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
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