Posted on 01/10/2005 5:15:03 AM PST by HarleyD
One of my favorite hymns:
Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand,
The shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land;
A home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way,
From the burning of the noontide heat, and the burden of the day.
O safe and happy shelter, O refuge tried and sweet,
O trysting place where Heaven’s love and Heaven’s justice meet!
As to the holy patriarch that wondrous dream was given,
So seems my Savior’s cross to me, a ladder up to heaven.
There lies beneath its shadow but on the further side
The darkness of an awful grave that gapes both deep and wide
And there between us stands the cross two arms outstretched to save
A watchman set to guard the way from that eternal grave.
Upon that cross of Jesus mine eye at times can see
The very dying form of One Who suffered there for me;
And from my stricken heart with tears two wonders I confess;
The wonders of redeeming love and my unworthiness.
I take, O cross, thy shadow for my abiding place;
I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of His face;
Content to let the world go by to know no gain or loss,
My sinful self my only shame, my glory all the cross.
This is a beautiful hymn of the faith and one of my favorites.
Not looking through the prism of Catholic or Protestant, but in the name of Christian love, I'll pick on us Proddies.
qUESTION: who is the greater modern saint:
or
My point here being, we must guard our hearts against false doctrine and nor look at those who are easy on the eye, or preach a seductive doctrine of health and wealth. We must have a strong enough sense of sound doctrine to detect manure when it is packaged in a seductive manner.
Great comparison.
Yep...you know the teaching, by your fruits you will know them -
I was thinking of Bonhoeffer, myself...who worked so hard do do the right thing during WWII and was martyred because he loved God more than his own life. I believe he was Lutheran.
And Francis of Assissi, another person deeply and totally in love with God.
And the lady at a local church who supervises the Altar guild (it's a Lutheran church), and radiates love of God.
And a person I know in Pakistan, where being Christian is almost equal to saying "Martyr me!"
And this dear man, working with the poorest of the poor, rag pickers' children, to teach them something about God and Jesus where the workers are far too few and the harvest is huge.
They're there - those who love the Lord with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind, and their neighbor as themselves.
They've all figuratively stood beneath that cross of Jesus, and looked up at those eyes of love, and falling to their knees, clinging to that cross, say, "Thank you, Lord" and sometimes, often quietly, move mountains out of that love, for they are doing it for their beloved.
It's hard for a big-name preacher to sometimes reach or stay at that place. Yet, they reach so many people, and open the door for a lot who might never hear the word and take it to heart at all, that all I can say is let God be the judge. John Osteen preached some sermons that helped me on my way to where I am....and I might have had trouble making it if it hadn't been for some of these televangelists.
God's willing and will use all of us as much as we're open to him.
Yet watered down gospel is at the root, I believe, of a lot of stuff nowadays. It's thin gruel where we need to get the meat of the Cross, and what it really means.
Lord,
teach us to stand brave,
filled with your spirit,
under the banner of your cross,
unashamed,
ready to be your witnesses,
this day,
and always,
Amen.
I'll leave it to Protestants to decide how they want to determine who constitutes a great saint. Any answers a Catholic maight provide would seem triumphantalist, or reference articles of faith you don't believe in.
[OK, I'd like to keep these issues seperate, but these are the issues I have as a Catholic trying to address that question. The magisterium in the Catholic Church is not any given person, although the Pope represents it. Rather, it is the consensus that the Catholic saints have come to. Historically, there seems to be a lack of consensus among Protestants about key doctrines, besides simply agreeing that Catholics are wrong. However, to the extent that any such consensus does exist, it provides a good example of what I'm putting forth: the adherence to and elucidation of an "orthodox consensus."
With this established, it becomes more possible to discern those whose faith yields miraculous signs (Fatima, for instance) apart from the charlaitans and crackpost (Bayside, for instance). Of course, the best accompanying sign is a resurgence of religious dedication. Again, this has to be distinguished from a religious fad through the lens of history and orthodoxy. Obviously, however, what consititutes miracles and orthodox adherence will be an inevitable source of disagreement.]
Bernadette Souborous, because of her unswavering loyalty to the message given to her, and her undying faithfulness to God - she refused to be budged, even with all the pressure to recant, or change her story, or make a big name for herself.
She is one of my heros - and a great role model, not for what happened at Lourdes, but for how she lived long after it was over.
St. Therese of Lisseux, because of her incredibly deep love of Jesus and the desire not to be big, but to put up with all sorts of irritations and trials in daily life, so she could love God all the better, and who taught us her little way of doing little things with great love, in the name of Jesus.
St. Jean Vianney, who, although a poor student who barely passed out of seminary, loved God with a flame in his heart that was obvious to all around. Just a simple parish priest whose greatest wish was that he could go be a hermit and pray for his sins, he had such a ferverent love of God that people came from all over France to have him hear their confession, and he converted many, many to living as a true child of God.
These people have several things in common: They loved Jesus with all they had, followed where he led.
We should all have such a personal relationship with Jesus.
Of course I realize I did treat your question as if it were rhetorical. Joel Osteen's web page and ministry certainly seems all glitz. That is not a critique on his role as a teacher. But the great Catholic saints have tended to eschew worldliness in a way Osteen doesn't seem to have done. Remember how I lumped "bishops and preachers" together as mere teachers? That wasn't to disdain their roles, but it was to acknowledge the great saints are set apart from them.
I don't mean to assert that Protestantism doesn't have its humble, un-worldly, "doctors of the faith," like Therese of Lisiuex, Catherine of Sienna, or Francis of Assissi, or even the likes of Padre Pio, Faustina of Poland, or Maximillian Kolbe. I have not learned of these saints through the secular press, so even if I were a neutral observer who did not think Catholicism to be the true faith, my own ignorance alone could account for why I have not heard of such men and women among Protestants. (I'm hoping you'll realize why I don't compare them to such figures as Jonathan Edwards or John Calvin.)
I wish I had remembered Jean Vianney when I was composing the message I had just posted!
If one can have a falling in love with a saint experience, I had one with the St. Jean Vianney...what an example of putting God before self, and being a true shepherd of his flock.
For those that don't know, he was a peasant who got a chance to go to school, and barely passed, and got sent to a ticky little backwater town that hadn't had a pastor since before the French Revolution, which had been several years before, and turned it around from a mostly Godless (or, much like today, where God isn't in the equation for a lot of people, although they like him) community, into a thriving holy place. He had the gift from God to help people see and face their sins and ask God's forgiveness, and he would counsel people for hours and hours every day.
He gives me hope as an example of what impact that people who are radically committed to the truth of Jesus can do...
But without the Cross, without the truth of Christ crucified, you can't have this. Pray, my friends, for more truly committed people who will be like lamps filled with Christ's true light in the midnight.
I concur Dataman. I don't necessarily agree with the statement made by the author:
1. God’s ways are paradoxical and hidden to human reason;
Certainly, there are aspects of God that are paradoxial and difficult to comprehend (Jesus wholly God and wholly man, etc.). But there is nothing that defies logic in God or His character. As a matter of fact, God is a God of reason and this is one way that man is made in His image. If we espouse to the world that they must throw out reason and follow Christ, we have started down a very slippery slope!
Thanks
Noted.
If you are so inclined, look for Joel Osteen on TV sometime. Cook up some popcorn and be prepared for something that looks more like an Amway convention and sounds like a motivational speeck.
You won't hear Christ preached. (Christ born, died, rose again, your sin, faith, etc) What you will hear, week after week, is that God wants to bless you. If you aren't blessed, it's because you don't want it enough.
Yeah, I've heard him; not so much that I'd want to pass judgment on him; I haven't heard any particular heresies, but the focus did sorta seem off. One of the errors of popular-notion Catholic-school-nun Catholicism (as opposed to the real thing) is that if you're not broke and miserable, you're doing something wrong*. He sorta came across like the opposite extreme, and no more centered on the Word than Norman Vincent Peale or Steven Covey.
(*There are several notions of Catholicism which Catholic-school students have a fairly twisted sense of. They were taught very adult spirituality as children, then when they hit the adult years, the AmChurch went juvenile on them, so they never came to understand the adult teachings. Hence, the saints' joy in suffering and renunciation of worldly goods came across to many as if it were saying that God wanted Catholics to be poor and miserable.)
On some thought, I wanted to do more than simply say "thanks." I wanted to appreciate your beautiful writing on this thread. It's beauty is than its exceptional eloquence, but actually its substance as well.
2Co 6:8-10 " by glory and dishonor, by evil report and good report; regarded as deceivers and yet true; as unknown yet well-known, as dying yet behold, we live; as punished yet not put to death, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing yet possessing all things.
That is very kind of you...
One of the things I like to say is when they come to take away the Christians, I don't want anybody to be confused about where I stadn...so I do what I can to stand for Jesus and him crucified, because I truly believe.
No spun sugar theology for me. I take my stand at the foot of the cross.
Good observation suzy. By the way, I think your "about" page has it right on target...
Since, therefore, the natural man is at a greater disadvantage, it is not reason that is at fault, but the condition of his unrenewed mind. Again, The first 6 chapters of I Corinthians reveal the two types of wisdom (or, in the case of the world, "sophistry"). Another problem we discover is that many of the first principles of the world are also false. If they are false, the conclusions based on them are as well.
It becomes clear why the secular idea of autonomous reason (Rousseau) is impossible. Human reason does not exist outside of the human mind; it is dependent on it. Various minds have various abilities to employ reason. The perfect mind does not exist and has not ever existed in humanity save Christ's. Therefore reason is dependent on a flawed human mind. Anything dependent is not autonomous.
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