Level Ag,
Do you truly know anything about history? The purpose of the Crusades was very simple and necessary:
Was the earthly reaction to the proactive aggressions of Islam against Christians and Christendom, and to free the Holy Lands, specifically Jerusalem, from the radical's hands!
The Knights Templar did not bury gnostic gospels and writings al la the Da Vinci Code, but rather they led the fight against Saladin’s evil forces.
To say there is no Biblical reason or scripture to support would be like saying no one should have gone after Hitler or Mussolini! Ridiculous...
Despite the Church's stance and doctrine on Just War and this conflict in Iraq, it is my firm belief that 100, 500, or a 1000 years from now, history will judge this period as the Crusade of the 2nd Millennia. And, I believe Pope BXVI will re-evaluate this circumstance - and in the line of Pope Gregory VII, Leo IX or Innocent III of Crusade times - and he will endorse the these actions in the Mideast along the same lines they did nearly 1000 years ago.
As far as Hahn is concerned, he helped bring me to the Church, so I thank God for him. However, I have soured on some of his purely Biblical justifications and interpretations that do fall outside of the Magisterium and Tradition....
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From the New Oxford Review.. www.newoxfordreview.com
CONVERTS OR "HAHN-VERTS"?
Scott Hahn's Novelties
June 2004
By Edward O'Neill
Edward O’Neill formerly taught religion on the college level.
Scott Hahn deserves much gratitude from the Catholic Church in the U.S. A theology pro-fessor at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Hahn has an infectious enthusiasm for the Catholic faith and a passion for explaining it in ways that ordinary people can understand, via popular audiocassette series, books, newsletters, talks, and appearances on Mother Angelica’s EWTN. Through his efforts, numerous Catholics have come to better understand and appreciate their faith, to develop deeper devotional lives, and to be more excited about being Catholic. Hahn’s enthusiasm for the faith and his clear, simple explanations of it are so powerful that even many non-Catholics have caught the vision and embraced the Catholic faith, leading to countless enthusiastic and dynamic converts.
All this is wonderful. It is cause for praising God and saying a sincere thank you to Hahn for his co-operation with God’s grace. At the same time, there is always room for growth, even for the most experienced presenter of the faith. In Hahn’s case there are factors that hamper him from presenting the faith even better — factors that are cause for concern. These concerns are magnified when one considers that Hahn may be the best-selling author of Catholic theological works in the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of his books have been sold, and their readership consists largely of laymen. Hundreds of thousands of his audiocassettes also have been sold, and tens of thousands watch him regularly on EWTN. When Hahn speaks, laymen listen. Some listen and absorb his ideas so thoroughly that they have begun to call themselves “Hahn-verts.”
Abbreviations for works by Scott Hahn:
RSH: Rome Sweet Home (with Kimberly Hahn);
FCL: First Comes Love;
FKP: A Father Who Keeps His Promises
Hahn the Intrepid
Hahn is a convert from Presbyterianism, and from an unusual theological wing or school within Presbyterianism: theonomy, a school that places much greater emphasis on Old Testament law than is common among most Protestants. As a Presbyterian, Hahn was a pastor of a theonomic church (Trinity Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Va.) and Assistant Professor at a theonomic school (Dominion Theological Institute in Washington, D.C.).
Even within conservative Presbyterianism, theonomy is an uncommon movement, and its adherents are often very much aware of going against the flow. In part because of this, theonomists tend to be theologically intrepid and adventurous, willing to explore ideas that may seem unusual to their peers. The thrill of theological discovery, and the exhilaration of sharing new insights and ideas with one’s fellows, runs strong in theonomist circles. Such open-mindedness can be a good thing; at its best, it can help one to rise above the preconceptions and cultural limitations common in one’s own circle, and to face up to difficulties within one’s worldview commonly glossed over by one’s peers.
Indeed, in Hahn’s case, there can be little doubt that such theological intrepidness was a factor in his conversion to Catholicism, that it helped him to face up to the difficulties inherent in sola scriptura and sola fide, and explore the case for such Catholic distinctives as sacred tradition, magisterial authority, and sacramental and liturgical worship. In his conversion stories Hahn has related how, as a Presbyterian pastor, he was eager to share his “discoveries” about sacramental and liturgical worship with his congregation, who received these with enthusiasm (RSH, p. 44).
Insofar as Hahn’s open-mindedness and enthusiasm for discovery has led him to explore and finally embrace the certitudes of the Catholic faith, it has served him well. However, Hahn’s enthusiasm for theological discovery has also led him, as a Catholic, to advocate ideas that are not so solidly rooted in Catholic tradition. Some of these ideas, in fact, are common in the theonomic Presbyterian circles from which he converted. Others would seem surprising or unusual in almost any circle, and they suggest an ongoing desire not merely to champion what is commonly accepted among orthodox Catholics, but to push the envelope theologically. While many of Hahn’s distinctive ideas fall more or less within the range of opinion permitted in Catholic thought, some, as this article will show, seem very dubious indeed, and a few are of the sort that, in a prior age, might have incurred such censures as “offensive to pious ears,” “suspect,” “rash,” or “proximate to heresy.”
Theology, Hahn-Style
Despite his propensity for creative theology, Hahn has not to date addressed his ideas to an audience of his peers with books or articles of a scholarly nature. All of his publications are written for a popular audience. Since he often presents material on covenantal and redemptive-historical theology, the consequent mix of abstruse subject matter and popular style sometimes makes for odd reading.
Other authors, even great theologians, have tried to convey the profundities of theology in a popularly accessible manner. Still, there can be something a bit comical about the way Hahn juxtaposes the pedestrian and the profound. In his works one encounters statements such as, “Much like Humpty Dumpty after his great fall, the human race cannot mend itself and restore unity through its own efforts alone” (FKP, p. 34), and, referring to the creation of Eve, “The stage was now set for the exciting drama that was about to unfold; except the director realized that something more was needed: a beautiful actress to play the female lead. Yahweh knew just what to do” (FKP, p. 60).
Another reflection of Hahn’s popular approach is his predilection for summarizing his themes with goofy puns in chapter and section headers. Even reviewers otherwise favorably disposed to him have complained about some of these groaners (a legacy of his time as an Evangelical, where this style of rhetoric is quite common). To give just a few examples from his book A Father Who Keeps His Promises, one finds section heads such as “Prime Rib” (referring to the creation of Eve), “Eve of Destruction” (Satan tempts Eve), “Flood, Sweat and Tears” (the Great Flood), “Deviled Ham” (Canaan’s sin), and “Abraham Makes the Cut” (the institution of circumcision). These are matters of style rather than substance, but as we shall see, there are also points of a substantive nature where Hahn’s judgment has been questionable.
Hahn the Fundamentalist?
His preference for popular rather than scholarly forums notwithstanding, Hahn does aspire to a level of academic credibility, and certainly has no wish to be perceived as anti-academic or fundamentalist. The fundamentalist label, in fact, is one to which he seems particularly sensitive. Discussing those who take Genesis 1 as teaching a literal six-day creation, Hahn carefully refrains from endorsing their view but notes: “While many of their critics reply by branding them ‘fundamentalists,’ like most labels, this one isn’t helpful or appropriate” (FKP, p. 39). To deflect similar charges from being made against his own work, Hahn at times appears to couch his views in carefully chosen language. For example, discussing the authorship of the Pentateuch, he writes: “For the sake of simplicity, we will consider the author to be Moses, and his original readers to be those ancient Israelites who received this material from him as part of God’s law (the five books of Moses). Such a traditional approach may seem out of fashion, but it has certain advantages that commend it” (ibid.).
It is understandable that one writing a popular text might prefer “for the sake of simplicity” to speak of the author of the Pentateuch as Moses rather than get dragged into the intractable debate over the sources and composition of the work. The Catechism itself speaks of the Pentateuch simply as “the Law of Moses,” without raising questions of a higher critical sort (#401). Yet it becomes clear that there is for Hahn more involved than considerations of simplicity, for he immediately enumerates several arguments supporting Mosaic authorship, capping them with a startlingly misleading appeal to Church authority: “For one thing, it takes its interpretive cues from the biblical text itself. For another, it has greater explanatory power. In sum, it makes better sense of Genesis, and the whole Pentateuch, for that matter. It also faithfully echoes the living Tradition of the Church, as it has been reaffirmed by the Magisterium” (ibid.).
In a lengthy footnote in which he continues to argue for Mosaic authorship, Hahn states that “the Catholic Church’s official affirmation of the ‘substantive Mosaic authenticity and integrity of the Pentateuch’ was promulgated by the Pontifical Biblical Commission (June 27, 1906).” He adds that “the Catholic Magisterium exemplified prudent flexibility in the way it maintains the traditional view of Mosaic authorship, which is reflected in more recent statements, such as the 1948 letter from Fr. Voste, Secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, to Cardinal Suhard of Paris.” He also asserts that “Decrees issued by the Commission before 1971 were issued as authoritative norms and binding guidelines for Catholic exegetes, though not strictly or necessarily infallible per se.”
From a Catholic theologian and exegete such as Hahn, this set of deliverances is startling. The binding force of the early decrees of the Pontifical Biblical Commission are universally acknowledged, even among conservative churchmen, to have entirely lapsed. The 1948 letter specifically retracted the force of the 1906 reply on Mosaic authorship, saying it was “in no way a hindrance to further truly scientific examination” of the question; thus it is impossible to say that the Church “maintains the traditional view of Mosaic authorship” (note Hahn’s present tense). Far from the early decrees “not [being] strictly or necessarily infallible per se,” they are not infallible at all.
If Hahn wishes as an exegete to maintain the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, that is his prerogative. But he should do so straightforwardly, not equivocating about the fact, not arguing that he speaks in a traditional manner for reasons of simplicity, and not misstating the Church’s position on the matter. He might thereby open himself to charges of fundamentalism, but other elements in his writing are sure to attract those charges anyway.
Hahn the Eccentric
In popular audiocassette sets (The Book of Hebrews, Salvation History), Hahn maintains on the basis of Jewish legend that the priest-king Melchizedek from Genesis 15 is actually Noah’s son Shem under another name. Hahn does not tell us why Genesis would introduce a character under one name and then four chapters later begin referring to him by another name without explanation. Yet the identity of the two technically is possible if Shem literally lived to be six hundred years old, as the genealogy of Genesis 11 states, and if the genealogy contains no substantive gaps, so that Shem survived to Abraham’s day. Still, the Shem-Melchizedek identity is a startling claim for a Catholic biblical scholar to assert, and one likely to attract charges of fundamentalism, for the genealogical literalism needed to make the identification would mean that the human race only dates to 4000 B.C.
Though the kind of literalism needed to identify Shem and Melchizedek may be characteristic of fundamentalism, few fundamentalists would follow Hahn in equating the two biblical figures. This is one of a number of areas in which Hahn maintains ideas so unusual that they scarcely find any advocates among biblical exegetes.
Another such area concerns Hahn’s view of the Fall of Adam. He notes that Genesis does not record Adam as having objected to eating the forbidden fruit and queries why, claiming that “there must have been another reason why Adam kept silent. But what is it? Fear of suffering death. And how can we know that? By going back and reading between the lines, by carefully listening again not only to what the serpent explicitly stated but also what he meant to imply.”
Hahn continues: “He said, ‘You will not die.’ And that defiant contradiction hung in the air until slowly the serpent’s meaning became clear: ‘You will not die — if you eat the fruit….’ In other words, Satan used the form of a life-threatening serpent, with his evil stealth, to deliver what Adam rightly took to be a thinly veiled threat to his life, which it was from the outset” (FKP, p. 69).
In other words, the serpent was not deceiving Adam and Eve into thinking they would not die, but threatening them with death if they refused to eat. Hahn is confident that this is the reason why Adam does not appear to object to the serpent’s claim (the possibility that Adam was tempted and gave in to temptation is something Hahn does not raise). He tells us: “This alone explains Adam’s silence. As the strategy of the serpent became clear, Adam had to make a dreadful choice. Would he stand up for his bride by engaging the diabolical serpent in mortal combat? Or would he try to cling to his cherished estate in Eden, with its many delights, such as earthly dominion, immortality, impassibility, and integrity?” (ibid.).
Hahn suggests that the serpent was not the devil appearing as a mere legless lizard but was, in fact, a dragon or other horrible monster (FKP, p. 66; FCL, p. 70). According to Hahn, Adam’s response should have been to engage the serpent/dragon in mortal combat, being willing to sacrifice his immortal life: “Knowing the serpent’s power, Adam was unwilling to lay down his own life — for the sake of his love of God, or to save the life of his beloved. That refusal to sacrifice was Adam’s original sin” (FCL, p. 70).
It is not clear how such a self-sacrificing, dragon-slaying, “knight in shining armor” view of the Fall might be harmonized with the Catechism’s statement that “As long as he remained in the divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die” (#376). But Hahn thinks that the devil did have the power to kill Adam: “In choosing to save their natural life — the only thing the devil really had the power to take — Adam and Eve chose to die spiritually” (FCL, p. 71; emphasis added). He also states that the Catechism “spells out” that Satan had power not only to seduce Adam, “but also to harm him physically and spiritually” and cites numbers 394 and 395 (FCL, p. 69). Neither reference, however, indicates that Satan had the power to physically harm man before the Fall. At best, Hahn simply assumes that Satan must have had in Eden the same power he had afterward.
Hahn’s interpretive novelties are not confined to the book of Genesis. They are found elsewhere, including the Gospels. For example, he devotes considerable book space (FKP, pp. 228-233) and a popular audiocassette (The Fourth Cup) to identifying the “fourth cup” of the Jewish Passover liturgy with the sponge of vinegar that Jesus drank on the Cross.
Today the Jewish Passover rite involves the drinking of four cups of wine, and Hahn claims that this was the custom in Jesus’ day as well. He argues that in celebrating the Last Supper, Jesus used only three cups of wine, and declared that He would not drink further of the fruit of the vine “until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mk. 14:25), prematurely ending the Passover meal. This was supposed to be a shocking event. Hahn states that for those familiar with the Passover, “Jesus’ skipping the fourth cup is almost the practical equivalent of a priest’s omitting the words of Consecration at Mass or forgetting Communion! In sum, the fundamental purpose of the liturgy was seemingly overlooked!” (FKP, p. 230). In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked the Father to let “this cup” pass from Him, refused on the Cross to drink wine mixed with myrrh, and finally — in His last moments of life — drinking from a sponge full of vinegar cried, “It is finished” (Jn. 19:30). According to Hahn, “the ‘IT’ that was finished was the Passover that Jesus had begun — but interrupted — in the Upper Room! And its completion was marked by the sign of Jesus’ drinking the sour wine, the fourth cup!” (FKP, p. 233).
While an interesting idea, Hahn’s account depends on uncertainties. One is the existence of four cups in the standard first-century Palestinian Passover meal. (Although the fourth cup is attested in later Jewish texts, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in A.D. 70, and the period of upheaval and subsequent standardization within Jewish religious life that followed, is a sufficiently formidable historical fault line to warrant caution about retrojecting liturgical norms of later centuries into the second temple era.)
Another uncertainty is the idea that Jesus used only three cups and then stopped the ritual. This is not easy to establish. Matthew and Mark mention only one cup (the one used in the Eucharist), and Luke mentions only two. This means that at least one other cup would have to be omitted on Hahn’s account, and if we have the omission of at least one cup, why couldn’t another cup have been omitted? It is possible that two earlier cups were omitted so that the Eucharistic cup was the fourth cup, just as it is possible that both an earlier and a later cup were omitted.
Hahn argues (FKP, p. 229) that Mark’s mention that the Apostles sang a hymn before going to the Mount of Olives would mean they were singing of the Great Hallel (Ps. 114-118) after the third cup. But this is not clear. Mark says that they sang a hymn, not those five psalms. The hymn that was sung could have been one sung after the fourth cup. It also is not clear that Jesus’ statement about not drinking from the fruit of the vine was at the end of the meal. Luke reports Him saying this before the Eucharistic cup (Lk. 22:17-20). Further, in Matthew, He says that He will not drink of the fruit of the vine until He drinks it “new with you” (Mt. 26:29). Did the Apostles also drink from the vinegar sponge? And when Jesus says “fruit of the vine,” does that include vinegar (Greek, ozos) in addition to wine (Greek, oinos)?
Jesus’ comment, “It is finished,” is found only in John’s Gospel, which Hahn alleges refers back to the end of the Passover liturgy of the Last Supper. John’s Gospel is distinguished from the other three by its not including an account of the Passover liturgy during the Last Supper. How likely is it that John understood Jesus’ words to refer to the Passover meal celebrated on the night before He died, yet deliberately chose not to mention that Passover meal in his account?
Even if the first-century Palestinian Passover meal typically included four cups, to what extent can it be seen as a model for Jesus’ celebration of the Passover at the Last Supper? While it is possible that omitting the fourth cup may have been as shocking to some as a priest omitting the words of Consecration, it can scarcely have been as arresting as Jesus including these words for the Apostles: The Messiah commanded them to eat His flesh and drink His blood (and in so doing inaugurated the New Covenant promised by Jeremiah), so it would be clear to the Apostles that the purpose and structure of the meal had been so radically altered that parallels to other Passover meals will be very limited. In view of these uncertainties, it is difficult to see why Hahn would devote so much time and energy to this subject — particularly in popular works whose audiences will be ill-equipped to evaluate the plausibility of his hypothesis.
While the Shem-Melchizedek identification may strike many as bizarre, the Adam-as-dragonslayer interpretation as colorful, and the fourth cup ruminations as interesting but speculative, one of Hahn’s interpretive novelties will strike many as simply incomprehensible: his view of the Millennium.
When it comes to the interpretation of biblical prophecy, Hahn is a preterist. This means that he believes most biblical prophecies have already been fulfilled, including some of the ones most commonly thought to refer to the future. This view is uncommon in contemporary Protestantism but is quite common in the theonomic movement from which Hahn converted. Indeed, some (referring to themselves as “consistent preterists”) even claim that the prophecy of the Second Coming has been fulfilled and that there are no remaining biblical prophecies to fulfill.
Hahn does not go this far. He subscribes to a “partial preterism,” which holds that the Second Coming and Final Judgment are still future events. Still, in one area, he goes beyond what is common among partial preterists. In a popular audiocassette set (The End: A Study of the Book of Revelation), Hahn maintains that the Millennium spoken of in Revelation 20 is neither a present nor a future reality but a past one. According to him, the Millennium ended nearly 2,000 years ago. He identifies it with the literal millennium following the coronation of King David, c. 1000 B.C., and so it occurred almost entirely before the time of Christ. This is not only different from the traditional Catholic view, which follows St. Augustine in seeing the Millennium as the whole of the Church age, it is virtually unheard of, as well as seemingly impossible to derive from the text of Revelation.
As striking as these interpretive novelties may be, there are even more significant novelties in Hahn’s work. These concern his two overarching themes: covenant and family.
Covenant
It would not be unexpected for a man of Hahn’s background to place a special emphasis on the concept of covenant. One of the major distinctives of conservative Presbyterianism is its “covenant theology,” which is a (or the) major alternative to dispensationalism in American Evangelicalism. Hahn himself became convinced of the importance of the idea of covenant long before his conversion to Catholicism — so convinced that in his first year in college (at Grove City College, a Presbyterian institution) he made a striking resolution: “I decided then, my freshman year, that the covenant would be the focus of my study for all future class papers and projects. And I followed through on it. In fact, after four years of studying the covenant, I determined that it was really the overarching theme of the entire Bible” (RSH, p. 17).
Hahn is still making good on his youthful commitment. He has continued to make “the covenant” one of the major themes in his writings, accompanied by the characteristic idiom of covenant theology. One will note that Hahn speaks of “the covenant” without qualification. This is typical of covenant theology, which envisions human interaction with God as being governed by a single, overarching covenant, though covenant theologians disagree over the particulars of this covenant. Also unclear is the precise relationship that “the covenant” has with the particular covenants recorded in Scripture, such as those God made with Noah, Moses, and David, or the one made through Jesus. The particular covenants are viewed as related to “the covenant,” yet in some sense as distinct from it. Thus Hahn writes: “From my reading, I was convinced that the key to understanding the Bible was the idea of the covenant [singular]. It’s there on every page — with God making one in every age!” (FKP, pp. 15-16).
Speaking of “the covenant” is not the only characteristic of the idiom. The term “covenant” itself becomes a buzzword, and one finds it used regularly as an adjective (the word itself, not “covenantal”), often when it seems superfluous. Thus in Hahn’s writings one often reads of “God’s covenant family,” “covenant love,” “covenant faithfulness,” “covenant kinship,” “covenant acts,” and “covenant oneness.”
Not everything in Hahn’s books is typical of covenant theology. One major element is unique and serves as the bridge to the second major theme in his thought: family. According to Hahn, covenants involve the creation of kinship bonds between the participants. To enter into a covenant with someone is to establish a family relationship with him. Hahn explains: “In the Protestant tradition, covenants and contracts were understood as two words describing the same thing. But studying the Old Testament led me to see that, for the ancient Hebrews, covenants and contracts were very different. In Scripture, contracts simply involved the exchange of property, whereas covenants involved the exchange of persons, so as to form sacred family bonds. Kinship was thus formed by covenant. (Understood from its Old Testament background, the concept of covenant wasn’t theoretical or abstract.) In fact, covenant kinship was stronger than biological kinship; the deeper meaning of divine covenants in the Old Testament was God’s fathering of Israel as his own family” (RSH, p. 30).
To explain the difference between covenant and contract, Hahn often uses a comparison between a prostitute (with whom one might have a contract) and a wife (with whom one has a covenant). The difference between a prostitute and a wife is taken as emblematic of the difference between contract and covenant.
Hahn omits in the above-quoted explanation that it is not only within the Protestant tradition but in the Catholic one as well that covenants are regarded as contracts, or a special kind of contract: a sacred one. Since God or the gods were called as witnesses to (and enforcers of) ancient Near Eastern covenants, they lent the agreements a sacred character lacking in ordinary, secular contracts. This alone would distinguish them from ordinary business agreements, without the need to postulate the creation of kinship ties as a distinguishing mark.
It is true that the marriage covenant creates a family relationship, but it is unique among covenants in doing so, and one must proceed with caution. The use and awareness of covenants has declined dramatically in Western society, and the marriage covenant is the last one remaining to any extent in the popular mind. As a result, exegetes from our culture seeking to understand the ancient Near Eastern concept of covenant may rely too much on their understanding of the marriage covenant as a model. It is not enough to contrast a wife to a prostitute and conclude that this was a defining difference between covenant and contract to the ancients.
Most biblical scholars who have written on the subject of covenant do not use the marriage covenant as their primary model for understanding the ones found in the Bible. They use another ancient form of covenant: the suzerainty treaty. Archaeology has produced a large number of these from ancient Near Eastern sites, and biblical interpreters have been struck by the similarities they display to the covenants found in Scripture, with which they share common elements of form and content. The Sinai covenant is particularly noteworthy in this regard, and seems to be modeled after suzerainty treaties, depicting Yahweh as the suzerain and Israel as His vassal state.
To what extent did such treaties create kinship ties? In ancient suzerainty treaties one might find poetic references to the overlord “being a father to” his vassals in return for obedient subjection, but this was more akin to a mafioso offering “protection” to businesses in his territory. If the vassals violated their obligations, they were a conquered people who would be dealt with harshly.
Hebrew society was organized in a patriarchal manner and social integration involved the creation of putative kinship ties with those being integrated into society. This was a legal procedure comparable to adoption. But to what degree did suzerainty treaties establish kinship ties? What precise kinship relationship did such covenants establish? Do we find vassal states regularly and non-metaphorically described as the “sons” or “brothers” of their conquering overlord? Are they duly inscribed in the appropriate slots in his genealogy? If, as Hahn asserts, “covenant kinship was stronger than biological kinship” (ibid., emphasis added), did overlords really show preference to their vassals over their own sons and their own people? Of course not.
If covenants other than matrimony create kinship ties by their nature, why don’t we see people who form covenants with each other in the Bible displaying an awareness of this? The biblical texts display an absence of kinship consciousness in the forming of covenants. Why don’t we see biologically unrelated covenant partners of the biblical patriarchs (such as Abimelech of Gerar) inscribed in the numerous genealogies of Israel that the Old Testament contains? Why do people who are biologically related to each other (such as Laban and Jacob) form covenants with each other? Aren’t their duties toward each other already dictated by the kinship they have — or do covenants deal with something besides kinship?
All of this is not to say that some kind of broader kinship dimension to covenants may not be defensible, but such a dimension is not obvious — or it would not have escaped the notice of biblical interpreters for so long. There is also the fact that in his books and audiocassettes, Hahn presents this alleged kinship dimension to his audience in flat-footed form, as if it were an established and unquestioned fact. Since he is not writing for an audience of fellow biblical scholars, his readers and listeners are not in a position to evaluate what he says, and one wonders how responsible it is for a scholar to behave in this manner. If conservative Catholics do not like liberals conveying higher critical speculation to biblically uneducated audiences as “the assured results of modern scholarship,” is it any more legitimate for Hahn to do the same thing with his conjectures?
Family
By identifying the central theme of Scripture as covenant (rather than, e.g., “God” or “Christ”) and by making the concept of covenant essentially familial in nature, Hahn uses covenant and family as the lens through which to view all biblical and theological concepts. For example, the covenant-family paradigm is used to explain the concept of justification. Hahn writes: “What I discovered was that the New Covenant established a new worldwide family in which Christ shared His own divine sonship, making us children of God. As a covenant act, being justified meant sharing in the grace of Christ as God’s sons and daughters…. Luther and Calvin explained this exclusively in terms of courtroom language. But I was beginning to see that as more than simply being a judge, God was our Father. Far more than simply being criminals, we were runaways. Far more than the New Covenant being made in a courtroom, it was fashioned by God in a family room” (RSH, p. 30).
Allowance must be made for poetic license. The Hebrews did not typically cut covenants in “family rooms” (or the equivalent in ancient Hebrew architecture). It is also true that divine sonship is a major theme of New Testament soteriology (the doctrine of salvation as effected by Jesus) and that some of Jesus’ parables concern the relationship of fathers and sons. Hahn could even appeal to the fact that the Council of Trent says that justification involves “a translation…to the state of grace and of the adoption of the sons of God.” Yet it is not true that Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers entirely divorced sonship from justification. Neither did Trent focus on sonship as the key to understanding justification. Nor is the courtroom metaphor absent from New Testament soteriology — Jesus having been commissioned by God as the Judge of all mankind — and His parables concern masters and slaves as often as they do fathers and sons. It does not adequately represent the texts of Scripture or Church teaching to allow the concept of sonship to consume the doctrine of soteriology and exclude or reinterpret the other concepts used to describe it, including the legal and servile ones.
Anyone familiar with Hahn’s works knows that they are relentlessly autobiographical. Even setting aside Rome Sweet Home (his and his wife’s autobiography), the pages of his works are peppered with references to his family (“Boy meets girl. Adam meets Eve. Scott meets Kimberly. You know the story,” FCL, p. 7), as well as anecdotes about it. These sometimes reveal more about the domestic life of the Hahns than one might wish to know, particularly when the marital act or childbirth is involved. Their inclusion might be defended as a way of keeping the text from boring the reader, but it is clear from the content of the anecdotes that the concept of family is very important to Hahn.
This is obviously a good thing in itself, yet, given the overriding importance of family in his writings and his theology, one cannot help wondering to what degree his theology may be shaped by his own feelings about his family. By intertwining theology and his family to the degree he does, one cannot help but wonder about the extent to which the two influence each other when one reads statements such as “my children have no trouble grasping what I mean when I call their mom the Holy Spirit of our home” (FCL, p. 130) or “It was no longer merely theological speculation. Just weeks before, Kimberly had given birth to our son, Michael. I’ll never forget the feeling of becoming a father for the first time. I looked at my child and realized that the life-giving power of the covenant was more than a theory” (RSH, p. 48).
The Apotheosis of the Paradigm
When one has conceived of a paradigm (or master key) that one is convinced has tremendous explanatory power, there is a tendency to try to apply it to many different situations. When that paradigm is theological in nature and bound up with such naturally powerful emotions as Hahn’s paradigm is, one wonders how far the paradigm will be pushed. If it is the master key to the Bible, will it be the master key to understanding God Himself? For Hahn, the answer is yes. He applies the covenant-family paradigm directly to the Godhead.
Hahn’s recent, controversial book First Comes Love is subtitled Finding Your Family in the Church and the Trinity. This may be more revealing than intended. By applying the covenant-family paradigm to the Godhead — and in particular by identifying the role of his own wife with the role of the Holy Spirit — Hahn indeed is finding his own family in the Trinity.
As early as his first book, Hahn was describing God as a family: “When God made man, male and female, the first command He gave them was to be fruitful and multiply. This was to image God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three in one, the Divine Family” (RSH, p. 28). By his second book, Hahn had added the other component of the paradigm, describing God as a covenant: “As you study Scripture, you’ll see how covenant laws are not arbitrary stipulations but fixed moral principles which govern the moral order. Moreover, they reflect the inner life of the Blessed Trinity. In short, ‘covenant’ is what God does because ‘covenant’ is who God is” (FKP, p. 29). In a section titled “The Trinity Is the Eternal Covenant Family,” Hahn fuses the two halves of the paradigm together: “The Trinity is the eternal and original covenant family. As Pope John Paul II writes: ‘God in His deepest mystery is not a solitude, but a family, since He has in Himself fatherhood, sonship and the essence of the family, which is love.’ The Trinity is the eternal source and perfect standard of the covenant; when God makes and keeps covenants with His people, He’s just being true to himself. In short, ‘covenant’ is what God does because ‘covenant’ is who God is” (FKP, p. 36).
In First Comes Love, Hahn fleshes this out even further, identifying the Persons of the Trinity with the members of a human family. Specifically, he attributes a “bridal-maternal” role to the Holy Spirit: “As we’ve seen again and again, we learn Who God is from what God does — from the works of creation and revelation. Thus, what we said earlier of the Trinity in general, we apply here to the Persons of the Godhead: By divine actions that are bridal and maternal, we may come to discern a divine bridal-maternity in the Holy Spirit” (FCL, p. 138). This is the basis of Hahn’s claim to his children that their mother is “the Holy Spirit of our home.”
By making this kind of claim, Hahn is succumbing to a predictable tendency: Since families typically consist of a father, a mother, and offspring, since we know that the Godhead contains three Persons, and since we already know that two of them are revealed to us as the Father and the Son, it is predictable that people in our culture will ask whether the Holy Spirit can be read as the Mother in a divine Family. For one powerfully convinced of something like the covenant-family paradigm, there will be a strong impulse toward answering this question in the affirmative.
Hahn gives the appearance of balking at least partially at this logic. He writes: “I must raise a caution here. This does not mean that we call God ‘Mother’; divine revelation does not call God by that name. Nor is it found anywhere in the Church’s living Tradition” (ibid.). This caution seems intended in part to deflect criticism of Hahn as having gone over to the feminist side. Yet Hahn has phrased himself carefully. While he says that we should not “call God ‘Mother,’” he nowhere says that the Person of the Holy Spirit cannot be called this. But nothing in Scripture or Tradition tells us to call the Holy Spirit “Mother,” so Hahn goes out of his way to adduce passages from Scripture and later Christian writings that he thinks document the “bridal-maternal character” of the Holy Spirit. It may be significant that he here notes that the Church’s Tradition is “living.” Perhaps he is holding open the door for a future magisterial blessing of his proposition.
What is one to make of Hahn’s application of the covenant-family paradigm to the Godhead? It is hard to determine what Hahn intends by referring to the Trinity as a covenant. He describes at some length the fact that God makes covenants, but he is strangely silent on what it means for the Trinity itself to be a covenant. Since a covenant is a form of agreement that is (at least ostensibly) entered into freely by separate parties, perhaps the most charitable thing that one can say is that Hahn’s unqualified description of God as a covenant is profoundly disturbing.
This is one of Hahn’s positions that in a prior age would have earned such censures as “offensive to pious ears,” “rash,” “suspect,” or even “proximate to heresy,” for it suggests that the unity of the Triune God results from an agreement entered into by the three separate divine Persons. At least Hahn doesn’t explain himself enough to rule out such an interpretation. What he probably means to say is that the communion of persons, however limited it may be, that comes about as a result of a covenant entered into by human beings, is analogous to the communion of Persons that God is as Trinity, even though differences between covenants and the Triune God are vastly greater than the similarities between them. Unfortunately, this is not what Hahn says.
What of the description of God as a family? Here Hahn is on somewhat safer ground, and makes regular use of the above-quoted passage from John Paul II to drive the point home. Yet this is a single quotation, and not from a highly authoritative papal document. It is from an address that the pontiff gave at the Puebla conference in 1979, and John Paul has not made this idea a keynote of his teaching on the family or the Trinity. If he had, there would be more quotations — and more authoritative ones — to use. Moreover, this quotation does not fit the kind of Trinitarian Family that Hahn postulates, for in saying that God “has in Himself fatherhood, sonship and the essence of the family, which is love,” the Pontiff gives the traditional view of the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son as their mutual act of Love, not as a “bridal-maternal” Person.
Subsequently, John Paul II has addressed the same subject in a document of more weight and with more reserve. In his 1994 Letter to Families, he wrote: “Human fatherhood and motherhood, while remaining biologically similar to that of other living beings in nature, contain in an essential and unique way a ‘likeness’ to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love (communio personarum). In the light of the New Testament it is possible to discern how the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of His life. The divine ‘We’ is the eternal pattern of the human ‘we’, especially of that ‘we’ formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness” (#6). Stating that the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God is different from saying that God Himself is a family, just as saying that the primordial model of any good may be sought in God without identifying Him as that good.
Finally, what of Hahn’s contention that the Holy Spirit has a “bridal-maternal character”? In the relevant chapter of First Comes Love, Hahn mounts a number of arguments that are remarkable for their weakness. This is particularly apparent when he attempts to marshal a biblical case for his thesis. He claims, for example, that “As a mother feeds her children, so the Spirit feeds the children of God with spiritual milk. As a mother groans in labor, so the Spirit groans to give us life” — yet there are no biblical passages which state that the Spirit feeds Christians with spiritual milk or that the Spirit groans in giving them new birth (apparently a conflation of Rom. 8:22, which speaks of creation groaning as in childbirth, with Rom. 8:26, which speaks of the Spirit interceding for us with groans, but with no mention of childbirth).
Hahn attempts to cite saints and theologians in favor of his thesis, yet some are being taken demonstrably out of context and the remainder are insufficient to provide a stable foundation in Christian Tradition for ascribing a “bridal-maternal character” to the Holy Spirit. One gets the feeling that they are not being adduced so much to provide evidence for the position as to provide a shield against criticism.
The specific arguments Hahn produces have been ably critiqued by his friend and colleague Monica Migliorino Miller (“The Gender of the Holy Trinity,” NEW OXFORD REVIEW, May 2003, pp. 27-35), so I will not offer an extensive response to them here. But I will make a few points that I wish Hahn would respond to, should he ever choose to defend his position in print.
First, if one wishes to see the Holy Spirit as having a “bridal-maternal character,” what are the implications of this for the Spirit’s relationship to the other two Persons of the Trinity? Hahn tells us that “the eternal personhood of the Spirit cannot be made to depend on a creature, no matter how exalted (e.g., Mary), since that would imply absurd or impossible notions” (FCL, p. 208). Therefore, if the Spirit has bridal and maternal aspects, they must be in reference to the other two Persons. Brides have husbands and mothers have children, so which of the other two Persons is the Husband and which is the Child? There seem to be only two possible combinations. One is that the Father is the Husband of the Spirit and the Son is the Child. Yet this would contradict what we already know about the processions within the Godhead, since the Son proceeds from the Father alone (without the aid of a maternal principle), and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The second combination would be that the Son is the Husband of the Spirit and the Father is the Child. This also contradicts what we know about the processions in the Godhead, since the Father proceeds from no one.
One might even go so far as to say, given the traditional understanding of the relationships among the three Persons of the Trinity, that if one were bound and determined to find a maternal principle in the Trinity, one would have to look not to the Spirit but to the Son, and that the Holy Spirit must be seen as the “fruit” of the love of God the Father and the “bridal-maternal” Son. Yet the third Person has been revealed to us as “Spirit” rather than as “Son” of the second Person and “Grandson” of the first Person.
Honoring the known processions of the Trinity while viewing the Holy Spirit as “bridal-maternal” results in further absurdities. In Hahn’s paradigm, the Trinity must certainly represent the only Family in existence in which a Father and a Son co-operate to have a Mother!
Hahn sketches a parallel between the procession of the Spirit from the Son and the Father and the creation of Eve from the side of Adam, who was created by God (FCL, p. 135). This preserves the genders he wants and the sequence of Persons, but it still poses problems for the alleged “bridal-maternal character” of the Spirit. Eve was Adam’s wife. Is the Spirit the wife of the Son? And without reference to the created order, with regard to Whom is the Spirit maternal? God?
Second, why does Hahn balk at calling the Spirit “Mother”? If his children’s mom is “the Holy Spirit of our home,” why cannot the Holy Spirit be “the Mom of the Holy Trinity”? Hahn tells us repeatedly, in work after work, that what God does is the key to understanding who God is, so if he can discern by the Holy Spirit’s actions that He (She?) has a “bridal-maternal character,” then why can’t these adjectives be turned into nouns? Why shouldn’t the Spirit be called Bride and Mother? Is the reason simply that floating this suggestion would be too hot to handle for Hahn?
Third, how would Hahn respond to magisterial statements that have a bearing on his theory? In his apostolic letter on the dignity of women, John Paul underscored the limits of the analogies by which masculine and feminine qualities are attributed to God in Scripture. He then stressed that the “eternal mystery of divine generation” joining the Son to the Father “has neither ‘masculine’ nor ‘feminine’ qualities” (Mulieris Dignitatem, #8).
John Paul went on to say that “All ‘generating’ in the created world is to be likened to this absolute and uncreated model. Thus every element of human generation which is proper to man, and every element which is proper to woman, namely human ‘fatherhood’ and ‘motherhood,’ bears within itself a likeness to, or analogy with the divine ‘generating’ and with that ‘fatherhood’ which in God is ‘totally different’ — that is, completely spiritual and divine in essence; whereas in the human order, generation is proper to the ‘unity of the two’” (ibid.). If the Holy Father is correct in this, it would undercut the need Hahn has of seeing a maternal or “motherhood” principle in the Trinity separate from the eternal generation flowing from the Father.
The Catechism warns: “Before we make our own this first exclamation of the Lord’s Prayer, we must humbly cleanse our hearts of certain false images drawn ‘from this world.’… The purification of our hearts has to do with paternal or maternal images, stemming from our personal and cultural history, and influencing our relationship with God. God our Father transcends the categories of the created world. To impose our own ideas in this area ‘upon him’ would be to fabricate idols to adore or pull down. To pray to the Father is to enter into his mystery as he is and as the Son has revealed him to us” (#2779).
Hahn quotes this passage (FCL, p. 10), yet he seems oblivious to the relevance of its warning to his own situation. Taken at face value, it would seem that the warning is intended to prevent precisely the kind of reading into God of “paternal or maternal images” which Hahn performs. If so, then in the Catechism’s words, he has succumbed to the temptation “to fabricate idols to adore or pull down” by refusing to enter into the mystery of the Trinity as the Son has revealed it to us.
Hahn in Context
Hahn writes of a particular point in his time in Protestant ministry: “I was eager to share what I thought were novel, innovative insights” (RSH, p. 43). Given the number of “novel, innovative insights” in his recent works — the Shem-Melchizedek identity, the dragonslayer model of the Fall of Man, the fourth cup, the Millennium as past event, the covenant-kinship model, “family room” soteriology, the idea that God is “the eternal covenant family,” and the “bridal-maternal character” of the Holy Spirit — it would seem these words are as applicable to his work today as they were in his theonomist Presbyterian days.
Some of Hahn’s ideas continue to reflect things common in theonomy. These include his passion for making the Old Testament relevant today and his literalistic readings in Genesis and other Old Testament texts. His preterism is a commonplace of theonomic thought, though his interpretation of the Millennium is not (theonomists are generally postmillennial, meaning that they believe in the Millennium as a future age in which the world is thoroughly Christianized, though one that precedes rather than follows the Second Coming).
Other distinctives of Hahn’s thought (the fourth cup, the “bridal-maternal character” of the Holy Spirit) are not attested in theonomic writings to my knowledge, but they do reflect the propensity of those in the theonomist subculture for theological and exegetical derring-do. Many theonomists employ a hermeneutic known as “interpretive maximalism,” according to which small details found in one Scripture passage may be used to connect with larger biblical themes and symbols in an almost stream-of-consciousness fashion. Some of Hahn’s argumentation bears similarities to this technique, as when he claims that “the Spirit groans to give us life” (FCL, p. 131) in defense of his “bridal-maternal” interpretation of the Holy Spirit.
The theonomic movement is associated with “Christian Reconstructionism,” whose key writers have been R.J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen, and Gary North. The major idea of the movement is that the Old Testament is far more relevant to the lives of Christians than is generally supposed among Protestants. In particular, theonomy (“God’s Law”) holds that the Old Law is binding except where it is expressly modified by the New Testament. According to Reconstructionism, every area of life and every culture on earth needs to be brought into conformity with God’s Law. As a result, advocates of this school of thought argue for a slow Christianization of modern society that would result in a New Testament-modified version of the Old Testament laws being brought into force. This is seen as involving the curbing of religious liberty and increased use of the death penalty for a wide range of offenses mentioned in the Old Testament. Though controversial even within the movement, the execution of incorrigible youth (based on Deut. 21:18-21) and the reintroduction of a form of slavery (based on a variety of Old Testament texts) are supported by many theonomists.
It should be pointed out that Hahn has not advocated these. Indeed, his recent works are largely devoid of political thought, so his views on them are unknown. But this is the school in which he received much of his formation as a Protestant, and the theonomy connection explains many of Hahn’s distinctives. One may wonder whether this background continues to play an undue role in his thought and in his professional comportment, particularly his propensity for rushing novel ideas to the public in popular books and audiocassettes rather than prudently circulating them for criticism and examination among his peers.
Hahn’s approach raises concerns regarding the enthusiasm with which he goes beyond commonly accepted principles of Catholic belief into the realm of the speculative or dubious. A basic principle of Catholic theology, expounded by the Fathers, is great caution in regard to novelty. A Catholic Scripture scholar would be well advised to broach significant new insights tentatively, with many scholarly qualifications, in an academic forum where they can be sifted by fellow professionals. By contrast, it is the theonomic firebrand’s mode of operation to rush dramatic novelties before the masses via popular books, audiocassettes, and newsletters.
Hahn needs to engage the academic world and allow his ideas to be tested. Thus far he has not done so. Because he has presented them only in popular works, few public critiques of them have been offered. Hahn has chosen not to respond to these few critiques, and the only responses to them have been defenses published by others (some by people outraged that Hahn would be subject to any criticism). One was an article published in the National Catholic Register by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, a close friend of Hahn’s and the man who received him into the Church (see NOR, Sept. 2002, pp. 23-25, and Dec. 2002, pp. 40-44). One hopes that this defense by Bishop Bruskewitz was a motu proprio (i.e., on his own initiative) and that Hahn did not solicit it. Catholic Scripture scholars do not seek protection from popular bishops when their ideas are critiqued. They take their lumps, they stand up to defend their own ideas; one waits to see if Hahn will defend his. He needs to do so if he feels that defenses of them can be mounted; otherwise, he should retract them or at least cease promoting them to popular audiences that will uncritically accept them. (I am aware of only one case where Hahn has responded to criticism. He wrote a letter to the editor of America magazine [Mar. 1, 2004], taking exception to an article by a liberal Catholic on the new apologists where he was mentioned in passing. He corrected one small error and complained that the author had placed him “at the far right of the contemporary Catholic theological continuum,” which Hahn denies.)
None of this is to take away from the great good Hahn has done. His enthusiasm for the faith and the Bible and for making it relevant to the lives of ordinary Christians has provided enormous benefit to many. Yet Hahn still has cause for caution, reflection, and re-evaluation. The popular audience he customarily addresses is in no way prepared to evaluate Hahn’s speculations, and many in that audience are certain to absorb them uncritically. It is well known that many have converted to the Catholic faith through Hahn’s efforts. Yet, as the man might himself put it, Christ wishes us to make converts, not “Hahn-verts.”
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