The Man on the Other Side of the Tiber

This may not be the last thing I have to say about religious identity, in particular because ripples from a shift in religious identity will likely take awhile before they settle down completely, if they ever do. Perhaps given the current sad rift between Christians, this is inevitable. I would be curious if anyone else who has crossed the great river has had similar experiences.

They have a saying in the Catholic Church--"Crossing the Tiber." Now the Tiber is a river, and as I understand, the crossing of the Tiber means going Catholic, what with the Tiber being geographically associated with Rome.

Maybe this, or maybe this isn't, a common experience in conversion. But in my experience, one thing that happens, or at least can happen, is that part of you will remain on the other side for the river, with the same sensibilities and preferences you had before. Now the Tiber can be a dangerous stream, and I daresay it's not necessarily much easier to get the rest of you over than it is to get your deciding portion over in the first place. There was a time in my life after my conversion when that man shouted louder, when I felt the urge to turn back more strongly. When that time ended my reaffirmation of my initial choice to swim the Tiber, but I’m not sure I did so in the healthiest manner, perhaps to mask my own insecurities about my chosen path.

The Scripture does tell you to put to death what belongs to the sinful nature, and it also tells you to die to yourself. But one thing the Scripture does not say is to kill yourself. I think somewhere along the line I tried to shoot the man on the other side of the Tiber. I'm fairly confident that I missed, and hit some other people instead. I'm also not entirely confident that that I was always aiming for him to begin with, and I'm not very proud of that possibility.

There are, certainly, plenty of things one can be angered about legitimately, and I don't mean to decry my embrace of Catholicism in the name of charity, real or superficial. But to anyone who suffered unjust displays of anger from me as a side effect of religious identity--I am sorry. Please forgive me.

Stupidly Contemplative Questions

Disclaimer: Chances are that if you're reading this, you're someone who has asked, or been asked, one of these questions. Chances are I have asked them of someone, and I definitely don't disrespect anyone for asking these questions. They can be helpful, but they're also stupidly contemplative questions. Explanation to follow!

It seems like sometimes we Christians like asking holy- sounding questions more than we like doing useful things. I don't mean questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, though certainly the outer reaches of Scholasticism are not always the most immediately relevant. But at least those people will speculate on, and get somewhere, and the obscure scholastic questions don't have the side effect of inducing needless guilt. I mean questions that can easily freeze us with how holy and scary and challenging they sound, like:

(1) "What are we doing to prove that we love God most?"
(2) "How can we share our faith?"
(3) "Do I know that I love God?"
(4) "How do I grow in God?"
(5) "How do I clean my room?"

Okay, that last one is a bit not like the others. It's a couple of degrees more removed from Christian living. But the questions share some things in common. At the outset, all such questions seem like insurmountable obstacles in themselves. With the possible exception of the third, they all bring to mind a few possible answers, none of which quite seems to be adequate right off the bat. And they all have potential to lead to a question-freeze, where you stand there stunned by how unholy or lazy in the Lord's work you are instead of actually doing something about it (or, if you prefer to put the emphasis on Grace, letting God work through you to improve your unholy lot.)

(1) This sounds like a reasonable question until you realize that the only answer that will satisfy a scrupulous person (remember that "prove" is the verb here) is to intentionally enlist in an order of monks or nuns whose only vocation is to seek bloody martyrdom under Shariah law while converting Muslims in one of the stricter Muslim countries. People with lax, or looser, consciences wonder what it is that they should have to prove to anyone else. And the well-ordered- conscience people are probably too busy proving it, insofar as we humans can, to answer the question or give it the time of day.

(2) This one actually does bear some real reflection, and I can't really do it justice here. So here, in its stead, is the injustice I will do the question: I think when people say this they usually mean verbally. I don't care what they mean, as long as they mean visually, and here I imply that the world sees with all five senses. I think what sharing our faith means is to communicate our belief in Christ as Redeemer of all through some sure and unambiguous sign which those regularly around us will "see." Even that's a rather vague sketch. While I like this question better than the others, I think its major freezing point is that it can be, like everything else, much more of a guilt trip than a question.

(3) To be honest, in my more cynical-theological moments, I tend to think number three is a question asked more for the fun of seeming profound and galvanizing people into a moment of crisis where they feel compelled to reflect, than it is to ask to actually help anything. And then we get to do the same thing I do when my room is really messy and I don't know how to start cleaning it: Spend a couple of minutes frozen in that question, then put off the real work for another week.

(4) This is another one of those famous challenge questions. I don't know about you, but when someone asks this one (including me, right now, to myself) I get images of a Rosary a Day and at least two Holy Hours. Mass at least once a week. And Adoration, which I admittedly dread trying to cultivate the habit of, because I know I'm going to have to work on my horrible attention span. But even the parts of this one I should like, being more theologically abstract, like reading the lives and works of the Saints...I don't really do. It's probably the attention span again. In terms of real-world problems this one is probably the closest, for me, to cleaning one's room. So many places I could start, but will I really feel good until it's all in place? 

(5) This one usually is more of an excuse than an actual question, but cleaning my room is a pretty good analogy for these questions, except that the spiritual room, for almost all of us, never gets acceptably clean until we're with God. In the end, though, these questions aren't that productive in themselves. I guess my big thing, my big beef with them, is that they seem to do more emotional harm and cause more mental anguish, at least for me, than they're really worth. And they provide a good out. Standing frozen by the questions for a couple of minutes is a great excuse not to act on them. With that in mind, I propose a remedy. I'm going to answer the questions. Each answer requires a bit of expansion, but said expansions will be simple. Format: "Question." Answer. Expansion.

(1) "What are we doing to prove that we love God most?" We're confessing "Jesus is Lord." Physical martyrdom is unlikely to happen to you. Idolatry is not. A simple question, for a given thing X. If I had to choose between Jesus and X, which would I choose?

Unfreeze by resolving to choose Jesus. Every time.

(2) "How can we share our faith?" With outward signs that are not hidden. Live your faith. Don't be afraid to wear a Crucifix around your neck or keep a Bible or Rosary visible in the sight of non-Christians.**

Unfreeze by resolving to live ethically and share your faith when asked, as a baseline.

(3) "Do I know that I love God?" No. Now stop worrying and love God. Because it's a surer sign of loving God if you're focused on serving Him, rather than worrying about whether you love Him. If you are paranoid, ask people who, in your view, love God and can tell a Christian when they see one. What do they see in you?

Unfreeze by admitting you don't know, but you've got a pretty good idea that the answer to the question "Do I love God?" is yes.

(4) "How do I grow in God?" Treat God like you'd treat a Lord, but seek to know him better as you would a trusted friend. You can't ask God questions directly, but you would want to get to know a friend. You'd want to experience this person. So experience God.

Unfreeze by thinking of a couple of different (concrete) ways to grow in God (not just fellowship with other Christians), then sticking to them.

(5) "How do I clean my room?" Clean it. Pick something doable and start with that. Kind of like (4).

In other words, unfreeze by cleaning your room, already.

By the grace of God, may we, even if frozen in bad fashion by these questions, unfreeze by answering them, and then acting on our answers, that we might go forth and better serve God. Otherwise we might wind up so paranoid about whether we can answer these questions, that we never get around to answering them in word or in deed.

Which is the reason these questions were asked in the first place, even if they don't always get us where they're supposed to.

--------------------------

* A portmanteau of "testimony" and "brag," that I first picked up from my friend Alicia on one of a few group trips to Christian Rock festival FreedomFest. I will decline to say whose bragimony she was referring to, save that it was none of our group.

** This is not an endorsement of violating workplace standards, as regards desk cleanliness or religious expression. But of course if your workplace can't tolerate an offhand mention of church...

Cynical Hope and the "O My Jesus" Prayer

While this reflection concerns (partially) a prayer that is a part of Roman Catholic tradition (little-t), the author considers the "O My Jesus" prayer to be worthy of meditation and reflection in its own right and invites all readers regardless of denomination to try and follow the trains of thought running on all the twisted tracks in his mind in this reflection.

It is said that when the Virgin Mary appeared at Fatima, she gave the children who were the visionaries a prayer that, for a Marian apparition, might seem strangely Christocentric (though if we Catholics are right about the purpose of Marian devotion, we shouldn't necessarily expect otherwise.) This prayer also, for an appearance more associated with conservative Catholicism, seems strangely universalist in its hope, even though it hardly advocates universalism. I suppose in that respect it resembles the Scripture.

O My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy.

I would advise anyone who thinks that sounds universalist to remember that the same tradition has Our Lady instructing us all to pray for the conversion of Russia, indicating that the leading of souls to heaven is, to say the least, far from complete.

I am in one sense a rather cynical Catholic; I find myself somewhat unsure that the world will be able to recognize the truths of Christianity and its ethos until it's too late not to go to hell in a hand-basket. On other hand I am believer and I walk by faith in Christ, the Sacraments, and Resurrection--and so even if the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, even if we're past that point of no return, there can be salvation for its people. Thank God. Perhaps if we pass that point of no return, as a society or as a world, it will shock a few more people into seeing the beauty of Christ. Sometimes I think people need to be nauseated by the Gospel--or perhaps by the radical absence thereof--before they realize something is wrong with a Gospel-less life. I'm not going to lie, I often feel like I ought to be trying harder at the whole "evangelism" thing.

O My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy.

At the same time, the world created by God is surely good, and I hope, sometimes against my senses, that it isn't actually going to hell in a hand-basket. That maybe society hasn't passed that point of no return. But I guess with all the wars, strange relativism and culture of death floating around it's sometimes hard to be optimistic. And yet I do try, in accordance with good Christian hope, to hope for the salvation of all, and not to despair too much. After all, the creation is still beautiful, even if sometimes its beauty is obscured by the sinfulness of man.

O My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy.

As we draw further on in a given society, there will be those who serve Christ and life, and those who serve the Enemy and death. Those attempting to be 'tolerant' or in the middle will need to pick a side. There is a strange connection here to the personal "last things," as we continually near our deaths. Let us hope that as many as possible will find themselves on the side of life and Love in the end, both in their personal end and the end of their respective societies, if they are around to see it.

If the Lord wills, I will be, in the end, worthy of the Resurrection.

O My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy.

Jacob's Hip

In John 20:29 (NIV), John tells his disciples, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

One thing that seems to be said by this passage is that a faith that does not require proof is a great gift. But what if there is a secondary blessing in not having tangible proof? When God touches people in tangible and measureable ways, the stories are scary. I sometimes wish I could have been there with Jacob, the Apostles, or Padre Pio, but to be there may have been too much for me.

There seems to be a horror in the Holy. Something in the Sacred can scar us. Perhaps we sinners are unfit to see or experience God as heavily as we sometimes do in this life. Maybe this is why the Saints who are closest to God so often carry symptoms which appear as misery to the world. Maybe if they have any misery left, it is not in reality a sickness or a stigmata, but complete conversion to Christ that cannot choose anything but faith and joy.

How I'm Learning to Stop Worrying and Love the Eucharist

For awhile I was on track to being one of those people who take the wrong kind of interest in doing Church right. I didn't hit rock bottom with my attitude at Mass. But I fell a bit. I already stunk at paying attention, and in the last few weeks I had been losing my focus on the center of the Mass! Instead I was getting cheap satisfaction through irritation at small things which may not even have been liturgically illicit, when I stunk at paying attention even besides those.

In my later Protestant years this was already a problem, but I think it might have been made worse by a liturgy with rules. Somehow I got the idea that I should take liturgy really, really seriously, all the time, even if I cheated the Eucharist in the process.

My increasing conviction, not at all the result of just my efforts, led to this Q&A: What's happening here? Jesus Christ is becoming Really Present. What should distract me from that? Almost nothing.

My new policy is twofold. (1) Only things that can affect the Eucharist are big enough to distract me. If it's illicit or lesser, I forget it or file it away. (2) I make an effort to explicitly thank Christ for His body at least twice while at Church.

Anyone else have this problem?

A Snippit of Conversation from About the Time I Decided to Convert

This is from mid-November of 2009. So that would've been about a month before I talked to Fr. Anthony about joining RCIA.

Dan:
well part of the problem was the fact taht [sic] miracles were drawing me to the church
and keeping me drawn to Christianity in general
i still think that's a good thing, but i know that miracles aren't supposed to be the thing you put your faith in

Pat:
but it is evidence

Dan:
but a few days ago i made the distinction between putting your faith in miracles, and miracles putting you over the edge to putting your faith in Christ

Pat:
if they weren't good God wouldn't have the,
good

Dan:
precisely. and i've seen too much evidence now to go back to the...dare I say atheism that may have inhabited my mind for even a few days, or even a few hours, at a time
(in addition to Fatima I've also done some reading on the case of Padre Pio...i still need to do more on lourdes, i should pick up a book)

Pat:
have one somewhere but that doesn't do you much good

Dan:
heheh :p
the big difficulty is i sometimes have the problem making the connection to 'hey, i believe that, okay'
but then when i really think about it something scares my brain
because it doesn't feel rational--it's mysterious
and like lots of people, i hate mystery
but when i look at the history, look at the evidence
it seems that there are moments in human history that ARE that mysterious, that horrific, that incomprehensible
One of those sorts of events recurs several times a day in Catholic and Orthodox churches all around the world
and it's disgusting, disturbing, and True
it sounds weird, but a lot of that connection, that disconnect I feel between my abstract thought and what goes on in the world...if the gap's going to be bridged, it seems like the Eucharist is the thing that does it
not that Jesus himself doesn't play a factor, but on an ongoing, daily basis that seems to be the major way
and also, of course, Jesus is still playing a factor in the sense that the bread/wine is Jesus
...gah, i dunno if you got anything out of that, sorry if it was just a jumbled mess of gah

Pat:
that is pure dan thought but I got most of it
just remember you can speak of the Eucharist and leave out Christ [Pat informs me that he meant to say "can't" here, but in the moment I had read "leave out Christ" as indicating simply "not mention Jesus explicitly"]
they are the same [from a Catholic perspective this is, at least for the purposes of this conversation, correct]

Some Questions/Comments on that First YMY Post

I'd said some thing about my initial impressions of the book Yes Means Yes over in this here post.

In the comments below my friend Eric had left some interestings which I felt merited a post in response. If anyone else wants to chime in they may feel free to do so either in the original thread, or here. Eric's comments will be in bold, my responses will be in normal text.

Full disclosure, I feel that I owe some of my thought to correspondence with the friend who lent me YMY, much to correspondence with other people and Eric (outside of the comment I am responding to), and a bit to correspondence with the Catholic philosopher Alexander Pruss.

The logic of "consentual sex" is in no way something which can be applied to consenting to marriage.

I am not sure what you mean--do you mean we can't apply it to each act within marriage, or that we can't apply it to the consent one gives to be married in the first place? I disagree either way--a consent, an "I will," is important. Coercion, even if it was not forceful, would certainly cheapen the strength of that will, if not pervert it. "I do" does not indicate an "I will" for all future instances; the question is when in the future "I won't" is acceptable. I don't think you're advocating coercion or force, but certainly within the context of a relationship built on Love, neither ought to be allowed. And if a construction of consent helps to enforce that ban, I'm all for it.

First of all, consenting to marriage is about a union of lives. While modern Christians seem to obsess over the sexual ethics, with some theology of the body people going so far as to suggest that sex is the ultimate realization of the union of marriage, really it's not the main point.

With few exceptions (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!) it's a pretty clear corollary of the Genesis definition of marriage, which seems to indicate a man and a woman becoming one flesh. A union of lives is certainly present but (again, rare exceptions) I'm not sure how that can not include the physical. I don't necessarily think you're trying to exclude the physical, but in terms of physical realizations, intercourse, aside from a man actually and literally laying down his life for his wife, does seem like it's pretty up there. There are of course other things.

Obsessing over sexual ethics obscures the reality of marriage, and applying the logic of "consentual sex" analogously to marriage adds fuel to the fire.

It's already been obscured. Everyone from Puritans and prudes to libertines and liberals have obscured it. Any husband who's ever beaten his wife or molested his children has obscured it. What the Catholic ethics people are attempting to do might add fuel to the fire. I don't care if it does. But if so their fire will be a cleansing fire, not a further obscurantist fire. I think the caution you've suggested already about not making sex the ultimate goal of marriage is a good one, especially given the counterexamples from the Church's Tradition. But for better or for worse, we live in a world where marriage has been obscured. If everything were clear, if everyone acted in the interest of Love, I think we could talk about an absorption of consent by Love in a similar vein to Wojtyla's talk of absorption of shame by Love--it's not that those things disappear or are not necessary, but that for a given relationship they no longer need to be discussed, at least not so directly, because both persons, acting in the interest of Love, will automatically practice them. If you in your marriage have reached that point, then I applaud that. Do I think some of the feminist movement and sexual ethicists have potential to do more damage in that area of obscuring, or even that they have? Yeah, but good Christian men who go home and do un-Christian things to their households have helped to create the reality that everyone has to wrestle with, which is that we're not yet at a point where Love can really be said to be absorbing anything.

Aside from the fact that agreeing to marriage is not the same thing as agreeing to use each other for pleasure, it should also be remembered that a married couple owes each other what's called the "marriage debt" which I'm sure would be horrifying to those who believe in "consentual sex" (though it should be remembered that men owe it to women as much as women to men).

I don't particularly like to use the language of debt with respect to sexuality. I do of course endorse the language of mutual ownership, but the fact remains the Love does not force. Paul's admonition on the subject--"do not deprive each other except by mutual consent for prayer and fasting" (not verbatim) seems to indicate that if there is that ideal, that if they're not setting aside a time for prayer and fasting, the marriage should indeed have a sex life. If a marriage has none, from a Catholic perspective, something is wrong. I agree; in that case something would be at the least seriously wrong. However, I don't think this justifies the use of coercion

You quote Cho as saying she has several times said yes to sex she actually didn't want to have.

For the record, I don't think that anyone, including Cho, really considers those instances of rape. When I read her testimony, I considered them to be instances of having sex for reasons that were at least less than ideal, if not actually wrong (either on her part and/or someone else's), and would have been less than ideal even if she'd been married.

Maybe by developing a more rigorous language of consent this could be somewhat limited, but if people are being asked to make this sort of decision on the spot the grey area is never going to go away.

A small emotional gray area (perhaps a small doubt of whether one wants to) can be taken along with an explicit willing for something to happen, as safely constituting consent in my book. The larger gray area is if coercion--verbal or alcoholic--is in any way present. So yeah, I'll agree that a small emotional gray is likely to be eliminated.

In fact, it is the sexual revolution that has created this grey area. When sex is restricted to marriage, there is no such "did she really want it... really?" type grey area.

I think we could easily imagine a scenario like Cho's more violent experience happening in a marital context. Doesn't mean it necessarily happens often, but it definitely doesn't close the question of whether a wife perpetually wants it, or perpetually wills it. It just might mean she's decided, oddly enough, to will something else, because it's less effort than going through with the deeper will, which is just "not tonight." And I think we could pretty easily imagine such a scenario having happened anytime in the middle ages just like it might happen today.

This will not go away unless sex outside of marriage on the whole is condemned. "Consentual sex" cannot solve this problem.

Agreed! But it's a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition. And in the meantime, until we have a cultural conversion with respect to sexuality, we're going to want to be able, if we can, to speak as Christians to less-than-Christian conditions. I definitely agree that until everyone is really asking themselves what Love requires--and until everyone has the proper understanding of what, at its basic level, that Love is--our problems, our sad necessity to even talk about what consent means (again, recall, in an ideal world, we wouldn't need to construct a meaning for it, because said need would be absorbed by person who relate to each other in Love)...Until we convert, until we are in a sort of societal sense, resurrected, it's not going to go away. I do condemn sex outside of marriage. But that doesn't mean I desire to see that sin compounded by other sins which are either qualitatively or quantitatively worse. It would be great if the old culture were be baptized and transformed into the new creation. But that's going to take time, and in the meantime, that old culture is going to need bandages.

It is in fact feminism and the sexual revolution which have in the first place made "date rape" and other such difficult middle grounds between consent and violent rape possible,

Great, but feminism didn't do that on its own. Coercion and un-Loving pressure are middle grounds that, while they don't necessarily constitute rape, were definitely there before. The question of date rape is a slightly different one to me, but I'm willing to bet that a number of other movements besides Feminism helped make it happen. Aside from whatever faulty teaching members of the Church--as opposed to the Church's teaching office--may have passed down, again we have the Puritans who, rightly or wrongly, are known for having overestimated the value of sexual shame, and the Libertines who are known for having done pretty much the opposite. I don't necessarily discount the idea that the feminist movement may have exacerbated some of the problems of society, or that said problems include complications relating to our idea of consent, of what it means to 'will' a sex act to happen.

and they will only go away when we reject feminism and the sexual revolution.

I am not ready to agree to this for all definitions of 'feminism,' but for all historically reasonable (that is, not deliberately redeemed by some Christian youth movement) meanings of 'sexual revolution' I would call this a necessary but not sufficient condition. We must invite God, to paraphrase an older Graham Kendrick tune: "Search [us], try [us], consume all our darkness." It's possible that somewhere along the line the Christian tradition began contributing to the confusion; certainly many of us in action, even if not in theory. That's part of the reason I think theory is important, why it's important to build a model of human sexuality that cautions us against coercion, even if it means re-phrasing (not re-interpreting, or mis-construing) our old ideas about what the Pauline injunction to regular physical unity actually means. I prefer to use less abusable language, language prone to--if anything--persuasion as opposed to coercion. I suspect the exact boundaries and lines that each couple must adhere to in order to respond to Love's demands will vary by the context of relationship, but as a general guideline I am more comfortable with the language of "should" than with the language of debt, and it is my belief that while either might be strictly compatible, one is much more likely to lead to bad practice--to moral untruth--than the other. I don't dispute that many couples take the phrasing of 'marriage debt' seriously and interpret it in a way which is not, in the context of their relationship, subject to abuse. And even a "should"--even a "debt," for that matter, has limits on proper method. At the risk of being overly subjective, something about a husband or a wife using the notion of a "debt" (or even a "should," but "should" seems less subject to this problem) doesn't strike me as a very resurrected situation for a marriage to be in. Neither does the notion of a celibate marriage, with few exceptions. It seems like the "should" might be more properly applied to what the two persons will in the first place, so that their wills in the matter move further and further in line with one another and so that neither ever tries--at least not badgeringly--to convince the other on the matter.* Let me be clear: I don't want to or will to excise the Pauline injunction from the Tradition. It can't be done. But I do not consider myself or any other Christian to be bound to the phrasing of "marriage debt," particularly, but not exclusively, due to the baggage it carries today and the abuse it has had over the years as a tool for abuse.

If we are Catholic, why should we draw or understanding of the proper ordering of gender within society from a bunch of largely atheist revolutionaries who have sought to destroy the norms of marriage, when the saints have already taught on the subject?

I'm not sure who precisely you're concerned about. My concern is to figure out where this movement might highlight moral truths that aren't--for whatever reason--talked about as much within the church. I have no desire to rewrite our narratives to match their goals. I do have a desire to see what the truth is in their results, and allow that truth to give further nuance to how I as a Christian construct my response to things, in particular my response to sexuality. But I guarantee you, I have no interest in rewriting the essential Christian narrative of sexuality and/or gender to include perspectives which aren't Christian. I have an interest in moral truth, no matter what its immediate source, and in seeing what the interaction is between that Truth, and our starting points. I have no interest in drawing my ultimate understanding of those things from anything other than an understanding of ourselves as creatures of God in light of the Resurrection.

And do the Saints discuss the subject of marital rape? Of childhood abuse? If so, those aren't exactly the popular or discussed passages. And if nobody's really putting it out there that the Saints have talked about this, and nobody's talking about what they've said, then (as far as me hearing what they've said goes) it doesn't do much to just say "the Saints have talked about this." This isn't just about gender and the basic meanings and contemplations of humans as sexual beings who are creatures of God. This is about how, building on that understanding, our specific conceptualizations of what a right relationship looks like influences our understanding of everything else. I guarantee you, in my mind, the feminist movement comes out substantially less than Good in the eyes of God. But that doesn't mean they haven't walked in shoes we've never walked in (female shoes, to start with) or experienced things we've never experienced (speaking only for myself without intending to imply anything about anyone else who gets involved in this conversation, I have never been abused)...and it doesn't mean--that feminists--even if they may have furthered the obfuscation of sexuality--have nothing valuable to say that can help us get out of the hole of obfuscation of sex that we've gotten into. Just like everyone else has nuances to contribute. Ultimately I do believe the constructions lending themselves most to proper service of Truth will come from the Catholic fold, and that the proper starting points are parts of the Catholic Truth that Christ preached and left to the early Church. That, by the way, goes for every area of life, including but not limited to human sexuality.

I see no reason, unless we are trying to impress the world by saying "don't worry, I'm not so crazy. I can be a feminist too." But why should we be trying to impress the world?

Hopefully, if we're trying to impress the world at all, it's by letting our light shine before it, so that it might see our good deeds and praise our Father in heaven. Don't get me wrong; I have problems with trying to be agreeable, and that's personal stuff that I need to work on for the sake of my relationship with God. It goes, by the way, with whoever I'm talking with, "conservative" or "liberal." But allow me to be very clear about this, lest anyone think otherwise:

I would gladly cast off any label other than Christian, and even that, if I felt it stood in the way of my commitment to Christ and to the Truth.

That said, nobody has yet applied the feminist label to me, and they're not likely to do so. I confess to erring on the side of dialog here (as I usually do), if I am indeed erring. Erring on the other side, however, might result in ignoring legitimate concerns of their movement, and that won't profit myself, the Church, or Christ at all, however, and it might do just the opposite; it might give credence to the view that Christianity that doesn't listen to those who are downtrodden and left-out. Some people are going to view us that way anyway, and that's their problem. But I'm going to do whatever is in my power to strip them of the stupid excuses they feel that 'religion' has given the to ignore it. Sometimes that duty will require me to speak up and correct, to declare what I believe is the wrongness of the world. Sometimes that duty requires me to listen.

My explicit statement in this matter of modern feminist thought, and in all others, is to claim a Catholic--not pre, post or simply modern, not Thomist or personalist, or anything else--Catholicism, in which I am hungry for the Eucharist, for Love, and for Truth and Justice, and with that as my banner and guide, spiritual home and philosophical home-base, to brave the postmodern wilderness and--if God can make me holy enough--help to convert that wilderness into something that looks more like the Kingdom of God.

* I see nothing prima facie wrong with the idea of persuasion on the part of either partner. The exact question of where coercion comes in is a good one, and I'm not sure a single line can be drawn that will be applicable to every individual marriage, because--as with many things--even the two persons and who they are will create a different context of relationship.

Observation on Something I Picked up from Kevin Johnston's Blog

Kevin Johnston is an awesome guy who I went to college with. He keeps a blog here called Sola Nobilitas Virtus. He usually has some kind of snappy quotation at the top and/or the side of the blog (the trend now is to have a more long-lasting one at the top and a quotation and picture on the right side that switch on a weekly basis.) Anyway, back when I think it was just the one on the right that changed, one of them was:

Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bells. I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.

I submit that this is a false dichotomy, and I stipulate that in saying such I am completely disregarding any intent it may have and focusing solely on its wording. There should be a church within a yard of hell, for parishoners who can brave it. We are after all a pilgrim church; we are not safe. And it seems that we can think many places that are almost borders between hell and earth (for reasons of physical poverty mostly, though I suspect we could identify just as many places where spiritual poverty was great enough.) And there are churches in them.

I'm not saying I should be one of those to go to that church. Though by going to church in America I may have already committed myself to such. In fact I suspect the commitment is really much easier to make even than that. In a sense, every square yard of this world that isn't the sanctuary of a Church is already within a yard of hell. I thank God that the sanctuaries and tabernacles have stayed almost totally inviolate, save for those intentional perversions which constitute crimes against God and humanity. But almost everything else--including, with sadness, the church meeting halls, the homes of Christians, even, have not. So it is not just a false dichotomy because the Church could be a rescue shop, in theory. It is an impossible distinction, because the Church cannot be a Church unless it is a rescue shop.

Ultimately, I suppose what this means is, ready or not, I'm called to go to that church! Will you come with me?

I's a Catholic

Yes I am. I am now Daniel James Ignatius (of Antioch) Lower. :p

Christian Carnival CCCXIX, and the Dan Going Catholic Project

Christian Carnival CCCXIX is up over at Thinking Christian.

In other news, my second confession is today. I'm not too nervous, but I should memorize or at least write down an act of contrition this time. I get received Sunday. To any who read this, prayers for discernment and wisdom are always appreciated!

Not a Theology Textboook: The End of the Affair

So this is the first in what will hopefully be a decent series on books that I love or found useful theologically (most of them if not all of them will be books by Christians) but which are nowhere near being theology proper, or as a literal creed of their authors, and should probably not be read as such, even if the total amount of theological error attained by such a reading is small. Now you might ask, what do I mean by a theology textbook? I mean something that is either designed primarily to teach/explain theology and/or advance the work of theology proper in a non-narrative format. Thus, for instance, The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a theology textbook. St. Augustine's De Catechizandis Rudibus is a theology textbook. St. Augustine's Confesiones is not. That does not mean it's not beautiful theological writing, but its aims are more mixed between reflection/exposition/speculation than DCR, which is essentially a catechism, not a narrative.

The End of the Affair hit a bunch of key themes for me. Oddly enough, the meaning of Christian love between persons wasn't a theme that I felt was so big in the book. I think there's a fair amount of it that gets practiced by the characters (some of them, anyway) but that's not really so much the point. I think a bigger point is how we can come to Love God, even in circumstances which aren't always quite so awesome, or even if we're people (always!) who aren't quite so awesome. Now a relative of mine who read this particular book didn't seem to get much out of it except that the characters were all idiots. (I haven't spoiled anything there; this fact will be readily apparent to most readers within the first fifty pages.) And that's part of Greene's charm. These idiots are loved by God, and God uses their messed up lives to draw them closer to Him.

In that vein, one of the big ideas here is that faith in God need not start with Love for God, or even with belief. This is true intuitively true if we think about it. We have all heard of the more irrational sorts of atheist who declares to hate God, and might as such be just a step away from faith. But more-so I think many of us have either had, or heard of, the experience of having faith that God is there before we actually have faith that God can truly be loved and trusted. Another big theme of the book is how one can fight God every step of the way on something--even on being Loved, and still yield. We really don't want to give up control. In their idiocy these characters demonstrate that time and time again, but they also demonstrate how they are not actually beyond redemption. God's Love, for Greene, is bigger than the fact of our sin or our Original Idiocy. And it uses what's there; the old creation doesn't just get replaced by the new; it gets transformed, which means sometimes that bitterness and cynicism have to be transformed, slowly and painfully.

I happen to believe the error is smaller for Graham Greene's The End of the Affair than it would be for many other books--including much of the theology proper I've been assigned in my day--but that doesn't mean it's nonexistant. Some persons, at least according to his Wikipedia article, charge Greene with giving sin a "mystique," a charge which I sort of understand, even if I don't agree. I'm more than willing to bite the bullet and suggest that maybe Greene has done so somewhat, but I doubt he did it intentionally, and I'd invite critics along those lines to consider that that's part of how sin gets us at the outset: It projects a mystique. One of the things Graham does well, is show us what happens when that projection is broken.

Besides this, I suppose it is possible that Graham Greene has given us too much optimism about what God can do with a broken situation...wait, what am I saying? Too much optimism about the power of God? Nevermind!

I'm not going to pretend that I have more of a problem with this book than I do. Obviously in trying to find things to criticize, just to offset my praise of Greene's work, I'm going to run into error myself, unless I really know why I disagree with what I'm critiquing. I guess if there is any real criticism to be made, it's that at least here Graham Greene is focusing on the depths of sin and rebellion against God in a way that not everyone will really find helpful, and which might even be scandalous to people at the wrong points in their theological career. But that's okay, because it's intended to be a narrative about how Grace steps in to save us, not as an exposition of the same. It is, quite perfectly, not a theology textbook.

A Letter to My (Formerly) Fellow Protestants

A Letter to My (Formerly) Fellow Protestants,

This is something I am doing in service to the Truth. This is not something I would do to rebel, to make anyone angry, to incite controversy or for for any other stupid reason. (In fact, that was part of the reason I didn't convert two years ago, was to avoid doing so for stupid reasons.) I believe that the Roman Catholic Church is closer to God in that it is closer to Truth. I do not mean to say that I think Catholics are automatically closer to God on a personal level than Protestants; in fact I know many whose relationship with God, and virtue, hardly measure up to the median of the Protestants I have known. It is true that not all of my reasons for joining are purely logical. The chief reason that isn't purely reasoned, is that I feel more secure in the work of Christian evidences within a Catholic framework, than within a Protestant framework. And also, the first reason given here is perhaps mostly personal, but I believe it to be theological at least in part. The rest are mostly theological in nature, though of course like any theologian I have my own personal biases and preferences. This is summary, not argument.

1. Invisible unity in the church isn't enough for me anymore. The Catholic Church is the only church that's got the capability to take in and put in proper proportion the concerns and biases of all the others. As one example, it teaches both predestination and free-will, without falling into the traps of Calvinism or Pelagianism. There is room for pretty much every type of Christian in this Tradition, except for the Christians who want to be able to do as they please (and interpret Scripture as they please) regardless of what those in authority say. And even those Christians appear to be generally tolerated, so long as they're not really loud about how much they are defying authority. Mystical unity isn't enough for me anymore; I need more visible unity. And the more I see what happens when Protestants rejoin the Catholic Church, the more I believe that this is the way things will get better, and the world will see us Christians as unified in spirit and in truth.

A side-note here. One may ask the question whether the Catholic Church's visible unity means anything with the amount of heretics it does tolerate (which is quite a few, at least quite a few of the quieter ones.) This is an excellent question, and I can answer in the affirmative: It does matter. It might not look any more unified than Protestant Churches, but quite frankly it does have one thing they do not in its togetherness. In the umbrella of Protestantism there is, as in Catholicism, nothing to prevent a single church from calling itself Christian even if it preaches doctrine which is continually opposed to Scripture and to historical Christianity. But in Catholicism there is a single authority that can actually say that that church is wrong. You might be thinking that Protestantism has, or at least specific Protestant churches have, a similar authority. I do not share your belief; sola scriptura de-centralizes doctrine and the search for Truth on many matters.

2. Protestant approaches to the Scriptures strike me as untenable. The approaches to Scripture which can be classified as sola scriptura all leave one question scorching my tongue: What passages of Scripture tell us what books are to be included in the Scriptures? You might think that this is a small problem, but history suggests it is everything but. The Protestants, the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox all hold different canons, and each of these camps in turn holds more books to be revealed Scripture than the one before it. The Canon itself as Catholics consider it was a couple hundred years in its most major developments, and a hundred or so more for the more minor adjustments. And several Christians throughout history have tossed out various books, or wanted to (most famously, Martin Luther wanting to exclude James and Revelation from the canon.)

It is, to my mind, not solid reasoning to simply assume we've got the right canon. In its weakest (and to my mind most solid) form, sola scriptura says that we must be able to find things in the Scriptures if they are to be called necessary for salvation. But what can be found in the Scriptures certainly depends on what books are included in the Scriptures, and so what's necessary for salvation winds up being dependent, ultimately, on a table of contents that is found nowhere in the actual sacred texts of the Christian tradition. Even if we could agree on the Canon, we could look around and find Christian churches in decent levels of disagreement about what was necessary for salvation. I don't know about you, but if I don't even know with some certainty what I have to be able to do to be able to consider myself saved, I'm in an interesting place. We might solve this problem by saying Jesus is the only essential, but I am skeptical of that very statement myself, at least in the way I have come to define the “essentials,” not to mention the fact that it immediately raises the question of what we mean by saying “Jesus.”
This is why I don't really think that we've got a systematic authority that allows us to say that, say, the Modalist Church down the road is actually in the wrong, no matter how much we'd like them to affirm that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are actually three distinct-but-not-separate persons: The Scriptures are wonderful. I love the Scriptures; with a little help, in fact, I can still recite the entire first chapter of James, and I've been studying them more seriously than ever before. But sola scriptura does not provide a solid centralizing authority for the Church.

The alternate possibility of prima scriptura (scripture as the 'check' for all doctrines) certainly appeals to me, some, but when we consider that prima scriptura can only screen out doctrines that actually run contrary to the Scriptures as being wrong, with the rest being (still) potentially essential, we wind up with a whole laundry list of things that, as historic Christians, we seem pretty much bound to believe, and yet most people who would get technical enough to even talk about the possibility of holding prima scriptura would deny them. On a practical level, whenever I start thinking along prima scriptura lines, I immediately start thinking about the early church, which immediately starts me down the road to Rome again. Which brings me to my next two points, both pretty well-related to historical doctrine:

3. The Roman Catholic Church affirms the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This might seem like a strange thing to be attracted to. And to be honest, it makes me queasy. It makes me uncomfortable. But if we study the bread of life discourse in John chapter 6, or the discourse on the Lord's supper in 1 Corinthians 11, they raise questions. Why, for instance, does Jesus switch to even stronger language about people eating his flesh, when people express discomfort with the idea, if it's purely symbolic to begin with? This certainly doesn't prove that it is literal, but it certainly raises the question. And why does the penalty for taking Communion unworthily—at least as seen by Paul—seem to be so severe, if it is merely a symbolic gesture? That the Early Church seems to have believed in a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is further solidified for me by St. Ignatius, who in the very early second century A.D. preached among other things that denial of the real presence was something done by Donatists, and couched his impending martyrdom in gory Eucharistic imagery. Is the doctrine of real presence gross? Absolutely disgusting. Quite uncomfortable. Is it the truth? It would seem so.

4. The Roman Catholic Church affirms the historically and council-vindicated titles/roles of the Virgin Mary. I'm going to confess here that no, I'm not totally clear on exactly what vindicates the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary. But Theotokos and Perpetual Virginity have been around for, well, awhile. Theotokos (“God-bearer” or “Mother of God”) has been around since the Nestorian controversy, in which the Council of Ephesus made it a title of Mary as a matter of correct Christological thought. That's not Catholic bias, either; that's history, and a history that took place before the major council of Chalcedon, which clarified some Christological points and in at least one of its statements reaffirmed the phrasing of Theotokos. Perpetual virginity has apparently been around for quite a while. At least since the fifth century with some consensus, but even before. Tertullian opposed it, for what it's worth, but the bulk of historical Christianity seems to affirm it, over and against what strikes as the 'plain' interpretation of Jesus's brothers. So even though I'm not totally 100% feeling forced to believe the other Marian Dogmas right away, I'm willing to accept them on the basis that I'm already trusting of the others, and trust that reasoning will probably fall into place later.

5. Prayer to/through saints and to/through Mary is affirmed by the RCC. This might seem like a negative mark. What about 'one mediator between God and man'? But it is still pretty clear that the mediatorship of Christ is of a special and unique kind in Catholic theology; if it be the case that the RCC considers the Saints or Mary to be mediators, it considers them to be mediators not of the same level, if even of the same type at all. There is a general belief (repudiated nowhere that I know of in the Scriptures) that the dead in heaven can hear us, even in many Protestant circles. It certainly does have some basis in Scripture, most notably in Revelation where incense symbolizes the prayers of the saints. Asking them to pray for us (in my mind) doesn't really boil down to anything different from asking an especially holy person here on earth to pray for us. If we have the chance, why not? The reason I say to/through is because it is only proper to say we pray “to” saints in the sense of “I pray you, pray for me”: otherwise it might be best for clarity if we said we pray to God and through the saints.

And yes, it is true that veneration and devotion to both Mary and Saints can get out of hand. Yes, it can. So can veneration (though not so-called) of Rick Warren, N.T. Wright, Joel Osteen and numerous other figures still alive in today's Christian world. (I should not hesitate here to mention C.S. Lewis, Calvin and Luther, but they didn't fit the pattern of being still alive.) The point being, it might be more obvious but that doesn't really make it any more wrong, or any less avoidable. One of the big things about the RCC and ethics, is lots of things are about proportion. Veneration and honor is given to Mary and the Saints, but more honor must be given to God. Ultimately the Saints and the Blessed Virgin all point back to God. Praying 'to' saints is really just praying through them. We may say we pray 'to' them only if we mean we are actually asking them to pray for us; they are not to be treated as having any special ability in and of themselves, but only what they have by the grace of God. Prayer and devotion to saints seems a fairly worthy enterprise, and the semi-dogmatic opposition of at least certain Protestant groups to the practice appears largely unfounded in the Scriptures.

6. I am consistently wowed by the consistency of their ethic of life, sexuality and justice. This doesn't mean I'm always comfortable with it. Am I comfortable with the idea of (if I marry) abandoning artificial birth control? No. Do I think I really have a total handle on the difference between artificial birth control and the natural methods championed by the Church? No. Do I have an immediate and biblical justification for going beyond the direct text of the Scriptures, and asking “why” God may have permitted or forbidden certain things? No. I do believe there is definite historical vindication of the Catholic ethic of life, in that until very recently, most Churches stood together on the issue of birth control. I do believe that it speaks to something (more than many Protestants would like) that most of the early Church seems to have been pretty down on birth control, not as much as it was on abortion, but still. It seems to be more in continuity with the historical church, and (again) it does not contradict the Scriptures that I can see.

If you are currently wondering where the Song of Solomon has gone, rest assured, it's still there. And as soon as you find the famous proof-text for non-procreative sex contained therein, I'll happily take a look at it, but I'm willing to bet you won't. Even if you could find such a passage, it would prove the Catholic ethic wrong on proper sexual relations the exact same way that the passage in the Torah commanding a 'curse' (really a conditional abortion) on an unfaithful woman proves the Catholic (and conservative Protestant) ethic wrong on abortion. And by that, I mean not at all. Now I've found Catholic sexual ethics to be personally very helpful for ordering myself and seeking virtue in my definitively doomed attempt to offer myself as a living sacrifice and be transformed by the renewing of my mind. And I find it very professionally consistent. But it doesn't stop there. One section of the Catholic ethic quickly leads to another; sexual ethics tie with life ethics, which tie in turn with social justice ethics. Even if it were to eventually turn out to be a failure (I am confident it will not), the Catholic ethic, in its various statements, restatements, formulations and reformulations, is the best effort I have ever seen at truly achieving the ethical unity epitomized for believers in James 1:27, saying that “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: To look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

7. The primacy of Peter and Rome hasn't been rock-solid established for me (heh), but it's been established beyond most reasonable doubt. It's pretty clear by the marks of both staunch Catholic and conservative Protestant scholars that Peter was given some kind of primacy by Jesus. Additionally, the primacy of Rome was held by at least a few early Fathers, and the later Council of Chalcedon seems to imply it by making Constantinople second to Rome. Also, Rome had implicit veto power over at least one of the canons ratified in Africa near the turn of the fourth century to the fifth. Apostolic succession has been in development for awhile, but it seems a fairly solid doctrine. Not rock-solid yet, to me, but definitely there in essence if not totally obvious in presence.

8. I am pretty much sold as a matter of historical accuracy that the Canon of Scripture ratified by the early Church's African synods was the same canon that the RCC uses today. This includes the books Protestants would call “Apocryphal,” like Tobit and the Wisdom of Solomon. If you study the synods concerned, it seems that they did indeed ratify this Canon. It's commonly argued that it wasn't a dogmatic thing for Catholics until Trent in 15XX. However, this is as far as I know the earliest declaration by a synod, and it was replicated shortly after by another. Given this Canon, and even a prima scriptura standpoint, many objections previously held to Catholic doctrine (in particular, purgatory) begin to fall away. As a matter of intellectual honesty, does it bother me that this particular Canon wasn't ratified in the East as well as in Africa? Yes, a little bit. But that concern certainly doesn't push me back into Protestantism—the Canon which Eastern Orthodoxy eventually settled on has two or three more books than that of the RCC, in addition to those books that Protestants call Apocryphal.

9. God, in Catholic experience, is merciful, but also severe. Chesterton once said: “Those underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe--that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature.” Chesterton was speaking, if I recall correctly, of a 'hate-the-sin, love-the-sinner' mentality, but his phrasing of merciful but severe, which in my mind is similar to being merciful yet perfectly just (even if the justice sometimes seems lenient, or the mercy seems harsh), seems a good marker on God as God is celebrated in Christianity. What I'm getting at mainly is (here I run the risk of getting into historical evidences) that the historical evidences I've seen put forth from the Catholic tradition seem to better embrace God as God of both the old, and new, testaments. I do not claim that it is a different God who works in the non-Catholic traditions, but there is something about the miracles that occur in Catholic contexts that points back to a Biblical unity. But the strange concoction called Catholicism also seems to contain the notion, somewhere in all of its Traditions and laws, that God is merciful and also severe. When was the last time you went to a Protestant church which, as a matter of weekly ritual, expected of its members a true confession of sinner-hood?

It is true that some of us need much more mercy than severity, and others much more severity than mercy (I often suspect I am of the second type), but Christian mercy must not be mere mercy, and Christian severity must not be mere severity.

10. Emotionalism and "reason"-ism are given proportional bounds. You are free to be emotional about faith so long as you do not pretend that emotion in devotion or worship, or "being drunk with the Spirit," is something absolutely necessary for saving faith. You are likewise free to be more "head-issue" centered about your faith so long as you do not pretend that emotion has no place in the life of a believer. Everyone is encouraged to cultivate devotional and rational aspects of their faith; nobody is permitted to ignore the validity of either approach as a primary means of experiencing the Divine. What is required is to seek God.

I have given my reasoning here. You are of course free to agree or disagree. I am attempting to be honest about what I know, and what I don't. There's a lot I still don't know, this is true. I'm still not sure where exactly Purgatory comes from, for instance. But what I've learned takes me away from where I started (the Free Methodist tradition, to which I am in great spiritual debt), and leaves me wandering. Eventually I come to the gates of the Roman Catholic Church, a humongous building the defies me to enter. I can almost hear the Crucifix mocking me, perhaps it is really the darker forces approximate to me, when I attend Masses: “Why don't you just leave? You've been thinking about this forever, and you're still just, here, standing in the gate-way, afraid to enter.” And the only answer I can really give, when I think about my desire for Truth, and the alternatives for finding it (putting it on shaky foundations, or just giving up the search entirely), is “Lord, to where else shall I go?”

And I assure you before God that I am not lying when I say this: My first allegiance is to my Lord Jesus, not just my Lord, but your Lord as well—Our Lord, if you will. This is an allegiance that I have discovered—painfully, in wrestling with it, at times even in trying to break it—an allegiance I am not free to disobey, a loyalty that I must respect. Free will notwithstanding, it is almost as if I no longer have a choice in the matter. My second allegiance is to Our Lord's Pilgrim Church on Earth. This does not mean that the work that has been done in me in Protestant contexts was bad—but it means I have come to believe that this work will be brought to a fuller completeness in the context of the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, this Church makes a claim to be the One True Church, but it does not declare that persons outside of it are untrue Christians. And I do not find myself compelled to no longer consider you Christians. Far from it! I will continue to pray for you and ask you to pray for me. I will continue to consider your counsel on spiritual matters. I will continue to hold massive respect for the Protestant subculture, especially those few and far between good Christian rock bands. I will continue to hold massive respect for Protestant theologians who serve the Lord well, which are a good deal greater in number than some staunch Catholics will want to admit. I will continue to love and obey my parents (and elders) in the Lord, and to be ever grateful for their raising me in the Lord. I will continue to be grateful to all of my family members who have faithfully done the same. I will continue to have massive respect for the Protestant pastors I have had in my life (shout-outs to Gene G., Joe W., Scott P., Mark M., Dave W., Matt P!) and my Protestant brethren who I know from New Vision Fellowship and other places, especially Chris C., the Palmers (and Shawn's awesome wife Alicia), Brent and Pam J., Billy A., Travis E., the Stevens family, Andy B., Colin C. and Chris B., Eben A., Dr. Will Deming, and Austin S. I will continue to read Protestant authors of all kinds, and seek the Truth wherever in their writings it be found—at the time of this writing, I'm still in the midst of C.S. Lewis's lovely The Four Loves. I will continue to read the Scriptures just as I used to (or, alternatively, will continue to fail at reading them just as I used to.) A part of my heart and mind will always feel and think distinctly Protestant about things even once I've 'crossed the Tiber,' as some call it, but this only strengthens point number one. I will continue to consider you brothers and sisters in Christ, whether you be my blood-relatives, or not. I will definitely be able to worship with you. On occasion I will even be able to come to Church with you. If you're further curious about why I've made this choice, you may feel free to ask further. This is the Truth I have found. And if you want to, I would be happy to discuss it with you.

In Faith, Love and Christ,
Dan “D.Lo” Lower

Tenderness in the Absence of God

Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor once wrote that "In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness, and tenderness leads to the gas chamber." Tenderness in this case means a desire that others not suffer needlessly, or a desire for their suffering to be alleviated if at all possible. Another Catholic, Walker Percy, picked up this theme in his 1987 sequel to Love in the Ruins, called The Thanatos Syndrome. Note that I don't take it as fully established that this tenderness necessarily leads to genocide, but historically it seems the case that this tenderness has indeed been a major cause of things like the holocaust. And get this. Not just they saw it. Lots of people saw it, and see it still, including theists and atheists, religious and nonreligious people. Perhaps notably, G.K. Chesterton saw it, though not so specifically, when he made his consistent warnings against Eugenics in the pre-World War II era. Let me repeat this again. Chesterton, who died in 1936, was frequently warning against the dangers of not only the slightly more obvious Nazi-ism, but eugenics. Again, G.K. went dust-to-dust in 1936, and as a bonus it might be noted that his major work Eugenics and Other Evils was copyrighted for 1922. Again, I am not suggesting a necessary link. I am suggesting that in all governing by tenderness--which is an ill-defined concept sans the Divine Love or some other objective measure of what the heck it means--we come out to a line in the sand, a line readily redrawn and moved. It has been described as a slippery slope; I find the line in the sand less suggestive of logical fallacy. But I do believe I say with no danger of fallacy that even if it be the case that we can get some traction on a slippery slope, it remains slippery. Again, I don't think it leads necessarily to genocide, but I can see how this can happen historically if not of necessity, and I am convinced that one morning we will get up, and this God-forsaking compassion will dress us and lead us where we do not want to go. [[EDITED FOR CLARITY: With that in mind I present a number of links exploring what tenderness in the absence of God can do to a society, followed by a few actual people who preach it in our society speaking in their own words, followed by what I think to be the only real solution to the problem--as opposed to solutions which are more temporary.]]

For further decent expositions of what the heck O'Connor and Percy were talking about, you can see this link, this longer article from Ingatius which fills in some of the gaps in how compassion can lead to gas chambers. For a good example of Chestertonian thought on the subject, one can check out this essay by G.K. himself, which might sound kind of flippant in places. But seriously consider what was said and when it was printed (1937).

It seems like some of the things in healthcare and philosophy nowadays are just too...convenient to ignore. Check out for instance, Peter Singer's article Why We Must Ration Health Care...granted that some rationing will have to happen if our country goes the socialization route. I have massive unease about giving his position anything resembling full support, though it is more than a little less abhorrent than I expected.* Next, check out Russia, where a journalist is writing articles that suggest newborns could be euthanise under the proper circumstances. Also, there's this monstrosity that appeared in the real live New York Times back in 2005 and also seems to be a piece of advocacy at least for tolerance if not outright acceptance of just "letting nature take its course" in certain cases.*** Not quite euthanasia, but getting there! I don't even need to mention the state of assisted suicide laws around the world (culled from pro-PAS sources in a time before Washington's Doctor-Assisted Suicide law passed.

Now of course, if the world were to be converted to a true ethic of life and Love, compassion fully under the dominion of Our Lord, or at least a reverence for Life and Love, lots of these problems would go away. At the risk of getting utopian, there would be no more worries about how much a life is worth, because with everyone living correctly (including proportionally correct donations by the rich and middle-class, to the poor) there would be a substantially lower need for rationing of any kind. Sadly, we are not yet living in the New Heaven and New Earth, the only places where this could really happen and (perhaps with a bit of irony) places where it won't be needed so much. That said, it seems a pretty obvious thing that we should be taking steps to bring as much of that Kingdom to reality here on Earth, and now, as we can. As with so many other things, fighting laws which cede to capitol-T Tenderness will help, fighting a political fight will help. But nothing, ultimately, will save us as a society or a world, as nothing saves a soul, but conversion.

ENDNOTES
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* I can't support it unless I can find some way of divorcing it from his other philosophical positions, including the main things he's known for, his proposal that infanticide is a lesser crime to that of killing a full-grown adult. Also, SuzyB, which also gets the hat tip for that particular article, makes some notes that remind me of my basic objection, which is that we shouldn't necessarily value lives differently. The thing is, there's no way to ration health care without eventually coming across like you're valuing lives differently.
** The original article doesn't appear to have a translation up; if someone finds a full translation tell me so I can link it.
*** I'll readily admit that I am still wrestling with the degree to which this constitutes "playing God," but if an infant is even remotely likely to survive in the long run it seems like measures should be taken to save him/her. Also, I will maintain that there is a qualitative difference between passively shortening the length of an infant's suffering and actively striving to end it.

Infants and Salvation

For a Catholic, one thing held is that baptism is necessary for salvation. So what happens to unbaptized infants?  One might argue from this dilemma that Catholicism presents an unnecessarily cruel view of what might happen to persons who die before baptism: What could they have done to deserve damnation?

In any Christian tradition, though, anyone being honest with themselves and with the Scriptures has to admit that this is not an easy theological question--it will either be hard emotionally, or hard intellectually, but I'm pretty convinced we can't have it easy both ways unless we stop thinking about it. (It may also be the case, as sometimes happens in Christianity, that it's going to be difficult on both fronts.) People who deny the notion of baptismal regeneration tend to focus instead on saving faith, commonly thought of as a faith which includes a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. A pastor for whom I have great respect once said that when talking about salvation, a fundamental question to ask is: "Did they know Jesus?"

But there's the thing. As a general categorization, nobody under the age of three meets that mark, because it's just not possible in general for them to have a saving faith (that would seem to require a greater cognitive faculty than they have), much less one that expresses as a personal relationship with Christ.

The most reasonable answer I've heard thus far is: We can't guarantee salvation, but we shouldn't necessarily deny it, either. (The Catholic form of this is that while the Church is bound by the sacraments, e.g. baptism, God is not, therefore we may hope for, but not preach as fact, the salvation of unbaptized infants.) The Biblical basis for both of these variants of hope can be readily seen: God desires all men to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. By implication this means that knowledge of the truth is not the same thing as salvation (therefore infants, who lack the cognitive ability to affirm the truth, are not barred by default from salvation.) But it seems like all of the definitions of what it means to be saved--barring exceptional circumstances--imply some sort of cognitive ability on the part of the saved, or some ritual which might be given them. In any case it seems to imply something which many infants who die will lack. (Not to mention those who die without the opportunity for infancy.)

How do you resolve this dilemma? Do you:

(a) Believe that children who are unable to meet and don't meet the marks are damned.

(b) Believe that children who are unable to meet and don't meet the marks are saved.

(c) Believe that children who are unable to meet and don't meet the marks might be saved, but that there is no guarantee.

I believe that I've covered the three broad categories of response here, but feel free to tell me if I've missed one. I'm counting "there is no way to know," or similar statements, as variants of response (c). My answer, in case you hadn't guessed, falls somewhere in the realm of (c). I encourage people to comment and give a response on this question, even if you're just giving the letter as your answer.  Feel free to elaborate on your answer if you want!

Defying the World's Categories: The Culture of Life

Who are the least of these? I'm going to take the tack of the persons least able to defend themselves: first physically, then economically. The abortion issue is obviously a piece of what we're dealing with here. That must be taken care of with some priority. The most defenseless human beings among us are the ones who've only entered the womb, not the outside world, and it seems clear that they do need defending. I would love to pontificate about America's wonderful progress, how much of a pro-life nation we actually are. But I can't, because we're not. A quick check at the number of Downs Syndrome abortions should clear up that perception.

I don't think we pro-lifers are going far enough in our pursuit of justice. Many of our most common arguments rely on the notion of the human fetus is a human being. The focus on the abortion issue is then justified by saying that those in the womb are the least among is, in the sense of being the most defenseless, the most open to attack and marginalization. This is fine to my mind, but it needs to be taken a step further. A pro-life stance that truly respects Christianity and its instructions for how we treat each other must take the next step and defend all stages of life, from womb to tomb, or as a high school teacher of mine memorably put it, sperm to worm. In many Catholic circles this is known as the 'consistent ethic of life,' and in some of these circles it's been misused as an excuse for downplaying the ethical gravity of abortion. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

Clearly, the right to life begins with the right to survive. But if we allow it to end there, we are not carrying the examples of our Lord and of the traditions of our great faith to their fulfillment. Certain things that happen in church history, even that which is seen in the New Testament, are clearly motivated by concerns for social justice. Why else does it seem that the main community discussed in Acts is one in which persons sell their possessions to give to the poor? Why else would it be that in the Gospels, Jesus instructs us that, essentially, a substantially higher burden is placed on the rich in entering the Kingdom of Heaven, than on the poor? The passage in which Jesus discusses 'the least of these' makes no reference to persons in the womb, but it does talk about visiting the sick and prisoners and addressing other concerns of social justice. It is clear that the Christian church has been opposed to abortion from the beginning, if only by the early church's interpretation of the Scriptures. But it is also clear that the church has been concerned with social justice from the start.

So where does this leave us? With the inescapable conclusion that as Christians striving to take our tradition seriously, we must care about justice inside and outside of the womb, about quality-of-life justice as well as survival. Abortion does seem pretty clearly to be the most wrong of the injustices perpetrated in America today. That's a pretty inescapable conclusion to my mind. But it is not the only injustice by far.

I give nothing but kudos to all the pro-lifers (and there are many) who are seriously striving to life out a consistent ethic of life. However, we need to take it further. It may be that there are a few people whose God-given mission is to focus on the issue of abortion and not to worry so much about economic justice issues. There might also be a few people whose mission is to the poor, and who aren't supposed to be doing so much directly on the abortion issue. To risk a smiting from God, however, it is nobody's God-given mission to ignore any facet of justice and avoid its implication for their lives. If we really want to give people a solid and inescapable picture of what a converted world could look like, it means we've got to go further. We've got to seek justice in everything we do, including the perhaps-uncomfortable economic justice of giving not only to the church but to charitable organizations. Abortion is bad, but we need to be pro-life, not merely anti-abortion; it's time we defied the world to define us. We need to show our current culture of injustice what the world could look like if we chose to care about each other, sperm to worm.

Pursuit of a Good God means nothing less.

So That's One Sheep...

A theological story. I should note that this was conceived during a conversation with Mike Schmitz under the influence of a Chesterton conference and is not, is not, is not an attack on Calvinism. It is a story which attempts to use Calvinist doctrines, both older and newer, as a mode of exploration for other theological ideas. There has been one innovation, or renovation, made to the Calvinist doctrines, and this has been made so that I might avoid the story being an actual attack on Calvinism rather than an attack on something much more vile.

That said, though in some ways this story may attack, and some ways defend, Calvinism, it should be taken that it is largely neutral on the subject, or intended to be, while I am largely against the subject, but more in its content than in its intentions or reminders. If as the Catholics claim, Calvinism really is a sort of heresy, it has as much to teach us as any other heresy, and more than a good many of them. Here's the story. Comments are welcome.

So That's One Sheep...

There were once two Calvinists. Each knew his doctrine quite well—what it was at least, and between them they could get to it from the Scriptures. It happens that they attended the same church—Jerusalem Church, in a small nonexistent town in the northwest. In this town most persons found themselves Calvinists, Catholics, or Calvinists who really were Catholics (excepting their hope in the perseverance of the saints.)

Now we must note that the proper start of our tale is the day of judgment, on which the two were brought in to give accounts of themselves. They did not know why, but it seemed God's good pleasure that they be brought in together. The first stepped forward. He was sad, wasted; a piece of modern art composed entirely of skin and bones. He looked at once hopeless and repentant, and barely made eye contact with the Judge as he spoke. “Sir. It is with great regret that I inform you that I am almost certainly damned. I know what Your teaching is—that those who are not among the elect shall have no experiences of conversion, that they shall not be affected whatsoever by taking communion, or by their baptism.

“I know for a fact, then, that I am not among the elect, not among the predestinate. I have always felt rushes of emotion whenever old friends and family came to visit me, and always felt inflamed with passion when I saw the ugliest bee resting on the prettiest flowers. But I have never felt anything or had any experience in receiving the bread and juice, and sensed nothing at my baptism. And indeed, even when I came to believe that Jesus Christ was Lord of my Life, I...I felt nothing.

“If Your hands are not truly bound by these laws You laid down, I should ask you to have mercy on me, though I should certainly not deserve it and have no right to expect it.”

The Judge nodded somberly and then turned to face the other man, who had aged well. He looked peaceful, at least mostly, and well-dressed, the opposite in physical health of the other. The Judge motioned for the other Calvinist to speak. “Sir,” he said, “It is with joy that I can stand before you in the hope of rising again. Like the other man I know Your teachings. I can recall with what rush of joy I came to believe in Jesus Christ, and with what passion I found myself dunked in the river, three times in a row. I can recall how when I first took the bread and juice I felt not damned, but elect, and felt then and there assured that I would be a persevering saint, because I had realized I was a sinner.

“So I ask You, O Lord, to please have mercy on this sinner as well, though I also have no right to expect it and, certainly, do not deserve it.”

The Judge again nodded somberly, the same curious nod as before. He looked back and forth between the two and then made a motion with his fingers—what terrible fingers!--And in walked Gabriel.

Gabriel was many-winged, and quite incomprehensible to the two men. He was, as they knew, a messenger, to a poor woman who had been the container for the Lord, and now he was to be the most terrible messenger of all.

Gabriel looked at the two men, his many eyes making contact with each of them at once, disorienting them over and over as he spoke. He turned first to the well-aged man. “I have some bad news. The first is that you will not be entering Heaven—well, not right now, anyway. You see, you in your assured Elect-ness neglected to do much of anything at all for the church, except sing on the worship team from time to time, and serve communion once a month. This might seem like a lot, but how much time did you really spend seeking the Truth, and seeking to live it out on days besides Sundays, and in particular to bring the Truth to the poor and unfortunate among you? Pardon the potential pun, but who in hell do you think you are to avoid such tasks? Your Pastor did not use such lofty language, but he continually told you to search the Scriptures for the truth or falsity of his words, preached painfully from the Book of James about the persecuting rich, and was always exhorting the congregation to practice what was being preached. You did this to some degree, but you almost always neglected, neglected, neglected throughout the week to serve God in what you did. Or need I remind you of the countless female secretaries and coworkers whose backsides were carefully examined, or the countless homeless people outside of your office building who were not only ignored financially, but also ignored when they simply wanted to say 'good morning'? As you did unto the least of these!

“Yes, your sins are many, and like this other man's they should under a less merciful God disqualify you from entry into the Promised Land. But if anything disqualifies you it is the overarching sin, that you, ultimately, did not seek to love and serve the Lord.”

The Elect man gulped. “There is good news, however. Your queer group of people called Calvinists was quite wrong about Purgatory. It does exist. You see there is a special subclass of persons in the class of the Elect which God chooses, by His own good pleasure, to send to a special sub-heaven, above-hell sort of place where they will have to rely on the prayers and mercy of others—all predestined for their benefit, of course. And when their time there is complete they may join the other Elect in heaven. But their placement in this purgatory is, really, just for the further appreciation of those already in heaven of the fact that it was God's good pleasure to predestine them to be elect, and to serve God, not just to be Elect.”

Upon this note a trap-door opened underneath the Elect man, and he disappeared rather rapidly into it. Then Gabriel turned to face the damned man. “As for you...You are saved, though you are quite an idiot.”

The face of skin and bones brightened.

“You served the Lord your God with all the heart, soul and mind and strength you could possibly muster, though you believed He had condemned you to an eternity in hell. But you served anyway—you served the poor, you served the rich, you served businessmen who were trying to push past you to get a breakfast burrito at some city stand. You were there visiting Him in prison, handing him breakfast on the sidewalk, not by your own works but because from the beginning you were elect. You served them all as if they were The Lord, and served them well—you took the Pastor's mandate to love literally (the best sort of literalist). And so you have done well, good and faithful servant. Would you like to know how many souls you seem to have helped along the way, in all? There were around three-hundred that you led more directly, and around thirty-thousand that you made straight paths into.

“As I said you were, however, an idiot. You somehow took this notion of conversion experience to mean conversion feeling. I fully admit that we up in heaven have been trying to get the message to Christians for years that they ought to stop talking about conversion experiences and start talking about conversion history, to avoid this nasty and awful overtone of emotion, but you still could've done your part, and realized that perhaps even though you felt nothing on taking communion, nothing on baptism, and nothing on realization that Jesus Christ was Lord, it was still a realization. That loving and serving the Lord day in and day out as you did, though you had no hope of Resurrection yourself, must have still meant that you were in some sense saved, in some sense converted—which as we of course know could not happen unless you were called. Therefore, unfortunately, you did propagate the untruth of the 'conversion experience' wherever you went even as you propagated the Truth of Christ, and propagate the untrue notion that you yourself were unsaved, though you were. But it seems it is God's good pleasure to strike this particular blemish out of you without the pain of being put into that special class of Elect to which the Elect man now belongs. Congratulations, and well done, good and faithful servant!”

“Thank you, s--” At this point a similar trap-door to that below the elect man sprung open, but it seemed that in this case the floor-boards had a spring, not a drop, below them, and the springing-board propelled the mess of skin and bones upward.

Gabriel turned to the Judge, exasperated. “I swear—well, I don't swear, but I do wonder, Father. Will they ever get it, really?”

Three Positions on Salvation

First let me thank Victor Reppert for the excellent link to the first explanation of Exclusivism, Inclusivism and Pluralism, the one with the questions I've used here. I should also thank Ben Schwarting for being the guy who wrote those excellent questions.

Warning: this is a large post. Please don't let that turn you off from reading it, but don't necessarily expect to finish it in one sitting.

The explanation is here, and features several interesting questions for each viewpoint. An alternative explanation of the topics being discussed can be found at Theological Studies. Both pages discuss the three basic positions on salvation as they pertain to Christianity.

If you don't want to hit any of those links (I'd recommend at least the first one; the second gives a better sense of where and how the theological/philosophical currents run) here's the basic rundown:

Exclusivism in a particular religion is the position that said religion's truth is superior to that of all others, and must be arrived at explicitly in order for 'salvation' (I use the word that is prevalent in Christian circles, thus it is quotation-marked, in recognition of the fact that transcendence or the successful seeking of Ultimate Reality is not thought of as 'salvation' in all religions) to take place.

Inclusivism is the position that said religion's truth is superior to that of all others, but does not have to be accepted explicitly in order for 'salvation' to take place.

Pluralism is the position that said religion is but one of many paths that are equal, or roughly equal, in terms of potential for 'salvation' and the successful seeking of an Ultimate Reality.

So a Christian exclusivist and inclusivist both believe that Jesus is a necessity for salvation; they disagree as to the exact mode of reception required on the part of an individual. A Christian pluralist believes that Jesus is not actually a necessity for salvation. Obviously, the beliefs and sentiments of particular individuals are a tad too fluid to fit neatly into these three categories, but they are helpful in providing a basic characterization of a given individual or religious group's stances.

So I will now attempt to answer the questions found on the first link for each viewpoint. Note that these questions assume we are working theologically, within Christianity; therefore they are discussed, well, with respect to Christ!

Exclusivism
For several years of my life I was in this camp, and so I will probably be second-most-faithful in answering questions about exclusivism. I hope that A. Scott takes the opportunity to answer these questions as well, and possibly let me know if I have misrepresented the Calvinist viewpoint at any turn.

1) What about those who have not heard the gospel of Christ?

The book of Romans says that all persons are without excuse for failing to give glory to God (1:20-21) and in my understanding, in exclusivist circles the common interpretation of this passage is that the truths necessary for salvation have all been made available to all men; logically it seems that this must extend to, at the very least, the truth of a savior who died for one's sins. I had a conversation once with an exclusivist who stipulated that for someone who had not heard explicitly of Christ to be saved, they would have to know that someone had died for them. And he seemed to believe the truth was self-evident.

Following that, the best answer is that God's justice is above our own, God's ways above our own; therefore, even if the answer is “they are damned,” it is not for us to question; there is a higher justice at work that we do not know.

2) What about those who have wanted to believe, longed for faith, greatly sought after God, and yet have never received the light, inward peace, or assurance of forgiveness?

I find the qualifier of inward peace kind of odd for Christianity. However, the 'light'--which I assume means the ability to believe—does pose an interesting question. The best answer I can give is that they ought to believe to the best of their ability.

Now for circles where a conversion experience is considered essential for someone to be considered 'saved,' the picture gets a little more complicated. In Calvinism or other circles accepting foreordination, one might simply have to answer that the person is not among the elect. Though I stress that election and the predestinate are by no means concepts exclusive to Calvinism, this response does still bring with it all the problems associated with Calvinism. In Methodism or other circles accepting free will, the answer may be a similarly awkward "well, I guess you're not saved, then," and brings all the equivalent problems for free-will standpoints.

Note that I would hold that if one's particular brand of exclusivism does not hold to necessity of a conversion experience or 'enlightening' experience, one is free to believe that a will to believe can stand in for belief even when one's ability to maintain a faith is severely limited.

3) Does the doctrine that ‘salvation is only possible through Jesus Christ’ stay consistent with the belief that God wants all to be saved?

Yes, absolutely. There is nothing inconsistent about these two beliefs held concurrently. There's not much of an answer to this question except to say that I don't really see where the supposed inconsistency is. The Great Commission, which tells us to go out and “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:16-20, New American Bible, italics mine), seems the natural biblical countertext for such a claim of inconsistency.

4) Is it true that in the end times, God’s grace will triumph completely and all will come to a faith in Christ?

That's a good question, but I'm not sure if it's relevant to exclusivism alone. In terms of eschatology, especially if speaking as best I can on exclusivists' behalf, I am sort of forced to answer yes; it seems impossible for God to truly win in any manner even close to that described in the Revelation (yes, it's singular!), there's going to have to be a big reveal that Christ is truly God. This leaves us either to the askwardness of people coming to a knowledge of God when it is too late for them to be saved (a problem faced by most Christian soteriology, I would venture), or the awkwardness of having turned a faithful logical implication of Revelation into universal reconciliation. So this really creates problems for exclusivists and inclusivists alike.

5) Is it true that Christ must be acknowledged as Lord and Savior in this life, or otherwise those that don’t will be condemned to Hell? If yes, then how can you reconcile that with the biblical view of a God of love?

In traditional exclusivism, to say the least, it is my understanding that the answer for part (a) is yes. The answer for part (b) runs along the same lines as the answer to question 1, in particular the paragraph beginning with “Following that...”, with the addition that just as we do not know as well as God what justice means, we will not know as well as God what is meant by love.

Inclusivism
I will be able to answer these questions most effectively, as my current position is a somewhat exclusive inclusivism (though it is based in part on things not common to all exclusivists.)

1) What about those who do not cling to any faith? If they lead a good life, are they saved through the ‘unknown Christ’ as well?

See the answer to question two.

Regarding viewpoints not mine, I would find it difficult to conceive someone who I would not say is in any sense seeking the Ultimate Reality even though they are striving to live the 'good life.'

2) Where are the boundaries? What determines a religion that ‘saves’, and one which does not? Or should we just look at elements within each faith? If so, which elements?

For my personal view, these two questions are sort of the same, because I guess I don't place the definition of what it means to be an anonymous Christian on whether the person has been raised in the correct religion; rather I look at it in terms of the individual's faith. Have they accepted what of the truth has been revealed to them, or at least put themselves on the road to doing so? Are they truly seeking the truth, such that if missionaries (and I mean good missionaries, mind you) came, they would be open to the message? Leading a good life plays into things insofar as good works play into any Christian's salvation: they are to say the least a sign of the inner workings of the heart even from the perspective of faith alone; thus the individual in question might not lead a perfect life, and in certain respects (for not all the moral code of Christianity is equally intuitive) more excusable for a non-Christian than a Christian, much moreso a non-Christian who has not been exposed to the fullness of the Truth. So in my view, I suppose the thing depends primarily on openness to God. Now for those who "do not cling to any faith" as the question asks, it would work similarly, as a function of the openness of their hearts to God.

3) What is the importance of missionaries if people can be saved through other faiths?

The answer to this is twofold. First, the Great Commission commands that we make disciples of all nations. It seems to be a fairly clear commandment, and commandments from the Incarnate Logos are pretty hard to ignore. So that's the first response.

The second response comes from my personal reasoning on the matter. We have two options, A and B. (In both of these responses, since the question works on "if people can be saved through other faiths," I am assuming inclusivism.) In option A, Ted is saved in the afterlife because he meets whatever criterion he must meet under exclusivism, even though he does not believe explicitly in Jesus Christ. But his understanding of the truth, even his ability to live fully as intended by the Divine, is hindered in this life. In option B, Joe is saved in the afterlife because he meets explicit criterion that would satisfy even a staunch exclusivist (explicit acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.) But in this case Ted has access, at least more ready access if not more access, to the fullness of truth and the full experience of the Divine. In other words, it's a case of earthly searching (however joyful it might be) and heavenly salvation versus earthly salvation and heavenly salvation. What is the greatest good for Ted?

Of course it's option B! If we can bring him Jesus now, we ought to do so!

There also may be persons who might not meet the inclusivist criteria for salvation and have never heard of Jesus. The role of a missionary in their lives might be so vital as to be used by God to change a soul's course from the path to hell to the path to heaven, in whole or even in part. In other words, missionaries still fill a massive need with respect to those souls that may not have been ultra-inclined to seek the Divine in the first place.

The importance of missionaries is to take the commandment of the Great Commission seriously, and bring people to Jesus, whether that means bringing them to Jesus sooner or bringing them to Jesus period.

Pluralism

This is easily going to be the hardest one for me to cover, as it's not a perspective I've ever really held, at least not in full and for very long. I kind of wish I could be one at times; I feel like it would make religion easier to embrace, in a sense.

1) What about faiths which have no place for a god, such as Advaitin Hinduism, or Therevada Buddhism – how do they lead to God?

All religions reflect the same Ultimate Reality; they simply reflect it differently. So there's no real difficulty in saying a given religion 'leads to God' because it's a reflection thereof. Therefore even in non-theistic religions or religions not including a personal God, there are still ideals set forth and paths to follow that lead the person closer to the Divine ethically, and more in tune with the Divine as it is expressed in themselves and others.

2) Is it possible to find salvation through something which is not true, even though it seems to satisfy its followers?

On this earth, it's not necessarily possible to find salvation proper on this earth, through things that are not true--but from a pluralist perspective it's not that it isn't true; it's just one more subjective interpretation of the same truth, a great Ineffability that we do not in this life know directly--even though some religions interpret it personally and others impersonally, it is still the same reality interpreted. Therefore in a sense all religions become true and all also become false; they all reflect the Truth, but they all reflect it falsely. So it is possible to find salvation through something which is not true; else we've gone straight from universal reconciliation to universal damnation (which I, speaking in these parentheses as a non-pluralist, would be forced to admit isn't totally unjust!). But this seems to eliminate part of the point of pluralism, which is to reconcile God's desire for salvation for all with the fact of many different religions and cultures, and many different individuals who seem to have no real control over the early formations of their religious beliefs.

3) Is a pluralist a Christian, or just a God-believer?

It depends on how you define Christian. Here I am working, as I have implied, from John Hick's idea of pluralism, which advocates in a sense the idea that all religions are simply cultural reflections of the same Ulimate Reality. So pluralist definitely believes in God, or at least in some Ultimate Reality that humanity is striving for. But the pluralist also believes that in their search, they themselves must follow Jesus--that the path for Christians is to take up one's cross and follow. So I would say a pluralist can indeed be a Christian, but only if their understanding of their religion includes following Jesus. Note that I am not claiming a pluralist is an orthodox Christian; I don't really buy that so much. But I do think there's a sense in which they can still be following Jesus.

4) Does the bible have any relevance to a pluralist? Is biblical truth only relevant for those who believe in that faith, and other faiths have other truths?

Everyone's truth is relevant to everyone's faith--we need to look at all the ways in which the Ultimate Reality is interpreted throughout the world and come to the best possible conclusions as to what the truest reflection ultimately is. (Pun intended.) It seems as though the basic truths that can be gathered this way are ethical; but what to do when the ethics of one faith run up against the ethics of another? I suppose the only real answer is to talk it out and try and figure out what is in the best interest of service to the Ultimate Reality, and argue for one's own faith only when one truly believes is in this best interest.

Conclusion
Whoohoo. That was a monster of a post. I know it took me like, three weeks since I've told some of you, maybe more like a month and a half, but there it is. Three questionnaires about sin and salvation answered from the perspectives of three different approaches in soteriology, to the best of my ability. All three have varying sub-perspectives, and I'm inviting the other people who might read this to comment and offer some ideas about what perspectives they take on the issue of salvation; I'm particularly interested in seeing people who consider themselves to fall into one of these camps and take a perspective different from the one I assumed when working from these camps; I am especially interested in other inclusivists who do not take inclusivism to be the same that I take it.