TABLE OF CONTENTS

 The CHURCH through SCRIPTURE,
SCRIPTURE through the CHURCH:
Catholicism explained to Evangelicals

 by N.
(origendeprincipiis.blogspot.com)

   Introduction: Treasure in Earthen Vessels

 PART ONE: “The Word ...”

1. Unity in the Faith and in the Knowledge of the Son of God
2. Word and Wisdom
3. These are the Scriptures that Testify About Me
4. The Pillar and Foundation of the Truth
5. Lights Breaking Upon Us, Gradually
6. Things, Rather than Their Explanations

 PART TWO: “... was made flesh ...”

7. It is by Grace You Have Been Saved
8. Be Ye Perfect
9. Signs and Wisdom
10. In Him All Things Hold Together
11. Body and Bride
12. You Must Be Born Again
 

PART THREE: “... and dwelt among us.”

13. On This Rock
14. All Generations Will Call Me Blessed
15. Treasure in Earthen Vessels
16. Ite, Missa Est

Appendix: Selective Bibliography

Introduction: Treasure in Earthen Vessels

On 21^st June, 1989, I became a Christian. Convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit, I sought salvation the only place it was offered: in Christ Jesus. And my life has not been the same since.

Chapter 1: Unity in the Faith and in the Knowledge of the Son of God

I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? (1 Cor. 1:10-13)

Chapter 2: Word and Wisdom

When the Protestant reformers sought to reform the Christian faith and restore it to what they saw as forgotten fundamental truths, in other words, to the authentic mind of Christ, they turned, rightly, to Holy Scripture. The clarion call of Evangelical churches everywhere is, quite sensibly, “We believe in the Bible,” or “We are Bible-based.” Thanks be to God, for that is one absolutely fundamental thing which Evangelicals and Catholics have in common. And here, by the grace of God, lies the hope of our reconciliation.

Chapter 3: These Are the Scriptures That Testify About Me

Both Evangelicals and Catholics recognise the Bible as a fundamental pillar of the Christian faith. Flawless (Prov. 30:5) and God-breathed (2 Tim. 3:16), Holy Scripture is our guide and our teacher. Nothing we say must contradict it; and everything we believe must accord with it. This is the Catholic faith, as much as it is the faith of any Christian. 

Chapter 4: The Pillar and Foundation of the Truth

In the last chapter, we wrestled with some of the difficulties and dilemmas implicit in the interpretation of Scripture. Whilst 

            every word of God is flawless;
            he is a shield to those who take refuge in him (Prov. 30:5) 

and whilst 

all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16) 

we are still confronted with the question of how exactly to understand what Scripture means – especially when we are faced with passages which can be interpreted in a number of ways. 

Chapter 5: Lights Breaking Upon Us, Gradually

In the previous chapters we have come to several important conclusions about Christian revelation. These fall into three main headings. 

First, we have established some important biblical principles concerning where Christian truth comes from. We have seen that going “beyond the Bible” is absolutely necessary. The Gospel of John tells us that there is much more to be said about Jesus than the Bible can contain (Jn. 21:25). And the same Gospel tells us that all of this truth, biblical and “beyond”, is promised to the apostles (and therefore arguably their rightful successors) through the Holy Spirit (Jn. 16:13). We have also seen that the apostles were commanded to teach the faith they had received by letter or by word of mouth (2 Thess. 2:15). They heard and passed on many things which did not make it into Scripture – as John implies, and as Paul confirms. And so, right from the beginning, what the Bible calls “Tradition” (paradosis) encompassed both those things written down in letters which later were gathered into the New Testament, and also those aspects of the Christian revelation which were not directly contained in Scripture but were passed on by other means. The concept of authentic Christian Tradition (both scriptural and non-scriptural) is therefore both biblical and apostolic. 

Chapter 6: Things, Rather than Their Explanations

 We need to assimilate things slowly, rather than their explanations.
- Fr. Pie Duployé [1] 

Chapter 7: It is by Grace You Have Been Saved

  Love and faithfulness meet together;
righteousness and peace kiss each other.
Faithfulness springs forth from the earth,
and righteousness looks down from heaven.
(Ps. 85:10-11) 

Chapter 8: Be Ye Perfect

In the last chapter, I deliberately avoided one issue, and my conversations with Evangelicals have suggested that it is an issue which is often very close to their hearts. Their demurral often goes like this: It is all very well talking about the unity of faith and love and good deeds; fine, it all comes as a big pistis package, and all of it is God’s free gift. But which bit of the package is it that really saves me? Is it the “belief” bit, or the “good deeds” bit, or the “love” bit – or even the baptism bit (1 Pet. 3:21)? And so, therefore – When exactly am I saved? At what moment and by what mechanism do I pass from lost to redeemed? And so how do I know that I am saved? How do I know if someone else is saved? Who actually is saved? Can we tell? 

Chapter 9: Signs and Wisdom

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (Jn. 1:14, KJV)

  

The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. What does this mean? At a very literal level, it means that Jesus came down from Heaven to live with us. But it means more, for Jesus did not just come for that – nor did He just come to impute righteousness to us and give us faith. He came to make a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17, 2 Pet. 3:13, Rev. 21:1-5), “to restore everything, as he promised long ago” (Acts 3:21, cf. Matt. 17:11). He came to draw us to the Father, that we might be one with each other (Jn. 17:21), as He and the Father are one (Jn. 14:9-10, 17:21). And yet more, He came to make us like Him (Rom. 8:29), and one with Him: 

Chapter 10: In Him All Things Hold Together

The road to Emmaus 

It was Sunday. Two disciples were travelling to Emmaus. Now read the rest of the account in your Bible: Luke 24:13-35. We began discussing this story at the end of Chapter Eight, but never quite got to the end of it. 

Remember what we said in Chapter Six about how sometimes our own understanding of God’s work develops best in the context of our own lived action? The journey to Emmaus exemplifies this. We do not know who these two disciples were, but the fact that one of them was called Cleopas suggests that neither of them had been present in the Upper Room. So it is not surprising that they began their journey bewildered by the events of the previous three days. 

Chapter 11: Body and Bride

 Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we partake of the one loaf.
(1 Cor. 10:16-17) 

 

We, who are many, are one body. What on earth can this mean? 

Chapter 12: You Must Be Born Again

 Before I became a Christian, I met many Christians who told me that if I wanted to be saved I must be “born again”. At the time I had no idea what they meant – except that they often seemed to use that phrase to refer to some highly charged spiritual experience they had had in the past, which induced them to make a personal decision to accept Jesus as their saviour. I assumed that they must be right – though at the time I did not know, or care, what the scriptural basis for their interpretation of this phrase meant. It confused me, for there seemed to be many Christians who did not refer to themselves as “born again”, and who, moreover, seemed somewhat embarrassed by the way the “born agains” used the term. 

Chapter 13: On This Rock

Whilst writing this book, I sent some of my early drafts to a Baptist missionary friend. His complaint was this: 

I agree with much of what you say in chapter 4. I agree that many Christians are much too individualistic... I agree that too many of us (especially Protestants and perhaps especially evangelicals) do not understand deeply enough the importance of the Body of Christ on earth. My problem comes when “the Body of Christ on earth” seems to become identical with the Roman Catholic Church. [1] 

Chapter 14: All Generations Will Call Me Blessed

I didn’t really want to write a chapter about Mary. I didn’t think it would be helpful. I think that sometimes Catholics make too big a fuss about Mary. And often Evangelicals go to the other extreme and ignore her completely – except when arguing with Catholics…! Why stir up a hornets’ nest, when the fact is that the biblical evidence is so inconclusive that neither side can prove the other wrong? 

Chapter 15: Treasure in Earthen Vessels

A couple of years ago, two of my friends, both Baptist ministers from the United States, were telling me, as we were driving in the car, about some of the problems and challenges they sometimes faced in their church life. They were clearly annoyed by what they regarded as the self-indulgence that they felt some of their fellow church-goers exhibited in relation to the business of choosing a church, and going to church. “These days people go to church for the entertainment value,” they complained. “They look for a church with good music or good preaching, and they go for the performance. They think they’re an audience, and the minister and the choir are the performers. But actually it should be the other way around. We’re not the audience. God is the audience.” 

Chapter 16: Ite, Missa Est

At the end of the eucharistic liturgy comes a little phrase which is easy to miss and rather awkward to translate into English. So here it is in Latin: 

            Ite, missa est. 

Appendix: Selective Bibliography

I am not a professional theologian. But we laymen can be amateur theologians. Indeed we must, if we are to be “prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks… the reason for the hope that [we] have” (1 Pet. 3:15). In the past, theological knowledge was limited to theologians or seminarians who could access the vast libraries of universities and seminaries. Now much is available to buy second-hand or to read for free online, if you look carefully.

Cognitive Restructuring and the Neocatechumenal Way

No one can leave the Neocatechumenal Way with his conscience intact. For there is no acceptable reason to leave that organisation.

Five Poems by Sarah

I think that this sequence of five poems by my friend Sarah de Nordwall expresses perfectly the essence of the journey into and out of spiritual abuse.

Covid Easter

(written during Covid lockdown) 

This has been a strange Lent – during which, whether we chose to or not, we have all been fasting from many things we would rather not have fasted from – “the ‘Lentiest’ Lent that has ever Lented”, according to a local priest. As we have “attended” mass via online livestream from the Christ Prince of Peace, Weybridge, it has been impossible not to feel a bit sorry for our dear Fr. Con, saying the liturgy in solitude in an empty church. But I am encouraged – and perhaps Fr. Con is too – by the wonderful Bishop Kallistos Ware, who wrote of his first experience of an Orthodox liturgy:

Life and Death

“Those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life” (Rom. 8:5-6)

Happy Pentecost to you all!

I have been thinking about life and death a lot recently.

Easter in the Highlands of Sumatra

This year, sadly, is the first Easter since getting married which I have had to celebrate apart from the rest of my family. However, I had the unexpected blessing of being able to do so amongst the Karo Batak people of the highlands of northern Sumatra.

The Holy Land

We have recently spent ten days in the Holy Land, on a pilgrimage with our parish. We are so excited by all the things we have seen, the places we have been, the people we have met – I hardly know where to begin. So, a few impressions…

Two Easters

I have had the unusual privilege of celebrating the night of the Resurrection twice this year.

Assumption

On the Assumption we attended the Cathedral of the Assumption in Penang. One bishop, five priests, at least a dozen servers, plus innumerable ushers, readers, ministers, singers, instrumentalists, and a congregation of at least a thousand. Five glorious mysteries of the rosary, with readings, each in a different language (English, Tamil, Chinese, Tagalog, Malay). Then mass in the same five languages (plus Latin and Greek of course, which makes seven!). It is such a breath of fresh air, for those of us who normally live in a land where cynicism and secularism seem to threaten the Church at every corner, to be somewhere where, despite the threat of real persecution, the faith truly thrives. If any of you ever feel disheartened about the state of the Church in the West, let me tell you some of the impressions I am left with out here:

Corpus Christi

I wanted to tell you about a wonderful Corpus Christi celebration A.F. and I had the good fortune to be part of two Sundays ago, in Penang, Malaysia. We turned up for mass at 5.30 p.m. at the not-very-large Church of St. Francis Xavier, in the centre of Georgetown. The church was so full it was overflowing, with people standing all the way out the doorway, down the steps and onto the front driveway. There were well over 1000 people there, and we soon found out why: This was the first time ever that permission had been given in Penang (a state in a predominantly Muslim country) for a public Corpus Christi procession, and practically the whole Catholic population of Georgetown had turned out for it.

Understanding Islam

Allah or Jesus? This was the question posed in an e-mail I received a couple of weeks ago, apparently forwarded several times over, originating I know not where. It described an event (which allegedly happened in London) at which a Muslim imam had claimed that it was the solemn duty of all Muslims to kill all non-Muslims everywhere. A bit of research exposed the story as a hoax – but I don’t know how many people had read the e-mail without doing the research, and are using it as proof that Muslims are a dangerous threat to all of us.

I received another forwarded e-mail a few months ago – this one claiming that under pressure from Muslims, all mention of the Jewish holocaust was to be removed from the National Curriculum. This also turned out to be a hoax. 

We clearly live in a time when fear of Islam is rife. There are apparently some good reasons to be wary, when one sees some of the terrible acts which have been perpetrated in our country and elsewhere in the name of Islam. But when anonymous individuals deliberately circulate false rumours in order to besmirch the name of a major world religion and all its adherents, then we seem to have reached a level of hysteria which at least demands some proper investigation.