Part 3 of 4

Earlier, we discussed two of the most-often cited reasons (by young Americans themselves) for leaving the church: they see the church as being intolerant and they believe the message of the church to be irrelevant.  Now to the third most-oft cited issue: there are too many hypocrites (especially adults) in the church.

A hypocrite is a fake, play-actor, a counterfeit. He who is bothered by hypocrites in churches would do well to consider the following:

• Patent and explicit warnings against hypocrisy are given in the Bible literally from cover to cover. One need not worry: God sees everybody and everything and nobody is “getting away” with anything.
• The proper emotion toward hypocrites should be pity, not anger. One should never, ever, in any sense, be envious of a hypocrite, in view of the hypocrite’s inevitably disastrous future.
• To focus on hypocrites, troubling as they are, takes one’s focus off Christ and, thus, causes one to be in danger of engaging in a subtle (but real and very effective) form of idolatry.
• Because a hypocrite attends a church is no reason why others should not on the same logic that hypocritical doctors and bankers and sports-fans should not cause one to forsake hospitals and banks and sports events. (“I am an honest person and because of the financial collapse in 2008 due to banking shenanigans, I will never deposit another dollar in any bank!” “And ditto about ever seeing another doctor in my life because Dr. Jones is on the take from pharmaceutical companies!) All professions demonstrably feature hypocrites!
• No person is totally consistent, including the hypocrite-chaser. It is entirely possible that somebody is labeling him a hypocrite as we speak! If one has attained spiritual perfection, he should do all churches a favor and not join any of them: by doing so he would seriously disturb the fellowship. With apologies to Shakespeare, “Consistency, thou art an oft-pursued-but-forever-unreachable-jewel.”
• Every church referenced in the New Testament had hypocrites, some notoriously, but no passage there counsels us to leave off attendance at corporate worship sessions. Such attendance is in fact explicitly commanded! (My fourth column addresses that subject.)
• It is true that “by their fruits you shall know them,” but a warning is called for here: human beings are famously incapable of judging the thoughts, motives, indeed, the entire realm of human psychodynamics which cause people to act the way they do. Jesus told His disciples to leave off separating the “wheat” and the “tares” for now, and allow Him to handle all that Himself when He returns. We can all be certain that (a) He will, indeed, separate false disciples from true ones, (b) His decisions will be perfect, and (b) there will be some shocking surprises.
• Before there was ever a counterfeit dollar bill, a real one had to exist. The counterfeit Christian proves the existence of the real thing. Imitate the winner, not the loser.
• BE DOUBLY CERTAIN THAT YOU ARE NOT A HYPOCRITE! Ponder, carefully, II Corinthians 13:5, “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?” (NASV, emphasis added)

Part 2 of 4

We have seen that the three most common excuses given for what some say is an en masse departure of American youth from the church, are: (a) the church is intolerant, (b) the message of the church is irrelevant, and (c) too many church-going adults are hypocrites.

Having addressed the “intolerant†question in Part One, we turn now to the “irrelevance†question.

Patently, many representatives of Christianity have, in spectacular fashion, made God and the Bible irrelevant. That fact is a no-brainer and is particularly comforting for those searching for such geniuses. I say “geniuses†because it is truly a tour de force that a human being could be capable of taking anything God said and make it appear irrelevant. Such a person is a prodigy. A sick prodigy, but a prodigy nonetheless.

I make two essential observations here. The first is this, which really says it all. It covers the entire waterfront: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning, consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without difficulty to find satisfying reasons for the assumption. Most ignorance is (a man’s) vincible will that decides how and upon what subjects in the (world) generally (make sense) because for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless….We objected to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.†That is from Aldous Huxley (Ends and Means, 270-274), and such statements from honest people could be multiplied endlessly. The celebrated psychologist William James put it this way: “If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.†(The Will to Believe, 23) The question of moral relevance of any act is always, at base, a moral issue, not a mental one.

The second observation I make is this: I propose a test for those who say the message of the Bible is irrelevant. The test is comprised of two parts, both simplicity personified. First, pick a city, say, Chicago, Tokyo, Gnatty Flat, whatever. With that city firmly fixed in your mind, take the second step in the test: Ask yourself: which one of the Ten Commandments would be irrelevant in your chosen city? Or, differently put, which one of those cities would not be seriously improved by the faithful implementation by the people therein of any single one of the ten?

Seriously. What about, oh, say, #9? That’s not (at first glance!) as tough as some of the others. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor?†Or how about #3, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain?†Or how about that tenth one, the one about greed? But I desist lest the pressure become unbearable. You may choose to love or hate God, love or hate His word, love or hate His people, but you should not insult all people with IQs above 32 by saying that you really believe those commandments are irrelevant, and thus not needed. Will Durant, in a post-script to his and Ariel’s magisterial The Story of Civilization said the most important question facing modern man is this: “Can any civilization survive without the constraints and consolations of religion?†(Emphasis added)

Ponder that sentence: after telling the story of man’s attempts at civilizing himself, from the dawn of history to the present, it all comes down to that issue? The implications of Durant’s sentence are vastly more voluminous than all the previous millions of sentences he wrote recounting the entire human story!

C. S. Lewis was more succinct: “…to be united with that Life (the life of God) in the eternal Sonship of Christ is, strictly speaking, the only thing worth a moment’s consideration.†(Miracles, 185)

Years ago I was working through a knotty problem in biblical prophecy. One author, offering several possible interpretations of the text, concluded with this, in stunningly profound understatement, even though written, one imagines, with a quiet pen: “The event itself will clear up the questions.†It is at least conceivable, from a purely philosophical view, that five minutes after the event of your death the relevance of the message of Christ may be a bit clearer.

Conservative, Biblical Review

(1)  As always, O’Reilly does a good job of historical research.

(2)  The first full fourth of the book has to do with the historical context of Jesus’ life and death—the Roman Empire in its “pax romana” period. He does good work on the various political pressures which—at the human level (which is all O’Reilly is interested in here) caused Jesus’ death. (In my estimation, it is overdone; the identity of an emperor’s homosexual partner, what happened to the third son of third “wife” of another or information about Cleopatra’s physique would be seen by some as a bit unnecessary. No compelling reason exists for much of the first seventy-five pages, even though it is interesting history. He would argue that he was demonstrating the crushing political machinations which made Jesus’ death necessary—at the human level. Fifteen pages would have done as much, especially since the New Testament is explicit about the subject. But, again, for history buffs, it is intriguing material.)

(3)  Interestingly, O’Reilly says (as he did in the interview with Norah O’Donnell) that one need not take the Bible “literally,” but in his book he does otherwise; he stays close to the New Testament account of Jesus’ life. Many serious students would have been more careful in reporting New Testament events, but he doesn’t stray far from the traditional picture of Jesus. He does not explicitly or seriously call into question Jesus’ miracles (p. 200, especially p. 156, where he states that the powerful deeds of Jesus are identified using both Hebrew and Greek words signifying supernatural events) but, strangely, says that “somewhere in the twelfth century, these supernatural happenings will come to be known as miracles.” A totally gratuitous sentence. One wonders: what is the difference between a supernatural event and a miracle?  He uses the word “legend”rarely, but too often for the taste of some. (On p. 199, he refers to the “legend” of Lazarus’s resuscitation.) He says that Jesus sweats actual blood in the garden (p. 222).  He even has Jesus admitting before Pilate that, indeed, He is the Christ, the Son of God. (p. 232-233) In much of this, O’Reilly sounds like an evangelical pastor who interprets the Bible literally. He does report the theory that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute (p.144; see Robertson’s “Harmony”, p.187 and Zondervan’s Bible Dictionary, p. 514, for a refutation of that theory.) He states that Judas acted to “force Jesus’ hand” (p. 209). He doesn’t defend Judas’ act, but has him thinking, “If Jesus is God, that will soon be known.” (p. 211)

(4)  O’Reilly refers to the “discrepancies” of the gospel accounts. “Before being written down, the Gospels were oral histories. This might explain some discrepancies among them.” (p. 126) Again, many serious students of the New Testament would argue that there are apparent discrepancies but none in fact. The four gospels have often been compared to four newspaper reports of an event about which, obviously, one would expect to see varied viewpoints depending on a host of facts regarding the four correspondents.  He admits (p. 1) that the events “appear contradictory and were written from a spiritual viewpoint rather than a historical chronicling of Jesus’s life.” (emphasis added)

(5)  He writes a puzzling sentence: “Whether knowingly or unknowingly, Jesus has led a life that is a continual fulfillment of Jewish prophecy.” (p. 176) Of course, Jesus knew He was fulfilling prophecy, as He often said.

All in all, the book’s central focus is the amazing life of Jesus Christ, a subject of cosmic importance. For new material, the book, while it deserves—in view of its subject—to be read by every human on earth, sheds very little new light on that life. O’Reilly made much of Jesus’ humanity, on the various political pressures which produced His death, of His hesitancy about dying, and about the exquisite suffering on the cross. None of that will come as much of a surprise to those with even a cursory knowledge of the New Testament. All Christians would agree: praise to God is eminently appropriate because a book about His Son is a best-seller in America.

The Norah O’Donnell Interview 

The interview was rather bland. The vast majority of modern media figures would naturally give O’Reilly, or any other Christian, a hassle for believing God induced anybody to write anything. O’Reilly was careful to state, and re-state, that he only felt that the Spirit of God wanted him to write. The surprise is that O’Reilly was surprised by the push-back. Has he not read the New Testament? Again, O’Reilly comes close to pillorying those who take the New Testament literally, and then writes a book in which he largely does so himself. He says that Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” but not from the cross because “nobody could hear Him.” The reader might choose to trust Luke (Luke 24:34) who, conceivably, had more accurate information than we do today.  He said that he studied Jewish, Christian, Roman, and Muslim sources in preparation for writing the book. Perhaps the inclusion of Muslims was a slip; Mohammed was born almost six hundred years after Jesus was crucified.

Bill Anderson

October 2013

No economic system is perfect but American capitalism is arguably the most admired on earth. With all its flaws it has created more wealth for more people than any other economy in human history, and in the process, has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system as well.

Simply put: American free-market capitalism is the most powerful economic machine in the history of the world.

Stephen Moore and Julian Simon, in “It’s Getting Better All The Time” write: “America’s hospitals schools, universities, technoligies, inventions, churches, courts, businesses, highways, airlines, cities, farms water systems, food chains, money, military, governent structure are the envy of the world.”

Bill Bennett, in “Why We Fight,” writes: “Whatever may be America’s many faults, we have provided more freedom to more people than any nation in the history of mankind, that we have provided a greater degree of equality to more people than any nation in the history of mankind, that we have created more prosperity, and spread it more widely, than any nation in the history of mankind, that we have brought more justice to more people than any nation in the history of mankind, that our open, tolerant, prosperous, peacable society is the marvel and envy of the ages.”

As to helping minorities, in a nation of over 315 million people, with blacks constituting eleven percent of the population, the richest talk-show host (Oprah Winfrey) is a black woman, our highest paid athlete (Tiger Woods) is  black, the highest paid pop-singer (Michael Jackson) is black, and, even though dead, remains the highest-paid, although some say a poor white lad from Memphis beats him in some years. The chief law-enforcement officer who is ultimately responsible for the execution of every single law of the most powerful nation on earth (Eric Holder) is a black man, and our highest elective office which houses the leader of the entire free world (Barack Obama) is black.

It is always to be remembered: the poor of the third world possess almost nothing; the American poor have cars, televisions, and cell phones.

When Europe was totally devastated following WWII, America had thirteen million men under arms, possessed the A-bomb and had the most powerful military on earth, but she did not conquer the world; she disarmed. And then, under the Marshall Plan (which see!) America rescued the entirety of western Europe financially from the wreckage of its economies, and prevented Russia from owning western Europe as she did eastern Europe. And that is not to mention America’s protection of Europe and the world from the two other “isms” which, together with the Bolsheviks, took the lives of over 172 million people(!)—Fascism and Nazism. The financial cost of the Marshall plan alone? Over 13.3 billion American dollars—in mid-1940 dollars! And none of that is to mention the countless billions which America has given in foreign aid, in many cases, to people who despise our wealth, but need it to survive. Think “Israel”—who does not hate us,” “Egypt,” “Greece,” etc., etc.) Consider the fact that neither NATO nor the UN could survive without American dollars in the face of socialisms which simply does not produce enough financially to save their own countries, much less others. All thoughtful Americans expect more pleas for financial bail-outs because of our economic power—even in what we call “difficult” times financially.

Canadian commentator Gordon Sinclair wrote about America coming to the financial aid of hurting people. He said, “I can name you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?” He said that, when fifty-nine American communities were flattened by tornadoes, nobody helped.” (“’Let’s Hear It!’ for the U.S.”)

Bill O’Reilly stated on “The Bill O’Reilly Factor” that America has liberated over 400 million people. And that at the cost of hundreds of billions of Amrican dollars produced by free-market capitalism. That statement was made before our rescue of Kuwait (3 million people), Iraq (38 million people) and Afghanistan (32 million people. That happened because Americans believe all humans possess certain “unalienable” rights, that is, rights which no man but God gave us and that no man or group of men should be able to take away from us, AND because she had sufficient capitalism-produced dollars to pull it all off financially.

A Fox News contributor, Ziad Abdelnour, writes about American “Exceptionalism:” “’Exceptional’ is a nation that can rise in less than 200 years to become the strongest, most dynamic economy in history, a nation born not of ancient tribes but of the best and hardest-working the rest of the world’s nations has to offer. That is what makes America ‘exceptional.’ There is no other such nation on Earth. There never has been and there will probbly never be again….We must have a second American Revolution. We must retain our economic freedom.” He then says, “You can do it yourself, by creating wealth for yourself.”

A footnote: free-market capitalism works everywhere it is turned loose. “In Asia, the turn to the capitalist way has raised up more than a half billion human beings out of an immemorial poverty just in the past twenty years.” (Michael Novak, “An Apology for Democratic Capitalism,” in “First Things,” February, 2009, p. 41.)

The danger to the world’s most powerful economic engine? A proliferation of onerous governmental regulations in an effort to redistribute American wealth which will kill jobs, produce a drag on business expansion, and destroy incentives to take entrepreneurial financial risks. Americans do not fear taking financial risks; they do fear punitive government financial policies which guarantee risk failure.

The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath (on Chapter 8, p. 199f)

McGrath says that certain emphases in classic Protestantism (notably by Luther & Calvin) tended to (he says “did”) lead to atheism on the part of many. In doing so, some of his arguments are palpably false, others are misleading, and he fails to give proper recognition to the bases of the reformers concerns about iconography and liturgy in the Catholic church.

1.  “Martin Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone is an example of this tendency to move away from a corporate understanding of society.” p. 199. (Nonsense; a false dichotomy.)  He later (p. 200), accuses the reformers of “the divorce of the realm of the sacred and secular.” (Ditto.)

2. “Salvation was no longer determined by membership in the church, but by one’s individual relationship to God.” p. 199. (Indeed!)

3. He admits that Weber’s thesis has been widely discounted, but writes as if it hasn’t. (It has been widely discounted; see Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason.)

4. Divorcing the sacred from the secular, he says, meant that “God could not be known directly; God has to be known indirectly.” He repeats this throughout the chapter. “The absence of any expectation of encountering the divine directly through nature or in personal experience inevitably (sic!) encourages belief in a godless world—a world that lives ‘as if God did not exist.’” p. 209. (It is simply impossible to imagine Luther or Calvin thinking or saying such things.)

5. He argues—throughout the chapter—that, for the reformers, one could not expect to encounter and experience the divine in everyday life. (202) (Again, one imagines Luther and Calvin yelling a cosmic “NO!”)

6. He writes incredible things on p. 203: “Christ could only be known as an absence,” “The outcome was inevitable and predictable. God became an absence in the world,” “For Catholics—as opposed to Protestants— the world was ‘charged with the grandeur of God,’” etc.) (I continue to wonder which reformer ever held such positions.)

7.  Yes (see p. 297) Protestants did de-emphasize (“fail,” to use his word) the imaginative aspects of the faith, but an honest man has to admit the possibility that the Catholics “failed,” and continue to do so, to properly appreciate the Biblical text! His entire thesis is, in my view, shipwrecked on his failure to deal with WHY the Protestants were anti-iconic in worship—which was based on their repudiation of popular Catholic heathenism which icon-centered worship produced. His admissions of this huge problem for the Catholics are weak and rare: see pp. 207 and 209-210.

8. He does not, in discussing the Orthodox and Catholic positions, ever deal with the almost total absence of any emphasis on Biblical exegesis, both in their medieval and modern congregational worship, except in some sort of ritualistic form.

9. To say that “God ceased to be a living reality in the popular Protestant imagination” (p. 211) is lunacy.

10. “Once more, it is a small step from declaring that God cannot be pictured (!) to suggesting that he cannot be conceived as a living reality in the rich imaginative life of humanity.” p. 212. (A truly amazing sentence with heavy pejorative insinuations, and a criticism, not simply of Protestantism, but of demonstrable Biblical Hebraic thought. McGrath has a pronounced tendency to superimpose general sociological categories when defining Christian worship.)

McGrath would be far better served, in my view, to say that all humans —without any reference to denominational categories or the absence thereof—are prone to divorce churchianity—liturgies or non-liturgies of every sort—from the recognition of the true and living God. To put it in a different way, morphological fundamentalisms of every sort—high church, low church, broad church, no church—are apt to set in when Christians gather. Are some worship styles more conducive to an authentic-and-Biblically-centered-existential-Christianity than others? Maybe so and maybe no. It would be, and is, an interesting debate. But if I were forced (it would take force!) to take one side as against the other, I’d take the motley and slipshod evangelical scene (I’m thinking of evangelicals as a sub-species of “Protestantism” here) against the Roman and Orthodox Catholics every time. (He himself does that in affirming Pentecostalism.) Did some Protestants fail to fully assimilate the best of Protestant theology? Yes, of course, they did and do, as many Catholics did and do with the best of Catholic theology. In my view, he utterly fails in his essential argument, i.e., basic Protestant theology provably, and justifiably, produced atheism.

For those who wonder about papal power, let them contemplate this: by a single sentence the current pope, Francis I has taken center-stage in the world’s media and will produce hundreds of thousands of sermons by sermon-makers of every sort.  The genial and gentle man said that if a person was “gay,” but sought God and was a person of good will, “who am I to judge him?” His handlers are scurrying into print and speech to draw boundaries around his statement, but there it stands, in his own words and nobody else’s words about his words, and in context. And—one recalls—in direct contradiction to the position of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, whose take on the subject was that homosexuality is “an intrinsic moral evil” and an “objective disorder.” Catholics, predictably, are dividing left and right on implications on the pope’s statement.

One asks, to begin with: was the pope a bit squeamish in not using precise words (homosexuality, sodomy, etc.) but the colloquial (and English) “gay,” which carries far less opprobium than the more accurate words?  (The fear of words is an intriguing study!)  Perhaps he was speaking only for himself, but, of course, no pope ever speaks for himself alone (thus, the world-wide dust-up). And, indeed, as he asks, who is he to judge?

All humans, we all agree, should be treated with dignity and respect. That does not mean, cannot mean, that we may not make moral distinctions about human activities. All of us do that many times every day.  Human existence is unthinkable without it. About this specific matter, Christ’s apostle put it plainly: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites…will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” On this, and all moral issues, why not quote (the many) explicit and pertinent biblical references?  (Emphasis added. I note in passing: putting the Bible aside for the moment, one never hears the act defended as “natural.”)

The plight of current western civilization is, in simple terms, as follows: we all have four essential sources for moral instruction: the family, the school, the culture, and the church or synagogue.  Alas, if the “Vicar of Christ on earth,” the one human who alone, we are told, has the power to speak “infallibly” on moral issues, does not agree with the explicit teaching of scripture, where does that leave the faithful?  In his statement, he has chosen to align the church with the  other three bases of our societal moral compass, all of which are in demonstrable moral decline.

In truth, no serious student of the Bible will be surprised by these things. We are plainly taught there that, in the last days of human history, A “great falling away” (the word is apostasy, i.e., a defection from the truth) is going to occur amid Christ’s flock. I kindly suggest that it is at least possible that Francis’ remarks match the prophecy.

Malcolm Muggeridge’s word is appropriate here: watching the demise of the church in England, along with the frank and open forfeiture of biblical convictions on the part of many among the clergy, he observed that empty church buildings are not tragic, but that it would be tragic to change the biblical message in an attempt to fill them.

Finally, I suggest we hope that Francis’ remarks were taken out of context, a possibility that is—at this point—not at all obvious.

“For the first time in American history,” the article begins, an American professional “from a major sport” has outed himself as a homosexual. The media is totally abuzz about it all, calling him “brave,” “avante-garde,” a  “hero,” a “front-running leader” in the “battle” for the rights of minorities. He is featured, next morning, on the national morning news programs, in multi-segments. Many are assigning him the number “42,” comparing him to another professional athlete who wore that number on his jersey when he broke the color barrier in major league baseball.  A past president applauds him. The current president telephones him and says he is“extremely proud” of our new hero, and is sure that the athlete’s admitting his homosexual sex  preferences bodes well for the country in many ways. The president’s wife tweets her effusive congratulations. One sports writer says the NBA commissioner should “demand” that the athlete be given another contract (he is a free-agent) to be fair. The young man, then, would have two “firsts,” the second one being given an undeserved job as a professional athlete solely to affirm current- but-ever-changing political correctness.

One ponders this question: if the athlete (let us suppose, for analysis sake) was to change his opinion later about homosexuality and go “straight,” one ponders whether the press and the illuminati would immediately jump on his new bandwagon in lock-step. The president has no word of encouragement to say to a well-known professional football player—a man of sterling character who has routinely visited, on his own dollar, various foreign countries to help the helpless—when he was pilloried by the press for certain public displays of his Christian faith. What we need not ponder is what the president would say, or when he would say it, if the NFL player outed himself as a practicing homosexual.

I have no personal animus toward the athlete. His sexuality is his (I almost said “private”) business. I wish him all the best in his sports career, and in his life. I wish, as well, that he had not felt the necessity of inviting the nation into another bedroom.

I ponder something else. Why is it that the sexually odd, the outré, are touted while traditional morality is consistently trivialized? And this: does all this buzz—not of the activity of a single individual but the national response to it— say anything about moral decline in America? St. Paul’s analysis of another culture comes to mind. He said of them, “…whose god is their belly and whose glory is in their shame.” He added, “Whose end is destruction.” (Philippians 3:19)

I am reading, again, Jacques Barzun’s excellent “From Dawn to Decadence,” a celebrated analysis of  the last five hundred years of western civilization. He is at great pains to say that “decadence” has nothing to do with morals, but with art, music, architecture, the “aging” of attitudes about institutions, the prevalence of a general cultural malaise, etc. It is as if, at the base of things, nobody can really say what is right or wrong, what is ethical or unethical. That would be entering into subjective sentiment. Or maybe he is saying such judgments are unimportant, even if we could distinguish the moral from the immoral. Here is the question of modern liberal “enlightened” western civilization (we being the inheritors of every single value of the eighteenth century “enlightenment” !): is it even possible to decay morally as a culture? And, if so, could such a thing be quantified? And would it matter anyway? American modernity, in every measurable way, says “no” three straight times.

Ten years after her death an extensive correspondence between Mother Teresa and her half-dozen spiritual advisers has come to light which indicates that she struggled, for the better part of half a century, with a sense of God’s absence.  Only twice, apparently, in the correspondence does she openly state that she doubted God’s existence, but the sense of His absence was persistent.

What are the possible explanations?

1.  Many, most, Christians have, at times, sensed something of God’s absence; it is endemic to the human experience.  And the Catholic mystics were notoriously so afflicted, i.e., “Brother Saul,” “St. John of the Cross,” et al.

2.  It is possible that she was suffering under a teaching that we are saved, or made acceptable to God, by means of our good deeds; if that was so, or to the extent that it was so, one cannot be surprised that she had difficulty sensing that she had pleased God.

3.  Several psychotherapists, of various stripe, have suggested that she was so passionate to live a perfect life, in total communion with God, that she set her sights too high, and thus, found them unattainable.

4.  She, confessedly, was worried about her pride; it may be that she was desperate to fight it and that her reaction was overdone.

5.  It is possible that her commitment to poverty produced an unhealthy state, physically, which produced psychological or spiritual ramifications of a negative sort.

6.  It must be remembered that Christians are called upon to suffer with Christ, not in order to help the true Messiah in His own role, or to play–in any sense–a messianic role, but in identity with Him in His life and sufferings.  Perhaps an extreme devotion to Christ–either proper or improper–on her part explains her experience.  (Some expressions of Catholicism come dangerously near to the position that we can, indeed, suffer salvifically–for the salvation of–others.)

7.  It must be remembered that Mother Teresa was living in one of the most spiritually depraved cultures on the planet–a culture given over to demon-worshipping idolatry.  That, alone, would impose immense pressures on the spirit of a genuinely committed Christian.  (If it be asked why her assistant nuns did not have her experience, it may be (a) they did but did not report it, (b) they experienced it but to a lesser extent, (c) they did not possess the depth of her passion for Christ and His work, or (d) different psychological and/or spiritual dynamics were operating in them.)