Saturday, June 2, 2012

0 for 2

"papal infallibility ex cathedra has only been invoked twice, and both times it erred."

     "As one wit has put the matter", according to Paul R. Hinlicky, in "Afterward:  Staying Lutheran in the changing church(es):  why we all need Lutheran theology," in Mickey L. Mattox and A. G. Roeber, Changing churches:  an Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran theological conversation (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), 310 (281-314).
     The paragraph that follows draws the whole argumentpredicated upon a rejection of [1] "Lutheranism as church for the sake of [2] Lutheranism as theology" and the development of doctrinetogether:  neither Orthodoxy nor Roman Catholicism takes "sin seriously enough", Orthodoxy, by claiming that "death and the devil's tyranny, rather than human sinfulness and God's judgment against it, . . . form the question to which the gospel is an answer" (298) and thus "fall[ing] captive repeatedly to ethnocentric nationalisms, even racism"; and Roman Catholicism (which, unlike Orthodoxy, does inherit "from Augustine an arguably more profound sense of the universal web of sinful abuse of God"), by "invok[ing] that arbitrary miracle of Mary's immaculate conception" and thus exempting the Catholic Church from its effects in the paradigmatic case of Mary at the very least (310-311).

Monday, May 28, 2012

"'do your graces think it's an easy job to blow up a dog?'"

"I know very well what the temptations of the devil are, and one of the greatest is to give a man the idea that he can compose and publish a book and thereby win as much fame as fortune, as much fortune as fame. . . ."

     Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote II.Prologue (trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2003), 456).

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Roeber on Orthodoxy on same-sex unions

"At least in certain circles, Lutherans now seem to be speaking a language and preparing to 'bless' unions so foreign that the Orthodox increasingly find no way to respond. . . ."
"Orthodox anxieties about Lutheran innovations in the area of human sexuality . . . reflect the possibility that the two traditions will now be incapable of speaking to one another with even a limited vocabulary.  The disagreement about the nature of what it means to be human cannot be separated, finally, from disagreement about who God is, from arguments regarding what the church is, and finally, from how humans are to find their way, male and female, toward union with God."

     A. G. Roeber, "Untranslatable?  Orthodox-Catholic-Lutheran conversation stoppers," in Mickey L. Mattox and A. G. Roeber, Changing churches:  an Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran theological conversation (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), 195, 211.