The Tide Is Turning Toward Catholicism: The Converts

It started with Scott Hahn and it is still going strong. The number of prominent Protestant clergy and theologians coming to the Catholic Church has been nothing short of remarkable. Priests like Father Dwight Longenecker and Father Alvin Kimel are new to the Church and they bring a lot of enthusiasm, scholarship and wit and humor with them. Father Longenecker might be the only priest who is a graduate of the admittedly anti-Catholic institute of higher learning, Bob Jones University. Deacon Alex Jones, a former pastor in a prominent African-American Pentacostalist Church in Detroit left behind a vibrant, growing congregation. However, the pull of Catholicism's 2,000 year-old history and her ability to weather many storms was too much for Deacon Jones. He now travels around the country telling his conversion story. In addition, there have been prominent theologians and university scholars like Dr Francis Beckwith, who very recently was the head of the Evangelical Theological Society. He came home to the Church in April. The aftershocks from his reversion to Catholicism (he was born into the faith but later left the Church for Evangelicalism during his teenage years in the heyday of the "Jesus Movement,") still are being felt. He followed Joshua Hochschild who surprised many in the theological world when he recently converted to Catholicism.

In my book The Tide Is Turning Toward Catholicism, I note that while many in the media, even some Catholics, are focused on those who have left the Church, few have noticed the significance of so many prominent members of other faiths who have come home to Rome. It should be noted that many who left the Catholic Faith, usually for a non-denominational mega church, often can't give a theological reason. They can only say that they enjoy the liveliness and entertainment that a mega church often provides. It is most encouraging that Catholicism is getting the crème of the crop from other churches. Entry into the Church for these converts is usually made after a long, difficult journey to come to terms with something that they never thought possible. For some, like Scott Hahn and Father Dwight Longenecker, the Faith they once mocked is the Faith they have changed their lives and alienated family and friends to join, a decision not taken lightly.

Often, it is an attempt to better understand Catholicism in order to disprove it that leads to conversion, when they simply could not come up with anything to dispute the key tenets of Catholicism: Scripture and Tradition, the Sacraments, Apostolic Tradition and the role of Mary. They found themselves falling into the trap that the eminent Pharisee Gamaliel warned about in Acts 5:33-39. They might be fighting against God.

Many of the former converts, some of whom were admitted anti-Catholics, have now become prominent defenders of the faith. Dr. Scott Hahn is a mainstay at Franciscan University and is often seen on EWTN. As a matter of fact there are so many converts and reverts coming home to the Church that one of the most popular shows on EWTN is The Journey Home, hosted by Marcus Grodi. Besides clergy and scholars there are hundreds of thousands who have entered the Church in recent years. This past Easter, it was announced that over 100,000 people came into the Church, just in the United States. While bloggers and Catholic apologists Mark Shea and Jimmy Akin came into the Church some time ago, Aimee Milburn and Gerald Augustinus along with twin brothers David Bennett and Jonathan Bennett have chronicled their recent journeys into the Church via their blogs. It is a truly remarkable story that often gets little media attention. If the converts keep coming, the Tiber is going to get mighty crowded. Indeed, the tide is turning!

We will have to agree to disagree on this, the very concept of error creeping into the Church flies in the face of Scripture and Christ’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail.

"Gates" are a defensive weapon, not an offensive weapon. The phrase "The gates of Hell shall not prevail" is not meant to mean that error is not going to creep into the church, but that the Church will knock down the gates of hell (which it has been doing for 2000 years) and hell shall not prevail against the offensive attacks of the Church (the corporate body of true believers in Christ) The Church is attacking hell. The gates of Hell will not prevail.

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds;) (2 Corinthians 10:3-4 KJV)

The Church needed reform

It still does. Get on the bandwagon.

but in discipline, not in dogma.

Much of your "dogma" is nothing more than the traditions of men which make the word of God of none effect. Drop the traditions of men. Seek first the kingdom of God.

“”Calvin was a heretic who used a distorted interpretation of St. Augustine’s understanding of predestination and a tortured reading g of scripture to create a new religion in his image.””

Absolutely!

This excerpt pretty much say it all. It is very sad what Calvin created in this total depravity

The real sculptor of the total depravity doctrine is Jean Calvin, founder of Reformed Christianity. Frenchman, lawyer, writer, and zealot, Calvin squeezed from the concept almost everything that a man could eek from it while still believing in Christ. Calvin also saw the dangers of the Lutheran political situation, and determined that Reformed Christianity would, if anything, subject the state to religious controls. His prestige thus rose among independent-minded men, and Reformed Christianity became the form of Protestantism that penetrated Europe.
He who would know the doctrine of total depravity must look to Calvin.

Protestants thought that the concept of the Creation as a mirror of God robbed the Divinity of His uniqueness and majesty. So did the idea that men were the wounded lords of Creation who, with God’s help, might someday be washed as white as snow. The doctrine of total depravity, which humbled the whole of Creation, and men along with it, did so for the purpose of emphasizing the glory of God. It succeeded in accomplishing the opposite. It began by insisting upon a view of the universe so dreary as to make men flee from the harsh God who allowed it as though He were the demon. Instead of magnifying the glory of God, it ended in His rejection. Secondly, the doctrine of total depravity causes those who are formed by it, yet flee from it, to leap back into a rule-less Creation. There exists no way to navigate a course through the Protestant Creation, no path avoiding the bad and leading to the good. All is wicked. True, there are those who take the opportunity to flee from the Protestant God to embrace a universe which they wish to be as perfect as they once thought it to be depraved. Nevertheless, the tendency of secularized Protestantism is to leave men rule-less and ultimately in despair. Ignaz von Döllinger, the nineteenth century German Church historian who later broke with Rome, irritated many followers of the Reform by demonstrating how the doctrines of contemporary Protestant preachers ran totally contrary to the immediate desires of Luther and Calvin. One could go further. The Reformation is in and of itself a principle of contradiction. It destroys man and it destroys God.

This theme may be developed with reference to a body-spirit analogy. Creation, for the sake of my argument, may, somewhat inaccurately be referred to as the “body” of existence, and God as its “spirit”. The doctrine of total depravity has sought to humiliate the body, or Creation, for the glorification of the spirit, or God. It has done this in a four-fold fashion. The results of its efforts has been the abandonment of the spirit, the body’s declaration of independence from God, and Creation’s collapse into rulelessness. It is essential to examine each aspect of this four-fold humiliation in turn.

One might note, to begin with, that the doctrine of total depravity killed the “rhythm” of the body. Christ asked men to use their eyes and their ears to see and to hear. Catholicism did this, and realized that the human body followed certain rhythms. One of these rhythms was that of fasting and feasting. Most civilizations have recognized that men need to fast and to feast in order to answer a two-sided aspect of their character. Needless to say, man’s animal nature does tend to pull him towards a desire to sit down to an eternal banquet, but, when he does so, he pays a psychic price that even natural human wisdom has abundantly catalogued. Pagans understood the value of self-sacrifice. Christ demonstrated that renunciation, built upon His abandonment to the Cross, was the pathway to heaven. Catholicism has, therefore, noted in the fast not merely a kind of biological necessity, but an instrument predisposing man to be receptive to, accept, and merit sanctifying grace. Lent, and other periods of fast and abstinence, are naturally good for man, and supernaturally still more beneficial.

At the same time, however, life with God is not a fast. It is a heavenly banquet. Christians ought to recognize the joy and glory of living in the presence of the Divine Majesty. The feast day, marked at its mid-point by food and drink, song, dance, and general merriment, is necessary as a most-fit means of emphasizing man’s future reward. A feast answers man’s longing for joyous abandonment, and prefigures the abundant love of God for His children. Carnival may be a somewhat raucous beginning to the Lenten season. The Easter merriment, however, is a perfectly suitable conclusion.

Protestantism’s seed doctrine of total depravity attacked this rhythm. It could not see that anything in the human character might give direction to the Christian seeking God. Calvinist Protestantism emphasized the need for a king of permanent fast, not as a means of preparation for sanctifying grace, but because feasting made men believe that the world could provide some pathway to or foretaste of joy. A life of permanent fasting is not, however, a human life. Its dreariness caused men to flee from the Protestant God in horror. When they did, they discovered themselves in a universe which was thought by their ancestors to be depraved, and, thus, had been left ruleless. Imitating Luther himself, who tended towards gluttony, they were logically led to the table d’hôte. They behaved in its presence like performers in La grande bouffe. They had no measure for their indulgence. They engaged in a permanent feast. But the permanent feast obscures man’s understanding even of his natural need to fast. It does so at least until such time as the misery of endless consumption ruins all his happiness. One can ignore the legitimate promptings of the body only at the risk of enormous discontent.

http://jcrao.freeshell.org/BarrenHarvest

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