1. The early church Fathers and their beliefs
2. The early church was NOT protestant
3. The passage about Peter/ the rock/ the keys (and Isaiah 22:21-22)
4. The promise to the disciples about their ability to remit sins
5. The history of the church (even though some of it was really bad, God was preserving true doctrine and keeping the church alive.
6. The passage in John 6 about eating Christ's flesh and drinking his blood and in I Corinthians 11:27 "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord" 29 "For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself." (and early church fathers denounce as heretics those who did not believe this meant the real flesh and blood.}The need for the Eucharist for Christians to abide in Him John 6:56
7. The fact that the Bible never teaches faith alone--it teaches faith with the need for repentance, Baptism, works and love etc Only time "faith alone" occurs is in James 3:24 where it says "You see that a man is justified by works, and not by faith alone." So a living faith--a faith lived out. {and yet all of these things are from Grace and this is what the Catholics teach--all from grace]
9. The study of the meaning of the Apostles Creed and The Nicene Creed both of which I have been stating for most of my Christian life---but I never really understood the communion of the saints and the one holy catholic and apostolic church, one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.....
10. The RC church is one that has always been firm on divorce and abortion.--so morality issues
11. The RC church has held to men only as priests, which I feel is Biblical
12. God promised that the Gates of Hell wouldn't prevail against the church, and therefore, I can't see that the church , for almost 1500 years could have been lost.
13. Jesus' prayer for the unity or oneness of the church. The RC church for the most part has remained united, whereas the protestants are always splitting more and more.
14. There are so many different interpretations of scripture and we all say the Holy Spirit is guiding us. Someone has to be wrong and someone has to be right. Is it too much of a stretch to believe God has given the Holy Spirit to guide the one holy catholic church?
15. What is the good of an infallible Bible if we don't have an infallible interpretation.
16. Basically Protestants believe in their own correct interpretations--each one being a mini-Pope.
17, The Bible states that the church of the living God is the pillar and ground (or support) of the truth.(I Timothy 3;15). It is through the church and its traditions and councils that we got the Bible, Sunday worship, the creeds, the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the nature of Christ etc.
18. First and Second century evidence for the mass including a Jewish Christian liturgy for it discovered in some archaeological digs (a Hebrew manuscript of the Eucharistic liturgy found in Syria)
also I wrote this on ctc
This was what made me consider the Catholic faith. I am going to give a long quote from a comment made by Ray Stamper which summarizes what started many of us on this journey towards Catholicism. This quote is found in comment 8 here:http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/01/a-response-to-scott-clark-and-robert-godfrey-on-the-lure-of-rome/
The Catholic approach to the patristic data is capable of accounting for all the doctrines of the fathers, including and especially, those few patristic works to which Protestants sometimes appeal as a means of legitimizing the doctrinal basis for schism – such as Augustinian doctrines on grace, free will, or justification. Doctrines which, upon examination in context (whether according to individual work or the wider Augustinian corpus), turn out to be entirely Catholic – Tridentine-compatible no less! Hence, even those select Augustinian passages in which Protestants think they possess something like a home field advantage, only appear as such to the degree that Protestants carefully avoid surveying the wider explicit, overt, Catholic Augustinian landscape. Inevitably, when an inquiring Protestant reads wider and deeper within the Augustinian corpus, he begins to sense quite clearly that Augustine is an ‘away game’ for Protestantism. That’s what happened to me. But that was only the first shock wave.
The patristic fathers (East and West), including St. Augustine, explicitly affirm gads of Catholic and proto-Catholic doctrines which most Protestant don’t care to touch with a ten foot pole, such as: apostolic/episcopal succession, Petrine authority, a ministerial priesthood, baptismal regeneration, sacramental confession, the Real Presence in the consecrated host (with plenty of explicit examples of how the host itself was worshiped, adored, protected, etc – which betokens transubstantiation), the restriction of the power of Eucharistic consecration to the ministerial priesthood, veneration and prayers asked of deceased saints and martyrs, monasticism, the value of consecrated virginity, the sinlessness and perpetual virginity of the Mother of God, and the list goes on – all in the very centuries in which many of the fundamental creeds which most Protestants embrace (such as Nicaea and Chalcedon) were formulated and ratified!
In other words, the Catholic approach to the Patristic data has a way of accounting for all the data – including that small subset of texts which Protestants apply to themselves (at least those Protestants concerned to show some doctrinal basis for the Reformation in the patristic record). By contrast, the Protestant approach makes very selective reference to a quite small subset of patristic passages (mostly St. Augustine) to shore up support for a few distinctive 16th century Protestant doctrines (which Protestants stipulate as “essential”, make or break, doctrinal matters based on a private reading of Scripture), while often ignoring the elephant in the room; namely, the enormous body of texts adverting to Catholic doctrine and ecclesiology circulating everywhere during the Patristic age. If a Protestant reads deep and wide in the patristic literature, yet remains Protestant (assuming it is a firm, permanent decision, and not a Tiber or Bosporus swim-in-progress), his decision to remain Protestant almost always reduces to one of three causes:
1.) He holds to a theory that the testimony of the fathers is hopelessly corrupt due to widespread doctrinal apostasy and “catholicizing” taking place VERY early (almost immediately) after the apostles. Here he faces two problems. Firstly, dubious dependence upon the argument from silence, whereby he stipulates that the “real” doctrine and structure of the primitive church was basically akin to his own Protestant congregation based on question-begging scriptural interpretation combined with relative post-apostolic documentary silence from say 70ad to 200ad (depending on one’s assessment of the authenticity and dating of the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch); but where the first actual post-apostolic records which do emerge from the earliest centuries are characterized by Catholic, and catholicizing, doctrinal and ecclesial notes. Secondly, if he adheres to some rule of faith derived from an eclectic selection of the doctrinal formulations promulgated within the early baptismal formulas and/or the first few ecumenical councils, he seems to be adverting to something like an ad hoc approach to doctrine, since he embraces some doctrines advanced within early formulas or by “ecumenical” gatherings of bishops (who understood themselves to have doctrine-promulgating authority through apostolic succession via ordination), while rejecting the wide array of Catholic-like doctrines held, taught, and practiced among the very same faithful and bishops responsible for the creeds and formulas he deems orthodox!
2.) He dislikes the Catholic (or Orthodox) Church to such a degree that, despite the ubiquity of Catholic doctrine and ecclesial organization within the patristic period, he unabashedly admits that he is ad hoc with regard to his embrace of certain creedal doctrinal formulations or the ratification of the canon, over against all the Catholic doctrines held and taught during the very same period.
3.) He recognizes the inherent problems and inconsistencies involved in 1 & 2, but for family or career, or some other set of situational reasons, cannot bring himself to follow where the data (and he might admit, the logic) leads.
Accordingly, one common reason that people end up converting to the Catholic Church after reading deeply in the fathers is because adoption of any of the above 3 options strikes them as contrary to personal integrity. I don’t mean to say that all persons who read the fathers deeply, yet remain Protestant, lack integrity. For example, a Reformed theologian, working within the ambit of a Reformed university and faculty, might take the “wide and early corruption” view (option 1) toward the fact of widespread Catholic doctrine and ecclesiology embraced by the fathers, without feeling the force of the two problems I raised in relation to that stance. The widespread embrace of the “early corruption” view – as a matter of course – by his overall tradition and especially by his colleagues and peers, can blind him to the inconsistencies which might seem obvious to another sort of Protestant who has a less entrenched attachment to a cherished doctrine (say sola fide) or ecclesiology (say Presbyterian polity), or even a lessened general animus toward all things Catholic. Still, for those who do leave Protestantism after encountering the fathers, it is very often nothing less than a re-affirmation of Newman’s oft-repeated quip: “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant”.
and: coming to the Catholic faith
also
also I wrote this on ctc
This was what made me consider the Catholic faith. I am going to give a long quote from a comment made by Ray Stamper which summarizes what started many of us on this journey towards Catholicism. This quote is found in comment 8 here:http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/01/a-response-to-scott-clark-and-robert-godfrey-on-the-lure-of-rome/
The Catholic approach to the patristic data is capable of accounting for all the doctrines of the fathers, including and especially, those few patristic works to which Protestants sometimes appeal as a means of legitimizing the doctrinal basis for schism – such as Augustinian doctrines on grace, free will, or justification. Doctrines which, upon examination in context (whether according to individual work or the wider Augustinian corpus), turn out to be entirely Catholic – Tridentine-compatible no less! Hence, even those select Augustinian passages in which Protestants think they possess something like a home field advantage, only appear as such to the degree that Protestants carefully avoid surveying the wider explicit, overt, Catholic Augustinian landscape. Inevitably, when an inquiring Protestant reads wider and deeper within the Augustinian corpus, he begins to sense quite clearly that Augustine is an ‘away game’ for Protestantism. That’s what happened to me. But that was only the first shock wave.
The patristic fathers (East and West), including St. Augustine, explicitly affirm gads of Catholic and proto-Catholic doctrines which most Protestant don’t care to touch with a ten foot pole, such as: apostolic/episcopal succession, Petrine authority, a ministerial priesthood, baptismal regeneration, sacramental confession, the Real Presence in the consecrated host (with plenty of explicit examples of how the host itself was worshiped, adored, protected, etc – which betokens transubstantiation), the restriction of the power of Eucharistic consecration to the ministerial priesthood, veneration and prayers asked of deceased saints and martyrs, monasticism, the value of consecrated virginity, the sinlessness and perpetual virginity of the Mother of God, and the list goes on – all in the very centuries in which many of the fundamental creeds which most Protestants embrace (such as Nicaea and Chalcedon) were formulated and ratified!
In other words, the Catholic approach to the Patristic data has a way of accounting for all the data – including that small subset of texts which Protestants apply to themselves (at least those Protestants concerned to show some doctrinal basis for the Reformation in the patristic record). By contrast, the Protestant approach makes very selective reference to a quite small subset of patristic passages (mostly St. Augustine) to shore up support for a few distinctive 16th century Protestant doctrines (which Protestants stipulate as “essential”, make or break, doctrinal matters based on a private reading of Scripture), while often ignoring the elephant in the room; namely, the enormous body of texts adverting to Catholic doctrine and ecclesiology circulating everywhere during the Patristic age. If a Protestant reads deep and wide in the patristic literature, yet remains Protestant (assuming it is a firm, permanent decision, and not a Tiber or Bosporus swim-in-progress), his decision to remain Protestant almost always reduces to one of three causes:
1.) He holds to a theory that the testimony of the fathers is hopelessly corrupt due to widespread doctrinal apostasy and “catholicizing” taking place VERY early (almost immediately) after the apostles. Here he faces two problems. Firstly, dubious dependence upon the argument from silence, whereby he stipulates that the “real” doctrine and structure of the primitive church was basically akin to his own Protestant congregation based on question-begging scriptural interpretation combined with relative post-apostolic documentary silence from say 70ad to 200ad (depending on one’s assessment of the authenticity and dating of the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch); but where the first actual post-apostolic records which do emerge from the earliest centuries are characterized by Catholic, and catholicizing, doctrinal and ecclesial notes. Secondly, if he adheres to some rule of faith derived from an eclectic selection of the doctrinal formulations promulgated within the early baptismal formulas and/or the first few ecumenical councils, he seems to be adverting to something like an ad hoc approach to doctrine, since he embraces some doctrines advanced within early formulas or by “ecumenical” gatherings of bishops (who understood themselves to have doctrine-promulgating authority through apostolic succession via ordination), while rejecting the wide array of Catholic-like doctrines held, taught, and practiced among the very same faithful and bishops responsible for the creeds and formulas he deems orthodox!
2.) He dislikes the Catholic (or Orthodox) Church to such a degree that, despite the ubiquity of Catholic doctrine and ecclesial organization within the patristic period, he unabashedly admits that he is ad hoc with regard to his embrace of certain creedal doctrinal formulations or the ratification of the canon, over against all the Catholic doctrines held and taught during the very same period.
3.) He recognizes the inherent problems and inconsistencies involved in 1 & 2, but for family or career, or some other set of situational reasons, cannot bring himself to follow where the data (and he might admit, the logic) leads.
Accordingly, one common reason that people end up converting to the Catholic Church after reading deeply in the fathers is because adoption of any of the above 3 options strikes them as contrary to personal integrity. I don’t mean to say that all persons who read the fathers deeply, yet remain Protestant, lack integrity. For example, a Reformed theologian, working within the ambit of a Reformed university and faculty, might take the “wide and early corruption” view (option 1) toward the fact of widespread Catholic doctrine and ecclesiology embraced by the fathers, without feeling the force of the two problems I raised in relation to that stance. The widespread embrace of the “early corruption” view – as a matter of course – by his overall tradition and especially by his colleagues and peers, can blind him to the inconsistencies which might seem obvious to another sort of Protestant who has a less entrenched attachment to a cherished doctrine (say sola fide) or ecclesiology (say Presbyterian polity), or even a lessened general animus toward all things Catholic. Still, for those who do leave Protestantism after encountering the fathers, it is very often nothing less than a re-affirmation of Newman’s oft-repeated quip: “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant”.
and: coming to the Catholic faith
concerning number 3 this comment 272 explains http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/03/jason-stellman-tells-his-conversion-story/#comment-50736I think it is worth your understanding that, in one sense, there cannot be a doctrinal reason for becoming a Catholic. The reason is that the business of being a Catholic means recognising the Church that has the authority to define doctrine. If a person decides on separate grounds (Scripture or whatever) that doctrine X is true and then looks around for a Church that teaches that doctrine – even if he decides that the Catholic Church is that Church – he has not really understand what it means to be a Catholic. He has not found the Church he must agree with; he has found the Church that agrees with him. He is still a Protestant.Those of us who have become Catholics have believed that Jesus gave a truth-telling Teacher in the world – a Teacher, not a Teaching (which is the Scripture-alone approach). The Teaching is, to be sure, there, but we hear it from the Teacher.When I became a Catholic, the statement I made, in church, was “I believe and hold what the Church believes and teaches.” Note the assymetry: I hold; the Church teaches.Clearly you don’t agree that the Catholic Church is such a Teacher – nor, indeed, that there is such an infallible human Teacher in the world. But I just do think it worth your understanding what being a Catholic actually means. It is not based on doctrine. It is based on a Person – and His Body, the (Catholic) Church.http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/09/i-fought-the-church-and-the-church-won/#comment-38358 comment 184 by John Jenson
In Mt. 18, where Jesus founds the Church upon the Rock of Peter (the language could hardly be more clear), Jesus is hearkening back to another moment in Scripture, Is. 22:
“[20]And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will call my servant Eliacim the son of Helcias,
[21] And I will clothe him with thy robe, and will strengthen him with thy girdle, and will give thy power into his hand: and he shall be as a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to the house of Juda. [22] And I will lay the key of the house of David upon his shoulder: and he shall open, and none shall shut: and he shall shut, and none shall open.”
He is investing Eliacim with the authority (exercised in the King’s absence) to act as Regent – a “vicar” of the King. The image of the keys was understood by the Jews as a symbol of complete authority. And the House of David is the OT prefiguring of the Church of the New Covenant. Jesus appoints Peter and his successors as Regents of his Kingdom in his absence, using language that any Jew who knew his Scriptures would recognize.
The foundation for the Catholic claim is historical and eschatological. Jesus founded One Church (“one, holy, catholic and apostolic”) and appointed one man as his Regent: Peter. “Christendom” is the Kingdom of Heaven – the Church – with Christ as Her King. So the Regent of the One Church is the head of “Christendom.” “Christendom” is a meaningless construct borrowed from political language. There is only the Kingdom of Christ: and this is the Good News.
also
two interesting comments on choosing a church
I think I may have mentioned this but I was raised Roman Catholic but I never knew anyone who really served our Lord Jesus Christ, sadly, whether they were not there or I was blind to them. However, as a protestant, I noticed many vibrant testimonies of self-denial for the glory of Christ Jesus, repentance, conversion, perseverance, etc,etc. I was immediately drawn in and I realized that I was a slave to sin and I needed freedom from sin. The protestant church I attended put a huge emphasis on doing works that are in keeping with repentance (Acts 26) so the an entrance into the kingdom of God would be granted to us abundantly (2 Peter 1).The question boils down to whether we should choose a church based on faith or works. You see more people doing good works in the protestant church. It makes me sad to hear that but it is a common situation. Some of it might be perception. It raises the question of whether we are competent to judge churches. In the final analysis we are not but we do see things. They are hard to ignore.But what are we looking for in a church? Suppose, for example, the Mormon church in your neighborhood was full of people who seemed strong in their faith and did many wonderful works of love in the community. Would you become Mormon? I couldn’t because I don’t believe the central teachings are true. That is a grace I want to receive from the church, the grace of sound doctrine. Where can I get it?There are more graces that were not even on my radar as a protestant, the grace of true sacraments, the grace of unity with the greater body of Christ. These do not depend on any works the church might do.But when you talked about your “entrance into the kingdom of God” you based that on works. As a Catholic I would talk about that entrance in terms of sacraments. That is in terms of the grace received.Works need to happen. If they are really lacking then there is a real spiritual problem. The church is going to have real problems. How many New Testament churches had problems? All of them. How many times were Christians told not to be part of that church but to start another one? Never. We are sinners joining other sinners. The question is who has the authority to forgive us in the name of Christ, who has the authority to feed us with the body of Christ, who has the authority to teach us from the mind of Christ?
and here from Lee from comment 17 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/02/the-papacy-and-the-catholic-act-of-faith/
However for me, I experienced a level of peace that I had previously not known, when I began to realize that Christ’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church actually meant the Catholic Church, rather than some nebulous invisible church that I had been struggling to believe existed. As you put it, “the Catholic act of faith is more difficult, because in this act one is believing that until Christ returns He is faithfully protecting and preserving this ecclesial body in orthodoxy…”. But I was incredibly relieved to realize that Christ really had established a visible Church, and I no longer had to play mind games to figure out when and if the Spirit was leading me into truthful interpretation of the Scriptures. In the year since I came to that realization, I have seen my faith grow, my lack of clarity in Scripture begin to diminish, and my love for Jesus (and His mother) intensify; and this in the face of the significant difficulty of walking away from the Protestant life that I had known for 33 years.
and To love Christ is to love the Church
” the love of which I am speaking is supernatural love, not love as the world understands it. This love is the love that comes from the heart of Christ, and is directed toward His Bride, the Church. He laid down His life for her. To love Christ is to love His Church, not remain separate from her on account of how people might treat oneself. To remain separate from His Church is to fall short of this love, because if we love Him we will love the Bride He loves. This is why we cannot “love God and hate our neighbor.” A “spiritual life” without love for Christ is of no worth. He laid down His life for His Bride, and we are called to the same. To hold back, out of concern for our “spiritual life,” is a deficiency in love, a kind of selfishness, like saying that we love Him but refusing to receive baptism or the Eucharist, for which He suffered and died so that we might receive through them the fruit of His passion and death.” Bryan Cross
from comment 32 here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/10/the-holiness-of-the-church/#comment-50087
also comments 137 and 138 from http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/05/apostolic-succession-and-historical-inquiry-some-preliminary-remarks/ :
Whew. Okay, let me back up and try to carefully respond to your response in such a way as to be clear, and to make the tone of my writing match my entirely charitable intent and empathetic feelings!
Hmm. How to do that?
Well, it may help to know that I grew up in Southern Baptist circles. Some in the church identified as “Reformed” Baptists, but I think I can say that by Presbyterian standards they were not out-and-out Calvinists. A lot of folks drew from Calvin but would call themselves “four-and-a-half-pointers” and similar labels…and as you know, the Baptist tradition excludes infant baptism and insists on full-immersion baptism. Within those circles, I never called myself explicitly “Baptist” but “Christian,” following the example of my parents; we served and were fed at a Baptist church but “we will go where God sends us” was the attitude. Later I served (as a musician) in non-denom churches and at a nearby Methodist church (where I still have a regular gig as a musician).
During all that time I was very serious about the Christian faith and desired to practice and believe it in an orthodox fashion. I wanted it to be true that what the apostles had heard from Christ, as applied in a modern setting, was what I believed and lived. If through no fault of my own I didn’t know or properly understand something, that was the Lord’s problem, to educate me in His time and in His way, but I didn’t want to ever turn away from something He wanted me to know, just because it was unpopular or personally difficult for me.
So I would never call a Protestant uneducated, or devoid of the Holy Spirit at work in them, or anything of the sort. Were I to do so, I’d be describing myself in that fashion. I’d be saying I was that way for the first, oh, 35 years of my life, which I know perfectly well is nonsense. And of course I wasn’t the smartest guy around in the Protestant world when I was a Protestant; not by a long shot. About the best I can say is that I had an inclination to think analytically and an affinity for apologetics. But I was learning from people wiser and more experienced than I, all the time: Protestants whom I love and to whom I am deeply grateful today.
Now as for “speaking for God”: No, I make no claim to speak for God here; but I hope to build upon what you and I both agree is God’s truth, and from that common foundation exhibit implications that you perhaps hadn’t previously considered.
For, I do hold that there are truths which are obvious once one has considered them, but which one can go a lifetime without considering. I think a person is not morally obligated to consider the implications of a realization if that realization has not yet occurred to them. But if someone else brings it up in such a way as to call their attention to it winsomely — once it has their attention and in a way that predisposes them to take it seriously — I think at that point, if it’s a matter of faith or morals, then moral responsibility for taking that realization seriously grows in proportion to the degree to which it has commanded their attention and they’ve had time to consider it.
So, during those first 35 years of my life, I don’t believe I was morally responsible for considering questions like, “How can Sola Scriptura be true if it isn’t taught in the Bible?” and “What does it mean, that there so many, and so varied, Bible-based interpretations of Christianity derived by good, Holy-Spirit filled persons with substantial seminary educations, which vary on such vitally important topics?” and “How can all these denominations claim to be ‘an Acts 2 church’ or ‘restoring the gospel to its original simplicity’ if our earliest evidence shows signs of the early Church being very Catholic or at least Eastern Orthodox in character, and if even Peter wincingly admits that ‘there is much in the writings of our brother Paul that is difficult to understand?’”
I went a long time untroubled by these questions, following Christ as best I knew how. But later, when by the grace of God, these and other related questions commanded my attention, I do think God morally obligated me to consider them and to take action if I arrived at conclusions which required I make changes.
So let me hit on the 4 things you said were implicit in my comment:
“1. That Protestants have no one who is as theologically educated as Catholics”
No! I don’t think that! (And even if I thought that I sure as heck wouldn’t use it as a foundational assumption for an apologetic directed at a Protestant!) This isn’t about theological education. A person could go a lifetime of studying the Bible without asking, “If an apostle had just finished ‘planting’ a church and was now leaving for a new missionary journey, knowing he would probably never return, what authority structure did he leave behind to ensure the church he ‘planted’ avoided heterodoxy, and what is the relationship of the New Testament to that authority structure?”
Or, a person could become brilliant at interpreting Scripture through the lenses of a particular tradition, all the while not knowing there was a fundamental error at the bottom of that tradition which was causing some of his interpretations to go askew. He would need to first arrive at the point where he’s willing (or, perhaps, forced by circumstance) to look outside his tradition to find answers…and then he might find that another tradition fit the evidence better. But within his tradition, he might be a brilliant expositor.
“2. That the Holy Spirit is not working in Protestants or their churches”
I could scarcely be a Catholic if I thought that; the Catholic Church affirms that the Holy Spirit IS doing just that, not least for the edification of Catholics.
In the words of Unitatis Redintegratio, “…anything wrought by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of our separated brethren can contribute to our edification.”
(But that does not mean that the Holy Spirit has placed an infallible interpretative gift in any particular Protestant or group of Protestants, or that (one of) the Protestant models of authority is exactly what Jesus had in mind for keeping His flock unified in faith and morals — one Lord, one Faith, one baptism — until He comes again.)
“3. That God wanted to limit His grace to one particular church or one particular model”
I absolutely don’t believe that He limits His grace, generally, to a particular church or a particular model of authority. We are bound by the sacraments, if we know about them; but He is not bound by them.
Now I do hold that there is one very important gift of the Holy Spirit — that of infallibly leading the People of God into all truth, which God has chosen to supply to the baptized through the visible mechanism and offices of the successors of the apostles and the successor of Peter. I hold that the grace which God gives us through that particular channel is the grace of a guaranteed living, query-able source for doctrinal truth on matters of faith and morals, for our catechetical benefit. (For Holy Scripture is inerrant, but it (a.) was never intended to be a Catechism, and (b.) cannot answer you if you say, “I think this passage means XYZ rather than ABC…did I get that right?”)
Can a Christian live a pure and holy life without access to that particular mechanism? Of course. Can the Holy Spirit lead a Christian into doctrinal truth even without access to that particular mechanism? Of course (though He obviously doesn’t guarantee that He will do so at every asking).
But I think Jesus gave us that guaranteed mechanism because He wanted us to have it, for our good, and the good of all His holy Church. Through that mechanism we gain an additional benefit: The ability to be obedient to His actual known truth, if we choose it, rather than to our best guess or the best guess of some other man, who may be wrong. It is not that we can’t get by without that, but I believe Christ in His generosity wanted us to do better than get by. (So, if Catholics are wrong about this, it is because they are giving Jesus too much credit.)
But Vatican II teaches that God is gracious to the Orthodox (who lack the Petrine office but have valid sacraments), to the Protestants (who lack certain sacraments, but retain valid baptism and matrimony and the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives for sanctification, and reverent attention to Scripture), and to non-Trinitarian sects, to Jews, and even to those with no religion or religious traditions bearing no historical connection to the plan of salvation.
So I do not, indeed, cannot hold that Protestants receive no grace from God. (Heck, I surely did, plenty, back when I was Protestant!) God’s generosity is not reserved solely for those in visible communion with the successor of Peter. It is merely that God has opted, in His wisdom, to make available a particularly useful gift, and has opted to do so through the Magisterium.
“4. That God is not big enough to bring people to Himself in a variety of ways”
Of course He is.
It is just that, when He brings people to Himself, He ultimately desires that they be “the People of God” not merely in an invisible spiritual union undetectable to non-believers, but a visible unity that the world can see. Jesus says that this is His intent during His “high-priestly” prayer in John 17: He prays that we (not just the apostles, but we who came after them) would “be one” as He and the Father are one.
Think about that. That’s pretty darned “one.” Does Jesus disagree with the Father about whether Christians should practice infant baptism? About whether the Eucharist is really His body, blood, soul, and divinity? About whether contraceptive use or homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered? About whether valid marriages are permanent on this side of the grave? About how church government should be organized and church discipline should be exercised? It is Jesus’ will that we be one as He and the Father are one.
And, He intends that we “be one” visibly, not merely in some qualified sense in spite of disagreements and divisions, but in a way the world can see: “That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be one in Us, so that the world may believe and be convinced that You have sent Me.” Can the world be convinced by a unity they can’t detect?
Is the world currently even convinced of what Christianity is, considering that Christians appear to have no unity of opinion about it? Our disunity hampers our witness. But the united Church of the first thousand years grew from 120 persons to 3,000, then swept through the Roman Empire, converted it in three or four centuries, outlasted it, and planted the seeds which produced the first Christian civilization of the High Middle Ages.
I think that God deeply desires that same unity to return, for the sake of saving souls, like Jesus said. And thus I believe it is the ecumenical destiny of all Christians to some day be reunited in one faith and one communion, and that the Holy Spirit desires this far more than we do.
…continued…
So, yes, God brings people to Himself in many ways. But He desires that they all be one family. So the “many ways” doesn’t, in its consummation, remain a permanent diversity in all facets, including truth! “In essential things, unity; in non-essential, diversity; in all things, charity.” And stuff like baptism and the eucharist are essential, so while all members of the family are unique, some things are common to the whole household.
Current Protestants agree with this, but say that the commonalities do not include the Magisterium, etc.; but we former Protestants have come to believe that the commonalities do include the “Catholic distinctives.”
Going on, Curt, you say that I make certain assertions that are “just wrong,” including that Protestant ecclesiology has failed in a mere 500 years. You answer this assertion, saying,
“Failed? Why is it that nearly every person on this board first came to Christ through the Protestant church? How many billions have come to Christ via Protestant churches through the years? Are you saying that they did not? or are you saying that God was just nice and let them in anyway?”
It seems to me that your response contains a misunderstanding, for which I am at fault: I did not define what I meant by saying that Protestant ecclesiology has failed. So let me say: A functioning Biblical ecclesiology would (a.) have roots in Scripture, both Old and New Testaments; (b.) would provide doctrinal stability, so that those remaining in the visible Church would retain the same doctrines over the centuries (allowing for development, but not reversal); and (c.) would, in any event, do way, way more than just get people to Christ.
So, yes, Protestant ecclesial communities have been God’s tool for bringing many people to Christ, including me! (As for God being nice and letting them in? Well, of course Catholic and Protestant alike agree that God is being more than nice, but absurdly generous and gracious and merciful, letting any one of us “in,” cradle Catholics included.)
But if all a Church does is bring people to Christ, it fails, because Jesus wanted it to do more than that. He wanted it to be able to render authoritative judgments on His behalf. This includes disputes between Christians, including when one Christian accuses another of sin. That means the authority HAS to include some kind of reliable judgment regarding doctrine, which would not be “reversed” or “abrogated” over time but would be developed into deeper understanding of the truth as time went by. That vision is implied by Matthew 16 and 18 and John 17 and elsewhere.
Now there is not a single Protestant denomination today that wouldn’t dismay the original generation of that same denomination through doctrinal drift alone. (Have you heard what some of the reformers — or for that matter the vast majority of all Christians prior to 1900 — had to say about artificial contraception?) Why this drift?
And within a few decades of Luther and Calvin splitting away, their two or three formulations of the meaning of communion had become, what, a hundred or so different competing beliefs?
You say, “When you say of the Protestant church… imagine how it will look in another 500 years, I think that is exactly what Martin Luther said about the Catholic church 500 years ago.”
Yes. And there are always bad clergy — even Jesus did no better at selecting clergy than to get 11 out of 12! There are always Judas priests.
“And the reformation of the 1500′s would have never gotten off the ground had the Catholic church abused less and loved more in that time.”
I agree wholeheartedly. If Christians aren’t saints — with gobs of outlandish generosity and self-sacrifice and humility pouring out of every pore, exhibiting heroic virtue and shyly keeping quiet the miraculous events in their lives so as not to draw excessive attention — not only do they not convert non-Christians, they make it hard for the baptized around them to be attracted to orthodoxy. How great the Church would be, if it only didn’t have people in it! (And any Church that was perfect would cease to be, as soon as I got there!)
So I agree with all of that.
But I think you misunderstood my “how will Protestantism look in 500 years” concern. I’m not talking about moral corruption. Catholics and Protestants, being human, will both be doing that until the Lord returns.
But I meant confidence that the doctrines of the faith are, indeed, the doctrines of the faith, unchanging through the millennia. I want to be in a Church that has staying power, so that if I look at what Ignatius of Antioch says about the significance of the bishops or what the Eucharist really is, it looks like not only what I think, but what the most prominent saints and doctors were saying about the same topics in each and every century in between me and Ignatius.
In the Protestant world, I cannot think of a single denomination where I could, today, have my kids baptized there, grow up in that church, marry in that church, start their own families in that church, and have me, now, be confident that my grandkids will be taught the same doctrines as me. I’m not talking about one local church going askew because of a bad pastor; I’m talking about the local church going askew and the only way to get away from it is to leave the denomination, because if you appeal to the denominational leadership, they’ll say either that what the local church is doing is right, or that they aren’t sure and are unwilling to say one way or the other.
The most prominent examples of course are in the Anglican world. In a functioning ecclesiology there’s not a single reason on earth why Gene Robinson and, for that matter, Katherine Jefferts Schori aren’t long-since laicized and instructed to not receive communion, for their own safety, for fear of drinking condemnation on themselves. (And as for Shelby Spong!) But the Anglicans can’t do that because organizationally they have no avenue for saying XYZ Is The Truth in an irreformable way. They could say it now, but a hundred years later they could say the opposite.
But I have no fear — none at all — that, ten thousand years from now, there will be female Catholic bishops, let alone gay weddings considered sacramental by the Church.
You say, “My faith is in Christ… not a church.”
Well, mine too. With all the sinners and hypocrites in it, it is a First-Order Miracle that the Catholic Church still exists, let alone has any worthy qualities. A half-dozen lousy Borgia popes couldn’t take down the Church; what human organization could survive that? I don’t put my faith ultimately in Pope Francis, or Benedict XVI before him, or John Paul II before him, let alone any of the other bishops. I’m putting my faith in Jesus Christ that He’ll keep pouring out the Holy Spirit on His Church to lead us into “all truth,” so that the Church, which is the Household of God, will remain the pillar and bulwark of the truth.
You say, “I know people here want to make it complicated…”
Well, no. I mean complexity for complexity’s sake is bad. Simplicity is good: But we want to avoid over-simplifying, on any occasion where the details matter.
Keep in mind that we’re discussing God here: The fundamental source of all reality.
Now, in merely physical terms, fundamental reality tends to look simple enough that you can sum it up in a single sentence…but it tends to be filled with head-whirling mysteries the closer you look at it. A chair is a chair. And it’s made of atoms, and atoms are atoms. And atoms are made of electrons, neutrons, protons: Fine. But neutrons and protons are themselves composites of smaller quanta. And quanta don’t allow you to simultaneously know their position and momentum, and have this weird property called “spin” that isn’t, really; and they behave sometimes like waves and sometimes like particles but they aren’t either, really; and they interact in probabilistic ways such that there’s a very very small but nonzero chance that you will, ten seconds from now, mysteriously vanish from wherever you are and reappear in Alpha Centauri, or turn to gold, or just evaporate into nonexistence.
(Counting to ten.)
You still there?
So, yeah, mere physical reality can be summed up succinctly to a certain degree, and sometimes the additional details don’t matter. But when they do matter, and you explore the details, a bewildering complexity emerges. If this is the case with the mere fundamentals of physical matter, how much more so with the fundamentals of theology and ecclesiology and soteriology?
Yes, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. Absolutely! But when you ask, “Son? How exactly does God have a Son?” then you get the mystery of the Trinity and you have to cope with the Holy Spirit, and I don’t suppose I will ever, in this life, “comfortably have a handle” on those mysteries.
So I’m sorry if I have unnecessarily complicated anything. But when the details of the truth matter, I not only expect some complexity, but am willing to endure it for the sake of accuracy.
When my first child was born, I was still serving in non-denom churches.
When my second was born, though, I was serving at a Methodist church…and they baptize infants. Moreover, my parents had divorced, and my father was opting to remarry. I was raised Baptist, believing in the permanence of marriage, and “believer’s baptism” by immersion. So what, from a practical standpoint was I to think? Was my father’s second marriage going to be mere adultery? Should I baptize my second child at eight days?
With respect to these controversies, both sides had Scripture they liked to cite; they had holy men with seminary degrees who argued their position. I know little Greek; the arguments of both sides seemed plausible.
Ah, but when I turned to the Church Fathers to research baptism, I quickly found that the earliest quarrel among Christians about baptism was about whether this New Testament “circumcision” was required to be on the eighth day, as under the Old Covenant, or could be earlier if the child seemed likely to die. I found that the Didache had a provision if the person being baptized was not old enough to “speak for themselves.” So that settled it: Infant baptism was okay. For the first time in my life I said, “With all respect and affection for those who taught me to love Jesus as a child, on this topic, they had it wrong.”
But while reading the Church Fathers, I found to my dismay that from the beginning they sounded very Catholic. Try as I might, I could locate no Methodists or Baptists among them. Oh, they sounded “Baptist” on every topic where a Baptist and a Catholic would say the same thing. But where Baptists and Catholics disagreed, I could find no Baptists.
To be even more precise (for this is a topic where details matter), I could find early Christians here and there who disagreed with Catholics in the same way a Baptist would, today, on one particular doctrine; but on all the other doctrines, they’d either agree with the Catholics, or hold some view that both modern Baptists and modern Catholics would call heretical. I could find ancient Catholics; I could find no ancient Baptists.
Where were they? What was the Holy Spirit doing for fifteen centuries? Napping?
And what’s all this in Ignatius of Antioch about the “Catholic Church” being “wherever the episkopos is” …and the “episkopos” being surrounded by presbyters, apparently a separate office? And what’s up with this passage where he said, “They [heretics] abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again. Those, therefore, who speak against this gift of God, incur death in the midst of their disputes. But it were better for them to treat it with respect, that they also might rise again…” …what’s up with that? Sounds like he took John 6 very literally. But how could a disciple of St. John the Apostle, who served under Evodius at Antioch, who became bishop when Evodius was martyred, and who was writing this en route to his own martyrdom around 110…how could he get it wrong? How could he, learning Christianity from John, mess up a core interpretation of John’s gospel?
I thought about what St. Paul said in 1 Cor 11. And then I thought, “Christ our Pasch has been sacrificed, come let us celebrate the feast.” I thought about the fact that any Israelite who didn’t eat the Lamb the night before the departure from Egypt would have had a dead firstborn in the morning. I thought about John the Baptist saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”
I said to myself, “Oh my God. It’s not just a symbol.”
And that was when I really started investigating the Catholic faith.
Well. Enough of all this rambling on my part. I think I responded to your questions. Blessings on you, Curt.
Sincerely,
R.C.
from comment 181 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/11/sola-scriptura-redux-matthew-barrett-tradition-and-authority/#comment-162120
The problem can be seen as soon as one reflects carefully on the following question: who counts as “the church”? Any heretic can define ‘the church’ according to his own beliefs and interpretations, and in this way affirm everything in the excerpted paragraph above as applying to his own [heretical] community, or to the set of communities he counts as sufficiently with the bounds of ‘orthodoxy’ as defined according to his false position. So all this locating of the Spirit in “the church” is worthless if“the church” is defined in an ad hoc way, because the position then reduces to ‘the Spirit speaks through the community of persons picked out by their sufficient agreement with my interpretation of Scripture.’ And that is even more nefarious than simply stating “the Spirit speaks ultimately through me” because it hides from itself its egoism, masking it under the semantics of community, as Neal Judisch and I have explained elsewhere.
Only the existence of a divinely authorized magisterium allows both ‘heresy’ and ‘schism from the Church’ to be defined in a non ad hoc way. But Allen and Swain do not acknowledge a divinely authorized magisterial authority, and for this reason their position regarding what is “the church” remains ad hoc. (I’ve pointed out this problem before in my reply to Mark Galli and in the last paragraph of comment #89 in the Brad Gregory thread.)
Moreover, fatal to the Protestant attempt to embrace tradition as in any sense authoritative is theecclesial deism inherent in Protestantism, according to which necessarily, as shown by the very need for Protestantism in the sixteenth century to the present day, tradition cannot be trusted, and must therefore be subject to one’s own interpretation of Scripture to test its authenticity. But when I submit only when I agree, the one to whom I submit is me. Hence, as I’ve shown in the post at the top of this page, when what gets to count as tradition is only that which conforms to one’s own interpretation of Scripture, one is giving only lip-service to the authority of tradition, while hiding from oneself one’s denial of the authority of tradition. In this way Protestant’s justification for its own existence presupposes that tradition is unreliable, and not authoritative.
Further evidence for this can be found in the confessionalists vs. biblicists debate within the Reformed community, a debate I’ve discussed here. The arguments raised by the Reformed biblicists against the confessionalists apply no less to the ‘catholic’ tradition, given a Protestant ecclesiology. Without a magisterium, there is no principled difference between choosing which Protestant confessions to which to ‘submit’ on the basis of one’s interpretation of Scripture, and choosing which catholic traditions count as ‘catholic tradition’ on the basis of one’s interpretation of Scripture. And if ‘catholic’ tradition is supposed to be more authoritative than the Reformed confessions because the former is not “Reformed,” then this only shows that Reformed theology is not ‘catholic.’
A second reason lies behind the inherent incompatibility of Protestantism and catholic tradition. The formation of a schism from the Church, in the name of standing with the tradition in the Church Fathers, is not itself part of the tradition of the Fathers, but is itself contrary to the tradition. For the Fathers it was better to die than to form or enter a schism from the Church (i.e. the living community). The tradition does not provide a justification for or affirmation of choosing to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church rather than submit to her authentic Magisterium; the tradition is exactly the opposite. So a belief in the acceptability of forming or entering a schism from the Church for the sake of presumed faithfulness to the tradition is itself a departure from the tradition, as is the embrace of excommunication from the Catholic Church, and of remaining in such a state of excommunication without appeal for reconciliation.
Protestants attempt to justify this position in two ways. They either claim that Protestantism is the continuation of the Church, and that the [Roman] Catholic Church departed from her through various errors, or they claim that Protestantism formed a branch within the “church catholic,” and was only cut off from a branch (i.e. the Roman Catholic Church), and is thus not in schism from the “church catholic.” The problem with the latter claim is that Protestantism’s ‘branch ecclesiology’ is itself a departure from the tradition. While “schism from” the Church is actually possible according to the tradition, yet because Protestantism’s invisible church ecclesiology makes “schism from” the Church conceptually impossible (see here), it thus does not allow for a non ad hoc distinction between a “branch within” the Church and a “schism from” the Church.
Likewise, the problem with the former claim is that the ecclesial deism inherent in the claim that the Church Catholic had departed from the faith is itself contrary to the tradition, because according to the tradition, the Church is indefectible. Any heretical group that separates from the Catholic Church can claim to be the continuation of the Church, and can claim that the Catholic Church separated from her. But any such claim can be justified only by way of ad hoc definitions of ‘heresy’ and ‘schism,’ definitions that depart from the respective definitions handed down within the tradition. So both attempted Protestant justifications for separating from the Catholic Church and remaining separated from the Catholic Church run afoul of tradition. And thus again, for these reasons, Protestantism and catholic tradition are inherently incompatible.
If I may “pile on” to what Bryan, Mike, and K. Doran have already written, I think the central issue here is clearly one of perspective with respect to the data, and not one of data per se. Since you seem to be sincerely interested in understanding where a Catholic might be “coming from” in assessing the data in a Catholic way, I’ll offer a bit of personal experience that may shed some additional light on the issue from the standpoint of one former Protestant’s personal perspective.
When I was a young Evangelical with very little historical or theological education, I was taught on more than one occasion that the Catholic Church was a type of cult and, moreover, that the odd doctrines of Rome (the papacy, priestly confession, Marian dogmas, veneration of the saints, etc) were all medieval corruptions of Christianity. As I grew older and matured intellectually, I began reading materials by various Reformed teachers and theologians, including the primary works of the magisterial Reformers. From these writers (especially secondary authors), I was forced to revise my earlier (and admittedly anachronistic) picture of Catholicism. I understood now that, in fact, popes and priests, and Marian dogmas, etc., very much predated the middle ages. Rather than medievalcorruptions or mutations of the gospel, these were instead mutations arising around the time that Constantine legalized Christianity within the Roman Empire.
Catholicism was the unhappy result of syncretism between Christianity and various forms of Roman imperialism and paganism. However, several years later, I began reading in the primary patristic sources and discovered a wide range of ante-Nicene patristic testimony supportive of either outright Catholic or what might be called proto-catholic doctrine; including,, of course, the affirmations of apostolic succession and the Roman bishop lists by authors such as those Bryan has already mentioned (Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Turtullian, Africanus, Hippolytus, Eusebius, etc). This discovery was psychologically shocking (perhaps partly because of the prior caricatures or pseudo-history I had been fed previously). Instead of the papacy being a medieval invention, or even a post-Constantinian invention, it turned out that apostolic succession, bishops, and – in particular – a bishop of Rome descending from Peter himself was something attested by fathers as early as the late 100’s, and on into the 200’s with only growing reference, attestation, and development from there on out. At this juncture, and in light of Petrine passages in the NT, I began to take the Catholic position quite seriously because (from my perspective) the direct data/evidence had already shattered two previous accounts of the timing and origin of Catholicism, (or at least quasi-Catholic doctrine), and the time gap between the “purity” of NT Christianity and the Catholic-like patristic references was becoming (again from my perspective) vanishingly small..
The intellectual movement from the caricature of Catholicism as of medieval origin, to the pseudo-history of Catholicism as a post-Constantinian invention, to the direct patristic testimony represented in my mind an ever contracting circle which transitioned from a removal of barriers and hostility toward Rome, to a serious consideration of her claims. Those Roman bishops lists –unless they are made up – fill in the gap between the closing of the NT and the time of Irenaeus, Heggisipius, etc. Given the number of lists and the earliest Fathers’ proximity in time to Peter’s martyrdom and their possible, if not likely, contact with the generation of believers who would have been privy to early events in the church at Rome, (here I think Bryan’s analogy concerning his grandfather is quite vivid and helpful); the notion that these ancient Fathers got it all wrong, whereas modern historical critics have got the correct skinny, just strikes me as preposterous. Moreover, the data and writings we do have between the time of Peter’s martyrdom and St. Irenaeus give us no information which negates the claims of Irenaues and the other Fathers who give Roman bishop lists traced back to St. Peter. If anything, the behavior of St. Clement in taking it upon himself to correct the Corinthians strikes me as a nod in the Catholic direction. So when you write:
I will once again list the evidence so that we can properly weigh the evidence and you can clarify my understanding:1. Jesus founded Peter as the head of the Apostles (Matthew 16:18) [actually Jesus says he will build His Church upon Peter. Being head of the apostles and the foundation of the Church are not necessarily coextensive]
2. Peter visited Rome on multiple occasions
3. Peter was martyred in RomeThis evidence that exists for roughly 150 years after the alleged installation of Peter. [and either silence or else fragments which have no bearing or negative impact on the early patristic witness prevails during this 150 years] After that time period we have the following pieces of evidence:4. Irenaues c. 180 AD presents a bishop list of Peter in Rome [and also other early fathers (200’s), St. Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Turtullian, Africanus, Hippolytus]
5. Later Church tradition argues that Peter was bishop in Rome [all bracket emphasis mine]
In light of all that data/evidence, my perspective honestly leads me to ask – “What’s the problem? What more could one ask for in terms of an evidential basis for the notion that there was always a succession of bishops in Rome, especially given the situation of Christianity within the Roman empire during the first 250 years of Church history?”
This is what I find so perplexing about your approach to the data, as well the approach taken by Reformed theologians like Mathison or Horton. Both of those men, for instance, make strong assertions like (and I paraphrase) “there is absolutely no basis for thinking that there was a succession of bishops from Peter in Rome”. But when one presses for the basis upon which such theologians make such apparently bold and confident assertions, one finds just the sort of evidential situation described above. And then I just scratch my head. It would be one thing if we had some document(s) in the 150 years between Peter’s death and St. Irenaues which explicitly contradicted the notion of a succession of bishops in Rome from Peter or even directly addressed the ecclesial polity of the Church in Rome – but as far as I know, we don’t.
So how small does the gap between the death of Peter and the first patristic witnesses have to be in order for the explicit statements about Roman succession given by the early Fathers to be regarded as of strong evidential value? If we had a Father in 140AD providing a Roman bishop list traced to Peter, would that do it? I seriously doubt it. Certain Reformed theologians would just contract the circle still further. “See (they would say) we have absolutely no evidence of a succession of bishops in Rome between the death of Peter and 140AD. The Roman claim is a historical sham!” And again, what such men would mean by making such an assertion is that there is no *additional* positive evidence for the Roman succession until 140AD; nor would they mean that there is some evidential data which explicitly negates the (now earlier) patristic witness about succession in Rome. They really just mean that *unless* they are provided with some additional (pre 140AD) testimony to a succession of bishops in Rome, they will remain justified in rejecting Catholicism. But what if there were some Father providing a Roman bishop list in 110AD? And so on.
So it just begins to look (as it looked to me before I became Catholic) that this sort of approach is really just a defense mechanism to justify Reformed theologians (and their seminary students) in avoiding Catholicism at all costs. Of course, none of that technically “proves” anything, but shows how different individual mindsets and perspectives can be with respect to the same data.
You are very cordial in dialogue, but I have encountered several Reformed Christians who are somewhat abrasive and say things like “You Catholics just don’t want to deal with the fact that there is no corroborating evidence between the NT and St. Irenaeus for the Catholic position. Your whole ecclesial system is built on the testimony of men roughly 125 years removed from Peter’s death!”; as if that were obviously problematic from an evidential point of view. But hopefully you can see, given the above account, how someone like myself – and given my history – wants to respond with something like: “you [Reformed] just don’t want to deal with the fact that the earliest patristic evidence we have all points to the reality of a succession of Bishops in Rome (a situation favorable to the Catholic position), with zero explicit evidence between Peter’s death and those first patristic witnesses to undermine the early patristic attestations. Your entire ecclesial system is built upon a documentary silence of 125 years, along with an undervaluing of the witness of the earliest Church Fathers for no good reason.”
Obviously, I think the place where the Catholic puts the evidential accent is far more reasonable than the place where the Reformed Christian (or the historical critic generally) wants to place that accent. Given this situation, and given that the data is what it is, I am not sure what options remain – perhaps the philosophical route Mike suggests.
Pax
Chesterton: The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.
see Chesterton's http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2645606/posts Why I am a Catholic.
from father angel below"http://fatherangel.tumblr.com/
This is what Catholicism means to me: it is a spiritual force, a power, from the Father of lights, through Jesus His Son, to mediate to many people the riches and treasures of Atonement, Forgiveness, Responsibility, Accountability, Justice, Love, Peace, Kindness, and Joy for the sake of building up a community of communion, togetherness, mutual concern, and ongoing conversion and repentance for the sake of helping each other be holy, become saints, and make it to heaven.
end
http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/03/jason-stellman-tells-his-conversion-story/
from journey home: http://chnetwork.org/2012/04/the-early-church-fathers-i-never-saw-by-marcus-grodi/ :
another testimony from a Lutheran converting is here http://chnetwork.org/2013/09/more-than-enough-conversion-story-of-kathy-mcdonald/?utm_content=bufferfd771&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Buffer
This one is worth the read and it goes into the early church Fathers , faith alone , the Bible alone etc A few quotes:
I was also confronted by something that has taken me years to grasp, and still I am afraid I cannot explain the Catholic doctrine of justification well. It is not simple or single-stranded, but involves the doctrines of sin (original and actual, mortal and venial), grace (actual and sanctifying), the sacraments (all seven), and runs so deep it can never be fully grasped. What confronted me was a completely new, non-linear way of thinking. I would have to empty myself of everything Lutheran and learn the Catholic Faith on its own, not in comparison or in relation to anything I had known as a Lutheran.
I was beginning to see Catholicism not as a set of doctrines, as I had understood the Lutheran faith, but more like a tapestry where every thread of truth is bound up with all the others: pull out one thread and the whole thing unravels; held together, you have a magnificent picture. I had begun with thinking I just needed to translate my Lutheran understanding into Catholic language, but I was looking for cognates in a language where there were none. This was going to be much more like learning Hebrew than Greek.
Here is another testimony concerning all of this:http://via-verdad-vida.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/the-road-to-rome.html included a quote from St. Augustine
end
“But which is more difficult to believe, and which is a better answer: that the authority of the Church was non-existent for 1500 years (and that the whole Church got it wrong about its authority), or as the early Church believed and universally practiced throughout the whole world wherever Christianity went, that the Apostles handed down their authority to successors as testified to repeatedly by the early Church Fathers?”
| — | bryan cross here at comment 93 |
and from Jason
“To be clear, I absolutely love (or am coming to love) what the CC teaches, although there were many things that I initially submitted to merely because of the Church’s authority. When we follow the pattern of faith seeking understanding, often times things that at first seem totally foreign and weird become the very things we learn to both embrace and treasure. I am sure the same was the case for the apostles who, after the resurrection, had to learn how to read the OT through completely new lenses. That kind of thing takes some getting used to.”
| — | Jason Stellman in a comment around 293 here |
from journey home: http://chnetwork.org/2012/04/the-early-church-fathers-i-never-saw-by-marcus-grodi/ :
Whenever I reflect on my own conversion as well as that of CHNImembers and the guests on The Journey Home program, the idea of “the verses we never saw” always rises to the top of the list of what opened our hearts to the Catholic Church. In other words, some Scripture, that we seemingly never noticed before or never clearly understood, all of a sudden caught our attention, or was pointed out to us, and voi la, we were on the “journey home.”
Also at the very top of that list must be placed the writings of the Early Church Fathers. Certainly an amazing majority of converts mention how reading the Early Church Fathers, either for the first time or for the first time with awareness, convinced them that the early Church was amazingly Catholic and certainly not Protestant!
With this in mind, I’d like to present a small sampling of quotes from these early Christian writers. This list of references that support the early presence of Catholic teaching and practice could be almost endless, but here are a few of those that were specifically influential in my own conversion.
The following quote certainly did not describe any form of Protestantism I knew. The author implies that the Apostles intended for the Church to be led by bishops who would then be succeeded by other bishops, as apposed to individuals who merely “sensed” that God was calling them into ministry or to start their own church or for a random group of believers to bond together and elect their leader. Here we see the early assumption of a continuous Apostolic Succession:
“Our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned, and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry.”—St. Clement of Rome
Letter to the Corinthians, 44:1-2, c. AD 80
There is a lot in the next quote that is certainly not Protestant: abandoning the bishop, his presbytery of priests, and his deacons, meant abandoning the “Catholic Church” (the first recorded use of this title). And what is the significance of a “valid” Eucharist? Does this imply that there were Christians celebrating the Eucharist, or maybe calling it the Lord’s Supper, on their own apart from a bishop’s permission or authority? What difference does this make, if it was only “symbolic”?
“You must follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father, and the presbytery as you would the Apostles. Reverence the deacons as you would the command of God. Let no one do anything of concern to the Church without the bishop. Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop, or by one whom he appoints. Wherever the bishop appears, let the people be there, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”—St. Ignatius of Antioch
Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8:1-2, AD 107
Does the following sound like the trajectory for today’s thousands of independent denominations, each with their own set of beliefs and practices? Or rather is the assumption that there was one Church, with “one soul and one and the same heart,” spread out as far as the one Gospel message (the Tradition) had reached:
“The Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although she is disseminated throughout the whole world, yet guarded it, as if she occupied but one house. She likewise believes these things just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart and harmoniously she proclaims them and teaches them and hands them down, as if she possessed but one mouth. For, while the languages of the world are diverse, nevertheless, the authority of the Tradition is one and the same.”—St. Irenaeus
Against Heresies 1, 10, 2, c. AD 190
Everything in the next two quotes conforms with Catholic doctrine and practice concerning Baptism, the Eucharist, and the acceptance of Church teaching for reception of the sacraments; as a Protestant, I had disavowed nearly all of this, preaching against it, and explaining it otherwise:
“They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, Flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His goodness, raised up again.”—St. Ignatius of Antioch
Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 7:1, AD 107“We call this food Eucharist; and no one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true and who has been washed in the washing which is for the remission of sins and for regeneration, and is thereby living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by Him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus.”—St. Justin Martyr
First Apology 66, A.D. 151
The majority of conservative scholars—Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant—throughout Christian history have accepted that the author of the following letter was the bishop of Rome, probably the fourth, with Saint Peter being the first. The significance of this particular quote, therefore: What is the bishop of Rome, Italy, doing expecting obedience of a church in Corinth, Greece? Though Greece at this time was under Roman control, still there was no reason to expect a leader of a religious sect in Rome to have any clout over a similar group of religious sectarians in Greece, unless that leader was a bishop with authority over them.
“Owing to the sudden and repeated calamities and misfortunes which have befallen us, we must acknowledge that we have been somewhat tardy in turning our attention to the matters in dispute among you, beloved … Accept our counsel, and you will have nothing to regret… If anyone disobey the things which have been said by Him through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in transgression and in no small danger…You will afford us joy and gladness if, being obedient to the things which we have written through the Holy Spirit, you will root out the wicked passion of jealousy.”—St. Clement of Rome
Letter to the Corinthians, 1: 58–59, 63, A.D. 80
Ignatius, who was from the East, wrote seven letters in all to seven churches, but it was only in his letter to the church in Rome, quoted below, that he expressed such exalted praise of the bishop!
“Ignatius… to the church also which holds the presidency in the place of the country of the Romans, worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of blessing, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of sanctification, and, because you hold the presidency in love, named after Christ and named after the Father.”—St. Ignatius of Antioch
Letter to the Romans, 1:1, A.D. 110
Irenaeus, a bishop from the region of France, who learned his faith from Polycarp, who learned his faith from John, demonstrates below the assumption of his day: that all churches must agree with the Church of Rome. How would a Protestant have to re-write this?
“It is possible, then, for every Church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the Apostles which has been made known throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the Apostles, and their successors to our own times… But since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the successions of all the Churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the successions of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient Church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, that Church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the Apostles. For with this Church, because of its superior origin, all Churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world; and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the Apostolic tradition.”—St. Irenaeus
Against Heresies, 3, 3, 1-2, c. AD 190
What most impressed me about the next quote is that, as John Henry Cardinal Newman pointed out in his Essay on the Development of Doctrine, this defense of the primacy of the bishop of Rome, expressed rhetorically not defensively, predates by nearly a hundred years the conciliar definitions of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ!
“The Lord says to Peter: ‘I say to you,’ He says, ‘that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church’…On him He builds the Church, and to him He gives the command to feed the sheep; and although He assigns a like power to all the Apostles, yet He founded a single chair, and He established by His own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. Indeed, the others were that also which Peter was; but a primacy is given to Peter, whereby it is made clear that there is but one Church and one chair. So too, all are shepherds, and the flock is shown to be one, fed by all the Apostles in single-minded accord. If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he desert the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church?”—St. Cyprian of Carthage
The Unity of the Catholic Church, 1st edition, A.D. 251
The following two quotes from very influential Churchmen of the fourth century address the sacrilege of schism from the Church established by Jesus in his Apostles centered around Saint Peter:
“(T)hey have not the succession of Peter, who hold not the chair of Peter, which they rend by wicked schism; and this, too, they do, wickedly denying that sins can be forgiven even in the Church, whereas it was said to Peter: “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shall loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven.” And the vessel of divine election himself said: “If ye have forgiven anything to any one, I forgive also, for what I have forgiven I have done it for your sakes in the person of Christ.”—St. Ambrose of Milan
On Penance, Book One, Ch. VII, v. 33, c. A.D. 390“There is nothing more serious than the sacrilege of schism because there is no just cause for severing the unity of the Church.”—St. Augustine
Treatise On Baptism Against the Donatists, Bk 5, Ch. 1, A.D. 400
Finally, this last quote from the early second century beckons to those outside the Church to come home:
“For as many as are of God and of Jesus Christ are also with the bishop. And as many as shall, in the exercise of repentance, return into the unity of the Church, these, too, shall belong to God, that they may live according to Jesus Christ. Do not err, my brethren. If any man follows him that makes a schism in the Church, he shall not inherit the kingdom of God. If any one walks according to a strange opinion, he agrees not with the passion of Christ.”—St. Ignatius of Antioch
Letter to the Philadelphians, 3.2, ca. A.D. 110
another testimony from a Lutheran converting is here http://chnetwork.org/2013/09/more-than-enough-conversion-story-of-kathy-mcdonald/?utm_content=bufferfd771&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Buffer
This one is worth the read and it goes into the early church Fathers , faith alone , the Bible alone etc A few quotes:
I was also confronted by something that has taken me years to grasp, and still I am afraid I cannot explain the Catholic doctrine of justification well. It is not simple or single-stranded, but involves the doctrines of sin (original and actual, mortal and venial), grace (actual and sanctifying), the sacraments (all seven), and runs so deep it can never be fully grasped. What confronted me was a completely new, non-linear way of thinking. I would have to empty myself of everything Lutheran and learn the Catholic Faith on its own, not in comparison or in relation to anything I had known as a Lutheran.
I was beginning to see Catholicism not as a set of doctrines, as I had understood the Lutheran faith, but more like a tapestry where every thread of truth is bound up with all the others: pull out one thread and the whole thing unravels; held together, you have a magnificent picture. I had begun with thinking I just needed to translate my Lutheran understanding into Catholic language, but I was looking for cognates in a language where there were none. This was going to be much more like learning Hebrew than Greek.
Here is another testimony concerning all of this:http://via-verdad-vida.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/the-road-to-rome.html included a quote from St. Augustine
"[T]here are many other things which most properly can keep me in [the Catholic Church's] bosom. The unanimity of peoples and nations keeps me here. Her authority, inaugurated in miracles, nourished by hope, augmented by love, and confirmed by her age, keeps me here. The succession of priests, from the very see of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after his resurrection, gave the charge of feeding his sheep [John 21:15-17], up to the present episcopate, keeps me here. And last, the very name Catholic, which, not without reason, belongs to this Church alone, in the face of so many heretics, so much so that, although all heretics want to be called 'Catholic,' when a stranger inquires where the Catholic Church meets, none of the heretics would dare to point out his own basilica or house"[20][20] Against the Letter of Mani Called 'The Foundation' 4:5
here is some on Ronald Knox's his converstion story https://archive.org/stream/spiritualaeneid00knoxiala#page/n5/mode/2up
Catholic beliefs http://www.ewtn.com/library/CHRIST/BELIEF.TXT
here is some on Ronald Knox's his converstion story https://archive.org/stream/spiritualaeneid00knoxiala#page/n5/mode/2up
Catholic beliefs http://www.ewtn.com/library/CHRIST/BELIEF.TXT
from comment 665 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/01/the-canon-question/ :
I’ve been following your posts for a while, and I want to comment in response to #661:
In other words, recognition of authority at every step depends on the work of the Holy Spirit. We know that some things are true by ordinary means; but we trust/have faith in these things by the Holy Spirit.
In this last post (and in some before this) you appeal to the Holy Spirit for your faith in Christ, and in recognizing the authentic books of the canon.
What I want to say is, as a Catholic, recognizing the authority of the Church is also a matter of faith. – and like you said, it is a matter of faith in every step – every humble step which is necessary in the process of submitting to our Lord and His Bride.
I recognize the infallibility authority of the Church and submit to Her not only because I think this was believed by the early church (Adrian Fortescue’s little book helped me here), but also by what I believe to be the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit. For I know Jesus prayed “that they may be perfectly One”, and compared with what God showed me in the wilderness of Protestantism, I found this prayer realized, most substantially, in the unity of the faith of the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church is formed by the successors to the apostles, the bishops, who even today still submit for the sake of unity to the successor to Peter. Protestantism, by contrast, lacks the structure which makes unity possible, and we can see this lack of structure in the division after division that has happened. And what’s worse than these divisions is there seems to be no way for Protestants communities to resolve disagreements with each other. Denominational bodies keep splitting and denominations keep getting smaller. Hundreds of different denominational churches in my city, almost all struggling from lack of membership and funds.
We know even the canon of scripture is under attack in Protestantism. Each group creates and uses a translation which best supports their beliefs. Even when using the same translation, groups disagree about what it says, while at the same time proclaiming their interpretation as the one that is obviously true. Some churches don’t even recognize the authority of the canon in the same way – nor do they agree on the books. The gospel of Thomas and other gnostic books are making their way into the Episcopal church and other places.
Compare the confusion of Protestantism with the Catholic Church. Christ has created a structure in the Catholic Church which is directed towards unity. As a fruit of this structure, She has withstood in unity in the face of heresy after heresy, and still She teaches consistently while deepening in Her understanding of God’s revelation.
In addition to this unity of faith, I can go to any Catholic Church in any city, and I will be united and in communion with my brothers and sisters in Christ. I can share the same table with them. Whereas, with many Protestant denominations, when travelling out of town, I would be hard pressed to even find a group with the same beliefs as my home church. Any unprogrammed NCYM Quakers here? Any exclusive psalmody Presbyterians here? Any women-ordaining but not homosexual affirming Baptists in this town? Any conservative Anglicans still in communion with Canterbury?
The authority of the Church is supported by scripture and Tradition. As a matter of essentials, there is no need to go farther than the proposition that the Church is “the pillar and foundation of the Truth”, and Jesus’s intercession that the Church be perfectly one – perfectly one, meaning “one faith, one hope, one baptism”. The meaning of this is crystal clear to a Catholic, but for the non-Catholic it takes faith and the testimony of the Holy Spirit to believe that what the Word says actually applies to the visible institution of the Church, which we see before us and among us in all Her imperfection. But unity of faith, as Protestantism has shown us, is not something achievable by man, but only by the Holy Spirit. How can the Church have authority if divided into different groups which preach different things?
You have brought up Trent and the decision on the canon multiple times in order to put doubt on that decision. But if, like Catholics, you believed in the authority of the visible Church, then it wouldn’t matter to you how many bishops voted in favor of the canon at Trent, or even how firmly their votes were. For the Catholic, simply knowing that the Church came to a decision on the canon at Trent, means by faith we can know that this decision was true – because the Church teaches it, and we because believe Jesus’s promises that He guides us into all Truth (and therefore will not let us go astray), and that the Church remains that foundation of Truth.
As a scholar, you probably know the story of St. Athanasius and what they say, which is that for a while during the Arian crisis it was “Athanasius against the world”. By God’s grace, despite great opposition, this one bishop carried the faith through the crisis so that the Church could finally come to decision at the Council of Nicaea.
At Trent and at other councils, there has at times been great opposition to the what became the decision of the Church. But nonetheless, despite opposition, the Church has over and over again shown Her ability to discern and decide, and then eventually rally behind that decision because of faith that the Holy Spirit truly works in the Church.
If it were about numbers of men, rather than about faith in the Spirit, then we would be doomed. But since it is about faith in the Spirit, the pursuit of unity becomes a matter of humble submission and trust in God’s work.
The writers and commentators at this website helped me by dispelling as unreasonable some of my initial objections to the Church. Eventually I was able to open my heart to the possibility, which is that God really did establish in the Church a structure which could clearly teach and maintain the unity of faith. Before coming to CtoC, I was full of doubts about all aspects of the faith. I listened to opinion after opinion and my faith just died. But coming to believe that Christ truly speaks through His Bride gave me a rock to stand on – a certainty in God’s revelation, and a realizable hope for the healing to the wounds of division which mar the Body of Christ. Believing in the Church and Her authority was the missing pieces I needed that He could rebuild and restore my faith in Him, in His Word, and in the community of the people of God.
Lover of Jehovah and His Word – I don’t know your real name, but I would like to suggest (humbly, if I may) a different approach than your current one, which seems like “let’s see whatever I can throw at them to make them doubt their Catholic faith”. Rather, could you direct your discussion here towards real, substantial unity of faith? Can you work with us for this unity?
You’ve surely spent countless hours replying to commentors here. Let me suggest, in the next day or two, if you are not doing this already, take a portion of the time you have spent here, and kneel and pray with us for the unity of the Church, for healing for the wounds of division which mar the body of Christ. Share with us the sorrow over the wounds to Christ’s Body – pray that we may all come to the humility it takes to seek unity. Then let’s all come back together after prayer and then work together in hope of fulfillment of Christ’s prayer that all Christians be perfectly one.
Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to be with us and give us the grace that every discussion here at CtoC be a step towards Christ’s call for unity.
from comment 57 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2014/03/the-quest-for-the-historical-church-a-protestant-assessment/ :
.............one that reminds me of my undergraduate thesis. The assumption of that thesis was that the wheels came off the cart at the very beginning, setting the “church” on a trajectory culminating in The Reformation. And, is this not what must be necessarily true for the Protestant position to hold? For my purpose then, I looked at other doctrines, grace specifically, and I found a similar movement: away from (my interpretation) of the New Testament toward something I thought was novel, a bad seed or at least incrementally at fault.
This all made sense! I was right! Christianity left the pure gospel, increment by increment, until finally God used a lowly German friar to bring us home to the pure Gospel of Christ. Him, along with others, gradually righted the ship, throwing off Roman accretions. The world was right, and I was right.
Then I paused for a moment and considered another possibility. If I but suspended for a moment my assumption that my interpretation of Scripture was that right one, and laid aside my assumption of incremental digression, another thesis emerged. Instead, I could assume that these early witnesses, these martyrs, were the best interpreters of the deposit of faith. That my novel idea of sola scriptura(almost functionally impossible in the early Church), was wrong, and that Sacred Tradition was something the Holy Spirit was doing in the Church – not myth to be dismissed. This meant that Christ was not a Victor only to have his victory unraveled, but rather a Victor who was only getting started and who promised that we would do greater things upon his ascension. If this thesis were true, the data tells me something else, and requires a different response from me.
I am Catholic.
end quote
As a Catholic, I also begin with “belief in Christ,” but then I try to unpack that by asking what Jesus taught about the transmission of the faith. I see that Christ entrusted that transmission to authorized interpreters, did not limit the deposit of faith to written words, promised his divine assistance in the maintenance and transmission of the faith, instituted a liturgical order, and wrapped the whole thing up with a promise to St. Peter. I see nowhere in the data of history and revelation where Christ tied the transmission of the faith to the text of the New Testament Canon. So, I conclude, any attempt to construe the faith from that text alone – apart from the means Christ did indicate – is to depart from the teaching of Jesus.
from here http://brandonvogt.com/c-s-lewis-catholicism-narnian-code-interview-michael-ward/
Dr. Michael Ward. Described by N.T. Wright as "the foremost living Lewis scholar" (Times Literary Supplement, 2009), Michael is the author of the groundbreaking study of Lewis’ writings, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
...........................................You recently converted to Catholicism after serving as an Anglican priest for many years. What drew you to the Catholic Church?
MICHAEL WARD: It was a long process—at least twenty years in the making. I view the change not as a turning of my back on my Anglican and Evangelical past, but rather as a continuation, a confirmation, even a completion of all that was best in that experience. Obviously, I can't go into any fine detail here about all the causes and reasons, but for me the change involved, among many other things, the following seven items, which I list in no particular order:
First, a concern about Biblical interpretation. I came to realize that it's not enough just to say, "Scripture is my final authority" and quote a text to prove a point, because the devil can quote scripture! One must have an authoritative interpretative community and tradition within which one approaches the Bible. Sacred scripture and sacred tradition are actually co-ordinate sources of authority: you can't have one without the other, and can only find your balance with them both together. I've been helped a good deal on this by a little book by Mark Shea,By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition.
Second, sexual ethics. I had to write an essay on that subject when I was training to be an Anglican priest and, for the first time in my life, I read the relevant papal encyclicals (likeHumanae Vitae). These caused me to sit up and take notice, because they actually made sense to me as did no other tradition of sexual ethical teaching that I was (or am) aware of. I began to see that the contemporary Protestant confusions on sexual ethics were in large part traceable to decisions made in the 1930s, on the seemingly unimportant matter of contraception. But from that apparently small change in doctrine, all the other developments have unfolded, with an iron inevitability. It’s all of a piece. Our current controversies about what constitutes marriage, for example, are part of the same moral earthquake that began rumbling so quietly in the ‘30s but is now rocking almost everyone and everything. Catholic sexual ethics contains many hard teachings, to be sure, but it makes sense, it holds together, and it also comes hand-in-hand with the graces of the sacraments that help us to live by those teachings—especially the sacrament of reconciliation, without which we’d all be permanently adrift!
Third, Peter. The more I looked at the Biblical teaching about Peter, the more I was convinced that he was commissioned into a very special office by Christ when he gave him “the keys” and said "on this rock I will build my Church". But Christ also says to him, "I have prayed for you that your faith fail not." Is it likely that Christ's prayer would not be answered? And if Christ is with the apostles "to the end of the age" (as per the close of Matthew's Gospel), does this not mean that the Petrine office would continue indefinitely, in the successors of Peter, the bishops of Rome, as, indeed, we see beginning to happen even before the death of the last apostle (according to Clement’s Letter to Corinth)? To be sure, many popes have been wicked, and the papacy has gone through tumultuous periods, but the tradition of Christian faith and morals has still been securely handed on, even to the present day. This is surely what one would expect, if the office has been properly constituted. The office-holder may be better or worse depending on the particular person, but the office never loses its constitutionality or authority.
Fourth, Mary. I began to be aware that Mary was a real blind-spot for me, and that my ignorance of her role in salvation history had a seriously detrimental impact upon my understanding of Christ. It was only when I edited a book on heresies (Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why it Matters What Christians Believe) that I was brought face to face with my own tendencies towards a Nestorian view of Mary. (Read chapter 3 of that book to discover what Nestorianism is, if you don’t already know!) Since becoming a Catholic, I have found that Marian devotions have been a tremendously rooting and enriching part of my spiritual life. She is the archetypal disciple, in whose very body God chose to dwell, in the unfathomable mystery of the Incarnation. And the place given to Mary in Catholicism helps explain also, at least in part, why Catholics have kept their head on sexual ethics, despite the modernist ethical earthquake. The femininity of the Church, and of all human beings vis-a-vis God, is constantly brought home to one by Mary’s example. The dignity of womanhood is affirmed, and all of us, men and women together, are reminded of the importance of contemplation and receptivity, of the need to say, with Mary, “Be it unto me according to Thy word”—and to let that affect our very bodies, as she did.
Fifth, that bodily, organic dimension of Christian life leads naturally enough to the Eucharist. "For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed." As I began to attend Catholic services in the year or so before I was received, I had two or three powerful experiences of the holiness of the Blessed Sacrament, even though I was not, of course, taking Communion. But just being in its presence gave me extraordinary sensations. I had somewhat similar experiences in my dealings with one particular priest (the one who eventually received me, Fr. John Saward), through whom I felt I was being connected to saints and angels and the whole invisible Church in a new and paradigm-shiftingly meaningful way.
Sixth, the Church of England and the English Reformation. I had always known, of course, that the birth of the Church of England was deeply inglorious. Henry VIII's reasons for breaking with Rome were not the most honorable, to put it mildly, and his nationalizing of the English Church pitched the realm into an Erastianism that it’s still not fully recovered from. I began to see that the last five hundred years or so of English history have been largely written by the victors in that “tragic farce” (as Lewis calls the Reformation), and that I needed to re-educate myself and consider how things looked from the losing side, to go down into the English equivalent of the Roman catacombs and pay attention to recusant history. In this connection, I was greatly helped by an anthology of Catholic literature which gave that alternative heritage. I've written a brief review of that anthology here.
I think it’s marvelous, by the way, that the bones of the Catholic King Richard III have recently been discovered; they remind me that I needn't stop being a patriotic Englishman in order to become a Catholic. On the contrary, I now see that Henry VIII (son of the man who defeated Richard III) did a terrible thing to England when he broke with Rome. Christian faith had come to these shores from the Church based in Rome and had been strengthened by the mission of St. Augustine of Canterbury under Pope Gregory the Great. And so I was very pleased that when I was finally received (on Michaelmas Day 2012), the ceremony took place in the church of St. Gregory and St. Augustine here in Oxford. It felt like a home-coming.
Seventh, and finally, the practice of going to daily Mass, which I began even before I was reconciled with the Church, has been tremendously helpful for my prayer life. It's so difficult to pray alone—or at any rate, it is for me. But if one assigns at least half an hour each day to actually being in a public assembly where the whole purpose is to pray, then one might as well actually, you know, pray! And of course, the Mass is a prayer in itself, not just a time during which one prays. So that was another reason for my plunging into the Tiber and making the crossing.
There are a number of other things that I could mention, but I mustn't go on any longer. All I would say, in summary, is that becoming a Catholic is the best thing that I’ve ever done or that has ever happened to me—and I say that even though for me it entailed giving up a very pleasant position (as Anglican Chaplain of St. Peter's College, Oxford), which I expect I could have kept for my whole career, and a most delightful room that came with it in the very centre of Oxford. But, as Newman rather similarly had to conclude about the snapdragon outside his window at Trinity College, it may be lovely, but there are other, more important considerations.
from comment 635 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/09/i-fought-the-church-and-the-church-won/
from comment 635 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/09/i-fought-the-church-and-the-church-won/
Another way of knowing it is through reason, inasmuch as one approaches it as a motive of credibility, without presupposing one faith paradigm or another, and thus without presupposing the truth of the Catholic Church. (See, for example, comments #221, #229, #236, and #237 in the “Sola Scriptura vs. the Magisterium” thread.) That’s the way, for example, the evidence from the Church Fathers leads so many people each year to conclude that the early Church was Catholic, and to become Catholic. In doing this research, they are not first presupposing the truth of Catholicism; they are seeing in the Fathers evidence of a Catholic way of thinking, living, and worshipping, and then determining whether it is more reasonable to believe that this is all due to a universal accretion from paganism on account of ecclesial deism, or whether it is better explained as having developed naturally and organically from what the first Christians received from the Apostles. That’s why the Baptist David Cloud refers to the Church Fathers as a “door to Rome,” as I’ve explained here. That’s why St. Campion’s argument from the Church Fathers requires the Protestant to presuppose ecclesial deism. That’s why in the video below Kristine Franklin (whose story can be found here) became Catholic in large part through reading the Church Fathers, as do thousands of others each year.
from comment 638
Well, if you think the Church Fathers were not Catholic, then do you affirm baptismal regeneration, asthey did? Do you believe, as they did, that the bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ, such that we sin if we do not adore the Body and Blood of Christ? Do you with the Fathers (and the Apostles’ Creed and Athanasian Creed) affirm that after His death on the Cross, Christdescended into hell, or do you, with John Calvin and R. Scott Clark, deny that after His death Christ descended into hell? Do you share the Fathers’ view of merit, or do you believe with Calvin that every work of the saints is deserving of condemnation? Do you share the Fathers’ belief that ordination imparts a grace and an authority received in succession from the Apostles, as I showed in comment #38 of the “Apostolic Succession and Historical Inquiry” thread, or do you instead with the Reformed (see comments #25 and #30 in that same thread) deny that ordination imparts a grace and an authority received in succession from the Apostles? Do you share the Fathers’ belief in the episcopacy, the evidence of which can be found here, or do you chalk that up to an accretion/corruption? Do you with the Fathers affirm the possibility of schism from the Church as distinct from heresy, or do you stand with Michael Horton and deny that possibility? Do you affirm what the Church Fathers say about the authority of the Chair of St. Peter in Rome, or do you disagree with them there too? Do you agree with them about deification, or do you stand with Scott Clark in denying deification (includingdenying the deification of Christ’s human nature) and claiming that our union with Christ is “never ontic“? Do you agree with the Fathers about purgatory, or do you stand with the Reformed in denying purgatory? Do you agree with St. Augustine and the Fathers that justification is by the infusion of grace and agape, or do you stand with Calvin and the Reformers in claiming that justification is byextra nos imputation? Do you stand with St. Augustine and St. Thomas on the distinction between mortal and venial sin, or with Calvin in rejecting that distinction? Do you agree with the Fathers and the Creed that Christ is “eternally begotten of the Father” [natum ante ómnia sæcula], or do you deny this line like Reformed teachers Mark Driscoll and Robert Reymond, because they don’t find it in Scripture? Do you with the Fathers affirm the “the communion of saints” in the Apostles’ Creed as including the notion of an exchange of spiritual goods (see here and here)? Do you affirm with the Fathers (see comment #18 in the “Reformed Imputation and the Lord’s Prayer” thread) that we are to pray the Lord’s Prayer daily, including the request that our daily trespasses be forgiven, or do you still hold that we are not to pray the Lord’s prayer because it is incompatible with Reformed theology (see comment #173 in that same thread)? The Church Fathers used the Septuagint and included the Deuterocanonical books in their biblical canon, but you depart from them, because as you stated in your previous comment, you restrict yourself only to “sixty-six” books of the canon.
And so on..............................................................But if you disagree with the Fathers on so much of what for them was central to the faith, then aren’t you really saying that the Fathers themselves were massively deceived? And if that is what you’re saying, then you have indeed fully embraced “ecclesial deism,” and all its implications.............
Also this quote:” No amount of argument can overcome the evidence for the fact that apart from Rome there only exist national churches such as the Armenian or the Greek church, state churches such as the Russian or Anglican, or else sects founded by individuals such as the Lutherans, the Calvinists, the Irvingites, and so forth.
The Roman Catholic Church is the only church that is neither a national church, nor a state church, nor a sect founded by a man; it is the only church in the world which maintains and asserts the principle of universal social unity against individual egoism and national particularism; it is the only church which maintains and asserts the freedom of the spiritual power against the absolutism of the state; in a word, it is the only church against which the gates of Hades have not prevailed.”
Vladimir Soloviev, “The Russian Church and the Papacy” (1889)
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