How does a Catholic respond to, "Are you saved"?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I was minding my own business last week. A perfect stranger came up and asked me, “Are you saved?” I was taught by Sr. Mary Marian my first grade teacher long ago that public discussion of my spiritual life was the terrible sin of presumption and if I boasted about my personal spiritual merits they would all vanish in a puff of diabolical smoke and I would most likely go to hell for the sin of pride and besides you don’t know if you are saved until you have unpacked your luggage in the master bedroom of your celestial mansion on a street of gold in the New Jerusalem, and you had better pack lightly anyway because if by some slim chance you make it to heaven, you’ll still have to schlepp that thing through eons and ages of roasting in purgatory. As a life-long Catholic, how should I have responded to the perfect stranger’s question “Am I saved?”

Yours sincerely, 

Ms. Alma Perdida

Dear Alma,

I have no idea how you should have answered the perfect stranger and are you sure the stranger was perfect?  Kidding aside, let us rephrase the question. I cannot answer for the state of your soul, but I hope that you and all Catholics would be able to answer that question in the affirmative, at least as we Catholics understand salvation.

When an evangelical Protestant says, “I am saved,” the Calvinist doctrine of the perseverance of the saints is often implicit in that statement. Jean (John) Calvin, was a young French lawyer who became the leading light of the Protestant Reformation from 1553 on, Fr. Martin Luther having died in 1546. Much of what Calvin taught can be summarized in the word “TULIP.” Total Depravity( Nothing good is left in humanity after the fall of Adam.) Unconditional Election (Saved or damned by God. Nothing you can do about it.) Limited Atonement ( Jesus died only for the chosen, not for the damned.) Irresistible Grace (One has no freedom to resist God’s overwhelming grace.) Perseverance of the Saints (Once Saved -- Always Saved).

When Protestant Evangelicals ask, “Are you saved?” They usually include this last part of the TULIP (Perseverance of the Saints, once saved -- always saved).  This first question will often be introduced with another question “ If you die tonight, do you know where you will spend eternity?”  If you say” Well, not really,” they will counter with “How would you like to know that if you die tonight that you will go to heaven?” to which you respond, “Of course I would!” They will then lead you in something called the Sinner’s Prayer which includes the words “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” It’s a fine prayer. I’ve said it often, but they will then inform you that you are now saved and no matter what happens, you are going to heaven. They will then move on to the next available sinner because you are now saved. 

This may seem a little preposterous to a Biblically literate Catholic who recalls the Lord’s words “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” and “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.” (Matt. 25:41,42) It certainly seems that Jesus was of the opinion that reciting a prayer would not get you into heaven.

We Catholics have no problem with the Sinner’s Prayer, but we look at it as a beginning, not an end, and we would hope that having asked for forgiveness, the newly repentant sinner would also go to the Sacrament of Penance, in conformity with the words of St. James. (Confess your sins to one another. James 5:16) We believe that God never takes your freedom away and that if, once having known the Lord,  you deny Him as did Judas, you are perfectly free to burn in hell, that is if you want to. 

“No, No, No!” I can hear some people shouting. “You are  saved by faith not works! Faith alone. Grace alone. Scripture alone! Salvation doesn’t depend on works! You can’t earn it!!!”   

Well, I suppose the Catholic would answer, “If God gives me grace and I throw it in the garbage can, the Lord might just say, ‘Suit yourself.” Admittedly you can’t earn heaven, but you can accept it or refuse it. That seems to be the sense of Scripture. When a non Catholic evangelical  says, “Once saved always saved! All you have to do is ask Jesus into your heart to save you”  I always tell them, "Golly, I hope you’re right, because if you‘re right, every Catholic who says the Rosary is going to heaven because the sinner’s prayer is part of the Rosary."

Our Blessed Mother, that great Catholic Evangelist, taught us to say the Sinner’s Prayer when she appeared at Fatima “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy. Amen.”  We say it five times every time we say the Rosary.” On the other hand if “once saved always saved” theology is wrong, there are untold millions of people roasting in hell because they thought that reciting a formula was enough to save them. 

I really hope they are right and we Catholics are wrong. We have nothing to lose, but if they are wrong there are lots of people going who think they are saved who haven’t ever fed the poor or given drink to the thirsty or anything else that Jesus expects. They aren’t saved, but are in fact preparing themselves for an unending barbecue in which they will be an hors d’oeuvre. 

We Catholics would say that we are saved by accepting the grace of conversion. If we allow the Lord to be Lord in our life and to change what we do and who we are, then, even if the work is not perfect, unlike your perfect stranger, God will finish the work in us in, you guessed it, PURGATORY!!! (which is what I believe the Bible means, in part, by judgment.)   

Wait a minute, the Bible says clearly “Know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 2:16) So, we may ask what are works of the law that don’t save us? Surely you are familiar with that rollicking page turner, the Halakhic Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QMTT)? Who doesn’t like to curl up by a roaring fire with a good Dead Sea Scroll? I quote:

 “And also concerning flowing liquids: we say that in these there is no purity. Even flowing liquids cannot separate unclean from clean because the moisture of flowing liquids and their containers is the same moisture. These are.... some of the precepts (“ma’ase” which also means “works”) of the law which we think are good for you and for your people...”

Let me clarify. From your reading of the book of Leviticus, Chapter 11, verse 30 you know that “The gecko, the monitor lizard, the wall lizard, the skink and the chameleon are unclean. If one of them falls into a clay pot, everything in it will be unclean, and you must break the pot.” Let us assume that a skink falls into a clay pot and dies, and you, unwittingly pour water from a clay pitcher into the unclean clay pot, does the uncleanness of the clay pot leap up the stream of water and make the clay pitcher unclean so that it too must be broken? The Loons who wrote this particular scroll said “Of course!” The Pharisees said “Certainly not!” Jesus and the ex-Pharisee, Saul/Paul of Tarsus said “Get a life!” 

This discussion should let you in on the theological bedlam that was tearing up the Jewish world at the time of the New Testament. When St. Paul said that one is not saved by works of the law, it is pretty clear that he meant not to worry any more about skinks falling into clay pots. From the rest of his writing, and Jesus said, it is pretty clear that sin is out and generosity is in. 

There was never a question among the first Christians that virtue and generosity and obedience to the universal laws of God are integral to one’s salvation. That idea didn’t arrive in the world until one thousand five hundred years later, when a German priest (like this author, at least ethnically) comes along and decides that not being saved by works of the law means you don’t have to act morally to go to heaven. I quote him: “No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day.” (From a letter of Luther to Melancthon, LW 48:281) Remember the Lutheran/Calvinist doctrine of “once saved always saved?” I suspect that Jesus and Paul would have been horrified by Luther’s opinion and still are.

The great appeal of the Evangelical Protestant message is it’s “assurance of salvation.” You say a prayer, and then go home knowing that even if you are running guns to the Hottentots and regularly beating your dry cleaner, you are guaranteed heaven, no questions asked. Again, I hope that it’s true, but having read the Bible a few times, I suspect it isn’t. 

I had a fascinating conversation with a great evangelical theologian a few years ago. Being a veteran of the Pentecostal movement, and still committed to the spirituality of Pentecost, I speak fluent evangelical-ese. Thus I was invited to appear on a Non-Denominational TV show along with my old friend and classmate, Brother Pfleger. My job was principally to explain the meaning of the hats that Catholics were wearing at some grand interment or installation of a bishop. They were very intrigued by the hats and why they came on and off at different times. I digress. 

Well, I was a bit nervous at meeting the great Rev. Doctor Calvin Moody who, in a pre-popish warm up had just been explaining to the TV audience, that, sweetheart though she was, if Mother Theresa was counting on her good works to save her, she was frying in hell. I tired to make nice by mentioning all the Protestant sounding things I could. I even mentioned altar calls I had led. An altar call is the invitation to someone at a revival or prayer meeting to come up to altar to give one’s life to Christ. Protestants don’t have sacrifices, so I can’t figure out why they need altars. Again, I digress. The Reverend Doctor frowned a little and said that at a North Side Non-Denominational Mega Church and Missionary Bible School, they didn’t often have altar calls, lest someone think that by the work of coming up to the altar they might think themselves saved, and thus might have a false assurance of salvation. 

I asked,  “So you can have a false assurance of salvation?” 

The Rev. Doctor said, “Oh, yes, you can have a false assurance of salvation!” 

To which I replied, “So then you can never be entirely assured of your salvation.” 

He said, “Oh, yes you can have complete assurance of salvation.” 

To which I said, “But it could be a false assurance.” 

To which he said, “Yes, indeed. Now you understand.” 

To which I said “I understand completely,” and quietly thanked God I am a Catholic, who can go to confession, do my best to resist sin and trust Jesus. 

So, it seems that even evangelicals don’t quite believe there is a complete assurance of salvation and it would seem that the Lord Jesus and St. Paul didn’t really believe that one is saved by Faith Alone, despite Luther’s correcting them on this point.

So, can a Catholic say “I am saved!” Darn tootin’ a Catholic can say I’m saved, and he can say it with a good deal more assurance than a Calvinist evangelical can. St. Paul wrote “For in hope we have been saved” (Romans 8:24) Let me give you an example. You are walking through the woods. You come into a clearing and find that you are sinking in quicksand. As you are about go under, you hear a rustle in the bushes and out comes someone with express intention of pulling you out. You shout “I’m saved!” Technically you aren’t saved until you are out of the quicksand embracing your savior, but you have the right and even the duty to rejoice in your narrow escape, while you still only see your deliverer. 

You are already saved in hope, if not in fact. He extends his hand to you. That’s grace, a pure gift. You lift you hand to grasp his hand. That’s faith. You are trusting that he will not yank back his hand at the last minute as a cruel joke. That’s exactly what Calvin’s god would do. He would say to some, “I have no intention of pulling you out. I just came to see you die.” Calvin taught that some were made to prove God’s mercy. Others to prove His justice. Hitler was a pussy cat next to Calvin’s god. Hitler could only make his victims suffer for a time, not an eternity, like the fierce god of Calvin.

So we Catholics are saved in hope. We trust Jesus and not some formulaic prayer. We believe that God’s gift of the Holy Spirit can transform our way of life so that even our works are pleasing to God and reflect His own love for humanity. 

The aforementioned evangelist might ask you if you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. How much more personal can you get than eating someone’s flesh and drinking their blood? Every time we go up to the communion rail to receive the Lord, we are giving our life for Him. We are saying in effect, “Just as you are giving me Your very life, Your body, blood, soul and divinity in this sacrament, I, too, swear to lay my life on the altar, to live for You, Lord, and, if need be, to die for You.” 

We have the most intimate and personal relationship with Jesus, the Son of God and the son of Mary. We do not, however, have a private relationship with him. Some people who talk about a personal relationship seem to mean a private relationship with God. They don’t need sacraments or popes or confession. They confess their sins directly to God, forgetting that St. James tells us in the Bible that we should confess our sins to one another. (James 5:16) They needn’t go to a boring church. They can worship God in the beauty of nature on Sunday morning, or perhaps in the beauty of 18 holes of golf, or even in the splendor of the K-Mart because God is not limited to rituals and buildings. They sing that dear old hymn “He walks with me and He talks with me, and he tells me I am His own...” The Catholic version of that hymn is “He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I had better be in church on Sunday morning and make sure I’m there before the opening hymn starts....” Our relationship is personal and shared. We love the Lord and we love His bride, the Church.

So yes, dear Alma, there is nothing wrong with the sinner’s prayer, provided you see it as a beginning and not an end, and you certainly should be grateful to the Lord for having saved you, and you should trust the Lord and pray for the grace of perseverance, but considering the times it is all the more important for 1 billion, 200 million Roman Catholics to be able to share their faith publicly, and to be ready to invite people to meet the Lord.

To be continued……..

Who is in charge when there is no pope? Epilogue

Letter to Sue Quetta, epilogue)

It has been pointed out to me, by people who are paying entirely too much attention, that I promised to explain the Defenestration of Prague but have not yet done so. Remember that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Still, for the sake of the curious I will explain the incident.

There were not one but two Defenestration’s of Prague! The First Defenestration occurred on July 30, 1419. During a religious procession, an angry mob of Hussites (followers of Father Jan Huss, a precursor to Luther and Calvin) stormed the town hall of Prague where they threw a judge, the burgomaster, and thirteen members of the town council out of the window to the pavement below where they were killed by the fall or by the mob of devout religious reformers.

The second Defenestration was the result of the election of Ferdinand of Styria as King of Bohemia. The Protestant Bohemians wanted nothing to do with this devoutly Catholic monarch.  So, when he sent two Catholic representatives to Prague in 1618, the Protestants, in a kind of reminiscence of the good old days, pitched the ambassadors out the castle window (a height of about five or six stories). Amazingly they lived! The Catholics said that angels had softened their fall, thanks to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Protestants said that it was dumb luck that they landed on a pile of manure in the castle courtyard. Are the stories not irreconcilable? After all, grace builds on nature. No matter the reason, the angry Protestants failed to kill the ambassadors of the new Crown Prince Ferdinand, (soon also to be Holy Roman Emperor). They lived, but a lot of other people didn’t. 

The fight soon spread to all of Europe and killed an uncountable number of people. Half of the male population of Germany died, and at least a third of the general German population, perhaps a million people. During the mayhem the Catholic villages of my maternal and paternal families were burned to the ground by the Protestant Elector, the Duke Christian of Braunschweig, home of the yummy delicacy usually called liverwurst. Perhaps that is why, as a boy, I often ate fried liverwurst, much loved in our household. Anyway, Duke Christian certainly fried a number of my ancestors.  The wars of religion raged for thirty years in central Europe, from 1618 to 1648. Simultaneously, the Huguenot and Puritan Wars ravaged France, England, and particularly Ireland, killing thousands possibly millions more. All because a couple of guys got tossed out the window in Prague. Who knew?

It is interesting to think that in the oppressive Catholic lands of Italy and Spain, dominated by medieval superstition and the terrors of the Inquisition, not a single person died as a result of the wars of religion.  In Germany, it may have been one million. In Ireland, it was about 600,000. In France, the Catholics got the upper hand and, rather than slaughter all the Protestants, they forced them to convert or leave. So, I suspect that the French death toll was less than 100,000.  The total death toll of the wars of religion was certainly more than two million. 

The wars finally ended in the German states in 1648 with the peace of Westphalia. Each prince would have the right to determine the religion of those under his authority. This is called “cuius regio, eius religio” (His region, His religion). In other words, “If you live in the town or land I own, you will practice my religion,” said the duke, the count, the baron etc. The principle of freedom of religion ended in Europe with the peace of Westphalia. And the end of religious freedom meant the end of religious conversion which has ultimately resulted in the end of Christian religion in much of Europe. Religious affiliation was no longer a matter of choice, but of good citizenship.  Now it is non existent in many places.

It is easy to find pundits who rail against the Inquisition, but who rails against the disorder and death that resulted from simple and grandly defiant gestures like Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church or the glorious Defenestrations of Prague? These appeal to us as heroic defiance in the defense of liberty. They in fact initiated a new form of government enforced religion and resulted in far more death and oppression than the Inquisition ever could have.  Still, we Americans and our modern imitators love the grand gesture.

I cannot get over the scathing criticism of Pope Benedict’s red shoes. The rumor went out that they were by Prada or Gucci! They were in fact made by a Peruvian shoemaker, by the name of Antonio Arellano, who has a small shop in the neighborhood of the Vatican. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger used to have his old shoes repaired there. When he got a new gig as pope, he revived the custom of the red papal shoes, red being the color worn by popes before the white cassock. He simply steered a little business Antonio’s way. Benedict tried to restore the unity of Catholic history which he called the hermeneutic of continuity. He wanted to remind the world that there had been a Catholic Church long before the Second Vatican Council. The Church grows. It doesn’t change. Its expression is ever new. Although the appearance is different, the truth is eternal. The DNA is always the same, to use a modern analogy.

The world clucked its tongue led by the American media. We Americans felt so vastly superior to the luxury loving pope with the flashy shoes because we buy our shoes at cheap outlet stores, thus being somehow simpler and more noble. Look a little more closely at the red shoes. When his shoes were still black, Joe Ratzinger had his old shoes repaired by an immigrant cobbler. He made them last a little longer. We throw old shoes out and buy new.  When he needed new shoes, decent shoes for a demanding job, he paid about $200 to a worker he knew, a just wage for a decent product. We, in our simplicity, go to the mall and buy $300 sneakers made by slave laborers who get pennies on the dollar if they get anything at all. And we are superior? We are more moral? We are frauds. We are stealing from the poor of the world, but have the gall to criticize a man who pays a fair wage to a free worker. We love the gesture, not the truth.

The pundits of the entertainment world  critique the old men who run the church as they pretend to be philanthropists. In reality, they do no more than let crumbs from their tables fall to the poor and feel noble for doing so. And we are foolish enough to think them sincere. We love the gesture, not the truth. C.S. Lewis in his masterpiece the “Screwtape Letters,” has the demon Screwtape remind his nephew that “the Enemy (God) wants men to be humble, or charitable or to be forgiving. We, the demons want them to feel humble, to feel charitable, to feel forgiving.” 

We moderns don’t believe that something is real if we don’t feel it. A Mother Teresa, or a Joseph Ratzinger, or for that matter, a Christ on Calvary who begged His Heavenly Father to let Him off the hook, have no place in our shallow sentimental culture. Because we love the gesture, not the truth,  Cardinal Ratzinger’s repaired shoes, Mother Teresa’s service in the midst of dryness and the nails in Christ’s hand were no gesture. They were truth.  Our new pope is being lionized by the media for what they perceive as humility. If, heaven forfend, his humility turns out to be more than a gesture, I have no doubt that they will turn on him, and would throw him out a window if they could. The grand gesture has caused more suffering and human misery than can be imagined. 

The truth and only the truth will set you free.

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 11

THE PERENNIAL QUESTION: WHY DID CATHOLICS ADD 7 BOOKS TO THE BIBLE? Part 11

Simple answer: the CATHOLICS added nothing ­─ the truth is that the Protestants took seven books away.

Complicated answer: Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, whom you might know as St. Jerome was born in 347 AD in Slovenia (then called Dalmatia, in the future, now former Yugoslavia. Figure that out.) In 378 he was ordained for the diocese of (Greek speaking) Antioch in Syria. In 382 he went to Rome and started working for Pope Damasus. At the pope’s urging, he decided to update the old Latin version of the Bible into a “more modern, easy to read version in today’s Latin.” (Today being 382 AD) It was called the Vulgate or the “Bible for the Common Man.”

First he translated the Greek New Testament. Then he updated the version of the psalms contained in the Septuagint. (The Septuagint was the widely read Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, completed in Egypt in 132BC. At the time, all Christians accepted the Septuagint as THE Bible.) Jerome went on to translate the rest of the Old Testament from the Hebrew and Aramaic sources of the Septuagint. It turned out to be a project that took years. It contained all the books in the Bible by the first Christians, but there were always questions, so....

Pope Damasus I, St. Jerome’s patron, assembled the first list of books of the Bible at the Council of Rome (382AD). The process continued in North Africa. A series of Synods (meetings of bishops) were held in North Africa beginning in Hippo in 393, and ending with the Council of Carthage(419). The meetings took up the question of what were the inspired books and what were not. There was a basic agreement on the texts, but even then, 400 years after Christ, there was still a need to make a definitive list. The pope and the North African bishops drew up their list from those books then in use by the Church, particularly those read at Mass. Finally, the list was submitted to Pope Boniface (Damasus’ successor) and the other bishops for confirmation. The list is as follows:

“It was also decided that, apart from the Canonical Scriptures, nothing else is to be read in the Church, in the name of divine Scriptures. Canonical Scriptures are therefore the following:… Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, of Kings the four books, of Chronicles the two books, Job, Psalms, of Solomon five books, of the Prophets twelve books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Tobias, Judith, Esther, of Ezdra two books. Of the New Testament: Gospels four, Acts of the Apostles one book, fourteen epistles by Apostle Paul, two by Apostle Peter, three by Apostle John, one by Apostle Jacob (James), one by Apostle Judas, one Book of Revelations by John.

These were the 73 books that St. Jerome translated and called the Latin Vulgate. The Vulgate Bible was the definitive text of Scripture in Europe for 1,130 years. As the Roman Empire collapsed, the Catholic Church maintained what was left of the unity and culture of the Roman Christian world. Europe fractured into a bedlam of languages, a sort of tower of babble, but the Church maintained a common language, a common culture, a common law and a common Bible, the Vulgate, that was both source and guide. The Church insisted that the Latin Vulgate be regarded as the official version, not to hide the Bible from the masses, but to make it available to the whole world. Everyone who could read, read Latin. It was the universal language of literate people. Books were as rare as Elvis sightings and people who could read were not much more common. In order to make the Bible available, it had to be in the closest thing to a common language that the western world then had ─ Latin. Even Constantinople the capital of the Greek speaking East spoke Latin as an official language until 610AD. So the Vulgate and its 73 books were accepted by all Christians as the canon of Scriptures, the big book on the coffee table, the Bible!!! Until.......

Fr. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. Many assume that the Church hid the Bible in an obscure ancient language and that Luther was the first to translate it into the common language. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There were perhaps 17 translations of the Bible into German before Luther. The question was which German? The little town whence came my ancestors had a version of German that is incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t grow up in that particular town. And the rest of us who speak standard German are utterly bewildered by a Bavarian who has had a beer or two. These early German translations were based on the Latin Vulgate, which in turn was based on reliable ancient manuscripts.

Luther may have published in the most standard central German, thereby creating modern high German, and he may have gone to Greek and Hebrew texts, but he went with later, less reliable manuscripts like the Textus Receptus. Jerome was only 300 years after the fact. He had access to the most ancient manuscripts. Luther had no such access.

Still worse, Luther didn’t really translate the Bible. He paraphrased and poeticized it. In John 11:35 we read in Greek “edakrusen ho Iesous” (in English “Jesus wept.”) Luther didn’t translate it that way. He wrote “Und Jesus gingen die Augen über,” “And Jesus' eyes overflowed." Poetic. Lovely. Heartfelt. A Really Bad Translation. Luther claimed he was just expressing things in the way that people really spoke.

Maybe they really spoke that way in 16^th Century central Germany. We Germans love kitsch and schmalz. (German words that mean gaudy and greasy.) We like cute art like Hummels. I own one or two myself. And shmalz? That means we like to lay it on thick. Like butter. Or even goose grease on rye bread. Yum. So Luther gave the folks what he thought they wanted. It was certainly what he wanted.

The most egregious example of his failure to translate is Romans 3:28. Luther translated it “We hold, then, that man is justified without the works of the law but by faith alone.” The word "alone" does not appear in the Biblical text, but Luther insisted that the word "alone" was necessary in German and that was what Paul meant anyway. This German doesn’t need the word and if Paul had intended it he would have written it. Luther both needed it and intended it if his strange and novel theology were going to claim Biblical inspiration. Luther didn’t use the Vulgate in his efforts to translate the Bible, he went straight to the Greek and Hebrew texts then in use. It didn’t occur to him that things might have changed in the course of a thousand years.

He looked at the Masoretic text still used by Jews today and there he found seven books fewer than the Vulgate had. He made the assumption that they weren’t in the Hebrew Bible because they weren’t authentic. It never occurred to Fr. Luther that perhaps those of the House of Israel who did not accept Jesus as Messiah, might have left out books that were very popular with the first Christians. These books were certainly in common use at the time of Christ. In other words, Luther claimed that 16^th century Jews were more inspired than 1^st century Christians. That was just about the last compliment Luther paid the Jews. Luther rejected the Christian Scriptures of 419AD in favor of the Jewish text which was not finalized until around 900AD. Well done Martin! To it he added his own flair for the dramatic and his curious beliefs in faith alone and predestination.

Fr. Luther had a low view of the books of Esther, Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. He called the Epistle of James “an epistle of straw,” “finding little in it that pointed to Christ and His saving work.” He also disliked the book of Revelation, saying that he could “in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.”

During the Protestant Reformation, Luther and his friends experimented with different lists of Bible books. In the end, the New Testament books stayed the same despite Luther’s attempts to downgrade James, Jude, and Revelation. He particularly disliked James. I suspect that the only appearance of the phrase “faith alone” appears in James. “A person is made righteous by works and NOT by faith alone.” (James 2:24) On this point Luther and St. James had differing opinions.

The Old Testament, however, was fair game. There were certain books included in the Septuagint, and thus in the first list of canonical books and the Vulgate, which were not included in the Jewish Bible. Protestants call them the Apocrypha, or hidden books, well named since Luther hid them from the world. He put them in between the Old and New Testaments saying, “These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read."

So there you have it. Luther’s translation of both Testaments was finally printed in 1534, turning seven books of the Old Testament into a footnote so unimportant that Protestantism eventually dropped them altogether. He put disclaimers in the New Testament that warned the reader that James and Revelation probably weren’t inspired. In the book of Revelation we read “For I testify to every man who hears the words of the prophecy of this book that anyone who adds to these things God will add the plagues that are written in this book on to him. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy God shall take away his part out of the book of life.” (Rev. 22:18-19 ) Let’s hope for Fr. Luther’s sake that God doesn’t apply this text to the addition of “alone” to Romans 3:28 or the convenient removal of seven books of the Old Testament.

Next Week, THE BIG MEGILLAH, or ROLLING WITH THE PUNCHES

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 1

Dear Rev. Know it all,

Who did the sons of Adam and Eve marry?

Patiently yours,
Eve Anne Gellikal

Dear Eve,

They married their wives.

Sincerely,
the Rev. Know it all

PS I imagine you would like a more detailed answer than that. This will take some time, and so I have to decide to answer your question with a long harangue of which this is the first installment.

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE. Part 1

Let me begin by quoting my favorite theologian, the Rev. Billy Bob. “God hates method. He loves principle.” Do not misread the preceding. God hates method, not Methodists. God loves Methodists very much. No one can put on a church supper like Methodists.

What is the Rev. Billy Bob trying to say? An example: You go to the Thursday prayer meeting and that Thursday you are in charge of the prayer ministry. You are wearing your favorite bowling shirt, your red feedlot cap and your St. Christopher medal. Before you sit, an afflicted soul who has come for healing prayer with the worst case of athlete’s foot in medical history enters the room. You anoint him with holy water, praying in tongues all the while with the laying on of hands and conclude with three Hail Mary’s. And much to your shock he is instantly healed!

You now know how to heal the sick. You wear your favorite bowling shirt, your red feedlot cap and your St. Christopher medal. You anoint with holy water, praying in tongues with the laying on of hands and conclude with three Hail Mary’s. So you do the same thing next week, now that you have the gift of healing, and nothing happens. The minute you think you’ve got God down to a method He does things a different way. God hates method. He loves principle.

This is the point that St. Paul is trying to make when he talks about works of the law. “...a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ...” Galatians 2:16. There is only one place other than the New Testament in all of ancient literature where the phrase “works of the law” appears. It is in the Dead Sea Scroll 4QMMT: “Miqtsat Ma’asei ha Torah” (“Precepts of the Works of the Law”). It seems to be written by Essenes to Pharisees about ritual purity. In the scroll 4QMMT we read in ruling 16 “Concerning streams of liquid; we have determined that they are not intrinsically pure. Indeed, streams of liquid do not form a barrier between the pure and the impure for the liquid that is in the stream and that in its receptacle become as one liquid.” So there! Take that, you loose and liberal Pharisees!

(What the heck is this guy talking about????)Simply this: If a clay bowl is unclean and you pour water from a clay pitcher into the bowl, the uncleanness leaps up the stream of water and pollutes the pitcher and both must broken! Surely you remember this from you reading of Leviticus? The scroll ends with “Now we have written you some of the works of the law which we determined would be beneficial to you.”

When Paul talks about works of the law, he is saying that we are not saved by this ritual nonsense, but by conversion of heart and mind. 500 years ago Luther decided that Paul was saying that we don’t have to do anything to go to heaven. Paul would have been a bit surprised at that conclusion (Romans 2:24), as would Jesus (Matt7:23) In fact, St. James says that it is clear we are not saved by faith alone, but by works also (James 2:24)

If Luther had understood that the phrase “works of the law” was about ritual purity and not about kindness and mercy, and that Paul simply wanted to explain that these external rituals of kosher law don’t save, he would have spared the world a lot of trouble. It is always intriguing to me that people who talk loudly about dead works and salvation by faith alone constantly try to get people who were baptized as infants by the pouring of water to be re-baptized by a very specific formula as adults and only by immersion. They believe in method, not in principle. Whether they admit it or not they are professing salvation by a work of law.

We want to reduce the Bible to a set of rules. It is a book of principles, the principles of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is not to say that rules are unimportant. On the Contrary! For children, good rules are essential and we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless we are like little children. These rules however, depend on love and trust and a desire to obey the Father who loves us. They are rules that teach the principles of the Kingdom. They are not rules that we can get around, rules that enable us to do as little as possible. They are instructions in the very character of God.

The prayer of the pagan is “God, give me what I want.” the prayer of the Christian is “Lord, teach me your ways.” (Psalm 25:4, 86:11,27,11 and the whole rest of the Bible.) The Bible is not a science text, it is not a history text, it is not a rule book. It has all these things in it, but it is primarily a collection of books that deal with the way God has loved us since the beginning of time.

So here is principle #1 THE BIBLE EXISTS TO TEACH US GOD’S WAY OF DOING THINGS, HIS CHARACTER, HIS PRINCIPLES AND HIS PROMISES.

Next week: the Bible is not a book

But I like "joyful" music at Mass

Dear Rev. Know it all,

What do you mean that Mass has become a kind of hybrid with American Protestantism? Will you ever cheer up? You’ve been listening to that dreary chant so long that it appears to have hardened your brains. Remember as St. Augustine said, “the Christian is an alleluia from head to foot.” The Mass is supposed to be joyful. The Christian is supposed to be joyful. I want music at Mass that makes me joyful and chant just doesn’t fit the bill.

Yours,

Ms. Joy Buzzer

Dear Miss Buzzer,

You sound like you got your theology from the back of a shampoo bottle. “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.” A nice hairdo may involve bubbles and lather, but the Sacrifice of the Mass does not. The joy of the Lord is not exactly the same as the joy the world offers. The joy of the Christian is caused by the nearness of the Lord, and not by how catchy the tune is.

First of all, put things into context. St Augustine may have said it, but when he said alleluia, he was chanting it in Hebrew. Alleluia means “Praise the Lord.” It is Hebrew and it has always been chanted until recent times. The very quote you use makes my point. The word “Hallelujah” was not in the common language. It was retained in the Catholic Liturgy of which St. Augustine was a priest and bishop in order to tie the Christian worship to their Hebrew past. It was kept in a “sacred language” precisely to express the universality of the Church. Remember that “Catholic” is the Greek word for “Universal.” We are members of a universal Church and, while it is appropriate to speak to local culture, we cease to be Catholic by definition when we make the Mass so local as to be unidentifiable. It becomes mine, not ours. I want to be a member of the Church that Jesus founded through the ministry of the Apostles, a Universal Church. Universality, that is Catholicism, means that the Church extended not only through space, but also time. The Church I belong to is part of an unbroken chain of worship.

In the church in the village where my family comes from in the old country, there is a baptismal fount. It is carved from a block of sandstone, and is so worn with time that it is almost impossible to tell what the carvings and decoration on it are. It goes back, I assume to the 1200's when the church was built. When I first saw it and touched it, I realized I was touching something that generations of my ancestors had touched. It was a vehicle by which they had reached through time in order to bring me to Christ and Christ to me. By my Baptism and my participation in the Mass, I was more profoundly united to them than I was even by my genetic and cultural inheritance. Well, I suppose we should throw it out and get a new one, one that made sense, one that has words on it we can read. Don’t you understand that there is a language that speaks more powerfully than words? Just because something isn’t easily decipherable doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be understood. The inheritance of 3,000 or 4,000 years shouldn’t be thrown away just because it leaves me cold. Perhaps the fault is mine, not the fault of the inheritance.

Fr. Martin Luther decided to rewrite the Catholic Mass, to declare that it was not a sacrifice. It simply became a re-enactment of the Lord’s supper, a sort of stage play, aimed at the audience, not the ultimate act of worship. "The cult (i.e. Mass) was formerly meant to render homage to God; henceforth it shall be directed to man in order to console him and enlighten him. Whereas the sacrifice formerly held pride of place, henceforth the most important will be the sermon.” (Luther quoted by Léon Christiani, Du luthéranisme au protestantisme (1910), p. 312)

The course was thus set for the modern world in which the value of a religious service had nothing really to do with the worship of God. Rather it has everything to do with the well being of the participant. It is about me, not about God. In that sense it is the worship of me, not of God. It is modern man distilled. Man, not God, is the measure of all things. Though I may feel just wonderful about the whole service, I have not stepped into the unending stream of history. I have not stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai nor entered Solomon’s Temple. I have not trod Calvary’s holy ground nor drank from the cup which the Savior drank. I have not wept for joy at the empty tomb, nor felt the fire of Pentecost. I’ve been to a Church service and I guess it was okay and now I’m going out to breakfast.

We live in a disposable society. We have plastic plates and plastic forks and plastic shoes and plastic cars and plastic music and on and on. It is all disposable, as are we. We are drowning in a sea of plastic. Give me something made of rock. Give me the Catholic Mass.

Rev. Know-it-all