The scandal that has felled Deal Hudson, and the controversy over Scott Hahn’s theological novelties, are two examples of why the neo-Catholic establishment is a house built on sand.

by Christopher A. Ferrara
REMNANT COLUMNIST,
New Jersey

Regarding Hahn's treatment of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, we see the same mistakes being made. Mind you, these are serious errors, because they undermine the traditional understanding of who, precisely, was responsible for the first sin, as well as the theological ramifications of that initial sin. In brief, Hahn claims Adam sinned first, not Eve. He writes: "Thus, Adam's failure was virtually complete by the time Eve took her first bite" (A Father Who Keeps His Promises (FKP), p. 72).

Editor’s Note: We wish to make it clear at the outset of our publication of this two-part exposé of the dangerous novelties contained in Scott Hahn’s imaginative book, First Comes Love, that we have no intention of doing to him what has been so often done to us by various organs of the neo-Catholic press—refuse to print a rebuttal. We invite Dr. Hahn to explain on these pages how his novel teachings on the Holy Ghost and the Fall can be reconciled with Tradition. Our only condition for printing his rebuttal here is that it would have to consist of more than Hahn’s mere declarations that he is a theologian and that his book has an imprimatur. (See Hahn’s letter to the editor in the September issue of New Oxford Review). Andrew Greeley is a theologian, and, as Mr. Ferrara points out in a pithy aside, even the Dutch Catechism had an imprimatur. We are convinced it is about time Dr. Hahn addressed the merits of the growing public criticism of his novel theology. The Remnant will be happy to afford him an opportunity to do so. MJM
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In the Internet version of this article published several weeks ago (www.RemnantNewspaper.com), I drew a parallel between two neo-Catholic celebrities?Deal Hudson and Scott Hahn?in order to make the case that the shifting sands of neo-Catholic celebrity are no foundation on which to restore a Church in crisis. The theological and evangelical “renewal” of which these lay celebrities are said (often by their own account!) to be the vanguard is a sham. The only answer to the crisis is a return by the hierarchy to a militant and robust traditional Roman Catholicism, purged of the feckless novelties of the past forty years.

Quite enough has been said about the fall of Deal Hudson in a sexual scandal he tried to cover up, but which inevitably exploded into public view as Hudson’s editorial moralizing brought him into the crosshairs of his even more liberal opponents. Suffice it to say that Hudson’s diehard defenders seriously embarrass themselves by arguing that Hudson’s “past” (i.e. the grotesque sexual exploitation of one of his students in 1994) is “not relevant” to his work as editor of Crisis. Tell that to the co-founders of the magazine, Michael Novak and Dr. Ralph McInerny. In a major scoop, The Wanderer’s Paul Likoudis obtained this comment from Novak by email: “If Ralph and I had known the truth from the beginning, we would not have brought him [Hudson] on as editor, and later history would have been different.” Let Hudson’s defenders explain that one away.

As Likoudis notes: “Novak’s response suggests that Hudson might have deceived his employers from the beginning.” On the other hand, if they knew of Hudson’s “past” when they hired him then the comment of Chronicles editor Tom Fleming (as reported by Likoudis) is most apt: “Fleming added: any members of the board who knew of Hudson’s molestation charges before he was hired should resign. ‘If they knew,’ he said, “their opinion should not be sought for anything?not even the time of day.” To Hudson’s remaining defenders I would say: lie down, fellas, you’re dead.

Scott Hahn’s Feminized Holy Ghost

While we can bid adieu to the Hudson affair, a great deal more needs to be said about another scandal in the Church: the proliferating theological novelties of Scott Hahn, the popular lay theologian of Steubenville and former Protestant minister. New Oxford Review (NOR) has been quite courageous in exposing this neo-Catholic icon’s bizarre theological speculations to public scrutiny, finding them utterly wanting and a danger to the faithful. In a series of articles NOR has demonstrated Hahn’s reckless propensity for theologizing without a net in hardcover books published for profit and sold to the general public.

NOR has even gone so far as to call for the burning of one of Hahn’s best sellers. In an article entitled “Burn Baby Burn”(September 2002), NOR editor Dale Vree skewers Hahn’s novel theology of the Holy Spirit as expounded in his Doubleday book First Comes Love (FCL). According to Hahn’s self-proclaimed “findings,” the Holy Spirit should be seen as “maternal,” “the uncreated principle of maternity, “bridal” and “feminine.” NOR points out that Mary was female, from which it follows that “if the Holy Spirit is female or feminine, then Jesus had two mommies, and presto ‘gay’ is good and so is ‘gay’ marriage. Dr. Hahn goes so far as to say the Holy Spirit is ‘bridal’ and that ‘Mary’s maternity is mystically one with that of… the Spirit.’ The imagery is blatantly and scandalously lesbian.” NOR is unsparing in its denunciation of this novelty:

After enjoying Pat's column, we came across an article by Scott Hahn, Ph.D., entitled "What Does the Bible Teach Us About the `Most Elusive' Person of the Trinity?" The article is about the Holy Spirit, it's definitely not a humor piece, and it's scandalously fallacious…

Our fear is that many orthodox Catholics will be seriously misled by what he's written…

Moreover, the burden of Dr. Hahn's article is to argue, in his own voice or by approvingly quoting others, that we must see the Holy Spirit as "mother," "motherly," "maternal," and "the uncreated principle of maternity," as well as "feminine" and "bridal." Likewise, an "attribute" of the Holy Spirit is "womanhood”….

Lest there be any doubt that Dr. Hahn is here proposing that the Holy Spirit is a "she," he notes that in the Old Testament "God's Spirit is identified with Wisdom," that "God's Wisdom is referred to as `holy spirit,'" and that all this is personified as "Lady Wisdom”… Nowhere in his article does Dr. Hahn call the Holy Spirit "He" or "Him," and nowhere does he refer to the Holy Spirit in masculine terms….

But his article is adapted from chapter 10 of his new book, First Comes Love: Finding Your Family in the Church and the Trinity … And the book is even more scandalous than the article. In the Sources and References section of the book, Dr. Hahn approvingly quotes Benedict Ashley as explicitly claiming that the Holy Spirit is Christ's “Bride.” So the Holy Spirit is not only one of Christ's Mothers, but His Bride as well. Thus Dr. Hahn's imagery is not only lesbian, but incestuous….

Vree notes Hahn’s disclaimer in FCL that his “findings” are only “tentative” and that he will “consign them to the flames” if the Magisterium finds “any of them to be unsatisfactory.” After citing various magisterial texts commanding that the Holy Ghost be referred to (and thus worshipped) exclusively in the masculine gender, Vree takes Hahn up on his offer: “Now that Dr. Hahn knows what the Magisterium teaches, we trust he'll order Doubleday to recall all the copies of his book from Barnes & Noble and all the other stores and, along with the copies in the warehouse, pile them up in the parking lot and burn them. What a bonfire that'll be!”
NOR has good reason to be so exercised over Hahn’s fiddling with the traditional gender theology of the Holy Ghost (even if Hahn does not explicitly call the Holy Ghost “She”). After all, NOR’s basic point is inarguable: Mary conceived by the Holy Ghost and for this reason she is traditionally known as “the spouse of the Holy Ghost.” As St. Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort explained in The Secret of Mary: “The Holy Spirit espoused Mary and produced His greatest work, the incarnate Word, in her, by her and through her. He has never disowned her and so He continues to produce every day, in a mysterious but very real manner, the souls of the elect in her and through her.”
Thus, if words are understood according to their objective signification, Hahn’s positing of a “maternal” or “bridal” operation of the Holy Ghost necessarily implies (even if Hahn does not explicitly say so or even subjectively intend it) nothing short of a homosexual abomination, as NOR rightly suggests. I mean this analogically, of course, since (to anticipate the banal objection) the Godhead has no gender in the literal, physical sense, as even Hahn readily acknowledges. It is just that what one says analogically of God has profound implications for what theologians call “the opposition of relations” between the Persons of the Trinity and the two processions of the Trinity (Son from Father and Holy Ghost from Father and Son)?concepts which form the basis for all Catholic theology on the purely relational (rather than essential) distinction between the three Persons of the triune God.

In short, the Holy Ghost has always and everywhere been known as He and described in masculine terms for a reason. The Church has never called the Holy Ghost She (or taught Hahn’s “bridal-maternal” Holy Ghost theory) for a reason. He who brought about Mary’s conception as her Spouse could not also have been co-maternal with Mary. This is intellectually repellent nonsense. Hahn’s novelty adds nothing to Catholic theology but unnecessary confusion?with which the Church is already too much afflicted.

Is NOR Overreacting?

But perhaps NOR has overreacted. Is Hahn really engaged in a theological project of feminizing the Holy Ghost? Hahn’s own friend and fellow theologian, Monica Miller, Ph.D., seems to think so. In an earlier piece for NOR , Dr. Miller, while professing her profound love and respect for Hahn, does not hesitate to lay it on the line: In FCL Hahn is proposing “that the Trinity is a family and thus the human family of father, mother, child is based on this supernatural truth. Within the human family [says Hahn], maternal activity is the historical expression of the Third Person of the Trinity…” Dr. Miller thus offers a critique of what she (rightly) sees as “Hahn’s theology on the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit.”

Hahn is on the wrong track, says Dr. Miller: “The Holy Trinity is not a Father, Mother and Child that has a strict biological correlation here on earth.” But, she concludes, “Scott is seeking that strict parallel” when he declares in FCL that “In the family we become three-in-one, imaging the Triune God.” The obvious problem with Hahn’s novelty of the Trinity as “family,” writes Dr. Miller, is

…who’s who? Do the Son and the Father beget the Holy Spirit? So the Holy Spirit is their child? But Jesus is not a Mother; He is the Son. Or is the Holy Spirit the mother? But we know the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, so He can’t be the mother. If there is a “child” in the Trinity we know it is the Son, eternally begotten of the Father but without the aid of a divine mother. We see that trying to create literal parallels within the human family to image the persons of the Trinity doesn’t work.

Dr. Miller concludes: “There is certainly not a shred of evidence in the biblical account of the Incarnation that the Holy Spirit has a maternal role.” In rejecting Hahn’s suggestion that Mary is the “created replication” of the Holy Spirit (Hahn’s version of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s dubious “quasi-incarnatus”), Miller notes the same problem later noted by Vree: “Is Mary’s maternity her own, or is it the Holy Spirit’s as well? And if it is the Holy Spirit’s as well, then Christ has two mothers?and that will never work.”

Hahn might answer that he did not actually say that the Holy Spirit had a maternal role in the conception of Christ (Dr. Miller notes he is curiously silent on this point), but that is what his theory necessarily implies?unless Hahn is going to say that the Holy Ghost was acting (analogically speaking) in His male gender when conceiving Christ as the Spouse of Mary, but otherwise has operations that can be described as maternal and bridal. But this would give us (analogically) an androgynous Holy Ghost (both husbandly-fatherly and bridal-maternal) quite foreign to Tradition and wholly repugnant to our common sense.

NOR’s extended critique of Hahn’s novel theology of the Holy Ghost has included an article by Edward O’Neill in the June 2004 issue. Like Dr. Miller, O’Neill objected to the blatant conflict between Hahn’s novelty of the Trinity as “family” that includes a “mother” and the traditional understanding of the relations between the Persons of the Trinity:

[I]f the Spirit has bridal and maternal aspects, they must be in reference to the other two Persons. Brides have husbands and mothers have children, so which of the other two Persons is the Husband and which is the Child? There seem to be only two possible combinations. One is that the Father is the Husband of the Spirit and the Son is the Child. Yet this would contradict what we already know about the processions within the Godhead, since the Son proceeds from the Father alone (without the aid of a maternal principle), and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The second combination would be that the Son is the Husband of the Spirit and the Father is the Child. This also contradicts what we know about the processions in the Godhead, since the Father proceeds from no one.

As we can see, the basic objection raised by Vree, Miller and O’Neill is that Hahn is trying to contrive a “mother” figure in the Trinity merely in order to vindicate his pet notion of the Trinitarian “covenant family.” But to do this, Hahn must feminize the Holy Ghost by means of terminology that is contrary to Tradition. As Dr. Miller warns, “feminization of the Holy Spirit has dire consequences for the covenantal nature of salvation and the sacramental economy of the Church.” Here we see why.

Hahn’s Worthless Disclaimers

No, Hahn’s attempt to feminize the Holy Spirit won’t work; it’s absurd. But still one must ask: Is it possible that Vree, Miller and O’Neill have all overreacted? Have they extended Hahn’s ideas farther than he does? Does FCL really maintain a bridal-maternal role for the Holy Ghost and seek a strict parallel between the Trinity and a human family? Yes, it certainly does. And, in my view, the book is even worse than NOR’s three critics have indicated. I say this not as a theologian, for that I am not. Rather, I write only from the perspective of any reasonably well-informed Catholic whose sensus catholicus and knowledge of Church dogma are sufficient to detect the scent of malodorous theological novelties.

In Chapter 10 of FCL, entitled “The Family Spirit,” Hahn enunciates his theory of the “bridal-maternal” Holy Ghost. In addition to the ostentatious disclaimer noted by Vree (I will burn my book, etc.), Hahn begins with this: “I must raise a caution here. This does not mean that we call God ‘Mother’: divine revelation does not call God by that name. Nor is it to be found anywhere in the Church’s living tradition.” Having issued this disclaimer, however, Hahn then proceeds to refer to the Holy Ghost repeatedly and exclusively as motherly, feminine and bridal (but never as “He”) even if he does not explicitly call the Holy Ghost “Mother.”

As O’Neill astutely observes in his critique, Hahn’s disclaimer “seems intended in part to deflect criticism of Hahn as having gone over to the feminist side. Yet Hahn has phrased himself carefully. While he says that we should not call God ‘Mother,’ he nowhere says that the Person of the Holy Spirit cannot be called this.” O’Neill rightly challenges Hahn to explain “why does Hahn balk at calling the Spirit ‘Mother’? If his children’s mom is ‘the Holy Spirit of our home,’ why cannot the Holy Spirit be ‘the Mom of the Holy Trinity’?... [I]f he can discern by the Holy Spirit’s actions that He (She?) has a ‘bridal-maternal character,’ then why can’t these adjectives be turned into nouns? Why shouldn’t the Spirit be called Bride and Mother? Is the reason simply that floating this suggestion would be too hot to handle for Hahn?”

But informed traditionalists are quite familiar with Hahn’s sort of disclaimer. The writings of the preconciliar neo-modernists are replete with examples of how they elaborately unveil their outrageous propositions while insisting they do not mean to suggest precisely what they have just suggested.

Following in the Footsteps of Congar

Under cover of his disclaimers, Hahn sets up his argument by noting that “all perfections are contained in the God we call Father, and this is no less true of perfect motherhood.” Well, yes, all perfections are contained in God, including the perfections peculiar to the womanly nature (sensitivity, tenderness, nurturing, receptivity and so forth), yet divorced from any short of literal womanliness. But, as Gerry Matatics has remarked in discussing Hahn’s theory with me, these perfections?and all others?are contained in the Godhead as a whole, not merely in one Person of the Trinity. This is Hahn’s fundamental error: his attempt to assign “motherly” perfections to the Holy Ghost (as opposed to the Father and the Son) so that can he can make of Him the “mother” of a Trinitarian “family.” The three Persons of the Triune God, however, simply cannot be separately categorized this way, and never have been by Tradition. In fact, the whole idea is really rather silly.

This insuperable obstacle to Hahn’s speculations does not deter him. As a further setup for his argument he quotes “the great theologian Cardinal Yves M.J. Congar” for the proposition that “there must be in God, in transcendent form, something that corresponds to masculinity and something that corresponds to femininity.” Hahn cannot be unaware that Congar was an infamous neo-modernist, who was stripped of his teaching positions by Pope Pius XII in 1954, before his disastrous return to prominence as a peritus at Vatican II. Congar’s neo-modernist tome True and False Reform of the Church (1950) was suppressed by order of the Vatican. In a fawning tribute to Congar by the execrable “Father” Richard P. McBrien earlier this year , we read of Congar’s petulant complaint that “from the beginning of 1947 to the end of 1956 I knew nothing from [Rome] but an uninterrupted series of denunciations, warnings, restrictive or discriminatory measures and mistrustful interventions (Dialogue Between Christians, p. 34).” The poor thing! McBrien calls Congar “a prophet” and “the most distinguished ecclesiologist in the history of the church [sic].” He even goes so far as to liken Congar’s “rehabilitation” at Vatican II to the resurrection of Christ: “His ecclesiology, for which he had suffered so much in the past, would become the ecclesiology of Vatican II itself… Resurrection followed the ‘blessed cross.’” This kind of nearly hysterical praise from a public heretic like McBride is almost as telling as an endorsement by Satan himself. Yet this is Hahn’s “great theologian.”

So Hahn, following Congar, wishes to introduce us to this mysterious feminine aspect of God?God’s “better third,” if you will. Hahn likens the role of the Holy Ghost in the Trinitarian “family” to the role of his wife, Kimberly, whom he describes as “the Holy Spirit of our home.” He then explains the theological basis on which he has taught his children why “blaspheming the Holy Spirit is treated differently than [sic] every other sin and blasphemy by their earthly and heavenly fathers. Dad’s first law is: You’d better not make Mom mad.” So, sins against the Holy Ghost are sins against the divine Mom. What can one say?

Hahn goes on to speak of the “Holy Spirit’s motherly role as comforter and consoler” and assures us that “what a mother does in the natural order, the Holy Spirit accomplishes in the supernatural order.” Hahn asserts that because the Hebrew word for “spirit” in the Old Testament, ruah, “is a feminine noun” , as is the Hebrew word for “glory cloud,” shekinah, “For many rabbis, these usages were sufficient evidence for the bridal-maternal character of the Holy Spirit.”

So what? In the first place, rabbis don’t even acknowledge the Holy Spirit as a distinct divine Person as such, but only as a manifestation or presence of God; hence rabbis do not address the issue of the Holy Ghost’s gender. At any rate, as even the currently reigning, Hebrew-friendly Pope observed on his trip to Athens in 2001, “The New Testament was written in Greek, with the result that it spread rapidly.” As Hahn knows, the Greek word for spirit is pneuma, which is neither masculine nor feminine. As Hahn also knows, in the official Latin Vulgate text of the Bible, canonized as normative for the Church by the Council of Trent, the word “spirit” has for 1600 years been translated as “spiritus,” which is a masculine noun. Furthermore, “the Latin text of the Sacred Scriptures had existed from the earliest times of Christianity… and had certainly come from the first days of the Faith…” ?that is, even before St. Jerome’s Vulgate. Thus, from the first days of the Faith the Holy Ghost has been called spiritus. Besides, if the mere usage of a feminine noun for “spirit” by rabbis proved that the Holy Ghost is in some way feminine, then Hahn would have proved too much: by his logic, the Church should have called the Holy Ghost “She” from the beginning.

So, then, according to Congar, Hahn, and lots of rabbis it is appropriate to view the Holy Spirit as bridal and maternal. Pressing ahead with his novelty, Hahn next informs us that “Some might object that this familial understanding (“social analogy”) of the relations of the Trinity clashes with the traditional “psychological” analogy proposed by the two greatest lights of the Western theological tradition, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.” Yes, Dr. Hahn, “some” (i.e., just about any Catholic who is concerned about the integrity of Tradition) might indeed object that your view clashes with the traditional view “proposed” by St. Augustine and St. Thomas.

Tinkering With the Divine Processions

Hahn is here referring to the traditional understanding of the two processions of the Trinity already mentioned: the procession of the Son from the Intellect of the Father by generation, and of the Holy Ghost from Father and Son as an act of will born of the mutual love between Father and Son. Hahn, quoting a couple of isolated phrases from St. Methodius which do not actually sustain his theory [see related article by Robert Sungenis in this issue-Ed.], argues that just as the bride Eve “proceeded” from the side of Adam via his rib, so does the “bridal-maternal” Holy Ghost “proceed” from the Father and Son as the “rib of the Word.” Hahn’s theory certainly does clash with the traditional understanding of the two processions. As O’Neill observed in his NOR piece:

Honoring the known processions of the Trinity while viewing the Holy Spirit as “bridal-maternal” results in further absurdities. In Hahn’s paradigm, the Trinity must certainly represent the only Family in existence in which a Father and a Son cooperate to have a Mother!
Hahn sketches a parallel between the procession of the Spirit from the Son and the Father and the creation of Eve from the side of Adam, who was created by God. This preserves the genders he wants and the sequence of Persons, but it still poses problems for the alleged “bridal-maternal character” of the Spirit. Eve was Adam’s wife. Is the Spirit the wife of the Son?...

But such considerations do not deter Hahn. Hahn argues that the two different processions suggest a “wifely/motherly” work of the Holy Ghost?that of loving?versus the “husbandly/fatherly” work rooted in the divine intellect and knowledge. For Hahn, this “motherly” difference in the procession of the Holy Ghost means something for the mode of our salvation: “We can look at our salvation in legal terms, as justice… We can see our justification, then, as a work of the Son, the Logos.” But, on the other hand, “We can describe our sanctification, then, as a work of the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier?and a work that is bridal-maternal in nature.”

To demonstrate his justification/sanctification disjunction in the order of grace (so that he can assign the latter aspect of grace to his “bridal-maternal” Holy Ghost), Hahn even lays out a chart to illustrate what he imagines to be the feminine attributes of the Holy Ghost’s procession as compared with the Son’s procession. Here we see in graphic form Hahn’s untenable concept of parceling out specific attributes to different Persons in the Trinity:

Procession of the Son Procession of the Spirit

Knowing Loving

Intellect Will

Justification Sanctification

Husband/Father Wife/Mother

Legal Liturgical

Justice Mercy

By creating a disjunction between justification and sanctification, bestowed respectively by the “husband/father” and “wife/mother” of his notion of the Trinity, Hahn does not only depart from traditional terminology, which is bad enough. His justification/sanctification disjunction also savors of the “double justification” theory rejected by the Council of Trent in answer to the Protestant “reformers” (and some Catholic theologians). According to this theory, “forgiveness of sins is accomplished by the imputed justice of Christ, [but] positive sanctification [] by righteousness inhering in the soul.” Trent teaches, on the contrary, that “sanctifying grace is the sole formal cause of justification… This means that the infusion of sanctifying grace effects the eradication of sin [justification] as well as inner sanctification.”

As Trent declared: “Justification… is not merely the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man… whereby an unjust man becomes a just man, and from being an enemy becomes a friend [of God]….” Moreover, justification and sanctification together, as one event of grace in the soul, are the work of Christ, whose “most holy passion on the wood of the cross” is, as Trent teaches, the “meritorious cause” of our justification (and simultaneous sanctification) through the infusion of the Holy Spirit in baptism, which is the “instrumental cause” of justification in Christ. Hence, whether or not Hahn actually subscribes to the “double justice” theory, it is false and misleading to suggest, as Hahn does, a distinction in the relations of the divine Persons between the One who justifies and the One who sanctifies.

But Hahn seems oblivious to all this. In his bid to augment the role of the “bridal-maternal” Holy Spirit, he declares: “It seems almost blasphemous to say this, but Christians can place too much emphasis on Christ.” Not almost blasphemous, Dr. Hahn. According to Hahn, “if we focus on the works of Christ to the exclusion of the Holy Spirit [a false alternative typical of neo-modernist exegesis] we are missing the most important work of Christ”?i.e. the most important work of Christ is “to give us the spirit.” Hahn has it exactly backwards. As St. Montfort noted in the treatise on Mary quoted above, the most important work of the Spirit is to give us Christ. Christ is the masterpiece of the Holy Ghost, created with the cooperation of the Holy Ghost’s spouse, Mary.

Hahn concludes his novel excursus by declaring that “To be fully human, to be fully divinized, then, we need the whole Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We need to be justified [by Christ] and sanctified [by the Spirit], we need the law, and we need love. We need to be fathered and mothered.” So, although according to Hahn’s worthless disclaimers we must not actually call God “Mother,” nevertheless he says we must be mothered by God in keeping with the bridal-maternal work of the Holy Ghost in sanctifying us. Let Hahn’s defenders try to explain what Hahn “really” means, if not this. Of course, Hahn cannot be expected to defend his own ideas against these criticisms, for he has thus far steadfastly refused to do so.

Useless Speculation

Ironically, Hahn should have been stopped dead in his tracks and persuaded to write nothing on his novelty when confronted with the very words of Our Lord which he does not get around to quoting until the end of Chapter 10: “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you… When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth.”

What more needs to be said about the temerity of tampering with the Son’s own affirmation of the masculine gender of the Holy Ghost? Our Lord’s own words, the foundation of Catholic doctrine on this question, should have been the beginning and the end of Hahn’s inquiry. But Hahn and the other “creative” theologians who roam the anomic landscape of the post-conciliar Church are like those characters in science fiction films, who awake to find the world has ended and that they are the only survivors. Hahn can just do theology and no one will stop him, just as the movie characters can plunder stores and steal cars because the police are gone.

When all is said and done Hahn’s feminizing novelty is utterly useless to the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, however, it is not merely useless to the Church; for Hahn’s kind of talk is very useful to the cause of feminist theology. As Dale Vree rightly observed in his NOR piece: “Feminist theologians and their Queer cheerleaders have been campaigning for a feminine Holy Spirit for decades. How odd — how depressing, actually — to see Dr. Hahn jump on the bandwagon.” Hahn would of course protest that he hasn’t jumped on the feminist bandwagon, just as he would protest that he hasn’t actually called the Holy Ghost “Mother” or “She.” But if Hahn’s words are taken according to their objective signification (as opposed to post hoc interpretations of what Hahn “really means”) he has done precisely that, whether he admits it or not.

In order to remedy the confusion his “bridal-maternal” Holy Ghost is no doubt causing among the faithful, Hahn should retract this novelty just as publicly as he has promoted it. Better yet, he should make good on his promise in Chapter 10 of FCL, as NOR urges: Burn it, Scott, burn it. Meanwhile, I would address this additional request to Dr. Hahn: Please stop messing with our religion.

Rewriting the Fall of Man

While Hahn is burning Chapter 10 of FCL, he ought to consider stoking the flames with Chapter 6 as well. O’Neill’s critique in NOR also takes Hahn to task for his strange speculation on Adam’s original sin. According to Hahn, the Original Sin was not the eating of the forbidden fruit in disobedience to the divine command, but rather a refusal to do battle with the serpent?whom Hahn imagines to be a “monstrous beast” or dragon?after the serpent threatened Adam with death if he did not eat of the fruit: “Knowing the serpent’s power, Adam was unwilling to lay down his own life for the sake of his love of God, or to save the life of his beloved. That refusal to sacrifice was Adam’s original sin.” This speculation is found not only in Chapter 6 of FCL but also in Hahn’s A Father Who Keeps His Promises (in the section entitled “Prime Rib”?one of the many juvenile puns with which Hahn brackets his theology).

In FCL (this time without issuing any disclaimer) Hahn concocts his new version of the Fall of man in order to explain why, as he sees it, Adam remained silent while the serpent was tempting Eve to eat. In the first place, where is it written that Adam was standing with Eve and had the opportunity to speak while the serpent tempted her? Hahn deduces this from the serpent’s use of the plural form of “you” in Hebrew. (Only Hahn was clever enough to notice this in 2,000 years?) From the serpent’s use of the plural “you,” however, one could just as easily infer that the serpent’s remarks were addressed to Eve as part of a couple, even though Adam was not immediately present.

At any rate, the Church has never even taught, much less made inferences from, Adam’s supposed “silence.” But Hahn does. For Hahn, Adam’s silence must mean that “Adam faced a life-threatening force, deadly in its intent and formidable in its subtlety… the serpent seized on the one thing that humans had been created to dread instinctively: dying.” Just a moment, please! When has the Church ever taught that Adam and Eve, in their original created state of integrity and bodily immortality (which is de fide ), were subject to a fear of death? On the contrary the Church teaches that God “imposed death as the punishment for transgression of His probationary commandment.” Before then, Adam and Eve (as partakers of the tree of life versus the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) would have lived forever, even if at some point they would have been translated to heaven. Yet Hahn’s theory necessarily implies that the devil was capable of imposing death before Adam had sinned; Hahn says the dragon was “a life-threatening force” and that Adam “feared his own death” from the dragon’s attack. This is simply preposterous.

So, in the Bible According to Hahn, Adam sinned when he caved in to the dragon’s death threat, not when he disobeyed the divine command respecting the forbidden tree. But how is it that not one pope, council or catechism in the history of the Church has ever mentioned this sin? Hahn’s idea makes a shambles of the Church’s constant teaching on the Fall as the penalty for disobedience to a divine command, in consequence of which?and certainly not otherwise, such as an attack by a dragon?Adam would suffer death. Let us quickly survey the wreckage Hahn causes.

First of all, if Adam sinned before Eve by failing to protect her from the dragon rather than by eating the forbidden fruit in disobedience to the divine command (after Eve had done so), then the Church’s entire tradition, along with every catechism, goes out the window. For the Church has always taught, and Catholics have always believed, that Eve was first tempted by the serpent, who deceived her into tasting of the forbidden fruit, and that Adam then sinned by doing likewise, thus bringing about the Fall: “From the woman came the beginning of sin, and because of her we will all die.” Wisdom 2:24. “But I fear lest, as the serpent seduced Eve by his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted and fall away...” 1 Tim. 2:14. Indeed, the Church has always taught that it was only the sin of Adam, following that of Eve, which was transmitted to his descendants by generation, and that Eve’s sin would not have been so transmitted. As St. Thomas observes:

… The Apostle says (Rm. 5:12): “By one man sin entered into this world.” Now if the woman would have transmitted original sin to her children, he should have said that it entered by two, since both of them sinned, or rather that it entered by a woman, since she sinned first. Therefore original sin is transmitted to the children, not by the mother, but by the father.

Did we not, along with every generation before us, learn this truth of the Faith in our catechisms? For example:

Did Adam and Eve obey the commandment of God? -- Adam and Eve did not obey the commandment of God, but ate of the forbidden fruit.
The devil tempted Eve to eat of the fruit, and she ate; then she gave some to Adam, and he also ate (Gen. 3:1-13).

Hahn, however, blithely reverses the sequence of events in Genesis, Chapter 3. He boldly declares that this newly uncovered sin of Adam ?the sin of “refusal to sacrifice” by laying down his life in combat with the dragon?occurred before Eve’s sin: “He committed it even before he had tasted the fruit, even before Eve had tasted the fruit.” That’s certainly news to the Catholic Church.

From this novelty a grave problem arises: If Adam sinned before Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, then his own eating of it could not have been the Original sin but only Adam’s second sin. That is precisely Hahn’s contention. But, as I have just shown, the Church has always taught that it was not Eve’s sin but rather Adam’s that caused the Fall: “Adam’s sin is the basis of the dogma of original sin…” Hence, if only Eve had sinned there would have been no Fall.

Therefore, Hahn’s novelty would make the entire account of the eating of the forbidden fruit in violation of the divine command irrelevant to the Fall of man. This is because, as Hahn would have it, the Fall occurred before Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit (when he originally sinned by refusing to “sacrifice” himself in combat the dragon), whereas, by everyone’s account, Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit did not cause the Fall.

It might be argued that Hahn’s notion could be reconciled with the traditional understanding of Genesis 3 if we posit the commission of two original sins by Adam: the first when he refused to engage in mortal combat with the dragon, and the second when he ate of the forbidden fruit in violation of the divine command, after Eve did so. But this would involve a kind of “two strikes” theory of Original Sin; the Original Sin of Adam would become the Original Sins. Here we see what happens when one endeavors to be a “creative theologian” who “finds” things in Scripture the Church has never taught before?a hopeless theological mess ensues.

But the mess does not end there. If Hahn is correct that Adam sinned before he ate of the forbidden fruit, why does the Genesis account present the eating of the fruit as the sin that caused the Fall and banishment from the Garden, rather than Adam’s supposed sin earlier on?which Genesis does not mention but which Hahn the Scripture sleuth detects between the lines? Consider the account of the “trial” of Adam and Eve by God and God’s pronouncement of sentence at Genesis 3:9-17:
And the Lord God called Adam, and said to him: Where art thou?

And he said: I heard thy voice in paradise; and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.

And he said to him: And who hath told thee that thou wast naked, but that thou hast eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?
And Adam said: The woman, whom thou gavest me to be my companion, gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

And the Lord God said to the woman: Why hast thou done this? And she answered: The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.

And the Lord God said to the serpent: Because thou hast done this thing, thou art cursed among all cattle, and beasts of the earth: upon thy breast shalt thou go, and earth shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.

To the woman also he said: I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions: in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall have dominion over thee.

And to Adam he said: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee, that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work: with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life.

Thus divine revelation tells us that Adam was condemned and sentenced because he had “hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree”?a sin of disobedience simpliciter. The Genesis account?that is, God speaking?says nothing about any earlier sin involving Adam’s refusal to sacrifice himself in a life-or-death confrontation with a dragon. Perhaps the encounter with the dragon and Adam’s “earlier” sin occurred during a divine coffee break. Or maybe the Eden Cam was malfunctioning at the time. To be serious, what Hahn is actually contending here is that God’s sentence of Adam fails to make mention of Adam’s primary offense. Worse, Hahn substitutes the sin of “refusal to sacrifice” for the sin of disobedience that God Himself specifies, and all of Tradition affirms, as Adam’s original sin. Hahn’s audacity is really quite astounding.

What is the Point of Hahn’s “Work”?

Why must Hahn tinker, tinker, tinker with the Church’s settled interpretation of divine revelation? Does he not recognize that tampering with the foundation of the edifice of Tradition threatens the structure as a whole? And why must he indulge his heterodox speculations in best-selling books, mass-marketed to lay people who swallow everything he says without knowing any better? What is the point of it all? Is it to create zippy theological products in order to move lots of books off the shelves? Is this a prudent way to handle Catholic doctrine? Really, is this any way for a Catholic theologian to behave?

It must be said that Hahn’s strange novelties do alarm many good Catholics who know the Faith well enough to see that something is seriously wrong with many of his writings. (I have not even mentioned Hahn’s Protestant-inspired view that the millennium ended 2,000 years ago or his notion of prima scriptura instead of the traditional twin sources of revelation, Scripture and Tradition.) In an online bulletin board maintained by Catholic Answers, a poster who had read NOR’s critique complained: “I had always been vaguely troubled by his [Hahn’s] inferences because I wondered why we had never heard any of this before. Did the Church not come to any of these conclusions until Scott Hahn came along?... I am a little concerned as to whether his exegesis is in line or within the boundaries of Catholic teaching.” That’s putting it mildly.

Hahn’s response to these public concerns about his theological views is not to address them. He has yet to defend any of his “findings” on the merits against critiques by NOR and others. The most I have seen him do?and even this was a first, occurring only days ago?was to send a letter to NOR’s editor (September 2004 issue) protesting that his books receive imprimaturs and are “reviewed” by bishops. Please! The Dutch Catechism was given an imprimatur, even though it was laden with theological error and had to be amended under (very weak) Vatican pressure. Everyone knows that since Vatican II there has been a vast proliferation of error-laden books bearing imprimaturs. In case Hahn hasn’t noticed, the Church is in the midst of an unprecedented theological and disciplinary meltdown in which imprimaturs mean next to nothing.

Unbowed by any criticism, no matter how cogent, Hahn allows his novelties to continue circulating far and wide in highly profitable best sellers that are imbibed by untold numbers of gullible Catholics left theologically defenseless by the postconciliar “renewal.” The saddest thing of all is that, his novelties aside, the pop theology Hahn dispenses (which in many ways is very sound) is far closer to authentic Catholic teaching than what non-traditionalist Catholics will receive almost anywhere else. That is how dire the situation has become.

A House Built On Sand

Like Deal Hudson’s magazine, Hahn’s theological franchise operation is no small thing. His books, marketed by mainstream commercial publishers, reportedly sell in the hundreds of thousands. And, like Hudson, Hahn has his own show on EWTN?two shows, in fact. His influence has become so great that people speak of being “Hahn-verts” to the Church. In the post-conciliar theological vacuum, Hahn is becoming the veritable Aquinas of neo-Catholicism.

But as NOR observed, “Christ wishes us to make converts not ‘Hahn-verts’.” And it was none other than Christ who warned us that “every one that heareth these my words and doth them not, shall be like a foolish man that built his house upon the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and they beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall thereof.” (Matt. 7:24-27).

The neo-Catholic establishment is a house built on the shifting sands of celebrity, including the celebrity of a hugely popular Pope who will not rule his Church, but rather basks in the adulation of a profoundly disoriented laity whose plight he does not seem to understand. The Church cannot be sustained in her mission by celebrities who hunger after novelty, whether it be carnal or theological. The Church does not need knights in shining armor from Washington, or books that make Hahn-verts instead of old fashioned converts, or even a Pope who is always celebrated but never feared. None of these celebrities can provide what the Church requires in the present crisis. Only the foundation stones of traditional Roman Catholicism, put firmly back in place by a militant hierarchy from the Pope on down, will be able to support the household of the Faith against the winds and floods that now assail it. How much more damage the Church will sustain in this crisis will be determined by how much more time it takes the hierarchy to restore the foundation. The fall of Hudson and the novelties of Hahn should make that clear to every Catholic who grieves over the state of the Church today.