De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

David waged a sacred war of extermination against the Amalekites This Sunday , (29th in Ordinary Time, year C) the first reading is about the Israelites conflict with the Amalekites. In a new video, Fr. Robert Barron addresses the claims of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al ) that the God of the Bible is a dreadful entity because of the violence in the Old Testament, which seems so out of step with the God of the New Testament. Of course, this is not a new problem in the Church. The Marcionites, founded in 144 AD, thought that there were two gods, the horrible god of the OT and the cuddly god of the NT and they jettisoned the OT from their Canon of Scripture. They taught that Christ was not the Son of the God of the Jews, but the Son of the good God, who was different from the God of the Ancient Covenant. They anticipated the more consistent dualism of Manichaeism and were finally absorbed by it (both were condemned as heresy of course). Fr. Robert here state...

Welcome to this, the sixth of my reflections on the theology of the Sunday readings at Mass. Thank you for taking the time to read it. I sincerely hope that this reflection will inspire you and help you to see how fantastic Sacred Scripture is, how layered and multi-faceted, and what a carefully considered part of the Mass. If you want to know how these posts came about, please read my first post in this series  here . This Sunday the theme for the readings might be summed up as: Our Union with the Body of Christ The readings are: Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18 Psalm: 33:2-3, 16-23; Response: v. 9 Second Reading: Ephesians 5:21-32 Gospel: John 6: 60-69 First, a little preliminary survey of each of the books. I will post the same, or similar prelims week on week, for each book as we encounter them. This week I have added a bit of detail on the First Reading from the book of Joshua as I thought it brought up some very interesting issues about how we...