I value comments that are posted on this blog in response to things that I have written, but when something is posted with which I profoundly disagree or find offensive I feel I must respond. That has happened in a comment posted on this blog on July 20, 2011, by someone identified only as “man with desire” in response to my post “What I Love About the Catholic Church.” That comment actually isn’t a comment on what I had to say at all. Rather, it is an anti-Catholic tirade. It makes statements about the Roman Catholic Church that are simply wrong and even dangerous and to which I believe I must respond.
The thrust of this “comment” is that people do not and cannot find salvation in the Roman Catholic Church. This writer believes that to be the case, as nearly as I can tell, because he disagrees with some of the teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Particularly misguided and offensive is the statement in the comment “The problem with the Catholic Church is that its rituals and doctrines do not lead people toward knowing the grace and salvation in Christ. Instead, they lead to something else.” I am not Catholic, and I have some profound disagreements with some things about the Catholic Church, most (but not quite all) of them having to do with church polity and ecclesiology. I know without doubt, however, that this statement about the Roman Catholic Church is false. Millions upon millions of people do, and for nearly two thousand years have, found precisely the grace of Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church. They find and have found salvation there.
As I said in my post to which this comment is a response the rituals of worship in the Catholic Church powerfully connect people with God and with Jesus Christ. I have felt that connection myself when I have experienced the Catholic mass. In the mass Catholic worshipers hear the word of Scripture. They pray in the name of Jesus Christ to God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. They hear a word of forgiveness for sin, and they hear a call to living the Christian way in lives of honesty, service, and justice. In the ritual of the mass God comes near to God’s Catholic people and touches their lives with divine love and salvation. The worship of the Roman Catholic church is the primary way in which most of the world’s Christians come into the presence of God and feel God’s grace in their lives. About that there can simply be no doubt.
The comment to which I am responding is based on at least two fundamentally false assumptions. They are closely related. They are first that salvation is something we do for ourselves by believing the right things and second that the function of doctrine is to give us the right things that we have to believe. The comment assumes of course that Catholicism is not right belief, but the more fundamental fallacy of the comment is this notion that salvation depends upon right belief and that the function of religious doctrine is to give us the right things that we must believe in order to be saved.. Let me address these two fundamentally false assumptions in order.
The basic assumption of the comment is that Catholic people are not saved because they don’t believe the right things. This assumption in turn assumes that salvation is something that we do for ourselves. God doesn’t save us, this line of reasoning says, rather we save ourselves by believing the right things. Grace in this way of thinking is not God’s free gift flowing out of God’s great love for God’s creation but is something we earn through our actions (beliefs being the actions in question here) and that we can lose through what we do or believe or don’t do or believe. This understanding of grace makes our salvation depend not on God but on us. Saint Paul, whose writings are regarded as Scripture by all Christians, assures us that this is not that case. Salvation comes through God’s grace, not through our zealousness in obeying any law, even a supposed law of right belief. If grace is truly grace, it cannot be otherwise. It cannot be otherwise because if grace is truly grace it is precisely something that we don’t earn. What we earn, through right belief or otherwise, isn’t grace; it is a reward. Salvation, however we understand that complex and puzzling concept, is not something we can or have to earn. It is God’s free gift to all people. That’s what makes it grace. The comment to my post at issue here errs profoundly is assuming that we must earn grace and salvation through believing the right things.
The comment at issue clearly assumes that the function of religious doctrine is to give us those right things that we must believe in order to be saved. This assumption too is fundamentally false. For one thing, if grace isn’t something we earn through right belief, and if the function of doctrine is to give us that right belief, then there is no place or role for doctrine in the life of faith. I believe that there is a place and a role for doctrine in the life of faith, but it isn’t to give us what we must believe in order to be saved. Rather, doctrine properly understood is, like Scripture, a symbolic and mythic statement of a particular understanding about the nature of God and of God’s relationship with creation, including God’s relationship with us. Doctrine properly understood doesn’t state absolute, universal truths. Rather, it expresses in symbolic and mythic form an understanding that believers have found to help a religion do the only thing that any religion legitimately does, namely, to connect its adherents to God.
To make this point perhaps a bit clearer let me use one element of Catholic doctrine and practice that the author of our comment cites as false belief, namely, the veneration of Mary and the other saints. Our author doesn’t use the technical term “veneration,” but that is the term that applies to the relationship of Catholic (and Orthodox) people to the Mother of God and the saints of the church. Veneration of Mary and the saints is not a part of the worship and prayer life of most Protestants. That’s because we believe that we need no intercessor with God on our behalf other than Jesus Christ. That does not mean, however, that Catholic doctrine about Mary and the saints is an impediment to Catholics experiencing the grace of God. Quite the contrary. Millions upon millions of Catholic people around the world find their church’s doctrinal understanding of Mary and the saints and the practice of venerating them in prayer and worship to be powerful spiritual teachings and practices that precisely do connect them with God and that do bring them an awareness of God’s active presence and grace in their lives. That we Protestants find our awareness of God’s active presence and grace in our lives in other ways does not make the Catholic doctrine and practice of the veneration of Mary and of the saints false. It just makes it different. In this sense of being something that connects people with God, which is the only sense in which a spiritual doctrine or practice can be true, the Catholic veneration of Mary and the saints is true for hundreds of millions of people.
Furthermore, the comment to which I am responding represents an kind of religious exclusivism that is theologically unjustifiable in theory and dangerous in praxis. I won’t go into detail here about why religious exclusivism is theologically unjustifiable in theory. The answer to that question lies in the necessarily symbolic and mythic nature of all religious language and all religious truth. For a fuller understanding of that contention see my book Liberating Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, OR, 2008, especially Chapters 3 and 4.
Religious exclusivism is dangerous in praxis because when people believe that they, and only they, possess the only truth about God they start killing people. I don’t mean to say that the author of our comment has ever killed anyone or ever will. I don’t know him or her, but I assume not. It is true, however, that religious exclusivism is one of the most destructive dynamics at work in our world today. Violence against those who deny the one truth which the religious exclusivist possesses is in fact a logical result of a belief that one possesses the only truth about God. As John Dominic Crossan has said, such people easily conclude that those who teach another understanding, one that for the exclusivist is necessarily false, have no right to live and even that the person in possession of the one religious truth has the right and duty to eliminate the evil people who lead people astray by teaching their false understandings. Violent Muslim religious extremism is the most obvious example of this dynamic in the world today, but it certainly isn’t the only one. Christian history is loaded with examples of the same dynamic at work among Christians. Just think of the way Christians in Europe used to execute supposed heretics and the way they thought nothing of exterminating peoples of the rest of the world in an attempt to convert and thereby save them. I am convinced that those of us people of faith who have seen the danger in the dynamics of religious exclusivism must speak out against it at every turn.
So, yes, I do appreciate comments on my blog. I am not, for now at least, going to take down this particular comment despite how offensive I find it to be. I will not, however, be silent in the face of what I believe to be dangerous theology. This comment expresses dangerous theology, theology we must counter every chance we get.
