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Thursday, March 8th, 2007
1:16 pm - Yet another Sola Scriptura post
I posted this on Orkut in response to some claims made by a gentleman named "Grant." His words are in red, mine are in the normal color for this blog.

jeremy... with all due respect, i cannot see how you can POSSIBLY justify to either yourself, or anyone else, the use of ANYTHING other that scripture to determine doctrine...

I justify it using the Scriptures themselves.

First, we have cases in the Bible where extra-biblical Tradition is confirmed: Christ's reference to the "seat of Moses" (a term that never occurs in the Old Testament), Paul's reference to Jannes and Jambres by name (even though they're never mentioned by name in the Old Testament), the reference in Jude to the Assumption of Moses (in a non-canonical book, but also passed down orally). Clearly, the biblical authors did not feel that only written Tradition was binding and relevant.

Second, we have evidence in Scripture that more was taught that is not contained in Scripture: "Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book" (John 20:30), "Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time." John admitted that he had more to write in his (very short) second and third epistles, but that he preferred to teach in person, saying "Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete." in 2 John, and "I had much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face." in 3 John.

Third, we have proof in Scripture that all of the Apostles' teachings were binding, not only those written in their letters. "So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter." (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

Fourth, the word of God isn't only written: it was also spoke, long before the New Testament was completed. "And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness." (Acts 4:31). "Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God." (Hebrews 13:7). These were not just the Apostles--these were the leaders of the Church, and the author of Hebrews makes an even greater demand: that we should conform our faith to theirs: "Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith." Here we see a binding Tradition in the imitation of the faith of our predecessors.

Fifth, we see that God has given us other gifts to help us to form correct doctrine: "And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes." (Ephesians 4:11-14).

Biblically, doctrine is to be formed not only by looking at Scripture, but by looking at our leaders and imitating their faith. It is to be formed by taking into account not only the words that the Apostles (or their delegates) wrote, but the words that they spoke, for they were not commissioned to write, but to preach. It is to be formed in light of what the evangelists, teachers, and pastors have taught throughout history, having been given to us to keep us from being blown about by every wind of doctrine.

Historically, I can't believe that Scripture alone should be used to form Christian doctrine, because the first century had much Christian doctrine, taught to the Church directly by the Apostles and their successors (like Timothy and Titus), but did not have all of Scripture. For us now to be under a rule of "Scripture alone" would be markedly inconsistent with the early Church, which could not have followed that rule.

As a matter of historical fact, it was not Scripture alone that preserved the Church from heresy. When Arius was teaching that Jesus was not God, but the highest and greatest of created beings, he used Scripture to defend his teachings. When Athanasius opposed him, he used Scripture to oppose him. But he also used the constant Tradition of the Church, the fact that the Church has always worshiped Jesus as God, most particularly in the liturgy given to it by the Apostles, to defend the Trinitarian belief. In the end, it was not Scripture alone that resolved this dispute, but Scripture and the Tradition of the Church as expressed in the first and second ecumenical councils that put it to rest. (It's notable, historically, that though this doctrinal dispute was resolved within the Catholic Church in the fourth century, it has arisen again in Protestantism, and has gone unresolved there: Unitarians, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses all subscribe to Arianism and cannot be convinced by Scripture Alone to recant.)

Logically, I cannot hold that Scripture alone can be used to determine doctrine, because there is no divine "table of contents" to tell me what Scripture is. Even were there such a table of contents, I could know whether to believe it because I could not know that the table of contents itself was Scripture upon which I could base my doctrine that the books it listed were also Scripture.

I cannot know whether a book is Scripture without referring to the Tradition of the Church, for it is by that Tradition, given to the Church by the Apostles, that books were determined either to be Scripture or not to be Scripture. Those that were inconsistent with the Tradition of the Church were most emphatically not Scripture, because the Apostles could not teach one thing orally and contradict themselves in written form. It is, in fact, a Tradition of the Church, not derived from Scripture, that gives us the 27 books of the New Testament.

In short, I cannot hold that Scripture alone is to be used in the formation of Christian doctrine because it's biblically contradictory, historically inconsistent, and logically incoherent.

the bible is God's perfect word...

The Bible is perfect in that it contains no errors, we can agree about that. But it is not perfect as in "complete." God's perfect (complete) expression of truth to the human race is not the Bible, but Jesus Christ Himself. "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power." (Hebrews 1:1-3). The final and complete revelation of God to man is not the Bible, but the man Jesus Christ. He is the Word of God. All else (whether transmitted in written form or spoken form) is merely the words of God.

SURELY he would have anticipated these problems,

He did anticipate these problems. He knew there would be winds of doctrine. He knew that lawless men would misinterpret the Scripture, especially Paul's letters, which are sometimes hard to understand (2 Peter 3). That's why He gave us the Church, the pillar and foundation of the truth, and gave us the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the teachers and pastors to prevent these things from happening. That's why Christ promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church.

and put any traditions he wanted into his living word?

They would still be subject to the same cunning men, twisting and distorting the Scriptures in their craftiness and deceitful wiles.

that is how i see it... anything over and above scripture is irrelivant, because if God wanted me to know about/believe/do it, he would have put it there

You have no indication in Scripture that that's the case. On the contrary, Scripture indicates that what God wants you to know, he entrusted to the Church by the preaching of the Apostles, and the Apostles' successors entrusted it to faithful men who could continue to teach it. "You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also." We have no indication that Christian doctrine is preserved only through Scripture, and every indication that it is preserved through the faithfulness of the leaders of the Church (remember Hebrews 13:7, quoted earlier?).

current mood: rational

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Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
4:24 pm - A couple questions for Sola Scriptura believers
A poster on the Catholic forums I frequent stated his belief in Sola Scriptura as follows:

Scripture, being the Word of God, is the highest authority and only infallible rule of faith in the possession of the church today.


If this is perhaps a summary of your belief in Sola Scriptura, I'm curious what answers you would provide to these two questions:

1. I see men and women wielding authority every day, but I've never seen a book or a scroll wield any authority. If I were arrested by a police officer, it would not be the law by which I was arrest that was wielding the authority; it would be the police officer. If I were convicted of a crime, it would not be the law by which I were convicted that was wielding the authority, but the court in which I was tried. In my experience, written words do not seem to possess any authority, only the enforcers and interpreters thereof. So how can a book, even a God-breathed infallible one, have actual authority?

2. Every natural language is grammatically ambiguous. On top of that, words in natural languages often have wildly varying meanings; the ambiguity arising from these various meanings cannot, in many circumstances, be discerned from the textual context. Even further, the meanings of words can be modified by the connotation or intention of the author, in degree, in forcefulness, and along a number of other axes. Given all this ambiguity in the meaning of any sufficiently long natural language work, what practical use has an infallible book when there are no infallible interpreters of that book?

Thanks,
Jeremy

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Saturday, January 6th, 2007
11:46 pm - Another (boring) Sola Scriptura post
I recently posted this on the Catholic forum I frequent:


After James 2, Ephesians 4 is probably the chapter in the Bible most neglected by Protestants. Here's a portion of it:

"And his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed back and forth and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles."

So yes, the Bible does protect us against deception; but probably not in the way you think. It does so by pointing us toward the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and the teachers who will guard us against cunning men and their deceptions.

Throughout history, false teachers have always quoted Scripture to support their false doctrines. Peter dealt with such false teachers in His second letter. He describes such teachers for the better portion of the second chapter, starting with "But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction." In the last chapter of his letter, Peter explains how they bring destruction upon themselves: "And count the forbearance of our Lord as salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, beware lest you be carried away with the error of lawless men and lose your own stability."

We are protected by God against the deception of men, but it's not via Sola Scripture, for even the devil can quote Scripture. We are protected by God through the Church, the pillar and foundation of the truth; through the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the teachers, and the pastors He has given us.

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Monday, October 16th, 2006
5:36 am - I am Catholic (and have been since April)
I just wanted to clarify, for those who read this blog (as in, all zero of you :)) that I am fully and completely Catholic now. Roman Catholic, to name a rite.

And I'm loving it.

For those who might have known me prior to my conversion and are curious about it, please email me or comment here asking what caused it, I love to explain it :)

For those who want to try to convert me back, by all means, try; as long as we can have honest discussion about it, I'll be happy to discuss it with you. Perhaps you, too will see the unfathomable strength of the Catholic apologetic :)

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Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
5:29 am - Tradition
In our conversation on the phone, you said that you don't accept Tradition. I want to point out to you what that really means.

It means that when you read Scripture, you rely on your own understanding, your own interpretation to understand what it means. Sure, you and I have the same words (or mostly the same words, barring the differences between the NKJV and the RSV/ESV/NASB) in our Bibles to look at, but we come to different interpretations of those words. We understand those words in different ways.

One thing that I think we can agree on is that interpreting Scripture is not easy. You've spent almost thirty years trying to do it correctly. I've spent a decade trying to understand God's written word correctly. I don't think either of us is ready to close the book and say, "I'm done, I've got it all right. When's the test?" :)

We can also know from Scripture itself that the Bible is sometimes hard to understand. Peter writes in 2 Peter 3, "So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures." You and I share a similar goal: we don't want to twist the Scriptures, especially to our own destruction. We don't want to be called "ignorant" or "unstable." In fact, Peter continues, "You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, beware lest you be carried away with the error of lawless men and lose your own stability." Lawless men distort and twist the Scriptures, and you and I need to be sure that we do not fall victim to that same error.

Let's look at the methods you and I use to interpret Scripture. Let's consider how you and I get from the set of words on the paper to our sometimes-similar, sometimes-very-different interpretations of those words.

When you derive an interpretation from the words of the Bible, you apply your own background, your own understanding, and your own knowledge of Scripture to figure out what a passage means. Sometimes a passage might be hard to understand, but you work through it the best you can to try to understand properly what it really means. You might consult some internet websites, or you might catch a timely sermon on the radio, or you might hearken back to one of your Harding University classes, or perhaps even look something up in a commentary if the passage is particularly hard to understand.

When I derive my interpretation from the words of the Bible, I apply my own background, my own understanding, and my own knowledge of Scripture to figure out what that passage means. Sometimes a passage might be hard to understand, but I'll work through it the best I can to try to understand properly what it really means. I might consult some Catholic internet websites, or look up an answer in the Catechism or some other resource approved by the Catholic Church.

What's the real difference here? When you try to understand Scripture, you consult whatever resources your church tradition offers you. When I try to understand Scripture, I consult the resources that my Church Tradition offers me. The big difference is whose tradition is right. Here's what I know: the Tradition that I use when I interpret Scripture is the same as the Tradition of the first century Church, the second-century Church, the third-century Church, the fourth century Church, and so on, until the 15th or 18th century (depending on what the issue that divides us is) when your tradition starts.

Neither of us rejects "tradition." We both have our own traditions. We use our traditions in different ways, though. I don't just approach Scripture with my own brain; I approach Scripture with the teachings of the Catholic Catholic throughout the centuries, with the brains of all the saints and doctors of the Church showing me how I should understand the Bible. In the end, my interpretation of Scripture is submitted to the Church, and (Lord willing) I won't hold an interpretation of Scripture that contradicts what the Church teaches.

You, on the other hand, though you use your sources of tradition; your commentaries or radio show hosts or teachers at Harding, don't submit yourself to their authority. In the end, your interpretation of Scripture depends on one person alone: you. Your interpretation is enlightened by the sources of tradition that you use, but it is not decided by those sources of tradition. In the end, your final authority on the meaning of Scripture is you. You may like to say, "My final authority is Scripture itself," but such a statement would be preposterous: the gospels don't tell us what Jesus *meant* by "This is my body," they only tell us what He *said*. When it comes down to it, you have to make a decision as to what Scripture *means*, and your final authority in that matter isn't Chuck Colson or Jimmy Allen or the elders of your church; your final authority is yourself.

This is where you and I fundamentally differ now: I submit myself to another, higher authority, and you do not. I submit myself and my understanding of Scripture to the teachings of the Church throughout history, and you do not. But what I'm doing is very biblical! To submit myself to the teachings of the Church is an eminently biblical thing to do! Consider what the Bible says:

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight...Be not wise in your own eyes." (Proverbs 3)

"If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the Church; and if he refuses to listen even to the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and tax collector." (Matthew 18)

"Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God; consider the outcome of their life, and imitate their faith...Obey your leaders and submit to them; for they are keeping watch over your souls, as men who will have to give account. Let them do this joyfully, and not sadly, for that would be of no advantage to you." (Hebrews 13)

So how can you complain that I accept Tradition? I do what the Bible tells me to do: I remember my leaders, I obey them, and I submit to them, because they are keeping watch over my soul. You can tell me that I'm wrong, and that the Catholic Church is wrong, and that our interpretation of Scripture is incorrect, but upon what basis can you say that? Your tradition? Your own, personal interpretation of Scripture? Some of the beliefs and the interpretations of Scripture that you teach and preach were not beliefs or interpretations held by Christians until the 15th or 18th centuries. Fundamentally, you're asking me to reject the beliefs and biblical interpretations held by the leaders of the Church for 1500 years, to rebel against those leaders and the leaders of the Church today, and follow your beliefs and your biblical interpretations. Can you understand why that's not an appealing idea to me? Even apart from the fundamental problems with your tradition, can you see why I don't think it's reasonable to pick your beliefs and your interpretations of Scripture over the beliefs and interpretations of Scripture held consistently by all Christians and the God-appointed leadership of the Church for a millennium and a half?

You read the Bible and interpret it one way. St. Augustine, or St. Justin Martyr, or St. Ignatius, or any number of other early Christians many of whom died for their faith interpret it another way. How can you be so sure that all these Christians were wrong, and that you're right? These men and many others lived exemplary Christian lives: how could they be so wrong on so many points on which you disagree with them?

And so that's the fundamental issue that you and I have. Everything else is secondary to that: the tradition that you use, you use as a guide but not an authority; the Tradition that I use, I use as a guide and as an authority. Consider, then, what you're asking me when we argue about doctrine. You're asking me to give up using the Church as an authority, and instead either use you as an authority, or use myself as an authority. How is that biblical? Where do we see this "Me and the Bible" mentality in Scripture? Think about whether you really want your argument to be, "My interpretation of the Bible is correct and the Catholic Church's isn't; you should refuse to submit to your leaders and instead choose me as a leader and as your pillar and foundation of truth," because that is the core of what you're saying. Please don't take that personally; it's not a personal accusation. Fundamentally, that's what every Protestant church or preacher is saying when he argues against what the Catholic Church (or any other church) teaches.

I understand if you don't agree with the beliefs that I hold based on the teaching authority of the Church; I understand if you don't interpret the Bible the same way as I do, since you don't accept Church Tradition either as a guide or as an authority. But it may be most prudent to let your disagreement be simply that: a disagreement, rather than an attempt to prove the superiority of your belief or your interpretation over mine; since, when it comes down to it, you don't have any solid basis upon which to say that your beliefs and your interpretations of Scripture are more correct than the Catholic Church's.

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Friday, May 12th, 2006
3:21 am - Discussion about the Real Presence (from a slightly patristic viewpoint)
Here's one email in a conversation I'm having with a friend of mine about the Eucharist. Pleasantries are removed just for brevity: it's a long email already.

So, the earliest Christians clearly believed the bread and the wine were conduits of God’s grace.


Let me first mention, right here, that this means that the earliest Christians viewed the Eucharist as a sacrament: an external sign which bestowed the grace that it represents. Even *this* fact is denied by Protestants today: that's why you see, in just about any evangelical statement of faith, a phrase like, "We believe that Christ gave the Church two *ordinances*, baptism and the Lord's Supper." They won't call either a sacrament because they don't believe that either actually serves as a conduit of God's grace.

Ultimately, Protestants make the same mistake as the gnostics: they can't believe that God uses matter to confer His grace. This is the root from which their disbelief in the sacraments and their disbelief in the authority of the Church springs.

That’s not to say they believed in transubstantiation of the medieval Roman Catholic formulation.


It also must be noted that the doctrine we're talking about now is the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist: not the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The two are different: transubstantiation is a doctrine of what exactly happens when the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. The substance of the bread is replaced with the substance of Christ while the accidents remain the same. The doctrine of the Real Presence, on the other hand, is the teaching that Christ is *actually*, and not just *symbolically* present in what appears to be bread and wine. Luther held to the Real Presence (though in a way the Catholic Church considers incorrect: he believed that both Christ and the Bread and Wine were present), but Calvin believed only in the symbolic presence.

The earliest Christians very clearly held to the Real Presence. Protestants, especially evangelicals, do not; they all hold to the symbolic presence taught by Calvin and Zwingli.

It's worth noting that just because the earliest Christians didn't know the word "transubstantiation" doesn't mean they didn't believe it. Justin Martyr and other Church Fathers never heard the word "trinity" but they certainly held to the belief. The word "homoousias," "one in substance with" never occurs in the Bible or in Justin Martyr's works, but no one denies that Justin Martyr, as an orthodox Christian, believed that Jesus was one in substance with the Father. Likewise, simply because Justin Martyr didn't know the word "transubstantiation" doesn't mean that he didn't believe it.

They almost surely didn’t.


They very clearly believed in the Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist, not just the symbolic presence. This much is so amazingly biblical that it's hard to imagine that even evangelicals deny it, but if we go to the Church Fathers, we have immensely strong evidence that they held to the Real Presence.

I've referred you to this page before, but I have a feeling you may not have read it, or else it's hard to believe that you could still hold that the Fathers didn't believe in the Real Presence (or even Transubstantiation): http://scripturecatholic.com/the_eucharist.html#tradition-I . Please read the whole page, but if you don't have time, let me paste a few choice quotes.

"They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again." Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to Smyrnaeans, 7,1 (c. A.D. 110).

"[T]he bread over which thanks have been given is the body of their Lord, and the cup His blood..." Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV:18,4 (c. A.D. 200).

"For the blood of the grape--that is, the Word--desired to be mixed with water, as His blood is mingled with salvation. And the blood of the Lord is twofold. For there is the blood of His flesh, by which we are redeemed from corruption; and the spiritual, that by which we are anointed. And to drink the blood of Jesus, is to become partaker of the Lord's immortality; the Spirit being the energetic principle of the Word, as blood is of flesh. Accordingly, as wine is blended with water, so is the Spirit with man. And the one, the mixture of wine and water, nourishes to faith; while the other, the Spirit, conducts to immortality. And the mixture of both--of the water and of the Word--is called Eucharist, renowned and glorious grace; and they who by faith partake of it are sanctified both in body and soul." Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor, 2 (ante A.D. 202).

"Having learn these things, and been fully assured that the seeming bread is not bread, though sensible to taste, but the Body of Christ; and that the seeming wine is not wine, though the taste will have it so, but the Blood of Christ; and that of this David sung of old, saying, And bread strengtheneth man's heart, to make his face to shine with oil, 'strengthen thou thine heart,' by partaking thereof as spiritual, and "make the face of thy soul to shine."" Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, XXII:8 (c. A.D. 350).

"Let us then in everything believe God, and gainsay Him in nothing, though what is said seem to be contrary to our thoughts and senses, but let His word be of higher authority than both reasonings and sight. Thus let us do in the mysteries also, not looking at the things set before us, but keeping in mind His sayings. For His word cannot deceive, but our senses are easily beguiled. That hath never failed, but this in most things goeth wrong. Since then the word saith, 'This is my body,' let us both be persuaded and believe, and look at it with the eyes of the mind. For Christ hath given nothing sensible, but though in things sensible yet all to be perceived by the mind. So also in baptism, the gift is bestowed by a sensible thing, that is, by water; but that which is done is perceived by the mind, the birth, I mean, and the renewal. For if thou hadst been incorporeal, He would have delivered thee the incorporeal gifts bare; but because the soul hath been locked up in a body, He delivers thee the things that the mind perceives, in things sensible. How many now say, I would wish to see His form, the mark, His clothes, His shoes. Lo! Thou seest Him, Thou touchest Him, thou eatest Him. And thou indeed desirest to see His clothes, but He giveth Himself to thee not to see only, but also to touch and eat and receive within thee." John Chrysostom, Gospel of Matthew, Homily 82 (A.D. 370).

There's more! But I'll save the space and trust that you'll read that whole link, from the location it starts at until the end. Please do! You'll see that the earliest Christians *clearly* believed in the Real Presence.

But they believed it had tangible benefit, manifest by the fact that they delivered the bread and wine to those who were absent. That makes no sense unless you believe that in some way the communion elements are instruments of the manifest grace of God.


Absolutely! But recall that this is something Protestants don't do today.

Note also that Protestants don't consecrate the bread and wine according to the clear directions of the Fathers. Protestants have turned the central component of the Christian religion since the beginning into a 3-minute addition to a service that does nothing, means little, and feels awkward for many involved. The true way to celebrate the Eucharist, the "source and summit" of Christian life, is with the whole Catholic Church, in the unity of the faith, in communion with the successors of the apostles and in particular Peter, the rock upon which the Church was founded. That's how it was meant to be done. Not in little plastic cups of stale grape juice with a small piece of styrofoam sandwiched between the aluminum and plastic lids.

Second century Christians believed that Jesus meant it when He said "this is my body" and "this is my blood." But so do I. Yes, I agree. I believe the bread and the wine are the body and blood of the incarnate Christ.


Do you really? Would you pray to them? Would you bow down before them as you'd bow before Christ? If not, then you can't truly believe that they are the Body of Christ, or else you can't truly believe that Christ is God, like the woman who annointed his feet with perfume did.

Do you partake of the Eucharist with sin on your heart? Do you examine yourself and confess your sins if you find yourself unworthy of receiving the holy Body and Blood of our Lord? These are things that you ought to do if you truly believe, with the rest of the Catholic Church, that Christ is Really Present in the Eucharist.

But the true issue is what it means when we say the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is His blood.


Wait, just before you said "I believe the bread and wine are the body and blood of the incarnate Christ" and here you say, "What [does it mean] when we say the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is His blood?" Which one is it? Either it *really* is, or it *really* isn't the Body and Blood of Christ. Either it *really* is or it only *symbolically* is the Body and Blood of Christ. Which do you believe?

I know what I believe: "For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." (John 6:55)

No one (including Justin) in the second century church ever tried to define exactly what it meant. The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation didn't develop for centuries after the second century. Believers in the second century were taught (as Justin says) that the bread and wine are (or represent) the body and blood of Christ.


No, no no! They are taught, always and everywhere, that the bread and wine *are* the body and blood of Christ. They *never* taught that it *represents* the Body and Blood of Christ. Let's not invent history here: if you want to claim that the Fathers taught the earliest Christians that the bread and wine are merely representative, show me a quote :)

But exactly what does that mean? In what sense? Metaphorically? Symbolically? Literally? Jesus frequently talked in metaphorical terms, e.g., "I am the light of the world." But no one's ever believed that Jesus is (literally) the sun in the sky.


But the Jews very clearly understood him to be speaking literally when He said, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you." And yet Jesus never corrected them, even when they stopped following Him because they couldn't accept His teaching.

But there's not a lot of need to go into John 6 here, I've already posted about it on my blog. Rest assured, every Protestant objection is taken care of. It is here where the Catholic interpretation of Scripture stands so very obviously above the Protestant distortion of the Scriptures.

The second century Christians believed that in some sense the communion elements were conduits of God's grace. But that's all they say for sure.


Most definitely not! If that's all you think they say, I'd have to doubt whether you've actually read the text. If you've read the texts, then by all means, offer me a better interpretation of what they very clearly say: the bread and wine *become* and then *are* the Body and Blood of Christ.

You can embrace the teachings of men like Justin Martyr without believing in transubstantiation. Perhaps Justin believed that, but there's no evidence he did or didn't.


"For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these...we have been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of his word...is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh" seems to be pretty darn good evidence that Justin believed in the Real Presence. If you want to claim that it isn't, show me a better interpretation!

He believed the elements are the body and blood of Christ.


Ah, but note that he said "flesh and blood," not "body and blood." In each account of the Lord's Supper, Jesus says of the bread, "This is my body." He uses the Greek word "soma" there. In John 6, Jesus says, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man..." He uses the Greek word "sarx" here. Note that Justin, when talking about the Eucharist, doesn't say "body and blood" but "flesh and blood," making reference Christ's discourse in John 6, implicitly affirming that He was talking about the Eucharist.

And again, there can be no argument made that Christ was speaking figuratively in John 6. Every argument fails.

In some sense he believed communion is no ordinary meal. But he also believed that Jesus is the light of the world.


Obviously he believed the latter in a symbolic sense. But his words indicate that he received the apostolic teaching of the Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist in a literal sense. His tying together of John 6 and the Eucharist reinforce that point.

It is interesting to note that until the 9th century both bread and wine were contributed by church members,


They still are, in many Churches.

and the faithful were given wine to drink as well as bread to eat.


And again, they still are, in many churches. The restriction that the laity may only partake of the Body and Blood of Christ under the form of bread is primarily a Council of Trent thing, to prove to naysayers that even if a Christian receives the Eucharist under only one form, he still receives the fullness of the sacrament, the Body and the Blood of Christ. This is based on 1 Corinthians 11:27, which says, "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread *OR* drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body *AND* blood of the Lord." To eat *either* unworthily profanes *both* the Body and Blood. Clearly, to receive either in a worthy manner is to receive both the Body and Blood. This has been a Church doctrine since the beginning, as is evinced by the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches, who give the Eucharist under the form of wine only to infants following their baptism and chrismation.

In either case, both of your points here are irrelevant to the actual issue :)

Not all Catholics celebrate the Eucharist today in the same way Justin and other second century believers did. They drank the wine; some modern Catholics don't get to. The point is, they can't say honestly "we do it just like Justin did."


No, but they can say honestly, "we believe in it like Justin did." Protestants can't say that.

Over the centuries they've revised the communion ceremony, and so have the Protestants.


We're not talking about ceremony here. We're talking about belief, about doctrine: does the bread and the wine BECOME the Body and Blood of Christ, or does it not? Protestants say no. Catholics and Orthodox say yes.

The true issue is authority - does the Roman pontiff or the Roman church have authority to define (and revise) Christian doctrine and practice?


That is the root of the issues between Protestants and Catholics, I agree, but that's not really what we're looking at here.

As shown by the controversy between Irenaeus and Victor (bishop of Rome in 190 A.D.), in the second century no one seemed to believe that the bishop of Rome had that kind of authority.


Again, an important point to consider! But not the point we're debating here: here we're discussing the Protestant denial of the long-standing Christian belief in the Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist.

Anyway, is this the same Irenaeus who said this?

"Since, however, it would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; [we do this, I say,] by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its pre- eminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere." Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3:3:2 (A.D. 180).

Irenaeus didn't question Victor's authority. He questioned Victor's reasons for acting. Origen commented on the issue as well, but neither did he question Victor's authority, he questioned whether Victor was being reasonable in excommunicating a group of people for celebrating Easter on a different day. Everyone took for granted the Pope's power to make such proclamations. If they didn't, why would they even have bothered to argue with him about it? If "no one seemed to believe that the bishop of Rome had that kind of authority" why did they even bother responding to what would appear to be the megalomaniacal commands of a bishop outside of his jurisdiction? If "no one seemed to believe that the bishop of Rome had that kind of authority" why didn't any tell him *that*, rather than say, "Hey, it's stupid of you to excommunicate people over when they celebrate Easter"?

To sum up, I agree with you. Yes, I do believe the bread and wine "are" (not that they become) the body and blood of the incarnate Jesus.


When I eat bread and wine, they aren't the Body and Blood of Christ. When I pour wine on my shrimp scampi, or when I eat bread with my brie cheese and grapes, I do not partake of the Body and Blood of Christ. "Common" bread and "common" wine are not the Body and Blood of Christ. Surely, this much is inarguable!

For it to be true to say, "This is the Body and Blood of Christ," common bread and common wine, which are not the Body and Blood of Christ, must undergo some sort of transformation, some sort of change. They must *BECOME* the Body and Blood of Christ. If you deny that the bread and wine at the Eucharist *become* the Body and Blood of Christ, then you are denying that they *are* the Body and Blood of Christ.

You may like to *think* of them as the Body and Blood of Christ. I know I did when I was a Protestant. You may *consider them to be* the Body and Blood of Christ. But these internal thoughts on your part do not justify you or anyone else in saying "These are the Body and Blood of Christ." For that statement to be true, a change, a conversion must take place by which the bread and wine disappear and the Body and Blood of Christ, the same Christ who was incarnated, take their place. You cannot truthfully say "These are the Body and Blood of Christ" if a transubstantiation has not occurred.

We simply disagree what it means. You assume that Justin means transubstantiation. But neither he nor anyone else in the second century ever articulates that belief.


All sorts of Fathers did. Show your superior interpretation if you wish to make this claim.

The question is open; reasonable men and women can honestly disagree


(I apologize ahead of time for being a bit...sensitive on this point.)

Reasonable men and women cannot "honestly disagree" on this issue. If Protestants are right, Catholics and Orthodox are worshipping bread and wine as if they were God, committing idolatry, and have hellfire to look forward to. If Catholics are right, Protestants, who do not "eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood" have no life in them.

Yes, these are slightly exaggerated consequences, but let's not pretend that the Eucharist isn't absolutely central to Christianity. You may as well say that Christians can "honestly disagree" on the nature of baptism. There is very little more important to Christianity than a proper, apostolic understanding of baptism and the eucharist, and most Protestants understand neither correctly.

"For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:27-28)

"Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." (1 Corinthians 10:17)

"I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." (John 17:20-21)

How can we fail to have unity in our understanding of the very sacraments by which we are to be united? How can you say that we can "honestly disagree" about issues so fundamental to the Christian faith? And if we are to compromise and "honestly disagree" rather than uphold the truth about Baptism and the Eucharist, then why not do the same thing about the Trinity? Universalism? *Abortion*?

I know that you don't feel that we can "honestly disagree" about abortion, but in the grand scheme of things, abortion is a far smaller issue than the Baptism or the Eucharist. It's so small an issue that the Bible doesn't even say anything explicitly about it. But the Bible says tons about Baptism and the Eucharist, and yet you feel that we can "honestly disagree" about those issues and not about abortion?

(unless you believe that the Roman pontiff has the sole authority as Vicar of Christ to make that decision, something that most of Christendom, including the Eastern Orthodox Church, has never believed).


The majority of Christianity through history is not Protestant or even Orthodox, but Catholic. Most of Christendom has long held that the bishop of Rome has jurisdictional primacy over all the Church. But again, that's another topic entirely.

When it comes down to it, though, you're taking papal authority yourself when you say, "reasonable men and women can honestly disagree" about the Eucharist. By what authority do you make such a statement? Who gave you the authority to say what constitutes a central Christian issue about which Christians can't disagree, and a peripheral issue about which they can agree? How can you say that Christians can "honestly disagree" about the Eucharist, but not that they can "honestly disagree" about abortion? The apostles, who did have the authority to make such claims, didn't write a word about abortion, but wrote tons about Baptism and the Eucharist. Were they wrong? Is it more important to understand that abortion is morally wrong than to understand that in a valid celebration of the Eucharist, Christ becomes really present in what was formerly bread and wine?

No one in the early Church "honestly disagreed" about this issue. There are no letters, no back-and-forth between one Church Father who held one understanding and another Church Father who held another understanding. The early Church was *unanimous* in its understanding of the Eucharist. No later Church Father corrected an earlier Church Father on this issue. None said, "Oh, he was just being so second-century. We in the fourth-century understand that Jesus was speaking symbolically." It was not until nearly a millennium after Christ died that there was even any debate whatsoever about this doctrine, that's how firmly engrained it was in the mind of the Church. It wasn't until the Protestant "reformation" that any significant body of Christians held a different view. Either you and most of Protestantism are wrong on this issue, or I and all of Catholicism and all of Orthodoxy and all Christians prior to Calvin are wrong on this issue. I don't often make arguments from numbers, but your belief entails that for 1500 years Christians made an error of the gravest sort, by worshipping bread and wine as if it were God Himself.

And to say that you and I can "honestly disagree" about this issue isn't even remotely charitable. If you're right, I and the 1 billion+ Catholics in this world are *worshipping* bread. Flour and water. We're calling it God and bowing down to it and giving it the greatest, highest worship (latria is the term we use) that we can. We're being idolators. To say that we can simply "honestly disagree" on this issue is to say that you don't care one whit about a billion people worshipping an idol, and you won't make any effort to preach the Truth to them.

We can't "honestly disagree" on this issue. You're just saying that because you want me to accept that you won't change your mind. Or because you've resigned yourself to the fact that not everyone who calls himself "Christian" will ever be unanimous on this issue. Or because you have no strong argument and just want this discussion to end. I can't "honestly disagree" with you on this issue. I can count the number of more essential doctrines on the fingers of one of my hands. You're denying the *central* practice and belief of the Church for 2,000 years, and you're asking me to "honestly disagree" with you about it, even call you "reasonable" for doing so; I'm sorry, I just plain can't do that.

(Don't confuse me for saying we can't talk about Christianity, or that I don't accept you as a Christian, or that I don't like you, or anything like that: that's not what I'm saying. What I *am* saying is that I will never relent in this argument because of the importance of this central doctrine to authentic, historic, orthodox Christianity.)

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Wednesday, May 10th, 2006
11:25 pm - Why did I become Catholic? (short answer)
This is from a thread on the Catholic Answers Forums, http://forums.catholic.com/ .

Can I ask you what led you to the Catholic Church? Before looking around online I thought I was the first person to consider converting (kidding, but you get the idea)


Oh, you'll find that there's a great many people who have converted to Catholicism! Several of them have excellent books. Check out Dave Armstrong, Scott Hahn, and Mark Shea for sure: these are all authors whose books I've read on my way into the Catholic Church. I've also heard great things about G. K. Chesterton, but I haven't read any of his books myself.

As far as what led me to the Catholic Church, divine grace being the root of it all, I could name any number of particular doctrines (such as the Real Presence, which I held in some form as a Protestant), but particular doctrines aren't the key reason I joined the Church.

When it came down to it, it was authority. I wanted more assurance of the Truth than I could muster faith in myself and my own interpretation Scripture. As a Protestant, the only guard between me and heresy (in particular, heretical interpretations of Scripture) was the few pounds of gray matter sitting on my shoulders. And while I'd like to have claimed (as many Protestants do) that the Holy Spirit led me into all the Truth (John 16:13), my own experience would have proved me wrong: I changed my interpretations, sometimes repeatedly, and found little consistency not only with the "Jeremy of yesterday" but with many other Christians whose faith I have no doubt is authentic.

I was tired of seeing myself as the only one who got it all right. Though often arrogant to a fault, it seemed to me that God must have given me (and all Christians) more than just our own brains to interpret the Bible correctly. I learned Greek in college, and felt that it helped me tremendously in understanding Scripture, but did every Christian really need to learn an ancient language in order to find the truth? And what did that mean for my understanding of the Old Testament, since I know no Hebrew?

Fortunately, at the peak of my frustration with an ongoing Calvinism/Arminianism debate with my dad, I met a Melkite priest who has (unreleased) apologetic material on the Catholic Church that he has written especially for Protestants. It was through Father Ignatius and his material that I discovered a passage of the Bible I'd never even noticed before: 1 Timothy 3:14-15:

Although I hope to come to you soon, I am writing you these instructions so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.


A week later it all made sense: my futile debates with my dad, my increasing distrust in the "infallibility" of my own interpretations of Scripture: I was taking on a role (the "pillar and foundation of the truth") that wasn't mine. It was the Church's.

From that point on, I knew I was looking for a new Church: the pillar and foundation of the Truth. When I found that the Catholic Church had the greatest claim to being that Church, I knew that I had to become a part of that Church, and so I did: dogma, doctrine, and all.

Hope that helps,
Jeremy

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Monday, May 1st, 2006
3:25 am - Response to a Protestant interpretation of John 6.
I recently, upon the recommendation of my dad, read your page on the Eucharist at http://www.godandscience.org/doctrine/eucharist.html .

First, let me say that I was very impressed by the way that you approached the issue. Too often, the debate between Catholics and Protestants sinks to a level where charity, if it is present at all, is at least undetectable. That wasn't the case in your page, and though I've concluded differently with regards to the Eucharist, I appreciated your forthright investigation into the Eucharist and your considerate way of discussing it.

Needless to say, as a Catholic (who recently converted from Protestantism), you and I do disagree on the issue of the Eucharist, as well as several other issues. Regardless, we are both Christian, and despite our disagreements, we ought both to love each other as the brothers in Christ that we are. In honor of that love, I felt that such an even-handed, honest look at the Eucharist deserved an even-handed, honest response, if only so that you may address what I think are some small inadequacies in your argument.

Let me first note that the doctrine of transubstantiation is technically a way of describing "how" the Eucharist becomes the Body and Blood of Christ. It's primarily a doctrine of the Western (Roman) Catholic Church; you won't find such a teaching in the Eastern Catholic Churches; they're happy to leave the question of "how" the Eucharistic bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ as a mystery. The more universal term used to discuss the Catholic doctrine you address in that article is the doctrine of the "Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist." Given the relative numbers of Roman Catholics and Eastern Rite Catholics in the United States, it's no surprise that there's a bit of confusion in terminology floating around :)

Early in the article, you ask the question, "How could Jesus, still present in His own body, say that bread and wine were His body and blood?" To that, I might answer with another question: "How could Jesus feed 5,000 with two fish and five loaves?" Or, "How could Jesus make the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers clean, the deaf hear, or the dead alive again?" The Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist is a miracle indeed, and the question of how, exactly, Christ could have been present in the Eucharistic host at the Last Supper makes about as much sense as asking how, exactly, he walked on water or rose from the dead. Some miracles don't have scientific or logical explanations. Augustine didn't have an answer to your question, but he made clear his belief on the issue: "Christ was carried in his own hands when, referring to his own body, he said, ‘This is my body’ [Matt. 26:26]. For he carried that body in his hands" (Explanations of the Psalms 33:1:10 [A.D. 405]).

Later in the article, you quote John 6:29, where Jesus says, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent," and then state, "You will notice that He did not mention anything about eating, but only about believing." There is much that could rightfully be called "the work of God" that is not mentioned in that verse. If the verse is by no means exhaustive in its description of "the work of God," can it really be argued that the fact that Christ didn't mention the Eucharist proves that it is unimportant? In 2 Timothy 2:25b we learn that it is God who grants that people "will repent and come to know the truth." Certainly that's a work of God, to grant repentance, is it not? Does Jesus' failure to mention it in John 6:29 really prove that the only possible work of God is our belief?

Much of your article on the Eucharist is spent making the point that Jesus, in verses 6:32 through 6:50, is speaking symbolically when He calls Himself the Bread of Life. I agree! The Catholic Church, to my knowledge, would agree with you on this point: Jesus is certainly speaking symbolically during the Bread of Life discourse in John 6. The question at hand, however, is not (as I told my dad) whether Jesus was speaking symbolically in John 6:35, but whether He was speaking symbolically in John 6:55 :)

It's important to note a certain nuance of the text in 6:32-50 that the article doesn't mention. It says, "The Jews started complaining again that Jesus claimed to be bread from heaven (John 6:42-43)." That is true, but look at the reason the Jews give for complaining: "Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, 'I have come down from heaven'?" The Jews' problem was that not that Jesus called Himself Bread; they understood Him to be speaking symbolically. Their problem was that He claimed to come from heaven! Their complaint is not a matter of symbolic versus literal interpretation of Jesus' statements, but a matter of His claim to have come from heaven.

One of the major issues I found with this article on the Eucharist is that, although it states (accurately!) that much of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist is based on John 6:53-56, it doesn't, anywhere else in the article, address those verses themselves. It provides an excellent description of the passover, and a good interpretation of Christ's message in John 6:32-50, but it stops short of addressing the actual verses that it admits are central to the Catholic argument. Even if you disagree with the argument I set forth here, I'm confident that the article would benefit from a proper handling of verses 6:53-56.

Let's look at the Jewish objection to Christ's message in John 6:52. Jesus had just said, "the bread which I will give for the life of the world is my flesh." The Jews disputed amongst themselves, saying, "How can this man give us His flesh to eat?" The Jews obviously interpreted Jesus literally: they understood Him to mean that He really intended, in the future, to give His flesh as bread, for eating.

Jesus often ran into the problem of His disciples interpreting literally a statement he intended to be interpreted symbolically. He ran into that very problem in Matthew 16. Let's look at the way He handles it there:

"When the disciples reached the other side, they had forgotten to bring any bread. Jesus said to them, 'Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.' And they discussed it among themselves, saying, 'We brought no bread.' But Jesus, aware of this, said, 'O men of little faith, why do you discuss among yourselves the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive? Do you not remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Or the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? How is it that you fail to perceive that I did not speak about bread? Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.' Then they understood that he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees." (Matthew 16:5-12)

When Jesus' disciples in Matthew 16 understood a symbolic statement of His too literally, He corrected them. When He finished correcting them, they understood Him correctly; they understood His symbolism. The common interpretation of John 6 by Protestants puts Jesus and His disciples in a similar situation: Jesus says, "The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh," and His disciples ask, "How can this man give us His flesh to eat?" They took Him so very literally, and many Protestants believe that He was speaking symbolically.

So what did Jesus do in John 6? Did He explain Himself? Did He say to the Jews, "Do you not yet perceive? I'm talking symbolically, as I have been previously in this sermon. How do you not understand that?"? No, Jesus doesn't. In fact, He reinforces His statement. "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you". But Jesus doesn't stop there. He strengthens His statement even further, continuing, "he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him."

Unfortunately, my RSV falls short in the translation of those last two verses. In fact, the Greek word underlying the English "eat" in John 6:54-55 is not the same as Jesus had used in the entire sermon. Prior to these verses, Jesus used the Greek word "phagein," which means, simply, to eat. It's the word a person would commonly use to mean exactly that: just plain old eating. But in verses 54 and 55, Jesus changes words: He switches to "trogein," which is a much more graphic word, meaning "to chew" or "to gnaw." It's the kind of word you'd use to describe mastication, the physical act of chewing food. It's a stronger, more literal word for eating than "phagein."

You see, when the Jews interpret Jesus' statement in 6:51 literally, Jesus doesn't explain to them that He was speaking symbolically. On the contrary, He reinforces his statement, and then goes the extra mile by using an even more literal word to emphasize how literally He wants to be taken. "He who chews my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him."

What's most interesting, I think, is the Jews' response to Jesus' statement. They don't say, "Oh, we finally understand that you mean to use symbolism here. We finally get it, that sounds reasonable, we can do that. We can symbolically eat your flesh and drink your blood." No, not at all! "Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, 'This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?' " Even worse, they stopped following Him! "After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer walked with him." These people interpreted Jesus' statement in John 6:51 literally, and He explained it, and they still interpreted His statements literally and even said, "This is a hard teaching." Certainly Jesus will explain to them so that they don't walk away! Certainly Jesus will give up the game now, and explain that He's speaking symbolically, and that there's nothing hard about symbolically eating His flesh and symbolically drinking his blood! But He doesn't. Jesus lets his disciples walk away from him. This is the only time in the gospels that disciples are reported to leave Jesus because of His doctrinal teachings, and yet Jesus lets them just walk away without ever explaining (if the Protestant interpretation is correct) that He was speaking symbolically.

Now that the Jews have left, Jesus turns to His apostles, the Twelve that He chose to be fishers of men, and He explains to them that He was speaking symbolically. Wait, that's not what He did! :) No, He says to them, "Will you also go away?" His teaching is there--it's obvious--and some of the Jews have left Him because of it. But now we see why Jesus chose the Twelve (or, at least, eleven of the Twelve): Peter stands up for them all and says, "Lord, to whom shall we go?" Note that Peter doesn't say, "Lord, we understand that you were speaking symbolically; of course this teaching isn't a problem for us." No, I think Peter and the rest of the apostles were confused. I think they had as much trouble figuring out what Jesus meant as the Jews. Except they know that Jesus has the "words of eternal life," and they're going to stick by Him, the Holy One of God, whether or not they understand everything He says. It wouldn't be until the Last Supper that the apostles would finally understand what Jesus meant, when He consecrated the bread and the wine and said, "This is my body" and "This is my blood."

The Protestant interpretation of John 6:53-56 leaves too much in the air. Why would the Jews object to Jesus' teaching if it was merely symbolic? Why wouldn't Jesus explain the symbolism if the Jews found their wrong, literal interpretation to be "hard"? Why did Jesus just let His disciples stop following Him because of such a simple misunderstanding? Why didn't Jesus at least explain the symbolism to His Twelve, like He did many of His other parables that were sometimes misunderstood? Why did Jesus only start talking about His flesh and His blood in John 6:51, when He hadn't spoke of His flesh at all prior to that?

As much as I argue this point with non-Catholic Christians, I can't prove your interpretation to be incorrect. If we are to consult the Bible and only the Bible in establishing doctrine, then neither you or nor I can prove the other's interpretation of John 6 to be wrong. But if we look further than the Bible; if we look into history to see what the earliest Christians thought, what the Church Fathers taught, and what the early Church practiced, we find that it was the unanimous belief of the early Church that the bread and the wine, by the unanimous Church practice of consecration during the Eucharist, became the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. This brings me to what I (unfortunately) must point out to be one of the lowest points of this article on the Eucharist: the quotation of St. Augustine.

Let me first note that I found the quotation to be rather confusing. It's not easy to understand. It takes some work to decipher what it means, but for all my effort, the best I can understand it to mean is that the Eucharist ought to be taken as spiritual nourishment. Of course, that's fully consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church! The Eucharist is meant to be spiritual nourishment: it's certainly not meant for physical nourishment! But let's look at some of Augustine's clearer passages and try to determine where he stood on the issue of the Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist. One passage was already included earlier, but here are a couple more:

"I promised you [new Christians], who have now been baptized, a sermon in which I would explain the sacrament of the Lord’s Table. . . . That bread which you see on the altar, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ. That chalice, or rather, what is in that chalice, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ" (Sermons 227 [A.D. 411]).

"What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ. This has been said very briefly, which may perhaps be sufficient for faith; yet faith does not desire instruction" (ibid., 272).

These passages can leave no doubt whatsoever: Augustine fully believed the consecrated host to be the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. This is why I describe the quotation of Augustine as the low point of this article: at all other points, we disagree in our interpretation of Scripture, but I feel that at this point, you've misrepresented Augustine to make him appear to support your viewpoint, when a full examination of his teachings and writings reveals the exact opposite. I have no doubt, however, that you've done this unawares, probably having picked up that quotation of Augustine from some website which misrepresented his teachings and beliefs to you.

I'll finish by addressing, in short, your issues with the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist under the topic heading, "Transubstantiation problems."

Your first problem is that we can't "eat" in a spiritual manner. You say, "Eating is not a spiritual act - only believing." But you've created a false dichotomy here, insisting that whatever we do with our physical bodies cannot be spiritual acts. But remember what Paul wrote to the Romans: "I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." What we do with our bodies can very much be spiritual: when Paul bows his knees before the Father in Ephesians 3:14, he does so as a spiritual act. In fact, he encourages us to do all our eating and drinking to the glory of God. Certainly to eat or to drink to the glory of God is a spiritual act! Eating and drinking the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is the epitome of spiritual worship with our bodies.

Your second problem I addressed earlier; you say, "if one were to interpret the entire discourse in terms of the Eucharist, Jesus would have been talking utter nonsense to the Jews." Of course, that's true! But the entire discourse isn't discussing the Eucharist; only the latter part is, as I mentioned before. But I would like to note here that if we interpret the Eucharistic portion of this sermon to be symbolic, Jesus "would have been talking utter nonsense to the Jews." The Jews already had a symbolic meaning for the phrase "to eat the flesh of" a person. We see this symbolic meaning in Psalm 27:2; Isaiah 9:30, 49:26; and Micah 3:1-3. If Jesus had meant John 6:53-56 in a symbolic way, He would have been saying, according to the Jewish idiom at the time, "Unless you attack me, unless you hurt me, unless you injure me you have no life in you." That's what it would mean for him to say, "Unless you eat my flesh you have no life in you." Such an interpretation makes no sense, and that's another reason we can be sure that Jesus was speaking literally when He said, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you."

Your third problem I wouldn't honestly expect from anyone but a Jehovah's Witness: "Third, the Bible prohibits the eating of blood...If the Eucharist really becomes the blood of Christ, then we are sinning by eating it!" This is, of course, why all Christians only eat their steaks well-done, why they refuse to give blood or to receive blood transfusions, and why we always salt our meat properly in order to remove all the blood before we cook it :) Obviously, the Apostles did not mean that we should do or abstain from doing any of these things, let alone abstain from drinking the blood of our Savior in the Eucharist.

I was saddened when I saw this: "A fourth problem is that the Catholic Catechism claims that Jesus is sacrificed at every Mass,13 while the Bible claims that Jesus' one sacrifice was sufficient." I was saddened because the very sections of the Catechism that you reference prove the falsehood behind the implicit claim that the Catholic Church teaches that Jesus' one sacrifice was insufficient! "The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are /one single sacrifice/" (CCC 1367). God makes Christ's sacrifice present for us like it is present to Him, from eternity: we see and participate in the sacrifice of Christ at Calvary, not in some new or different sacrifice. You can find this same idea in the Jewish understanding of the passover, whereby they not only commemorate, but participate in that night in Egypt when God's mercy shone forth so greatly. It disappointed me to see this common misunderstanding lent credence in such an otherwise reasonable article.

You say, near the end of the article, "Jesus is with each believer at all times, not just when we take communion. I find that very reassuring and trust that it is true." You're most definitely correct! The Catholic Church teaches this same doctrine as well: otherwise, why did Christ say, "I will be with you always, even to the end of the age"? But the Catholic Church teaches that Christ is present in a special, sacramental way in the Eucharist.

Even though we disagree, I do hope that we can appreciate our brotherhood in Christ Jesus, and at the very least disagree in a way that proves our love for each other as fellow Christians. I do hope that the points I've made here resound with you, whether you adopt the Catholic interpretation of John 6, or at least correct the few misunderstandings in your article.

Thanks for your time,
Jeremy

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Friday, January 13th, 2006
2:18 am - Sola Scriptura
The other foundation of protestant theology is the doctrine of "Sola Scriptura," that is, "Only the Bible." Here's how it's phrased in a few statements of faith I've gathered from some various protestant churches:

Salvation Army: "We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God; and that they only constitute the Divine rule of Christian faith and practice."

Evangelical Free Church of America: "We believe: The Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, to be the inspired Word of God, without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for the salvation of men and the Divine and final authority for Christian faith and life."

Evangelical Covenant Church: "The Covenant Church states its view of Scripture as follows: "the Holy Scripture, the Old and New Testament, is the Word of God and the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct."

Riverdale Baptist Church: "We....believe in...the divine inspiration and authority of the Holy Scripture, and the One it proclaims, in all its parts as the supreme and sufficient rule of faith and practice."

The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod: "I accept the Scriptures of the Old and the New Testament as the written Word of God and the only rule and norm of faith and of practice."

Grace Brethren North American Missions: "We of the National Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches, in harmony with our historic position, believing the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible to be our infallible rule of faith and practice"

Vineyard Columbus: "I believe in the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both the Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety, without error, in all that they affirm, and as the only infallible rule for my faith and practice."


If you got bored, I don't blame you -- it's all very similar. You can see these and some other statements of faith regarding the Scripture at http://xrl.us/ji53 . I purposefully put the excerpt from my church's statement of faith last, since that's the one I'll focus on.

Anyway, what these views all have in common, if I selected them properly, is the idea that the Bible is our ONLY rule for faith and practice. Of course I affirm that the Bible is divinely inspired, true, authoritative, and without error, as my Vineyard's statement of faith affirms. That hasn't changed. My love for the Scripture hasn't changed. But what I've realized is that I can no longer believe the rest of the Vineyard's statement of faith on Scripture: I cannot believe that it's "the ONLY infallible rule for my faith and practice."

Why can't I believe this? It's a long story, but here are the main arguments:

1. The Bible itself doesn't claim to be the only authority for my faith and practice. There is nowhere in the Bible where it says, "Scripture alone is our source for faith and practice." If we choose to believe this doctrine, then we must accept it on faith: not only that, but we must accept it on faith even though it's not in the Bible. In this way it contradicts itself! "All my doctrines must come from the Bible" must be ended with, "Except this one, which doesn't come from the Bible" in order to be consistent.

2. Even the Bible itself points to other authorities for Christian faith and practice:

2 Thessalonians 2:15: "So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter."

1 Corinthians 11:2: "Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you."

2 Timothy 2:2: "And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also."


The oral tradition of the Apostles (such as Paul) is considered authoritative in the Bible. Not only that, but we know that there are certainly a number of things in the Bible which are not laid out for Christians: how to worship on Sundays (or even whether to worship on Sundays!), for instance. Peter and Paul and the other Apostles most certainly would have shown their new converts how to worship God, wouldn't they? Why then is there no record of this in the Bible? And yet Paul insists that the Thessalonian Church "stand firm and hold to the traditions" that they received from him, even if he didn't write them in his letter.

So the Bible itself even points to another authoritative rule for faith and practice: the teachings of the Apostles. Not all of this was recorded in Scripture.

3. There is no divinely inspired Table of Contents for the Bible. Again, I absolutely believe that Scripture is God-breathed, but without the Church to tell me, I cannot know what "Scripture" is! For all I know, only the Old Testament could be divinely inspired, and all the New Testament books would be the creation of man. There's nowhere in the Bible to tell me which books are in the Bible. Even if I claim that Scripture is my "only rule for faith and practice," I must depend on some source other than Scripture to tell me what Scripture is. Again, the doctrine contradicts itself: "Scripture is my only source for faith and practice, except I rely on Luther and the Protestant Tradition to determine what books actually are Scripture."

4. Even if I take the 66 books of the protestant Bible on faith, I still don't know how to interpret them. I'm in much the same situation as the Ethiopian eunuch: "So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, 'Do you understand what you are reading?' And he said, 'How can I, unless someone guides me?' " Without the Church in its role as the "pillar and foundation of truth" to guide my interpretation of Scripture, I can never be certain that I've interpreted Scripture accurately. I could claim the assurance of the Holy Spirit, leading me into truth, but so can millions of other protestants with whom I disagree.

5. What Sola Scriptura seems to amount to is a doctrine in the infallibility of myself in interpreting Scripture. Consider our Calvinism debates. I had one interpretation of a verse, and you had another. Neither of us would budge, because we would both feel that we were personally infallible in our interpretation of Scripture. Catholics take a lot of flak for their belief in the infallibility of the Pope, but consider that every time a protestant changes churches because he disagrees with the leadership of that church, he's claiming the exact same kind of infallibility for himself: he *cannot* be wrong in his interpretation of Scripture.

6. Here's what I consider to be the most damning argument against Sola Scriptura. If Sola Scriptura is true, then it should lead to unity of doctrine. That is, in all matters of faith and practice (or at the least all the essentials), every single Christian who claims Sola Scriptura should arrive at the same truth. If the only rule for their faith and practice is the Bible, what could cause them to differ in their beliefs? If they do differ, they must then be bringing in some of their own personal tradition; their culture, perhaps, or their historical influences.

Here's what I know: after just under 500 years of Sola Scriptura, there are more than 30,000 denominations in the United States alone. Sola Scriptura, far from causing unity, has caused more disunity among Christians than has ever existed in the history of Christianity. For the first 1,500 years since Pentecost, there was one Church: the Catholic Church. Since the Reformation, protestants split, and split, and split some more, resulting in the wide variety of beliefs we see in the churches of people who call themselves Christian that we see every time we drive down the road. There are protestants who believe baptism is necessary for salvation, and protestants who don't. There are protestants who believe that baptism should only happen to believing adults, and protestants who don't. There are protestants who believe that baptism must only be administered by immersion, and protestants who don't. And Baptism is the way a person gets into Christ! The way a person becomes part of the Church! And after 500 years of Sola Scriptura, here we are: protestants can't even agree on an essential matter of faith and practice like baptism!

Here's a quick summary:

1. Sola Scriptura can't be found in the Bible.
2. Sola Scriptura contradicts biblical references to other authoritative sources.
3. Sola Scriptura can't tell us what books belong to the Bible.
4. Sola Scriptura can't tell us if we've interpreted the Bible correctly.
5. Sola Scripture leads to a belief in the infallibility of the individual's interpretation of Scripture.
6. Sola Scriptura has been a gross failure. Even those who claim to believe it do not agree on essential points of faith and practice.

And, lest I forget:

7. Sola Scriptura did not even exist as a doctrine until 1520! The first-century Church didn't believe it, nor the second-century Church, nor the third-century Church, and so on...until 1520, there were absolutely no Christians who believed in Sola Scriptura.

Again, please don't mistake what I'm saying: I still love the Bible. It's my favorite book, and I'll still read it just as much, if not more, now that I recognize that Sola Scriptura isn't true. But I can't believe Sola Scriptura because it simply doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny. And given what the Bible says about the Church, I don't need to believe Sola Scriptura: the "pillar and foundation of truth" is Christ's Church, and once I find that Church, I'll be in even better hands than I was interpreting Scripture myself and according to whatever traditions and cultures I brought to the table.

Now you have the two major reasons I'm considering the Catholic Church: the foundational beliefs of all protestant churches, I can't believe anymore.

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2:07 am - Sola Fide
We were reading about how Jesus interacted with people, and took from the Sermon on the Mount in both Matthew and Luke. Let me quote the relevant passages:

Matthew 5:44-45: "But I say to you, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.' "

Luke 6:35: "But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil."


Both of these passages make loving, doing good, etc. conditions of being sons of God. Just like John 1:12 makes belief a condition of having the right to be sons of God, these passages make doing good, that is, works, a condition of being sons of God. The conclusion seems unavoidable: we are saved not by faith alone, but by works as well.

Here are a few more relevant passages, just to drive the point home:

Matthew 7:21: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven."

Matthew 25:31-46

Romans 2:6-8: "He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury."

James 2:24: "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone."


I can find no better interpretation of all of Scripture than that good works are absolutely required for salvation. Not only that, but until 1520, the idea of "justification by faith alone" didn't even exist!

Whether or not I become Catholic (it becomes more likely every time I think about it), I know this: one of the two foundations of protestant theology, Sola Fide, is opposed to Scripture, and I simply can't believe in it.

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Saturday, June 5th, 2004
11:15 pm - I think call/cc should go in.
Here's something I caught on Orkut earlier:


Suppose you have to implement an algorithm, whatever it may be, and later you have to code an application that interatively shows the several steps of the algorithm working. In languages without first class continuations, this is a pita: you have to break up all of your algorithm just so that you can stop it at the right times, extract the intermediate data structures, show them, and then come back.

With a little help of some macros and call/cc, I can code something that simply says:

(show-intermediate-state algorithm-state)

which would nonlocally jump to, for example, a GLUT display routine, show the things, wait for a keypress, and then return right to the middle of the algorithm, without changing the original algorithm in any way.


That seems too cool to pass up. Call/cc, we welcome you to L.

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3:40 pm - Email sent to my lisp teacher.
I just wanted to ask what, in your experience, are the most important features of Lisp. I'm thinking about doing away with some features from Common Lisp and Scheme that might have some severe repercussions :) In approximate order of importance (or likelihood to occur):

I'm considering making conses immutable. No set-car!, set-cdr!, rplaca, rplacd, or any of that jazz. This would really make things easy, for instance, for multi-threaded programs (no synchronization necessary), and also (for instance) for &rest arguments. This idea I got from Henry Baker's paper, "Critique of DIN Kernel Lisp." Another possibility from that same paper is that of making lexical variables (i.e., function arguments and let bindings) by default immutable (un-reassignable) and having a special form (like let-mutable) for binding mutable definitions. Baker suggests that in order to make type inference easier; I'm somewhat less impressed by that idea; type inference is still easily possible (by dataflow methods) even in the presence of such mutable bindings.

I'm also considering making bindings immutable (not settable) by nature. This would mean that redefinition of functions would not be possible. How important is this to normal Lisp development? I know it's one of the features that is often given as one of the awesome features of Lisp. One possibility I'm considering is having two separate environments with separate requirements -- i.e., function redefinition is possible in the development environment, but in a delivery environment (i.e., one in which the program/system has been compiled to a lower-level language) it's not possible.

What do you think about these ideas? What about the idea of separate restrictions on the development environment and delivery environment? I don't necessary envision a particularly slow or unusable delivery environment; in fact, I think it'd be cool to have a highly flexible development environment (like most Lisps today) with around the same speed as Python or Perl (or even clisp or smalltalk) but then also have a more static "delivery environment" not necessarily even saddled with including the compiler.

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12:25 am - L conses.
Idea:

Conses will default to immutable in L. That way, only those who want to pay the price for immutable conses will do so -- others can have nice, applicative lists that don't require synchronization or copying.

How will that happen?

cons will (as all other functions) be a generic function. nil is where the magic will be. We'll define nil to be some special singleton object, only eq to itself. Then we'll define an "eql method" for cons, equal to nil, which...hmm. This is probably better shown in code. Here's a close CLOS (hah) equivalent:

(defgeneric cons (car cdr))

(defmethod cons (car (cdr (eql nil)))
(new cons-immutable car cdr))

(defmethod cons (car (cdr cons-immutable))
(new cons-immutable car cdr))

(defmethod cons (car (cdr (eql nil-mutable)))
(new cons-mutable car cdr))

(defmethod cons (car (cdr cons-mutable))
(new cons-mutable car cdr))

That's basically the gist of it. Only cons-mutable will have a method for car= and cdr=.

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Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
2:24 pm - L's object model.
Idea:

Sometimes I've been torn between the "generic function" object model and the "message sending" object model. Mostly because I've made use of the message-sending object model in Python by writing (in Supybot) an IrcObjectProxy that dispatches all unknown methods to its Irc object, and that's something that's harder to do in the generic-function object model.

Today that has been settled in my mind. The message-sending object model can be easily and universally implemented via the generic-function object model.

We provide a class, MessageReceiver, which is instantiated with a "message receiving class" (these are disjoint from the classes in our native generic-function object model) and arguments. The "message receiving class" (from now on referred to as "m-class") then has a certain of its methods (__init__, perhaps? :)) called with the arguments, returning a "message receiving instance" (from now on referred to as m-instance). This m-instance is basically a pair of an m-class and instance state (sound familiar?) Then for every generic function X, we register a method on the class MessageReceiver class that basically tries to get the m-class method X and call it with the m-instance state as its first argument. So basically we've implemented Python's entire object model in L.

This would prove particularly nice if we were able to compile Python to L, because then we could get some rather nice libraries right off the bat.

Note, however, that MessageReceiver instances are in no way inferior to other classes in our generic-function model; they're just less optimizable (because less is known about them statically). But they can implement just the kind of proxy stuff that IrcObjectProxy does, as long as we provide them with a protocol similar to Python's __getattr__ or Smalltalk's doesNotUnderstand.

So we're definitely going generic-function object model.

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Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004
10:03 pm - L
Idea:

Implement an interpreter. Have a function that exports the current interpreter state (as in, generic functions, etc.) to C. It can take an argument that is a function to call as C's main function. It'd be especially cool if eventually it could remove unused functions or unused branches of generic functions, but that's not so big a deal.

Issues:

We still need to allow modules implemented in whatever our compile-to language turns out to be.

Current reading:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/papers/3imp.pdf

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12:38 am - More little things about L.
Ideas:

There will be none of this "You can use square brackets instead of parentheses." I find that disgusting about Scheme, and it makes things infinitely harder for me to read.

Aside from that, I think it might be better to use square brackets for something else: thunks. Thunks, for those not familiar with the terminology, are functions that take no arguments. They're useful for delaying computation, for passing around little chunks of code without executing them, etc. I think it would be nice to offer a quick and easy syntax for thunks: the square bracket. These two forms would be equivalent:

[+ x y]

(fn () (+ x y)) ; Remember, fn is our lambda)

I think that would reduce the syntactical overhead of thunks quite a bit, and would make things that use thunks much easier to use. Users of Smalltalk will, I'm sure, note the resemblance. Arc suggests a possible similar syntax, except extended to accept arguments -- I see no reason for such extension. Maybe, if we find 1-argument anonymous functions are coming up quite a bit, we could offer something for them:

(fn1 (+ 10 _))

might be equivalent to

(fn (_) (+ 10 _))

That's just an idea, and certainly not as useful an idea as the square bracket thunks, methinks.

Open questions:

Single or multiple inheritance?
Include continuations or don't include them?

Papers I've been reading, in order of relevance/importance:

http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CritLisp.html
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/papers/3imp.pdf

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Sunday, May 30th, 2004
12:54 am - More about L.
Two more things I'd like to discuss about L.


Continuations.

They strike fear in the hearts of people who don't understand them, but arouse adoration from most of those who do. They're useful to do some really cool things in programming; they, along with function calls, make possible any control structure imaginable. User-level threads? Done. Exceptions? Done.

But they also make many things harder. Common Lisp's unwind-protect, for instance ("finally" in Python or Java or C++, for non-Lispers). Garbage collection becomes significantly more complicated as well.

So I think, if they are to be added to L, they'll be added after it's already a rather established language. The things for which they're useful won't be useful until we're writing significant and large libraries, I don't think.


Dynamic variables.

These seem useful for many of the reasons that they're useful in Common Lisp. What I'm especially curious about is their relation to global variables. It seems that it might be possible to make all "global" variable accesses actually be accesses of the dynamic variable environment. I think this is an implementation we'll certainly try out.

Wow. If this works, I think it may make macros significantly easier. One of the issues with macros is the question of what environment they're defined in. If, while compiling, we're maintaining a snapshot of the globals to serve as the initial dynamic environment, then we'll be able to use them in macros appropriately (perhaps with eval, if they're not compiled yet) and that'll be simple. Hmm. This deserves a ton more thought.


A note about attitude.

I just said something that rather surprised me. Someone asked how to do such and such "idiomatically" in Common Lisp on IRC. My response was, "Just write a macro, who cares about idiom?" That's the kind of attitude I'd like L to foster. We want people to get things done. When we offer a very specific way to do something, that should be suggested. But when something is just "idiomatic" -- when it's not important enough for us to provide a macro to do already, I don't want people to feel that they need to "stick to the standard idiom," but rather that they can solve their own problem, and tell us how they solved it. This, I imagine, will be how the language will grow -- people will show the developers cool ways they've solved a given problem/idiom, and we'll say, "That's cool, can we steal it?" and stick it in the language. I don't think we should stifle innovation by insisting on conformity.

Oh, another thing you'll never hear: "We're trying to reduce the number of globals in the language." Or, "Strings already have too many methods." Or, "Continuations are too complicated for this language." Sometimes it sucks using Python as my main language.

I do wonder, however, what we'll do for namespaces. That's a problem to solve later, I think.

Anyway, let me know what you folks think of these ideas.

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Saturday, May 29th, 2004
2:02 am - Plans for L.
So, I figured I should post a few of the ideas I'm stealing for L, the language I want to invent and write an interpreter and compiler for. Many of these ideas are shamelessly stolen from Paul Graham (PG), in his discussion of Arc (a similar language he's inventing but seems not to want to release) and various other "hacker" topics.

The language will be called "L" because it's Lisp and because it's brief. If it's successful, I think it really could become "The C of Lisp."

It's going to be a Lisp. Yes, that means parentheses, but it also means macros. Real macros. And not any of that hygienic crap -- we'll have full-blown defmacro (although we'll likely call it just "macro").

I really love PG's ideas on brevity. The less typing it takes me to say something, the more I can say. So forms in L will use small names ("fn" instead of "lambda," etc.) and fewer parentheses (i.e., cond will not include an implicit progn, so we cut parentheses down by a pair per condition clause).

All normal named functions will be generic functions, and will, if they include type specifiers, actually be methods of the same-named generic function. Anonymous functions will not be allowed to include type specifiers; I can't see the point.

Generic functions will use multiple dispatch -- there will be no distinguished receiver as in most popular OOPLs . This is useful, and since we're using a generic-function OO model, there's no real reason not to allow multiple dispatch.

All normal conditionals/etc will be anaphoric -- that is, they'll have pronouns that can refer to the results of their condition expression. Instead of this:

(let (x (some-long-computation))
(if x
(do-something x)
(do-something-else)))

We'll allow this:

(if (some-long-computation)
(do-something it)
(do-something-else))

"it" will be implicitly bound to the result of the condition expression. This will work similarly in cond, while, when, unless, etc.

We won't be afraid in certain well-documented situations to "coerce" values to a particular type, assuming the coercion is easily overridable by the value/class. If we allow eql specializers, then types will be able to specialize something like this:

(method (coerce (eql 'bool) (lst list))
(empty lst))

Instead of coercion, we may instead just make each class be callable to convert values to its type -- it provides a default implementation, and classes themselves can override it.

We will, of course, be single-namespace (i.e., like Scheme, not like Common Lisp that regard). Functions and values will use the same namespace, it's simple and, I think, results in fewer characters being typed.

We will include a macro "calc" that will map infix mathematical expressions (using C operators) to prefix syntax. Doing math in prefix syntax is pretty hard.

Our first major focus will be string manipulation. Why? Because that's what most people do for throwaway programs, so that's what we're going to need the most. Also, I think that an appropriate Lisp with nice macros and whatnot should be able to do string manipulation better than Perl, and that would be nice.

Some other ideas from Arc that I like:

* Using "=" instead of set*
* Using "do" instead of "progn"
* Calling the basic associative data structure a "db"

Undecided things:

Rest parameters will obviously be supported, with the same syntax as Scheme. Keyword parameters, though useful, we'll have to see about. They significantly complicate things both for users and for implementors.

I haven't decided if we need multiple-inheritance or not. Usually I'm in favor, but I may not remain that way. The main point of the OOish-ness in L will not be to create large or deep trees of classes, but instead to be able to overload certain functions for differing implementations of the same interface. I'm willing to hear arguments for both sides.



Implementation strategy.

First, I want an interpreter in Scheme. We should be able to write a meta-circular one pretty easily, and we can play around with that until we've got something decently stable.

Once we've got something stable, then we should start writing the compiler in L itself. It will compile to C or C++ or Parrot bytecode or whatever, but it'll compile to something, hopefully, that doesn't require much substrate, because then we'll compile the L compiler and get to work on libraries and such. I think (at this point) we'll write an interpreter for L in L itself in order to offer eval.

I'll need help along the way. I'd love discussion and ideas, but I'd also love actual coding help. Let me know if you're interested.

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Wednesday, May 26th, 2004
1:38 am - So I may as well make my thoughts public.
Many theological/philosophical ideas have been floating around in my head lately, and it seems to me a waste to leave them there. At the very least, it will be nice to have a record of such ideas for later internal dialogue. I also flatter myself a bit that some people might be interested in reading these half-formed fragments of thoughts, most likely unoriginal, but we'll see :)

Anyway, if you're interested (or just bored) stay tuned. I think I'll kick one out tonight.

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Friday, February 13th, 2004
4:53 pm - Letter to the Lantern Editor.
Regarding this editorial.


In your editorial "Pill pastor" published on February 13th, you state that, "A pharmacist's only responsibility to a patient is his or her medical well-being." While your statement itself is correct, you omit one very important responsibility that a pharmacist (or any human being, for that matter) has: a responsibility to uphold and abide by his own moral code.

We all, as human beings, have a responsibility to be to true to the moral code that we choose for ourselves. While Herr might be an inadequate pharmacist in the determination of Eckerd's and a significant portion of the general population, he would be an inadequate person if he were to elevate the requirements of a mere job above his own moral code. Morality is not something that a person can simply toss aside because his employer requires it of him. No employment manual, ruling, sentencing, or judgment should cause a person to voluntarily participate in what he considers to be immoral.

Herr's "quest" was not to preserve an embryo. I'm sure he knew full well that the customer could simply go to another pharmacy and fill her prescription there. Herr's intentions were simply to satisfy his own conscience with respect to his actions. He chose not to be an accomplice to what he considered could be murder. That's his choice, and he was willing to subject himself to the consequences of his actions in order to maintain a clean conscience for himself.

The last paragraph of the editorial is so full of empty rhetoric that I could fill an entire letter discussing its faults. Put simply, however, it is not unscientific for a person to apply his moral code in the situations he finds himself in, nor is science (or any other endeavor) even remotely unbiased: the unequal distribution of research money indicates that quite well. Nor does a person suddenly become a "soldier for religion" when he refuses to participate in behavior he considers immoral.

Should Herr have been fired for what he did? Certainly, especially given the obligations stated in his employment manual. Do I respect him all the more because he knew that and still chose to abide by his moral code? Definitely.

Jeremy Fincher
Rank 4, Computer Science.

P.S. Your statement, "The Gospel should be spread from behind a pulpit, not a pharmacy counter," reveals a common misunderstanding of a Christian's duty. "Whether, then, you eat or drin