Posted on 09/06/2007 3:27:02 PM PDT by annalex
The Marian dogmas were big problems. I still thought [around 1984] the Catholic claims on Mary were outrageous. I went back and read some essays, and concluded that the Bible alone wouldn't compel acceptance of the Marian dogmas; the Bible alone wouldn't lead you to them, yet sustained theological reflection on Jesus' relationship to His mother; if you take the humanity of Jesus with the utmost seriousness, and you take Mary as a real mother, not just a "conduit," and you begin to think about motherhood and sonship, and you think about what it means to receive a body from your mother: flesh . . . God didn't make Jesus' flesh in Mary's womb; He got Mary's flesh. If God had wanted to, He could have made Jesus as He made Adam: from the dust of the earth. But He didn't. He decided He would use a human being to give Jesus His humanity. And so what kind of flesh is Jesus gonna get? If He's gonna be perfect humanity, He'd better have perfect human flesh untainted by sin. To me the Immaculate Conception, seen in that light, made sense. The Assumption also seemed to me to make a great deal of sense. There were precedents to it: Enoch and Elijah, those who rose from the dead at the time of the rending of the veil of the Temple. And if Jesus is going to give anybodye priority; if He's going to truly honor His mother and father, wouldn't He give Mary, whose flesh He received, priority in the Resurrection? So I think that's what the doctrine of the Assumption preserves. I could go on and talk forever on the distinctive doctrines of the Church.
Artificial contraception . . . Dave wanted me to go into that [I had asked a question earlier]. I had a very difficult time seeing it as good logic. The Church insists that the multiple meanings of sexual intercourse always be exercised together. Since one of the meanings is procreation and another is intimacy or the what's called the "unitive function", those things can't be separated from one another licitly. I didn't like that, because it seemed to me that if intercourse served multiple purposes, then there's no reason why, at any particular time, one purpose ought to retain priority or even exclusivity in the exercise of that act. They were both good. I think that the change came when I finally hit upon an analogy; I had to see another human act in which multiple meanings had to be exercised together, and not separately. And I thought of eating food. Food serves multiple purposes: nutrition, secondly, pleasing our senses. God likes tastes; that's why He gave us taste buds. He wants food to taste good. What do we think of a person who says, "I really like the taste of food, so I'm going to disconnect my eating of food from nutrition, and I'm just gonna taste it." Well, we call him a glutton; we call him a "junk food junkie." What do we call a person who says, "I don't care about what food tastes like; I'm just gonna eat for nutrition's sake." We call him a prude or we have some other name for him. We think that they're lacking in their humanity. That helped me in understanding sexual intercourse. I think it's sinful just to eat for the taste, or merely for the nutrition, because you're denying the pleasure that God intended for you to receive, in eating good food. I say the same thing with sexual intercourse. You're sinful if you separate the multiple meanings of it. If you procreate simply to make babies, and you don't enjoy the other person as a person, I think that's sinful, and I think that if you merely enjoy sexual intimacy and pleasure, and are not open to sharing that with a third life: a potential child, then you're denying the meaning of sexual expression. That was a continuing realization that the Catholic Church had been there before me.
When I learned that you [me] were interested in the Catholic Church, it was kind of funny, because by that time I had been pursuing this on my own, and feeling like I was a little bit odd. So it was good for me, . . . I was their pastor for a while at Shalom, and Dave and Judy and Sally and I have known each other for many years, and I've always liked Dave and Judy. We've had some disagreements at times over the years, and a little bit of even, "combat," but I always was fond of them, because I always recognized them as people who were willing to live out their convictions, and that always means a lot to me. I like to be surrounded by people like that because it's very easy to just live in your head and not get it out onto your feet. So I knew that they were committed to living a Christian life. They were interested in simple living, and interested in alternate lifestyle. They saw themselves as being radical Christians. And I always liked that. So even when we disagreed, I was always fond of them, in that I respected what they were doing. So it was heartening to me, to find that my return to the Church was in its own way being paralleled by Dave's acceptance of Roman Catholicism. It was a queer parallelism. When we went to see Fr. John Hardon that night, I thought it was interesting and odd that you were doing it, but I told you that night: "it seems to me there are only two choices: either Orthodoxy or Catholicism." It was reassuring. I met Catholics through rescue that I actually liked, and that was heartening.
I returned to the Catholic Church, because, for all its shortcomings (which are obvious to many evangelicals), both evangelicalism and Catholicism suffered from the same kind of "immoral equivalency." All the things that I once thought were uniquely bad about Catholicism, I also saw in Protestantism, so it was kind of a wash. I stopped asking myself all the so-called practical questions, and made the decision based on theology alone. That way I got to compare theology with theology. People love to compare the practice of one group with the theology of another. So you end up with the theology of a John Calvin versus the practice of some babushka'd Catholic woman. And it's just not fair. You gotta compare apples with apples. Evangelicals tolerate pentecostal superstition and fundamentalist ignorance, without breaking fellowship. So why criticize the Catholics for tolerating some superstition and ignorance? Evangelical churches are largely made up of small, dead, ineffectual fellowships. Two-, three-generation fellowships that have lost their reason for existence, and they just keep rollin' along. The vast percentage of evangelical churches are about 75 people. And they're not doin' much. So what's the problem if Catholic churches are full of dead people too? It's a wash. Evangelicals tolerate and even respond positively to papal figures like Bill Gothard, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and men whose teachings or decisions explicitly or implicitly sets the tone of the discussion and suggests and insists upon right conclusions. And these men are not just popular leaders, they are populist leaders. In other words, they often appeal to the anti-intellectual side of the uneducated. They stir up resentments between factions in the Church Politic and the Body Politic. The pope, on the other hand, is not a populist leader. You don't see the pope, in the encyclicals I've read, taking cheap shots, driving wedges between the intelligentsia and the masses; you don't see them doing cheap rhetorical tricks, like you do find among popular evangelical leaders. If the pope plays his audience, it's usually through acts of piety. He's not trying to stir up resentments.
Evangelicals are currently seeking more sense of community and international community, more accountability -- you hear more talk about confessing your sins to one another; they're looking for a way to justify the canon, visible signs of unity. Catholicism has all these things. It offers them already. And then of course evangelicals seem only to be able to preserve doctrinal purity by separating, dividing, and splitting and rupturing the unity of Christ. That's their method for maintaining the truth: divide. And that to me is the devil's tactic: "go ahead, divide 'em; it's easier to conquer them that way." Even in the area of their strength (the Bible), evangelicals are not without serious shortcomings. Matthew 16 is a great example of that. What's worse?: to omit clear biblical teaching, or to add to it? Evangelicals omit fundamental biblical teaching about Peter as the rock, about the apostolic privilege of forgiving or retaining sins. These things are not unclear. They're only unclear in the Scripture if you've adopted a certain type of theology, and then you have to dance around, doing hermeneutical gymnastics to avoid the clear intention of the verse. The binding and loosing passages in Matthew 16 and 18 are as plain as the nose on your face.
So I returned to the Catholic Church because I am absolutely convinced that the Roman Catholic Church preserves and retains (for all its shortcomings) the biblical shape of reality. It retains sacramental awareness, human mediation (which is a very prominent biblical theme which has been lost in evangelical churches), a sense of the sacred, which is present in the Scripture; and recognizes typology as having not only symbolic value, or pedagogical value, but also ontological value. It retains memorial consciousness and corporate personality, the idea of federal headship, doctrinal development. All of these things are lectures in and of themselves. But these things that people always wanna talk about (purgatory, saints, Mary), all fit into those categories. The structure of biblical reality is more present in Catholicism than any other tradition that I'm familiar with. And I'm really quite convinced that I don't have extravagant expectations, either. I think these things are really there. It's not a pipe dream.
[someone asked, "why not Orthodoxy?"]
Competing jurisdictions, which basically told me, "you need a pope." If the point is that you need a visible display of unity for the work of evangelism to have lasting success, how can you have the Russians and the Greeks fighting with one another all the time? I know conservatives and liberals fight in the Catholic Church, but it's structured in such a way as to be able to end the debate at some point. God acts infallibly through the papacy. The discussion can be settled. It can't be settled in Orthodoxy at this point. They're always fighting over jurisdictions. The laxity on divorce . . . I heard a saying recently that "your doctrine of ecclesiology will affect your doctrine of marriage, or vice versa." If you believe in divorce, then you believe in the Reformation, because you believe that Christ will divorce part of His Body. If you believe that the relationship between Christ and His bride, the Church, is indivisible, then you will believe that (among Christians, anyway) marriage is indivisible. There should be no divorce. And I think that the Orthodox are lax in that area. I think that they're too ethnic - that's probably due to a type of caesaropapism, and that their views of culture don't seem to work out very well. Those are some of the reasons. Also, it just wasn't around. Where do you go? You have to work too hard to find a place, and then you have to worry about whether they'll do it in English. I went to St. Suzanne's first of all because it was around the corner, and I believe that geography has a lot to do with community.
[I asked, "what was the very last thing that put you over the edge?"]
It was very incremental. Instead of their being one moment of decisive realization, there were moments of little pinpricks of light along the way. In one sense I crossed the line when I heard Fr. Stravinskas describing the Mass as a re-presentation of Christ's sacrifice, and I realized that the worldview that he was presenting was the worldview that I had believed for a long time, but had not been able to articulate. But I didn't know where to go from there. I think it was the same day that that happened, the one man who had been most influential on my thinking on the relationship between religion and culture during the 1980s, Richard John Neuhaus, announced that he had become a Catholic. I said, "oh my God!" His book, The Naked Public Square, really shaped my thinking on the relationship between religion and public life.
And another one would be the Scott Hahn tapes on Mary. What Scott did for me was, he managed to draw enough suggestive biblical material, that my ideas of development now could be fed from the Scripture. You have to understand that the Marian dogmas just seemed excessive. It's not that I had any intrinsic hostility to them. I thought they were kind of nice in their own way. But I didn't see the biblical precedent to it. He gave me enough biblical material to ignite a spark of hope about them, and then when I began reading the theology on them, I said, "I can receive this now." We're talking months.
I remember now: I needed reassurance. I'd forgotten all about this. What was on my mind was the work of the kingdom, and whether I could be as effective within the Catholic Church, as I could be in the Protestant church. I hadn't nailed down everything about Catholicism, but I recognized that the shape of Catholicism was a lot closer to the Bible, than a lot of what I was seeing in Protestantism. But practically speaking, you don't see Catholic evangelists out there very much. It came down to this: what justified staying apart? "What reason do I have for not being there?"
The Catholic understanding of “This is my body” as well as the discourse on the Eucharist in John 6 is not repudiated by any context. Regarding the extraordinary means of salvation, this is still literal reading of John 6; the example of the Good Thief, which is also read literally, merely explains that Jesus speaks of ordinary means in John 6.
The Good Thief fulfilled every requirement of the Church, by the way. His suffering provided for baptism of blood; his good works were defense of the innocent Jesus, he repented of his sin by acknowledging the justice of his punishment and his communion with Christ was face to face.
And she was corrected.
But then again not, because she only said blessed, she didn't immaculately conceived, born without sin, co redeemer, queen of heaven, hearer of prayers, distributer of graces, yadda yadda yadda. So all she did was say blessed are the body parts. It took the RCC to make it Mary the person and then expand times a million to actual veneration. Did you notice how close the word veneration is to worship in it's definition?
We have two levels of goodness here: the righteous yet afflicted with original sin stock producing what would have been a righteous yet afflicted with original sin Mary, and the Divine Goodness that gives birth to man Jesus. If the Father had made Jesus out of clay like Adam, there would be no questioon of how, -- but it pleased the Father to use a human mother. She is then both a culmination of the human Jewish stock, and a tabernacle of the Divine Word. This supports the immaculacy of Mary; it is logical that the immaculacy was imparted onto her at her conception.
So, "eating His flesh and drinking His blood" can mean something other than the physical acts of eating and drinking
Speculate you. The context of John 6 is firmly against any symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist. The Good Thief episode merely explains that one should "eat the flesh of the Son of Man" if he is able to do so, and the Good Thief was not.
The woman was corrected in the manner of her veneration: her attention was drawn toward Mary as the deliverer of the Word rather than a physiological creature. Her desire to venerate Mary was not corrected.
It is true that the precise manner of venerating Mary was not spelled out anywhere in the Gospel. The same applies to any other human liturgical practice: we still argue when to sit and when to stand, whether to baptise children and how to baptise, whether the Eucharist is to be unleavened bread, etc.
Basically, we find out own way to express our veneration: there is not right or wrong way, so long as it is done in true piety. Some contemplate icons, others pray the Rosary, light candles, kneel and prostrate etc. We are free to do as we please with that.
The interface was between afflicted with the original sin (Joachim and Anna) and free from its effects (Mary), but that was not a result of the natural order of Mary’s conception, but of a divine intervention bypassing it.
Mary’s freedom from personal sin, as opposed to her freedom from the original sin is the result of the operation of her free will. She could sin if she wanted to.
Literal reading means discerning the intent of the speaker. We know from other scripture that those unable to receive the Eucharist but who repented and labored for Christ to the extent that they could, like the Good Thief, also had eternal life. Hence, the literal reading of John 6 is the Catholic reading, as always.
How does the word blessed get promoted to venerate?
Hail, Mary, full of grace
the Lord is with you
blessed art thou among women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
Holy Mary, Mother of God
pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death
Amen
Here Mary is put in the context of her connection to Jesus and praised as uniquely blessed. She is then asked to pray for us at all times and expecially as we die.
So we go from "blessed rather" to venerate and then you modify the word venerate to mean slightly less than what it really means.
Your argument requires that we redefine the word "blessed" and the word "rather" and the phrase "those who hear the word of God and keep it". As Rush says, words mean things.
We don’t know what form the veneration of Mary took when the woman in the crowd addressed her. We know that veneration of living saints is often embarassing to them. Now, with Mary and an army of saints in heaven, we venerate them in the way that comes most natural to us. It is strange that the latter-day Protestants don’t do so at all: it is a serious defect in your prayer life, especially when you take this as a pretext of attacking the Church of God.
While dictionaries mix up veneration and worship, we don’t do so, precisely because words mean things. One worships God; one venerates a saint or a holy object. When St. Peter’s clothes were collected as relics, it was an acceptable practice; but when pagans attempt to worship the apostles, the apostles stop them.
The fundamental form of worship is the sacrifice of the Mass. We do not offer masses to Mary, but we invoke her holy name several times during the mass: asking for her prayers as well as the prayers of all the saints and living brothers and sisters in Christ during the confession Rite, when the Creed is spoken, and when the communion of saints is invoked in the Eucharistic prayer. Also, some priests like to say three Hail Marys in the end.
St. Peter’s clothes were collected as relics
Actually, St. Paul's:
11 And God wrought by the hand of Paul more than common miracles. 12 So that even there were brought from his body to the sick, handkerchiefs and aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the wicked spirits went out of them.(Acts 19)
when pagans attempt to worship the apostles, the apostles stop them.
10 And when the multitudes had seen what Paul had done, they lifted up their voice in the Lycaonian tongue, saying: The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men; 11 And they called Barnabas, Jupiter: but Paul, Mercury; because he was chief speaker. 12 The priest also of Jupiter that was before the city, bringing oxen and garlands before the gate, would have offered sacrifice with the people. 13 Which, when the apostles Barnabas and Paul had heard, rending their clothes, they leaped out among the people, crying, 14 And saying: Ye men, why do ye these things? We also are mortals, men like unto you, preaching to you to be converted from these vain things, to the living God, who made the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them...(Acts 14)
John 16:26 In that day you will ask in My name, and I do not say to you that I shall pray the Father for you; 27 for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God.
Coincidently I just read this today. Jesus sure seems to be saying not to even pray to Him but to the Father. What a far cry from RC doctrine.
The notion “not to even pray to Jesus” is indeed a far cry from Catholicism.
That's ironic because I have a very Marian RC friend that prays to Mary almost exclusively. He is offended by evangelicals and they're prayer to Jesus.
Is your friend offended by the evangelicals because they pray to Jesus or for some other reason?
I’m out with a flu/cold for the moment, so find myself with some small amount of time :)
Returning to our discussion;
What exactly is a Protestant?
- To refer to someone as a ‘Catholic’ has clearly defined parameters. To refer to someone as Protestant however has no such benefit... even your working definition of ‘tactile apostolic succession’ misses the mark, as some ‘Protestant’ groups claim this (though I may be incorrect here).
Instead of the term ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’, or any other man inspired term, I think the only true distinction is between those who follow Christ Jesus and those who do not.
It’s all a package either way, as far as I can see.
I'd largely agree. It really centres on whether you accept Catholic tradition or not. Weighed against what I read in scripture though, there is much within RC tradition that seems to go directly counter to what I read in God's Word. At the simplest, this can be seen in the title of the Pope as 'Most Holy Father'. Compare that to Matthew 23:9, which says;
And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven.
I'm afraid my medication is kicking in... getting very drowsy. I'll have to take this up again later.
May we be imitators of God, and of Him alone.
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