Thursday, April 30, 2009

Jerome

I had a fun confirmation today. I've been thinking about one part of this book, and an absurd argument that some have espoused about a certain part of Scripture that just makes no sense at all to one imbued with a rational mind. I started thinking about the meaning of it, and arrived at something that seemed to make sense to me, but wanted to try and get confirmation from a reliable source who could hold credibility.

As I snooped around today at one of my favorite websites, the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, I found confirmation that what made sense to a layman in the 21st century is something that echoed exactly what Jerome, a Doctor of the Church, wrote 1600 years ago. There are a lot of absolutely preposterous interpretations of Scripture in the world today, and I for one would rather listen to a Doctor of the Church than I would to some yahoo attempting to do "violence to Scripture," (as Clement would say), to justify immorality. I'll take the tradition of Jerome over modernity, any day.

To quote Chesterton:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

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