"Scott Hahn's Novelties"

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That is the title of a 12 page article in the June issue of New Oxford Review. The author talks about some of Dr. Hahn’s ideas, which he thinks are strange.

For one thing, Dr. Hahn says Melchizedek was really Noah’s son Shem! :confused: I never heard anyone say that before.

Dr. Hahn also says that Adam’s sin wasn’t disobedience but was his refusal to fight a dragon! He says, “Would he stand up for his bride by engaging the diabolical serpent in mortal combat? . . . Adam was unwilling to lay down his own life . . . to save the life of his beloved. That refusal to sacrifice was Adam’s original sin.” :eek: I never even heard a Protestant say anything like that.

The author refers to other strange ideas. Some of them come from really conservative Protestantism, but some not.

The biggest problem seems to be that Dr. Hahn applies the idea of covenant to just about everything. He even says the Trinity is a covenant, which makes it a kind of contract by the three persons. He also talks about the Holy Spirit in feminine language that sounds like a liberal Catholic talking. :bigyikes:

This is a long article. I’m really worried by it. The problems the author brings up look real to me. If you have read it, let’s hear what you think about it.
 
Can you post a link here to that article?

I have several of his books and find him an “okay” read - his subheadings for every new topic make me nuts so I don’t even read them. Sometimes I think he tries too hard to be clever and “punny.”

In my (not so) humble opinion… :o
 
I just got finished reading that article. Actually, I just skimmed it. I’m going to go back and reread it. I like Scott Hahn, but I had always been vaguely troubled by his 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 laud his enthusiasm, and I appreciate the fact that he is responsible for many converts, re. “Hahn-verts” as they’re known, but I am a little concerned as to whether his exegesis in line or within the boundaries of Catholic teaching.l
 
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Tarcisius:
The biggest problem seems to be that Dr. Hahn applies the idea of covenant to just about everything. He even says the Trinity is a covenant, which makes it a kind of contract by the three persons.
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If there is an online edition of the article, please provide a link to it.

Even if he does apply the idea of covenant “to just about everything” (which I think is an overstatement), there is still a fundamental difference between a covenant and a contract.

The former establishes a lifelong, ultimately unbreakable relationship between the ones who establish it. The latter sets up a relationship between parties only for as long as it takes to fulfill its terms.

If those terms are ignored, then the contract is null and void. Not so with a covenant. Even when the people Israel were unfaithful to the covenant it had made with the Lord, he kept renewing it with them because of his own faithfulness.
 
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Tarcisius:
That is the title of a 12 page article in the June issue of New Oxford Review. The author talks about some of Dr. Hahn’s ideas, which he thinks are strange.

For one thing, Dr. Hahn says Melchizedek was really Noah’s son Shem! :confused: I never heard anyone say that before.

Dr. Hahn also says that Adam’s sin wasn’t disobedience but was his refusal to fight a dragon! He says, “Would he stand up for his bride by engaging the diabolical serpent in mortal combat? . . . Adam was unwilling to lay down his own life . . . to save the life of his beloved. That refusal to sacrifice was Adam’s original sin.” :eek: I never even heard a Protestant say anything like that.

The author refers to other strange ideas. Some of them come from really conservative Protestantism, but some not.

The biggest problem seems to be that Dr. Hahn applies the idea of covenant to just about everything. He even says the Trinity is a covenant, which makes it a kind of contract by the three persons. He also talks about the Holy Spirit in feminine language that sounds like a liberal Catholic talking. :bigyikes:

This is a long article. I’m really worried by it. The problems the author brings up look real to me. If you have read it, let’s hear what you think about it.
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I must have missed this, I have heard him on the radio and read some of his books and never seen any of this…I have seen and heard some of his beleifs of the covenant but they seemed consistent to catholic teachings to me…
 
I have heard these teachings from Dr. Hahn and I can assure that there is no need for you to worry. They are either being misunderstood or taken out of context. If you would like to get it straight from his own mouth, you can get the tape set “The Bible Alone?” available from St. Joseph Communications (www.saintjoe.com). It is an EXCELLENT series.

Dr. Hahn does not present these views as necessarily part of the faith; only as explanations. To cite a specific example; the dragon Adam refused to face. Exactly how do you view the “serpent” mentioned in Genesis. Midieval imagery has conditioned us to picture him as a snake. However, Revelation describes the “serpent” that is the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning as a seven headed dragon. Dr. Hahn then proceeds to redraw the picture of the confrontation between Eve and the serpent in that light. Instead of a wily snake suggesting that God is lying about dying if the forbidden fruit is eaten, you now see a giant seven headed dragon towering over Eve and saying with a meanacing tone, “You WON’T die if you eat the fruit.” The implication being that he would kill her if she refused. You don’t have to agree with him on this, but it does bring an entirely new light to what happened in the Garden.

After all, St. Paul states somewhere that Christ was willing to do what Adam was not; suffer death. Dr. Hahn then asks where Adam was while Eve was being confronted. It turns out that he was apparently right there!!! It is VERY interesting and enlightening; even if you don’t accept his premise.
 
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Tarcisius:
For one thing, Dr. Hahn says Melchizedek was really Noah’s son Shem! :confused: I never heard anyone say that before.
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Just curious, why would it matter if it was or was not Shem?
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Tarcisius:
Dr. Hahn also says that Adam’s sin wasn’t disobedience but was his refusal to fight a dragon! He says, “Would he stand up for his bride by engaging the diabolical serpent in mortal combat? . . . Adam was unwilling to lay down his own life . . . to save the life of his beloved. That refusal to sacrifice was Adam’s original sin.” :eek: I never even heard a Protestant say anything like that.
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Actually, he is saying that it was disobedience. God told Adam to tend to the Garden. Satan entered the Garden, Adam did nothing. The point, I believe, that Dr. Hahn is making is that the first sin was actually Adam’s. He should have protected (tended) the garden from evil (dragon) and trusted in God. Instead, Dr. Hahn theorizes that Adam held back, didn’t trust in God, and didn’t lay down his life for his bride (the way that Jesus did). What specifically gives you a problem with this? Not that I’m saying your wrong to have a problem with it, who knows, maybe I’m not seeing something that you are!
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Tarcisius:
The biggest problem seems to be that Dr. Hahn applies the idea of covenant to just about everything. He even says the Trinity is a covenant, which makes it a kind of contract by the three persons. He also talks about the Holy Spirit in feminine language that sounds like a liberal Catholic talking. :bigyikes:
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He doesn’t apply the covenent to everything. He outlines what he believes are God’s covenents with us very well in an EWTN video series called “Our Father’s Plan”. I’ll have to read the article to understand the Trinity statement, I’m not remembering that one specifically, so I can’t comment on it./QUOTE]
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Tarcisius:
This is a long article. I’m really worried by it. The problems the author brings up look real to me. If you have read it, let’s hear what you think about it.
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I’ll say more when I read the article. In this case, it will also be usefull to read the full text the author is commenting on if it is not in the article. Dr. Hahn is a well educated, very conservative catholic from the talks/speeches I’ve heard.

John
 
Scott Hahn is no heritic! You have just as much a right to disagree with his opinions as he has to have them. To the best of my knowledge he believes and affirms everything that the Church requires him to believe, the rest of which is open to debate!
 
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cecelia:
I like Scott Hahn, but I had always been vaguely troubled by his inferences because I wondered why we had never heard any of this before.
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I remember reading in Rome Sweet Home that his ideas he thought were novel he actually found again in studying the Church fathers.
 
I have heard a lecture series where Dr. Hahn discusses the Adam and the dragon scenario. I’ll be honest, his explanation of it makes a lot more sense than anything else I had ever heard, shed a whole new light on Adam’s failings in the area of both disobedience and his unwillingness to sacrifice his life for another, and a numebr of other things that perfectly paralles Christ in contradiction. When Christ became the new Adam, he confronted the tree, did not cave in to temptation or fear in the garden, and sacrificed His life for His bride.

God only knows the actual form that Satan took. But I always found the idea of someone being talked into eating an apple by a talking snake every bit as silly as an intimidating creature using fear as a weapon.
 
As far as the allusion to Melchizidek being thought of as Shem, the faithful son of Noah, this comes from rabbinic literature.

Scott Hahn, like most scholars, stands on the shoulders of others for many of his illustrations, as the reference to Church Fathers above indicates. And, also as was pointed out, as long as theologians do not go outside the defined teachings of the Church, they are allowed to speculate for helpful ways in which to understand the Faith.

It seems to me that most of the animus against Dr. Hahn and others arises from a sector of the Church who fear the
“Protestantisation” of the Church by new converts, especially if they are popular.
 
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Fidelis:
It seems to me that most of the animus against Dr. Hahn and others arises from a sector of the Church who fear the
“Protestantisation” of the Church by new converts, especially if they are popular.
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It’s my impression that the Scott Hahn’s of the world are the ones going out of their way to protect traditional Catholicism, not the other way around. Luke warm cradle Catholics are the ones im leary of!
 
TheMutant has made many good points about the snake versus dragon depiction of “the diabolical serpent” which I agree with. Maybe you aren’t used to hearing a dragon referred to as a serpent, but it is equally as valid as picturing a snake. When you imagine the forbidden fruit of Genesis, what do you picture? An apple? Almost everyone does because that is what we see in art but nowhere does the Bible say that the forbidden fruit was an apple. It’s just become the ubiquitous image.

“For one thing, Dr. Hahn says Melchizedek was really Noah’s son Shem! :confused: I never heard anyone say that before.”

I don’t know about the Melchizedek/Shem thing. Never heard anything about that.

“The biggest problem seems to be that Dr. Hahn applies the idea of covenant to just about everything. He even says the Trinity is a covenant, which makes it a kind of contract by the three persons.”

Covenant versus contract, it’s been explained adequately above I think. Is marriage a contract or a covenant? The Catholic view is that it is a covenant. Dr. Hahn, in the book “First Comes Love” which is all about the Trinity, frequently likens the relationship between the three Persons of the Trinity to marriage.

He is not saying it is the same as marriage. Rather, the reverse is true. Marriage is made in the image of the Trinity for our benefit so that we might have a glimpse of that Holy union however imperfectly. This is obvious when you remember that of course God existed before marriage, so all human institutions created by God mirror Him, not the other way around. It is only that our language is imperfect to describe this.

Lastly, covenant theology as written by Dr. Hahn is not a Protestant idea. Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Moses all entered into covenant relationships with God. The story of man is the story of our covenant with God. You could even say that Adam was the first to break covenant with God by his disobedience (perhaps to defend Eve as Dr. Hahn suggests) in the Garden of Eden.

Just because certain sects of Protestantism also claim covenant theology and Dr. Hahn wrote about it (however incompletely) before his conversion does not make it a false idea. Even Pagans, who are far outside the Christian family of separated brethren, have some snippets of Truth in their pagan religions. It should not surprise you then that Protestants, who are closer to the Church in lineage, have something more than snippets.

“He also talks about the Holy Spirit in feminine language that sounds like a liberal Catholic talking.”

Having actually read the book that the New Oxford Review is mainly commenting on, I can tell you that Dr. Hahn was quite aware that to bring up anything about the Holy Spirit having feminine qualities is a hot-button issue for many. The fact is, though, that it is True. What else are we to make of God describing Himself as like a mother nursing her young?

Big “However” here. However, Dr. Hahn does not fall into the fallacy of calling the Holy Spirit “She” or imagining that the Holy Spirit is a female deity or some other such feminist nonsense. He does liken the Holy Spirit to the wife’s role in marriage, but again we must remember it is the Holy Spirit that came first, not woman or wife. It would be more proper to say that “the wife partly images the role of the Holy Spirit.”

Obviously the Holy Spirit is not a “She.” For one, Mary is often described as the “spouse of the Holy Spirit” which gives the Holy Spirit a masculine attribute. Also, the Creed says that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son,” which places the Holy Spirit in the sort of third position, that of the “fruit” of the union of the Trinity.

Since Dr. Hahn’s book on the Trinity attempts to examine the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity in terms of relationships that are common to non-scholars (marriage), he does explore what the Holy Spirit’s feminine qualities teach us about the Trinity and following that what we can learn about how we should act in our own marriages.

Finally, I do want to say that Dr. Hahn was integral to my conversion because of his book “Rome Sweet Home.” I would have become a Catholic without his testimony eventually of course. I don’t understand those who seem to take glee in attacking him or his books. Perhaps it is strange to hear orthodox Catholic theology described in a fresh way, but naturally the culture of the Church changes as she adds new members to the Body of Christ.

I heartily recommend any of Dr. Hahn’s popular theology books to you. My favorite is perhaps “The Lamb’s Supper.” I understand that some people don’t like puns, but I find them quite entertaining. (He uses puns for all the chapter titles, such as “There’s something about Mary,” in "Hail, Holy Queen. OK, that’s a film reference, not a pun, but you get the idea.)
 
Have you read his book, First Comes Love? He explains how God is a covenant. He’s also really big into the “covenant” thing as his students (I know one) tend to do the same.

His explanations, however, do make sense.

You should try reading the Lamb’s Supper as well.
 
I’m currently reading Hahn’s A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture, which is a very thorough summary of Hahn’s studies, and a good presentation of salvation history from a Catholic scholar and theologian.

Many of Hahn’s ideas are seemingly novel, but he goes to great lengths to document what he writes, from Jewish and Patristic sources.

For example, Hahn gives ample documentation from Patristic, Jewish, and Medieval commentaries to show the Melchisedek is Shem, and that the serpent in the garden may have been a dragon.

We have to remember that the Church does not have infallible commentaries of Scripture. She gives us dogmas which, as it were, are parameters within which a diversity of interpretations can exist. Often, these interpretations are complimentary, not contradictory.

I believe it is impossible to appreciate Hahn’s other works fully until one has first read his A Father Who Keeps His Promises. Read this book, and all its footnotes, to see how Catholic Hahn’s ideas truly are.

There are two things I’ll note in particular:
  1. Hahn never denies that Adam’s sin was one of disobedience. He simply attempts to cast new light on the nature of this disobedience.
  2. There is, within the Catholic mystical tradition, a sense in which God, especially the Holy Spirit, can be spoken of in feminine terms. This can be done in both an othodox and a heterodox fashion, as can any article of the Catholic faith.
 
Father Mitch Pacawa has also discussed the feminine qualities of the Holy Spirit. I’d hardly call him a heretic.

The problem I see is that someone like Hahn - or anyone else - can write a lengthy discussion with a lot of citations from other sources, and center the discussion on a less popular idea that is not heretical. But someone simply says “Hey, that nut Scott Hahn thinks the serpent was a dragon!” Well, yeah it does sound nutty out of the context of the presentation.

But let’s be honest here. Once upon a time a snake climbed up a tree, talked to Eve, and outwitted her, made her eat an apple, and Adam just stood there and went along with things… well, why does that sound like the more intellectual view?
 
Next we’ll have individuals complaining about St. Patrick explaining the Trinity with a shamrock.

I’ve read Scott’s material…it’s decent. I’d recommend it.
 
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theMutant:
If you would like to get it straight from his own mouth, you can get the tape set “The Bible Alone?” available from St. Joseph Communications (www.saintjoe.com). It is an EXCELLENT series.
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OOPS! 😃

I indicated the wrong tape set. The one where he discusses the topic of this thread is “Salvation History,” also available from St. Joseph Communications and also an EXCELLENT series. If you want to hear what Dr. Hahn said about Shem being Melchesidech and the serpent in the Garden being a Dragon, this is the tape set to get. There may be other sources where he makes the statements, but this tape set is where I heard it. Of course, “The Bible Alone?” is also an EXCELLENT tape set that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to hear what might be the most thorough and completely biblical refutation of Sola Scriptura around.
 
Hahn does not teach anything that is not supported by Scripture, The Catechism and Tradition, including the writings of the early Fathers of the Church. He was led into the Church by the Truth of the Church and teaches only the Truth. He does not make anything up. Thank God for Scott Hahn. We need more just like him.
 
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Tarcisius:
Dr. Hahn also says that Adam’s sin wasn’t disobedience but was his refusal to fight a dragon! He says, “Would he stand up for his bride by engaging the diabolical serpent in mortal combat? . . . Adam was unwilling to lay down his own life . . . to save the life of his beloved. That refusal to sacrifice was Adam’s original sin.” :eek: I never even heard a Protestant say anything like that…
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although not said exactly like this, the idea that it was adam’s lack of action was his sin is put forth from protestants. larry crabb’s “the silence of adam” talks about this. it is ultimately a men’s book but the theology in there is consistent to what hahn talks about. adam was there the whole time eve conversed with the serpent. also, it wasn’t until after God confronted the 3 of them that the “serpent” lost it’s legs or wings. it’s not sure which but it is after that he is cursed and has to slide on his belly. so he either had legs or wings before.
 
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