A ONE-TIME BELIEVER IN ONCE SAVED, ALWAYS SAVED
"THIS ROCK" GIVES THUMBS UP AND THUMBS DOWN ON BOOKS
ORAL TRADITIONS FOUND IN WRITING
MIND OVER EMOTIONS
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
I received a nice note from a reader in South Africa. Susan Grave said she is delighted that Catholic Answers has uploaded back issues of "This Rock" to its web site, but she worries about running up her phone bill now that there is so much to read at:
http://www.catholic.com
Indeed there is. We have the full run of issues from January 1996 to the present. (Well, not quite the present: We delay uploading the two most recent issues out of courtesy to subscribers to the print edition.) We hope to have the remaining issues, covering 1990 through 1995, uploaded by the end of December.
AN ABSOLUTE BUT UNCERTAIN ASSURANCE
Subscriber George Frame responded to last week's E-Letter (the topic was "once saved, always saved") with this:
"In the 19 years I spent as an Evangelical among the Plymouth Brethren, I heard many sermons on the eternal security of the believer. I gave a few myself. What you describe in your hypothetical example, I lived.
"A 'professing believer' who claims to be born-again and departs from truth is said to have a 'false profession.' I have seen sincere people experience nervous breakdowns over their concern as to whether or not they had truly been born again or were being deceived. There used to be a well-known independent Baptist preacher who used to delight in 'saving' Baptist preachers who had 'false professions.' His name was L. R. Shelton, and he wrote a book called 'How the Lord Saved a Baptist Preacher.'
"For a number of years I struggled with this insidious teaching in my own life. Had I really believed rightly? Was I really saved? Was I truly born again? How could I have true assurance of salvation? Had I truly repented?
"The doubts, uncertainty, and fear can be paralyzing. Fundamentalists who believe 'once saved, always saved' trumpet this false doctrine, but what they are actually doing is trying to persuade themselves that it is the truth. In the quiet honesty of their hearts, they question it.
"A close friend of mine who believed the doctrine of eternal security for many years used to ask me why Catholics weren't terrified of the possibility of being lost since they lacked the assurance that he possessed. I would explain to him that Catholics neither presume God's grace or despair of it.
"I would ask him if he believed that he was created in the image and likeness of God, and he would affirm that he did. It was easy at that point to demonstrate the reality of free will in our experience and as an attribute that we possess as children of God. By the way, this man, at the age of 59, is currently in an RCIA class!"
SPECIAL BOOK REVIEW ISSUE
I just read the December issue of "This Rock." It is in the mail to subscribers. This is a first for us: an issue devoted to book reviews. There are seventeen in all, and the books are awarded anywhere from zero to five stars. I was particularly interested in the pans. (Authors are more interested in what is wrong with other writers' books than in what is right with them.) I concur with the thumbs down--and with the thumbs up given to other titles. I think our reviewers did a fine job.
Also included in this issue are recommendations by eight Catholic Answers apologists. Each briefly discusses five favorite apologetics titles, which means readers have a total of forty books that should be on their shelves.
Rounding out the issue are inside accounts of two small Catholic publishers, Sophia Institute Press and Roman Catholic Books, and a look at a famous writer of more than one hundred books, Hilaire Belloc.
When leafing through the issue, I discovered an embarrassing blunder. An old photograph shows Alice von Hildebrand, a regular contributor to "This Rock," seated with two now-deceased friends, Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J., and Prof. William Marra. Alas, the caption under Marra gives not his name but that of the late Dietrich von Hildebrand! I hope my friend Alice will forgive the goof and that her late husband and Bill Marra, looking down on us, will enjoy a chuckle at our expense.
If this special issue is well received, each year we may devote an issue to book reviews and to profiles of Catholic publishing companies. At any rate, we intend to have book reviews in each issue of the magazine. Catholics need to know which books are worthwhile and which are worthless.
WHERE IS ORAL TRADITION WRITTEN?
That sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? If something is written, it isn't oral. If something is oral, it isn't written. Yet, when it comes to oral tradition, we often find evidence of it in writing. In "Off the Record," published in 1954, Msgr. Ronald Knox gave examples of this:
"All English-speaking Catholics pray 'Forgive us our trespasses' as you do [this is from a letter Knox wrote to a Protestant inquirer]. But in our English Bible the rendering is 'Forgive us our debts.' It is not that we imitate you; but that the Pater Noster has come down, all these centuries, by oral tradition, in the form in which we said it in the Middle Ages, before our translation of the Bible existed.
"I think there are stray bits of Catholic belief which are in the same position; i.e. that they owe nothing to written sources. For instance, the commonly held view that the Jews will be converted before the Second Coming may be an inference from the eleventh chapter of Romans; but I think it is more probably an oral tradition which has lasted from St. Paul's day to ours, alluded to occasionally in written records, but owing its vitality to mere handing on by word of mouth."
MINDING THE MIND
In another book, the posthumously published and hard to find "Proving God," Knox quotes someone who noted that "an unintellectual salvation means an unsaved intellect." I like that construction.
When it comes to accepting their faith, some Catholics seem to act like Mormons. When Mormons come to your door, they give you a copy of the "Book of Mormon" and ask you to read it. They say you will receive assurance that it is "another testament of Jesus Christ," and that assurance will come by way of what they call a "burning in the bosom." Catholic apologist Arnold Lunn used to call this kind of thing "fif," which stands for "funny internal feeling." You will know the "Book of Mormon" is true because you will feel all aflutter inside.
That's the kind of test not a few Catholics give to their own faith. They know it is true because it makes them feel good. This is an abandonment of the use of the mind. Our faith objectively is true, but truth is known by the intellect, not the emotions. The emotions may motivate us to investigate the truth of something, but they cannot establish its truth. That is a task for the mind.
If our faith were proved by "fif," then those saints who underwent a dark night of the soul--I have in mind such luminaries as John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila--could not be said to have accepted the faith as true. For substantial periods they had the opposite of a "burning in the bosom," but they never chucked the faith because, despite the lack of emotional highs, they knew it to be true because their minds told them so.
All Catholics need to remember that the virtue of faith has to do with the mind, not with the emotions.
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' new discussion forums at:
http://forums.catholic.com
where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
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