Is Union With Rome A Moral Imperative?

Is Union With Rome A Moral Imperative?

I am a Christian, a member of a religion stretching back two thousand years. I am, one could say, the spiritual heir of nearly one hundred generations of those who came before me in the faith. And yet, I was born into a divided Christendom, clinging to one of the Reformation's innumerable shards.

And, so far as shards go, it was not a bad one. I grew up as a Free Methodist, the result of a schism from mainstream Methodism, which was itself a schism from Anglicanism. Anglicanism has its own story, of which more will follow later.

Free Methodism is a Protestantism of the Arminian variety, which affirms free will, denies eternal security (the belief that we can never, even through deliberate renunciation, lose our salvation), and does not teach that God is a most, shall we say, “unpleasant” being who has decided to hate (to the point of predestined damnation) the bulk of humanity from the moment of their conception. The Free Methodist Church is a wonderful church, and it has been the spiritual home of my family for many generations.

And yet, as a body created by schism, it has had a relatively short life on its own. The heritage of faith only goes back to 1860, before one must jump back into the parent church. Continue back through Methodism, and one finds oneself in the Church of England. If one dares to continue, one will find oneself in the Church of Rome, the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church, by its very existence, is controversial to the Protestant. There is this idea that we Protestants rediscovered Christianity five hundred years ago and put the religion back on the right track. It can be baffling to see so many believers -- indeed, the largest single group of believers -- still within the Roman communion.

Those who know me very well know that I have been strongly interested in the Catholic Church for several years now. This has been surprising to some, and even shocking and upsetting for some others. To say to a devout Protestant that one is considering Catholicism is much like saying that one is considering renouncing one's citizenship and pledging allegiance to a foreign land. This is particularly shocking if the Protestant believes, as many do, that the Catholic Church is evil and apostate, the home of the anti-Christ.

I first expressed serious interest in the summer of 2005, while serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Someone, in such a callous disregard for separation of church and state that Barry Lynn would have surely collapsed from shock had he known, had taped the Prayer to St. Michael to the window of one of our humvees. I investigated it further, out of curiosity, and this led to further study of the Catholic Church.

I continued my study when I returned to the U.S., amassing quite a library of Catholic apologetics. I even entered the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program in Savannah, Georgia, with the intention of joining the Church on Easter Sunday, 2007. I did not follow through, however, due to some lingering doubts. That decision, I fear, has been to my detriment, though perhaps the fact I see that is a sign of hope.

In an earlier note, entitled “500 Years After Rome,” which I posted on February 5, 2010, I argued that the Protestant Reformation has had rather disastrous consequences and that, in hindsight, maintaining union with Rome, even a flawed Rome, would have been a better course of action. That argument was based primarily on the idea of unity and doctrinal cohesion.

I made a later argument in favor of traditional Catholic-style liturgy, in my note, “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” Certainly, I prefer traditional liturgy to what we have in Evangelical churches today, but that is largely, though I would not say entirely, a matter of taste. And, if aesthetics are to be the deciding factor, I attended an absolutely beautiful Church of Ireland (Anglican) service in Dublin recently, which put the Ordinary Form (Novus Ordo, post-Vatican II) of the Catholic Mass to shame.

And yet, as beautiful as the service was, Anglicanism has no great appeal to me. It looks, at least in the glorious high-Church atmosphere of the 11^th century (and therefore, formerly Catholic) Christ Church Cathedral, like Catholicism used to look, but appearances are deceptive. Underneath the beautiful display, the doctrines and moral teachings of historic Christianity have been eroding away. In the Catholic Church, however, the doctrinal and moral foundations are still firmly in place, no matter how strenuously clergy and laity alike so often rebel against them.

Anglicanism is interesting, however, when it comes to my own religious heritage. King Henry VIII had once been a loyal Catholic, and he had opposed the innovations of Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers on the continent. However, his desire for a male heir – and Anne Boleyn – coupled with some good old English nationalism, led him to break with Rome. If not for those factors, England may have remained a Catholic nation. As a Free Methodist, tracing my heritage back, I cannot help but wonder if I would have been raised a Catholic instead, if King Henry VIII had stayed true to his wife and to his Church.

However, King Henry did split, the Reformation did happen, and here we are, heirs to a centuries-old schism. The question is, what are we to do about it? May we continue as we are, accepting the status quo, even if we lament the original separation? Or, does each and every Protestant have a moral duty to return to union with Rome, in the Catholic Church?

These are very serious questions. We Protestants often talk of the importance of unity, and yet I cannot help but think that Protestantism, by its very existence, is an offense against unity. It had its origins in rebellion and division, and it perpetuates rebellion and division. Personally, I do not believe Protestantism contains the viable framework necessary to maintain any sort of unity or doctrinal orthodoxy. This is nothing against the strong faith and commitment of so many Protestants, but I believe we are working within a system that is doomed to failure.

And yet, most of us are born into this system. We did not choose to leave the Catholic Church. Our ancestors, for various reasons, chose to do this long ago. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says the following, in entry 818:

“However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers . . . . All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.”
Very well; this is all very positive. We are not charged with the sin of separation, and we are acknowledged as fellow Christians. However, skipping down to entry 846, we read this:

“Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.”

If I may repeat the last sentence again, “Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse to enter it or to remain in it.”

Those are fairly strong words, though still showing a great deal of mercy to the ignorant. Most Protestants ignore or disagree with words such as these, believing that their faith is perfectly fine, thank you very much. However, for those of us who do consider such words, for those of us who think there is at least a chance the Catholic Church is correct in what it says, we cannot set the matter aside.

This is where that moral duty comes in, which I mentioned earlier. This is not about aesthetics or about what each of us may prefer in a church service. This is a matter of what we must do, not a matter of what we would like to do. It is a matter of our salvation. We may look into the Catholic Church and decide, in all sincerity, that it is incorrect, and we ought to stay where we are or go elsewhere. Or, we may embrace its claims and rush eagerly into its doors. What we cannot do, I believe, is ignore it.

Schism is an unfortunate state in which to be. As Protestants, we are separate from those who were our predecessors in the faith. At some point in time, our spiritual ancestors said to their bishops, “We will no longer acknowledge your authority,” and then went their own way. In the years since, many of us have have come to accept their decision as the default. What I propose is that we each consider the matter anew. We should each decide if the schism is something we wish to personally maintain and pass down to our children, or if we should return to Rome.

“What a minute,” some will say. “You do not understand. I was raised Catholic, and I never heard the Scriptures; I never learned how to have a personal relationship with Christ. I was saved out of the Catholic Church. Why would you want to go there?”

Leaving aside the question of what in the world they were doing during mass, if they never heard the Scriptures, or what can be more personal than receiving Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist, I think these are legitimate things to say. The Catholic Church in our day has done an astoundingly poor job of teaching the faith to its members. One could argue about why this has happened, but the result is that many Catholics have left the Church and have embraced some form of Evangelical Protestantism or left Christianity entirely.

The fact that so many Catholics do not know their faith is a serious problem, but the problem, in my opinion, is not the faith, but the fact they do not know it like they should. One almost never hears of learned, faithful Catholics in our day studying their way into Protestantism, though there are numerous examples of the reverse being true and Protestants studying their way into the Catholic Church. Instead, the casual Catholics and the Christmas and Easter Catholics and those who found themselves simply going through the motions on Sunday are “saved” by Evangelicals who actually do know their faith.

The newly converted Evangelicals worship God wholeheartedly in their new church, and one cannot fault their zeal, and one cannot help but be glad they are now seriously serving Christ. However, did they have to leave the Catholic Church to do this? Did they have to commit themselves to a new and exciting version of Christianity, or could they have stayed in the Catholic Church, sharing in two thousand years of faith and participating in the sacraments?

I have, over the past few years, had some objections to the Catholic Church, but they were not the objections of Luther or Calvin or any other Protestant. My concern, a concern shared by John Henry Newman, was that Rome had introduced innovations and perhaps the true, apostolic, historic faith was to be found elsewhere. Newman believed, for a time, that this faith could be found in Anglicanism. I have often thought it could be found in Orthodoxy. I do not think it is likely to be found in some radical new theology preached in the new church down the street.

“But the Reformation was a restoration of the true, historic, apostolic faith!” some might say. While I respect the opinion, I must disagree most emphatically. When I look at the practices of the ancient Church, its writings, its councils, and its creeds, I see sacraments, apostolic authority, the communion of saints, infant baptism, and a visible Church. The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church continue to hold to these. Protestantism has largely rejected them, while adding a few doctrines, such as sola fide and sola scriptura, that were clear departures from what was previously believed.

If someone were to be suspicious of purgatory, papal infallibility, or the immaculate conception, I would be sympathetic. These are doctrines believed by the Catholic Church, but not by the Orthodox Church, and they were formally defined after the East-West split in AD 1054. I have respect for the Orthodox objections, and if someone, out of a desire for the true, apostolic, historic faith, were to become Orthodox, I would completely understand. However, if a Protestant were to object, simply because the doctrines did not line up with his or her interpretation of Scripture, then I am unlikely to be convinced, particularly since the Protestant also rejects so much that Catholicism and Orthodoxy hold in common.

It is difficult for me to believe Rome was right about the inspiration of Scripture, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of Heaven and Hell, and yet Rome's teachings about the communion of saints or the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist are damnable lies. If the Catholic Church is completely wrong about sacraments, authority, and Sacred Tradition, I am far more likely to reject the faith entirely than to scrape away a few pieces and make my own personal Christianity out of them.

What shall we conclude? Was traditional Christianity hopelessly flawed, with the mess that is Protestantism being the best we can do? Is the Christian religion itself a hodgepodge of conflicting options which we should abandon in favor of agnosticism or atheism, admitting that none of us have a clue who God is or what He wants from us? Or, did Christ found one Church, which He has continued to guide into all truth, promising that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it?

For myself, I am increasingly inclined to believe Christ did found a Church, the Catholic Church, and it is the obligation of every person to enter into it. I am still a bit indecisive and I have not made any formal decisions, but I have to wonder how much longer my indecision will be a valid state of inquiry, rather than a form of rebellion against Almighty God.

I welcome your thoughts. May God have mercy on us and guide us to the truth.

The End May Or May Not Be Near

The end is near, I have heard it said. Soon, perhaps as early as next Thursday, the Rapture will happen. All the true followers of Christ will suddenly be lifted up to Heaven, leaving cars without drivers, airplanes without pilots, and Mr. Smith's biology class without that one kid who rolls his eyes whenever Mr. Smith says the word “evolution.”

It appears that something great and terrible is about to befall humanity. Great plagues will lay waste the land, the multitudes will suffer indescribable pain, and “them that dies will be the lucky ones.” Thankfully, if we are the right kind of Christians, we will get to skip out of here before the going gets tough.

This belief that the end of the world is imminent is very popular within a particular segment of Christianity. Numerous books have been written and movies have been made about this subject. Sermons have been preached, Study Bibles have been published, and detailed accounts of the “Last Days” are readily available.

A fascination with the end of the world is, I suppose, normal for us. Jesus' early followers thought the end was going to happen in their lifetimes. As Rome fell in the West, the end had to be near. When the year AD 1000, with all its Y1K concerns, approached, I am sure many throughout the world thought the world's story was almost complete. We saw it in 2000, and it looks like we get to have it again in 2012.

And yet, the world keeps on spinning and we are still here. True, I suppose the world could end before I finish this sentence. Then again, perhaps we will have to wait a bit longer. While we're waiting, perhaps I'll hunt down a copy of 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Will Be In 1988. I do love to read.

I would like to address two issues that are affected by this “End Times” fascination. One is peace in the Middle East, and the other is the environment. Both are areas where end times fever goes beyond an eccentric hobby and can actually have very real consequences.

As I sit and think, it occurs to me that a devastating nuclear war in the Middle East, in which millions die and the land is ruined by radiation, is actually a bad thing. And yet, there are many people who eagerly look forward to such a scenario. This big war could be just the thing to set off the end times and trigger the Rapture, if it hasn't happened already. Every time someone throws a stone in the Gaza Strip, the Armageddon clock can move forward one more second.

The conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis is a complicated one, and I do not pretend to have the answer. Both “sides” have their supporters, who tend to thoroughly ignore the humanity of their “side's” enemies. One tends to expect the radical Islamists, if the term is appropriate, to support the Palestinians and the radical Jewish Zionists to support the Israelis, so this is no surprise. It is a little less expected to see Western anti-war leftists on the same side as the radical Islamists, and it is also a bit of a shock to find Fundamentalist Christians on the same side as the radical Jewish Zionists.

Leaving the Islamists and Western anti-war leftists aside for this discussion, let us look at the Fundamentalist Christians. They are a powerful ally of the Israelis, influencing U.S. foreign policy and sending aid to Israel. And yet, there is something very peculiar about this relationship. Fundamentalist Christians have a tendency to think that Jews, by virtue of not being Christians, are heading for Hell, and they also have a tendency to think that a horrible war in the Middle East is a desired event.

My guess is that the Israeli Jews appreciate the aid, though they would personally like to avoid the horrible war, and perhaps even Hell, if that's not too much to ask. Their faith that God will miraculously save them during the war by sending fire to destroy their enemies may not be quite as strong as that of their Fundamentalist benefactors.

Resolving conflicts between peoples tends to require compromise and reasoned discussion. For the Israelis and Palestinians who truly want to live in peace, there is hope that they can sit down at the table and work something out. Perhaps other parties can even participate. However, if a particular group, such as the end times focused Fundamentalists, believes that it is God's will for the modern state of Israel to extend to the Euphrates River and that the Palestinians have a moral obligation to move to Portugal, it is difficult to see what help they can be. They may even sabotage the peace process by their hardline stand on behalf of the people who actually have to live with the consequences.

It is a wonderful thing when brothers can live together in harmony. What a glorious thing it would be if the Israelis, Palestinians, and all the people in the region could share peace, happiness and mutual prosperity. To work for such a peace would be a noble thing, and I salute all who are doing so. For those who are hoping the Rapture takes them away before they have to deal with wrinkles and walkers, however, this peace could actually be a disappointment.

This world is a changing place. Not so long ago, the oceans teemed with life, and vast forests covered much of the world. Today, as we look at our polluted, deforested planet, we are becoming increasingly aware that many of our actions are harmful, and real change is needed in order to preserve our home. This awareness has begun to move from fringe environmental groups to the mainstream, and there is hope that we may be able to work together to ensure our children will inherit a liveable planet.

Among the end times crowd, however, this goal is often looked upon with scorn. If Christ is going to take us all away in a few years, why do we need to protect our oceans and forests? Why do we need to make sacrifices for future generations that are not going to exist? Why do we need to take care of this planet, when God is going to give us a new and better one?

While opinions do vary, there are many who believe Christ's return will occur during the lifetime of those who saw the restoration of Israel as a nation in 1948 (some will stretch it to 1967, when Israel reclaimed the old city of Jerusalem). Whatever date one chooses, this probably only gives us another fifty or sixty years, at most. If we are to assume that this planet only has fifty or sixty years left, it is easy to see how an environmental policy of rape and pillage appeals to people. Let's use it while we have it, and then watch it burn as we ascend to glory.

How many more generations of humanity are still to come? We simply do not know. Perhaps we will all be wiped out by a meteor strike in a few decades. Or, in a more hopeful scenario, perhaps we will become a galaxy-spanning civilization, living out our lives on countless worlds, our earthbound years being but the infancy of our species. Who is to say?

I propose that we take care of our home, in the best way we can. Perhaps I am sentimental, but I would like for my children to be able to walk through a forest or see a pod of whales skimming the surface of the ocean on a summer's day. I would like to know that I did my best to ensure those who come after me inherit a better world than I received. We do not know how long this place needs to last, so let us take the concept of stewardship seriously, and take responsibility for what God has given to us.

I understand that people want to feel special. They would like to feel that God has chosen them, out of all the generations in human history, to be taken up in the Rapture. They would like to feel that there is something that sets them apart from those who have come before. They would like to feel that they, uniquely among the masses of humanity, will be spared the pains of death.

And yet, if the experience of every other generation in history is any indication, the reality is that you, me, our families, friends and acquaintances are all going to die. This is a scary and often upsetting truth, because no matter how strongly many of us believe in the glorious hereafter, none of us really know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what is going to happen to us. And yet, countless generations before us have experienced the same thing, and there is little to indicate that our generation is something special. Our bodies will shut down, for one reason or another, and then...we shall see.

I mean no offense to people who, based on their reading of the Bible or the teachings of their theological traditions, truly think that the end is near. What I am suggesting is that none of us can be certain. Life is a gift, and none of us, Rapture or no, can know how long we have. So, rather than obsessing over the coming apocalypse, why not spend our days loving our neighbor and making a better world for our children? And then, perhaps in some distant age, Christ will return to a world we have not managed to destroy. Keeping the place in order in the meantime seems like the decent thing to do.

Give Me That Old Time Religion

There is a song I remember from when I was a child. It was called “Give Me That Old Time Religion,” and the chorus was very simple:

Give me that old-time religion,

Give me that old-time religion,

Give me that old-time religion,

It's good enough for me.

Other verses would follow, listing other people for whom that “old time religion” was also good enough. There is another version, by Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger, which references various ancient religions, which we did not sing in church. It is quite funny, but its content is outside the purpose of this discussion.

Getting back to the original song, this gospel tune, dating back to the late 1800’s, tends to make me think of old camp meetings and Sunday morning services in country chapels. It makes me think of ministers preaching the Gospel in a straightforward, uncompromising way. It makes me think of the great hymns of the faith, sung with gusto by the entire congregation, all without the benefit of drumsets or electric guitars. It makes me think of a more pure, simpler time, a time that had already largely passed before I came on the scene.

It is a time I miss, as I stand in church in my jeans, the pop/rock strains of the latest contemporary music filling the room. I miss the old days of singing “Amazing Grace,” “Revive Us Again,” or “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand.” I miss the days when church on Sunday was a little less like the rest of my week, the days when it was something special and sacred.

I hesitate to bring all this up, because sometimes I feel like an old man, yelling at the neighborhood kids for walking on his lawn. Musical styles change, people will say. We have to appeal to the new generation, people will say. Dressing up for church scares away the poor, people will say. I appreciate these arguments, and I am sure there is something to them. However, I cannot help but feel that there is more at work here than simply a change of style. It seems to me that what we are experiencing is a loss of our sense of the sacred.

It was a Saturday in 2006, and I was stepping cautiously into the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah, Georgia. Unless one counts a few masses in Iraq held in the shared chapel, I had never before set foot in a Catholic church. It was the most beautiful church I had ever seen. As I walked in, I was faced with the holy water font, a reminder of my baptism. The walls were covered with paintings and stained glass windows, showing stories from the Bible and from the lives of the saints. All along the sides of the church were the stations of the cross. In front was the altar, an object that held far more meaning in this Catholic house of worship than in any Protestant church I had previously attended.

Soon after my Saturday visit, I attended mass. I sat with a kind married couple, whose Bible Study I had participated in earlier that morning. I saw people walk in, drop to one knee beside their pew and, facing the alter, cross themselves in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We knelt to pray, we said the Creed, we prayed the Our Father, we sang hymns (to include one in Latin!). I watched the procession, as the priest walked down the center aisle, holding the Sacred Scripture over his head. We heard more scriptural readings than I had ever heard in one service before. We stood, out of respect, during the reading of the Gospel.

Though I, as a non-Catholic, did not receive Holy Communion, I felt that I had truly participated in the reverent, holy worship of God. This was not a show put on for my benefit. There was no rock band on a stage, there was no multimedia display. And when the priest elevated the Host and said, “This is my body,” I felt that I truly was in the presence of Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity.

It was much the same at St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church, also in Savannah. I walked in alone, not knowing what to expect. Here I found the same reverence as at St. John’s. The people lit candles, kissed icons, and made more signs of the cross than I had ever seen in my life. Incense filled the air, the choir sang (again, without a rock band) in Greek and English, following a liturgy whose age is comparable to the settled canon of the New Testament. When it came time for the Eucharist (communion), even infants in their mothers’ arms were brought forward to receive.

Having experienced the reverent, sacred liturgies of both East and West, it has proved difficult to find the same level of worship in modern Evangelical Protestantism. The statues and icons of Christ and the saints have been torn down, the stained glass windows have been smashed, and the sacraments have been reduced to mere symbols. Even the great hymns of Protestantism have begun to disappear. As Dr. Thomas Howard, the brilliant author of Evangelical Is Not Enough once said:

“Evangelicalism has changed drastically, having bought almost completely into a jazzy, breathlessly contemporary ambience, registered most obviously in their hymnody, which is now limited to ‘praise songs,’ in the place of the immensely rich, 500-year-old treasury of hymns which were Protestantism's greatest glory.”

This sort of talk likely offends many people, which I understand. Modern evangelicals are proud of their churches and believe that they are true places of worship. I do not doubt that this is the intent, nor do I doubt the sincerity of the worshippers. To me, it is ludicrous to suggest that God requires a beautiful liturgy and beautiful churches. Humans, however, are creatures who are drawn to beauty and who are inspired by beauty. Keeping that in mind, is it really a good idea to strip away any sense of beauty, reverence and ceremony from our services?

I think this is a question worth pondering, and even the Catholic and Orthodox churches should consider it. The Catholic Church, in particular, has gone through a ruinous 40+ year affair with iconoclasm, from which it is only now beginning to recover. It remains to be seen how the Orthodox Church, still a bit of an outsider in the West, will deal with the pressures of the modern world.

Much of this is about preference, I realize, and I know there are other issues at work. Doctrinal disputes are important, of course, which is partly why, along with love for my current church family, I am not yet a Catholic or Orthodox Christian. Still, I cannot help but long for the ringing of the bells, the smell of the rising incense, the reverence of traditional liturgy, and the physical act of worship in the sacraments. There is also something wondrous about the idea that Christ is present in the Eucharist, that the waters of baptism truly wash away sins, and that a man and woman are truly united in marriage.

Those are just some of my thoughts. I welcome comments.

God bless!

500 Years After Rome

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther was a priest, teaching at the University of Wittenberg; John Calvin was not yet one year old; Ulrich Zwingli was a college student at the University of Vienna; Menno Simons was not yet four; King Henry VIII had only recently ascended to the English throne; and Western Europe had one faith and one Church.

Today, the situation is quite different. We have gone from a society with one Church, to a society with many Churches, to a society that believes the Church does not matter.

Many of us may object to this, exclaiming that our faith matters very much, and that we are fully committed to living a Christian life. I do not doubt this. What I do doubt, in many cases, is our commitment to and belief in the Church.

Consider, if you will, where we attend services on Sunday. What sort of name is on the sign or printed on the bulletin? It may say, “First Baptist Church,” or perhaps, “St. Paul’s United Methodist Church,” or some such thing, but in many cases it probably says something like, “ Town Name Christian Center,” or, “Town Name Community Church.” With some churches, in very small print, we might see written, “a Free Methodist congregation,” or “a free and independent member of the SBC,” but there is often no indication of denominational affiliation at all.

“Bravo!” some will cry out. “We are all followers of Christ. Denominations do not matter. Let us break down these barriers and rejoice in our common faith.”

It is a noble-sounding sentiment, and it fits well in a time when tolerance is seen as the highest virtue. However, if I may quote G.K. Chesterton, “Tolerance is the virtue of a man with no convictions.”

To clarify, the reason our theological differences do not matter is that we do not truly believe in our own theologies. The average Christian in the pew may profess a great deal of love for Christ, as he or she may understand him, but few would be willing to die in the defense of their church’s distinctive doctrines.

Unity is certainly something to be sought after, but the unity we rejoice in today is a result of reducing Christianity to the lowest common denominator. This process is still ongoing, and it does not show signs of stopping anytime soon. The dogmatic certainty of the early sixteenth century Church has been diluted to “mere Christianity,” which is itself on its way to “mere spirituality.”

Many of us will disagree, I realize. We will say, perhaps, that we believe the Bible is true. We will say we firmly believe in the existence of Christ and the reliability of the Christian faith. I applaud this, I really do. However, I must take this a step further. We believe in the truth of Scripture and the Christian religion? In that case, is it important to believe rightly when it comes to the importance of baptism and what it does? Is it important to believe rightly when it comes to the nature of Holy Communion and what it really is? Is it important to believe rightly when it comes to demonstrable gifts of the Holy Spirit? Is it important to believe rightly when it comes to the assurance of salvation?

At this point, many will say that these are “non-essentials,” and that disagreement on these issues should not prevent unity. It is important to note, however, that this list of non-essentials was not so long fifty years ago, and it certainly was not five hundred years ago. Care to guess how long this list might be in another fifty years? As time is passing, less and less Christian doctrine is considered to be important. If nothing is done to halt this trend, in a few centuries or less, will there be any Christianity left?

This progression from orthodox Christian belief to modern relativism stems largely from the rejection of authority. We disagree with our church’s stand on a particular issue or issues, so we reject our church’s authority and form our own. And, really, to be honest, is this so surprising? For the children of the Reformation, all of our churches exist because of a previous rejection of authority. As we storm out of the church and form a new one down the street, what can our former pastors say? If we are rebels, then so are they, and so are their spiritual forebears.

To continue, once we, as a society, decided that it was legitimate and proper to throw off the authority of one Church, why should it be a surprise that it has become common practice to throw off the authority of every Church? Our religion is increasingly becoming the religion of the individual and his or her interpretation of the Bible. There is no recourse to an authoritative Church. Rather, individual Christians, many of whom likely believe the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility to be a damnable heresy, believe that the Holy Spirit is guiding them to an infallible interpretation whenever they pray for guidance and read the Holy Scriptures.

We are left with a problem, however, because we Holy Spirit-seeking, independent Christians disagree about any number of doctrinal matters. If there are a hundred of us in a room, there are probably a hundred different sets of doctrine. Odds are that many of us are quite sincere in our search for truth, and yet we still disagree and come to contradictory conclusions.

At this point, I believe we must consider the possibility that perhaps the one person and his or her Bible system does not work. Perhaps the wholesale rejection of authority is not the best way for Christianity to operate. Perhaps, and this is the shocking part, we were better off five hundred years ago than we are today.

“You would return us to the darkness of Romish papism!” some will cry out, wringing their hands and looking frantically about for Spanish inquisitors. It is a rather significant thing to consider, I will admit, and I realize that, for many of us, the thought has not dared to cross our minds. It lies in forbidden territory, inscribed with the warning, “Here there be monsters,” on our Protestant maps.

And yet, that is the Church from which we came. Sometimes I think we forget this, as if somehow Christianity was on pause for fifteen hundred years. We think we can go from the book of Acts to Martin Luther, ignoring fifteen centuries of men and women who served Christ and belonged to His Church.

Perhaps we do not agree with every doctrine of the Catholic Church, but can we at least say that these men and women were Christians? If we Protestants can call each other Christians, despite our various theological differences, can we not say the same about these Catholics? Or, while tolerating the errors of our misguided brethren down the street who formed their particular sect in 1892 or 1986 or 2009, are we truly going to deny the Christian faith of those within the Church that we all came from and that dates back to the time of the apostles?

Were people going to heaven under the care of the Catholic Church? Were they being encouraged to live righteous lives? Were they told to love God and love their neighbor? If people were being saved within the Catholic Church, has the splintering, chaotic explosion that is Protestantism proved to be any kind of an improvement? Are we as Christians and as a civilization better off now?

1 Timothy 3:15 says that the Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth. If we agree with Scripture, can we really say that leaving the Church behind was such a good idea? Some will say that the “Church” is an “invisible body of believers, scattered throughout thousands of denominations.” Perhaps I am old fashioned, but it seems that a pillar and foundation that people can see and identify and look to for truth is a superior kind of pillar and foundation. Foundations and pillars are strong, and they hold up large and tall buildings. If the foundation and pillar were to be broken apart and scattered, the building would fall. Since the Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth, if the pillar and foundation are invisible, the truth is much more difficult to find.

We rejected the authority of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. Since then, we have been steadily rejecting more and more of traditional Christian doctrine and practice. Would the apostles recognize our churches? Would the early Protestant reformers even recognize our churches? We have established a pattern of rebellion, continually breaking away from what is old and embracing what is new and different. When our children leave the faith entirely and take up atheism or some new and exciting foreign religion, they are going down the same path that Martin Luther and John Calvin and their compatriots took all those years ago.

As this comes to a close, I want to point out that this is not intended to be an attack on anyone’s faith in Christ. I see this as more of a critique of a system, a system that has shown itself to be flawed. This is not a work of Catholic apologetics. I am not at a place in my life where I could write such a thing. I am a class of ’07 RCIA dropout, with great affection for Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, along with an appreciation for all that is good (and there is much) in my Protestant heritage. I think, however, that we have been taking the Protestant system for granted, assuming that it is the way things ought to be. With all respect, and with great love for all people, I ask you to at least consider the possibility that it is not.

May God bless us all and guide us to the truth.

Authority and the Adventurer

This is an excerpt from G.K. Chesterton's book "Orthodoxy":

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts.

The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy. It is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion.

Now, the non-Christianity of the average educated man today is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I discover simply that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way. Let us take cases.

Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge. The only objection to them (I discover) is that they are all untrue.

If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humor or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton.

People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an anthill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a beehive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old?

No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals, following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began in some darkness and terror. When I did attempt to examine the foundations of this modern idea I found simply that there were none. Science knows nothing whatever about prehistoric man for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence is very much the other way.

In the earliest legends we have—such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia—human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods. History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity. Learned men literally say that this prehistoric calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it. I cannot keep pace with these paradoxes.

And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same; the view that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the world and discover simply that they don’t. Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and colored dresses and art in the open air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame that has preserved the pleasure of paganism.

We might fancy some children playing on the flat, grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the center of the island, and their song had ceased.

Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round. I am left saying, "Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy in the countries of the Catholic Church."

One explanation, at any rate, covers all three: the theory that twice was the natural order interrupted by some explosion or revelation such as people now call psychic. Once heaven came upon the earth with a power or seal called the image of God, whereby man took command of nature; and once again (when in empire after empire men had been found wanting) heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man. This would explain why the mass of men always look backward; and why the only corner where they in any sense look forward is the little continent where Christ has his Church.

I know it will be said that Japan has become progressive. But how can this be an answer when even in saying "Japan has become progressive" we really only mean "Japan has become European"? But I wish here not so much to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark. I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed to something else.

I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian arguments. If that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the moment another. These are the kind of thoughts that in combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased. First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious—such people as the Irish—are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament, I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the a fortiori. His "how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds.

The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of nonresistance greatly increases the mystery, but it also (if anything) rather increases the violence.

We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane, for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given: Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.

I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalizations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.

If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: It didn’t. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with skeptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterward the ship sank, but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome.

If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever reemerged (and many such have never reemerged), it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I added it only because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood.

It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is done about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their members, are simply the conditions under which they were asked to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to disgorge.

These people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the especially hard professions—the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier.

In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion: The skeptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The skeptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average skeptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this incomparable energy that appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy that can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy that last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?"

There is an answer: It is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world—that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless, it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: It could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our estate: You and I have no business to be here at all. We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life—it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps—ever since.

I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to convey the main contention: That my own case for Christianity is rational, but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a nonbeliever for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren’t; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn’t; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colors and gay with gold; because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn’t—it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.

Lead, Kindly Light

LEAD, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

-John Henry Newman, 1833