Showing posts with label reflection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reflection. Show all posts
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Cylinders and Crosses
The experience of God's massive and overwhelming nature is best found, for me, on sunny days or black nights. I'm not sure anything captures the beauty of the Creator any better than seeing His creation bathed in the light of His great lantern, and realizing that He is yet still bigger, yet still more shining. Or that anything captures His scope, His power and might, as well as staring into the void of space, and realizing that He is yet bigger, more massive, more infinite than the universe itself. When I apprehend the beautiful view of a landscape in the sun, or the void of space at night, I come closest to what I might call a healthy fear of God--"be still and know that I am God"--and that this God could crush me, that this God is more eldritch and big than the whole organism of the Earth and more consuming than the void, but that yet this God wants to know and to love me.
I don't understand.
Of course I can spend all the time I like chasing experiences that teach me the attributes of God by their massive yet massively imperfect analogy. But though nature comes close, there are, still, places and times in my life God can be found in yet more direct fashion. I speak, at least in part, of moments in time spent kneeling before and metal cylinders or crosses, housing something that looks like bread.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Waiting for the Clouds to Move
I went to a park near my house today to finish a Marilynne Robinson essay, “Imagination and Community,” from her so-far-excellent When I Was a Child I Read Books. And I will talk more on that book later; it's setting me down some interesting intellectual paths.
At any rate this park is basically a small forest, and I knew it was likely to be a bit cold for me in the shade I took a light jacket. I found a clearing with some play equipment, and thought at first I might settle on a swing and do some reading. This proved a bit uncomfortable, so I sat on the sawdust and leaned against the ladder of some monkey bars. I had noticed where the sun was likely to be headed, based on where it was rising, and I wanted to see if the clearing would get sunnier as the day went on.
While I was reading Robinson I did find some of my efforts to enjoy the sun being thwarted by clouds. Now by the standards of certain predictions of those persons known as “weather-people” the weather was actually quite nice, and it was by my standards, too. The sun-breaks came and went, and watching them on the way in was a fun distraction from the essay. I also found myself checking periodically to watch the progress of the sunlight when it came out in fuller force, and was pleased to find my prediction was right.
A startling moment: I discovered there was a spider crawling on my leg. How it got there without my noticing I don't know. I made a startled movement and a noise, and the spider jumped off. I watched my new friend for a second to see if it would crawl away, and it did. For a second after I was paranoid, but it did not return. It reminds me of an incident at University of Portland in which a ladybug had hid in my backpack and traveled with me across the campus.
At some point I noticed that the clouds were moving rather quickly, and that in a few minutes the sun would be out in full force for at least a few minutes. I overestimated, I think, both the time that would take and the time the sun would be in the pure blue sky, but I noticed something more interesting in the meantime.
I could see the sun through the clouds. At the first I wondered if maybe the ball I was seeing was actually the moon, but it wasn't. It was just the sun, obscured enough by the clouds that it was vaguely safe to stare. Based on the slight weirdness that followed in my eyes, I don't recommend it often, but it was an interesting experience. It reminded me of the description of the Miracle of the Sun, though if I understand correctly, people saw the sun at Fatima not through the clouds but in the open sky.
It also reminded me of an incident in the Old Testament, which a Christian blogger had brought to my attention a good few months ago now, in which God covered his face so that Abraham would not die from seeing it.
And once that sun did finally emerge from the clouds, it did emerge about as dangerous to my eyes as anything short of God could be. A notion about the sun, from C.S. Lewis: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Or another, from Chesterton: “The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.”
I have remarked to one or two of my fellow people in the last month or so that I feel it is misguided for people to say that the world is beautiful when what they mean is that it looks beautiful. For the world to be beautiful it must be beautiful when there is rain as well as when there is sun. But perhaps there is still value in the fact that the world often looks more beautiful in the sun than in the rain. Sometimes it takes the sun to reveal the beauty of the world. Sometimes it takes God to help us see the beauty in people, to reveal their nature as it really is. The sun is really God's delegate for nature (as the moon is the sun's delegate at night), to do the duties for the natural world that God does for people.
Really, in this light (pun!), sun-worship is an understandable mistake. There is some analogy between the Divine and the sun. Just as the clouds made the sun 'safe' to see, so there is a 'fog' or a covering that makes the Divine safe for now, as we see through the glass darkly. Perhaps at that time when we can see the Divine without dying, we will be able to see the sun clearly, in the open blue, without wrecking our eyes. And we will see all, both nature and persons, as they were meant to be and in their proper lights.
For now, when I get up and leave those moments of seeing the sun through the clouds, and failing to see the sun in the clear blue, maybe the best I can do is thank the sun for shining, and God for assigning it the task.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Practice
I know a guy named Luke who told me the other day about a routine he had had once, of buying flowers for a girlfriend. It wasn't necessarily a thing he did just to mark special occasions, or to gain favor with her or make up for something he'd done wrong.
It was something he just did sometimes when he happened to be in the right place, and being there reminded him. Not exactly a liturgical ritual, but routine enough that it was a practice for him.
Now of course some men do buy flowers to get out of trouble or with lesser motivations, but not this guy. And of course, lacking a lot of utilitarian value, they're not going to be every girl's thing. But somehow I doubt their instrumental value was the point for Luke, or for the girlfriend in question. Obviously if she was not the type for flowers as a romantic gesture, a different routine would have been more appropriate. But the point is, it was something he just did sometimes, to show his affections.
I know this isn't just a thing exclusive to romantic endeavors for him--I know it extends to his spiritual practice as well, and many of us can recall the time he took a bunch of us to a very fancy restaurant on his birthday. And paid. Of course, he's not the only person on the right track in these departments, but his is the example I'm sharing today.
I know at the least that I could use more of that initiative to just do things sometimes with no substantial reason or motivator except to show others that we care. For that reason I found that particular tidbit to be pretty awesome.
It was something he just did sometimes when he happened to be in the right place, and being there reminded him. Not exactly a liturgical ritual, but routine enough that it was a practice for him.
Now of course some men do buy flowers to get out of trouble or with lesser motivations, but not this guy. And of course, lacking a lot of utilitarian value, they're not going to be every girl's thing. But somehow I doubt their instrumental value was the point for Luke, or for the girlfriend in question. Obviously if she was not the type for flowers as a romantic gesture, a different routine would have been more appropriate. But the point is, it was something he just did sometimes, to show his affections.
I know this isn't just a thing exclusive to romantic endeavors for him--I know it extends to his spiritual practice as well, and many of us can recall the time he took a bunch of us to a very fancy restaurant on his birthday. And paid. Of course, he's not the only person on the right track in these departments, but his is the example I'm sharing today.
I know at the least that I could use more of that initiative to just do things sometimes with no substantial reason or motivator except to show others that we care. For that reason I found that particular tidbit to be pretty awesome.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Love is Free as in Speech
The following post is mostly cribbed from notes I was taking while unfolding and expounding some ideas to my friend Nick at King Burrito one day. As such, where the word "Nick!" is interjected, it indicates a thought I feel I owe primarily to him, though he had opportunities to more subtly influence all of this as it was being written. So thanks in particular to him for taking part in this interesting process. Another friend of mine, whose blog I would link if he had one, made an appearance here, though it's in the form of a hopefully-verbatim quotation from several months ago.
An analogy from the open-source software community:
A friend from work once claimed to me that "free love" was an oxymoron. I asked why. One of the examples from his response ran roughly this way:
Firstly, was there a subtle equation of physical affections with love, or even eros particularly, here?
NICK! Physical affection [including sexual contact] is an act of will.
In other words, physical affections may or may not represent/signify love and/or eros particularly, and even if they do, neither love nor eros reduce to physical expression.
Secondly, my friend's explanation of his statement seems to rest on the idea that "free" means free as in beer, not free as in speech. But the use of the phrase "free love" indicates that it rests at least partly on the definition of "free" as in speech.
NICK! The hippie definition of "free love" is freedom from the social and natural law constraints, as well as [often] from commitment to the other.
The truth the hippies may have sought, I believe, was a love free of societal pressure, fully committed to the other.
Now to my work-friend's example: Insofar as it becomes fornication and is thus enslaved to sinful nature, that gift is not freely given in love and is not free. But if it's not free, it's not free for those reasons, not because someone happened to pay for dinner beforehand. In this case, he was probably thinking of a date between unmarried persons, so the love is almost certainly not-free if I took his intent to be that sexual intercourse was taking place.
In a discussion tangentially related to this one I was analyzing with a friend a similar, though more innocuous example, and I was trying to figure out what made the love free. His answer:
LUKE! "Because it's a gift."
There you have it, folks:
We hit upon something subtle here that does not appear in my notes: We have now made a definite identification that love is an act and not merely a possession, abstract or concrete. It is a thing that can be given or mediated in the form of gifts to another.
Nick gave the better phrasing, or at least the better half of it, when thinking of the gifts we give to signify love:
NICK! The gift is free, but the gift costs something to produce.
All gifts truly given in love will cost something. They will cost one's time (basically all of them), means or craft or money (a meal, a trinket), one's personal bubble (physical displays of affection), or a share in one's inner thoughts and life (perhaps especially letters or simply sitting and talking.) The gift is free but the gift costs something. Inevitably gifts truly given in love will build up to be gifts that cost you your guise of invulnerability, your walls.
Truly free love will have walls, but they will be walls to keep out sin and slavery, and not merely walls around oneself to maintain invulnerability. And this free love will allow the persons engaged therein to tear town their walls to each other.
What I've said here was prompted mostly by reflections on love in a more romantic sense free, though a good deal of it obviously applies to love in all its forms and I (along with the persons prominently quoted to help define what the freedom is in love) take our presuppositions from the Christian tradition of Love and its meanings therein. Note the cost of Love:
Two closing questions. I don't have an adequate answer for either and thoughts are welcome here, or on Facebook, or wherever:
If God is Love as part of His nature, is God's love free as in speech?
Is there a cost to receiving love from other humans? From God? If so, what is that cost?
An analogy from the open-source software community:
Free as in speech, libre: free from becoming someone's exclusive intellectual property. Used here we mean that a thing is free as in speech insofar as it is freely given, uncoerced.
Free as in beer, gratis: free from a cost, costing little or nothing.Open-source software is often both libre and gratis, but depending on the software and possibly on the license it can be free as in speech, that is, having its source code free from becoming someone's particular copyright possession, without always being given away at no cost.
A friend from work once claimed to me that "free love" was an oxymoron. I asked why. One of the examples from his response ran roughly this way:
If you pay for dinner on a date, and later on things become romantic in a sexual sense, is that love free?There were two problems, however, with what I perceived to be the presuppositions at work.
Firstly, was there a subtle equation of physical affections with love, or even eros particularly, here?
NICK! Physical affection [including sexual contact] is an act of will.
In other words, physical affections may or may not represent/signify love and/or eros particularly, and even if they do, neither love nor eros reduce to physical expression.
Secondly, my friend's explanation of his statement seems to rest on the idea that "free" means free as in beer, not free as in speech. But the use of the phrase "free love" indicates that it rests at least partly on the definition of "free" as in speech.
NICK! The hippie definition of "free love" is freedom from the social and natural law constraints, as well as [often] from commitment to the other.
The truth the hippies may have sought, I believe, was a love free of societal pressure, fully committed to the other.
Now to my work-friend's example: Insofar as it becomes fornication and is thus enslaved to sinful nature, that gift is not freely given in love and is not free. But if it's not free, it's not free for those reasons, not because someone happened to pay for dinner beforehand. In this case, he was probably thinking of a date between unmarried persons, so the love is almost certainly not-free if I took his intent to be that sexual intercourse was taking place.
In a discussion tangentially related to this one I was analyzing with a friend a similar, though more innocuous example, and I was trying to figure out what made the love free. His answer:
LUKE! "Because it's a gift."
There you have it, folks:
Love is libre: Freely given.
Love is not gratis: There is a cost.Freedom of choice in an act, then, does not imply no cost to the act.
We hit upon something subtle here that does not appear in my notes: We have now made a definite identification that love is an act and not merely a possession, abstract or concrete. It is a thing that can be given or mediated in the form of gifts to another.
Nick gave the better phrasing, or at least the better half of it, when thinking of the gifts we give to signify love:
NICK! The gift is free, but the gift costs something to produce.
All gifts truly given in love will cost something. They will cost one's time (basically all of them), means or craft or money (a meal, a trinket), one's personal bubble (physical displays of affection), or a share in one's inner thoughts and life (perhaps especially letters or simply sitting and talking.) The gift is free but the gift costs something. Inevitably gifts truly given in love will build up to be gifts that cost you your guise of invulnerability, your walls.
Truly free love will have walls, but they will be walls to keep out sin and slavery, and not merely walls around oneself to maintain invulnerability. And this free love will allow the persons engaged therein to tear town their walls to each other.
What I've said here was prompted mostly by reflections on love in a more romantic sense free, though a good deal of it obviously applies to love in all its forms and I (along with the persons prominently quoted to help define what the freedom is in love) take our presuppositions from the Christian tradition of Love and its meanings therein. Note the cost of Love:
 |
| image from wikimedia commons |
If God is Love as part of His nature, is God's love free as in speech?
Is there a cost to receiving love from other humans? From God? If so, what is that cost?
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Pray Always
You ever see those Facebook groups like "Pray for person X" or "Pray over event Y"?
You've seen them. Usually they come as a response to something we deem worthy of our prayer. And almost always, certainly, the thing in question is worthy of prayer.
If you're like me, you've kind of stopped joining those groups. Mostly because we're neurotic and feel that we're going to somehow guilt ourselves into never leaving them and winding up being "that guy" who's in 5,000 groups (or more recently, "likes" 5,000 pages) on Facebook. And I don't want to be that guy.
But it also seems like these groups are missing the point, or rather, that they paint an incomplete picture of things. I would submit that while it is always good to pray and make our intentions known to God, it is also good to make sure that we really pray without ceasing, to establish a rhythm of prayer which doesn't depend on tragedy or special blessing.
I'm terrible at this, by the way. My closest thing to a daily rhythm is a daily decade of Rosary and a "God, help me to be better tomorrow" before I go to sleep.
Anyone else have thoughts on establishing this rhythm? Anyone have ideas on how to do it other than brute force?
You've seen them. Usually they come as a response to something we deem worthy of our prayer. And almost always, certainly, the thing in question is worthy of prayer.
If you're like me, you've kind of stopped joining those groups. Mostly because we're neurotic and feel that we're going to somehow guilt ourselves into never leaving them and winding up being "that guy" who's in 5,000 groups (or more recently, "likes" 5,000 pages) on Facebook. And I don't want to be that guy.
But it also seems like these groups are missing the point, or rather, that they paint an incomplete picture of things. I would submit that while it is always good to pray and make our intentions known to God, it is also good to make sure that we really pray without ceasing, to establish a rhythm of prayer which doesn't depend on tragedy or special blessing.
I'm terrible at this, by the way. My closest thing to a daily rhythm is a daily decade of Rosary and a "God, help me to be better tomorrow" before I go to sleep.
Anyone else have thoughts on establishing this rhythm? Anyone have ideas on how to do it other than brute force?
Monday, September 20, 2010
Spiritual Warfare Metaphors?
I'm not sure how I feel about them. I'm not sure the phrase "prayer warrior" really applies to anyone who isn't at least a person who's had some real experiences praying against more concrete manifestations of dark forces. I feel like for most of us the effects aren't that direct. (This is not to be taken to mean they are not present, but let us note that war has many indirect effects on non-soldiers.) I believe in the unfortunate pervasiveness of dark forces but at the same time the ways they work, "war" seems too violent an image for the resulting conflict. Of course, the whole thing is a war, but I think of angels and exorcists as being more the warriors. I think most of us are more like homeland manufacturers or field support. So yeah, we're fighting a spiritual war. Nothing metaphorical about that. But I'm not sure we're quite as on the front lines as we sometimes might think.
Thoughts, anyone?
Thoughts, anyone?
Thursday, July 8, 2010
The Red and the Blue...
Should be treated as apolitical. Basically this is a thought I've had laying around since my Senior year of college, at least. Now it comes out! Hopefully the graphs do all the talking so I won't have to. The case I didn't visualize, where the faith community is off on its own tangent, and the red and black lines converge, is definitely in some "bad" category. Where would you put it?
More graph-themed posts will be coming!
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
In the Meantime
These are some thoughts that started about a week ago when a TV show I was watching reminded me I was single. That was not a good day.
I don't know what my vocation is. Either it's marriage or it's some sort of consecrated single life (Holy Orders in that case, probably.) Anyway, I realized that day that I wasn't happy being single. I'm not sure why that is. Could be because I'm called to marriage, or it could be that I'm so afraid of turning into this guy* that I can't stop watching myself whenever I make a new friend of the female persuasion. Maybe I'm called to the Priesthood, but I'm really in denial (some of my reasoning for discerning away from the clerical state doesn't quite seem to hold up, to me.) Some days (not today especially) it's enough to make me want God to just slam one door shut, and open the other one wide. Just some kind of obvious sign. That'd be great.
Sometime, when I find and fulfill my vocation, I have a feeling that dealing with the fact of sexuality is going to get a lot easier. Because then I'll have a state I can accept, and live with; no more nebulous single-hood.
It'll come in God's time. In the meantime, please pray that I would be less neurotic when I meet women, and know when to relax and when to be vigilant. (Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility was a huge help in the way of a philosophical framework for living; book recommendations on the subject are good if you can think of any.) But if nothing else, prayer for discernment--in the immediate and in the vocational sense.
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* If this is your first XKCD comic, you might not want to browse the site. Sometimes it's a little less spiritual and a lot more offensive than that one. But that comic itself should be fine.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
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
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
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Plantinga's Advice for Christian Philosophers
Alvin Plantinga gives some killer advice to potential Christian philosophers in this essay.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Omniscience, Identity and Christian Rock
Sometimes there's an awesome expression of a theological truth to be found in my sometimes cheesy and somewhat angsty library of Christian rock. Take Falling Up's "Flights," for example. This song's chorus makes for an amazing expression of the truths of action and identity found in God as well as the inescapable nature and omniscience of God. Much more eloquent than I think I ever expected to hear when I got this album way back in 2007 or whenever. I got the lyrics from here, with one by-ear correction, but I honestly can't endorse whatever ads they put on the left. Especially if whatever you see is like what I saw. Lyrics for "Flights" run:
They search, They light
This place a face of the fearless
To wait the night
It's calm but you're starting to hear this
It moves so fast, stopped hearts but holding on faster
Come back, like that, and you know that
Chorus
You will find
That I'm everywhere you go
And I'm all the places you will not be
You will find
That I'm everywhere you go
And I'm all the things that you want to be
It leaves this light
This sparkles broken inside you
I swear it hides
This siren's moving it's way through
The race we hear
The fall of the wind and the whispers
The take, so clear, and you know that
Chorus
Constantly moving your heart is just wasting away
Endlessly waiting this life is just slipping away
Chorus
They search, They light
This place a face of the fearless
To wait the night
It's calm but you're starting to hear this
It moves so fast, stopped hearts but holding on faster
Come back, like that, and you know that
Chorus
You will find
That I'm everywhere you go
And I'm all the places you will not be
You will find
That I'm everywhere you go
And I'm all the things that you want to be
It leaves this light
This sparkles broken inside you
I swear it hides
This siren's moving it's way through
The race we hear
The fall of the wind and the whispers
The take, so clear, and you know that
Chorus
Constantly moving your heart is just wasting away
Endlessly waiting this life is just slipping away
Chorus
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Games With God
Hello friends, it's been a long time since I've written much of anything on this blog. Lots of good and bad things have happened. As it may have been clear earlier, I decided almost 10 months ago to begin a year of vows, most of which just involved typical abstinence (no alcohol, no girls, no smoking) and a fast every Tuesday. I recently decided to end the vows, however, for fear that they were doing more harm than good.
At the outset of the vows, I was trying to keep myself on a straight path by avoiding things that I had seen which cause problems in my life. Thus, I decided to make decisions that would destroy my party life altogether. This was not a bad decision, but I failed to see the root of the problem. The problem will never be that I drink alcohol, or that I have something to smoke, or that I am attracted to women. The problem is that I don't see God as being real enough in my life.
Over years of heavy involvement in churches, I am starting to see vows, rules, and expectations as being very limiting and very dangerous. This weekend I suddenly realized that while I was trying to fend off the "dangers of this world" with my vows, I had failed to conquer the sin in my heart. I realized that the human heart wants to know God, but we want to know God on our own terms. We want to play games. We want to follow rules. We would rather assume these games, these pointless little games, that we think will earn points with Him.
I found myself tallying up points when I did something unselfish, fed a homeless person, restrained my tongue, witnessed to someone, went to church, encouraged a friend, etc.
My actions were plenty good, but my heart somehow was not. I was earning points for myself instead of living this way simply to be obedient. I somehow gained the notion that I could earn something good by living good.
I decided to shed it all off recently. I need to discover what faith really means at this point. God is real. God isn't just this game we're playing. He's not tallying up scores. He's a friend, a savior, a lover, a defender, a father, a brother, and a holy, righteous God who has made it clear time and time again that His desire is to dwell among us. His existence is infinitely more solid than everything that we've ever considered to be reality. How does He feel when instead of actually communicating with Him, we just try and tally points up? How do you think He feels about these silly rules that we try to follow to fit in to Christian culture, when what He really desires is closeness with us and true obedience to His will?
Give it some thought; this is open for discussion.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Vows
As I turned 20 this year, I made vows to last the entire year. I also have created a new blog to journal my year with respect to the vows. Since it is related to theology, I thought that it would be a reasonable idea to link to it here.
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