Yahoo Answers and the Catholic Church
For a number of reasons, I’ve been hanging around Yahoo Answers of late. The primary reason being that Yahoo started putting up Catholic related questions at the bottom of the Catholic Spitfire Grill homepage, and I thought that perhaps it might be a good place to answer a few questions that people have about the Catholic Church. I’ve got to say though that regularly looking for honest questions about the Catholic Church to answer at Yahoo Answers is looking a lot like dumpster diving for something to eat. The anti-religion athiests (those are different than rational athiests with whom you can have really cool discussions) are out in force with their wild accusations on one side and the anti-Catholic Chick Tract-reading Protestants are on the other and it’s kind of like watching a train wreck. I actually saw a Protestant link to a Chick Tract with the confident assertion, “Read that and I’ll bet you won’t still be Catholic.” I read it. I assure Mr. or. Ms. Anonymous on the internet, that the level of discourse found in the average Chick Tract does not endanger my Catholic faith. In fact, when when they don’t make me angry, they make me giggle. Then this afternoon, I was on the phone with a friend while looking at the latest Catholic questions that were linked to The Grill and when I started giggling, she demanded to know why. I read her the following question:
What sect of Christianity should I join?
I sort of want to become Catholic, but I don’t feel like going to church. The Catholic Church requires baptism, and I am not going to ask my parents to bring me down to the local church and get baptised. (I was never baptised.) I also do not feel like taking long classes to become a Catholic. I think I would rather be a Protestant, as I don’t have to go to church or get baptised. I can just consider myself Protestant without setting a foot near church.
and she DOUBLE DOG DARED me to blog about it. As you can see, I am a pushover for double dog dares. So here are my observations on this. I have often been told what a good thing it is, that Christians can now read the Bible and just decide for themselves what it takes to be a Christian. So here we have this young person, with an improperly formed conscience and a Bible who at least publicly thinks that those Christian rules are really more like general…you know…guidelines. Suggestions really. Disposable if they’re too much trouble. Now I KNOW that most Protestants (but not all….isn’t choice a good thing?) would counsel this young person on the need for Baptism and regular observance of the Lord’s Day, BUT why is this person’s conscience less well formed than ANY of ours (mine most assuredly included)? Oh sure. I can almost hear you from this side of my computer, “This young person has not received the Holy Spirit.” Well, do you think, that the sinner’s prayer is going to automatically put this young person’s conscience to rights? How would this young person know which Protestant Church has got the correct doctrine if his/her conscience is leading them merely to seek out an acceptable set of rules? It seems to me that even the Protestant believers (most of them I know anyway) who would say that this person needs discipleship and training from a church are saying that the reception of the Holy Spirit on being saved ISN’T sufficient….Well now, why isn’t it sufficent for this person but it IS for YOU [Protestant believer]? At what point in the Christian walk do our consciences become perfectly formed enough that the “Bible and me” (aka sola scriptura) is really all you need? One month after the sinner’s prayer? Two months? Six years? Is it a heart issue? Well then, how do we know that our hearts are in the right place? Can we trust a deformed conscience to give us a correct “feeling”? As I have matured in my Christian walk, I have discovered that the deeper I go with Christ the more I discover my conscience was not only severly deformed previously it is STILL grossly deformed. I submit, that ALL of our consciences are deformed and ALL of us are reading our Bibles imperfectly and that just as this young person needs the church to properly form his/her conscience SO DO WE.
Just as this young person NEEDS the church so do we all and it isn’t the church WE feel most comfortable in (best set of rules) or the church that has the doctrine that best corresponds to our own personal interpretation of Sacred Scripture (that’s idolatry of our intellect). It’s the ONE, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church that Jesus built on Peter the Rock. ONE Holy Spirit working through a whole bunch of deformed consciences interpreting the Bible for their own personal selves yields not ONE church but thousands and thousands and growing.
1 Timothy 3:15 But if I should be delayed, you should know how to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth.
Please note that the antecedant to ‘pillar and foundation of truth” is not “Bible”, or “scriptures.”
