March 2008 Archives

“Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior.”
Isaiah 45:15

We Catholics take 2 Timothy 3:16 very much to heart. “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” The key here is the all Scripture part. To look at what the New Testament says is fine, but we need to look at all the Scriptures to get a good foundation for the Eucharist. Therefore, our first stop will be deeper in the past, in the Old Testament.

Thusly we begin…

I’m going to take a break until after Easter. I’ll be back on Monday with the first of the Sacraments posts.

Happy Easter everyone!

Thanks to all who voted for me in the Catholic Blog Awards - especially those that I’m not related to by blood or marriage. I somehow managed to triple my vote count from last year!

The results are now available.

What to expect…

First we explore the Eucharist. I foresee four posts on this particular topic, but that may change as time goes on. I have four working drafts in play right now, so I may change some elements as I work through the early versions. The first post is almost done.

Objections might wait till the end of the line. That way we make sure all the details are in before we start working through the objections. I may post a 5th piece, just as a sounding board for any objections that come up. But, then again, I may not. Readership is still very low, so there may not be enough objections to warrant a whole post.

Again, this may change as I go along, but right now I think the table of contents for the first set will look something like this:

1 – Foreshadowing
2 – Establishment & Form
3 – The Bread of Life
4 – The View of the Early Church

When I started this series of posts, I had planned to use only text available in the average Protestant Bible. Obviously, I’m going against this in number 4. However, after getting into the outline, and starting the drafts, I felt that we should also look at the Sacraments as the early Christians looked at them. The importance of this will be explained later.

Each of the Sacraments will be handled in much the same way…I think.

I seem to be having some formatting issues with the new layout. I’m not sure why, but lots of text looks like it’s bold, while other sections of text look like is thin as a reed. It looks better on Safari, but really kinda pathetic on Internet Explorer. The blockquotes also look kinda odd.

Anybody else out there on different browsers seeing different font weights?

I want to begin a detailed discussion of the Sacraments. This post will serve as an introduction, and the whole series will probably take many months; in fact, I can see a situation where it might take more than a year to finish. We’re going to delve back into the original Greek in some cases, and look closely at the biblical origins of the Sacraments in detail.

Thusly we begin...

Our word "sacrament" comes from the Latin “sacramentum”. Sacramentum is an interesting word with a couple of meanings that are important to Catholics.

Sacramentum in Latin means “oath”. The sacramentum was sworn by the soldiers or Rome’s Legions to bind them to their duty. It was also used much as we use an oath today in court. Two litigants would swear the sacramentum when they deposited money prior to resolving a case in court.

Over time, the word sacramentum took on another meaning as well. It can also mean “mystery”. It was used in this sense by St. Paul in his letters. In his translation of the Vulgate Bible, St. Jerome used sacramentum where the original Greek uses μυστηÏ?ιον (mus-tay-ri-on). The mystery here is not the same as the genre of fiction we know today. We’re looking at St. Paul’s use of the word, not Dashiel Hammett’s use of it. This mystery far bigger. It is something that is beyond our human understanding, and reason alone will not suffice to grasp it in all its glory. We must have faith to grapple with this kind of mystery.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that our English word "Sacrament" is an oath shrouded in mystery.

Keep this in mind as we explore the Sacraments in upcoming posts.