Category: Roman Catholicism

Change, certainty and salvation

Orthodoxy often gets the back-handed compliment of complaints that it hasn’t changed. For every such compliment, I’m grateful.

But Chris Castaldo pays us the same compliment intentionally:

The notion that Rome doesn’t modify authoritative teaching such as the articles and canons of Trent is, with all due respect, out of step with reality. If you were looking for an example of a church that hasn’t changed for over a millennium, you’ll want to consider Eastern Orthodox Churches, not Rome.

It’s kind of odd after that affirmation to see Castaldo tear into Rome, instead of lovingly caressing Orthodoxy. But I guess Rome’s the 800 pound gorilla against which all western Evangelicals must contend – especially if one was raised Catholic, rather as I tend to obsess a bit about the subspecie of Evangelicalism in which I was instructed beginning in boarding school.

But it’s still puzzling. Castaldo works in a pretty smart setting: Wheaton College and formerly College Church of Wheaton, with both of which I’m pretty familiar. Why doesn’t it occur to him to question the magisterial Reformation not having turned Eastward? Why does he accept (as I assume he does) Evangelicalism’s break with the Magisterial Reformation during and after the First and Second Great Awakenings? (Maybe if I had followed his blog over time, I’d find that he has questioned all this and still come out where he is.)

But he does a good job of arguing that Rome changes. Really. It sounds to me as if Rome is nowhere to go if you want stable, clear doctrine, P.R. to the contrary notwithstanding.

On the one hand, for instance, you’ve got extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, but then it’s a matter of disputed and changing interpretation just who is extra Ecclesiam.

You have a purportedly infallible Magisterium, but nobody to interpret what the Magisterium truly teaches, or even whether Pope so-and-so was speaking ex cathedra when he uttered this or that. And in this election season, I’d be remiss not to note that liberal Catholics cite Catholic social teaching on the preferential option for the poor to justify voting for a feticidal maniac while conservative Catholics insist that voting for feticidal maniacs is intrinsically evil, whereas the best approach to helping the poor is a matter of prudential judgments. (It’s not my fight, but I give the edge to the conservatives there, in case my scrupulously neutral contrast left you wondering.)

That doesn’t sound to me like much of an improvement over an infallible Bible with no infallible interpreter. Infallibility – of Bible or of Magisterium – is a nice dogmatic theory, but not much practical use, it seems. (Calvinists have the same tap-dancing problem. When one of The Elect apostasizes, it just goes to prove he wasn’t really Elect. Some “eternal security,” huh?)

Good form seems to dictate that I now pronounce that you should come to Orthodoxy for stable, clear doctrine. But I won’t. “Stable” we’ve got down pat. “Clear,” not so much. Or so it seems to me.

But I don’t think the faith is about certainty about everything. What’s certainty got to do with union with God? Devils know the right factoids about God, for goodness sake.

Lack of certainty about some things doesn’t mean I’m confused about what matters. I know what I should do this morning first thing when I get up: thank God for another day to repent as my feet hit the floor, say my morning prayers and read today’s epistle reading. The morning prayers are pretty much universal; the Bible reading’s there because I’ve decided that’s when I’ll do it daily (if no other time). I know what I should do at mealtimes: more prayers. I know what I should do at bedtime. Still more prayers. Seven times a day would be good, actually. “Without ceasing” better still. And repentance, not pride, through it all. (I’m lousy at living this out. I’ll never be saved by my own effort.)

Saturday night? Vespers. Sunday morning? Matins and Liturgy. The texts are set. The music is sober, in whatever musical tradition it’s done. It’s a privilege to be obligated as a Reader (the lowest level of Clergy) to do these services.  They form me; they shape my soul.

The Creed? Definitely. It keeps me away from cliffs over which souls have been plunging for 2000 years. But it doesn’t tell me exactly where inside the protective fence I should be. It doesn’t tell me a lot of things about which I might feel idle curiosity. It wasn’t meant to be a Procrustean bed. And that’s okay.

So, what’s the conclusion? I’m not sure. I’ve only been Orthodox 15 years this month, and I had 49 years of bad habits to break. They’re not all broken yet. I’ve noticed for about 14.9 years that the Church isn’t pumping me full of right answers to rattle off to any question or objection, just like all the other ideologues on the block. I sometimes long for greater certainty, but then I’m ashamed of the pride that feels entitled to know instead of trusting.

I may be selling certainty and clarity short. But it seems to me that much as Abraham was told “get thee up into a land I shall show thee,” we walk by faith, not by the sight of a detailed roadmap with reservations staked out each night along the way. It that scandalizes you, and if I’m wrong, then I pray you’ll stumble onto someone who’ll set the record straight.

That someone would be in an Orthodox Church, by the way.

Reformation Day thoughts

Today is Reformation Day. In 5 years, there presumably will be a huge shindig for the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses.

Some people take this very seriously, as do I (it’s hard to understand America without it), but some are invested in it so much as to take it very, very seriously.

In the “very seriously” camp is Russell Saltzman, “dean of the Great Plains Mission District of the North American Lutheran Church, an online homilist for the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary, and author of The Pastor’s Page and Other Small Essays.” How he took it seriously is the subject of a recent essay:

The post in question was called “Why Can’t Lutherans Take Catholic Communion?” which would seem to be self-explanatory. Nevertheless, Reverend Saltzman explains how he, a Lutheran, came to receive Holy Communion in a Catholic church. (Hint: It required an archbishop.) He goes on to lament that, while Catholics are free in most cases to receive the sacrament in Lutheran churches, Lutherans are still barred from receiving in Catholic churches.

I read the same Saltzman essay Strange Herring (who’s in the “very, very seriously” camp) read, and had some of the same reactions. But since I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying member of the Lutheran party, I did not take time to do the take-down Strange Herring presented, from which the preceding block quote is taken.

I particularly like his quote of “Mary,” who commented on Saltzman’s essay:

Lutherans are welcome to take Communion on the same terms as everyone else. Make your profession of faith at the Easter Vigil and be received.

If you think your differences from us are too big for that, they are too big for you to receive.

The eventuality of Saltzman’s way of thinking – that no serious differences remain between Lutheran belief and Roman Catholic belief – if one takes schism as seriously as the Church always did until the centrifugal force of sola scriptura required turning it into a virtue, is what the late Richard John Neuhaus did 22 years ago: return to Rome.

My take on the Reformation is “Why, oh why, didn’t Luther & Co. return to the Church from which Rome is in schism?”

Evangelicals & Contraception

[I’ve encountered a few things worth digging into a bit, and have been left with too little time for collections. I’ve not foresworn them, though.]

The Spring 2012 Human Life Review opens with 21st-Century Evangelicals Revisit Contraception and Abortion.

You need to realize that the Review is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. That’s just a fact. The Founder was Catholic, his Catholic family carries on the work, most contributors are Catholic (the regulars on the masthead are 4 Catholics, 1 Orthodox, 1 Episcopalian, and 1 Jewish atheist) – and frankly, almost all of the really rigorous prolife thought has been Catholic during my lifetime at least. Thank God for them.

Add that Evangelicalism is decentralized in the extreme, and changes, chameleon-like, to remain “relevant” and I was skeptical that the piece could say much. But it’s one of the great marketing coups of our time that Evangelicals think they’re united, and have largely succeeded in getting people to identify their peculiar sensibility as “Christianity” rather than as a subset or sect. And since there are a lot of folks with that sensibility, if you want a political movement, it will generally be good to enlist them.

I was right about the article not measuring up:

While the evidence is largely anecdotal, there appears to have been an increase over the past two decades in the number of Evangelicals who are reconsidering their support of contraception as they seek to develop a more consistent pro-life witness.

“Anecdotal” is a near necessity, I suppose, as it would be hard to do a study of Evangelicals that wasn’t methodologically dubious.

But the article did pull up some interesting history, parts of which have delighted the “progressives” who aren’t religiously illiterate (think Slacktivist, for instance). I’m going to summarize, with my own personal observations italicized):

  • The Reformers joined Rome (as far back as Augustine, pre-schism but proto-western in his thought) in their condemnation of Onanism – which is about the best one can do at gauging what their view of contraception would have been.
  • Evangelicals (at least as the author views them – consider that caveat as applying to each subsequent occurrence of the term and its cognates) were among the earliest and fiercest opponents of birth control in the late 19th Century. This came as news to me.
  • Anthony Comstock was Evangelical, not Catholic. This, too, came as news to me.
  • Opposition to birth control was generally seen as a reformist and heroic cause.
  • After Comstock’s death, his nemesis Margaret Sanger became ascendant, and the Episcopalians broke millennia of Christian tradition in 1930 by a timid endorsement of contraception for those who can’t remain abstinent, so long as they adhere to Christian principles – principles that the endorsement itself was ambiguating. Soon, “most Protestant groups came to accept the use of modern contraceptives as a matter of Biblically allowable freedom of conscience” (Wikipedia).
  • After World War II, worries about overpopulation became pandemic.
  • By 1950, arch-fundamentalist Dr. Bob Jones Sr., of Bob Jones University, was demanding that newlywed aspiring dorm parents promise to practice birth control if they got the position.
  • By 1973, many Evangelicals viewed Roe v. Wade as a blow for religious liberty. The Southern Baptist Convention was particularly equivocal. (I was then unequivocally Evangelical, and was vaguely uneasy about pro-abortion clergy – none of them Evangelical, in my experience – playing Harriet Tubman to “enslaved” pregnant women. But I was not activated until 1980.)
  • Beginning in late 1979 or so, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop enlisted Evangelicals in the anti-abortion cause with their film and book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? I was one of those enlisted.
  • Evangelicals, however, were still very friendly to contraception.
  • By hanging out with Catholic pro-lifers, some Evangelicals anecdotally are reconsidering contraception, and one of the niche Evangelical markets is “the Quiverfull movement.” But the leaders he cites in support (all three listed here, with a fourth) are generally fringe figures in Evangelicalism – serious Calvinists, in my experience, aren’t entirely certain whether they remain “Evangelical.” 

I have always, since my earliest days of enlistment in the pro-life cause, thought the Bible case against abortion, if all we had was Bible, was one that Evangelicals would never buy if an argument of equal strength told them to do something they found uncongenial. But then, with Bible only, I doubt that Evangelicals would believe in the Holy Trinity or have a remotely correct Christology. They owe a very large unacknowledged debt to the Church that preceded them, and that they typically think is quite corrupt and paganized. Sigh.

But the Church has always opposed abortion, and I’ve come to appreciate the strength of theological arguments (in addition to things I learned in biology class) that are not narrowly Biblical.

In theory, at least, Evangelicals don’t like theological arguments of that sort, so I don’t know how much staying power their renewed opposition to contraception and abortion will show.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.