Fr. Barron: Against Heresies

Culture & Heresy: Fr. Barron on the YouTube Heresies, Pt. 1

In the spirit of the great St. Irenaeus, Fr. Barron takes on some of the key heresies of our culture, as expressed in the viewer comments on his earlier YouTube postings. The cultural significance of these heresies lies in the way they function - in the new virtual Areopagus and irl - as automatic conversation-stoppers, a back-of-the-hand refusal of respectful conversation or dialog.

For example, scientism, a self-refuting vision of reality, functions in comboxes as a crude knockdown way of refusing to consider or even understand a religious argument or explanation. It is expressed in the embarrassing crudity and ignorance of the New Atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins - but not them alone. It comes out in the even cruder and more confident arrogance of the comments that appear whenever the question of atheism is raised on YouTube or the blogosphere.

Similarly, many people I read, and some I know, will respond to any argument from a catholic perspective with a litany of charges about the wrongdoings of Catholics past and present, as if that refuted Catholics' own understanding of the Church and ecclesiology. Fr. Barron calls this heresy 'Church angelism.'

Culture & Heresy: Fr. Barron on the YouTube Heresies Pt 2

It seems that biblical fundamentalists and atheists agree on one thing - reading the Bible literalistically, without respect to historical or cultural context or even literary genre. They read what is not really a book but a library of books, written at different times by different hands in different genres - song and poetry, history, saga, wisdom literature, prophetic and apocalyptic utterance, as if it were all the same. As if when a friend writes in a Facebook post that it is raining cats and dogs here that we are to imagine that animals are falling from the sky. Or as if assembly instructions for a piece of furniture (assembly required), a Shakespeare play, Homer's Odyssey, A Harry Potter book, and the New York Times were all to be read the same way.

It is a strikingly modernist rejection of context and tradition. Those who wrote and read the Bible at the time millennia ago did not do so in that literalistic way. They were well able to discern the difference between the report of an event, to be understood as an accurate description of what happened and a love poem or an apocalyptic vision. Both fundamentalism and atheism - and the literalism with which they read the Bible - seem to be peculiarly products of the 19th century, notwithstanding their precursors.



As for how to read the Bible as a Christian with one's full intelligence, reason and faith, there is no better example than Benedict XVI's new Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection, a great book by a great pope.

The Lure of Heresy

As Alister McGrath shows in his brilliant and compelling book, Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth, heresy has enormous appeal to the postmodern mind. Consider Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. Risibly inaccurate and absurd as it is - there are shelf-fulls of books and articles refuting it on every point - millions of people believe its fabrications to be the real story, the suppressed truth of the history of Christianity.

McGrath's book analyzes the dynamics of heresy's appeal and I won't try to summarize it. In my experience, the attraction is similar to that of conspiracy theories in general. Believing that, say, 9-11 was a government conspiracy - which millions do despite all the evidence to the contrary (Popular Mechanics took apart the most widely believed theories, but with no discernible impact on popular belief) - enables one to bask in one's own intelligence and cleverness. We are not duped like everyone else - said as if we were a small group of people in the know, rather than millions. Such conspiracy theories and heresies rest not on a serious examination of evidence, but on a will to challenge tradition, orthodoxy, inherited wisdom and belief. Modern art rests on this desire to shock and offend, on the denial of beauty and tradition. There is something of the permanent adolescent about all this, as the German writer Martin Mosebach points out in Heresy of Formlessness in relation to art and liturgy:

The 20th century cult of youth culminates in a cruel curse: while the aging process cannot be stopped, the aging human being is not allowed to mature. and is condemned, until his life's end, to play the long-dead games of his youth. This is most clearly seen in the world of art--which is so closely related to religion--where the avantgardisms of 1905 are still being repeated again and again, as an ossified ritual, a hundred years later. And, with her famous aggiornamento, the Church thinks that, in order to survive, she needs to 'open herself' to these senile avantgardisms! (Mosebach, pp.81-82).

These thoughts came to mind after a recent trip to the Barnes & Noble bookstore in the Ala Moana shopping center in Honolulu. I usually check out the sections of religion and philosophy and once again I was struck by how the Christianity shelves give more space to heresy than to orthodoxy, to Crossan and Spong than to Benedict XVI. Brant Pitre's 's brilliant and bestselling book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper was not to be seen, nor was the pope's great work of lectio divina, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection. Does this reflect consumer demand or the bias of the B&N buyer? I don't know.

In any case, it was something of a relief to come home and find Fr. Robert Barron's take on John Crossan at his Word on Fire site. Here it is: