"Godless Generation"

I was reading about internet phenomena the other day, and I found out about the 'puppy-throwing marine' youtube video. For the sake of time I'll assume that title is descriptive enough. Anyway so this video got banned because a puppy dying was seen as offensive. Then I saw a video from a girl named 'angie the anti-theist' filming her abortion (she did it by pill). What does this say about our culture? That people think a puppy's life is more valuable and it's death is more offensive than the murder of a child.

The Vulgate quotes St. Peter speaking in the Spirit at Pentecost saying "salvamini a generatione ista prava" - Save yourselves from this perverse generation. Another translation says: "godless generation".

I was in my Existentialist philosophy class and after I asked if Sartre had any logical argument for Atheism and she replied 'no but it's just a generally accepted premise that he doesn't".

I was reading Karl Rahner's work on the Trinity and in it he was arguing against traditional Catholic theology. This is a man people apparently say is a 'hero' of the faith. The "textbook" theologians as he calls them, were the real heroes.

All of this has made me better understand this command to save ourselves from this godless generation. This is another reason I'd like to completely do so and maybe become a priest, to be completely removed from this culture's values and be a living image of Christ. What a job?! But how incredibly difficult...

Necessity of Sacrament to Word

Today I was at my parents Baptist church/ecclessial community, and the sermon was good. An old fashioned pietistic/wesleyan call to repent sin, accept Christ into your heart, and put you're life under his lordship. They had salvation in three steps (as all good Evangelicals know - you have to have the 3 point sermon), and they were called the ABCs of salvation. While the sermon was fine in itself and well done for the time they had, I thought a good analogy would be that if it was the ABC of the Christian faith, Classic Protestantism (not to be confused with North American Evangelicalism) would be D-G, and Catholicism would be H-Z. In our gigantic Roman Church we have so much to learn about (today I was just learning about analytic vs transcendental vs existential thomism alone!), and I once again understood what Chesterton meant when he said that the Church is much bigger from the inside. So many many many people have been through it and contributed to it, it's more a Kingdom than a Church. I also noticed that all the talk about accepting Jesus into one's heart, could've been so easily tied to Transubstantiation and the reception of Christ in the Sacrament.

As Karl Rahner reminds us, grace is the communication of God-self to ourselves, and in the words of the consecration 'this is my body', the aramaic meaning is "this is my SELF". Luckily I was able to receive the Eucharist yesterday, and truly accept Jesus, his very body, blood and divinity. (Though hillariously our priest accidentally prayed "O Lloyd" instead of "O Lord", and he forgot the sign of the cross at the beginning of the Mass, he was retired but he came back and I guess his memory was failing.)

May we receive the Word of Christ in the story of Christmas, that he may dwell in our hearts by faith, and may we receive the Word in the Sacrament, that Jesus may dwell in our bodies as 'one flesh' as he did so blessed in Our Lady.

la nouvelle theologie / ressourcement

For an essay on Karl Barth and Gianni Vattimo that I had to write, I proposed as a solution to the problem of the death of God/Metaphysics, ressourcement theology. I don't quite know how it happened, but it just did.

The more I read about von Balthasar and de Lubac and Gilson, the more excited I was, and the more I wanted to be a theologian or a historian of theology. It was amazing how new everything seemed and perhaps that is what people meant about 'the spirit of Vatican II'. I of course do not advocate women priests, or anything against magesterial teaching, but rather the re-emphasis of the ancient faith's answers to the questions of today.

I'm still reading through Gilson's "The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy", and I'm getting Karl Rahner's "The Trinity" as well as the rest of Pelikan's Church History. Hopefully they will teach me something more about this movement.

I don't know much about Rahner though, and people say I'm going to hate him, and that he's passe (couldn't get the accent working).