Bad Reasons To Convert To Catholicism

Scholasticus ^ | 5/11/2007 | Scholasticus

[Alex Murphy]

Evangelicals converting to Catholicism has become something of a trend. Many conservative episcopalians caught between a rock and a hard place have opted for a return to Rome. And there are some big names in evangelical theology who have gone over, including the (until just recently) President of the Evangelical Theological Society. Scot MacKnight has just written a piece in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS) trying to figure out why the Roman road has grown more and more popular these days.

The Pontificator has written a series of posts on “Bad Reasons Not To Convert To Catholicism”. (The assumption is that you want to convert, but you have wrongheaded protestant baggage holding you back.) But of course that there are bad reasons-not-to-convert does not imply there are no good reasons-not-to-convert. However I am not going to be offering good reasons not to convert to Roman Catholicism: first, because I’m not positive there are any, though I have my suspicions; second, because I am not in the business of trying to dissuade people of their religious commitments for the sake of winning an argument on the internet. What I am going to do is to critique one very bad reason for turning Roman Catholic which is often used as a sort of bludgeon by triumphal converts against their former protestant co-religionists.

Here is a quote from someone I will not name, discussing the ‘greater joy’ he found upon his conversion to Roman Catholicism:

“Why this greater joy? Because I do not have to be the judge in judgment of the Catholic Church, of the Scriptures, or even of myself. It’s not my job. Millions of people over a period of two thousand years have reflected on our holy faith, and struggled with it, some cases even given up their life for it. Shall I improve on their combined insight, as it is shared with us through the Magisterium? Shall I pit my few decades against millions and millon [sic] of man years? No!”

I have nothing against conversion to Roman Catholicism, and nothing against people being happy about a renewal of their spiritual life that attends upon conversion. But the implication of this quote is that the protestant is a theological solipsist who has arrogated to himself a right to judgment he cannot possibly use well.

I won’t debate whether this is an accurate representation of Protestant theology. (It isn’t, but I’ll leave that to my theologian friends to demonstrate.) At any rate historical ignorance is not an essential part of protestantism, but it certainly is true that Protestantism emphasizes the importance of individual judgment and individual faith and so on.

Which brings me to the problem with the quote above. In making his statement, the author absolves himself of all responsibility and judgment. I don’t have to think anymore about what is true, good and so forth, the Magisterium will tell me. It is hard work to be thoughtful and responsible and to learn judgment. But everything fine is difficult. Thoughtfulness, responsibility and judgment are virtues the cultivation of which the church ought to be in the business of teaching. Indeed these virtues are not lacking from the more mature, reflective expressions of Roman Catholicism I’ve encountered in my life either.

Protestant or Roman Catholic, there is something basically deficient in a person who just goes along with whatever is said at church on the basis of blind authority. Being Roman Catholic does not obviate the necessity of using one’s own judgment just because the Magisterium isn’t always there beside you to tell you what you ought to do in daily life.

And converting to Roman Catholicism doesn’t solve your worry about individualism because it is still you, the individual, who converts. By your act of conversion you make your own private judgment upon the entire 500 year tradition of protestantism. And we have a couple of smart people over in our camp too. So it simply ridiculous to say that you want to be Roman Catholic so you don’t have to act as a judge over history . . . you are always already judging history.

None of this says that one cannot have an appreciation for the past. Just as I have avoided implying that Roman Catholicism as such requires the denial of responsibility, so too should any Roman Catholics avoid implying that Protestantism as such requires the denial of history. To be a Christian well requires both, not a decision between them.

[Quix]

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Must have been REALLY traumatic . . . having “the swarm” pinged.

What an honor to be part of the Biblers’ swarm.

Thin skinned? Hmmmm . . . sounds like the daffynitions have been drug out again.

Last I checked, “thin-skinned” had to do with a kind of insecure, affronted, brittleness—a hair-trigger offendedness—particularly of a personal nature—personally affronted, personally offended.

People say all kinds of things about me the live-long day and night and it’s amusing.

Now speaking about God and Truth and Scripture, THAT I can get wound up about easily. I don’t tend to think of that as thin-skinned. And I don’t expect that I’ll allow the DAFFYNITIONS of the Vatican to coerce me into changing my definition of thin-skinned, either.

[Quix]

[Pontificatorial note: Someone pushed the buttons for a mini-core dump on Quix's !!!!TRUTH!!!! and righteousness file. Somewhere along with severe indigestion and a desperately fatigued need for some humor . . . the following spilled out. Read at your own risk with at least half a funny-bone.]

The Vatican/Roman institution/organization/edifice/church . . .

So well-known hereon for

1. Mangling history 13 ways to Sunday . . .
2. Mangling Scripture with more twists, turns, convolutions than Alice's rabbit hole . . .
3. Mangling simple definitions of simple words so wholesale and routinely it's a wonder ANY linguistic communications occurs at all . . .
4. Mangling, affronting and even blaspheming Christ and Holy Spirit's work with all manner of usurptations in too often truly outrageous and seriously spiritually hazardous ways . . .
. . .

You want us to think of this !!!!TRADITIONS!!!!-BOUND fossilized pile of political power-mongering and bureaucratic self-aggrandizement as

'the pillar and ground of truth?'

TEARFUL GUFFAWS TO THE MAX!

Sounds like someone's been reading WAAAAYYYYYYY TOOOOOOO MUCH Kierkegaard and ended up with yet more layers and clouds of fantasized postulations, dogma, encyclicals . . . !

JESUS CHRIST IS THE TRUTH, THE WAY AND THE LIFE. PERIOD.

And, in one of the most mystifying assertions of His ministry EVEN HE asserted that ONLY THE FATHER was good.

It is almost beyond comprehension--even as a psychologist experienced in deliverance ministry stuff--it is almost beyond comprehension that any sane, educated, Biblically read, logical "CONSERVATIVE" creatures above the IQ of a . . . could even BEGIN to delude themselves into thinking that

ANY

Human pile of self-serving bureaucrats

COULD POSSIBLY

END UP telling, asserting, claiming a CONSISTENT story about anything--MUCH LESS ANYTHING WITHIN 3 GALACTIC CLUSTERS OF DISTANCE WORTH CLOSE TO

TRUTH!

Most of the TRULY CONSERVATIVE Biblers' swarm and lurkers are not that stupid nor clueless. We've been around enough bureaucrats to know better.

Folks are still looking for the perverbial single solitary TRULY HONEST, TRULY TRUTHFUL man low these many centuries.

And yet the Vaticons would have us believe that a bureaucratic collection of deliberately self-serving, self-righteous, narrowly rigid, wholesale biased, wholesale manipulative [cue Monty Python Spanish Inquisition music] THAT--A COMMITTEE of such blokes is going to result in

PURE PILLARS OF PRISTINE TRUTH?

Quick, someone, please tell me it's a bad joke gone worse.

I wouldn't begin to assert that the best congregation I'd ever been in was a pristine pillar of truth. They did good to get it mostly right most of the time. And most congregations are a lot worse than that.

And all the Vatican congregations I've ever been around have been AT LEAST THAT BAD.

And the Vatican edifice on the whole--has great gaping chunks that are absolutely antithetical to anything remotely CLOSE to the truth.

SCRIPTURE + HOLY SPIRIT OF CHRIST = TRUTH.

ANYTHING less is polluted. ANYTHING LESS = flesh + whatever this side of eternity.

HINT--THE FLESH IS NOT A WELL-SPRING NOR A PILLAR OF TRUTH.

Advocating anyone
hook up to
a COLLECTIVE BREAST OF BUREAUCRATS
to suckle TRUTH
is more than a little like advocating that folks suck on a rattlesnake for mother's milk.
It doesn't matter the brand of the RELIGIOUS edifice on the church-yard sign.
It's the nature of bureaucrats, of humans.

It's like compounded interest.

Take a bunch of narrow, rigid, brittle, self-righteous, self-serving, vain-glorious, political, power-mongering, militarily supported bureaucrats MEETING IN COMMITTEE . . . add in layers of inducements, privileges, !!!!POWER!!!! . . . heat up with various political and military confrontations . . . mix thoroughly with various demonic influences and pressures . . .

AND THEN PRETEND THAT TRUTH is going to come out the spigot?

!!!!????????????????????!!!!

I didn't realize that Monty Python had married Harvard Lampoon and birthed a new planet??? Talk about fantasized 'UNreality!'

Try again. That dog won't hunt. That dog ain't even a dog--it's a drunken sea slug in a dog suit.

[Quix]

I was referring to the moon-bat cartoon in #40.

I have no clue what you’re going on about.

[Quix]

And some folks actually believe such preposterousness!

[netmilsmom]

Yeah but make sure that you separate the wheat from the chaff.

Check out the first line.

“Evangelicals converting to Catholicism has become something of a trend”

“Evangelicals converting to Catholicism has become something of a trend”

“Evangelicals converting to Catholicism has become something of a trend”

Aren't we constantly told that this isn't happening? The non-Catholic churches are exploding? We are whithering on the vine.

*snicker*

[Titanites]

Thin skinned? Hmmmm . . . sounds like the daffynitions have been drug out again.

Maybe so - the definition I used was yours.

[Titanites]

CLOWN FORMAT

[netmilsmom]

>>Nancy Pelosi thinks the same way about murdering babies the unborn fetuses blobs of cells. Others even interpret the Bible to suit their sexual deviancy. It ends where? <<

That, my FRiend, is an amazing observation.
The Devil may come as an Angel of Light. Many people read those texts and find what they want there.

I have asked many a person who interperets scripture themselves, “How do you know?” that it is inspired by Our Lord.

I haven’t gotten a decent answer yet.

[chesley]

Nancy Pelosi comes to her conclusions only by IGNORING what the Bible pretty plainly teaches. This is NOT, IMO, “interpretation”, but rather it is deceit.

At any event, I have to assume responsibility for my own actions, beliefs, and response to God's offer of salvation through Christ's blood. Same as the Pope. Where does it end? Heaven or Hell.

[netmilsmom]

>>Nancy Pelosi comes to her conclusions only by IGNORING what the Bible pretty plainly teaches<<

You're kidding right?
She is ignoring YOUR interpretation of the bible.
No where does it state that a person is a person at the moment of conception. The “I knew you in the womb” does not say, “at the moment of conception”

And how about this...
“And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. “But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, (NAS, Exodus 21:22-24)”

That's what I used to rationalized my pro-abort status when I was young and stupid.

You can find what you need when to interpret it yourself.

[Lord_Calvinus]

Bump for a later read, but it almost seems like the title suggests there is a good reason when there is none.

[netmilsmom]

I think I may have silenced the crowd on post 70.

[RFEngineer]

“What do you do then?”

Did he take the snakes with him, or not?

[RexBeach]

Hi. Sorry, I don’t understand your post to me.

[chesley]

OH. Were we talking specifically about abortion? I'm talking about her whole philosphy. She clearly, for example, ignores Commandments 8, 9, and 10.

And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. “But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, (NAS, Exodus 21:22-24)”

So, here we have an accident, He is punished as the judges decide?

So what are you saying, and why are you trying to pick a fight? I might agree with something the Pope says, I m ight not. But I think through every response. He is not God. He is not Christ. As a Protestant, I don't even believe that he is Vicar of Christ (where is THAT in the Bible?). So why, other than his learning, which in the current case I admit is great, should I take his pronouncements as Gospel rahter than what I can plainly read in the Bible for myself?

[chesley]

If you're just going into the Bible, or the Constitution, or “The Wizard of Oz” to find what you need to support your predetermined positions, of course you can find something in there that will do it. If you ignore the obvious contradictions with other parts of the text.

On the other hand, if you consider the text to be an organic whole, the range of interpretations that can be considered valid narrows tremendously.

[Quix]

Why THANK YOU!

That’s Quite cute.

I’m confident it will be very useful in coming posts . . .

to illustrate the Vaticons’ judggling and parsing of daffynitions, rubber Scriptures and rubber history.

[netmilsmom]

And everyone can find what they want in the Bible.
That is the point.

You say that she (and anyone that wants to justify abortion) ignores Commandments 8, 9, and 10, but to them, they means a different thing.

There is an accident in that scripture quote, however, the pre-born life is given less status. Accident or not. The Pre-born being killed is met with a fine. The woman being killed is “eye for eye” and “Tooth for tooth”.

So you see, actually the Bible states clearly that the Pre-born is not a life, if that is what you interpret it to mean. If you are looking for a justification for taking a pre-born life, it's right there. Plain as day.

I'm not trying to pick a fight, I am telling you that you say that Nancy is against what is clearly written. I tell you, no. She can be easily mislead by interpreting scripture herself. As can anyone.

[netmilsmom]

>>If you’re just going into the Bible, or the Constitution, or “The Wizard of Oz” to find what you need to support your predetermined positions, of course you can find something in there that will do it. If you ignore the obvious contradictions with other parts of the text.<<

Exactly. And humans are very fallable. They see things from their own slant. I am too stupid to interpret scripture, seriously. Telling me that I can, doesn’t change the wrong answers I’ve gotten before.

[Puddleglum]

Bad reason #486: to move up the ranks in the Klan.