April 22, 2012                                    David Timbs    (Melbourne)                                       David's previous articles   

Freedom and the Compulsive Mind

Jesus: The Sabbath was made for people not people for the Sabbath.

Jesus the bearer of God’s revelation received a stunning revelation himself. The one who preached a message of a complete change of life and conversion underwent a profound change of direction and was himself converted.

This conversion came with his submission to a baptism of repentance of which he himself had no need. Instead, Jesus chose to accept this ritual as it exposed him to the plight of his fellow Jews. His baptism signified a profound identification with sinful humanity and it changed him. That change manifested itself very quickly but first Jesus had to make a judgment about what was truly the mind of God and what was the mind of his traditional faith. Ultimately, it would cost him his life.

Jesus the observant Jew prayed daily to give praise to God and to plead for the realisation of God’s Rule on earth as it is in heaven. His obedience to the will of God would have been unquestioning as would have been his acceptance of his Tradition. Every morning, from his childhood, Jesus prayed the customary Benedictions. These reflected a vision of a socio-religious reality that was accepted as a given. The second to the fourth of these entailed the Jewish male thanking and blessing God for not being born a foreigner (a Gentile), a slave or a woman.

If one were to focus on one particular motif in the ministry of Jesus it might well be liberation from those particular forms of servitude that afflicted the mind, heart and spirit of human beings. This commitment to freeing people from the forces of spiritual and psychological oppression is spelt out in the prophetic text Jesus took as his own,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Lk 4: 18-19 [Is 61: 1-2]).

Right from the beginning of his ministry Jesus was acutely aware that it was an excessively rigid interpretation of the Mosaic Law by the teachers of Israel that was the principal source of that oppression. The harsh restrictiveness of Jewish socio-religious laws became such a burden that traditional observance was expressed in four contending interpretations. The systematization of Torah and its rigorous application became so complex that, in frustration, the great Jewish teacher Hillel, who came before the time of Jesus, summarised everything in one simple, legendary formula, 

What you hate for yourself, do not do to another. This is the whole of the Law and the Prophets. All the rest is commentary. Now, go and study it.

Jesus and his Movement taught exactly the same principle when they came up against the oppression and slavery caused by the burden and yoke of the Law (Mt 7: 12; 22: 34-40).

Paul: For freedom Christ has set us free.

Paul frequently found himself in a position where he had to defend himself against allegations that he was a shabby latecomer to the faith, that he had no credentials as an Apostle and therefore had no authority. In one of the most dramatic passages in all of his letters, Paul speaks passionately about his standing in Judaism before his conversion and his transformation in Christ,

If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh (bragging rights), I have more”: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the Law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the Torah blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as shit, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on Torah, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith;…(Phil 3: 4b-9)

Paul of Tarsus, the greatest apostle and interpreter of the Gospel among the Gentiles, insisted that for the members of the Jesus Movement rules, regulations, traditions, customs, even the Torah itself were incapable of establishing right relationship with God and neighbour. Christ alone was and is the key to it all.

Paul taught that the dignity and freedom of the sons and daughters of God derived not from the compulsive and pathologically disordered submission to the Torah with its regulations and customs but from Jesus Christ. Embedded in the core Tradition Paul received was the Memory that in Christ humanity is given a new being, identity and purpose,

Now before faith came, we were confined under the Torah, kept under constraint until faith should be revealed. So that the Torah was our slave-teacher (paidagogos) until Christ came, that we might be restored to right relationship by faith. But now that faith has come, were are no longer under the slave-teacher; for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized in Christ have put on Christ. There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ (Gal 3: 23-28).

For Paul as for Jesus, backsliding into the perverse slavery of legalism and blind conformism is a defeat for the Gospel and the new humanity guaranteed by it.

The Compulsiveness of the Traditionalist Mind: Australia Incognita and What happens when religion gets the better of you. 

There is no doubt that there has been a concerted effort over the past forty years by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI to appease the Traditionalist/conservative elements in the Church. The sources of their discontent are many but almost invariably they are linked to the Second Vatican Council and what they brand the ‘Spirit of Vatican II ism’ and its alleged excesses. Especially in the world of modern blogdom it is possible to recognise almost instantly the levels of divisiveness and acrimony the debates over Vat II have generated.

Some self-styled Traditionalists are now rejoicing in Benedict’s Reform of the Reform in Continuity and wishing in effect that Vatican II would be confined to the status of ‘a good idea at the time’ while the so-called liberal dissenters are left somewhat bemused, bewildered and dismayed that two papacies have effectively not received the major directions and reforms of the Council.

The divide among Catholics is seen very clearly in the world of blogdom. Here Traditionalists and their ‘dissenting’ liberal opponents slug it out on issues theological but most especially on the status of the Second Vatican Council, its teachings and the directions which have emerged.

A rather interesting insight into the mind of the Traditionalist blogger is the author of Australia Incognita, Kate Edwards. She is a fierce opponent of her pantomime horse character, ‘Vat II ism’ and almost everything that emerged from it. Ms Edwards would rather that it had never happened.

The driving force behind the ecclesiology proposed in Australia Incognita is a theology of Christ which is a hybrid of Gnostic Christianity, OT symbolic imagery and, to some extent, the Greco-Roman cult of Mithras. Jesus, the Church, its life and sacraments are interpreted through the lens of OT symbolism and often bizarre allegory found in the commentaries of the Fathers of the Church.  Edwards acknowledges little or nothing of the Incarnation and what it means for Salvation or for the Church. A disembodied Christ if far easier to control and domesticate than the Word made flesh.

Edwards while consistently calling for popular biblical literacy is actually terrified of it and the kind of rigorous discipline and honesty it demands.  A naive fundamentalism wrapped in imaginative allegory and promoted as lectio divina is clearly the preferred option.

Ms Edwards’ views on Church order are particularly revealing. A disembodied Church flows from a disembodied Christ. It should not be surprising that Australia Incognita has difficulty with the concept of Church as the People of God. It is far too messy, difficult to govern and perhaps even uncontrollable. Church as the disembodied, gnostic Body of Christ fits so much more comfortably into a theology of predetermination, regulation and stasis.

 For Australia Incognita, with its culture of obsessive compulsive adoration of its own authority, both a disembodied Christology and ecclesiology are claimed to be validated and confirmed as fixed Catholic dogma in the Council of Trent. That one is Edwards’ Council.

The evangelical obsession of Australia Incognita to recreate a fixed, stable and thoroughly  orthodox Church has been manifested over the past year in Edwards’ grand plan. A number of constants in Edwards’ ecclesiastical vision are: proactive, punitive moves against the heterodox, that is, anyone who digresses from her own benchmarks of loyalty to the Pope and the Magisterium, vigorous promotion of the Latin Mass, monastic life, total exclusion of laity from liturgical service and any significant blurring of the demarcation lines between the clerics and the non-ordained.

 Edwards admits of little or no negotiating room on these issues. A constant rallying cry of the Edwards reformist crusade is the caution of JP II who warned against the clericalisation of the laity and the laicisation of the clergy.

A predictable plank in Edwards’ platform is that it shares crucial common ground with organisations such as the ruptured SSPX and the fringe dwellers of the far right wing of Traditionalism. They spend an enormous amount of time defending an elite self-interested, fearful and obsessive compulsive sect-like Catholicism, increasingly playing the persecuted and martyr game, belly-aching about their imaginary oppressors but rarely mentioning Christ or the Gospel. A poster in Cathnews, a target for Edward’s frequent moans and shrill, petulant teenage protests, remarked in recent comment, 

I’d be impressed if Ms Katherine and her ilk paid more attention to the Gospel and less to sniping at what she seems to see as dangerous post-v2 tendencies. She might not identify with the SSPX and their ilk, but in her devotion to all things ‘traditional’ (which by her mindset are automatically good) she appears to be a fellow traveller - JR, CN, 05/02/12.

Edwards’ pattern of self-reinforcing virtue and sanctimonious rage surfaced in a recent spray at Cathnews, its moderator Christine Hogan, blog organiser Michael Mullins and me, an occasional contributor.  

Unfortunately, Edwards’ self-inflated importance and wildly exaggerated theological competence illustrate sadly what happens to a person when it is not faith but religion that gets the better of them.

As Ms Edwards plans for leadership of the re-established Tridentine Church in place of the heterodox New Church she might contemplate the wisdom of Peter De Vries,

 Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be!  

David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.