Preaching the Gospel Unequivocally
Here’s a comment from Steve to our post “Why Was The Cross Necessary?”. I wish to highlight it because he hits upon something that has bothered me in the past, having come to the Catholic Faith from being raised in a Baptist home and having had the Evangelical experience and all that entails. First, here is the comment;
Steve Says:
June 4th, 2010 at 4:52 pmI enjoy reading your posts… so, thanks for keeping your blog up to date.
I have to tell you, though, I was sorely disappointed by Barron’s explanation of the cross. Here was an excellent opportunity for him to present the gospel… but the gospel did not come through.
What must I do to be saved? Not a word. Why should I be grateful for the cross? Not clear.
As a Protestant this kind of presentation only further confirms why I am not Catholic. Even if we could put aside most of our differences it seems, to me, deeply troubling that the gospel does not come through.
Jesus did not die merely to be present in death or to participate in our death. He died as our substitute. He took our penalty on Himself… and it was necessitated by the justice of God. Justice had to be served somehow, and the glory and wonder of the cross is that it was served by Jesus so that if we will come to Him in faith and repentance we need not serve it ourselves.
What I would like to highlight first is Steve’s sense that Father Barron has wasted an opportunity to teach and preach the gospel unequivocally. That is what I would like to comment on and provide more video.
Quite honestly, I noticed this very thing when I became Catholic, before and after. It wasn’t, in my estimation however, a function of the truth of the Catholic faith, so much as it was a manifestation of the state of the Catholic Church in our time. That is to say, I was well aware that there were and are some deep problems with the large, billion strong contingent world wide of people that have been baptized Catholic.
Moreover, there were evidently severe issues of abuse and infidelity among the clergy, and timidity and some fuzzy theology among some of the Bishops. And to cap it off there was the fall-out of the Second Vatican Council, whereby using that council as their springboard, forces of heresy, of modernism and relativism were inside the walls of the Church and doing their utmost to undermine it from within. Combine that with watered down catechesis of children in that period of time and today the Church is in dire need of real renewal.
Indeed, that is one of the central messages that Pope John Paul II and now Benedict XVI have preached whenever possible. Renewal of the Church.
Why didn’t that scare me away? Was I not entering into a sinking ship? Well, by the time I realized the full extent of the problems in the Church I had had a chance to read from the early fathers of the Church, and to have a look at Church history. Ironically enough, part of the impetus for that study came from the very last sermon that my own Baptist father preached. He suggested that that at some point, perhaps 300 years from Pentecost, that the gospel had “lost its edge.” Like many Evangelical Protestants before him and since, he believed that the Church had lost her way and that there were a only few true believers within the bounds of the Catholic Church up until the time of Luther and Calvin, et al.
Being well on my way by then in researching the issues between the Protestants and Catholics, and having more and more recognized the truth of the Catholic position both Scripturally and historically, I had to set out on a mission to discover where it was that the Church went off the rails.
In short, what I found was the truth of the Catholic teaching, and also her authority from Christ to teach it, and her bulwark of the Holy Spirit against error. Along the way I found that the one authority that I had been raised to believe in as that authority, the Scriptures, did not teach Sola Scriptura or Sola Fide, two of the pillars of Protestantism.
And, in the study of Church history I found the great battles against heresy, the councils in the midst of persecution and then interference from Roman emperors that despite adversity had held the Apostle’s teaching and had codified the great doctrines of the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ, etc. that the Protestants had carried with them in large measure even in rebellion against the authority of the Church.
And astonishingly, all of this doctrine and the Scriptures themselves had survived through centuries of great upheaval, of wars, of calamities, of the invasion of Islam, and also notably, through times of great corruption in the Church, among the clergy and on up through to the Pope himself. The lesson I had begun to learn from years ago was that the truth is not changed by the bad actions of its emissaries, or even through the times of great mediocrity and ignorance, among the laity and the clergy.
Today, I find myself in less than a high moral position to be harshly critical of the ministers of Christ’s Church. Certainly, some things are crystal clear, such as the evil of sin, in particular the abuse of children. That we all can unequivocally condemn, praying for the conversion of heart and the reconciliation of the offenders while we make certain that they are brought to account before civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and those ecclesiastical authorities are held to account for the manner in which they follow the Canon Law of the Church which is designed to protect the innocent, not hide the guilty.
But when it comes to the preaching of the gospel, I think that while accepting our own individual responsibility, we can be saddened by an apparently common mediocrity in that endeavor. It should cause us to pray for our priests and ministers, in particular that the Holy Spirit will lay the burden of evangelization on their hearts and motivate them to preach the truth more boldly. Here’s what one Catholic preacher has to say;
“…God wants it! The Holy Spirit is going to make it happen!”
One of the lessons that I did learn from my own father was that when the Holy Spirit moves in renewal (it was called revival among the Evangelicals) the relative talents and abilities of his messengers is irrelevant. It is the Holy Spirit that speaks to the hearts of men in need of conversion. It is the Holy Spirit that convicts them of sin. I find that teaching is precisely the teaching of the Catholic Church as well. And so, while I cannot say that I have been consistent as I should be, it has been for some time the burden of my own heart in prayer that the Holy Spirit will convince and convict people of their sin and start a fire of repentance and renewal among Catholics, a fire that will spread to all around them, such as this world has never seen.
In the meantime, there are those such as Father Barron who have taken up the challenge of evangelizing and have preached the gospel in the way that they have been trained. In his case, the fact that he is a theologian and professor first is apparent in his preaching and teaching. I have found that theologians tend to make the poorest preachers unless they were preachers first. However, in Father Barron’s case we must bear in mind that his first direction is toward those he has come into contact with at the level of higher education. I remember how I was as a philosophy major many years ago and I have no doubt that the relativist and atheist and New Age influences are even more profound in university than they were in my day.
And, we must also realize that the basic catechesis for many of those Father Barron encounters who are ostensibly Catholic was severely less than adequate in many cases. That is documented. Also, as I pointed out in the comments of the post “Why Was the Cross Necessary?”, in the video I posted he was not preaching per se.
Clearly, the gospel of Jesus Christ is for everyone, and although I personally enjoy Father Barron’s insights, I recognize that for the average non-theologian they may raise more questions than they answer. He is orthodox in his teaching as far as I am able to know but as Steve points out, if you are expecting a straight-up old-time gospel you may not get it directly and will likely be disappointed. However, in our most recent post, http://www.whippleshire.com/nsblog/2010/06/06/the-wrath-of-god-freedom-and-the-law/ Father Barron is speaking to a larger conference audience and becomes more of a preacher, at least in style and in the language of the common person.
Here is an example of two sermons from Father Frank Pavone of Priests for life, at two masses (April 6 and 7, 2010) on EWTN during the week after Easter of this year. His preaching is powerful and unequivocal, in my opinion.
Certainly, to some extent, the style of evangelization is related to theology, particularly the theology of justification. But there is no theological reason that Catholic preaching is in its current state. I believe that it is being rediscovered in certain places and will become more evident.
However, back to Steve’s comment. In defense of Father Barron’s commentary:
As I did in the comments of the other post I would once again point out that yes, “justice had to be served somehow” and in fact, if God did nothing at all, justice would be served on us. We would die in sin and pay the eternal penalty. That kind of justice is inescapable in the universe that God created. We could whine about it, we could rail against God because of it, we could declare there is no God, or we could try to please him by good works, but it would be all to no avail.
The only reason there is any escape for us is totally and only because of God’s love for us. There is no other reason. He does not need us in any material way. He is perfect without us. Rather, he wants us, he loves us. Therefore he desires that we do not get what we deserve and therefore he had a plan for our escape from the moment Adam and Eve sinned. And therefore we can see that his justice is not at all like our justice.
Justice? The death of Jesus on the cross was not just punishment for our sin as we count justice. His death was payment for infinitely more sin than we have ever or can ever commit for all generations of mankind. The death of the Son of God on the cross was an outrageous penalty to pay.
EDIT June 7, 2010 - After thinking about this today I have thought of perhaps a better way to express this;
The debt or penalty that we owed is infinitely in excess of what we could pay, but the price that Jesus paid was infinitely in excess of the penalty that we owed.
The real sad little secret of our human rebellion is that while it totally separates us from communion with God (our sin is critical because of the fact that it is sin against God) until and unless we accept God’s plan of reconciliation in Jesus, our sin is so small and petty compared to the majesty of God and our little self-aggrandizement is pitiful in God’s eyes. We should be down on our knees in thanksgiving just for the fact that he did not brush us aside like irritating flies but instead loved us and came to us while we were still in sin, took on our human nature, not just for awhile, but for all time.
Is that not always the way it is with sin? We lose so much to gain so little, and in the end it all looks so petty and small before the great God that created us.
And so again, the penalty Christ paid for our redemption was terribly unjust if we count measure for measure, pound for pound in our own understanding. But to God, who as Father Barron says, hounded us to our darkest places including death, to be with us and reach us and be one of us, all for the purpose of bringing us home to him; the justice of the Cross is God’s justice, filled with his love and mercy, the only reason that we have any escape from our just fate given to us from Adam.
In the midst of the arrogance of mankind in our own time, I think that it is fitting to present the gospel in such a way as to avoid any misconception that somehow God is in our debt so that Christ paid the price. (NOTE: I know that is not what Steve was speaking of when talking about Christ as our substitute. But I have heard that kind of equation misconstrued in such a way as to reverse the onus of debt.) How often have we heard the outcry, “if God cared about us he wouldn’t let this or that happen.” God is not the capricious God of Islam, yet we cannot be presumptuous either. We must take his revelation as he has given it. We must accept his salvation his way through the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ, because it was all freely given. We can have assurance in his promises because it is all grace. But if we take the idea of necessity of payment for sin we cannot transfer that necessity over to God. His “necessity” he imposed upon himself out of love.
Jesus said to Pilate that he was in charge of Jesus’ fate only because Jesus allowed him to be. Jesus freely gave his life. He chose to do so to conquer death so that we could conquer death in him. When we think about that, how can we reduce that to some human mathematical equation of justice and attribute that idea of justice to God? What he did was infinitely more than human justice because he did it out of love and mercy (God’s justice) and he gave us the opportunity to surpass Adam and Eve. In Jesus, fully God and fully man, God took on our nature in order to give us the opportunity to participate in the divine nature. This is the divinization of man that Father Barron mentions, available to those who believe in him and are baptized into him. And for those who object to the expression “divinization”, as some do, perhaps a re-study of the eschatology of St. Paul would help. God didn’t offer us his salvation to say, “there, now you’re saved, don’t bother me anymore.” His whole point in reaching down to us and bringing us up out of sin is to bring us into communion with him, by putting the divine life in us. The Holy Spirit already dwells in us does he not?
That is why I believe that Father Barron’s presentation does actually go to the heart of the matter quite thoroughly.
But I really appreciate Steve’s comment and the opportunity to delve into these issues.