First Things First

I'm sure with that title you are expecting some more background narrative and such before I actually starting dealing with topics.  You are wrong.  I'm dealing straight up with my first topic.  Today, Athena and I were asking ourselves how serious we are about this Catholic thing.  Do we really want to be Catholic?  If we were to decide today to forget it and just go back to a Protestant church...which church should we go to?  I'm pretty sure I could talk myself into just about anything right now - Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic.  Lots of honest people talk themselves into one of these or others every day.  Do I want to continue down this path of research into the Catholic Church and talk myself into it?  By what measure can I possibly make a decision?

In my Beginning post I said that my intent was to stand by the 66 Book Protestant Bible (at a minimum).  So, to that end:

To whence should the follower of Jesus look for final, ultimate, truth? 

Easy...every red-blooded Protestant is taught from the earliest of ages that Scripture is our final guide.  Scripture is the plumb line for determining all truth.  As the Bereans searched the pages of Scripture to be sure Paul's message lined up with the truth, so we are to do.  So, to Scripture:

 1 Timothy 3:14-15 - I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. (emphasis added)

2 Thessalonians 2:15 - So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter. (emphasis added)

2 Timothy 2:2 - And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. (emphasis added)

And that is that.  Feel free to keep reading, but that is the answer according to the plain reading of Scripture:  the Church of the Living God is the bulwark (foundation or ground) of truth.  The people within the Church of God are to stand firm in the traditions taught by Apostles whether by word of mouth or written letter.   Apostolic teaching has been handed down to reliable people for teaching.  So, really...I'm sure I'll type some more stuff, but if you are short on time you can stop reading.

Here's how I would expound on that from my own thoughts, not from Scripture.  The New Testament Church operated for centuries without a 66 Book Bible.  Sure, letters, gospels, Old Testament books, and many other writings existed within the Church.  But there was no official canon as we have today.  And how blessed are we that we do have the canon - delivered to us by official stamp of the Church.  The Church, its practices, traditions and teachings, was in full operating practice many centuries before the canon was established.  The Bible we have today is the direct result of an operating Church.  The Church came first.  The Church, utilizing Apostolic authority, traditions and wisdom, determined which writings were canon and which were not.  Luther removed some books (7 of them)..not my beef here.  To my mind, the following is circular reasoning:  The Church traditions, practices and authority that delivered to us an authoritative Bible has no authority.

The letters to the Churches and the book of Acts speak to a fully formed, operating church. They provide instruction, correction, encouragement, traditions, practices, etc.  I can't think of a single reference in Scripture that goes something like "Wait for the canon; you are only half formed and are lacking the manual."  So, reliable teaching, Apostolic authority, tradition - these were important for centuries to all followers of Jesus.  And they still are to Catholics.

And that leads me to another thought on this subject.  Catholics don't necessarily believe that each believer holds the keys to kingdom (Matt 6:19).  They believe that interpretation happens as a function of the Church (2 Peter 1:20).  Not so with Protestants.  Protestants believe the clear reading of Scripture. (Please prepare for sarcasm.  My point is not to make light of anything, but to show that it's same-same).   Just me and the Bible.  No community of interpreters is needed, such as systematic, covenant, dispensational, etc.  Among like minded believers this works terrifically; this passage in the Bible is clearly symbolic, this is literal, this is future, this is past - clear reading of Scripture that we all agree on.  Among another community, this passage is definitely not symbolic, in fact no passages are symbolic, this is present, and that could be future or past, and in this camp we all agree with each other.   But that's kinda the problem - within a framework of interpretation, everything makes sense.  But when we try to talk to someone from a different interpretive community...well, that makes sense too.

Some students of the Bible may dispute the preceding point and insist that they do not operate within a framework of interpretation invented by man - they just read the Bible.  They read the Bible as if they were on a deserted island with no outside influence.  Well...I think that position can only be held for one of a couple reasons - that person is in denial, or that person has never seriously engaged with a student of the Bible that thinks differently than them.  Practically speaking, I suppose it is technically possible to live a deserted island student of the Bible experience, but then you wouldn't actually be living as the Bible says to live:

Hebrews 10:24-25 - And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. 


So, whether we like it or not, all Bible students end up in a community of interpreters.  The Catholic Church operates within an interpretive community or framework.  Please name me a community of believers that does not.  What to do.  If only there were a direct link to the original teachings, traditions and practices of the Apostles who walked around with Jesus. 

And even more, lest ye think that you can gather with believers but interpret your Bible back on the island.  Not only are we to gather with believers and be nice to them, we are supposed to agree with them!

1 Corinthians 1:10 - I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.

And even more.  With words like "yourselves" and "together", this group is sacred.

 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 - Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?  If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.

So, to condense all that.  The Church is the foundation of truth.  It is a sacred, universal community of perfectly like minded believers which safeguards and passes on, person to person, the traditions, teachings, writings, and authority of the Apostles.  To be sure, there are many other things that can be said about the Church and about Scripture, but that condenses my initial thoughts on Sola Scriptura.

Final thought.  Certainly, this is conjecture, but I think it's an important thought.  If a clear written account of the Christian faith was of utmost importance for a pillar of understanding the New Covenant, wouldn't Jesus have instructed the disciples to write everything down?  He did give them plenty of instructions.  He did send them out.  He did give them authority.  But Jesus did not write anything down (except in dirt) that we are told of, and he didn't instruct anyone else to write anything.  Writing things down is certainly not unprecedented in the Bible - God himself wrote the Law on tablets, and then He told Moses to write them down.  Jesus did set up a system for passing on knowledge of the New Covenant, but it wasn't in writing (and I plan to look at those instructions in more detail later). 

Thanks for listening.  I can't promise, but I'm thinking I'll talk about Sola Fide next.  Oh man...I almost forgot the most important Sola Scriptura passage to discuss.

2 Timothy 3:16-17 - All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.


2 thumbs up.  I will only point out that "useful" is not the strongest word in the dictionary.  But at this point, even though I've only highlighted that one word, I feel the need to promote the importance of the Bible, which I sincerely do uphold.

On topic for this post:  do you belong to an interpretive community, traditions, sola scriptura, authority.

Love,
Paul

Is This an Entrance or Exit Ramp?

This is a background post and catches me up to current life.

In college I worked for a guy named Tom.  Great guy.  Introduced me to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.  Talked to me about hundreds of topics both faith and beer related.  Irish.  Oklahoman.  Funny.  Paid for lunch, usually.  And Catholic.  He started the diaconate program in the Church while I worked for him.  But we never really talked about Catholic stuff so much; just Christian stuff.  I credit him with getting my head straight on some things about Jesus and the Bible.  But it was really only a passing concern that he was Catholic.  That was my first close relationship with a Catholic, and that was 18 years ago.

More recently, a couple years ago, some friends of ours left the Protestant church and became Catholic.  Hmm.  Interesting, but not particularly troubling - people go off the rails all the time.  But the idea was kinda back there in my mind - how could someone switch teams like that when it seems obvious that all that Catholic stuff is wrong.  Athena talks to her much more than I talk to them;  so, I'm not sure, but I never got the impression that they were trying to win us over to Catholicism.  If anything, I think Athena may have asked her some questions.  And in turn Athena and I would occasionally discuss a Catholic idea.  Easy...yeah, they are definitely wrong about that.  For my part, that pretty much covers my exposure to Catholicism.

Somewhere in that timeline, a couple years ago, Athena read Rome Sweet Home by Scott and Kimberly Hahn which probably added fuel to the occasional talks about Catholicism that we had.  But I really wasn't interested.  We were having a hard enough time with church without adding in all this crazy Catholic talk.  Our experience with church life, and especially kids and church life, has been difficult.  Has that influenced us to check out Catholicism?  Probably.  Do people have a difficult time with the Catholic church?  Yes, I'm sure they do and many of those problems have been well documented.  So, you deal with difficult stuff and difficult people in both Protestant and Catholic communities - I have no illusions about that.

In a conversation in December 2017 Athena and I decided we needed to be more committed to church - the question was which church.  Which Protestant church actually.  We just hadn't gotten plugged in anywhere really well and we both knew we needed to.  For some reason I cannot fathom right now, I agreed to read Rome Sweet Home before we decided.  We also went to mass with our Catholic friends and told our 5 kids they could go or not, it was up to them.  4 out of 5 went.  Our 17 year old was firmly against it.  At that service the sky was opened, I had a vision, and I could see everything in the universe in perfect alignment.  Sorry, that's a bad joke.  It was just a regular mass service of which I did not understand a whole lot.

When we got back home we had a bit of a conversation with our 17 year old who hadn't gone.  The gist of the conversation was that none of it really matters anyway - you can't get 2 protestants to agree with each other on the Bible, and they both disagree with Catholics.  Who can possibly know what's right?  Later, as I mulled that over it started to bother me more and more how divided the Protestant church is.  I don't think anyone really has an accurate count of how many official denominations there are.  Even if there is such a count, every non-denominational church is particular in its own way.  Of course, if you focus on just the essentials of the faith, the number of divisions gets much smaller.  Of course, first you have to agree on what the essentials are.  For some Protestant denominations it's difficult to say whether they are really "in" or not - I mean, they believe in Jesus...but they also believe xyz, so whether you talk about denominations or essentials you really end up at the same problem - lots of super committed division.  Some Protestant churches would even include some Catholics inside the essentials of the faith.  Of course, some would not, which creates a bit more division.  Here, let me draw you a venn diagram to clarify things:

...You see the problem.  It's pretty much endless divisions.  For detail oriented people, that diagram actually has nothing to do with the church - can you imagine though?  That would be ludicrous to attempt.  Anyhow, that much division is a difficult problem for a group that's had 500 years to work things out.  The real worry is that it's getting worse, not better.  I have no real data to back that up, but I've not seen a whole lot of denominations merging.  A very important scientific concept is entropy - energy and order decline over time.  However, if God is involved that certainly doesn't have to happen.  I wonder why God would not be involved with his people in such a way that disunity did not increase over time?

I also finished Rome Sweet Home.  Good book.  Easy read.  Not so much a point by point defense of Catholic doctrine, but enough to interest me to actually look into Catholic doctrine.  A few points I was left with.  1) Here's a guy and his wife that were uber reformed, educated theology majors who after a relatively minor shift in thought found themselves in the Catholic camp.  2) Many of their uber educated and reformed friends, after hearing the points which brought them to Catholicism, either became Catholic themselves or never talked to them again.  3) Maybe, just maybe, it is possible that there is Biblical support for Catholicism.  I don't think the authors tried to make this point, but I'm left with the impression that if you do 2 things you might just end up being Catholic - take the Word of God seriously, and follow reformed theology to it's end.

There was one other idea that has stuck in my head from that book.  Can you imagine the anarchy that would exist if the founding fathers of the U.S. had said "There's your Constitution.  There is no President, no Congress, no Court.  It is up to each citizen to interpret and apply it's ideas as they believe most closely reflects the words written herein."?

Well, those are the questions I'm starting with and the reason I'm pursuing answers in Catholicism.  First, where is unity in the church?  And second, shouldn't we expect there to be actual formal spiritual authority and offices in the church?  In future posts I hope to start dealing with these and other topics instead of just providing narrative.  Could be awhile though...I'm not in a big hurry. 

Finally, since we are talking about venn diagrams, this one is apropos if you just switch the title to "who I can go to church with".

And with that, on topic for this post:  venn diagrams, unity in the church, disunity in the church, influences.

Love,
Paul

The Beginning

Hello family, friends, others.  You are either aware that Athena and I have started a journey towards Rome, or you don't know us and have stumbled upon this anyway.  The point of this blog is for me to document the journey. I think it may help me. I’m also not opposed to thoughtful dialogue. 

Meaningful, constructive, thoughtful, honest, transparent, encouraging, smart, bold, in love, "real".  These describe good dialogue, which I am interested in.  You don't have to agree with someone for these things to exist in a dialogue.

Frustrating, hurtful, not heard, rabbit trails, personal attacks, off topic, extremely looong monologues,  strawman arguments, dismissive, condescending.  These describe bad dialogue, which I am not interested in.  You can agree with someone and still have bad dialogue.

  A few reasons I think this blog is necessary:

1)  Everyone wants to be heard.  You may not really care to hear about this journey from us.  If we write the journey here then you have the option of listening or not - it's up to you.  If we were to try to talk to you about it in person, you may feel trapped in a conversation.  Conversely, you may have some things that you want to say to Athena or I about this journey;  things you feel we should consider, things you think we have wrong, feelings you have.  Athena and I want you to feel heard and we want to consider points that you consider important.

2)  Conversations regarding faith are difficult.  Sometimes the time, the place, the people present, or the time available do not facilitate a meaningful conversation.  In my experience conversation about difficult topics in the faith veer into things like:  somewhere it is written, I don't know where, and I am paraphrasing, and I am taking it out of context, and my comment is not really related to what you just said, and I am angry, and I need to get home, and my Buddhist brother-in-law here is bored with this conversation so he is about to introduce some eastern philosophy into the mix.  My hope is that a blog format will allow both us and you to fully articulate thoughts and ideas, and to be fully heard.

3)  Time.  Thoughtful conversations take a good deal of time.  If you introduce an idea to me that I am not familiar with, I probably need a little time to soak it in and mull it over.  The blog format allows us to introduce and respond to multiple lines of thought independent from each other, and perhaps after a good deal of time has passed during which we have thought through something.

4)  Rules.  We can have rules here.  And they are listed on the right side of the page. 

In all honesty, I'm not 100% sure where all this will go.  I don't expect to be able to put a nice bow on this journal at the end and say "there it is...a complete guide to the truth about everything."   I'll probably put forward some wrong ideas and possibly come to wrong conclusions.  That's ok, I've been wrong before.  But I'm honest enough to say that it's possible that I'm wrong about some Protestant things right now.  I don't think it's necessary for a person to thoroughly research every religion to determine if it's right or wrong.   For us, circumstances were such and certain ideas expressed that have made it necessary for us to explore Roman Catholicism (to be described more fully in future posts).

I don't know how often Athena or I will post.  And I don't know how long this will take - perhaps we'll abandon the road to Rome tomorrow.  Athena or I will try to document the bridges we cross on the road, and provide an opportunity for you to give your thoughts in the comments.  I also don’t know if there will be any real dialogue on these posts. After some consideration I’ve decided that I probably won’t actively make any friends or family aware of this blog. So, mostly I expect I’ll be talking to myself. 

Finally, for those that don't know...I'm not that smart.  This blog is intended to be academic on a layman level.  I don't know Hebrew, Greek or Latin.  I am familiar with the Bible but still have things to learn.  If you have a doctorate in theology and would like to point out where I'm wrong...that's great, but I may or may not understand what you say.  I am beginning this path with a theological mix most easily nutshelled as Calvinist Baptist.  My intent is to take the Bible seriously, by which I mean that the 66 Book Protestant Bible is authoritative - I would not want to espouse a belief that goes against the Bible, and I would not dismiss any part of the Bible as inauthentic or corrupted.  (And yes, I am aware that there are different canons - but at a minimum I stand by the 66 Book Protestant Bible.)

On topic for this post:  Recipe for good dialogue.  Am I wrong sometimes.  When is it necessary to explore an idea further.

Love,
Paul