Modernist Fr. Robert Barron placed in charge of Chicago Seminary

[SaintAndrew]

  Fr. Barron is no different than Richard McBrien in substance.  

That is ridiculous.
Totally ridiculous.
McBrien is on a way different level. Hans Kung is more orthodox than McBrien.

[Phillipus Iacobus]

Heresy is heresy. 99.99999999% Catholic is no different than 25% or 2% Catholic. It's all or nothing.

[jonbhorton]

Some of the stuff here is taken out of context. For instance, the statement about the Ascension was made while defending the doctrine against people who claim that it shows that early Christians were primitives who thought that Heaven was literally up in the sky. His point is simply that the Ascension is not about Jesus flying up to a magical kingdom in the sky. Most of the other ideas mentioned are also much more understandable in context.

No, that's not what he was saying. He was saying the early Christians thought as "Jews" do and that we think too much like "Greeks."  And he picks and chooses what to take literally in the "story" of the Ascension as he sees it and then explains how early Jewish Christians would have seen it, not as a physical event but a "transforming" of the earth by Heaven and the point of the Ascension is how the Church needs to transform the world. 

Jesus didn't go "up" but he seems to buy into the idea that the "Apostles' were looking up but then the whole story is the Apostles "looking up" simply means to "imitate Jesus through the Church." 

He misses the point entirely. 

He sees human action through the Church as transforming the world into the Kingdom of Heaven.  He does not see the world as we do "a vale of tears" and admits it.   He does not even come near the idea that Christ will actually return and literally recreate the world by His own power and not through ours.  Same old abuse of the Church for Utopian liberalism.  Nothing new.

This is because Fr. Barron buys into a quaint and faddish 19th century notion that is truly bad science called evolution and that error informs everything about his faith. 

He must have missed the part where almost every single Jew during Jesus time wasn't thinking like that; and while metaphors indeed exist throughout scripture, this is certainly not totally one, if at all. They were looking for a physical change to couple the spiritual. Fr. Barron's POV, the way you have described it, is nothing short of cultural revisionist history and plays into the Messianic Jewish movement's entire attack against solid Catholic doctrine.

Christ ascended into a cloud. His physical body. Does this mean that once shrouded in water vapor He didn't warp into what science would now call another dimension? Not at all. But did He physically ascend to at least a point? Darn tootin.

Maybe he also metaphorically appeared in the upper room, and metaphorically spent from Resurrection to Ascension eating with them, ministering, etc.

It's all a metaphor. Yay.

What rubbish

[Crusading Philologist]

I think this emphasis on the literal is interesting. Whenever trads discuss the creation narratives or the Ascension or whatever else, their only concern seems to be whether or not it actually happened. In contrast, the Fathers, while generally assuming the literal truth of most of the events in Scripture, were more concerned with the moral, spiritual, and eschatological meaning behind the events in the Bible. The question of whether or not the events described in the Bible actually happened is, of course, important, but I'm not sure why this question should crowd out everything else that we might learn from Sacred Scripture.

Anyway, Gerard is guilty of apriorism in his reading of Fr. Barron. He has decided that Fr. Barron is a modernist, and so he fits everything that Fr. Barron says into this preexisting structure. I doubt anyone who listened to Fr. Barron's discussion of the Ascension with an open mind would be able to identify it with what Gerard has described above.

[salus]

Crusading perhaps the overwhelming majority of Catholic's in the age of the Father's believed the Bible to be true history , today the situation is very different, many many priests and Bishops have swallowed evolution, biblical criticism and other trick's of the Devil and do not take Bible History as factual.

[FleetingShadow]

Fr. Barron believes in universal salvation. I've heard him in context say that in one of his videos.

That's anti-Christian nonsense.

I just watched the youtube video on Hell if that's the one Vetus is talking about...

To be fair, he doesn't say he believes in universal salvation. He says firstly that we may pray that all will be saved and secondly that we may reasonably hope that all will be saved. I don't agree with him on the second point. But 'anti-Christian'? Come on...

[Vetus Ordo]

Fr. Barron believes in universal salvation. I've heard him in context say that in one of his videos.

That's anti-Christian nonsense.

I just watched the youtube video on Hell if that's the one Vetus is talking about...

To be fair, he doesn't say he believes in universal salvation. He says firstly that we may pray that all will be saved and secondly that we may reasonably hope that all will be saved. I don't agree with him on the second point. But 'anti-Christian'? Come on...

We can't reasonably hope that all will be saved because that goes against what Christ Himself revealed in the scriptures. No matter each one's take on whether the elect will outnumber the reprobate or not, the fact remains that it's a revealed truth that there two classes of men in this life: the elect, who are saved by God's grace, and reprobate who are damned. We can't reasonably hope that all men are elect, unless we're throwing scripture out of the window.

[Parmandur]

Fr. Barron believes in universal salvation. I've heard him in context say that in one of his videos.

That's anti-Christian nonsense.

I just watched the youtube video on Hell if that's the one Vetus is talking about...

To be fair, he doesn't say he believes in universal salvation. He says firstly that we may pray that all will be saved and secondly that we may reasonably hope that all will be saved. I don't agree with him on the second point. But 'anti-Christian'? Come on...

We can't reasonably hope that all will be saved because that goes against what Christ Himself revealed in the scriptures. No matter each one's take on whether the elect will outnumber the reprobate or not, the fact remains that it's a revealed truth that there two classes of men in this life: the elect, who are saved by God's grace, and reprobate who are damned. We can't reasonably hope that all men are elect, unless we're throwing scripture out of the window.

In 1 Timothy 2:3-4 and 2 Peter 3:9, scripture tells us that God wills all to be saved.  Damnation comes through the reprobate refusing the grace of salvation, and while I don't buy the empty Hell argument, from scriptural argument it can't be said that we ought not to hope for what God wishes, that is for all to be saved.  Hope is different than faith.  We believe in Hell, but nobody is beyond hope of God's grace.

[FleetingShadow]

Yes, surely hope is distinct from expectation in faith. It does seem an unreasonable hope which does not take seriously enough the warnings of Christ in my humble opinion. I came to Fr Barron's defence because it seems like some on this thread are a little too eager to find something potentially incriminating they can pin on him without giving the good priest the benefit of the doubt.

On the Ascension issue also, I agree with Philologist. It seems to me Fr Barron was simply trying to explain the metaphysical seriousness of the Ascension to a youtube audience which may have a somewhat superficial and cartoonish understanding of many aspects of the faith.

Our Lord's whole resurrected being, his two natures, including his physicality, ascended from this realm to the realm of Heaven. The measure of his body's levitation is really not the point. It seems to me like that is what Fr. Barron was trying to communicate.

[Parmandur]

Yes, surely hope is distinct from expectation in faith. It does seem an unreasonable hope which does not take seriously enough the warnings of Christ in my humble opinion. I came to Fr Barron's defence because it seems like some on this thread are a little too eager to find something potentially incriminating they can pin on him without giving the good priest the benefit of the doubt.

On the Ascension issue also, I agree with Philologist. It seems to me Fr Barron was simply trying to explain the metaphysical seriousness of the Ascension to a youtube audience which may have a somewhat superficial and cartoonish understanding of many aspects of the faith.

Our Lord's whole resurrected being, his two natures, including his physicality, ascended from this realm to the realm of Heaven. The measure of his body's levitation is really not the point. It seems to me like that is what Fr. Barron was trying to communicate.

Yes, quite.