some thoughts on beaches.

on joining the roman catholic church

“May the words of my mouth
and the meditation of my heart
be pleasing in Your sight,
O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

This is my prayer as I begin this day of seeking God for direction – I’ve come out here, to a hill near Buzzard Hill, in the snow and ice, to pray and fast and to decide whether to join the Catholic church. Why? I have been studying it for the past 9 months, ever since I told Renee that I didn’t think we could get married if I didn’t join the Catholic church. So, one of the primary things I need help in is whether I’ve been on this journey because I want to marry her or whether God is leading me into the church. It’s not as if I’m not in a church, but ever since going to PHC I’ve realized that I need to commit publicly to a body of believers, and I still haven’t done that, even though I’ve been so heavily involved at the Falls Church for the past 2 and a half years. How did I get there? What do I actually believe about church?

My first church was Christian Assembly, a non-denominational charismatic church, founded by Derrel Emmerson in the 70s. That is where I originally learned about Jesus, and that is originally what I thought the church was supposed to look like – informal, led by the Spirit, not formally affiliated with anyone else but willing to work with other churches from time to time. There I came to realize I could have a personal relationship with Christ, that He died to save me from my sins, and He provided the gift of the Holy Spirit to help me live out His commands. But Christian Assembly wasn’t my only source of teaching on life in Christ – both my parents and Bob Jones University featured prominently. My mom grew up Catholic and left the church when she got saved and started going to CA. My dad grew up Presbyterian USA but joined the charismatic fellowship in high school. They are both passionate about following Jesus, and they instilled in me the need for daily quiet times, studying the Bible, memorizing Scripture, prayer, and the absolute necessity of confessing sin and forgiving sin. Bob Jones taught me that there was such a thing as theology, and stressed the importance of obedience to God’s commandments. I think this caused a good deal of confusion in me from early on, because CA was teaching me not to try to be good, and simply accept God’s grace and try to love Him more, while BJU taught how important obedience was – these aren’t conflicting ideas necessarily, but I’ve always felt unsure of what exactly my role in my own salvation was, b/c on the one hand I was supposed to do nothing and on the other hand I was supposed to do a lot.

When I started reading what the Catholic church actually said about salvation, it was the first time I felt like these two “competing” ideas became harmonized. Faith and works together are my response to the grace God poured out on me in sending Christ. I have come to believe that “sola fide” is a faulty view of Scripture, and that Luther developed this doctrine out of context. There are too many passages that speak of how important what we do is in determining what happens after death (Sheep and Goats, Sermon on Mount, Romans 2, James). God saves me by His grace alone, not because of anything I have done, but my response is to believe and obey. You can’t have one without the other, and though I think most Protestants agree, they tend to overemphasize sola fide, leading to confusion.

But I learned many good things from CA and BJU. At CA, I learned that God still speaks through people, and not just in His Word. From BJU, I learned that God’s word is my guide and everything that claims to speak for God ought to conform to His revealed Scriptures. Yet I felt that these two positions could also go to extremes. BJU emphasized the exclusivity of God speaking through the Bible almost to the point that I didn’t feel like I could really hear God’s voice telling me to do or not do something unless those very words were in Scripture, thus severely limiting the personal-ness of my relationship with Him. CA, on the other hand, tended to allow too much liberty for people to speak in prophecy that I often wondered whether it was God speaking or the person coming up with their own ideas. And again I have found that the Catholic church harmonizes these two ideas by teaching both the importance of Scripture and the importance of how God has spoken through His people in the past as a guide for what He is saying today – and the church does believe that God speaks, but they also don’t believe that He will ever contradict what is in Scripture and what He has spoken through Tradition. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it is Protestants who “believe” in “sola Scriptura” who are now finding that Scripture doesn’t teach that homosexuality is a sin, and conservative Protestants argue well against them but could be so much stronger if they showed how Christians have always understood Scripture to mean what is right and wrong. I think Protestants try too hard to re-invent Christianity ever so often as they interpret Scripture anew, with no obligation to listen to the past. I believed that CA was the closest thing to the early church…until I started reading what early church fathers like Ignatius, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Augustine…etc. actually thought about the church, and what they actually did at church. They believed in sacraments – in God pouring out actual, real grace, through physical things. At CA, I remember one sermon where the pastor said that there were no “holy places” anymore (Emmerson said this in Chile), and I instinctively disagreed with him. God works through the stuff of this world, and him saying that made me wonder why we still are fascinated by walking where Jesus walked. Why do we meet in a church? Sure, I concede his point that we aren’t restricted to these “holy places” to worship God, but that combined with the idea that I am merely a vessel led me to think that I was supposed to be a passive funnel of the Holy Spirit, rather than an active participant in being His vessel. That places weren’t important, even though it seemed like they were. But it was more a general impression that my flesh was rotten to the core and in heaven I would have a spiritual body, not a fleshly one – and that since this world was going to pass away, it wasn’t really all that important. One of the most revolutionary ideas I learned during my Fellows year was that though yes, the world will pass away, as we know it, it will be re-made anew – not starting from scratch, but re-formed from our current world, into something glorious. And I will get my body back after death – a new, glorious body, but a body nonetheless. Why? Because what God created is good, and because Christ tied Himself to matter in the incarnation and resurrection. And in studying the Catholic teaching on sacraments, the saints, Mary, etc., I’ve found that far from being relics of Roman paganism, their ideas on these things are essentially rooted in Jesus’ incarnation, taking even further my ideas on eschatology I gained from the Fellows year. Sure, some of these things are still difficult for me to understand and get used to, but knowing that they are intended to be rooted in Christ’s decision to dignify flesh in the incarnation makes me think that I could really learn from them, and that I’m missing the fullness of what Jesus did in becoming man – Christ honored His Father and the apostles, and Protestants imitate Him in doing the same. Well, He honored His mother too – why don’t we do that too?  We’re afraid of idolatry – fair enough. But the church is very clear that Mary should NOT be worshiped, and Catholics who do so are not in obedience to authority. So Mary and the saints are not obstacles any more – rather, they are compelling reasons to join the Catholic church – the same church of St. Francis, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Mother Theresa, and many others I haven’t even heard of.

But what of bad Catholics? Bad popes? To me this is the same as arguing Christianity isn’t true because there are bad Christians. Certainly there are. It is a fallacy to argue against a thing by its abuses.

There’s another compelling thing about the Catholic church that is almost entirely missing in the Protestant tradition, and that is confession of sin. I remember distinctly one time in college, when I had looked at Sports Illustrated Swimsuit online, and went to Dean Wilson, and I wanted some kind of penance, but he told me that wasn’t necessary. Ever since then I have wanted to confess to a Catholic priest. Part of me says – no, you’re forgiven, you’re just operating legalistically in the flesh, but part of me says – if there is temporal punishments, isn’t there temporal retribution? Our legal system is proof of this. And my mom hammered it in to me, rightly so – I wonder if that was a product of her Catholic upbringing. Not just that – it is absolutely Biblical (James 5). And a question from Living Waters still sticks in my mind – when you confess your sins privately to God, how do you know you aren’t just confessing them to yourself? And even though I think confessing to an accountability group is incredibly helpful, I still feel like we don’t know quite what to do with it in that context. It is much more powerful when someone ordained to lead reminds you that you are forgiven.

So I think the last* thing that really attracts me to the Catholic church is their celebration of communion. It is again rooted in the incarnation, and was believed without dispute until Wyclif.  At CA and in my family, we had a very regular and respectful celebration of communion. It was to the point that we would confess to each other our grudges or where we had been wrong before we took it. After going to a Baptist church in college for 3 years, I realized that I really missed having communion every week, and I got frustrated with the Sunday worship because it often seemed superficial. In a conversation with Eric Papetti, I realized that we were missing the one clearly established part of worship commanded by Christ in not having communion, and went with him one Sunday to an Episcopal church where the liturgy was entirely focused on communion. I loved it, and signed up for the Fellows program at an Episcopal church, only to find that their main service only had communion once a month. I have really missed communion, and have really grown to appreciate the Catholic celebration of it, and want to be able to take communion there. It bothered me at first that I couldn’t take communion with them, and I still don’t fully understand the position, but I realize that their position is based on reverence for Christ, and a desire to work towards actual unity in the church, by not minimizing our differences.

A few other thoughts – my thinking on where to go to church was formed at college as I was frustrated by people who would drive great distances out of the community where they were actually living out their faith to go to church. I resolved that I would find the closest orthodox Christian church and go there to involved myself in the community, which is why I chose Pville Baptist. When I heard that the Catholics had a parish system, it resonated with this idea.

Also, apostolic succession is very compelling to me. It seems in accordance with the incarnation that Jesus would choose men to lead his church in successive inheritors of that position. As Steve Garber said, we don’t learn, really learn, by reading a book – we learn by someone showing us how to do it. This is another reason I think “sola Scriptura” is wrong, and that it just makes sense for there to be a Pope and succession of bishops, for all their flaws.

All of these seem like good reasons to me to join the Catholic church. But I was also reminded yesterday by the Joscelynes of two other important questions. One – it’s one thing to be a Catholic, but what will I do as one? The other, will this bring me closer to Christ? – full stop. The first question is a good one, and I still don’t have the answer. I do know that I have always wanted to encourage church unity, and that I have felt called at certain times to call the people who call themselves Christian to repentance. These two parts of me won’t change in the Catholic church, as I have given a little thought already to leading Catholic Bible studies, leading a more contemporary worship service, and doing Catholic mission work. I would certainly like to serve in a Catholic church, and I doubt there would be any problem with me finding an outlet to do that.

The second question gets to the crux of the matter. For some reason, it is harder to answer. The only things I have been able to think are that ever since I started this journey of learning about the Catholic church, it has caused me to search the Bible more deeply and direct me to understand more and more who Jesus really is and what that means for my life. It may be a very simple thing, but for some reason I am drawn to pray in Catholic churches (I remember esp. one time out at ccAdvertising when I found the Catholic church in Herndon and went a few times) more than any other church. All the priests I have met – Fr. Gurnee, Fr. De Celles, and Fr. Hanley – have encouraged me to seek God out. And I believe that Christ is physically present, in a mysterious way, in the bread and wine of communion, and long to experience His physical presence there. It is a significant thing that I believe I can actually be in Christ’s physical presence – that I can have the experience of seeing God in an objective way through communion. It’s not that I don’t believe I could follow Christ in a Protestant church, but it’s that I believe I can be closer to Him in the Catholic church, and that He will one day transform this earthly body of mine into flesh fully sanctified and glorified, and that I can participate in that process but have greater tools to do so through the sacraments of the church.

If all this isn’t God calling me to join the Catholic church, I don’t know what else I would need. Yes, I do believe that I should join the Roman Catholic church.

I guess I have known this for a little bit, but I am a little scared of what it will mean. The Catholic church is very different from what I have grown up in, and I imagine at times it will frustrate me to no end. But just as John Yates’s sermon yesterday focused on Jeremiah buying the field of Anathoth as a step of faith even though it seems crazy, I believe that I need to take this as a step of faith, and trust God with what will happen to all my relationships at the Falls Church…and actually all my relationships. Lord, guide the way.

“O great and powerful God, whose name is the LORD Almighty, great are your purposes and mighty are your deeds. Your eyes are open to all the ways of men; you reward everyone according to his conduct and as his deeds deserve.”

~Jeremiah 32 v. 18-19

lent

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