Purify Your Bride

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. John 17:20-23

You see these verses quoted a lot in ecumenical dialogue. This is Jesus’ clearest statement about His heart for unity. But what kind of unity is He talking about? Well, lets think backwards. He says our unity is to “let the world know that You sent me.” Well, what kind of unity is going to let the world know this? Would a invisible, spiritual unity do it? How can it? We are talking about the world. We are not referring to people of faith. An invisible, spiritual unity is going to require faith to see it. I can see the unity between the Reformed and Catholic faiths. But I have eyes to see it. I know both fellowships love the same Jesus and express it in different ways. They disagree a lot on liturgy, quite a bit on doctrine, much less on morals but on a spiritual level there is the same dynamic at work.

But what about a non-believer? Is he going to be impressed by this unity? Not a bit. He is not going to see the underlying spiritual realities. He is going to use his eyes and ears and notice a lot more differences than similarities. Really there is not much chance he will give us credit for better than random agreement. They both talk about God and Jesus and the bible but after that they go in very different directions. Is he going to see evidence that Jesus must have been sent by God? Hardly. It is going to look to him like the the divinity of Jesus could easily be made up. There is not reason to suppose anything supernatural is going on.

Now if our churches got together and maybe did a service project or a praise and worship event as a group of Christians from different traditions. Would that convince our typical man of the world? I doubt it. It would show they don’t hate each other. That is a start. But it is hardly evidence of Almighty God. It is just evidence of good manners.

So what would do it? What kind of unity would make people say that can only be a God thing? If these Christians were wrong about Jesus they would never be able to achieve this level of oneness. For starters we could start meeting together on Sunday mornings. Sunday morning has been called the most segregated time of the week. That normally refers to racial segregation but we can see it along many lines. People are less united when they go to church than they are when they do just about anything else.

The other thing we could do is take leadership from the same people. Somebody who one Christian respects as an authority from God can be seen as a buffoon by another Christian. There is something about following spiritual leaders you have picked yourself that is quite unremarkable. Could you not do the same thing even if God didn’t exist. You would have to call them self-help communities rather than churches but what is the real difference? If you pick you own leader any obedience is just sticking with your own agenda.

But if you had one church with one set of leaders not picked by the membership and those leaders would teach one doctrine over all times and in all cultures then you would have people taking notice. But that could never happen. Well, it did. It happened in the early church. They got it. They figured out what Jesus meant in John 17. He meant what He said. Guess what? The world did come to know Jesus is God. They knew it so well they condemned many Christological heresies.

It is an unending object of amazement to behold what is at best, ignorance, if not the worst, arrogance, of the misuse that the Early Church Fathers receive in the hands of Roman apologists. Our Roman opponents are accustomed to shout “out of context” immediately at the faintest citation of any patristic witness whose words appear to be at odds with the modern day views of the Roman communion, whether they have actually investigated the context of any such citation or not.

So how do Catholics know he quotes ECF’s out of context? Well there is the fact that anti-Catholics like him have been caught at it about a million times. See this for proof that he is doing it once again. So we know the game. People throw mud at the saints and the church. Catholic apologists clean it off. It is like an addict complaining you predicted he was going to ask for money. Behaving badly so frequently that people see the pattern a mile away. By some strange logic we are supposed to assume that those people are somehow uncharitable.

But we know for another reason that David King’s arguments are wrong. Because St Jerome was a Catholic. That is such a huge problem for his argument. It is never dealt with. If St Jerome was a Sola Scriptura guy then why did he remain in the church? Is it because he found all the church’s doctrines biblical? Sure he did. But isn’t that kind of a problem for those who argue that the Catholic church clearly contradicts the bible on a whole host of doctrines? How does St Jerome with his alleged Sola Scriptura mindset not have a problem? Would he not have found some disagreement and rejected the papacy over it?

The truth is everyone who does serious theology diverges from the church once in a while. But what happens when they do that? Do they see the church as being there to correct them or do they see the church as obviously all wrong? Needing to bow to their wisdom or else they will leave. Protestants imagine that these major Catholic thinkers never ran into this issue and that is why they remained Catholic. That is silliness. People didn’t just naturally agree back then any more than they do today. They agreed because they made a choice to bring their thinking into line with the teaching of the church. That is precisely the opposite of Sola Scriptura.

So many people have religion kind of separated off. We believe it is true but we don’t want to get to crazy with it. Religion gives people inner strength and comfort so they can get on with the really important stuff. But hell completely destroys that logic. The fate of your eternal soul is important. It is not the only reason why our devotion to God needs to be our top priority but it is the easiest to understand. Ultimately it is all that will matter.

Salvation is always for the few while the many are not saved. That was true of Noah. The focus is on the 8 people who were saved. But there were many more who were not on the ark. Jesus talks about the wide road and the narrow road. The implication is that going with the flow is not going to get you saved. People try and push against that. God would not condemn the majority. He is too nice. But God takes sin very seriously. We are to take our own sin very seriously.

Do we really want to be holy? Do our lives show that? Someone who is going with the flow of society does not really have a hunger for God. He does not really have sorrow over the sins of this world. He has basically decided to accept evil. Sure he wishes it was not there but is not willing to do anything radical to remove it from himself. He prefers himself how he is over the new creation God is offering him.

Salvation in a context of almost everyone being saved is almost a contradiction. We need to be saved from something. If we live in a world where heaven is the rule and not the exception then going to heaven cannot be described as being saved. Then the problem of sin is just a problem for the few and not for the many. God wants us to choose Him over the world. He does not want us to simply hope the world will be saved.

If you think like a nominalist and focus on how you interact with that baby then your answer will be that everything about the baby has changed. I can now see it, hear it, touch it, etc. It needs to be cared for in a very different way. It now has a name. All of these things cause you to put unborn children in a very different category from born children.

So you can see that if we approach the abortion question with a nominalist mindset we are likely to arrive at very different answers than if we approach it from a scholastic or Thomistic mindset. In fact, one nominalist person might arrive at very different answers from another. You might arrive at different answers if you are the mother, the father, or perhaps a friend or neighbor. A ton of issues that would be irrelevant to the scholastic are going to muddy the waters greatly for a nominalist. What is the mother’s situation? Is she in a stable love relationship with the father? The Thomist would ask if that changes the essence of what the baby is. If the answer is No then there is no need to factor that into your thinking. It does not mean the Thomist does not care about this woman’s life situation. It just means it does not impact the moral reasoning around abortion.

That is generally true of nominalist reasoning. The circumstances matter a lot more so every question becomes muddled. You see lots of very strange scenarios being brought into the discussion. Because the revolves around the externals and not in the heart of the matter one can dream up cases where the externals are different. Debates about torture go there a lot.

Then you have the cases where nominalists just don’t comprehend. Why can’t we have female priests? Why can’t we have gay marriage? The answer comes back to the intrinsic nature of the priesthood or of marriage. But the response comes back with questions that focus on the person’s empirical date. If my interactions with priests would be possible with a woman then what is the big deal? Same with married couples. Everything I do with a married couple could be done with a same-sex couple. So why does anyone care? There is no understanding of the assumption behind it that my interactions, or at least those I understand, are all that needs to be worried about.

Mark Shea talks about the two stages of human moral decay. The first stage is “What could it hurt?” The second stage is “How were we supposed to know?” But the key is that answers to the first question are only accepted if they connect with nominalist thinking. For example, Humanae Vitae gave an excellent answer the the question of what could go wrong if contraception was widely accepted and practiced. But nobody felt the need to respond to it or explain where it went wrong. Why not? Because it approached the question from Thomistic point of view. What is the intrinsic nature of sex, procreation, and marriage? What are we risking when we change the relationship between them? The answer is quite clear. You risk losing respect for human life, recognition of the sacredness of sex, the stability of marriage and the family. But those ideas are out of bounds to a nominalist.

I believe that when Catholic bishops stand together in unity with the pope they have great power. That is what we are seeing more and more of in the US today. Right around the same time we are seeing a shift in public opinion on abortion. More and more Democrats are taking notice. People have often said the Democratic party is so solidly pro-abortion there is just no point in pro-life forces even trying there. Turns out they are much more willing to switch sides on this issue than anyone thought.

So what does this mean for the pro-life movement? It means it should be much less closely tied with the Republican party. It needs to focus on public opinion first. Win that battle and the politics will take care of itself. That does not mean they should not be active in Washington. They just need to have a more two-party approach. Many people are pro-life and agree with the Democrats on most other issues. I know I am one and there seem to be many bishops in the same boat.

I think once you open the debate inside the Democratic party you might see a lot of things happen. You might see some people giving the issue serious thought for the first time. You might see pro-choice people willing to admit Roe v Wade went too far. That state lawmakers should be allowed to pass some restrictions on late term abortions. The poll numbers on unrestricted abortion at full term are crazy low. Yet that is the law.

Here is the parable, from Mat 13:

24Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
27″The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’

28″ ‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’

29″ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. 30Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’ “

and here is the explanation Jesus gives from the same chapter:

36Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.”
37He answered, “The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. 38The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, 39and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.

40″As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.

Now the principle point of objection seem to be Jesus saying “the field is the world” and Augustine seeming to equate the field with the catholic church. It seems wrong. But I know what Augustine is getting at. We have 3 kinds of plants in this field. We have the wheat, who are the true Christians. We have the weeds, who are the obvious non-Christians. Then we have the tares, who are non-Christians who look a lot like Christians. As far as church goes there are only 2 kinds that matter, the wheat and the tares. The obvious weeds would be people who have no interest in church. There is no issue with how to handle people like that. So when Jesus says the field is the world it is a bit confusing. The focus is on the wheat and tares taken together. That is the church. Those are the people who have the external basics of Christianity. So the field is the world but the place where we need to apply the key message of this parable is the church. That is where we are likely to make mistakes judging the wheat from the tares.

Jesus’ command here is mind boggling. Don’t try and pull the tares out. If you try you will make mistakes and end up with a worse mess than you started with. Augustine saw this in the Donatists. The same thing can be seen in many protestants schisms. Trying to purify the church is a strong impulse. We see unholy people in places of power and we react with righteous anger. We want to fix the church. So we rebel. We bad-mouth leaders. If it gets bad we form a faithful remnant and start a new church. But long term do we make things better or worse? Our intentions were good every step of the way but is that really the point? Jesus says don’t fix it. We don’t know people’s hearts. We don’t understand the long term spiritual implications of schism. We have no clue how many wheat plants die during this process. We are not qualified to fix the church.

Jesus says, “I will build my church.” We have trouble with that. Things don’t happen the way we want or at the speed we want and we get into fighting mode. We need to be patient. Just focus on our own holiness and being a witness to those around us. Jesus promised the gates of hell would not prevail. Trust Him. Jesus does not say the tares are fine. They are bad. He just says leave them.

5For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. 8For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.
10Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, you will never fall, 11and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Nobody is talking here about salvation being assured no matter how you live from here on out. In fact it is very much in line with the Catholic idea of assurance coming from having you life transformed by God’s grace.

3Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, 5who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

So the goal of your faith is the salvation of your souls. Wonderful. Does that means nothing can go wrong? We have a living hope but we must keep going. That is why Peter encourages them to remain strong in trials. That strength is from God’s grace. But we still have choices. He does not say you are on autopilot and have no worries. In fact, verse 17 says, “Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear”. So there is judging and there is fear. We have the strength to persevere but we need to actually do it.

It got me thinking that there might be something to about being a heretic that makes you a better evangelist. Certainly Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are good evangelists. The reformed protestant church I was in was never very good. The fundamentalists were the real evangelists. So it seems that those who are not encouraged to think too deeply about their faith are more zealous in sharing the faith. Evangelicals and catholics who have a more sophisticated faith almost seem like they are above evangelizing. They look down on the “turn or burn” preachers. But those guys get a lot of converts.

Sola Scriptura does lend itself to apologetics. If you have a lot of people out there who don’t see scripture like you do you learn to fight your corner. You learn the proof texts. You learn the slogans. You learn the rhetorical tricks for shutting down an opponent. These things make a typical person very confident their ideas are true. Often they are confident about false things because you can find proof texts and shout down opponents just as easily whether you are right or wrong. In fact, you are more likely to do that when you are wrong. Wrong faith requires confidence boosters all the time.

There is also the problem of going deep into a faith that is just very thin. You end up with questions that have no answers or have too many answers. Catholicism is an ocean and most heresies are wading pools. If you try and go deep you crash into something hard and learn not to go there again. Often protestants will assert that the faith is meant to be very simple. But the truth is just that their faith is simple. God is not simple. Their ideas about God are simple. Yes, God can be understood by simple people. But that is because He can fly under the intellect. When you engage Him with your intellect He is infinitely complex.

What does Mathison say is the difference between them? He actually say their respect for tradition and the discernment of the church. That is true. Strong protestant theologians tend not to be lone rangers. They tend to connect with a church and a tradition and benefit from the insights of others but also from their ability to reign in their creativity and keep a free radical from going too far afield.

But Mathison does not solve what I think is the major problem of this kind of protestantism. That is whatever principles, if any, separate him from Solo Scriptura. They do seem to be arbitrary principles. They are not biblical principles. It is not clear where they come from. It is not even very easy to state them. Protestants are asked over and over again what is the criteria for schism? When does a theological question become serious enough to justify splitting from your church? There are generally two vague principles articulated. You must be sure you are right and it must be a serious error. But when you try and be precise about these principles you get all sorts of problems.

How can you objectively know when you are certain enough that the church is in error? When the scripture is clear? What does that mean? Clear to me? That seems like a pretty easy condition to meet. The question of what qualifies at serious is no easier. The answer seems obvious in some ways yet so many people get different answers. Any principle you state seems quite arbitrary.

The bible does not address these questions at all. The only question it seems to answer is about schism. It says schism is bad. We know that is true. Mostly. It is the mostly part that gets us into trouble. But if we said schism is never good then we would be Catholics. So we need to understand that biblical principle not in an absolute sense but in the sense of schism as a last resort.

But what does this last resort idea really mean? It is hard to be precise about it in a positive way but not so precise in a negative way. The notion of unity except as a list resort simply means unity until it gets hard. It is incomprehensible as a principle of morality but it is easy as a principle of immorality. We understand the idea of marriage being forever expect when it gets hard. We understand how the moral reasoning for it becomes difficult. That it because it is not morally coherent.

Once you understand it this way it is easy to multiply examples. Abortion is wrong except in hard cases. Lying is wrong except when… How are the exceptions around Christian unity any different? If you take a sound moral principle and give yourself a free pass when it gets hard then you destroy it’s power. Morality is most important in those cases when we are tempted to leave it behind.

So the difference between the Sola protestant and the Solo protestant is like the difference between the person who lies rarely and feels bad and the person who lies frequently and feels no remorse. At the end of the day you can’t trust either of them. In some sense they are both liars. But one is a lot better off. He is closer to the truth. But he is not consistent.

“One is tempted to advance that children make people better off under the ‘right conditions’ — a time in life when people feel that they are ready, or at least willing, to enter parenthood,” Dr. Luis Angeles, of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, said in a news release from the journal’s publisher. “This time can come at very different moments for different individuals, but a likely signal of its approach may well be the act of marriage.”

The simple fact is that if you learn how to love as God loves that will lead to happiness. If you see romantic love as a way to get something for yourself then you will tend to be less happy. Typically couples who get married have a better understanding of the concept of an unconditional gift of self. They also have the grace of the marriage sacrament to help open them up to it. Couples who open their marriage up to children will tend to understand that even better. The larger the family the more likely it is they get it.

Both marriage and large families are very strongly correlated with religious commitment. Bringing a child into the world is a lot more satisfying when you believe in something bigger than yourselves. Whatever purpose you see for your lives can easily be seen as something your children could buy into and stretch the significance of your contribution into another generation.

Even Christians tend to be surprised when the devil’s lies are exposed. Every step of the way it feels like we are giving up short term pleasure. But that feeling is a lie. That road that seems to lead to selfish happiness really doesn’t. Even those who reject it because they know it’s wrong at some level are surprised to find the pleasure offered was an illusion. We know we should not be surprised but we are. At some level we believed the devil and didn’t believe God.

That all people of good will, especially those who make political and economic policies, may commit themselves to care for all creation.

This reminded me of what the pope said in a speech almost a year ago now. There he embraced the argument you hear from many secular people that the earth is a gift and we have a moral responsibility to preserve it. That is one of those religious statements that many people don’t realize is religious. If it is a gift then who gave it to us? We have a responsibility? To whom? Certainly it does not follow from evolution that we have a responsibility to preserve the beauty of the earth. There is an implicit acknowledgement that God created the earth and that we owe God proper care of the earth.

But then the pope pushed it one step further. He said that same creation we want to preserve also contains some biological and sociological structures. Families made up of a man and a woman with their children are not something we invented. They are like the oceans and the rain forests. We received them as a gift. By the same logic then we are morally responsible for preserving such things.

This is an interesting argument. It points our a harmony between one of the left’s favorite issues in preserving the environment and one of the right’s favorite issues in preserving traditional marriage. This, of course, drew the predictable sneering response from the usual suspects. But then it seemed to just die. I think it really show how little room there is in public debate for intelligent argument. If an argument fits on one side or the other of the debate then that side will keep it alive. But when an argument transcends sides then nobody wants to keep it alive.

Even if one side keeps something going it almost never sparks an intelligent exchange if ideas. That should be the goal of any debate to arrive at the intelligent point and counterpoint. We have lost that. Pope Benedict throws these interesting bits of reasoning out there all the time and nobody seems equipped to respond. The world is starving for some wisdom. Yet somehow we lack the enzyme to digest it. We scan it so we can quote the things we agree with and attack the things we don’t but we can’t really interact with somebody’s thinking in a coherent way.

It is one of those paradoxes that the more intelligence we claim the less we can use. That is because the image of the intelligent person is somebody who knows all the answers. So people work hard to cultivate that image. But somebody who want to pretend they know all the answers can’t actually interact with people in an intelligent way. Intelligence requires you throw out many ideas and discuss them seriously even if you know most of them are wrong. It requires the humility to learn from someone even if you know ten times more than they do before you start. The last thing real intelligence is worried about is looking smart or getting the credit.

Pope Benedict is like that. His positions are only firm because his arguments are solid. If you can show they are not solid you can change his mind. He just seems to be on such a different plane from everyone else. Like we are watching a saint in action.

“The gaping divide between evangelicals and Catholics is ecclesiology and authority, not justification and salvation, as important as that debate remains,” George said. “There is enough commonality that evangelicals and Catholics with a living faith can recognize one another as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ with a common Lord and common grace that brought them together. The hard issues are questions related to the church, such as the Petrine office [the papacy] and the Eucharist. Those discussions will occupy us for the next 100 years.”

This is interesting because it is full circle from what the reformers said. They said justification was the key reason for rejecting the papacy and leaving the catholic church. Now that the key reason is no longer key for most protestants we find that schisms are not so easy to fix. But it does make legitimate the question of whether Luther was simply wrong to split from the church over justification. Would most protestants have to honestly answer that he was? Does it matter? To some it will. To some it already has.

The other quote I found strange was from NT Wright. He is the guy who has convinced so many that the reformers badly misunderstood St Paul’s epistles:

Wright himself finds strange the notion that he’s leading people to Rome. “I am sorry to think that there are people out there whose Protestantism has been so barren that they never found out about sacraments, transformation, community, or eschatology. Clearly this person needed a change. But to jump to Rome for that reason is very odd,” he said. The best Reformed, charismatic, Anglican, and even some emerging churches have these emphases, he said.

“An excessive use of philosophy rendered Abelard’s Trinitarian doctrine dangerously fragile”, said the Pope. “Likewise, in the field of morals his teaching was not without ambiguity as he insisted on considering the intention of the subject as the only source for describing the goodness or malice of moral acts, ignoring the objective moral significance and value of actions.

This seems interesting because Abelard is before William of Ockham who is talked about as the founder of nominalism. The trinity from a nominalist point of view is kind of boring and irrelevant. They accept it as revelation and just move on. There is no point in contemplating the inner realities of God because what matters is God’s interaction with us. So when somebody contemplates the trinity and comes out with the Theology of the Body suggesting we are to relate as man and woman in the same way as God relates as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit then the nominalist mind will simply not be able to digest that thinking.

The moral side is clearer. Protestants do see moral consequences as related to the intent of the actor. This is based on faith alone. Every sin is talked about in terms of its corresponding defect in the Christian’s faith life. What matters is not the sin itself so much as the failure to trust and obey. That is an important aspect of every sin. But is it the only aspect. Sometimes the act can have objective spiritual consequences. An obvious example is murder. When we kill there is a spiritual fallout. Somebody’s body and soul are separated and they leave the land of the living sooner than they would have had we not killed.

When you assume the sinner’s faith is all that really matters then you equate many things that should not be. If a Christian is unaware that something is sinful then does that sin do damage? The Catholic would say Yes. Even if your intentions were good you can still do serious damage to your relationship with God and that of those around you. It is like poison. You don’t have to know it is poison for it to be harmful. As a protestant I would have said that all that matters is whether you are sincerely trying to do God’s will. If you are then God will bless you.

Notice what happens. When you tell a protestant that contraception is immoral or that not partaking in a valid Eucharist is sinful then he does not need to worry. He does not believe these things can hurt him spiritually. For him that is enough. There is no chance that getting these wrong will damage his soul without him knowing it. So he does not need to be right. He just needs to be sure he is right and live from that certainty. If he is sure then being wrong is innocent. If it is innocent then he can ignore it because objective sin does not matter. Only defects in faith matter.

But what if he becomes unsure? Then he is in a much harder position. How can he be sure that his analysis is not impacted by a defect in faith? Most sin has some sort of moral reasoning behind it. God says to do X and people convince themselves it is OK to do not X. So if you have serious doubts about the morality of contraception and then decide it is OK? How do you know that your choice does not flow from a lack of faith? That your faith in Jesus is partial. That it is just a pious facade that you find excuse for not doing when it gets hard? The truth is you don’t. When the question is unclear and the passions of your flesh are involved you will never know if you are just chickening out at the call to holiness or rationally rejecting a burden God never intended. Our minds are just too complex and we are just too good at lying to ourselves.

So you end up at a strange situation where a protestant can value certainty more than he values truth. If he is wrong then he is OK as long as his wrongness does not flow from an insincere commitment to Jesus. If he opens his mind to the ways different faith traditions look at scripture then he can lose that certainty.

Now if you change the example from contraception to gay marriage you get a different reaction. If someone is sure gay marriage is OK then can they just proceed without worry. Or does being right start to matter now? Then you will start to see protestants quoting passages like Mat 7:21-23:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

With gay marriage they are still thinking along the lines of the intrinsic nature of man and woman and marriage. They don’t when they talk about contraception. In that case it is about my intent. You are becoming nominalistic. You are pretending there is nothing more to it than what you interact with.

Not surprisingly St Bernard of Clairvaux lived a much more saintly life than and Abelard:

“Abelard, who among other things introduced the term ‘theology’ as we understand it today, … originally studied philosophy then applied the results achieved in this discipline to theology”. He had a “religious spirit but a restless personality, and his life was rich in dramatic events: he challenged his teachers and had a child by a cultured and intelligent woman, Eloise. … He also suffered ecclesiastical condemnations, although he died in full communion with the Church to whose authority he submitted with a spirit of faith”.

The truth is protestants like Peter Kreeft and myself and many others are coming into the church today. It is good for us and it is good for the church. We can bring some of the good things of protestantism that Kreeft is referring to. We don’t lose those things when we convert. We just enrich them. Most of the things we see as typical strengths of protestants are individual things. They are not so much church things. The ability to talk about your faith and reason within your faith. There is nothing stopping you from doing that as a Catholic and teaching other Catholics to do it as well.

What bothers me is when he calls that making Catholics protestant. I get what he is saying. But that is not the essence of what it means to be protestant. What is at the center of protestantism is also found in the Catholic church. That is the idea of your own personal theology. To varying degrees protestants will all have their pet doctrines that they will not submit to the teaching authority of the body of Christ. Many Catholics have the same issue when a teaching gets hard. They just reject it and assume the problem is really with the church. What they have done is embrace protestant thinking.

Kreeft points out that many Catholics have a worse problem with this kind of dissent than protestants do. I think it is more true in the academic world where Kreeft lives. Catholic scholars tend to be a lot more liberal than protestant scholars. But I would say that is because the protestant scholars have embraced Catholic tradition more firmly than their Catholic brothers. So it gets confusing. But it does not help to talk about Catholics becoming more protestant.

His idea of spiritual gravity is also a bit off. He assumes that protestants are moving towards the true Jesus rather than a distorted image of Jesus they have convinced themselves is true. If that was the case then protestants would all come together. But they don’t. Kreeft does not seem to see this as a major problem. It is huge. Yes, Catholics need to take their faith more seriously. That would make Catholicism much more attractive. But there are some that are doing that already. We need more but we need to get them from strong protestant fellowships as well as strengthening some lukewarm Catholics. It does not matter where you are you have a responsibility to move to that center. That center is Jesus revealed to us in His body, the church. We need to have the courage to go there no matter what the cost. It starts with a few saints and can grow from there.

Obedience produces unity. Unity gives a powerful witness. That witness draws more people to the center. Their obedience produces greater unity…

The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can’t figure a way out. Have you heard, “If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better”? Or, “If only we follow the Republicans, they’ll make it all work again”? I bet you haven’t, or not much. This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Perhaps the success of Obama has to do with offering phantom hope. That people had lost real hope in the future. Why is that? One key reason is the loss of eternal hope. When we believe in heaven we can build the earth fearlessly. When we have lost sight of heaven we have only the materila world left. When that is threatened we can get disheartened.

November is a month for hope. We are to focus on the last things. Heaven, Hell, Death, and Judgement. We need to think about how this world will end and how our lives will end. We start with All Saints day and All Souls day. We think about those who have arrived and can help us and also those who are close and could use a little boost from our prayers. We believe heaven, hell, and purgatory exist. We need to live like they exist. Who cares about the economy? We need to focus on what matters. People’s eternal souls matter. Everything else is small potatoes.

But we don’t talk about the last things much. It has become impolite to do so. Christians went through a phase when everyone was saying you needed to accept their particular brand of Christianity or you were going to hell. Now we are in the reaction to that. We don’t dare associate hell with any belief or behaviour. Modern people just sneer at any mention of heaven and hell. Much of what Christians say is easy to sneer at. We have the “turn or burn” sermons popular in some protestant traditions. But exactly what image of Christ do you need to turn to? Can it be the watered down version that many liberal protestants talk about? Why not?

The truth is the fear of hell is not the best reason to turn towards God anyway. It is a good reason. God’s justice will be done. If you turn from His mercy you will not excape it. But there is a better reason. It is the beauty of heaven. It connects very well with the progressive language of modern culture. We are to lift ourselves up to a more perfect society. We are to be all we are capable of being. We are to love each other and help lift each other up. Society buys this. But what they need to understand is that that is what heaven is. That God is not denying us a better future but He is showing us the way. That way might include some things that are not intuitive. Things like sexual purity that society has decided has no value. God says we can’t leave that behind if we want to lift the dignity of the human person. Is that so hard to understand?