Miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5:1-5:11)
1 While the crowd was pressing in on Jesus and listening to the word of God, he was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret.
2 He saw two boats there alongside the lake; the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets.
3 Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.
4 After he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch."
5 Simon said in reply, "Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets."
6 When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing.
7 They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come to help them. They came and filled both boats so that they were in danger of sinking.
8 When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man."
9 For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him and all those with him,
10 and likewise James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners of Simon. Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men."
11 When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.
As used by Luke, the incident looks forward to Peter's leadership in Luke - Acts and symbolizes the future success of Peter as fisherman. By this transposition Luke uses this example of Simon's acceptance of Jesus to counter the earlier rejection of him by his hometown people.
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
The story of the abundant catch of fish that ends with the calling of Simon Peter and his companions into discipleship. These experienced fishermen have caught nothing during the whole night, and now Jesus instructs them to put out to sea again in broad daylight and cast out their nets. This seems to make little sense according to the practical knowledge of these men, but Simon answers: “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets” (Lk 5:5). This is followed by the overflowing catch of fish, which profoundly alarms Peter. He falls at Jesus’ feet in the posture of adoration and says: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Lk 5:8). In what has just happened, Peter recognizes the power of God himself working through Jesus’ words, and this direct encounter with the living God in Jesus shakes him to the core of his being. In the light of this presence, and under its power, man realizes how pitifully small he is. He cannot bear the awe-inspiring grandeur of God—it is too enormous for him. Even in terms of all the different religions, this text is one of the most powerful illustrations of what happens when man finds himself suddenly and directly exposed to the proximity of God. At that point, he can only be alarmed at himself and beg to be freed from the overwhelming power of this presence. This inner realization of the proximity of God himself in Jesus suddenly breaks in upon Peter and finds expression in the title that he now uses for Jesus: “Kyrios” (Lord). It is the designation for God that was used in the Old Testament as a substitute for the unutterable divine name given from the burning bush. Whereas before putting out from the shore, Peter called Jesus epistata, which means “master,” “teacher,” “rabbi,” he now recognizes him as the Kyrios.
“Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Mt 9:38): We cannot simply pick the laborers in God’s harvest in the same way that an employer seeks his employees. God must always be asked for them and he himself must choose them for this service. The calling of the disciples is a prayer event; it is as if they were begotten in prayer, in intimacy with the Father. The calling of the Twelve, far from being purely functional, takes on a deeply theological meaning: Their calling emerges from the Son’s dialogue with the Father and is anchored there. Twelve was the symbolic number of Israel—the number of the sons of Jacob. From them the twelve tribes of Israel were descended, though of these practically only the tribe of Judah remained after the Exile. In this sense, the number twelve is a return to the origins of Israel, and yet at the same time it is a symbol of hope: The whole of Israel is restored and the twelve tribes are newly assembled. Twelve—the number of the tribes—is at the same time a cosmic number that expresses the comprehensiveness of the newly reborn People of God. The Twelve stand as the patriarchs of this universal people founded on the Apostles. In the vision of the New Jerusalem found in the Apocalypse, the symbolism of the Twelve is elaborated into an image of splendor (cf. Rev 21:9–14) that helps the pilgrim People of God understand its present in the light of its future and illumines it with the spirit of hope: Past, present, and future intermingle when viewed in terms of the Twelve.
What does the following text say they are sent to do? “To preach and have authority to cast out demons” (Mk 3:14). The first task is preaching: to give people the light of the word, the message of Jesus. The Apostles are first and foremost Evangelists—like Jesus, they preach the Kingdom of God and thereby gather people into God’s new family. Because the world is ruled by the powers of evil, this preaching is at the same time a struggle with those powers. “In following Jesus, his herald has to exorcise the world, to establish a new form of life in the Holy Spirit that brings release to those who are possessed” And, as Henri de Lubac in particular has shown, the ancient world did in fact experience the birth of Christianity as a liberation from the fear of demons that, in spite of skepticism and enlightenment, was all-pervasive at the time. The same thing also happens today wherever Christianity replaces old tribal religions, transforming and integrating their positive elements into itself.
The world is now seen as something rational: It emerges from eternal reason, and this creative reason is the only true power over the world and in the world. Faith in the one God is the only thing that truly liberates the world and makes it “rational.” When faith is absent, the world only appears to be more rational. In reality the indeterminable powers of chance now claim their due; “chaos theory” takes its place alongside insight into the rational structure of the universe, confronting man with obscurities that he cannot resolve and that set limits to the world’s rationality. To “exorcise” the world—to establish it in the light of the ratio (reason) that comes from eternal creative reason and its saving goodness and refers back to it—that is a permanent, central task of the messengers of Jesus Christ. In the Letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul once described this “exorcistic” character of Christianity from another perspective: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:10–12). Alongside the commission to exorcise, Matthew adds the mission to heal. The Twelve are sent “to heal every disease and every infirmity” (Mt 10:1). Healing is an essential dimension of the apostolic mission and of Christian faith in general. The healing power of the messengers of Jesus Christ is opposed to the spirits of magic; it exorcises the world in medical terms as well. In the miracles of healing performed by the Lord and by the Twelve, God displays his gracious power over the world.
At this point it may be appropriate to mention another item peculiar to Luke. In the opening verses of chapter 8, he recounts to us that Jesus, as he was making his way with the Twelve and preaching, was also accompanied by women. He mentions three names and then adds: “and many others, who provided for them out of their means” (Lk 8:3). The difference between the discipleship of the Twelve and the discipleship of the women is obvious; the tasks assigned to each group are quite different. Yet Luke makes clear—and the other Gospels also show this in all sorts of ways—that “many” women belonged to the more intimate community of believers and that their faith-filled following of Jesus was an essential element of that community, as would be vividly illustrated at the foot of the Cross and at the Resurrection.
Comments by Father John Bartunek (www.rcspiritualdirection.com):
Christ the Lord Jesus shows his mastery over the hearts of men (the crowd was “pressing round” him to hear him speak) and over the forces of nature (they caught a “huge number of fish”). Yet when he asks Peter to “put out into deep water and pay out your nets for a catch,” the future Apostle complains before he obeys. However many times God shows himself worthy of our trust (creation, the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the sacraments – what more could he have done to win us over?), we still hesitate to do things his way. We need to acknowledge him as Lord not only with our lips, but with our hearts as well, and with our decisions. Like Peter, we need to apply all our natural effort (they had been fishing all night), but then take the extra step of faith: “Master… if you say so, I will…”
This applies to our apostolic endeavors, but it also applies to our moral lives. Many times the Church’s teaching on controversial moral issues (for example, artificial and assisted reproduction, contraception, divorce and remarriage) is hard to understand on a merely natural level, especially when the prevailing culture bombards us with contrary views. In those moments especially, we need to realize that the life we are called to live surpasses our natural capacities. Jesus could never have proved to Peter beforehand that he would take in a miraculous catch in the middle of broad daylight, but that’s what the Lord had in store for his disciple. To experience the wonderful action of God’s grace in our lives, we have to bolster.
[The Other Face of Terrorism - by Father Sameer Advani (Director of the ‘Christianity and Culture’ Program at the Vatican):
As Cardinal Ratzinger described once terrorism is much more than just fundamental Islamic terrorists. Ratzinger identified terrorism as the belief in man's self-sufficiency, the idea that we can solve our problems on our own without God's help. In its core, terrorism is, he said, "the criterion of heavenly expectation applied to the present world" where trust in God's saving action is replaced by unlimited confidence in man's ability to bring about his own unconditional salvation through "the promise of a new humanity."
This would of course explain the "coarse terrorism" of those who, like Osama Bin Laden, aim to change society through violence and win salvation by establishing an eternal Islamic kingdom on Earth at the expense of those who don't share their zeal for a universal Muslim state.
But it also explains a more "elevated" form of terrorism — one that thrives in the West. Seemingly boundless technological advancement has allowed modern man to claim that he no longer needs the outdated and childish concept of religion or God, and that science has made him Absolute. He feels that he can replace the imaginary heaven promised by God with a phenomenon within his power to control – a future age constructed by his effort and genius in which all difficulties will eventually be solved and suffering become a thing of the past.
The problem is that the morality accompanying this ideology ends up justifying exactly the same type of violence and murder of "traditional" terrorism. If, for instance, all that matters is the establishment of an ideal future, whether it be in society or on the individual level, it should come as no surprise that the sacrifice of embryos for "genuinely high-quality scientific results," or the abortion of children who stand in the way of a woman's freedom of "self-realization," should not only be condoned but actively pursued.
Ironically enough, it is precisely an unlimited and unrestrained lust for life that ends up devaluing life, because when life loses its seal of the sacred there is nothing to prevent it being thrown away when it no longer pleases or is useful. The terrorism of modern materialism and scientism ends up making man little more than a means to an end, an object without dignity to be used, manipulated and eventually discarded in the goal of creating an earthly utopia. "If man chooses to treat himself as raw material," C.S Lewis warned in 1943, "raw material he will be."
Drawing attention to the fact that scientific progress has allowed us to more profoundly grasp the rational structure of the universe, the Pope Benedict XVI warned that refusal to recognize the underlying source of that rationality, of the ethical message contained in the very act of existence has "done violence to human nature" and "reduced the human being to an object of experimentation."
"I feel the duty to affirm yet again that not all that is scientifically possible is also ethically licit," the Pope stated. "It is not blind trust in technology… but the recognition of the law inscribed in our nature… of the norms written by the Creator in the human being… that is the true guarantee of freedom and dignity."
Nineteen years after he first labeled this disregard for natural law the true terrorism of our age, Benedict XVI's message remains clear: if we choose to ignore God and try to construct a society without Him, we will only succeed in surrendering our own humanity.
]
[Interviewing Professor Peter Harrison (Australian historian and philosopher) - Science and Faith
Sometimes religion has supported science and sometimes it has been opposed to science and sometimes it’s been indifferent to science, but the picture is a mixed one. My own view is that if you look at the overall shape of relations, the relations have been much more positive on balance than negative.
On the Catholic support of science, I’d say we only need to look at the fact that no other institution from the late Middle Ages and probably into the 18th century, no other institution in Europe had supported astronomical research to the extent that the Catholic Church did. They were big supporters of astronomy and obviously the medieval universities which the Catholic Church got up and running; this was the site where science was conducted. They were huge supporters of knowledge and learning.
Galileo
Speaking about the historical relations between science and religion, the first thing people say is ‘what about Galileo?’ Well, Galileo does fit the model of a complex situation.
If we ask ourselves who in the scientific community in the early 17th century the scientific consensus at the time was firmly against the view that Galileo was proposing. There are a number of difficulties with the scientific claims that Galileo was making. One of them: there was a lack of stellar parallax. And what this meant was that if the earth was in motion, the relative positions of fixed stars should appear to change and they don’t. There’s a complicated science behind why stellar parallax was not observable; it was only observed in the 19th century as it turns out but part of the story was to do with the aberration of the telescopic observations of the stars that made them appear closer than they actually were and they’re much further away … so, there’s a complicated science there
The other thing that we can say is there was another perfectly reasonable theory, the Tychonic theory, that explained some of the observations that generated the difficulties with an earth-centred universe: the phases of Venus would be an example here. This theory accounted for those without having to put the earth in motion.
The science was complicated so that’s why I’d say … Certainly there were religious elements there, so if you look at the condemnations of Galileo, there were a number of areas where it was thought to be problematic scientifically and the church was on strong grounds there and there were a number of issues that were religious, to do with the interpretation of Scripture, so there was that component but it wasn’t as simple as it’s often made out to be. Broadly speaking the context of the Protestant Reformation was important because the Catholic Church’s authority was threatened and what Galileo does is come along in the famous “Letter to the Duchess Christina” and starts to do biblical exegesis for himself, saying ‘if we do biblical interpretation this way, we can see it supports my science.’ Now, this was a disastrous move politically because for individuals to claim the right to interpret Scripture was a Protestant position; it had been explicitly condemned at the Council of Trent and the Catholic Church is very nervous about people essentially going down this Protestant path. So, that’s part of the background.
The internal politics are also very interesting. So, Pope Urban VIII is in charge when Galileo is tried by the Inquisition. He was a friend of Galileo’s originally; they were good friends; he was one of Galileo’s key supporters. Galileo alienated him by making him look an idiot in the book in question which was the Dialogues. But Galileo had key supporters in the church and we know that because the theological sophistication of this letter which is about biblical exegesis where Galileo evokes Augustine to good effect … it’s clear that someone is feeding him this theological information. So, he definitely had supporters and indeed we know that.
Galileo was placed under house arrest; that’s certainly the case, but he spent much of his house arrest in a villa outside Florence and when he was in Rome he was put up by the various church authorities. And he remained a committed Catholic to the end of his life; in fact Galileo was a member of the clergy.
The construction of the conflict myth
we get a history of science-religion relations being constructed by two key figures: John William Draper, an English-American chemist, who wrote works about the history of Europe, and his key work is The History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion. That’s the first time we get the quite explicit articulation of the idea that there’s a long-standing conflict between science and religion historically.
And then the second key author of this conflict-type hypothesis is Andrew Dickson White who was the President of Cornell University in the US and wrote a book called The History of the Warfare Between Science with Theology in Christendom and this then also identified numerous instances of science and religion conflicts in the past.
And from that time on I think, this idea of a conflict between science and religion became a kind of key theme. There are good stories there about the lone scientific hero there battling the forces of religious dogmatism, so it makes for such a good story—Galileo the lone hero, persecuted by the Inquisition. So, I think these things are like hooks; they get into people’s minds and then they’re reinforced by contemporary instances of science-religion conflicts such as religious-motivated anti-evolutionism; it all seems to fit together in a coherent view of our history.
In the 17th Century the scientific revolution where modern science is getting up and running is motivated by religious considerations. They think that science is the study of God’s handiwork and that’s a reason to pursue science. They also have key religious presuppositions for pursuing science and one of these is the assumption that the natural world is governed by laws of nature which are in effect divine edicts that tell the world how to behave. Given that God can choose any range of orders for nature, we have to empirically investigate the world in order to see what kind of world God has chosen to substantiate.
In terms of the relations between science and religion, they are intimate in these formative phases and that’s really important for science getting off the ground and becoming one of the key going concerns in Western culture, and that’s quite a unique thing; we don’t see that at any other time or anywhere else.
Other cultures have backed other kinds of human activities but we decided to back science, and part of the reason that we did that was because of the religious reasons for backing science and they were articulated in the 17th Century. For instance in China were always other priorities. That they understood the importance of technology but to some extent, if you look at the Chinese civil service and the public examination system, it’s clear that they were more interested in human relations, the things that we would associate with humanities rather than sciences. So, they prioritised something that they regarded as more important and, as I say, it’s quite distinctive of the West that we put so much emphasis on science
If we look at England, what we see from the 17th century to the late 19th century is a very strong consensus that brings theology and science together. So, natural theology and science are almost inextricable. The Church of England is very much behind science, key scientific figures are religious figures and theology is the medium for the popularisation of science.
Certainly in the English context religion provided that legitimacy for science, to show that science is religiously safe—it’s religiously useful—and that it is, to some extent, actually an intrinsically religious activity. A number of the key founding figures of the Royal Society were clerics like Bishop John Wilkins was a major force behind it. So, there was a lot of clerical involvement in the early Royal Society.
Isaac Newton again was a very much religiously committed individual although in his time, somewhat religiously heterodox, but Newton also thinks that when we study nature, we’re studying God’s handiwork. And indeed, he wrote that when he composed the Principia that actually had in mind providing reasons for people to look at nature and think about God as a consequence. The Newtonian System couldn’t actually work without the direct implication of God at various points as Leibniz famously pointed out thinking that this was a flaw in the Newtonian System.
Now, this changes in the late 19th century and some of the key figures are Thomas Henry Huxley who was a very strong supporter of Darwinism and —the social background in England is important— Huxley came from a working-class background. He wasn’t educated at Cambridge or Oxford and he resented the fact that the Anglican establishment had control over scientific positions in Europe.
So, what he wanted to do was to liberate science from the strictures of ecclesiastical control. And this is perfectly understandable if we remember that at this point in time, unless you signed up to the Anglican articles of faith, you couldn’t take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. So, the control of the Church of England extended to the control of university positions and Huxley wanted to break that monopoly and he thought that science was the way to do it. And he explicitly wanted to use evolutionary theory as a way of undermining the authority of the church and setting up a conflict essentially between science and religion.
Has Science made religion redundant?
I think for science to make religion redundant, what would be required is that science is doing the job that religion once did. And we often hear this argument and Richard Dawkins is a famous proponent of the argument, that science and religion attempt to offer competing explanations for the same thing. But this involves a huge misunderstanding of what religion is about. And religion is about the ultimate questions, the questions of purpose and the questions to do with the origin of intelligibility, very things that make science possible. Science cannot itself answer these questions, science assumes a degree of intelligibility. And intelligibility of the world might just be a fluke, it might just be a brief feature of the universe …
There are a series of questions and the most fundamental one of all is: why there is a world at all? And that’s not a scientific question, that’s a philosophical or religious question. And once we have the world, why does the world have the particular features that it does? Why does it have an order that we can come to understand? And then crucially, how is it that our minds which presumably are the end products of a long process of evolution, how is it that that can give rise to minds that can understand the rational structure of the universe? And these questions, I think, are genuinely puzzling unless you’re going to engage in some significant philosophical and theological arguments. As I said, they’re not answers that science can give us because science presupposes already a certain kind of set of answers to those questions. So, the idea that science could actually displace either philosophy or religion seems to me a complete nonsense.
But I should also say beyond that, that religion is not just about the fundamental questions, it’s about a particular way of life and it’s about purpose and meaning and science doesn’t even address these. And to some extent I think, some of the hard human sciences actually count against notions of purpose and meaning. If you run with hard and deterministic understandings of humans, that is to say that we don’t really have free choice or at the extreme end, that we’re not really conscience. These seem to me to be non-starters. And they’re non-starters because in a way they’re self-defeating. So, when science starts to lead us down those paths, it seems to me that religion has something to say. If our moral universe is to have any sense, we have to have a degree of free choice. And I think there are a lot of other assumptions that will have to be taken on as well.
The question is now whether we value what science can deliver to the extent that we think that we don’t need any other moral or theological or values-based reason to engage in science. My worry is that the arguments for the purely utilitarian arguments for science, that is to say that we value science for what it can deliver us, that these might ultimately … I don’t think science can continue to survive because there are a lot of curiosity driven questions. The dangers for science, I think, come from two sources. Firstly, an overly utilitarian understanding of science that says you only study it because it’s going to generate benefits socially, and the other one is that it becomes completely divorced from these fundamental questions of purpose that religion is itself concerned with, and they were the fundamental questions originally which gave science the impetus it needed to be a central features of western civilisation and culture.
The idea that atheism or the idea that science is somehow in partnership with atheism has typically had the consequence that people have dismissed the science as a consequence of that. So, one of the reasons that some religious folks are anti-evolutionary is that they see that evolution is part of a package, a stalking-horse for a set of values that they think are uncongenial and that diminish the dignity of human beings, for example, and that’s really the key concern that they have.
]
On fasting (Luke 5:33–35)
33
And they said to him, "The disciples of John fast often and offer
prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same; but yours eat
and drink."
 |
| Jacopo Bassano - Miraculous catch of fish (1545) |
2 He saw two boats there alongside the lake; the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets.
3 Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.
4 After he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch."
5 Simon said in reply, "Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets."
6 When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing.
7 They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come to help them. They came and filled both boats so that they were in danger of sinking.
8 When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man."
9 For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him and all those with him,
10 and likewise James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners of Simon. Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men."
11 When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.
As used by Luke, the incident looks forward to Peter's leadership in Luke - Acts and symbolizes the future success of Peter as fisherman. By this transposition Luke uses this example of Simon's acceptance of Jesus to counter the earlier rejection of him by his hometown people.
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
The story of the abundant catch of fish that ends with the calling of Simon Peter and his companions into discipleship. These experienced fishermen have caught nothing during the whole night, and now Jesus instructs them to put out to sea again in broad daylight and cast out their nets. This seems to make little sense according to the practical knowledge of these men, but Simon answers: “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets” (Lk 5:5). This is followed by the overflowing catch of fish, which profoundly alarms Peter. He falls at Jesus’ feet in the posture of adoration and says: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Lk 5:8). In what has just happened, Peter recognizes the power of God himself working through Jesus’ words, and this direct encounter with the living God in Jesus shakes him to the core of his being. In the light of this presence, and under its power, man realizes how pitifully small he is. He cannot bear the awe-inspiring grandeur of God—it is too enormous for him. Even in terms of all the different religions, this text is one of the most powerful illustrations of what happens when man finds himself suddenly and directly exposed to the proximity of God. At that point, he can only be alarmed at himself and beg to be freed from the overwhelming power of this presence. This inner realization of the proximity of God himself in Jesus suddenly breaks in upon Peter and finds expression in the title that he now uses for Jesus: “Kyrios” (Lord). It is the designation for God that was used in the Old Testament as a substitute for the unutterable divine name given from the burning bush. Whereas before putting out from the shore, Peter called Jesus epistata, which means “master,” “teacher,” “rabbi,” he now recognizes him as the Kyrios.
“Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Mt 9:38): We cannot simply pick the laborers in God’s harvest in the same way that an employer seeks his employees. God must always be asked for them and he himself must choose them for this service. The calling of the disciples is a prayer event; it is as if they were begotten in prayer, in intimacy with the Father. The calling of the Twelve, far from being purely functional, takes on a deeply theological meaning: Their calling emerges from the Son’s dialogue with the Father and is anchored there. Twelve was the symbolic number of Israel—the number of the sons of Jacob. From them the twelve tribes of Israel were descended, though of these practically only the tribe of Judah remained after the Exile. In this sense, the number twelve is a return to the origins of Israel, and yet at the same time it is a symbol of hope: The whole of Israel is restored and the twelve tribes are newly assembled. Twelve—the number of the tribes—is at the same time a cosmic number that expresses the comprehensiveness of the newly reborn People of God. The Twelve stand as the patriarchs of this universal people founded on the Apostles. In the vision of the New Jerusalem found in the Apocalypse, the symbolism of the Twelve is elaborated into an image of splendor (cf. Rev 21:9–14) that helps the pilgrim People of God understand its present in the light of its future and illumines it with the spirit of hope: Past, present, and future intermingle when viewed in terms of the Twelve.
What does the following text say they are sent to do? “To preach and have authority to cast out demons” (Mk 3:14). The first task is preaching: to give people the light of the word, the message of Jesus. The Apostles are first and foremost Evangelists—like Jesus, they preach the Kingdom of God and thereby gather people into God’s new family. Because the world is ruled by the powers of evil, this preaching is at the same time a struggle with those powers. “In following Jesus, his herald has to exorcise the world, to establish a new form of life in the Holy Spirit that brings release to those who are possessed” And, as Henri de Lubac in particular has shown, the ancient world did in fact experience the birth of Christianity as a liberation from the fear of demons that, in spite of skepticism and enlightenment, was all-pervasive at the time. The same thing also happens today wherever Christianity replaces old tribal religions, transforming and integrating their positive elements into itself.
The world is now seen as something rational: It emerges from eternal reason, and this creative reason is the only true power over the world and in the world. Faith in the one God is the only thing that truly liberates the world and makes it “rational.” When faith is absent, the world only appears to be more rational. In reality the indeterminable powers of chance now claim their due; “chaos theory” takes its place alongside insight into the rational structure of the universe, confronting man with obscurities that he cannot resolve and that set limits to the world’s rationality. To “exorcise” the world—to establish it in the light of the ratio (reason) that comes from eternal creative reason and its saving goodness and refers back to it—that is a permanent, central task of the messengers of Jesus Christ. In the Letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul once described this “exorcistic” character of Christianity from another perspective: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:10–12). Alongside the commission to exorcise, Matthew adds the mission to heal. The Twelve are sent “to heal every disease and every infirmity” (Mt 10:1). Healing is an essential dimension of the apostolic mission and of Christian faith in general. The healing power of the messengers of Jesus Christ is opposed to the spirits of magic; it exorcises the world in medical terms as well. In the miracles of healing performed by the Lord and by the Twelve, God displays his gracious power over the world.
At this point it may be appropriate to mention another item peculiar to Luke. In the opening verses of chapter 8, he recounts to us that Jesus, as he was making his way with the Twelve and preaching, was also accompanied by women. He mentions three names and then adds: “and many others, who provided for them out of their means” (Lk 8:3). The difference between the discipleship of the Twelve and the discipleship of the women is obvious; the tasks assigned to each group are quite different. Yet Luke makes clear—and the other Gospels also show this in all sorts of ways—that “many” women belonged to the more intimate community of believers and that their faith-filled following of Jesus was an essential element of that community, as would be vividly illustrated at the foot of the Cross and at the Resurrection.
Comments by Father John Bartunek (www.rcspiritualdirection.com):
Christ the Lord Jesus shows his mastery over the hearts of men (the crowd was “pressing round” him to hear him speak) and over the forces of nature (they caught a “huge number of fish”). Yet when he asks Peter to “put out into deep water and pay out your nets for a catch,” the future Apostle complains before he obeys. However many times God shows himself worthy of our trust (creation, the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the sacraments – what more could he have done to win us over?), we still hesitate to do things his way. We need to acknowledge him as Lord not only with our lips, but with our hearts as well, and with our decisions. Like Peter, we need to apply all our natural effort (they had been fishing all night), but then take the extra step of faith: “Master… if you say so, I will…”
This applies to our apostolic endeavors, but it also applies to our moral lives. Many times the Church’s teaching on controversial moral issues (for example, artificial and assisted reproduction, contraception, divorce and remarriage) is hard to understand on a merely natural level, especially when the prevailing culture bombards us with contrary views. In those moments especially, we need to realize that the life we are called to live surpasses our natural capacities. Jesus could never have proved to Peter beforehand that he would take in a miraculous catch in the middle of broad daylight, but that’s what the Lord had in store for his disciple. To experience the wonderful action of God’s grace in our lives, we have to bolster.
[The Other Face of Terrorism - by Father Sameer Advani (Director of the ‘Christianity and Culture’ Program at the Vatican):
As Cardinal Ratzinger described once terrorism is much more than just fundamental Islamic terrorists. Ratzinger identified terrorism as the belief in man's self-sufficiency, the idea that we can solve our problems on our own without God's help. In its core, terrorism is, he said, "the criterion of heavenly expectation applied to the present world" where trust in God's saving action is replaced by unlimited confidence in man's ability to bring about his own unconditional salvation through "the promise of a new humanity."
This would of course explain the "coarse terrorism" of those who, like Osama Bin Laden, aim to change society through violence and win salvation by establishing an eternal Islamic kingdom on Earth at the expense of those who don't share their zeal for a universal Muslim state.
But it also explains a more "elevated" form of terrorism — one that thrives in the West. Seemingly boundless technological advancement has allowed modern man to claim that he no longer needs the outdated and childish concept of religion or God, and that science has made him Absolute. He feels that he can replace the imaginary heaven promised by God with a phenomenon within his power to control – a future age constructed by his effort and genius in which all difficulties will eventually be solved and suffering become a thing of the past.
The problem is that the morality accompanying this ideology ends up justifying exactly the same type of violence and murder of "traditional" terrorism. If, for instance, all that matters is the establishment of an ideal future, whether it be in society or on the individual level, it should come as no surprise that the sacrifice of embryos for "genuinely high-quality scientific results," or the abortion of children who stand in the way of a woman's freedom of "self-realization," should not only be condoned but actively pursued.
Ironically enough, it is precisely an unlimited and unrestrained lust for life that ends up devaluing life, because when life loses its seal of the sacred there is nothing to prevent it being thrown away when it no longer pleases or is useful. The terrorism of modern materialism and scientism ends up making man little more than a means to an end, an object without dignity to be used, manipulated and eventually discarded in the goal of creating an earthly utopia. "If man chooses to treat himself as raw material," C.S Lewis warned in 1943, "raw material he will be."
Drawing attention to the fact that scientific progress has allowed us to more profoundly grasp the rational structure of the universe, the Pope Benedict XVI warned that refusal to recognize the underlying source of that rationality, of the ethical message contained in the very act of existence has "done violence to human nature" and "reduced the human being to an object of experimentation."
"I feel the duty to affirm yet again that not all that is scientifically possible is also ethically licit," the Pope stated. "It is not blind trust in technology… but the recognition of the law inscribed in our nature… of the norms written by the Creator in the human being… that is the true guarantee of freedom and dignity."
Nineteen years after he first labeled this disregard for natural law the true terrorism of our age, Benedict XVI's message remains clear: if we choose to ignore God and try to construct a society without Him, we will only succeed in surrendering our own humanity.
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[Interviewing Professor Peter Harrison (Australian historian and philosopher) - Science and Faith
Sometimes religion has supported science and sometimes it has been opposed to science and sometimes it’s been indifferent to science, but the picture is a mixed one. My own view is that if you look at the overall shape of relations, the relations have been much more positive on balance than negative.
On the Catholic support of science, I’d say we only need to look at the fact that no other institution from the late Middle Ages and probably into the 18th century, no other institution in Europe had supported astronomical research to the extent that the Catholic Church did. They were big supporters of astronomy and obviously the medieval universities which the Catholic Church got up and running; this was the site where science was conducted. They were huge supporters of knowledge and learning.
Galileo
Speaking about the historical relations between science and religion, the first thing people say is ‘what about Galileo?’ Well, Galileo does fit the model of a complex situation.
If we ask ourselves who in the scientific community in the early 17th century the scientific consensus at the time was firmly against the view that Galileo was proposing. There are a number of difficulties with the scientific claims that Galileo was making. One of them: there was a lack of stellar parallax. And what this meant was that if the earth was in motion, the relative positions of fixed stars should appear to change and they don’t. There’s a complicated science behind why stellar parallax was not observable; it was only observed in the 19th century as it turns out but part of the story was to do with the aberration of the telescopic observations of the stars that made them appear closer than they actually were and they’re much further away … so, there’s a complicated science there
The other thing that we can say is there was another perfectly reasonable theory, the Tychonic theory, that explained some of the observations that generated the difficulties with an earth-centred universe: the phases of Venus would be an example here. This theory accounted for those without having to put the earth in motion.
The science was complicated so that’s why I’d say … Certainly there were religious elements there, so if you look at the condemnations of Galileo, there were a number of areas where it was thought to be problematic scientifically and the church was on strong grounds there and there were a number of issues that were religious, to do with the interpretation of Scripture, so there was that component but it wasn’t as simple as it’s often made out to be. Broadly speaking the context of the Protestant Reformation was important because the Catholic Church’s authority was threatened and what Galileo does is come along in the famous “Letter to the Duchess Christina” and starts to do biblical exegesis for himself, saying ‘if we do biblical interpretation this way, we can see it supports my science.’ Now, this was a disastrous move politically because for individuals to claim the right to interpret Scripture was a Protestant position; it had been explicitly condemned at the Council of Trent and the Catholic Church is very nervous about people essentially going down this Protestant path. So, that’s part of the background.
The internal politics are also very interesting. So, Pope Urban VIII is in charge when Galileo is tried by the Inquisition. He was a friend of Galileo’s originally; they were good friends; he was one of Galileo’s key supporters. Galileo alienated him by making him look an idiot in the book in question which was the Dialogues. But Galileo had key supporters in the church and we know that because the theological sophistication of this letter which is about biblical exegesis where Galileo evokes Augustine to good effect … it’s clear that someone is feeding him this theological information. So, he definitely had supporters and indeed we know that.
Galileo was placed under house arrest; that’s certainly the case, but he spent much of his house arrest in a villa outside Florence and when he was in Rome he was put up by the various church authorities. And he remained a committed Catholic to the end of his life; in fact Galileo was a member of the clergy.
The construction of the conflict myth
we get a history of science-religion relations being constructed by two key figures: John William Draper, an English-American chemist, who wrote works about the history of Europe, and his key work is The History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion. That’s the first time we get the quite explicit articulation of the idea that there’s a long-standing conflict between science and religion historically.
And then the second key author of this conflict-type hypothesis is Andrew Dickson White who was the President of Cornell University in the US and wrote a book called The History of the Warfare Between Science with Theology in Christendom and this then also identified numerous instances of science and religion conflicts in the past.
And from that time on I think, this idea of a conflict between science and religion became a kind of key theme. There are good stories there about the lone scientific hero there battling the forces of religious dogmatism, so it makes for such a good story—Galileo the lone hero, persecuted by the Inquisition. So, I think these things are like hooks; they get into people’s minds and then they’re reinforced by contemporary instances of science-religion conflicts such as religious-motivated anti-evolutionism; it all seems to fit together in a coherent view of our history.
In the 17th Century the scientific revolution where modern science is getting up and running is motivated by religious considerations. They think that science is the study of God’s handiwork and that’s a reason to pursue science. They also have key religious presuppositions for pursuing science and one of these is the assumption that the natural world is governed by laws of nature which are in effect divine edicts that tell the world how to behave. Given that God can choose any range of orders for nature, we have to empirically investigate the world in order to see what kind of world God has chosen to substantiate.
In terms of the relations between science and religion, they are intimate in these formative phases and that’s really important for science getting off the ground and becoming one of the key going concerns in Western culture, and that’s quite a unique thing; we don’t see that at any other time or anywhere else.
Other cultures have backed other kinds of human activities but we decided to back science, and part of the reason that we did that was because of the religious reasons for backing science and they were articulated in the 17th Century. For instance in China were always other priorities. That they understood the importance of technology but to some extent, if you look at the Chinese civil service and the public examination system, it’s clear that they were more interested in human relations, the things that we would associate with humanities rather than sciences. So, they prioritised something that they regarded as more important and, as I say, it’s quite distinctive of the West that we put so much emphasis on science
If we look at England, what we see from the 17th century to the late 19th century is a very strong consensus that brings theology and science together. So, natural theology and science are almost inextricable. The Church of England is very much behind science, key scientific figures are religious figures and theology is the medium for the popularisation of science.
Certainly in the English context religion provided that legitimacy for science, to show that science is religiously safe—it’s religiously useful—and that it is, to some extent, actually an intrinsically religious activity. A number of the key founding figures of the Royal Society were clerics like Bishop John Wilkins was a major force behind it. So, there was a lot of clerical involvement in the early Royal Society.
Isaac Newton again was a very much religiously committed individual although in his time, somewhat religiously heterodox, but Newton also thinks that when we study nature, we’re studying God’s handiwork. And indeed, he wrote that when he composed the Principia that actually had in mind providing reasons for people to look at nature and think about God as a consequence. The Newtonian System couldn’t actually work without the direct implication of God at various points as Leibniz famously pointed out thinking that this was a flaw in the Newtonian System.
Now, this changes in the late 19th century and some of the key figures are Thomas Henry Huxley who was a very strong supporter of Darwinism and —the social background in England is important— Huxley came from a working-class background. He wasn’t educated at Cambridge or Oxford and he resented the fact that the Anglican establishment had control over scientific positions in Europe.
So, what he wanted to do was to liberate science from the strictures of ecclesiastical control. And this is perfectly understandable if we remember that at this point in time, unless you signed up to the Anglican articles of faith, you couldn’t take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. So, the control of the Church of England extended to the control of university positions and Huxley wanted to break that monopoly and he thought that science was the way to do it. And he explicitly wanted to use evolutionary theory as a way of undermining the authority of the church and setting up a conflict essentially between science and religion.
Has Science made religion redundant?
I think for science to make religion redundant, what would be required is that science is doing the job that religion once did. And we often hear this argument and Richard Dawkins is a famous proponent of the argument, that science and religion attempt to offer competing explanations for the same thing. But this involves a huge misunderstanding of what religion is about. And religion is about the ultimate questions, the questions of purpose and the questions to do with the origin of intelligibility, very things that make science possible. Science cannot itself answer these questions, science assumes a degree of intelligibility. And intelligibility of the world might just be a fluke, it might just be a brief feature of the universe …
There are a series of questions and the most fundamental one of all is: why there is a world at all? And that’s not a scientific question, that’s a philosophical or religious question. And once we have the world, why does the world have the particular features that it does? Why does it have an order that we can come to understand? And then crucially, how is it that our minds which presumably are the end products of a long process of evolution, how is it that that can give rise to minds that can understand the rational structure of the universe? And these questions, I think, are genuinely puzzling unless you’re going to engage in some significant philosophical and theological arguments. As I said, they’re not answers that science can give us because science presupposes already a certain kind of set of answers to those questions. So, the idea that science could actually displace either philosophy or religion seems to me a complete nonsense.
But I should also say beyond that, that religion is not just about the fundamental questions, it’s about a particular way of life and it’s about purpose and meaning and science doesn’t even address these. And to some extent I think, some of the hard human sciences actually count against notions of purpose and meaning. If you run with hard and deterministic understandings of humans, that is to say that we don’t really have free choice or at the extreme end, that we’re not really conscience. These seem to me to be non-starters. And they’re non-starters because in a way they’re self-defeating. So, when science starts to lead us down those paths, it seems to me that religion has something to say. If our moral universe is to have any sense, we have to have a degree of free choice. And I think there are a lot of other assumptions that will have to be taken on as well.
The question is now whether we value what science can deliver to the extent that we think that we don’t need any other moral or theological or values-based reason to engage in science. My worry is that the arguments for the purely utilitarian arguments for science, that is to say that we value science for what it can deliver us, that these might ultimately … I don’t think science can continue to survive because there are a lot of curiosity driven questions. The dangers for science, I think, come from two sources. Firstly, an overly utilitarian understanding of science that says you only study it because it’s going to generate benefits socially, and the other one is that it becomes completely divorced from these fundamental questions of purpose that religion is itself concerned with, and they were the fundamental questions originally which gave science the impetus it needed to be a central features of western civilisation and culture.
The idea that atheism or the idea that science is somehow in partnership with atheism has typically had the consequence that people have dismissed the science as a consequence of that. So, one of the reasons that some religious folks are anti-evolutionary is that they see that evolution is part of a package, a stalking-horse for a set of values that they think are uncongenial and that diminish the dignity of human beings, for example, and that’s really the key concern that they have.
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| Healing the paralitic, part of a mural in the Greek Orthodox Church in Capernaum. |
On fasting (Luke 5:33–35)
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| Jose Benlliure y Gil - Palique y trago (1878) |
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