Read me. Right at the beginning. I'll accept the charge that I was biased from the beginning, in this one sense: If you don't actually live in the intellectual space where you could be wrong in protesting the Catholic Church, you could read every Catholic book known to man, but you didn't truly consider it. Seeking God is a whole self sort of endeavor; if it doesn't scare you, if it doesn't drive you to prayer, then there is something you have left of yourself on the table. Some of you are out there saying, "I looked into it, like you have, and I just didn't reach the same conclusion. Fair enough?!" That'd be fine, if it were true. But some of you never really step out of your paradigm and into the other. Any person who does inevitably gets his pronouns confused; the Catholic Church is a live option. It's a mind that straightforwardly says, "If this were true, what would it mean? What's different? How then do I test this claim? What evidence exists to support it? Is there evidence against the claim? Is there a viable counter-claim to be the Church Christ founded?" (Yes, there is. I'm happy to answer that one for you.) But let's do what Westley suggested, and list our assets and liabilities, shall we? First, if you are a Christian, you are at least hoping in the promise of eternal life in Christ. That's a pretty huge asset. When we all agree that the One we seek is "God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!" believe me, really the whole thing is gravy. All you have to do is figure out why you know that. Sounds simple, but it's slightly more taxing than it appears. God is Love! The main liability? Not knowing something about Him that you need to know. At the risk of stating the obvious, if you actually ask about the Catholic Church, more than likely, you have some kind of problem or question that has prompted the inquiry. Most normal people don't ask such monumental questions for sporting fun. Not everyone has to be an intense, emotional, living, breathing, crisis like I was. But if it didn't matter, you wouldn't ask.
You hear it a lot from people, "Oh, those Catholic converts, especially the ex-Reformed ones,"--they seem to have a momentary bit of uncharity in failing to notice that you're sitting right in front of them--"they have an inordinate desire for certainty." Why, yes! I'll accept that charge as well. You know what we call that? "Communion with God, who is Truth." If you call that "inordinate," or otherwise inappropriate, I have to ask if you've noticed your historical amnesia on this very point. And to be quite frank about it, if you didn't read books that re-packaged skepticism as some glorious treatise on humility and the Creator-creature distinction or some such, you wouldn't give this lunacy another thought. Let's get something straight: A fundamentalist isn't wrong for desiring certainty; a fundamentalist is wrong because he asserts that God is preserving him as a conduit of truth for the rest of us without any evidence. Put it another way: If a guy says he's from the police or the government, the next obvious thing you say--you're thinking it even before you read my words--"I'm gonna need to see some ID." Hitchens said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and he was right, in a sense. Only problem is, he and the other atheists stopped using reason (there, I said it) and so, dismissed the most ready evidence a priori. Of course the truth of God seems like a leap. It's like Vizzini cut the rope, and you still think you can reach the top. David Hume, call your office! Wait, never mind. I digress. The point is, Kant and Descartes are also both lurking, and that's problematic. It's not a very long trip from dogmatic agnosticism necessitated by ecclesial deism and pluralism to actual skepticism and atheism, because that skepticism about reality itself is rooted in the belief that man's conclusions are untrustworthy on account of his nature. If they are committed atheists, we call them "misanthropes," if they are Christians, we call them "Calvinists." With due respect, either way, it all ends up the same. Sooner or later, someone is going to say, "If we're all hapless sinners who have no hope of getting it right, why are we gathering into communities of hapless, hopeless sinners and asserting things we cannot possibly know, given the premise?" If you don't need certainty, you don't have it to say Johnny-Bob is wrong and you are right. Why this isn't obvious, I don't know. One of our problems theologically was, we didn't care enough about our assertions in their particularity to ask from whence they had come. The only reasonable answer in theology is God. Interpretation or hermeneutics in community doesn't amount to anything unless that community is vouchsafed by God. The alternative is fundamentalism or individualism. Those terms mean the same thing.
You hear it a lot from people, "Oh, those Catholic converts, especially the ex-Reformed ones,"--they seem to have a momentary bit of uncharity in failing to notice that you're sitting right in front of them--"they have an inordinate desire for certainty." Why, yes! I'll accept that charge as well. You know what we call that? "Communion with God, who is Truth." If you call that "inordinate," or otherwise inappropriate, I have to ask if you've noticed your historical amnesia on this very point. And to be quite frank about it, if you didn't read books that re-packaged skepticism as some glorious treatise on humility and the Creator-creature distinction or some such, you wouldn't give this lunacy another thought. Let's get something straight: A fundamentalist isn't wrong for desiring certainty; a fundamentalist is wrong because he asserts that God is preserving him as a conduit of truth for the rest of us without any evidence. Put it another way: If a guy says he's from the police or the government, the next obvious thing you say--you're thinking it even before you read my words--"I'm gonna need to see some ID." Hitchens said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and he was right, in a sense. Only problem is, he and the other atheists stopped using reason (there, I said it) and so, dismissed the most ready evidence a priori. Of course the truth of God seems like a leap. It's like Vizzini cut the rope, and you still think you can reach the top. David Hume, call your office! Wait, never mind. I digress. The point is, Kant and Descartes are also both lurking, and that's problematic. It's not a very long trip from dogmatic agnosticism necessitated by ecclesial deism and pluralism to actual skepticism and atheism, because that skepticism about reality itself is rooted in the belief that man's conclusions are untrustworthy on account of his nature. If they are committed atheists, we call them "misanthropes," if they are Christians, we call them "Calvinists." With due respect, either way, it all ends up the same. Sooner or later, someone is going to say, "If we're all hapless sinners who have no hope of getting it right, why are we gathering into communities of hapless, hopeless sinners and asserting things we cannot possibly know, given the premise?" If you don't need certainty, you don't have it to say Johnny-Bob is wrong and you are right. Why this isn't obvious, I don't know. One of our problems theologically was, we didn't care enough about our assertions in their particularity to ask from whence they had come. The only reasonable answer in theology is God. Interpretation or hermeneutics in community doesn't amount to anything unless that community is vouchsafed by God. The alternative is fundamentalism or individualism. Those terms mean the same thing.
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