We Cannot Love God if We Do Not Love His Word

Emil Brunner, the twentieth-century Swiss theologian and one of the fathers of neoorthodox theology, wrote a little book titled Truth as Encounter. His thesis was that when we study the things of God, we are not studying truth in the abstract. We want to understand theology not merely so that we can make an A on a theology exam. We want to understand the doctrine of God so that we can understand God, so that we can meet the living God in His Word and deepen our personal relationship with Him. But we cannot deepen a relationship with someone if we do not know anything about him. So, the propositions of Scripture are not an end in themselves but a means to an end. However, they are a necessary means to the end. Thus, to say Christianity is not about propositions but about relationships is to establish an extremely dangerous false dichotomy. It is to insult the Spirit of truth, whose propositions they are. These propositions should be our very meat and drink, for they define the Christian life.

Recently I read some letters to the editor of a Christian magazine. One of them disparaged Christian scholars with advanced degrees. The letter writer charged that such men would enjoy digging into word studies of Christ’s teachings in the ancient languages in order to demonstrate that He did not really say what He seems to say in our English Bibles. Obviously there was a negative attitude toward any serious study of the Word of God. Of course, there are scholars who are like this, who study a word in six different languages and still end up missing its meaning, but that does not mean we must not engage in any serious study of the Word of God lest we end up like these ungodly scholars. Another letter writer expressed the view that people who engage in the study of doctrine are not concerned about the pain people experience in this world. In my experience, however, it is virtually impossible to experience pain and not ask questions about truth. We all want to know the truth about suffering, and specifically, where is God in our pain. That is a theological concern. The answer comes to us from the Scriptures, which reveal the mind of God Himself through the agency of the Holy Spirit, who is called the Spirit of truth. We cannot love God at all if we do not love His truth.

It is very sad to me that in today’s sophisticated Western culture, people are more familiar with the twelve signs of the Zodiac than with the twelve tribes of Israel or the twelve Apostles. Our world likes to see itself as sophisticated and technological, but it remains filled with superstition. Christians are not immune to this. We, too, can succumb to the new-age desire for the power to manipulate our environment. We do not have to go as far as accepting the foolish idea that the courses of the stars determine our destinies, our prosperity, our achievements, and our successes. However, it is equally superstitious to equate our feelings and inclinations with the leading of the Holy Spirit. It seems so much more exciting to live with a freewheeling openness to the leading of the Holy Spirit rather than practicing the laborious discipline of mastering His Word. This is exceedingly dangerous ground. If we want to do the will of the Father, we need to study the Word of the Father—and leave the magic to the astrologers.

We Catholics understand that no amount of elaboration appears sufficient for folks like you. You either wear blinders, or refuse to accept the proof, or are unable to comprehend the writings of your very own leading Lutheran theologians and Episcopalians who converted to Catholicism. You ask what the sacred traditions of the Church? ALL what the Church does as part of its liturgical and ritual practices, and beliefs in communion with Christ, the saints, and its martyrs.

No one is saying that the “the leading of the Holy Spirit is absurd.” Rather, because of the diverse and often contradictory beliefs of Protestants and Episcopalians, each cannot claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit. That would make the Holy Spirit a contradiction unto itself.

Surely, the congregations of Joel Osteen, Jimmy Swaggart; Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Billy Graham, and hundreds of your neighborhood local Foursquare Churches cannot each claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit.

To deny the Eucharist, you will have to REFUTE:

1. Scripture itself. John 6:53

2. The sacred oral tradition, the very tradition that was used to cross check and cross reference the books in the Bible that were infallibly assembled as authentic by the Catholic Church. So if you doubt the oral tradition, you must doubt the fact-checking sources for the Bible, and consequently the accuracy of the Bible itself. You cannot have it both ways by accepting the Bible as authentic and un-tether its infallibility from the sacred oral tradition.

3. The beliefs and practices of the early disciples of Christ before the Bible was assembled in the early fourth century which the Church continues to this day in the administration of the Sacraments of the Church and its forms of adoration and veneration.

4. The beliefs of saints, martyrs, and stigmatists who believed that the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Holy Eucharist is at the very center of Christian belief and this is why the Tabernacle was at the center of all Catholic Churches and worship and was so for FIFTEEN CENTURIES (AND CONTINUES TO BE) before the curse of Protestantism in 1517 (especially now with their mainline denominations using scriptural warrant to ordain gay, lesbian, and coming soon, transgender pastors) washed ashore spreading, what the great essayist Hillaire Belloc called, a “cluster of heresies.”

5. The explicit writings of the early Church fathers.

This would include St. Irenaeus of Lyons, an early Church Father and Doctor of the Church
https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/library_article/541/Eucharist_as_Pledge_of_Resurrection_St._Irenaeus.html

In fact, the real presence of the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist (transubstantiation), also known as Mass or the Lord’s Supper, was taken for granted in the early Church.

Written by St. Irenaeus about 185 AD, this excerpt in the link above makes clear the Church’s realistic interpretation of the Eucharist as the risen body of Christ.

6. The brilliant Catholic theologians after whom colleges and universities have been named.

7. The pre-eminent Episcopalian and Lutheran theologians who have converted to Catholicism such as Rev. Richard Neuhaus who wrote he found “the fullest expression of Christ in the Catholic Church.” (However, Bible

Christians tell us the “Holy Spirit” rather than having led them to the ONE truth, instead deserted them and the Holy Spirit is somehow, somewhere else, perhaps dwelling among some Protestant sects but we don’t know for sure which sect it is: Joel Osteen’s or Jeremiah Wright’s)

The resurrection is not some simple belief of a dead man coming to life.

Pope Benedict XVI (the theological Einstein of our times) captured this brilliant in the following passage. In the middle volume of his triptych, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI tried to describe those Resurrection-changes in history and nature (which are, of course, ultimately indescribable) like this:

“Christ’s Resurrection . . . is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here . . . [and think of] the Resurrection as something akin to a radical “evolutionary leap,” in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence. Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. “

“The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, “spirit and blood” have a place within God. . . . Even if man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its “space,” its “bodiliness,” in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind.”

“This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Paul’s prison letters (cf. Colossians 1.12–23 and Ephesians 1. 3–23) that speak of the cosmic body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christ’s transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are therefore able to live definitively in the fullness of indestructible life. . .”

“[Thus] Jesus’s Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point. . . . [An] ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.”

You can now see why without the living body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, the Resurrection has no meaning.
I
ndeed, deny this belief, and Protestantism is no different than a Hindu whose reading of the Upanishads and the Bhaghavad Gita tells him of an afterlife, or Buddhist beliefs in Bodhisattvas who as enlightened beings have put off entering paradise in order to help others attain enlightenment.

In a word, such beliefs are in the end of matters of “faith” but they are as moribund as the reality of only the dead.

In the Eucharist, Catholics have the Living Body and Blood of Christ as He Himself promised during His time on earth and the Last Supper.

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