I just want to know

I'm frustrated.

And the more I read and pray the more frustrated and desperate I become.

I envy my friend who converted to Catholicism. I really do. He's settled on this and happy. I'm neither. The matter isn't settled for me. Not in my head, not in my heart. I'm unhappy with my own personal spiritual life and frustrated with the confusion. I can't seem to reconcile all the conflicting data. Meanwhile I just want to be closer to God but don't seem to feel that happening. And the old evangelical standbys of "just read your Bible and pray" or "have a daily quiet time" aren't cutting it. It's just not that simple. At least not for me.

We like the Anglican church we're attending, but we're torn. Still trying to sort out what's best for the kids and wishing we could combine parts of the Methodist church we were attending (specifically that children's program) with the liturgy and reverence here. I wish I knew more of the hymns. And it would be nice to feel more settled on the question of paedobaptism.

This is hard. I think I believed I was done wrestling with the big theological issues after I got past my "cage-phase" Calvinist years. I couldn't have been more wrong. And while at times it's stimulating and exciting, right now it's tiring and frustrating and confusing.

And I think this is the best I'm going to be able to do to put the myriad thoughts swirling around in my head into words. Please pray for me and my family.

Peace

We're continuing to enjoy the Anglican church. The liturgy is pretty and I like that I actively participate throughout the service rather than just during the singing portion in the beginning.

But I think beyond any of the philosophical or theological arguments for a liturgical service or anything like that, right now the thing I am enjoying most is the quiet and the reverence. It gives me a sense of peace and calm. I don't think I realized how sometimes the contemporary style with all that goes with it added to the frenetic feeling you get from life and work and raising kids and all that stuff. Something about the way things are done in a more traditional, liturgical setting feels like I stepped out of this crazy world for 90 minutes and can take a breath, pause, reflect, hear, repair. The setting, unlike your average modern worship center that could just as well be a local concert hall or school auditorium, gives you a visual indication from the minute you walk in that you've stepped into a place that is "other than." It's set apart for worship and you can leave the craziness of your everyday life outside for a few sweet minutes and meet with God.

It's not that I didn't get that from previous church experiences at all. Just the act of going to worship and hearing the Word taught well and taught faithfully is rejuvenating and life-giving. And sometimes the upbeat songs were encouraging when I was down or worried. But I've come to appreciate stillness and quiet, reflection and contemplation and that's what I'm getting right now from this experience.

I know that liturgy is just as much about what you offer to God as what you receive. And I hate to focus only on what I'm getting out of it. But it's where I am right now in my thoughts. I'm being drawn in and it's making me hunger for more of it. We may not end up staying here with this particular parish, but I hope we do or if not, God will help us find a place similar where He wants us planted and taking root.

The Catechesis Of The Good Shepherd

I'm curious if anyone out there reading this is familiar with a children's program called The Catechesis Of The Good Shepherd. It's a Montessori learning method for ages 3-12. A brief description:

The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is a faith formation experience for children ages 3-12. Based on the premise that God and the child share a relationship, the curriculum is designed to develop the religious potential of every child and produces in the child the desire to draw nearer to God.

The work of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is done in an Atrium. The Artium is more a place of worship than a traditional classroom. It is an environment created so that children can develop a living, personal relationship with God. The Atrium is a place where Jesus Christ is encountered by reading and reflecting on the Bible, through prayer and singing and by exploring the liturgy of the Word.

The Catechesis was developed more than 50 years ago in Rome, Italy, by Dr. Sofia Cavalletti, a Hebrew scholar and theolgian, and Gianna Gobbi, a Montessori educator. Today, this Montessori method of Christian formation exists in more than 22 countries.

The curriculum focuses on three age levels. Level One is for children ages 3 1/2 to 6; Level II is for ages 6 to 9; and Level III is for ages 9 to 12. Each level explores the fundamental theme of Covenant as reflected in the Bible and as we live it in our liturgy. Each level introduces 30 to 40 age-appropriate lessons which build on previous teachings.

It is the children's Sunday School program at this Anglican church we're attending and I'm utterly unfamiliar with it and with the Montessori method of teaching. I want to make sure my kids will be getting meaningful instruction on God, Jesus, the Bible and so on at an age appropriate level. Any thoughts, helpful articles and especially personal experiences are heartily welcomed.

Thanks!

Experiencing liturgical worship

So, the past two weeks, my wife and I have attended an Anglican church here in town. The first week was sort of odd. I liked a lot of the service, particularly the liturgy surrounding the Eucharist. But it was not a normal week for them. It was their annual commitment Sunday where people are reaffirming their commitment to serve and their commitment to financial stewardship. Then they had an infant baptism. Then there was a fairly lengthy testimony from one of the older members who has been going through cancer treatment and to top it all off, it was All Saints Sunday and the assistant rector was delivering the sermon instead of the senior rector who I had heard before from message on their website. So between all of that and being completely unfamiliar with the liturgy and when to sing or when to respond, plus the service running long, we left with mixed feelings.

On a side note, if all that mattered was how we were treated, we'd have joined on the spot. Hands down it's the friendliest, most welcoming people I've ever encountered visiting a church. Anyone within a 20-foot radius managed to make their way over to us and warmly greet us. People sitting right behind us or on the row with us were helpful in pointing out where we were in the liturgy and where to go and what to do. Sweet, sweet people.

I wanted to return and at least experience what would be considered a "normal" Sunday for the church before making a decision. My wife wasn't so sure. I think when I said I wanted to visit a more traditional church, she wasn't envisioning quite as much tradition as I was. So we talked and she agreed to go the next Sunday as I had been assured via email correspondence with the senior rector that this Sunday would be more of a typical one for them and he would love to meet me afterward. I agreed that if we left and she still felt the same way about it, we'd go back to the contemporary church we'd been attending and see what God had in store for us there.

Well, we went this past Sunday and again, I really liked it. Being more used to the order and "rhythm" of things the second time, we didn't feel so lost and confused. The rector's sermon was excellent. Such strong, Biblical preaching and teaching. And again, the liturgy of the Eucharist was so reverent and worshipful and I just love partaking of the Lord's Supper every week. We met the rector and his wife and liked them a lot. They seem like genuinely caring people.

But I wasn't sure what my wife thought.

So we're talking on the way home and I ask her how she felt about it this week and she said that no one was more surprised than her, but she really, really enjoyed it. She felt more comfortable. We sat a little further back and in a weird way, not getting so much attention made her feel less "watched" and more able to just take it all in. She enjoyed the sermon and the hymns. It was a good all around experience. After making sure she wasn't just saying what I wanted to hear and that it's truly how she felt, we have decided to commit to attending for a least the next month. We want to find out more about their children's program and maybe meet with the rector and find out more about their particular place in the Anglican communion, more details on the doctrinal beliefs and so on. So I'm excited.

Just be in prayer for us as we seek God on where He wants us. And pray that we will be able to dig deeper into all that a liturgical approach to worship has to offer.

I'm not dead

Just ruminating on some things. When I have something coherent to put out there regarding what's going on in my head, I'll be here with bells on. In the meantime, due to a very generous reader and friend, I'm reading The Meaning of Tradition by Yves Congar and The Spirit And Forms of Protestantism by Louis Bouyer.

And I'm exploring a conservative Anglican church here in town. I think I want to visit. Part of me resists because it only plays into the "mutt" reputation I have when it comes to churches. But, I think I'd like to at least try and experience a more liturgical, historically rooted way of worship and I'm just not at a place where a Catholic church would be an honest option or make sense for me.

Lord, give me guidance, grant me wisdom.

20,000 Popes vs. 1

One of my favorite reads in the blogosphere, Michael Spencer (aka The Internet Monk) posted this quote in a post about Catholicism:

"I would rather have 20,000 “little popes” with their Bibles, all believing they can err and be corrected by scripture, rather than one pope who cannot err or be corrected by scripture."

What I can't figure out is why this is better. How does this solve the problem? These 20,000 Protestant popes all believe they hold the correct view of Scripture already. They are mostly seeking to correct the other 19,999, not be corrected. This still leaves us with a conundrum, that thus far I'm unable to figure out, which is: whose interpretation of Scripture are we to follow?

I mean, I'm sure we all agree that Truth is knowable and that God intended for us to know what it was. So how does having 20,000 little popes help things? Perhaps a fellow Protestant could explain why this should be comforting to me.

Lutheran perspective

There is a fascinating interview going on over at the Internet Monk's site right now with Josh Strodtbeck, a Lutheran blogger, on God's Sovereignty...particularly compared to the Calvinist view. He's unpacking all kinds of stuff from election, to assurance of salvation and other issues from a Lutheran perspective. You really need to check this out.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Being wary of legalism and man-made traditions

So, getting back to my background in legalistic Christianity...

All of this stuff from my past makes me highly suspicious of anything that smacks of man-made tradition. I spent so long trying to earn God's favor, trying to live up to standards that humans, not God, imposed on me and the thought of ever getting bogged down in something like that again gives me a sinking, hopeless feeling if I allow myself to go there in my mind. And this is my dilemma as I consider the claims of the Catholic Church.

As I study the teachings of the Catholic Church, I run into this problem time and again because of the Catholic teaching on the authority of Sacred Tradition. There are dozens of things that a person must do or assent to if they are to be considered a truly Catholic Christian that have little to no support in Scripture. Some of these beliefs include:

The Assumption of Mary

The Immaculate Conception

Missing mass or any Holy Day of Obligation being a possible mortal sin

Not fasting an hour before communion making one unable to receive the Eucharist. (see this thread for an example of what I mean.)

Issues surrounding the use of contraception such as a wife using the pill for medical reasons unrelated to pregnancy and this meaning the couple cannot have sex or a spouse with a communicable disease (AIDS, hepatits) and not being able to use condom to allow them to have sex without infecting the other.

In general, it's the Catholic Church's pattern of binding the believer's conscience on matters that Scripture either doesn't talk about or doesn't give enough detail to warrant such definitive rulings. I realize there are orthodox Christian doctrines that Scripture doesn’t go into a ton of detail about such as the Trinity, but there is enough in Scripture to toss aside the Oneness theology fairly easily if you use some basic logic. But the Catholic Church has elevated some pretty obscure beliefs to the level of official dogma that just doesn’t make sense to me. Where is the Assumption of Mary mentioned? And how do you build a case for the Immaculate Conception out of a vague “full of grace” reference? And while I do understand that Scripture teaches us not to “forsake the assembling of (our)selves together”, how does that translate into missing Mass or a Holy Day of Obligation being a mortal sin unless you were too sick or some other serious reason?

It just smacks of the same sort of building of doctrine on oblique Scripture references and man-made taboos and no-nos that I dealt with in the Assemblies of God. It seems to run completely counter to admonitions in the New Testament such as this from the Apostle Paul:

Colossians 2:8, 16-21

8 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ… 16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.

20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. (emphasis mine)

If you bind someone’s conscience regarding Sunday Mass or various non-Sabbath Holy Days for instance, how is that not passing judgment on someone with regard to festivals and Sabbaths? And while fasting an hour before receiving the Eucharist might be a good practice, should we be making it a requirement to the point of telling someone not to receive the Body and Blood of our Lord if they forgot and ate something within that time frame?

If I’m being honest, this sort of thing scares me. I’ve been in the rut of adding to God’s requirements and it only ends with frustration. The commands He does give are hard enough to live up to without piling on a few extras just because I think they are good things. On the one hand, Catholics don’t seem to be all hung up on certain externals like drinking alcohol in the way that so many conservative Evangelicals and fundamentalists seem to be. But then there’s this whole host of other things that you never hear a peep about in Protestant churches that they do get hung up on. It just seems like a journey to Rome just trades one set of man-made legalisms for another. And that worries me as I weigh the merits and claims of the Catholic Church.

Short hiatus

Sorry I haven't gotten up the next installment. I'm working on it but it's not done and we're headed out on vacation for a week. I'll jump on it as soon as possible after I get back.

Sorry to leave you hanging

We had a death in the family this past week and things have been rather nutty. I'll finish my thought started with the last post in the next few days.

A little more background as a lead-in

As I mentioned before, I came to Christ in a Pentecostal/Charismatic church, just shy of my 17th birthday. The process actually began about 2 ½ years earlier when we started attending this church after growing up in a rather staid, lifeless Methodist church. My parents were Christians, but in terms of the church environment, a daily walk with God, really understanding the Bible and things of that nature weren’t emphasized. Truth be known, I don’t remember any kind of invitation to come to Christ. I went through confirmation classes or some sort but that was about it.

So when I encountered this new environment, I was at once intrigued and repelled. Intrigued because these folks spoke about a relationship with Jesus and prayed as if God were right there in the room with them and they were friends. Repelled because of some of the excesses…a lot of emotional and overwrought expressions of worship in church, use of a lot of “Christianese” that seemed bizarre to me at the time and really strict beliefs regarding sin. They seemed to have a lot more restrictions on what proper Christians could or couldn’t do. Some of the women didn’t wear makeup (though this was rare), some wouldn’t play any game that involved playing cards, drinking was a huge no-no as was listening to rock music (particularly “secular rock”), going to movies and the like. It was quite extensive. It wasn’t codified or anything where you could go read it, but it came out in discussions with the more serious believers. And at any moment, you could find out that something you thought was totally innocuous or even good was actually something bad. It changed from person to person so it was hard to nail down.

Then there were the implied or expressed marks of spirituality such as speaking in tongues, whooping, yelling and dancing in the aisles during the praise and worship music, how much you read your Bible each day, how many hours you prayed each day, how many people you “witnessed” to that week, the number of times Jesus was mentioned in the contemporary Christian music you liked, whether or not your were experiencing the “victorious Christian life”, whether you were at church on Sunday morning AND Sunday night, plus Tuesday night visitation, the Wednesday night service, the Friday night Bible Study or attended every night of the yearly “revival week.” Then there were the ones who were into Spiritual Warfare who seemed to see a demon lurking behind every problem, setback, hindrance, rock, bush, tree or corner. If you didn’t agree or see these things also, you weren’t “in tune with the Spirit” or lacked discernment.

Somewhere around age 20 or 21, I hit a wall. I held impossibly high standards and made people feel inferior when they didn’t keep them or didn’t deem certain things as important as I thought they should. But as rough as I was on others, I was just as bad toward myself if not worse. I was exhausted. I loved God and was trying so hard to please Him and live up to what I thought were His standards. But it was taking a toll because nothing I did was good enough. I could have prayed harder, worshiped more freely, sinned less, read my Bible more, been more disciplined and had purer motives. I needed to have more faith, believe in God’s promises better, have more joy, be an overcomer and expect more miracles. I was on a vicious treadmill and I was ready to give up on the Christian life altogether. The song “We All Need” from Bryan Duncan summarized my dilemma perfectly:


I was raised with the lessons and the victory speech,
And I fought for the standards that I could not reach,
And I hold my tongue when the pain is great,
And cover my tears as we celebrate,
While a private war rages with the fear and the doubt,
As I try to run faster to find a way out
I'm convinced if I stumble they'll just cast me aside,
Mock at my weakness and shatter my pride.
'Cause I've watched as we've stoned the more hesitant soul,
So, we all must remember,
It's still God's grace we all need to know.


I was beaten down by the expectations. I don’t mean to say there were never times of great joy, but there was always this underlying heaviness and doubt. I just wasn’t sure I could do it anymore. But mercifully, I had a breakthrough.

True to God’s relational nature and His desire for us to grow and learn with the help of others (rather than this lone ranger thing I was trying even in the midst of the crowd), it was a friend’s gentle challenge to me that saved me. I was arguing with her about something that I (and my denomination) regarded as sinful. After debating it for a while she issued me a challenge to take as long as I needed and to look up every verse I could find on the subject and if I could make my case from Scripture that this thing was indeed sinful, she would agree with me and stop doing it. I thought it would be easy. I poured over every passage. I worked in a Christian bookstore at the time and had access to tons of books and reference materials, multiple Bible translations and other study helps. I researched for weeks. In the end, I had to admit that the case against this thing wasn’t just weak, it was almost non-existent. I couldn’t make my case. I couldn’t even appeal to church history to support it beyond a scant few denominational strains within the last century or so. I was floored.

But beyond that, a light came on. What else had I been told that wasn’t discussed in Scripture? I became ravenous. I was reading the Bible more than at any time since I first became a believer. I was looking up this taboo and that no-no and finding that the vast majority of the things I was fretting about were either greatly exaggerated in their importance or hardly mentioned in Scripture at all. I read a really good book called The Grace Awakening by Charles Swindoll and a whole other picture of God began to emerge for me. God wasn’t standing over me, shaking His head and lecturing me on how disappointed He was. He loved me even in the immature, goofy, bound up mess I was in. He wasn’t standing aloof at the finish line mocking me when I fell and berating me to get up. He was running the race with me, guiding and teaching me. And he wasn’t nearly as concerned about some of these cultural taboos as I was.

Everything changed from that point. I became an absolute stickler for people being able to support a viewpoint from Scripture that took all of the Bible into account and wasn’t just built on man-made traditions or some unique interpretation of one or two verses isolated from the context in which it was written or the rest of the Bible. I had enough to worry about just trying to follow the things that God had revealed in Scripture without adding a whole host of other additions that ultimately repeated the errors of the Pharisees in creating a system of laws to earn God’s favor and prove one’s spiritual prowess (though to be fair, none of the proponents of these things would ever characterize them that way). It was so freeing. And while the pendulum probably swung too far toward Christian liberty in some cases, on the whole I found a renewed joy and enthusiasm for serving God. I was actually sharing my faith more and it came more naturally rather than being a task-oriented sort of thing. I took comfort in the idea that my sanctification wasn’t something that was instantaneous but that “he who began a good work in [me] would be faithful to complete it.” (Phil 1:6) and I’ve lived my life that way ever since. Confidence in my standing with God and His grace toward me while striving to know Him better has become my creed.

It’s this experience that provides the backdrop for my current dilemma. That will come in the next post.

How do you find a true church?

I was reading someone's testimony of their struggle with this question and found he was asking a lot of the same questions I am. Let me post it then I'll continue:

As an active Protestant in my mid-twenties I began to feel that I might have a vocation to become a minister. The trouble was that while I had quite definite convictions about the things that most Christians have traditionally held in common—the sort of thing C.S. Lewis termed "mere Christianity."

I had had some firsthand experience with several denominations (Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist) and was far from certain as to which of them (if any) had an overall advantage over the others. So I began to think, study, search, and pray. Was there a true Church? If so, how was one to decide which?

The more I studied, the more perplexed I became. At one stage my elder sister, a very committed evangelical with somewhat flexible denominational affiliations, chided me with becoming "obsessed" with trying to find a "true Church." "Does it really matter?" she would ask. Well, yes it did. It was all very well for a lay Protestant to relegate the denominational issue to a fairly low priority amongst religious questions: lay people can go to one Protestant Church one week and another the next week and nobody really worries too much. But an ordained minister obviously cannot do that. He must make a very serious commitment to a definite Church community, and under normal circumstances that commitment will be expected to last a lifetime. So clearly that choice had to be made with a deep sense of responsibility; and the time to make it was before, not after, ordination...

...As I groped and prayed my way towards a decision, I came close to despair and agnosticism at times, as I contemplated the mountains of erudition, the vast labyrinth of conflicting interpretations of Christianity (not to mention other faiths) which lined the shelves of religious bookshops and libraries. If all the "experts" on Truth—the great theologians, historians, philosophers—disagreed interminably with each other, then how did God, if He was really there, expect me, an ordinary Joe Blow, to work out what was true?

The more I became enmeshed in specific questions of Biblical interpretation—of who had the right understanding of justification, of the Eucharist, Baptism, grace, Christology, Church government and discipline, and so on—the more I came to feel that this whole-line of approach was a hopeless quest, a blind alley. These were all questions that required a great deal of erudition, learning, competence in Biblical exegesis, patristics, history, metaphysics, ancient languages—in short, scholarly research. But was it really credible (I began to ask myself) that God, if He were to reveal the truth about these disputed questions at all, would make this truth so inaccessible that only a small scholarly elite had even the faintest chance of reaching it? Wasn’t that a kind of gnosticism? Where did it leave the nonscholarly bulk of the human race? It didn’t seem to make sense. If, as they say, war is too important to be left to the generals, then revealed truth seemed too important to be left to the Biblical scholars. It was no use saying that perhaps God simply expected the non-scholars to trust the scholars. How were they to know which scholars to trust, given that the scholars all contradicted each other?

The bolded portion sums up my basic problem. As I survey the landscape, I see all these different takes on the various doctrines and other issues of great importance. And it seems that my own approach thus far is sort of a cafeteria-style Christianity. I'm rather Calvinist in soteriology. I lean toward a Lutheran understanding of the Eucharist (though that's not fully developed...suffice it to say that I definitely see it as more than just a symbolic gesture.) I see baptism as an obedience issue rather than an actual part of the salvation process. I'm suspicious of grand hierarchical authority structures. I appreciate and even long for tradition and elements of liturgy, yet I'm loathe to switch from my more contemporary and relaxed worship style for fear of dead ritual and rote recitations. Bottom line: I pick and choose the various doctrines that seem right to me. I don't do it arbitrarily. I give it a lot of thought and prayer. I go to the Scriptures. I try to examine my motives and as best I can, remove the tendency to favor one doctrine over another simply because it gives me warm fuzzies.

But this can't be the right way to do this. There are millions of others just like me who do the same thing but come to very different conclusions. What seems as plain as the nose on my face to me confoundingly escapes others. And they are similarly baffled that I've come to the conclusions I have. No wonder we have thousands of Protestant denominations running around, each with some slightly different take on the sacraments, salvation, Bible interpretation and so on. And even the ones that adhere to a certain denomination's take on all this fare no better. They line up their learned scholars to put forth the case for their view on these important matters against the learned scholars from another denomination yet no one moves an inch. They still argue over baptism as a means of grace necessary to salvation versus a mere sign and act of obedience that nonetheless is not salvific and dozens of other similar issues. What should we do, take the side with the highest cumulative IQ?

So what to do? How do you handle this? Do you just chalk it up to "we'll never know until we all get to heaven?" Do you find this troubling at all? And how do you know this? Do you think this is how God intended His church to be or do you think we are supposed to actually know the answers to these questions here on earth? Give me your thoughts.

Yes, I'm Schizophrenic

Not really. Not that way anyway. Not the kind that spends half the day thinking one is the King of England and requires medicine.

No, I'm schizophrenic* because on the heels of the linked article at the Internet Monk's blog and subsequent posts supporting the notion that a more traditional, mainline type church is what I'd love to find, I'm here to say that I've given it some thought and have concluded that I don't know what I want.

I deplore simplistic, poorly-written modern praise choruses with their repetitiveness and "Jesus is my boyfriend" mushy sentiments, but I actually like a lot of modern praise songs and I enjoy being able to express my emotions toward God in a church setting.

I love beautiful, poetic, theologically rich hymns like "All Creatures Of Our God And King", but there are a lot of hymns I detest. "Victory In Jesus", "I'll Fly Away" and "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" come to mind. Do we have to sing those?

I love the beauty and formality of a traditional church sanctuary, complete with pews, kneelers, stained glass and altars, but I also like the lyrics to songs projected on the screen so I don't have to keep looking down and if I want to lift my hands in praise to God, I don't have to tuck the hymnal under my arm or set it down.

The idea of traditional liturgy - responsive readings, reciting of the creeds, beautiful spoken prayers from a prayer book, weekly Holy Communion - appeals to the part of me that longs for connection to our Christian history. But I do remember growing up in a church that did those kinds of things and the way people droned through the liturgy like a bunch of zombies. If I had to be subjected to that every week, it would break my heart and bore me to tears.

So what is it I want? What kind of church has all this stuff in just the right proportions? Is there such an animal? And am I being ridiculous?

* And yes, I realize that multiple personality disorder is the proper term. Work with me here. I'm just using the typical vernacular. Don't get your undies in a bunch. :^)

Mainline Churches: We're Having A Moment Here

July 25th, 2007 by Michael Spencer

In Appreciation for Bishop William Willimon.

Mainline churches….we’re having a moment here.

Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Disciples of Christ…do you know what I mean? We’re having a moment, and it’s slipping right by.

What moment?

We’re having a moment when thousands of evangelicals are getting a bellyful of the shallow, traditionless, grown up youth group religion that’s taken over their pastor’s head and is eating up their churches.

It’s a moment when people are asking if they want to hear praise bands when they are 70…or if they will even be allowed in the building when they are 70. It’s a moment when the avalanche of contemporary worship choruses has turned into one long indistinquishable commercial buzz. It’s a moment when K-Love is determining what we sing in church and that’s not a good thing.

It’s a moment when some people are wondering if their children will ever know the hymns they knew or will ever actually hold a Bible in their hand at church again. It’s a moment when a lot of people are pretty certain if they hear the words “new,” “purpose” or “seeker” one more time, they may appear on the evening news for an episode of “church rage.” ...

To read the rest of the excellent post from The Internet Monk, click HERE.

The guy is spot on.

Assurance of salvation

One of the Big Issues that I'm grappling with as I evaluate the Catholic and Reformed views on salvation is the issue of assurance of salvation. The confidence in the mercy of God to handle human weakness and frailty as we grow in Christ during this life here on earth is a big deal and has been for many saints who've gone before from St. Augustine to Martin Luther to John Wesley.

I'm struggling with the Catholic view on one being able to lose their salvation or "state of grace" as they tend to describe it. In a nutshell, there are two kinds of sins: venial and mortal. Protestants are generally unfamiliar with this idea, instead believing that "sin is sin" and while some may have more serious earthly consequences, all sin is equal in terms of eternal ramifications. But Catholics cite 1 John 5: 16, 17 as the Scriptural reason for the distinction they make:

16 If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this. 17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death.

In Catholic translations of the Bible, they actually use the phrase "mortal sin" to describe "sin leading to death." This isn't a big deal as the word "mortal" is used this way all the time (i.e. "mortal wound" for instance means "a wound that results in death.) Furthermore, to truly be a mortal sin, the action committed has to be a grave or serious matter (in other words, murder as opposed to breaking the speed limit or telling someone they're new haircut is nice when you really think it's not), the person committing it has to know that the Church considers that matter to be grave or serious and finally, the action has to be done with full consent. In other words, you didn't do it rashly without thinking, or by accident, or under duress.

So while it isn't easy to commit a mortal sin, Christians certainly do it. It doesn't have to be the blatantly obvious things like murder. There's lusting in one's heart which is adultery according to Jesus. And obviously, unless someone had a gun to their head, they did it of their own volition. Now here's the issue for me: in the Catholic view of things, mortal sins are named such because they actually remove the Christian from a state of grace. In Protestant language, the person in that moment loses their salvation. And should they die before going to confession and receiving absolution for that sin, they will be condemned to hell for all eternity.

Now to be sure, Catholics aren't the only Christian group that believes one can lose salvation once obtained. Almost all Pentecostal denominations, Methodists and a host of other denominations believe that a Christian can choose to reject the faith and turn their back on God, resulting in them losing their salvation and going to hell when they die. But if you ask them how a Christian would lose salvation, you would rarely if ever get an answer that intimated that one could bounce back and forth, in and out of "being saved" with the commission of a single sin except in the most extreme circumstances. Most would describe it more as a process where the believer sins and doesn't repent and over time, his or her heart is hardened by their sinful actions and lack of remorse and repentance to where they essentially leave the faith. On rare occasions, they may be so bold as to directly state "I renounce my faith", but saying the words would not be a prerequisite...their heart is what is the determining factor.

If losing one's salvation is this easy, how does one who believes this way not live in constant fear? What if our earthly fathers did this? There would be several million more teenagers out there living on the streets if they kicked their rebellious teen out the the family and out of the house everytime they willfully disobeyed their parents on matters the father considers serious. But of course, our earthly fathers (which are meant to be a representation to us of our Heavenly Father) don't do that. We may be disciplined and it may be severe. But it would take a consistent and deliberate and unremorseful pattern of rank disobedience and defiance for most parents to even consider "the nuclear option" and kick them out or disown them. And it would probably involve things like drugs or heavy drinking, endangering the family in some way, bringing lovers over to have sex in the house and so on.

So how is it that our Heavenly Father would condemn someone to hell, whose life pattern was one of striving to grow in Christ and live a faithful life, for committing one serious sin then dying before repenting of it? And for Catholics, the list doesn't have to be the biggies like murder, adultery or homosexual sex for instance. It could be deliberately missing Sunday Mass or some other Holy Day of Obligation (like Ash Wednesday) without a good reason such as being too sick to attend. It could be using a condom when having sex with one's wife. It could be lusting after an immodestly dressed woman (or man). Heaven forbid that someone could have otherwise been a faithful Christian but make a poor choice in a moment of weakness then die in a car accident before the conviction of the Holy Spirit set in and they repented or made it to confession.

Now some would say that God doesn't "kick us out," rather, we walk out on our own. I have a hard time believing this is what's happening. Again going back to the example above...when you disobeyed your parents on some serious matter, were you honestly leaving your family and disowning them? I'm not trying to minimize the wrongness of what you were doing, but did your parents, even when they were mad and decided to implement some seriously tough love in the form of discipline, ever take it as a decision to turn your back on the family and remove yourself from it entirely? Or did they take it as an occasion of momentary, episodic rebellion or disobedience that required correction, not abject condemnation?

Coming from more of a Lutheran or Calvinist view of salvation, I do believe in eternal security, but even if I simply held the view of more Arminian Protestants, there is still some assurance that God doesn't kick you to the curb right away. Sin breaks fellowship with God and there are certainly possible consequences to that...missing out on provision or blessings, living with guilt and the accompanying spiritual turmoil, God handing out some kind of direct discipline and chastisement or even a desensitizing to sin that makes it easier to give in the next time and take you further down that path toward rejecting Him altogether. But I wouldn't live in mortal fear that I had immediately lost my salvation. I would trust that God would be convicting me of sin and working to restore full fellowship with me, not that I would cease to be one of His children any longer.

How do Catholics deal with this?

Isn't it ironic...don'tcha think?

This won't be a terribly long entry, but I just wanted to comment on an interesting exchange I had on a message board with someone of a more Reformed background. As I'm working through all this stuff in my head, I'm engaging Catholics and Protestants in some debate over various differences in doctrine between the camps, playing a little Devil's Advocate to see if I can dig deeper than the stock apologetic responses each side tends to give.

So at one point in the discussion I ask how Reformed Guy knows that his interpretation of a particular passage is the correct one. His response was basically that the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses ask the same question and accuses me of saying that we can't know anything that Scripture says since almost every passage in the Bible has more than one interpretation. This is an obvious red herring because I'm not talking about cults that come up with novel interpretations of Scripture or completely new doctrines that can't be found in any writing of the earliest Christians. I'm talking about a passage that, for instance, Catholics take literally and Protestants interpret figuratively or vice versa. How do we know who is right?

Here's the ironic part. He goes on to criticize my appeal to early Christian writings as a typical Roman Catholic apologetic tactic then tosses out this little barb at the end:

"It is clear that the Catholic church says they do not teach or practice idolatry, but it is equally clear that they do in fact teach and practice idolatry. Of course in the post-evangelical mindset, we forget history and adopt a post-modern approach to defining what it means to be a Christian."

So help me out here: when interpreting Scripture we shouldn't appeal to the writings of the earliest Christians, many of whom were contemporaries or direct disciples of the Apostles to help us understand how to interpret difficult passages because "that's what Roman Catholics do", but at the same time our problem in not interpreting Scripture correctly and understading what it means to be a Christian stems from forgetting history? Which is it? Do I look to Christian history as a guide and context for understanding the Bible or not? Or is it that only history before 90 A.D. and after 1517 is legitimate to appeal to as a guide for interpretation?

Phos Hilaron

For those curious about Phos Hilaron, click here

The translation I'm most familiar with is by John Keble. You may be familiar with the song by Chris Tomlin called "Hail Gladdening Light" which uses this translation in the lyrics:

Hail, gladdening Light, of His pure glory poured
Who is th'immortal Father, heavenly, blest,
Holiest of Holies--Jesus Christ our Lord!

Now we are come to the sun's hour of rest;
The lights of evening round us shine;
We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit divine!

Worthiest art thou at all times to be sung
With undefiled tongue,
Son of our God, giver of life, alone:
Therefore in all the world thy glories, Lord, thy own. Amen.

The Journey Begins

First, a little background since none of you know me from Adam. You can decide later if you care.

I'm an evangelical Protestant. I've been a Christian since shortly before my 17th birthday and am coming up on the 20-year anniversary of the day I came to Christ. I grew up in the Methodist church but when my parents divorced around age 14, I started attending an Assemblies of God church. It was here that I first encountered people who seemed to have a real and personal relationship with Christ and enjoyed coming to church on Sundays. Unfortunately, the Methodist church I attended was dead and stale and most of the people seemed to be just punching a time card because going to church is What You're Supposed To Do.

So anyway, it's in this Pentecostal environment that I came to know Christ. After I graduated college and moved to another city, I attended other kinds of churches: a non-denominational charismatic church (which interestingly was Calvinist in its soteriology), a Presbyterian (PCA) church and finally settled upon a non-denominational Evangelical church that was basically Calvinist in soteriology and believed in expository preaching, yet was contemporary and informal in style. I loved the place and still do. But I'm at a crossroads.

I've moved back to my hometown to get closer to family (so my children can see their grandparents more) and take a job that pays better and has better future prospects.We're attending a good church now, but I'm less than satisfied if I'm being honest. I'm longing for something but I'm not sure what. I'm dismayed by the continuing drift and divisions in Protestant churches. A good friend of mine who also attended the AG church I came to Christ in recently converted to Catholicism. And this is someone I deeply respect. He's got a good head on his shoulders. He deeply loves God and wants to follow His commands. He doesn't make rash decisions or jump from fad to fad. In fact, he grew up in the AG denomination and remained there until converting, so he's way less of a religious mutt than I am. Yet he read the writings of the early church fathers extensively and prayed for several months and decided that the Catholic Church was what it claimed to be and joined it.

Well, that got me curious. First of all, I wanted to be able to converse knowledgeably with him. I love discussing theology and wanted to know where he was coming from. But second, I realized that his conversion, coupled with my interactions with a couple of wonderful Catholic friends online was really making me want to know more about my faith from a historical perspective. Even as I've enjoyed things like modern praise music (done well) and more informal worship services, I've quietly lamented the lack of connection to our history as Christians not only on an individual level, but in our corporate expressions of worship as well. Over the last year or so, I've found myself drawn more to old hymns, even if redone with more modern arrangements because of the poetic lyrics and deep theological truths they expressed. I loved it when our church would recite the Apostle's or Nicene Creed or Phos Hilaron (as translated by John Keble) as I felt such a deep connection to generations of Christians centuries before me in reciting the same words they said, but those occasions were all too rare (though more than most contemporary-style churches I've known). I wondered why in all the striving for cultural relevance, we'd seemingly lost the sense of awe and mystery in Holy Communion (did we ever have it?), and why we don't partake of it more often.

I wondered why as Protestants, we more or less trace our Christian history back to the 1500s and Martin Luther, then leap back 15 centuries to the approximate date the Apostle John died. We never talk about it. Did the church cease to exist for 1500 of the last 2000 years? Did pagan influences and corrupt theology and doctrine come barging in immediately after the Apostles died? There are probably different answers to that question that would attribute varying degrees of apostasy and theological error to the Apostles successors, but the point is, we almost act like those 1500 years never existed. Or if they did, nothing between about A.D. 90 and 1517 has, nor should it have, any bearing on our understanding of the Bible and our Christian faith. I don't know how to answer that but it seems preposterous on its face.

So, all of this has brought me to something of a crisis of faith. Not between having faith in God or not having faith in God or debating his existence. It's more of a crisis over what the Christian faith is. Being raised a Protestant and becoming something of a Calvinist in soteriology about 10 years ago, I thought I was done figuring out the big stuff. But the more I read of the writings of the early church...men who risked all they had and often paid with their very lives...the more I found that they believed an awful lot of stuff we Protestants eschewed long ago in our quest to get back to the primacy of Scripture and dispense with unnecessary man-made traditions. My head is spinning and I'm not sure where it's going to go from here. Maybe this blog will help me sort it all out.

I just want the truth, no matter where it leads.