Why I Returned to the Catholic Church. Part VI: The Biblical Reality

Cor ad cor loquitur ^ | 16 November 2004 | Al Kresta/Dave Armstrong

[annalex]

Why I Returned to the Catholic Church (Al Kresta)

. . . Including a Searching Examination of Various Flaws and Errors in the Protestant Worldview and Approach to Christian Living

Part VI: The Biblical Reality

(edited and transcribed by Dave Armstrong; originally uploaded on 16 November 2004).
[Part breakdown and part titles 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?"

[DungeonMaster]

The verse shows Jesus smacking down the beginnings of Marianism. It was desired to exalt Mary for bringing Him and He showed that simply being any old Christian is more blessed than the part that Mary had in His incarnation.

[annalex]

:)

[annalex]

This is your spin. It does not agree with the scripture, because Jesus did not stop the woman from venerating His mother, -- He taught us how to properly venerate her.

27 ... a certain woman from the crowd, lifting up her voice, said to him: Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the paps that gave thee suck.

Here Mary is venerated for her physiological motherhood.

28 But he said: Yea rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it.

Here the woman is corrected: Venerate her, and all who hear and keep the Word.

Does He mean every Christian? No, because the commandment to keep the Word is a difficult calling, "why call you me, Lord, Lord; and do not the things which I say?" (Luke 6:46).

[swmobuffalo]

“that’s the other view”

LOL It’s the only view based on Scripture. There’s no where in the New Testament that Jesus proclaims the CATHOLIC CHURCH the one and only. You can twist anything to make it fit but when it comes down to it, that proclamation isn’t there.

[annalex]

I was ordained 30 years ago too, but I quit to become RC

One of these days you've got to post your own story.

[Mad Dawg]

And you guys say WE are far-flung in our interpretations of Scripture?

So When Mary says, "Behold, from now on (Dawg translation of "apo tou nun") all generations will call me blessed," Jesus would have added, "But, MOM, they'll be wrong!"

I think one of the great things about IHS's teaching is that he often turns things away from the "out there" to the "in here". So the end of the whole Good Samaritan story is," Go and do THOU likewise," and when somebody asks Him about the commandments He says,"What do YOU think?"

So I would go this far with you, that if somebody praises Mary and does not address his own relationship with Jesus and with God, that's perverse. And when somebody praises Mary in the anecdote, He doesn't let him off the hook, but challenges him to deal with his own relationship with God. "Enough about my mother, where are YOU when it comes to obedience?" That's the Jesus I love and admire. What a great teacher!

So it's not so much that "simply being any old Christian (and WHY do we have to bring up my age?)is MORE blessed ...." IMHO It's that "my" blessedness is my business, and comparing it to anyone else's is silly.

But when I rejoice in God's grace to Mary (or to you, for that matter) it's not ducking my relationship with God or handing it over.

But if he says blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it, who has done so more than Mary? (And I would construe Μενουν ... as "No, you dope, HERE's the way to think about blessedness!")

I think people often duck the encounter with God. And yes, one could use devotion to Mary as a way to do that. One could use ANY devotion -- especially when accompanied by a sense that one's prayers are going to get one into heaven -- as a way to avoid that heart-to-heart in which one's own painfully deep neediness, moral and every other kind, meets the penetrating eye of God. To that extent, let all devotions be cast aside if they are "performed" with that attitude.

"Lilies that fester...," as I am fond of saying ...

[annalex]

There’s no where in the New Testament that Jesus proclaims the CATHOLIC CHURCH the one and only.

Because there was no other church till Luther came up with his theological fantasies.

[Mad Dawg]

LOL It’s the only view based on Scripture.

Ah, artillery duel rather than conversation. Your disagreement is noted and the notion that the only reason people disagree with you is that they twist things is also noted. Thank you for sharing.

I would have said that for those who read the Bible the way you read it, your view follows. But not everybody who reads Scripture reads it as you do, and not everyone who differs from you does so by twisting.

I personally find in Scripture good grounds for trusting the Catholic Church.

[annalex]

Good post, as usual, but I would take issue with

I would construe Μενουν ... as "No, you dope, HERE's the way to think about blessedness!"

There is no "No". The usual translation is "Yes, rather" both in King James and Douay.

[Mad Dawg]

One of these days you've got to post your own story.

I am WAY too young to die, at least by a thousand Free Republic cuts.

Briefly, I found that the Episcopal Church, while having all the trappings and behaviors of a body which truly believed that it was a valid Church and that God spoke to it through the members thereof, actually believed nothing at all. Conventions were run NOT to discern the will of God, but to enact an agenda. Canons and other legal entities were created with no expectation that they would be followed. A bishop (Spong) who was member of the "house of Bishops" which passed a moratorium on the ordination of practicing homosexuals could ignore the resolution and be acquitted in a trial. But the priests who presented charges because of The Bishop's acting against his own house's resolution would be penalized for 'behavior unbecoming'.

That's only one of I'd guess a dozen examples. The House of Bishops declares that the "Philadelphia 11", the first women to be "ordained" (irregularly) were NOT validly ordained, but then later decides to allow them to function as priests anyway.

It was all "pretend"!

So I asked myself, "How does one lose the faculty of will?" And the answer was,"By abusing it."

If one looks at the chaos and doctrinal confusion in the Pepsicola Church from the death of Henry VII on one sees an immediate decay of will.

SO I concluded, reluctantly at the time, the the decay of will began with choosing to separate the Church from communion with the Holy See.

Q.E.D.

The only thing good a sinner can do with his will is offer it to God, and even that offer is more of an "Indian gift" (no offense meant to anyone) than a real offer. One is finally reduced to pleading,"Lord, take my will before I snatch it back, and keep it secure from my sinfulness, PLEASE!"

At my pre-ordination retreat, an Anglican nun advised me to offer my will and "my" ministry to God every day.

I dare to conclude that finally He honored my offer.

And now, most of the time, I smell far worse than weeds. But everyday that I am NOT acting like a priest, I am making an offer of obedience. I really wanted to be a priest. All the stuff I do, with sheep and Law Enforcement and such, is just marking time.

Now I am vulnerable. But I AM armed. Choose carefully ;-)

[Mad Dawg]

Bauer, Arndt and Gingrich has "on the contrary". Kittel doesn't have it.

You don't like the Mad Dawg translation? I was thinking it was kind of an intensive of μεν which has a sense of "on the one hand". B,A,&G also offer μενουνγε which I take to be kind of a double intensive.

SO you got your "ho men .... ho de ..." kind of lingo as in. "Ho men Dubya is Republican, ho de he's kind of lousy on the border issue." On the one hand this on the other hand that.

So that's where I got the sense of "You are looking at it all wrong, the way to look at blessedness is ...."

But, yeah, reasonable folk could differ.

Thanks for nice words. I appreciate it.

[annalex]

Yes, the disintegration of the Anglican communion is painful to even watch. I can imagine the pain of living it. Thank you for sharing.

[jo kus]

the Catholic Church proclaims it is the only one who has the truth!

I just got done saying that the Church possesses the fullness of the truth AND that other communities possess portions of the truth. Where do you get the idea that the Catholic Church is the only one that possesses truth? We do not deny that Protestants possess some truth, nor do we deny that Islam possesses some truth.

Regards

[DragoonEnNoir]

(Mad Dawg wrote) in contemplation of Scripture

Yet contemplation or meditation in a Christian context is not the emptying of ourselves or the reliance upon 'our' wisdom... rather it is the listening to the Spirit of God which is His gift of guidance to all who call on His name.

But when he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. (Jn 16:13-14)

I understand your comments on the origins of Marianism, yet there are several severe flaws with it. Firstly and most critically, it ignores what Christ himself says about his mother and his family in other scripture. As an example, when told that Mary and his brother were without (we're not going to even get into Immaculate Conception and the siblings of Christ here!), He replies,
Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?". Pointing to his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother." (Mt 12:48b-50)

Please note that this is not to devalue Mary or James as people blessed and chosen by God, but to affirm that all honor and glory belong to God.

When looking and contemplating scripture, we should look and consider it in it's totality, and not as isolated parts.

The second problem (there are more imo, but let's try to be slightly more brief) is that it assumes human wisdom in the things of God. We are told both that the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom (1Cor 1:25), and if I recall correctly, there is also a passage which equates human wisdom with the thinking of Satan.

Your comments on witchcraft are interesting, but think also on why God so detests witchcraft. As I read (especially in the OT) on witchcraft, God does not say it is not real, rather He commands that we place no Gods before Him, and honor no Gods except Him. The essence of witchcraft is to try to control (or to give the illusion of control... after all, Satan is the prince of lies) your surroundings, to place your trust and faith in a God other than God. In one sense, reliance on birth control can be seen as that, yet it is not the thing itself that is evil, but the warped usage of it which is.

My 'physical' comment was for any readers with a Gnostic bent. There are always those who attempt to remove God from any physical act, and who see spirit and flesh as entirely in opposition to each other. Yet, in it's proper place (in a union before and in God, of a man and a woman into one), love in all it's aspects, including physical love, is a truly beautiful thing.

On both the ABC and my 'new law' comment, I'd like to post this passage of scripture;
Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!"? These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. (Col 2:21-23)

Like the OT Law, any rigid law does not restrain us... rather it makes us aware of how we fall short and sin.

The essence of Christ is that we are no longer under law, but under grace. All things are permitted of us, yet not everything is beneficial, and we are to judge all things by the Spirit which has been given us as a guide (along with scripture, which is the Word of God). We are to judge our actions not in light of rigid rules which can be bent, misunderstood or misapplied, but rather by the greatest commandments.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (Mt 22:37-40).

As Paul continues in Collosians,
Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. (Col 3:1-3)

Sorry if this is a bit disjointed... writing late at night, and now it's time to rest.

May our Lord be glorified in all we do.

[swmobuffalo]

“I would have said that for those who read the Bible the way you read it, your view follows. But not everybody who reads Scripture reads it as you do, and not everyone who differs from you does so by twisting.”

Apparently some read literally and some read something else.

[MEGoody]

God didn't make Jesus' flesh in Mary's womb; He got Mary's flesh.

Then one would think that Jesus would have been female rather than male.

[wmfights]

Quite happy as a Missouri Synod Lutheran.

God Bless you. Trust in the LORD.

It really takes great strength to overcome the conditioning that starts from before you can walk.

[ArrogantBustard]

Pepsicola Church from the death of Henry VII

I'm quite sure you didn't intend to "diss" Henry VII, who was apparently a decent King. I'm sure you meant Henry VIII ... who was, IMO, a pig. With apologies to pigs.

[annalex]

Mothers cannot have sons?

[annalex]

As a Catholic I read the scripture literally.

Baptism now saves you
The sins you forgive are forgiven the sins you retain are retained
This is my body
What you bind on earth I will bind in heaven
There be no schisms among you
How can they preach unless they are sent?

Christ did not start scores (being charitable with the count) of denominations, scripture tells us. He started one hierarchical authoritarian sacramental Church.