I have been a lifelong Protestant of one kind or other. Raised in a nonconformist sect, I was formed with a strong anti Catholic prejudice. Though the Christadelphians are one of the several 19th century sects founded by men (or women) who fancied they had, at that late date, ‘rediscovered’ biblical Christianity, we looked back on the Protestant Rebellion of the 16th century with borrowed nostalgia, especially toward the Anabaptists, which we somewhat restated the tradition of. There is much righteous indignation in the souls of such radical protestors. At the same time, confusion. Historical confusion mostly, in trying to answer the question, “Exactly when did the the Church fully apostatize?” Our sect rejected the doctrine of the Trinity because the word was ‘not in the Bible’. Nor did we reclaim Aryanism, his was far to godlike a Jesus for us. No, we simply ignored all Christian documents after the Bible, defaulted to the Old Testament when things got tricky, and then clumsily asserted that there were no more faithful followers of Christ in the world after the second century at latest. God sent His son into the world as a special human creation, and after 150 years the light he brought was extinguished, that is apart from the Bibles that were around (which wasn’t really true, but, hey, never mind that detail). Of course, the divinity of our Savoir is throughout the Scripture, Old and New. The Bible on its own is sufficient to know that Jesus is God Incarnate. Only in our confused teaching we did not do the historical work and read the earliest writings of those converts taught by the Apostles, to see the trough line from the Apostles to Nicaea. As far as the inconvenient fact goes, that there is no Bible collated and canonized until the 4th century, we were taught that God used the false church to preserve the Scripture so that people could read it, find the truth, and be saved. So you see, I have a very confused and heretical beginning to my Christian faith life. And yet, the first time I remember being conscious as a young child of the Beatitudes being read out at the ‘meeting’, I was transfixed.
Without Luther and the mainstream Protestant Rebellion, that obscure little sect would never have come to be. If there had not been division in the Kingdom of Christ in Europe, and the logical inertia of Sola Scriptura had not come to proliferate sectarian division, the Church may have remained intact, or more intact, at least. But such a destructive event in the Church cannot happen apart from the permission of God. Though I have no evidence, as with our thesis’ antecedent in the ten tribes given to Jeroboam by the word of the prophet Ahias, I have no evidence to prove the Protestant rupture was according to the will of the God. The division of Israel happens at the apex of that kingdom. It seems for this very reason the judgement comes soon and harsh: Solomon had been given the privilege to build the temple of the LORD, and this against God’s repeated chastening, “The LORD God does not dwell in temples made with human hands”. Yet Solomon, for the love God had for his father, David, was permitted to build the temple. The LORD will not be mocked or taken for granted though; Solomon had worshiped false gods to please the many strange women he loved. ‘More is less’, is a constant biblical admonition. So the kingdom was torn from him and given to another.
The case for Divine judgement on the Church at the time or the Reformation, or the initial potential of Luther as a reformer, rather than a wrecker, will have to be left to be determined by Revelation, or by those with more historical expertise than I poses. Jeroboam was conscripted by God to take the northern tribes. He even makes the messianic journey of exile into Egypt before assuming his divinely given right of rule after Solomon’s death. His kingdom was to take a vassal role in matters of religion though, as the people would need to go down to Jerusalem, into the kingdom of Judah, to sacrifice and worship at the only temple of the LORD. Jeroboam, threatened by the thought that his people would go up there and turn their hearts from him to Rehoboam king of Juda, set up two golden calves for his people to worship, one at Bethel to guard the way to Jerusalem in the south, and one in Dan to guard the north. And thus, he fails utterly at his vocation. If Luther at first had righteous zeal for God, and this case is not easily made, he is guilty of setting up false worship of God by the full bloom of his ‘reform’.
I will be making some unproven assumptions at the beginning of this process, like the ones above about Luther and company. I have reasons above mere personal intuition or preference in making them. Often they are against my personal intuitions and preferences. While this is not proof in itself of veracity, it is at least a possible indication of obedience rather than insistence. Much righteous fervour can be attached to personal insistence. I hope to prove these assumptions in time. Questions are always welcome (well, almost always). Though yet a Samaritan, I see the ‘Reformation’ as a rebellion against the divine order. I have no authority to state absolutely if this Rebellion places all its progeny into soteriological exile, but I can in my own case state that coming to understand the One, Holy, and Apostolic Church and its soteriological method and authority has utterly transformed my understanding of the Faith once delivered. It has taken the weight of faith off of me personally, as something I need to find, conjure, or muster up the courage to leap toward, and has made it the free gift of God for me to submit to in obedience. A large part of the work on this blog will be in establishing the historical and logical inertia of the Church, and that Christ came in fact to establish a Church as the vehicle of salvation, and not merely to call believers who would collect into a family at best, or into the necessary evil of community at worst.
If this is how I see the history of Christendom, why don’t I just join the Catholic Church and get it over with? I very much wish the problem of ecclesiastical exile were so easily solved, that I could just move down to Judea and find my home. The Catholic Church is in a state of confusion, and has been all the days of my life. Vatican II closed the year of my birth, 1965. So, ‘the Church’ of my viewing has been rampant with clownish antics, moral scandal, public flirtation with idolatry at the highest Chair, and an overall tendency toward decline. I have found contemporary Catholicism incongruent with the ancient Church, and that of the Middle Ages, both of which intrigue me. And yet I find the Church remarkably congruent from its inception up to the beginning of the 20th century. Often in my Christian walk, I have craved joining the Catholic Church, as this seems to be the only moral-logical way to end the schism in the Church, and in my own soul. I had many years ago realized, by reading the writings of many of the Saints up John Chrysostom, that the smug dismissal I had learned, that the message of the Apostles was corrupted early on, was shamefully bogus. These men and women were spiritual giants compared to me, or any contemporary Christian of any camp for that matter. They were superlative not of themselves though; their strength always came through profound obedience to the Divine Will, a submission that is, quite frankly, as terrifying as it is inviting. More, when I finally read Saint Basil’s and Sant Athanasius’ formulations of the Trinity, I realized just how impoverished my understanding was. This complex understanding of God is not some Greek philosophical corruption of the simple Hebraic Gospel truth, as I had been taught in my youth. It is the necessary reality of the Father Creator, the Incarnate Son, and the life in the Holy Spirit that the early Church enjoyed. Why should we expect God to be so easily comprehended, as if He were a material object? Why should we find it so hard to find that He is a tri-personal Unity? At least why would we reject this notion because it is ultimately beyond our comprehension, though we can have an understanding of and a personal experience with all three persons of the Trinity. I place this here partly to show that the unfolding of doctrine over time requires that there be a Church that this unfolding happens within. The, sometimes, contemporary Protestant notion that Jesus didn’t come to make the Church, but only to call individuals into a family relationship, is parasitic on the True Church that God extended His Revelation to in the early centuries after the Incarnation. For, through the Church, the foundations of the faith were set and the edifice built. And all Protestant sects are some confused mix of rejecting parts of that edifice while finding other parts indispensable; pick-and-choose-ism is the very definition of heresy.
In a faith crisis I left the ecclesial community of my childhood and youth and tried for several years to be secular. I put myself through a personal reeducation program to try to ‘
get the religion out"‘ so I could be a sane member of our secular society; I went to Uni and studied philosophy. This project ultimately failed. Without indulging in too much detail now, I held the secular worldview to the same standards I had held my faith too, at least in my heart. I deconstructed it with a kind of PoMo judo. If this world had taken that which was most important to me, well it sure had better be truer than what it toppled. I found the secular atheist edifice to be founded on assumptions more than evidence. Sure some facts, but not nearly as cohesive as claimed. So, I looked for another church to join. The Catholic Church still confused me for the reasons already given. Also, I was divorced and in a common law relationship with woman. I had a vague understanding that I would not be able to remarry in the Church. (Though I have found since that annulments are granted quite liberally in the Novus Ordo church.) So, I found myself at a liberal high Anglican church—Catholicism without the Pope, as they say. I spent 25 years as an Anglo Catholic. Recently I was barred from entry to my parish church because I would not take the cure for the Corona Doom. I will have more to say on this in time. I have come to be grateful for this exile, as it has forced me to ask this big question, “Where is the One, Holy, and Apostolic Church”? My time with the Anglicans was fruitful in certain ways, though I was there too long in the end. I am loyal, at least I try to be; even after I was ready to move on, the fellowship of the parish kept me there. During my time with the Anglicans I was able to ‘do church’ and learn at least some of the basics of orthodox faith, though I also had to process many errors. To my condemnation my personal moral discipline while there was mortally sinful at times. But I was not instructed in morality, really, at all. I mean apart from eco-social and global citizenship morality. We did have programs for charity toward the poor and homeless, so the works were not entirely politically based. But, there was effectively no instruction or requirement in personal holiness. This seems to be the moral logic that attends the sanctification of ‘gay marriage’; it introduces moral chaos, how can you then require chaste living from the ‘straight’ members of the congregation? So, I have also an urgent need to find the Church of God so I can make confession, do penance and live in a community that demands and supports personal holiness in such a weak and sinful creature as I am.
These posts will not always be so personal or confessional. Substack encouraged me to introduce myself so I have, sort of. I mostly want to seek answers that are true outside of myself, or any other individual. This is not to say that Christianity is above the personal, quite the opposite. Only, the true Christian doctrinal interface with reality cannot be defined personally. This is what we mean when we say something is true—it is true in the world, true for everyone. The personal part comes in individual obedience to divine will and truth. We have so long lived under the social rule in the West that religion is a matter for personal conscience, that we think God Himself believes in freedom of religion. Personal conscience in faith is only, at best, a civic good, allowing different religious communities to exist without harassment in a pluralistic society. It is also, at its worst, a means of allowing a godless social order to ascend. We see now just how viciously dogmatic a godless order can become. We see the utter madness of a society based on the principle that reality is defined within the minds of people, and that the social order must accommodate whatever fantasies and desires people hold, or, more to the point, feel. Such secular fideism ends in the chemical and surgical sexual mutilation of children, amongst other horrors. Yet, just such a liberal religious notion was ambiguously codified in the Vatican II document, ‘Dignitatis Humanae’, which is more than a little disconcerting. We will look at these documents in some detail later in this work, but for now, the text is confusing at least. It at once claims the Catholic faith is the one true religion, and also says that, “All are bound to seek truth, to embrace the truth they come to know, and to hold fast to it.” The spirit of this document has been interpreted liberally by clerics, bishops and Papal claimants. We only need to think of John Paul II kissing the Koran. Or less esoterically, in 2019 when Pope Francis signed, “A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” which says, “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.” Philosophically and theologically the notion is absurd. Is God really so vaguely defined, His being and plans so uncertain? If so, why does it matter if we worship a golden calf or make the trip down to Judea, go to Catholic communion, kiss the Koran, or sit pretzel legged in silence with Buddha?
If we are to worship God in Spirit and in Truth, as our Savior said to the Samaritan woman at the well in Saint John’s Gospel, then it cannot be up to us to decide what is Truth, person by person. This segue brings us back to our thesis. The woman at the well is the late offspring of Jeroboam’s rebellion. Her people have a form of worship in their mountain—a residue of the golden calf cult presumably. Under this ‘religion’, the woman has managed to live in personal moral chaos. This is much as we live today in the divided church, religious confusion and moral faltering. When our Lord tells her of her sinful life, because of his knowing it without her telling him, and presumably in the loving authoritative manner he spoke to her, the woman replies;
Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers adored on this mountain, and you say, that at Jerusalem is the place where men must adore. Jesus saith to her: Woman, believe me, that the hour cometh, when you shall neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, adore the Father. You adore that which you know not: we adore that which we know; for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true adorers shall adore the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father also seeketh such to adore him. God is a spirit; and they that adore him, must adore him in spirit and in truth.
Saint John 4:19-23 D-R
In an attempt to essentialize these words of Jesus: neither Jews nor Samaritans adore the Father in the fulness of spirit and truth at this time. The Jews are closer to the Father by their historic election, but that preeminence is running out: the Father is looking for a new adoration in spirit and in truth. This is clearly not a statement of religious indifferentism, rather, of radical particularism. A common mantra in our culture is, “I am spiritual not religious” (tends to pair with “My Karma ran over your dogma” on the backs of older Volvos). This is the elevation of the personal, and is the natural development toward fideism by way of the Protestant Sola Fide. There is an opposite error, the tendency to rule, or truth, without spirit. The true worship is to be both mystical and rational. As said, the truth cannot be personally defined, or we collapse back into subjective fideism. Nor can the adoration merely be the reasoned ascent to dogma, however true. However, the true dogma will inspire, and Jesus Christ came to be this very dogma in human flesh, breathing the Spirit of life into all who will receive it.
The decline of faith in our age has been exacerbated by the Scientific Revolution. This is hardly a controversial point. Still, this social revolution’s effects are diverse and subtle. The most potent intention exerted by secular scientists is the seemingly immutable assumption that they know something that undermines the material cause of the historical Church, and the Bible as Revealed truth. True believing has been relegated to the lunatic fringe, at best to the private arena of our own communities, or even, when these communities loose courage, to the privacy of our own souls. So, there has been a tendency to shift the balance of the spirit:truth ratio hard toward spirit. The secular scientist has earned the right to rule over the material realm, the real or true world, and we are left with the fantasy life of running various spiritual scripts over this ontological hard drive. If this is true, if our faith has nothing to tell us about material reality, or is at least not grounded in a material ontology, then we must accept religious pluralism. If our faith is not so grounded, then it is just one of many, yea, potentially infinite spiritual ‘realities’. And, as our Christian faith, as an extension of the Old Testament Hebrew faith, is founded on many spacetime interventions by the Living God into the material world, what’s left of it, when these interventions, especially the Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection, become physically dubious, is quite meager indeed.
As a counter strike, I will be rendering the materialist assumption dubious, the good Lord willing. It is no more than a pseudo religious dogma that there is nothing but matter and its attending energies in the cosmos. The rejection of metaphysical substance from our inquiry into material processes is not discovered, It is merely asserted. As soon as we admit of metaphysical intentions in the being or organization of our material realm, we admit of God. This admission is blasphemy to the secular scientific order. Yet, the prejudice is contrary to the most essential principle of science, that we should set no bias before we begin our inquiry, and then we should draw only reasoned causal inferences from repeatedly measured physical phenomena. As I will show in presenting the discoveries I have made over the past several years that we can often see metaphysical, or meta-material if you like, substances and intentions by an orderly and rational contemplation of material being and its organization. As Saint Paul said to the Romans, connecting moral decadence with denying the divine hand behind nature;
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those men that detain the truth of God in injustice: Because that which is known of God is manifest in them. For God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable.
Romans 1:18-20 D-R
But we have lost the courage of this simple faith. We have become cautious, and don’t want to be too particular in our claims lest we be proven wrong and regret it. This is a good caution, that we should not make outlandish claims about physical things. We wince whenever we read Clement of Rome and his description of the Phoenix as an example of Divine wisdom. Yet throughout the history of the Church such claims are remarkably few. There is a double caution guiding us. For one, we don’t want to put Christian faith on the line for unbelievers to mock along with our falsified speculations. More, we don’t want to presume we know more than our Creator has revealed to us. As Saint Basil said in Homily 1 section 10 of the Hexameron, “Let us prefer the simplicity of faith to the demonstrations of reason”.
Yet, Pope Saint Pius X, inspired by Dei Filius from Vatican I, offers boldness through both reason and faith in the Oath against Modernism;
I profess that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world (see Romans 1:19), that is, from the visible world of creation, as a cause from its effects, and that, therefore, His existence can also be demonstrated. (My emphasis)
So, I will proceed with cautious courage to bring forward these metaphysical demonstrations. I hope there will be those who can intelligently critique them. If they are proven valid, or at least if they are not falsified, I hope that they will foster courage of faith in others a they have in me.
As we have seen through this ramble of mine, our faith has been challenged at both ends, as it were. Firstly there is the spirit of Enlightenment doubt that had almost fully dominated, at least among the learned, in the 19th century. This spirit was at once the source of Kierkegaard’s neurotic angst and Nietzsche’s bombastic angst. And it has been that undermining sense of dread that we just might be engaged in a fantasy world for adults. The accusation is certainly made by Atheists, both scholars and dolts. And by this doubt in first things, the Church, the visible evidence of Christ’s saving presence in the world, has become obscured. We are so far down this doubtful path, we can be tempted to think we are doing God a favour for believing in Him against this hoard of confident doubters, that belief as belief is a spiritual good in itself. But this is just the disease of naturalism. The belief that the only certain thing about the world is its material being, and our belief that God made it is only a preferred hypothesis for its origin. By its own material witness the cosmos is self generated, and self sustaining, according to the dominant ideology of the elite classes. Though most of the elite couldn’t defend their materialist cosmological primacy if their tenure depended on it. Stay with me friends, for it is just this materialist entitlement that I intend to falsify. Though I suspect that you like me will not escape a wounding from this two edged sword.
Saint Michael the Archangel defend us in battle!