Purify Your Bride

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?

It is an interesting question posed to Bryan Cross by the Internet Monk. It is the sort of thing that scares protestants from even thinking about unity. There were already comments making reference to the Borg. But unity by definition means one church organization. So Christian Unity means protestants and catholics together. What would you call the re-unified church? The name should not be the biggest issue. But the fact that many protestants cannot even imagine naming such an entity is really quite sad. I know many who have spend their lives building the Christian Reformed Church. To see it folded into something larger is hard to swallow. So we believe in Christian Unity our hearts are so far from it that even thinking about it makes us uncomfortable.

What would a re-unified church look like? That is an interesting question. Everybody tends to make the assumption that it would have to look a lot like their church. After all you believe your church is doing things the way God wants. It is teaching what God wants. It is worshipping the way God wants. It is resolving disputes in a Godly way. If you don’t believe that then why are you in the church you are in? But then you think that is not likely that all those other Christian traditions are just going to decide to be like yours.

The really amazing fact is that none of it matters. We are to be one. That is all. The rest of the details are up to God. He will clean up the mess. We just need to decide to be of one mind. Will that mind be one with the mind of God? It will. God guarantees that. We just don’t trust Him to keep his promises. We think that to be reunited we need to figure everything out. Quite the opposite. We need the courage to reunite without having it figured out. Like we actually expect Jesus to build His church and prevent the gates of hell from prevailing against it. Then we need to obey that church because we do believe it speaks for God.

So what would a re-united church look like? I think every Christian tradition would be amazed at how much of what is good about their spirituality will still be there after reunification. The spiritual gifts God has given you don’t disappear when you join the true Church of Christ. They just get more powerful. You might need to keep you spirit under control for the sake of order. But that is just so the entire church might be built up by every one’s gifts. Most of the fear that you somehow won’t fit in is completely unfounded. There is so much more to be gained than to be lost. But we need to believe that God can really be the Father of the household of faith. That He can make it work.

The reason we can’t trust that God will work in and through His church is because we have experienced so many bad churches. In the protestant world churches are purely human institutions. There is a real chance they will fail. They can fall into error. They can split. They can die for a wide variety of reasons. The idea that the one church of Jesus Christ will be different is just hard to comprehend. Being one can really be that powerful? Could the way we have been doing things for so long be so wrong?

But let’s consider some uncomfortable questions. What if there is an intrinsic connection between the popular acceptance of contraceptives, and the legalization of abortion? And what if there is an intrinsic connection between the acceptance of contraception among Christians, and the popular acceptance of contraception? If so, then there is an intrinsic connection between the acceptance of contraception among Christians, and the legalization of abortion. In that case there is a deep contradiction between picketing in front of an abortion clinic, and using contraceptives or being in a Christian denomination that condemns abortion but condones the use of contraceptives.

But how different is that from what happens in churches. Pastors claim to preach God’s word. That is what people want to believe they are listening to and that is what they are told they are getting. Churches constantly repeat phrases like “the bible says” or “God’s word says” like there was no disagreement about it at all. Often when other christian teachings are be attacked the phrasing will be “Some people say X but the bible says Y”. People don’t mind hearing about controversies but they want to be told which side is right. They are looking for truth not confusion.

Most protestant pastors will admit their teaching is informed by a certain tradition. They will quickly admit they are fallible. But they don’t preach that way. They don’t market their church that way. They make every effort to make people believe they are presenting the word of God in an unbiased, infallible way. Do people believe it. Sort of. It is like the newsmen. Bias is complicated so we want to remove it from our world. We want to trust people.

So are pastors habitual liars? Most lie to themselves as much as they lie to anyone. They cannot deny that other traditions exists or even that their own sin effects how they interpret the bible. They know those things are true but they cannot succeed as pastors unless they simply put those questions out of their mind. It is like a lawyer who knows his client is guilty. He can’t think about that or he won’t be a good lawyer. A pastor is like a lawyer. He needs to argue that God’s will is for you to join my church and accept leadership from me. He has no way to know that is God’s will. But he is making his case with power and passion because he knows the guy in the church across town is making the same case for his church.

There is a hunger for infallibility. We want to put Jesus in the center of our lives but we can’t do it unless we know the truth about Him. Pastors understand that. But they don’t believe God provided us infallibility. So they insert themselves into that gap. They sincerely believe they are teaching truth. They don’t want to be wishy-washy and keep saying “I could be wrong”. But the truth is they could be and often they are. Sincere Christian pastors teach falsehood in God’s name all the time. Almost every pastor does it almost every Sunday. It is a truth that is hard to swallow but it is also hard to deny.

When you are choosing between a large number of competing theologies you don’t want to make a thousand choices on a thousand questions. You want a system so you can keep the choices manageable. You just have to choose the right system and you get the right answers. Then when you get to learn a theological system really well you gain confidence in it. You start to see how some of the problems of the system have interesting solutions. You can fall in love. You can say this is the system for you and you will forsake all others. You don’t do that consciously but it does happen.

Theology is similar to mathematics in this respect. There is a beauty to the logic and the abstract structures, categories, and theorems that is hard to explain. You can see the hand of God in a mathematical model. You can also see the hand of God in a theological model because of it’s mathematical beauty not because of its truth. But people can confuse beauty with truth. Elegant arguments and clever systems are beautiful but they can still be false. Still the beauty speaks to us deeply and we think that is God confirming His truth. We can become very sure we have it right even when we have it wrong.

GK Chesterton talked about mad men having a world view that is logical and consistent but just too small. Small enough to fit in their mind. These theological systems are bigger than those of the madman but still smaller than that of Catholicism. Catholicism is then true system of God which is so much higher than anything man could imagine. When you have a smaller system you can be sure you are right. You can understand how it works and have the certainty of a madman. If is only when you embrace the full bigness of theology that you see the need for a church. If you have embraced Calvinism or dispensationalism then you don’t need a church. The system is simple enough to get the right answer. With Catholicism you have no chance.

When you fall in love with a system you do feel you are betraying a sacred trust when you question that system. Certainly I felt that way when I was opening my mind to Catholicism. I felt guilt. I knew that was silly. The bible says to test everything. But these felt like forbidden thoughts. There was a fear that if I wandered from my Reformed roots I would lose God completely. Reformed thinking was good enough, wasn’t it?

Mt 25:31-46, the sheep and the goats – this is likely the most straightforward description of what agape looks like. It is loving God by loving the least lovable people in our society.

Mt 6:14,15, “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Agape is present if and only if we forgive others.

Jn 6:53,54, “Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” We get this grace through the Eucharist.

Jn 15:5,6 “Jesus said to them, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned”. Agape is always fruitful.

These are all places where actions are connected with salvation. The law/grace doctrine has great trouble with them. They essentially have to back up and say salvation is not being explicitly connected with works but actually with the faith behind the works that is never mentioned in these passages. It is awkward to say the least.

Then there are the passages where it explicitly says faith without agape does not save:

1 Cor 13:2, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

James 2:24, “You see that a person is justified BY what he does and not by faith alone”

The reverse is not true. It does make sense in the Catholic world to teach that salvation comes by faith. Especially for unchurched people who don’t have a clue about infusion of agape. People like the Philippian jailer in Acts 16:

30He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

31They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” 32Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. 33At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his family were baptized.

Paul was not going to talk about sheep and goats at this point. He wanted to make it simple. What did he have to do. Believe. That gets the ball rolling. But immediately he is baptized. Him and his household. How does his household get saved? It does not say they have to believe. Maybe they are not of age. Maybe they just receive the grace of baptism and enter a state of grace.

So the question of the canon is closed. When did it close? What was the process that closed it? As a protestant my thinking was the last thing closed it. Not the bishops agreeing because that would imply that councils are infallible and I didn’t want to go there. My feeling was a combination of long near unanimous support from Christians and something around need. The idea that Christians need the bible to believe and God will give us what we need. Between this two you could reasonably believe that the New Testament was inerrant and inspired.

Then you ask the next question, what about church authority? The papacy? The ecumenical councils? Certainly those things were believed by nearly all Christians for a very long time. Was it long enough? It does not seem so now. But would it have seemed so in the year 1500? If a number of Christians stop believing in the inerrancy of scripture, which we are seeing by the way, if that happens and it persists then the bible loses the foundation on which it’s trustworthiness is based? That does not seem right. So disbelief after a long and strong acceptance no longer matters in the case of scripture. What about the church? Are we seeing disbelief after a long and strong acceptance? Why does it matter?

Then you go to need. We need the bible. We don’t need the church. Or do we? How well have we done since we rejected the authority of the church? We have seen schisms and heresies at a rate never before imagined. We have seen the Christian religion get watered down to the point where nobody knows what it means anymore. We have seen religious practice fall and fall. We have seen society drift further and further from Christian morality. Is it possible that not having a head has made the body of Christ ineffective? I know Jesus is the spiritual head but a body without a physical head really loses something. Are we sure we don’t need Church authority? Anyway, I got to the point where the need thing was at best begging the question and at worst simply deceiving myself.

So what is left? There is the self-authenticating idea. That never made much sense to me. Maybe some people felt that way about scripture but I didn’t. I believed it because I was a Christian. I had nothing to do with the text being so eloquent. Some of it was. Some of it was not. But that wasn’t my basis for believing it. I know when Mormons say they believed the Book of Mormon was inspired because of a burning in their bosom that seemed quite philosophically unsound to me. The truth about God should be based on something less subjective and arbitrary. You could find some fairly well respected protestants putting forward the self-authenticating theory. That seemed to indicate a serious problem when they were willing to embrace such a weak argument.

So what do you say to someone who simply denies that the scriptures are inerrant? Most protestants want to say they are not Christians. But on what basis? As usual, GK Chesterton puts it well:

Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed “Psalms” or “Gospels”; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures?

The trouble with the conservative protestants is that many oppose change simply because it is change. That is there mental makeup. They did oppose improvements in the rights for blacks and women. Many of them are still quite sexist and racist. They tend to oppose health care, environmental protection, and gun control. The trouble is that becoming Catholic represents a huge change for them. In their mind and in the mind of their community saying Catholicism is true is about as liberal as it gets. It requires overturning many doctrines that are firmly settled in the thinking of protestants. But they are wired to resist change. How is that ever going to happen?

This is why conversions are really miracles. It does not matter if we are naturally liberal or naturally conservative. We tend to see God as being like us. Liberals see God in reason and see danger in faith. Conservatives see God in faith and see danger in reason. Right now society has grown to liberal. Because of that the conservative answer is often the right one. That is not a universal principle. Many saints were liberals in their day. St Thomas Aquinas and St Francis Assisi come to mind. They respected God’s revelation but were not afraid to question the accepted thinking of the day.

But in today’s society conservatives are right to be suspicion of those who tell them to use reason to question their core truths. Many times the progress being offered is human ideas replacing the revelation of God. So why is Catholicism different? One thing that struck me is that Catholicism was making God bigger. Modern liberal Christianity makes God smaller. You are asked to question many things you have not questioned much before but it is not with an agenda to rid your life of that pesky God stuff. In fact, you can see how protestantism originally was about getting rid of pesky God stuff. The papacy was too much God. Now liberals never say they are rejecting God but rather some human idea about God. That is what protestants said too. The question then becomes whether they were right. Accepting the papacy is a radical change but it is not really a liberal idea. Rejecting it was a liberal idea. That does not make it wrong. It is just the emotions are all backwards. You feel like you are going into uncharted territory but the truth is the papacy has been rock solid for 2000 years. It is protestant churches that are built on sand.

So the protestants that are really Catholic in their thinking are the ones who are least likely to open their minds to the Catholic church. The people who are most concerned with losing the church of 50 years ago are not going to consider the church of 500 years ago. What is 50 years old feels old. What is 500 years old feels new. Emergent church people, who have a liberal mindset, are happy to embrace something 500 years old because it feels new. They love the fact that it is an intelligent spirituality because it looks at history. The emotions are all backwards.

For example, in Mark 7:6-8 we have Jesus quoting Isaiah. But He is quoting the version of Isaiah that is found only in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. So what do you do with that? Jesus and the pharisees are obviously aware of the LXX and nobody argues it is not the word of God. Some of the other quotes from the LXX have parallels in the Hebrew text and one might suggest Jesus quoted the Hebrew version and the gospel writer replaced it with the LXX version. This one does not allow that. Jesus Himself must have been quoting the LXX.

Why is this a big deal? The two are mostly just a translation from one language to another but there are some differences. There are 7 books found in the LXX that are not found in the Hebrew bible. Those 7 books contain some passages the reformers don’t like. So they rejected them and said only the Hebrew bible is inspired.

Now it is important to note that many reformers admitted they rejected these books for doctrinal reasons. Protestants today understand that this is very circular. Doctrine comes from scripture but then scripture comes from doctrine as well. So they argue that the only reason they were rejected is because the Hebrew books were older and they were the common scriptures in Palestine during the first century. That just flies in the face of what the reformers actually said. For them, it was about doctrine and they were the ones who did the deed. They can make up better motives later but we need to be aware that that is what they are doing.

The other thing that we need to understand is that the translation process was something that had the hand of God on it. This makes sense. Greek is going to be the language of the world during the time of Jesus and the early church. God paves the way for this by providing a Greek scripture that has His own seal of approval. The details of the translation process are not that important but it is important that it was seen as supernatural by the Jews. They did not view the LXX as a human translation of the Hebrew word of God. They viewed it as an inspired translation. There is nothing in the New Testament to indicate Jesus or the apostles denied this.

In fact, quite the opposite is true. The LXX was considered a document that pointed to Jesus quite strongly. It was for that reason they began to doubt it. The virgin birth was one doctrine that was taught more explicitly in the LXX than it was in the Hebrew scriptures. So as Christianity grew the Jews became more and more critical of the LXX. It was doing what God intended it to do. It was making Greek speakers into Christians.

Now St Jerome did spend a lot of time with the Jews when he translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin. He ended up accepting many of the negative things the Jews were saying about the LXX. He rejected the supernatural account of its origin and the inspiration of the books that were not in the Hebrew version. He was very well respected as a bible scholar and translator. Still his objections did not get much traction. The question was never even brought before an ecumenical council until Trent.

The problem is we have forgotten what being Catholic is all about. The central point of being Catholic is having Jesus as Lord of your life. If He is not Lord of you life then everything about the faith is a lie. The sacraments are not just meaningless. They are a desecration. Prayers that are powerful when believers say them become vain repetition. Nothing about the faith makes sense if you don’t surrender to Jesus and try to become like Him in every way.

So what does that have to do with remarriage? Well, Jesus says remarriage is impossible. Now if you have been married once and are planning to marry again then you are saying remarriage is possible. That means your view of marriage is not the same as Jesus’ view of marriage. If Jesus is Lord of your life then you will see this as a problem. My thinking is out of sync with God’s thinking. My thinking needs to change. If you do that. If you change your view of marriage to make it line up with Jesus’ view then you will see your first marriage as no marriage at all. It was part of an impoverished mindset that made marriage co-exist with multiple partners. So it makes sense to seek a declaration of nullity around that marriage.

But what about the case where the person has not changed their thinking on marriage? That person needs to wrestle with the question: Is Jesus Lord of my life? If the answer is Yes then changing your thinking on marriage is required. You cannot claim Jesus as Lord and continue to differ with Him dramatically in such an important area of life. You need allow Jesus to transform your thinking or you need to admit the answer is really No. That Jesus is really not Lord of my life.

If you end up realizing that you have not really made Jesus Lord that is a major blessing. It means you can stop pretending you are OK with God and face the face that you are on the wrong road. But it is an ugly truth that people don’t want to face. They have been telling themselves they are good Catholics. Many times the church plays along. There are unwritten rules not to challenge people with the hard teachings of Jesus. Stepping up to those challenges is precisely what makes Catholicism worth while. But to many priests don’t get that. They let people play games with the faith and don’t call them on it.

Remarriage is one time in life when it becomes obvious. It becomes hard to pretend to be Catholic while living the life of an atheist. But people still do it. They have to lie and say they were not serious about their first marriage. They have to do something. They end up blaming the church for the problem. They are right but not in the way they think. They church is at fault because they allowed the Lordship of Jesus to be moved out of the center. They allowed people to see Catholicism as possible without that Lordship being recognized.

So people say the church’s policy on annulments is silly. That people should not have to stop going to the Eucharist just because they are in their second marriage. The truth is they should not have been going before that. They are not serious about the faith. That seems very harsh. It isn’t really. The church has bent over backwards not to judge them. But the remarriage has forced them to judge themselves in a public way. Better to know that there is a problem before it is too late.

Even then, many Catholics who are trying to be compassionate end up just being offensive. They end up bad mouthing the church. Partly it is because they want to be liked. They want to be nice. They want to keep everyone in the church. Jesus didn’t do that. He wanted people to count the cost and if they were not willing to pay it to leave. You are either all in for Jesus or you just walk away.

2

Speaking of Pope Benedict. I have missed to many of his teachings. On thing Amy Welborn used to do well. That is find an unofficial translation of his talks and pull out some highlights. I miss that. Don’t know if anyone else is doing that on the web.

3

Chris West has responded to the controversy surrounding him. He was very gracious. There is tension between walking in the sure knowledge that Jesus is stronger than any temptation we might face and knowing we are still frail and not above temptation. Both are true but they seem to be in conflict. It just seems like his critics have been too strong in the things they have said. His tone is very humble and he does not attack anyone.

4

The gospel to day is interesting. Jesus says we are on our way to a judge. Settle the matter before we get there. It is one of the purgatory proof texts. But that is never Jesus’ point, to teach us that such a place exists. His point is to deal with the matter before you get to the judge. Dealing with sin on earth is so much easier than dealing with it in purgatory. Do we buy that? No matter how hard it is to imagine ridding ourselves of our unholy bits it will be harder if we just leave them.

5

Catholics and Evangelicals talking about Mary? Pretty crazy times. There seems to be a lot of good stuff on Mary coming out. Mark Shea’s books. Then there is this. A few more I am forgetting.

6

Listening to some church history while I drive. In the first century Christians had to deal with contraception, abortion, and infanticide. They called it the way of death. It led to Christianity becoming illegal and many being tortured and killed. You wonder, with all the torture debates, how many see the real possibility of these tactics being used against Christians by our current way of death?

7

It is interesting how the same topic crosses my mind over and over in the space of a few days. Last week it was Romans which I blogged about. This week it has been the canon. Not sure what I have to add to that debate but I might take a stab.

When you do this the crisis of truth goes away because the people are in a trust relationship with a small group of Christians who are of like mind. They are just going to accept what that group is saying as Christian. They are not going to cross check the answers with the group down the street. So you can instill in them your own brand of Christianity without being challenged.

But does it last? It is amazing how little protestants worry about that. Once somebody has had an experience of Jesus they can work out the details later. They are not concerned if they go to another church. Many ministries hardly notice when their graduates stop going to church. Part of it is the “once saved always saved” mentality. Part of it is just being self absorbed. I had a joyful experience ministering to this person and watching them respond positively. Now I am doing the same with the next batch. I am connecting people with Jesus. Look at the parable of the sower. Some will fall away.

But people who are doing these things don’t look at the Catholic church and see anything appealing. They see lapsed Catholics coming to them who have experienced many Catholic traditions but did not see Jesus at the center of them all. They don’t see Catholics as having a passion for the lost. They don’t see them as having a hunger for scripture. They see them as focused on liturgy and they are just confused by that. They have a heart for church unity but they don’t see that as needing to include Catholics. Mostly they are sad that other mission oriented Christians are often in other churches.

My first real contact with the catholic church was encountering a mission oriented group of Catholics. They ran retreats that presented the love and forgiveness of Jesus to lapsed Catholics and then asked for them to make a commitment to respond and give their life to Jesus. It was a beautiful thing. It felt very evangelical but it was 100% Catholic. It was a ministry started by a priest but at this point was run almost 100% by laymen.

It is hard to express how much that opens doors in your mind to the Catholic church. I stayed with this group because I wanted to be close to where the spirit was working and this community was one such place. It taught me that Catholics were Christians. They could sing. They could learn scripture. They could pray and pray and pray. There was just nothing to dislike about what was going on.

Sadly, those ministries are the exception to the rule. The more Catholics do those kinds of things the more Catholic voices are likely to be respected in evangelical circles. We can try and assure them all day that Catholics believe in grace and that responding to the gospel with faith is the way to acquire that grace. But if we are not actively inviting people to change their lives by confronting them with the gospel then they will assume we don’t really get it. They might be right.

So how is this supposed to work? One thing that came across in discussions about the Anglican communion is that there are liturgy focused churches and there are evangelism focused churches. The Catholic church is not supposed to move from one to the other. It is to do both. My understanding of Vatican II is that it talks about priests and deacons being focused on liturgy and the laity together with religious brothers and sisters being focused on non-sacramental ministries. Not all of them will have evangelism as a focus. Some might minister to the poor. Some might do teaching. But it is laymen that need to fix this problem. Clergy need to be the shepherds. Shepherds don’t make more sheep. Sheep do that.

The Catholic faith is very deep and complex. But at the center is a very simple message. God has come to earth in the person of Jesus. He loves you. He wants to transform your life. You need to surrender to Him and let that happen. We need to keep that as the center of our spirit walk. It needs to be obvious to everyone inside and outside the church. Yes, the details are important and beautiful. But if we lose the child-like faith that should be at the center then nobody is going to understand it.

18Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 19Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. 20Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. 22This is why “it was credited to him as righteousness.” 23The words “it was credited to him” were written not for him alone, 24but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. 25He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.

So what can we say about Abraham’s faith? For one thing it seems in a different league from my own faith. If I was 100 years old and God told me I was to have a son how strongly would I believe it? Paul says Abraham “did not waver through unbelief”. He says he was “fully persuaded”. So when we talk about Sola Fide it should be clear we are talking about a very, very strong faith. Something that is rock solid even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Not being 99% convinced or even 99.99% convinced. We need to be 100% convinced.

Sola Fide is often talked about as making salvation simpler. I think if you take this level of faith as you requirement for salvation it is harder than working out your salvation with fear and trembling. Now protestants never go there. But how can they not? Remember Romans 4 is the only place they can find their concept of salvation or righteousness by faith described. How can they justify ignoring the intensity of faith described in that very chapter?

The other thing you notice is Abraham’s belief led to a becoming. He became the father of many nations. So rather than say works are irrelevant Paul reminds us that Abraham’s faith did lead to works. That he allowed God to change him. That he cooperated with God’s grace over many years and several false steps.

The other thing that is often preached but not mentioned in the actual text is the idea of being forgiven for future sins. The idea that if you are made righteous can you become unrighteous by committing a future sin? Protestants make a big deal about this but it is absent from Paul’s words. When you scratch them on it they will go to Rom 8, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” But that is off point. Rom 8 lists a number of things but none of the things listed are sins. All of them are forms of suffering. The kind of blank check that Sola Fide describes is highly counter intuitive. You would think that if it was really the truth of the gospel of Christ it would be spelt out clearly and emphatically somewhere. Romans 4 would be a good spot.

What you find is quite the opposite. We are warned that certain sins mean we are not in the Kingdom of God, Gal 5:19-21 comes to mind. The final judgement is talked about again and again as being based on what we have done. It is never talked about as a judgment of people’s faith. There are many warnings about works that look good but are not because they are done from bad motives. But where are the examples of works that look gravely immoral and the person is declared to be saved anyway based on an act of faith occurring prior to the sin? This only happens in the mind of protestants.

To a large extent our unity depended on our uniformity. As the years went by, mixing with outsiders became more common the uniformity dissipated. But that is when we started having problems with unity. There were liberals and conservatives. There were charismatics and traditional worshippers. Things like Christian schools that were bedrock became questionable. Every time uniformity broke down then unity would break down.

We understood that Christ was supposed to unite us. One image was often used. There is a large circle where everyone is far apart. Then in the center there is something representing Jesus. Everyone is told to take a few steps towards Jesus. The effect was that the people got closer to each other as well. It is a great picture but we never really asked if that dynamic was really happening at our church. It actually seemed like as conservatives moved towards Jesus and liberals moved towards Jesus they got further apart. Both had different images of Jesus so they were not really moving towards a common center.

What does unity look like? Is it merely a common set of doctrines? That is uniformity. It is not unity. I am a Java programmer in Canada. I have many things in common with a Java programmer in India. Does that make us united? I don’t think so. If we were working for the same company or even on the same project that would make us united. But if we are just doing our own thing and happen to end up in the same patterns of behaviour completely independently then we are uniform but not united.

So what does church unity look like? The body of Christ. Eyes, hands, teeth, liver all working to keep the physical presence of Christ in the world healthy. But where is the brain? Jesus is the brain. Really? Can a physical body have a spiritual brain? Remember the different images of Jesus. If we have different ideas about what the spiritual brain is like then our body becomes even more dysfunctional.

Look at 1 Cor 12:21:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”

Does it sound like Jesus is the head? Paul is talking about a possibility of the head of the church becoming proud and thinking it does not need the feet. So Paul envisions the body of Christ having a human CEO. Then look at Luke 22:24-30:

24Also a dispute arose among them as to which of them was considered to be greatest. 25Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. 26But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. 27For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves. 28You are those who have stood by me in my trials. 29And I confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me, 30so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
31″Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you[plural] as wheat. 32But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

Does it sound like Jesus does not expect any human to be the greatest in the Kingdom of God? He does not say that at all. Instead he explains how such a person should rule “the greatest among you should be like …” After that he mentions one person by name, Simon Peter. Satan has asked to sift all the disciples, what else could the plural “you” be referring to. Jesus prays for Peter. Would Jesus do that today? If Satan was sifting the church, would He focus on protecting Peter?