Click here to view the embedded video.

Credit goes to Insight Scoop where I saw this link from Return To Rome blog. (The blog of Francis Beckwith, former evangelical returned to the Catholic faith)

I don’t wish to mock those Christians who are dispensationalist, even though there is no warrant, either in Tradition or Scripture for their fanciful end times theories, but I have to admit I had a belly laugh at this one.

http://www.mainstreet.com/article/lifestyle/all-dogs-dont-go-heaven-post-rapture-pet-care

Guilt and Temporal Punishment

A core element of the doctrine of purgatory and also of merit and indulgences is the distinction between punishment due to the guilt of sin, and the temporal punishment that may quite likely be a result of that sin.

The Broken Window

Here’s the classic example to illustrate the difference between the two. The young boy is careless with his baseball and breaks a window in his house. When his father comes home he goes to his father contritely and admits his guilt and his father forgives him.

This is where the Protestant usually will end the story.

The Rest of the Story

However, the Catholic understands that the window is still broken and that the father must repair it. He might even ask the boy to do something around the house, perhaps dishes, perhaps rake the lawn, whatever the father feels that the boy is able to do as a reminder that sin has effects, even after forgiveness. If the boy were older and earning some of his own money he might ask for some compensation for the window, perhaps not all of it, depending once more on the finances of the boy and his level of maturity. That is left to the wisdom and benevolence of the father.

Sin Has Consequences

It might be objected that God forgives sin totally and shouldn’t that be enough? With respect to guilt for sin, absolutely. But just think of the case of someone who has abused alcohol or drugs for years. They may well have some serious physical side-effects of their sin. (That’s why people don’t want to call it sin these days.) They may even have some measure of brain damage. Can God forgive them and give them eternal life? Of course. But he may not give them a miracle to repair the damage. That may be something they live with for the rest of their lives. Could we say that is a penance, a temporal punishment for their sin?

Likewise, we believe that every sin has some consequence, some more severe than others, but man that may not meet the eye. We know that every sin affects every other faithful Catholic because they are a part of the body, and when one part hurts, all parts are affected in some measure. Therefore, we do our little penances when we confess our sins, but we know that deeply engrained habits of mind and heart are hard to break sometimes. There is an “attachment” to that sin. All of this may be internal but it is just as real a temporal consequence as is the broken window.

Purgatory

Ultimately, for those remaining remnants of temporal consequences when we die, there is purgatory to burn off the dross. The guilt of the sin has been forgiven if we die reconciled with God, and we know we are destined for heaven. That is why St. Paul puts it in terms of a man’s works.

The Obvious Temporal Punishment

All of this explanation of purgatory to get around to the point of this post. There is one obvious temporal punishment that is with us so inevitably that we forget that it is actually a temporal punishment. What is that? Physical death itself.

For anyone that dies in the state of grace, in friendship with God, there is the assurance of everlasting life. But the point is, they still have to die. That has not been taken away. It is a punishment that came down to us from the sin of Adam, no less, and it is still upon us, even after we believe in Jesus and are baptized. Is God being cruel with us? Why can’t he just take that part away for anyone who believes in Jesus? Why can’t we just float on up to heaven when it is our time? Didn’t Jesus conquer death?

God is Just and Merciful

What we see from this is that God both just and merciful. He doesn’t change the temporal punishment for that horrendous original act of ingratitude on the part of Adam, but he takes away the guilt of all those who will believe and gives them eternal life after they have passed through the temporal punishment of physical death. The only ones who will be spared this will be the ones who are in a state of grace when Jesus returns in glory. They will not have that particular temporal punishment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://www.cisanewsafrica.org/news.php?id=4605

It seems the Catholic(?) Vice-President of the U.S. would like to bribe the Kenyans into a constitution that would support abortion. The man will have a lot to answer for one day.

Here are some of our Catholic Kenyan brothers and sisters. I like this one;

They love to praise God. Let us pray for them, that they can resist the abomination of abortion in their constitution.

I think back and realize that in the course of my life, for the sake of brevity and short-hand shall we say, somewhere along the way I fixed a time point of my own conversion experience, my own “born-again” experience in my youth, growing up in an Evangelical Protestant home. There is a time that I have remembered, and which I have re-counted as that being “saved” moment, and it was very real and my understanding of it was very real. However, when I reflect back to it more leisurely I realize that at the time I was not thinking of that experience so much in that respect, but rather as one more moment of turning from sin and selfishness in repentance, although that particular time was perhaps more emotionally poignant in my memory.

This highlights a difficulty that I’d had for many years even before I could step back and reflect upon it, while I was still growing up and in that Evangelical environment. To my mind at the time it seemed that it was very critical to being saved, to have that one “point-in-time” conversion, at which time I “got saved.” My difficulty was in pin-pointing that one time. I even envied those people who had grown up wild and sinful and had had a powerful conversion, who could look back and say “that was the day I was saved.”

Once Saved Always Saved

Part of the difficulty for me was the teaching that I had absorbed which I now refer to as OSAS, once-saved-always-saved. This is what Dr. Anders touches on in this video. If we know that once we are saved that we have nothing to worry about, then it becomes critical, particularly for an imaginative kid, to be very precise and certain about that salvation. But if we have trouble pin-pointing that moment, then we begin to have doubts of our own salvation.

At the same time I was able to think rationally and realize that in the very essentials of the faith I had been taught, I was a believer. So how do I reconcile this? The short-hand answer that I used for years was as I mentioned above, a particular conversion experience that I had which I can still remember, sometime before the age of 10. That is about all I can remember substantially, although some fragments of detail are there and when assembled make a respectable “got saved” story. And, I have never thought, nor do I now, that I made anything up or mis-represented what did happen. But I think that in the urgency of convincing myself, nevermind others, of a one time salvation moment, I may well have attributed more significance to the experience than it deserved.

Conversion to Holiness

Again, reflecting back, I realize that the pressure in my own mind to be able to make that kind of “born-again” experiential claim was a direct result of the theology I was raised with. Now, as a Catholic, I understand that such conversion experiences can and should happen to us all of our lives as God works with us to make us holy. Without the pressure to pin it down to one internal event as salvation itself, I am much more able to hear the Holy Spirit when he speaks or urges me in the path that I should follow, including those moments when I have drifted away somewhat and then respond to God’s invitation to reconciliation in a moment that can be a significant emotional experience to a greater or lesser degree.

But such things, while wonderful moments of miraculous work on God’s part which I feel internally, they are not confusing to me, they are not indicators that I was not saved before but am immediately afterward. No, they are not the measure in and of themselves of my salvation. Instead, I can know objectively, by my own state of mortal sin or not, whether I am in a state of grace, and I know what has to been done to be reconciled with God.

Constant Conversion

Now if I look at that only as my objective, that is to make just the bare minimum commitment to Jesus Christ, there is a good chance that I have not made a proper examination of conscience and have not truly repented and may not get to heaven if I were to die at that point. On the other hand, even when in a state of grace there is so much further for me to advance in holiness that I know there will be many moments of conversion. In fact, I should expect and desire them, knowing that God is working in me to make me more like Jesus Christ. Constant conversion.

Can we go backward spiritually? Yes. Does that then require more conversion to bring us back even to where we were? Of course. And not all conversion experiences are particularly emotionally poignant. Emotions are a response, they are not the essential ingredient, so that to use them as a marker will get us off track.

Getting back to my youth, I can remember more or less settling the issue in my own mind, knowing that I believed in Jesus Christ and that I was a Christian, so that I could tie it all up in a neat package and say with assurance that I was saved. I was glad to be able to do that and then I was hit with baptism.

Baptism

That is where I rebelled, where I drew the line. How is it that I had been told all my life to that point that all I needed to do was believe in Jesus, accept him into my heart as my personal Lord and Saviour and I would be saved? I had convinced myself that had done all that. Now they threw me a curve. So I took them at their word. Baptism was not necessary for salvation so I was not interested.

It wasn’t until I entered the Catholic Church that I was baptized, and then that I realized it was an integral part of salvation. Looking back now, and remembering my own internal struggles I have likened the Evangelical position to a form of gnosticism. I realize that the “gnosis” of the original gnostics was qualitatively different from the “born-again experience” of the Evangelical, but there is a parallel insofar as the Evangelical will depend upon the inner knowledge, the experience to determine for him whether he is saved. I do not debate whether the particular experience of the Evangelical is actually the work of the Holy Spirit. That is between that person and God. But his experience cannot be my measure, or the measure for anyone else down the street.

Subjective Salvation?

Dr. Anders points out that part of the reason for the truncation of the faith of the Evangelical is the rejection of anything sacramental. That is to say, in their view, God does not transmit grace through the physical or corporeal world. Everything then is subjective. While the fact of salvation is objective, it is only determined subjectively.

In Catholic theology, the subjective inner conversion of heart, the individual’s faith, is indeed critical to their salvation. But it cannot be divorced from the actual sacraments given by Christ. The two are intrinsically tied together as the Scriptures and the Apostles taught. And, from my own point of view and experience, I saw then that the inner working of the Holy Spirit, the gift of faith, does not then need to be tied to one particular experience or another. What a liberating realization! Enough that we have faith in Christ and receive his grace, and srtive for holiness with his constant help.

I have wondered why it is that I like this piece so much. Listening to it once more I begin to wonder if it is the fact that the voices are balanced, unlike many chorale pieces.

I had thought it was simply because of the basso profondo but it is more than that. The deep bass voices are there and prominent but I think the beauty is in the way they are balanced with the tenors, altos and sopranos. So much of chorale music stresses the high tenors and sopranos.

I suppose to me this gives a more rounded feel of the human voice and there is nothing as beautiful as the human voice in music. That is why the a cappella chorale is the best.

Here’s another that I love because it features an alto soloist who I find amazing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But what I found interesting is the novel way that he approaches the Scripture passage James 2:26. (We’ll include the verse of contention #24)

[24] You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.
…
[26] For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead.

-RSVCE

Often in this discussion I have heard the qualification from the Sola Fide defender expressed this way;

“We are saved by faith alone, but faith is never alone.”

However, doesn’t verse 26 of James 2 expressly deny that categorical statement? Is he not saying that faith can indeed be alone? John Martignoni uses the question “Is a body in the morgue still a body?” to engage this discussion and explain the analogy we see here in Scripture.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur Nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum.
Fiat voluntas tua,
sicut in caelo et in terra.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
et dimitte nobis debita nostra
sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem,
sed libera nos a malo.

Steve Says:
June 4th, 2010 at 4:52 pm

I 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;

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.