One of the problems with modern Evangelicalism is the desire to make the Gospel easy to follow. So many Evangelicals wish the entire Gospel message to be reduced to a bumper sticker-level that is easy to understand, easy to accept and easy to follow. But in doing so, they jettison much of what is important in Christianity.

Christianity, however, is a total way of life: it involves a compete giving of one’s life to Christ in body, mind, and soul. This is something that cannot be done in a day and, in fact, it consumes our entire lifetimes.

Luis Palau, a popular Evangelical preacher, falls into the trap of over-simplifying the Gospel:

“Only Christ can give you eternal life. Religion cannot do it. Charitable work will not do it. Good behavior will not do it. Doing communion won’t do it. Reading the Bible won’t do it. Saying your prayers won’t do it. Only Jesus Christ will take you to Heaven if he lives in your heart,” he said.

Let’s look at this more closely:

“Only Christ can give you eternal life.”

A good start, as this is only too true. Christ said that “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6). Yet it is after this that Palau gets off the tracks:

Religion cannot do it.

The Evangelical bug-a-boo: “religion.” Religion, of course, can be used in many ways – it can be an attempt by man to reach God (not a bad thing to attempt, but one fruitless without God’s help) or it can be simply a man-made way to follow other men (never a good thing). But religion at its most fundamental is the way in which man interacts with God, and the Christian religion is one revealed by God as the means to follow Him. As such, religion CAN bring eternal life.

Charitable work will not do it.

Read Matthew 25:31-46 about the sheep and the goats, which Christ concludes by saying, “Then they [the goats] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Clearly feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and welcoming the stranger will impact our attainment of eternal life, or else why would Christ have given us this parable?

Good behavior will not do it.

The story of the Rich Young Man in Matthew 19:16-22 is a bit more nuanced than Palua’s statement. When the young man asks Jesus how he can obtain eternal life, Christ’s first response is “If you want to enter life, obey the commandments.” If being good were unrelated to eternal life, why could Christ have said this?

Doing communion won’t do it.

Jesus would disagree: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world…I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6:51,53).

Reading the Bible won’t do it.

Well, as a Catholic I’m a bit surprised that a Prostant would admit this one, so I’ll concede this point to him. (Although reading the Bible is a primary means in which we know how to obtain eternal life).

Saying your prayers won’t do it.

How can we “receive Jesus” except by praying? How can we know Christ except by conversing with him? I know that he means mindlessly repeating our dinnertime and bedtime prayers, but I think it is never a good idea to denigrate the most important activity we can engage in – prayer.

Only Jesus Christ will take you to Heaven if he lives in your heart

Again, this is true – it is only Christ who can take you to heaven.

Palau’s problem is one that most who do not have the fullness of the Faith fall into: they separate and divide what should not – and cannot – be separated. Palau is right to believe that it is only by following Christ that we can be saved, but following Christ involves our whole being, including: “religion,” charitable work, good behavior, communion, reading the Bible and saying your prayers. Without doing those things, we are not really following Christ and eternal life can elude us.

Let us follow the words of Christ himself when he was asked this question:

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
(Luke 10:25-27)

Sometimes I can’t help myself: when I see an error in reporting about Catholic matters, I feel I must correct it. Here is a case in point:

In the Omaha Catholic Examiner, Todd van Kampen writes,

If there were a Top 10 list of Catholic cultural touchstones, surely “Catholic priests can’t get married” would be listed somewhere in the top five (if not No. 1). But did you know that it isn’t always true?

He then goes on to give an example of a former Protestant minister (who is married) who was recently ordained a Catholic priest under the Pastoral Provision of JPII that allows such things. He also mentions (correctly) that married men can be ordained Eastern Catholic priests.

So what’s wrong with the article? (Ten points if you already picked it out)

A Catholic priest cannot “get married.” What can happen in extraordinary cases is that a married man can be ordained a Catholic priest. Even in his article, Mr. van Kampen notes that if a married priest is widowed, he cannot remarry. This has been the ancient practice of the Church in both East and West: although married men can be ordained priests in the East and in exceptional cases in the West, no priest – either in the East or West – can get married.

This discipline (and it is a discipline, not a dogma) is a wise one. Can you imagine the issues that could arise from a priest being “available”? What if they started dating someone who went to confession to them in the past? What if multiple women in a parish were interested in an “eligible” priest? No thanks.

Today is the feast of one of my favorite saints, St. Justin Martyr. St. Justin was the first Christian to directly engage the dominant pagan culture with the message of Christianity; in other words, he was the first Christian “apologist.” If you read his works today, many of his arguments seem a bit odd, but you must read them within the context of the culture he lived in, as he was highly effective in spreading Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.

One of Justin’s primary arguments was the concept of the “spermatos Logos” – the “seeds of the Word.” This is the idea that the Christian faith is present in some form in the Greek philosophers and in other non-Christian religions and philosophies. When Plato, for example, taught something that was true, he was supporting the Christian faith, which is founded on Christ, who is Truth. Although Justin and the early Church condemned the pagan aspects of the Greek philosophers, this positive attitude towards them led the Church to use Greek philosophy to explain doctrines such as the Trinity and the Incarnation in terms that all men could grasp. It was a huge leap in promoting the Christian religion throughout the world.

St. Justin, pray for us!

President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was recently baptized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka the Mormons).

She’s been dead for 14 years.

This is an example of the bizarre practice of the Mormon church called “baptism for the dead,” in which Mormons posthumously baptize people by proxy. (Many people don’t realize that this is a primary impetus for their famed genealogy work; as they discover their ancestors they perform these proxy baptisms for them.)

I had some discussions with Mormon missionaries recently, and when this topic came up their sole source for this belief is 1 Corinthians 15:28-29:

When everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will (also) be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be all in all.

Otherwise, what will people accomplish by having themselves baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, then why are they having themselves baptized for them?

There are many problems with the Mormon exegesis of this passage (for one, nowhere does Paul actually condone the practice, he just mentions it in the context of another discussion), but I think the bigger problem is that this is an extreme example of sola scriptura (which is ironic, since Mormons claim to reject sola scriptura). Nowhere is there any evidence that the Christian Church practiced a “baptism for the dead” at any time in its history. Furthermore, the Church’s practice of baptism has never allowed for a “proxy” in the place of the recipient, especially in a situation in which the recipient doesn’t even know about it! This would run counter to the underlying reason for baptism, i.e. one’s personal inclusion into the family of God. And baptizing a dead person is contrary to the teaching of Scripture that baptism brings new life to the believer. Yet in spite of all this the Mormon church yanks this verse out of context and develops an entire doctrine out of it (this is similar to the fundamentalist invention of the “rapture”).

The Catholic understanding of Divine Revelation is more holistic: we believe that there are two means by which revelation has come to us – Scripture and Tradition – and we believe that, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Church is the authoritative teacher of that revelation. This three-pronged approach helps to prevent such egregious cases of ripping verses out of the context of the life of the Church. Read Dei Verbum for a beautiful exposition of the Church’s understanding of Divine Revelation.

For a more detailed explanation of the problems with “baptism for the dead,” see this page from Catholic Answers.

A common dispute between Protestants and Catholics is the use of Tradition as an authoritative means of passing divine revelation. Most Protestants of course only accept the Bible as an authoritative source, but Catholics recognize both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition as means by which God has revealed Himself and His salvific plan. However, I have found in many of my own discussions with non-Catholics (and sometimes Catholics) that many do not understand what exactly Tradition is.

For a long time, even after I became Catholic, I saw Tradition as solely consisting of the writings of Councils, encyclicals, and the saints (especially the early Church Fathers). And I think most Protestants see it like that as well. However, that transfers a flaw in Reformation thinking, one that sees the written word as the only assured way of transmitting knowledge. This is a flaw conceived in the age of the printing press, and one that Jesus clearly didn’t share, as he didn’t write anything nor command anyone to write anything.

Tradition includes, of course, those writings, but it is primarily the life of the Church, which is the womb of those writings (including the writings of Scripture). This life consists of Catholics believing, preaching and worshiping, and in a special way it includes the liturgy, which is the life of the Church at its most fundamental level. The liturgy is the action in which we are united to our Trinitarian God and it is a primary means in which our Faith is transmitted from age to age.

We can see an example of this in the Arian debates of the 4th century. Arius and his followers were claiming that Jesus was an exalted creation – the first-born of God, but created, nonetheless. Up to this time, there were no councils to look it, no papal encyclicals, and the writings of theologians and even saints were somewhat conflicted and unclear as well. And Scripture alone did not solve the problem – some passages made Jesus appear to be equal to God, and some on the surface did not. The Arians themselves were very Scriptural in their arguments and loved to quote the Bible in their defense. However, the orthodox had a “trump card”, so to speak: they reminded everyone that in the liturgy, they had worshiped Jesus for the past 300 years. And everyone was in agreement that only God was to be worshiped. Therefore Jesus must be God. Thus, the life of the Church, as experienced in the liturgy, is what transmitted this fundamental truth about our Savior for 300 years before it was formalized in the Council decrees. Without Tradition, we would still be debating the divinity of Christ. (This also shows that the Council of Nicea did not “invent” the divinity of Christ – as a certain bestselling author would assert – but merely affirmed what was already practiced and believed by the Church.)

For those interested in seeing how the life of the Church transmitted Christian beliefs from generation to generation before the written word became primary in the 15th century, I would recommend Jaroslav Pelikan’s 5-volume The Christian Tradition series.

The Resurrection of Jesus we celebrate this week is our own guarantee of access to eternal life. Christ is the “firstfruits” of our future resurrection and life with God. The question now becomes: how do we receive this eternal life which Christ has made available?

A common belief among non-Catholic Christians is that one must simply “believe in Jesus” to obtain eternal life. The quote used most often is John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

The problem is that this is only one instance of Jesus speaking about “eternal life” and how to obtain it. On my count, there are 17 instances (including synoptic parallels) of Jesus talking of eternal life and its possession. I looked at each of these and broke them down into four general categories: Faith, Good Works, Self-Denial, and Sacraments. Here is a basic outline of each instance:

Faith
John 3:15; John 3:16; John 3:36; John 5:24; John 6:40

Good Works
Matthew 19:16; Mark 10:17; Luke 18:18; John 12:50; Matthew 25:46

Self-Denial
Matthew 19:29; Mark 10:30; Luke 18:30; John 12:25

Sacraments
John 4:14 (Baptism); John 6:54 (Eucharist)

Then there is one more instance of Jesus speaking of eternal life:

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
(Luke 10:25-27)

This final passage, I think, sums up all the various statements of Jesus on how to obtain eternal life: if you love God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and if you love your neighbor as yourself, then you will surely have faith in Christ, perform good works, deny your passions, and receive Christ’s sacraments. And in doing so, you will obtain the object of your love: eternal life with God.

Catholic Destination has posted an article I wrote entitled “Are Only Catholics Going to Heaven?” It might seem like a question with an obvious answer to many, but I was surprised by how often I have been asked this question during inquiry meetings I’ve held at my parish.