point, Sheen emphasized that
"The very day Sodom was destroyed, Scripture describes the sun as bright; Balthasar’s realm came to an end in darkness; people saw Noah preparing for the flood 120 years before it came, but men would not believe. In the midst of seeming prosperity, world-unity, the decree to the angels goes forth, but the masses go on their sordid routines. As our Lord said: For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, even till that day in which Noah entered into the ark, and they knew not till the flood came, and took them all away; so also shall the coming of the Son of man be.” (Matthew 24:38-39)
Sheen wondered if we’re even aware of the signs of the times because “basic dogmas of the modern world [were] dissolving before our very eyes.” Replacing them were the assumptions that
1) man has “no other function in life than to produce and acquire wealth,”
(2) the idea that man is naturally good and “has no need of a God to give Him rights, or a Redeemer to salvage him from guilt, because progress is automatic thanks to science-education and evolution, which will one day make man a kind of a god,” and
(3) the idea that "reason isn’t for discovering the meaning and goal of life, namely the salvation of the soul, but merely to devise new technical advances to make on this earth a city of man to displace the city of God.”
Isn’t technology, advancing at a dizzying rate, demanding the obedience of so much of the population?
[Just look at the virtual bondage of contemporary man to the Internet and its multitude of platforms providing instant gratification to human senses and human egoism!]
Sheen pointed out the signs of the times reveal we’re “definitely at the end of a non-religious era of civilization, which regarded religion as an addendum to life, a pious extra, a morale-builder for the individual but of no social relevance, an ambulance that took care of the wrecks of the social order until science reached a point where there would be no more wrecks; which called on God only as a defender of national ideals, or as a silent partner… but who had nothing to say about how the business should be run.”
Then the great bishop said something that at first seems shocking as we look at today: “The new era into which we are entering is what might be called the religious phase of human history.” But he quickly said this didn’t mean men will “turn to God.” Rather, they’ll turn from indifference to having a passion for “an absolute.”
The struggle will be “for the souls of men… The conflict of the future is between the absolute who is the God-man and the absolute which is the man god; the God Who became man and the man who makes himself God; brothers in Christ and comrades in anti-Christ.”
S goes on to describe the anti-Christ, which we’ll leave for
another time, other than now to say
“his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.” The saintly bishop brings in Communism, too, which has its place in what’s going on at the time and beyond, as we still see. Remember what Our Lady of Fatima said about Russia spreading its errors (Communism) if the world didn’t heed Our Lady’s directives.
The farsighted Sheen reminded,
“God will not allow unrighteousness to become eternal. Revolution, disintegration, chaos, must be reminders that our thinking has been wrong, our dreams have been unholy. Moral truth is vindicated by the ruin that follows when it has been repudiated. The chaos of our times is the strongest negative argument that could ever be advanced for Christianity… The disintegration following an abandonment of God thus becomes a triumph of meaning, a reaffirmation of purpose… Adversity is the expression of God’s condemnation of evil, the registering of Divine Judgement... Catastrophe reveals that evil is self-defeating; we cannot turn from God without hurting ourselves.”
Sheen gave another reason why a crisis must come — “to prevent a false identification of the Church and the world.” Our Lord wanted his followers to be different from those who were not: I have taken you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.
(John 15:19)
Even in those 1947 days Sheen saw that “Mediocrity and compromise characterize the lives of many Christians. Many read the same novels as modern pagans, educate their children in the same godless way, listen to the same commentators who have no other standard than judging today by yesterday, and tomorrow by today, allow pagan practices such as divorce and remarriage to creep into the family; there are not wanting, so-called Catholic labor leaders recommending Communists for Congress, or Catholic writers who accept presidencies in Communist front organizations to instill totalitarian ideas in movies. There is no longer the conflict and opposition which is supposed to characterize us.
We are influencing the world less than the world influences us. There is no apartness.”
He quoted St. Paul on this very idea, telling the Corinthians: “what has innocence to do with lawlessness? What is there in common between light and darkness? What harmony between Christ and Belial?”
Sheen perfectly mirrored 2018-19 headlines when it comes to people who stand up for the faith, for pro-life, for marriage. “Evil must come to reject us, to despise us, to hate us, to persecute us, and then shall we define our loyalties, affirm our fidelities and state on whose side we stand. How shall the strong and weak trees be manifested unless the wind blows? Our quantity indeed will decrease, but our quality will increase. Then shall be verified the words of Our Master: whoever does not gather with me, scatters.”
(Matthew 12:30)
Already in 1947 Sheen saw “the coming of the Day of the Beast, when there will be no buying or selling unless men have been signed with the sign of the Beast who would devour the child of the Mother of Mothers.”
The good bishop noted — remember this was 1947 — “With the family disintegrating with one divorce for every two marriages in 35 major cities in the United States, with five divorces for every six marriages in Los Angeles — there is no denying that something has snapped… Anyone who has had anything to do with God is hated today, whether his vocation was to announce His Divine Son, Jesus Christ, as did the Jew, or to follow Him as the Christian.”
What would Sheen tell us today as we’ve deteriorated far beyond what he already saw, as he added:
"Every now and then in history the devil is given a long rope, for we must never forget that Our Lord said to Judas and his band: This is your hour. God has His day, but evil has its hour when the shepherd shall be struck and the sheep dispersed.”
Yet Sheen is not fearful for the Church but for the world in speaking of the “emergence of the anti-Christ against Christ.”
“We tremble not that God may be dethroned, but that barbarism may reign; it is not Transubstantiation that may perish, but the home; not the sacraments that may fade away, but the moral law. The Church can have no different words for the weeping woman than those of Christ on the way to Calvary: Weep not over me; but weep for yourselves and for your children.” (Luke 23:28)
Over the centuries the Church has had its Good Fridays, he reminds us, but there’s always Easter Sundays “because Jesus promised the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And "Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.’
(Matthew 28:20)".
As bleak as things may be, never has “there been such a strong argument for the need of Christianity, for men are now discovering that their misery and their woes, their wars and their revolutions increase in direct ratio and proportion to the neglect of Christianity. Evil is self-defeating; good alone is self-preserving.”
Like prophets of old, Sheen stood firm in hope, giving practical recommendations as true today as in 1947.
First, Christians “must realize that a moment of crisis is not a time of despair, but of opportunity. The more we can anticipate the doom, the more we can avoid it. Once we recognize we are under Divine Wrath, we become eligible for Divine Mercy. It was because of famine the prodigal said: ‘I will arise, and will go to my father.’ The very disciplines of God create hope. The thief on the right came to God by a crucifixion. The Christian finds a basis for optimism in the most thorough-going pessimism, for his Easter is within three days of Good Friday.”
Sheen offered this great, hope-filled encouragement too: “One of the surprises of heaven will be to see how many saints were made in the midst of chaos, and war and revolution.” He points out the great multitude standing before the throne of God and identified as “These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
(Revelation 7:14)
There’s more to spur us on, firm in hope. Sheen strongly reminds that after “Our Divine Lord had pictured the catastrophes that would fall upon a morally disordered civilization…he did not say ‘Fear,’ but when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.”
(Luke 21:28)
“The world is serving your souls with an awful summons — the summons to heroic efforts at spiritualization. Catholics ought to stir up their faith, hang a crucifix in their homes to remind them that we too have to carry a cross, gather the family together every night to recite the Rosary that through corporate prayer there might be intercession for the world; go to daily Mass that the spirit of love and sacrifice might be sprinkled in our business, our social life and our duties. More heroic souls might undertake the Holy Hour daily, particularly in parishes conscious of the needs of prayers of reparation as well as petition, conducting such devotions in their churches... The forces of evil are united; the forces of good are divided. We may not be able to meet in the same pew — would to God we did — but we can meet on our knees...
Those who have the faith had better keep in the state of grace and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray. The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about...
There is only one path out of the chaotic conditions, the concerned bishop revealed. “The only way out of this crisis is spiritual, because the trouble is not in the way we keep our books, but in the way we keep our souls. The time is nearer than you think.”
He advised us to turn to St. Michael in prayer. We once did with the St. Michael prayer after every single Mass until the 1960s. Today, some dioceses are restoring the practice. Would they all did.
And we are to turn especially to Our Lady: “As Thou didst form the Word made flesh in Thy womb, form Him in our hearts. Be in our midst as tongues of fire descend upon our cold hearts and if this be night, then come, O Lady of the Blue of Heaven, show us once again the Light of the World in the heart of a day.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/02/2019 00:10]