Northern Virginia Catholic Bible Study House rules/notes… 1. Meetup is www.meetup.com/catholicbiblestudy Zoom Meeting Logon info is the same every week: Zoom ID: 861 1782 2081 Password: 406952 2. Questions encouraged. If you have questions about anything, you can ask in the chat, email the Meetup group, or me directly at ron@hallagan.net. 3. Unedited recaps of meetings are posted via Meetup after our meeting. The final edited recap is posted on our Catholic Catacombs Light website www.catholiccatacombs.wixsite.com/website/recaps a week later. You will be notified via Meetup of both. 4. See The Chosen. Knowing Jesus Christ means being able to better relate to God. Check it out: The Chosen at https://thechosen.link/1Y1R7. 5. Respectfulness. We will be discussing differences between religions and between Christian denominations, and agree to be respectful at all times. Specifically, Protestants are our friends and brothers in Christ, and I personally owe part of my return to the faith to them. 6. No politics. It would be easy for us to self-destruct, but that’s not our goal. Our goal is to learn the Bible, explain the Catholic faith, and help members develop a closer relationship with the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit in their daily lives. 7. Catholic Prayer, Fellowship, and Spirituality Meetup led by fellow member Jason Goldberg: https://www.meetup.com/online-catholic-prayer-fellowship-and-spirituality/ 8. Prison fellowship – opportunities to volunteer one Saturday per month for 2 hours (12-2 or 2-4) serving Catholic prisoners at the Fairfax County Jail. Ask Ron (ron@hallagan.net) or Gina (gmasterson99@gmail.com) for details. Why? "I was in prison and you visited me." – Matt 25:36 RSVP Reminder: Please RSVP whether you are attending or just reading the notes afterwards. The more RSVPs, the more Meetup will give us recognition, which will draw others to us, which is our way of evangelizing! Bible Study Format: 5 min prayers, 10 min Catholic topic, 45 min main topic from the weeks listed below Week 1: Aug 2 – Gospel Week: Mary & Martha (Lk 10:38-42); Teach us to Pray (Lk 11:1-5,9-12); The Kingdom is like… (Mt 13…) Week 2: Aug 9 – Bible Week (Gen àRev): Joseph, Prime Minister of Egypt (Gen 43-50) Week 3: Aug 16 – Survey Topics Voted on by Members: We are currently on #2 Purgatory (final) à Next is Heaven I (Dante)
Ö 1) Jesus’ Greatest Parables 2) Hell, Purgatory, Heaven 3) Christian Comparisons 4) Great Women in the Bible 5) Why is there suffering? 6) World Religions 7) Book of Revelation 8) Major Councils/Crusades/Inquisitions
Week 4: Aug 23 (31) – Open Mic Week (anything goes!):
1) What is Sanctifying grace vs actual grace?
2) What is the Heresy of the Good Serpent?
3) Can you provide an elevator response for the Inquisition?
4) How do you “gird your loins”?
Opening Prayer
Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything,
please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere.
We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough,
because in reality everyone is connected in the Body of Christ that we are in, and no one stands alone.
To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do.
Help us each day to stand for love, unity, and goodness because Jesus prayed that all may be as one.
We offer our prayer together with all the other members, together with our Lord, Jesus Christ…
And as Jesus taught us to pray:
Our Father Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily Bread;
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us all.
Amen.
Next Holy Days
Solemnity of All Saints – Nov 1
Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls Day) – Nov 2
This week’s OPEN MIC QUESTIONS
1. What is Sanctifying grace vs actual grace? 45%
2. Can you provide an elevator response for the Inquisition? 45%
3. What is the Heresy of the Good Serpent? 36%
4. How do you “gird your loins”?
Questions on deck… (feel free to add your own as we go)
1. Can you provide me with an elevator response for the Crusades?
2. What is justice? Is it always good? Does God cause bad things to happen? If one suffers but the results are good, is that justice?
3. How should we celebrate/honor the Christian Sabbath Sunday?
4. How does the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe affect our Catholicism?
5. The love and unity of the Holy Spirit are two of its Trinitarian descriptions. How are they different? How does they affect us?
6. The knowledge of God is “participatory.” Is that why nonbelievers have difficulty?
7. Are Charity and Love synonymous? How are they different? What are the 4 highest forms of Charity?
8. What race was Jesus?
9. The History of the Mass going back to Cain & Abel, and the meaning of the Eucharist now.
Question One: What is Sanctifying grace vs actual grace?
In order to understand grace, one needs to understand two other concepts first.
Q: Does anyone know what the three most fundamental ideas to the Christian religion are?
Sin, Redemption, and Grace
Q: Why?
Let’s review all three.
1. We sin. The entire idea of sin depends on the idea of justice. If we hurt someone, we affect the scales of justice. Fairness dictates that scales must be returned to where they were before you did the hurting. Our court system tries to emulate justice. For example, if you steal a car and get caught, you must return the car in the same condition, or pay for a new car, plus pay any further expenses incurred by the car’s owner during the time they were without the car, plus any penalties and/or jail time for breaking the law to dissuade you from doing it again. Justice. Please notice that justice does not come from nature. Plants and animals don’t seek justice for murder or violation of rights. Only humans do. It is part of our spiritual genetics.
To varying degrees and at different times in our lives, we are not completely truthful, loving, patient, understanding, kind, forgiving, or humble. When we are this way, we are choosing self over God, self over others, self over love. This is our fallen condition. We have hurt more people than we can count, and too often we don’t care enough to do anything about it. On a collective basis, the atrocities that mankind has committed against itself (our own species) are far beyond the ability of anyone to catalogue.
Of course we would all like to go to heaven, but we don’t know how, and we can’t stop sinning long enough to find out, let alone make up for the past.
The Fall of Man wasn’t just a one-time event; it continues, and justice requires that we pay the piper. In the meantime, we are subject to this life and this world, and when eternal justice catches up with us after this life, we will not be in a good place.
If mankind, individually or collectively, put all its sins on one side of the scale of justice, what could possibly offset the other side?
2. What is Redemption?
To redeem something means to buy it back, or to pay a debt in order to get something back. In ancient times, the word redeem was understood better than today. If a man went into enough debt and couldn’t pay it, justice required that he lose his wife and children to the debtor; they would become the debtor’s servants (slaves). If you eventually managed to get enough money, you could go back and “redeem” your wife and kids by paying off your debt, usually at some higher cost (i.e., interest). Justice was met when you balanced the scales.
Something more familiar for us today: If your car was towed because there were unpaid tickets, in order to get your car back you need to go to the impound lot, pay the police for the tickets (which now includes penalties) plus pay for the towing in order to “redeem” your car. Justice was met when you balanced the scales.
Q: How does this relate to the Christian use of the word Redemption?
We originally belonged to God. However, we were given our freedom (free will), and we used it to leave Him by choosing ourselves over Him, ourselves over others, self over love, kindness, unity, compassion, etc. In living a life of selfishness, we went into debt against God from whom all justice comes. We basically threw our lot in with the devil. That’s why after The Fall it says sin entered the world along with us. Notice there is no sin in nature. Like justice, sin only follows humans.
Although sin and selfishness are far more attractive dates, we kind of hope that God wants us back since otherwise we may end up spending the rest of the time with Satan and his bedfellows. Our choice.
We should be amazed and very glad to find out that God says he loves us and wants to “redeem” us back from our fallen state. But God has two problems to overcome to redeem us:
a) How can He afford to pay off all our debts – for all humanity past, present, and future?
Some say God could just snap his fingers and make it so, but is that true? What about justice? Would not that leave it unbalanced?
If God is perfect justice, how could He be unjust at the same time? God cannot be good and evil.
Moreover, shouldn’t justice be served by the guilty party? If someone steals your car, is it just for someone else to pay for it?
Never despair, God has a plan. He decides to send his Son/Logos. He will become a human and pay our debt with his life.
b) However, there still is a 2nd problem: God can’t redeem us like He’s getting his car back. Why?
Because we are not a car. We have free will. What if we still don’t want to come?
God decides to do it anyway and open the door to Heaven and invite everyone in, knowing some will not accept.
Knowing that we will still be challenged by the attractions of this world, He will also send us Grace through the Holy Spirit to strengthen us and help us along the way. The Holy Spirit is now in the act – the whole Trinity, in fact! The seven biggest ways He sends Grace to us are in what we now call the Sacraments.
Which brings us to GRACE.
3. What is Grace?
The CCC says actual grace is "a supernatural help of God for salutary acts granted in consideration of the merits of Christ for the furtherance of man’s eternal salvation.”
There are lots of ways grace acts in our lives, but there are two basic categories of grace: Sanctifying Grace and Actual Grace.
a) Sanctifying Grace is a state of holiness. We need our soul to be in a state of sanctifying grace to enter heaven. We lost it in the Fall of Man, and we regain it in Baptism. Sanctifying grace can be strengthened and grown. What we get at Baptism is the first deposit - enough to get us into heaven if we don't lose it. Now we enter into a journey, a relationship, with Christ whereby we grow Sanctifying grace.
b) Actual Grace are one-off types of help sent by God (sent on His own, or when we pray, or when someone prays for us, etc.) to aid us in all kinds of circumstances that we find ourselves in.
Q: What is the role of Grace?
The aim of all grace is directed to the production of sanctifying grace where it does not already exist, or to retain and increase it where it is already present.
As I said, there are different kinds of grace within these two categories. We can review the types of grace in each of the Sacraments next time.
Q: Which sacrament has the most sanctifying grace if it is understood and received properly? Hint: it is the reason all the other sacraments even exist.
The Eucharist. The Last Supper made all the other possible.
Question Two: What is the Heresy of the Good Serpent?
I actually called it the “Heresy of the Good Serpent” for lack of a name, but the story goes that the Serpent was the good guy in the Fall of Man (Genesis chapter 3). It states that the serpent was trying to give knowledge to Adam & Eve and that God was trying to withhold knowledge from them and hold them prison in Eden.
The question came from Ademola. Ademola, do you want to add to that?
The premise is that God and Eden were evil and the Serpent was good.
I would not even argue this point because to do so gives it a modicum of credit, which it doesn’t deserve. Someone who would postulate this would be the same kind of person who would believe the earth is flat and man landing on the moon is a conspiracy. However, I’ve gone this far, so…
In Genesis 1, God creates all things and after each part of creation he states they are “good.”
Eden was an earthly paradise, not evil. Work was not work as we knew it. They had everything they wanted.
God only told them to refrain from one tree in the Garden. It was not the tree of knowledge for a) Adam & Eve had knowledge as they were already stewards of paradise and b)when they ate from the tree, they did not gain any more knowledge.
When they ate of the tree, they did gain shame, and they certainly didn’t gain courage, or they might have stood up and stated the truth. Instead, when God questioned them, Adam threw his wife under the bus and Eve blamed the serpent. Seems as though the tree took whatever good they had out of them.
The Tree was a tree of pride. It was not about “knowledge” but of seeking to own knowledge for themselves; such “knowledge” gives one the faux power to dictate right and wrong, hence the name of the tree.
Serpent Heresy II: There is another myth out there called “The doctrine of the serpent seed.”
The doctrine of the serpent seed, also known as the dual-seed doctrine, is a controversial, faux Christian belief that holds that in the Fall of Man the Serpent mated with Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the offspring of their union was Cain.
This event resulted in the creation of two races of people: the wicked and the righteous. The doctrine frames human history as a conflict between these two races (good vs evil) in which the descendants of Adam will eventually triumph over the descendants of the Serpent.
Question Three: Can I provide everyone with an elevator response to the Inquisition?
In order to give you an elevator response, we need to review some anti-religious bias in general and a summary of the Inquisition in particular.
Anti-religious Russian propaganda under Lenin
Anti-religious and anti-Catholic history
Atheists love to say that religions are responsible for most of the violence and killing in human history. Well, first of all, every society that ever existed throughout history had religion. Therefore, saying religion was involved in all the wars and violence of the past would have to be true 100% of the time. In the same way, did you know that all the people who ever drank water before were responsible for most of the wars and violence in human history? So perhaps the truth is that both religion and water were the causes of all wars and violence.
Let’s get more specific and compare, say, deaths involving Christian countries in recent memory vs. deaths involving atheist run countries:
If we combine the estimated deaths from all the Crusades, Inquisitions, and witch burnings during the 500-year period of the Middle Ages, one might get a total of about 200,000 people. Alternatively, if we combined the deaths caused from just three atheist governments – under Stalin, Hitler, and Mao – within a 30-year period (1932-1962), the deaths exceed 100,000,000. That’s 100 million – which is about 500 times greater than the religious number. Note also that the 200,000 deaths caused by religion were over a 500 year period (about 400 per year), whereas the 100 million deaths caused by atheists were over a 30-year period (about 300,000 per year).
Now, even though the Christian death counts were ridiculously lower, we are not defending them. And this is a key point.
When atheists kill, they are following their worldview of survival of the fittest.
When Christians kill, they are not following Jesus’ worldview. Christian killers are typically rogue Christians.
Therefore, if an atheist rejects religion because he thinks it leads to violent conflict, then he should also reject atheism since far more violence and deaths have been conducted in the name of atheism.
A side historical correction: Some people like to say that Hitler was a Catholic. His mother certainly was, but his father loathed religion and said it was for stupid people. Hitler avowedly followed in his father’s footsteps and was well-known for mocking his religious teachers throughout school. By 1942, Hitler had vowed to “root out and destroy the influence of Christianity.” In Hitler’s eyes (biography by Alan Bullock), “Christianity was a religion only fit for slaves. Its teachings were a rebellion against the natural law of selection by the struggle of the fittest.” Hitler was a Darwinist.
Q: Why is the Catholic Church picked on in the media more than any other religion?
Three reasons:
1. The Fall of Man is about the pride of man. The pride of man is about man replacing God, being our own God. Being our own God is imagining we are free to do whatever we like. If we all did whatever we liked, we’d all be dead because our “wants” conflict, and therefore only the richest and most powerful win. “Freedom” comes from the term “free will.” It is the ability to choose good, or not; to be good, or not; and to do good for others, or not. Clearly, the Fall of man is not over, and we still have free will. God came here and showed us a way out, but he will also honor our free will. Remember, the choice we make in this life is the choice that remains with us forever. That is the power of our choice.
2. Man has been attacking God and religion since the very beginning, so it’s nothing new. The last big effort began with the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th Century (we have enough knowledge now, God, so we don’t need you anymore – recall Time Magazine cover April 8, 1966 “Is God Dead?”). Now, if you are going to attack religion, you attack the biggest. Why attack the Messianic Jews or the Quakers or 20,000 other Protestant denominations when you can attack the 2000-year-old Elephant in the Living Room – the Catholic Church – which is bigger than all the rest combined?
Which would you attack if you were Satan?
3. Since the Protestant “Reformation” in the 16th Century, the English Protestant perspective has dominated the teaching of history, from its perspective, which was/is anti-Catholic. This is why it is helpful to learn Church history from an authentic Catholic perspective. We all have an obligation to defend the Church and its history when it is maligned or misrepresented, or when myths are presented as historical fact. But, we can’t defend what we do not know.
That said, and for what it’s worth, those who hold these erroneous views don’t generally know much history, either. Most of them just parrot the same myths they’ve heard, over and over again.
Q: What do we know about the Inquisition that is counter to public opinion, and what can Catholics say about it, if anything?
Many Catholics squirm at the very mention of the Spanish Inquisition, oftentimes conceding to claims that it was the most brutal time in Church history. But was it really as brutal as it is often described?
The answer is no; yet, on the other hand, we should by no means attempt to whitewash whatever happened.
The word “Inquisition” has indeed become a bad name, but it wasn’t so when it started. It began as an office in the Church set up to respond to the many heresies of the Middle Ages. Remember, the Apostles and their successors had a sacred duty to teach the truth and not let Christianity be coopted by false teachings. Most of Paul’s letters in the New Testament were written for that reason.
Q: “Heresy” is an emotionally loaded term that is often misused. What is a heresy?
Heresies have nothing to do with people outside the Church. To commit a heresy, four conditions must be met: 1) it involves someone who a baptized member of Church, 2) they must be teaching something contrary to the essential truths of the Church (such as the Trinity, Incarnation, Real Presence in the Eucharist, the Mass, the Immaculate Conception, etc.), and 3) the person refuses to be corrected.
For example, the priest named Arias (A.D. 325) was a heretic because 1) he was a member of the Church, 2) he taught things that were not Christian (i.e., Jesus wasn’t God), and 3) he refused to be corrected. What was the result? He was excommunicated, meaning he could no longer be a priest in the Church, teach for the Church, or represent the Church in any way.
This is generally how it worked for the first 350 years of the Church.
Once the Roman Empire became Christian in the second half of the 4th century, we find at times the civil rulers – who also were Christians – getting involved and sometimes taking matters into their own hands. Civil rulers – similar to earlier practices of Roman Empire – often considered heretics traitors to the State (which sometimes was true since religions often represented other countries). Nevertheless, the Church strongly retained the position that violence was not acceptable in treating heretics.
This is generally how things worked from 5th to about the 12th century.
Spain and the Moors
Setting the Context
Now we enter the later middle ages (post A.D. 1100). Europe was full of heresies at the time, most of them coming under the heading of Catharism. Catharism was a complicated mix of non-Christian religions reworked with Christian terminology. The Cathars had many different sects, but they had a common teaching that the world was created by an evil deity (so matter was evil), and we must worship the good deity instead. So, the spirit was good and the material world was evil.
The Albigensians formed one of the largest Cathar sects. They taught that the spirit was created by God, and was good, while the body was created by an evil god, and the spirit must be freed from the body. Having children was one of the greatest evils, since it entailed imprisoning another “spirit” in flesh. Logically, marriage was forbidden, though fornication was permitted. Tremendous fasts and severe mortifications of all kinds were practiced. You can’t make this stuff up.
Then there was the rebirth of the Manicheans, a third century heresy that married a handful of eastern and gnostic beliefs with Christianity to make it easier and more attractive. And, of course, life on the European continent was becoming more and more dangerous as Islam was expanding from into it from both east and west: from Asia Minor and Eastern Europe to the east and through Spain in the west (the Moors). Europe was properly nervous.
It should be noted that virtually everyone in Europe at this time was Christian, which means Catholic. Civil rulers considered both Islam and these heresies a threat, and the public was in general agreement. Local authorities began trying heretics as enemies of the state to get rid of them, and they weren’t always fair in the process. Sometimes local rulers would use heresy as a tactic to get rid of their local political enemies, when they had nothing to do with religion at all.
The Church originally set up the office of the Inquisition to evaluate and support the Christian countries of Europe in the effort to stop heretical movements. Official “Inquisitors” had to be approved by Rome and meet strict criteria – trained in canon law, knowledge of handling heresies, etc., with the hope of ensuring justice was fair. However, the Church was not in the business of implementing punishment so, if someone was guilty, carrying out the punishment typically fell to the civil authorities. Thus, the plan to reduce abuses wasn’t as effective as hoped.
Secular rulers would sometimes use Scripture to justify their punishment of heretics. For instance, in Leviticus 20 it says you a man or woman who is a medium or spiritist (a heretic) should be stoned to death. Or when Jesus referred allegorically to the wheat and the chaff being separated at the end of time and the chaff thrown into the unquenchable fire, some local rulers said, “Why wait?”
There is no doubt there was abuses by the Inquisitors as well, just like there would probably be today. Money speaks all languages. The Church had very little routine communications with other countries or the Inquisitors, which often would take many months. But there is no question the Church became aware of the abuses and did not assert itself as it should have to stop it.
The same was true for torture. Torture was at times used – not by the Inquisitors but from the civil prosecutors who were seeking to get confessions to bring before an Inquisitor. I once read where the local prosecutor swore up and down there was no torture whatsoever used for punishing heretics, just to get them to tell the truth. Good God!
The only positive news, if you can call it that, was their relative infrequency.
What about the frequency? We often hear of tens of thousands of deaths caused by the Inquisitors, but this was not the case. In the entire 1500s – at the height of the Spanish Inquisition – about 50 people were executed in Spain
If you have never seen the BBC documentary The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition, I highly recommend it. It summarizes the most recent scholarship about how the Inquisition began, why it persisted, and how the English Protestant perspective shaped it into something much larger than it was.
As much as Catholic-bashing has become a sport, it is ironic to note that to the great humiliation of the Protestant churches, religious intolerance and persecution – even to death – were continued long after the Reformation. In Geneva this was put into practice by state and church, even the use of torture and the admission of the testimony of children against their parents – and with the sanction of Calvin. Bullinger (of the second Calvinist Confession in Switzerland) announced the principle that heresy could be punished like murder or treason.
The historian Robin Briggs estimated that some 40,000 to 50,000 people were executed as witches in Europe between 1500 and 1750, often burned at the stake. The Catholic Inquisitions are estimated to have killed 4,000 to 5,000.
When you hear this (the Inquisition is 99% myth), that does not mean it didn’t happen. It only refers to the numbers. Wild estimates in the hundreds of thousands were thrown around for many years, and 99% of that was myth.
Now it is time to convert all this information into an elevator response.
Elevator Response
Q: How do you explain your Catholicism in light of all the murder and mayhem caused by the Church during the (Spanish) Inquisition?
A: “Ah yes that was a difficult period, although there is quite a bit of misinformation out there. Have you ever seen the BBC documentary called The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition? It’s very, very enlightening, and I highly recommend it. It’s only about 45 minutes, you should look it up: The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition, and it’s put out by BBC.” (Total = 25 seconds)
Bonus Question Four: How do you gird up your loins?
Closing Prayer
Dear Mother Mary
We dedicate this closing prayer to you who intercede for us always.
We thank you and we appreciate your bringing us ever closer to your son, Jesus.
Hail Mary, full of grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
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