8 thoughts on Roman Catholicism

"Only one way to Life:
 One Faith, deliver'd once for all;
 One holy Band, endow'd with Heaven's high call;
 One earnest, endless strife; 
This is the Church th' Eternal framed of old."

Lyra Apostolica

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Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent

By John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide;

“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.”

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1. God’s project, Christianity, is not to have us probe deeper into what is presently true about ourselves, but finding us dead, God gives us new life. Moreover, just because something makes sense, that doesn’t mean it’s true. 

Why is it so difficult to refute an opposing thinker who is steeped in the logical-rhetorical sense-making of Thomistic thought? I think the reason this might be a nearly impossible task for someone from outside that tradition is that Thomas Aquinas carved meticulously-defined categories within other meticulously-defined categories (ad infinitum) and proved syllogisms within them—something like calculating the physics of an invented world or correcting the grammar of a novelist’s invented language. To counter such proofs would always open oneself up to the accusation of begging the question by assuming a paradigm wherein the categorical definitions are false (i.e., the paradigm of not living in Thomas Aquinas’ skull-sized universe). 

2. Roman Catholics have fallen into a trap that binds faith in God to faith in broken things. I contend rather that faith and its transmission are evidence of salvation, not its causes. Roman Catholic philosophical theologians endeavor to make Truth qua Tradition known over time by spinning webs over the arc of history; they imagine that history progresses toward a final synthesis which will come at the end of this now two millennia-year-old dialectic done in their heads. Roman Catholics demand unity of teaching about practical matters with the implicit belief that we can in our unified doctrine advance upwards to God and the eschaton. In response to this accusation of hegelianism, sometimes Roman Catholic apologists will accuse Protestants of "arbitrary minimalism," and assert that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater (think of Mere Christianity). To my mind, that’s sort of like saying “family first” is too minimalist. I'd argue that it is true that the Trinity is enough; flowing from the Trinity are other facts about our lives in relationship with God.

3. Syncretism of contingent things in creation, though it may be compatible with a vague belief in a transcendent Creator, doesn’t flow from faith in the trinitarian God.

Here’s one Lutheran scholar who converted to Roman Catholicism: “Only in a binding context of doctrine and praxis can new insights emerge, practices be reformed, and church doctrine be articulated or rethought. Without the public established by this binding authority, Christians cannot encounter God’s word anew, not make any new discoveries; without this binding authority everything becomes the object of individual evaluation and assessment. Where everything is arbitrary, however, everything and nothing is ‘new.’ As paradoxical as it may sound, the core church practices and church doctrine, precisely in their binding nature, are essential if the Holy Spirit is to lead the church to perfect truth and teach it new things by perpetually reminding it of Jesus Christ.” (Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, P. 128).

The preceding is the most concise statement of what I understand and reject of Roman Catholicism that I’ve ever read. Reinhard Hutter delivers a perfect example of what I’ve identified as a typical discomfort in Roman Catholics with feeling deeply alone in the world, of being abandoned by an effectively mute creator-god only ever heard about and encountered but not heard from directly or understood—a condition self-treated by having every tincture of spiritual experience distilled in particular cultures, histories and psycho-spiritual endeavors and then defined by the authorities. For them it goes like this: they experience something spiritual, and then have the experience defined for them. But what is God’s “word” good for if it doesn’t effectively communicate anything? Are his words just out there to be encountered and vaguely experienced but not spoken to us? This is how we let syncretism creep into our Tradition.

4. Roman Catholic apologists who insist that all Christians join their ranks stake their claims on what I’d call the ‘enduring institution model’ of history that would portray the Church as an institution essentially unfaltering; they insist so much on the miraculous quality of a corrupt and moribund body that one almost forgets that it’s supposed to be a resurrected, mystical body. Roman Catholics assume that the Protestant churches are together just a leaky ark, the same sort as the Roman one, and they point to the lastingness of their superior vessel. Their principle that the Reformation should finally settle into a Church modeled like the Roman Catholic one begs the question of despairing turbulence in the flow of history. The fact is that the Church has already been scattered across time and space. Roman Catholics frame the life of faithfulness within their church as one of being the hands of God bringing the Kingdom here and now—and that the eschaton is only frustrated by the incompleteness of the task.

5. Paul Tillich averred that Christians ought not place their hope to escape their anxiety—in light of finitude—in ecclesiastical authority. He wrote, “perhaps Catholicism is right in thinking that the religious substance is better preserved in the authoritarian community. But certainly Catholicism is wrong in thinking that Protestantism is to be explained as an attempt of the individual to become the bearer of the religious substance” (https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/bitstream/123456789/33065/1/Paul%20_Tillisch_s_protestant_principle.pdf).

Most Roman Catholic apologists are divisible into two camps: those who work in defense of the institutional Church Militant (traditionalists and conservatives) and those who work to obscure the exclusivity of the institutional Church Militant (cultural Catholics and theological liberals). I find that neither camp preaches Christ crucified except to one of those two ends. Both camps are entirely enthralled or even captured by carnal, temporal, interests for or against the institutional Roman Catholic Church. I’m often bewildered that so many converts to Rome are impressed that an institutional hierarchical structure of the predominant religious community would retain power and influence (i.e., “survive preserved”) for the two thousand years during which people have given it money and power. I’m never the least surprised or amazed that there would be large institutions with Christians that last centuries or even millennia as long as there are Christians with global influence and power.

6. We need to be certain that we're in the Church that Jesus Christ established. When will every believer in every denomination of church find themselves in agreement? When we’ve died and are raised. Death and resurrection are no respecters of denomination; Jesus Christ doesn’t “have beliefs” that “align” with those of any single denomination and on judgement day that will not be his concern—so why is it ours? 1 Corinthians 3:11.

We don’t get to join a band of poor miserable sinners; we join the body of Christ. There’s nothing romantic then about the prospect of blending in with an old grey mass of traditions if the others with us are not in Christ.

The Roman Catholic Church tries to close the gap between what goes on in our souls and minds and those of the apostles with a “development of doctrine” hypothesis (J.H. Cardinal Newman). By their lights, such developments are antecedent to any search for historical discrepancies or changes in the very same Roman Catholic teachings that are taken to be the signposts for a life of wisdom in Christ. In other words, the argument might go like this: “If you want to become wise and to have the mind of the Church, you must become wise with a Roman Catholic mind.” I’d want to ask in return, though, “What necessary truths from Scripture needed development in order that expanded definitions were declared to all (until, that is, the next round of heresies emerges?)” If any necessary truths require development for sufficient understanding, then none have ever had a sufficient understanding of their meaning. Furthermore, we learn more about persons (e.g., God) when they reveal themselves to us and a singular fact about a person doesn't evolve by posing new questions about that person in their absence.

One poignant risk Roman Catholics run is a sort of imagined submission to the authorities about everything and to whatever they say, which actually risks translation to not knowing what one believes. They point their finger at Protestants and say we can't account for the epistemological problem of knowing what writings should be in the canon. “No golden index!” they’ll jeer.

No golden index? We don’t need to look to men to tell us what is believed by the Church—a third party—rather than knowing for ourselves. God gave us Scripture in history just as he came into history himself. How were the apostles to know that Jesus was who he said he was? Golden spectacles to see him through? We can have satisfying explanations for a little while. But we can’t off-load our deepest longings or faith in their eventual fulfillment onto someone else, or onto some collective whole church. To say one believes “what the Church believes,” and to draw confidence from authorities by vicarious understanding, is to have faith that others believe rightly, thereby fashioning a new idol out of old materials.

The Roman Catholics’ idea of Tradition flows from Aquinas’ understanding that faith is in propositions told and heard, rather than being known the way we know by sight (see: https://youtu.be/dCTQok6Th58). There is some truth in this but I believe the content of faith is more than what is described by propositions and that more is passed between believers than propositional knowledge to be believed or disbelieved. Faith is also trust. It is true that faith is in specific content, but I’d like to also hone-in on the fact that it is given directly to each individual believer. Aquinas says that what is given to us, infused, is the habitus of faith which is not itself understanding but is in the will. I say it’s more.

7. Wisdom doesn't increase our salvation; wisdom informs us of being saved. Our salvation is not in becoming wise, even if this is done by God’s transformative work in us. It’s more accurate to say that insight into our relationship to God involves, or accompanies, biblical wisdom. The more conformed we are to biblical wisdom—the more sanctified our reasoning—the more clarity we’ll have about the nature of Wisdom itself and therefore about the nature of God and of our relationship to him as those who are saved. This clarity about God, ourselves, our relationship to God and about what it means to be in the Church, accompanies knowledge of our salvation—as the God of the Bible is the God who saves his Church.

8. All of the sacramentalism and intellectual trappings of Roman Catholicism are grounded in this: that concupiscence was a natural conflict in man and a propensity to sin which was present in Adam and Eve before the fall. That this isn’t so on biblical grounds, is, to me anyway, the obvious defeater.