Fifteen

THE CATHOLIC LIFETIME READINGS PLAN

An Apologetic Exhortation

“Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Pet 3:15).

Gentleness and reverence come naturally and supernaturally to those who know they are living in the kingdom. We are always in the presence of the holy, and we see in all others the image of our immortal king.

We should always be ready with an answer. But this is what should set Catholic apologists apart: we answer to lift people up, not shut them up. If we genuinely listen to people who disagree with us, and if we learn to present the content of the Catholic faith to them in a positive way, we are far more likely to persuade them. Sometimes, in the midst of an argument, we can get so caught up in the mechanics of argumentation that we miss many opportunities to witness to grace.

JUST AS IT SHOULD BE

The great nineteenth-century theologian Matthias Scheeben said that something like that happened in the centuries after the Protestant Reformation. Both Catholics and Protestants, he said, got so caught up in their debates that they produced misshapen theologies and misleading witness; because, instead of focusing on the essentials of faith, they dwelt on the points in dispute. Scheeben noted that the Council of Trent (echoing St. Paul in Rom 8:14–17) had provided a serious and considerate answer to Protestant questions on justification—but Catholics ignored it! They were so busy formulating a response in the legal terms that the reformers were using that they missed the transcendent beauty of Trent’s doctrine.

Trent defined justification as “a transference from the state in which man is born a son of the first Adam, to the state of grace and adoption of the sons of God.” If Catholics had used the language of Trent, Scheeben said,

the notion of justification would have escaped the shallow and muddled treatment that has so often disfigured it. Many inverted the proper procedure. Instead of starting with an adequate idea of God’s adoptive sonship and then determining the concept of justice contained in this idea, they preferred to regard divine sonship as a relationship to God arising from human justice, which they looked upon as a right disposition connected with freedom from sin, and an inclination toward morally good conduct. Thereby they did away with the possibility of fixing upon anything supernatural in this justice, and could conceive of the divine sonship itself only in an extremely vague, if not altogether rationalist, fashion. But if we follow the Council of Trent, and if with the Council we focus our attention on the fact that at bottom justification is a transition to the state of an adoptive child, to the state of the children of God, it emerges before our eyes with its greatness unimpaired.

This was a missed opportunity of massive proportions. Luther had described justification as “the doctrine by which the Church stands or falls” and “the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the ruler and judge over all other Christian doctrines.” Luther argued his case from Pauline texts, emphasizing “that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law” (Rom 3:28). So emphatic was Luther about the worthlessness of human works that he inserted the word “alone” after “faith” when he translated Paul’s text, claiming that salvation is by “faith alone.” Yet the phrase “faith alone” actually appears in only one place in Scripture, and that is in the Letter of James, which explicitly denies what would later become Luther’s keystone of doctrine: “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (Jas 2:24). Luther dealt with the problem by proposing to remove James from his New Testament; later theologians argued that Paul and James meant different things when they used the verb “justified.”

The semantic differences between James and Paul are debatable at best. The semantic differences between Protestant and Catholic dogmatists, however, are a fact of history. And Catholics could have avoided much of it if they had simply followed Trent in placing their own accent on the idea of divine filiation—the astonishing fact that Christians are, by grace, adopted sons of God. As St. John of Damascus put it in the eighth century: in baptism, we become by grace what God is by nature.

Trent’s approach also would have enabled us to speak of justification in the “covenantal” terms favored by John Calvin and his division of the Reformation. For Luther and Calvin, as for St. Augustine and the Council of Trent, you have to experience divine regeneration before you can exercise the faith that justifies. Regeneration precedes justification. Generation is how we come into the natural family as children. Regeneration, through baptism, is how we come to God’s family.

It is only in recent decades that Catholic theologians and ecumenists have earnestly begun to employ the methods proposed by Trent. And the results have been remarkable. On the institutional level, we have seen the world’s Lutherans sign a “Joint Declaration on Justification.” On the personal level, a great many Lutherans—both clergy and laity, and even some very prominent theologians—have recently come into full communion with the Catholic Church (notably Richard John Neuhaus, Reinhard Hütter, Bruce Marshall, Mickey Mattox, Leonard Klein, and Jennifer Mehl Ferrara).

MASS CONVERSIONS

The lesson from history should be clear to us. So much depends upon our deep, personal appropriation of the faith—in positive biblical terms—and in the Church’s own terms! We must make the biblical and Catholic doctrine our own, through study and prayer. (The first conversion we must seek—always—is our own.) And then we must strive to present our faith in a positive way, rather than in a simply reactionary way.

Sometimes we may answer with a single verse, because that’s what our friends are looking for; but the true Catholic answer is the entire Bible. Sometimes we may answer in a single breath; but we must also answer with our entire lives. For we are servants, like Christ. We are witnesses, like His holy Apostles. Only if we are saints and servants and witnesses will we be true apologists—and, more than that, true evangelists.

Evangelization is not the work of arguments alone. People need to see the reality of the kingdom when they see the Church and see her members, and even the most clearly formulated doctrine cannot force anyone to see what our own sins have obscured. The Catechism echoes St. Thomas Aquinas when it says: “We do not believe in formulas, but in those realities they express, which faith allows us to touch. The believer’s act of faith does not terminate in the propositions, but in the realities which they express” (CCC, n. 170). Our apostolic goal, then, is to manifest the kingdom. Giving a more convincing reason doesn’t make the truth of the kingdom more real, just more accessible.

We have many reasons to believe. We have plausible, good, and beautiful reasons to believe. And many of our friends, neighbors, and coworkers are desperate to find a reason to believe. Our words and our lives should give them ample reasons.

As Father Scheeben noted, though, all our reasons come down to one: We are God’s children now. Divine filiation—our family relationship with God—is a key that unlocks so many of the mysteries and enigmas of Scripture—and opens the door to a more positive and effective apologetics. Once we see ourselves as God’s children, the other mysteries fall into place. Baptism? It is our birth into the family. The Mass? It is our family meal, our holy sacrifice at the altar of our true home. The saints? They are our siblings. The Blessed Virgin? She is our mother. The pope? As God’s vicar, he is our holy father. The kingdom? It is ours because it belongs to the Son of God. The Church? It is our home, because it is the kingdom of heaven, and the kingdom of heaven belongs to children like us!

People sometimes ask me what is the best way to prepare for the task of apologetics. Well, we should all be doing certain things: praying, reading the Scriptures, seeking wisdom from reliable teachers, and seeking the grace of the Holy Spirit, to name just a few. But we can also take a “shortcut,” because there’s one practice that encompasses all those others.

If I had to name only one preparation for the work of apologetics, it would be this: full, conscious, and active participation in the Holy Mass. Go as often as you can. Of course, we must go on Sundays and holy days. But go on weekdays, too, if you can do it in a way that doesn’t threaten your employment or burden your family.

The Mass is where we grow familiar with the contours of reality. It’s where the natural world—of wheat, wine, and water—meets the supernatural, and where they coexist in one kingdom, with the angels crying out “Holy, holy, holy!” before the consecrated elements. It’s in the Mass that we are set apart, along with those elements of nature, to be consecrated, to be holy, to be divinized.

The Mass is where the Bible dwells in its natural and supernatural habitat. The Mass is where the whole Bible hangs together, and it’s the only place where the whole Bible is proclaimed consistently and fully. For the Mass is the culmination of the Bible’s prophecy. The Bible is about the Mass, and the Bible suffuses the Mass. When we go to Mass often, we absorb the Bible, as if through every pore of our body. We take it in with the grace to understand it.

I’ll tell you about my early experience of this.

KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

I was a new Catholic, and I was flush with the pride of discovery.

I’d just presented a paper to a doctoral seminar on the Gospel of Matthew, and I thought my work was important and original. I also believed it was true. Even the grueling, two-and-a-half-hour session of questioning by my professor and fellow students had left me—and my thesis—unscathed.

What was the subject? I argued that Matthew’s account of Jesus giving Peter the “keys to the kingdom” cites the obscure oracle of Isaiah about the transfer of “the key of the House of David.” What Jesus conferred upon Peter—namely, authority over His Church—corresponded to what Isaiah’s king had conferred upon Eliakim in making him prime minister of the Davidic kingdom. In both cases there was an office with both primacy and succession. When one person vacated the office, another took his place, and the successor held authority identical to that of his predecessor.

Earlier scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, had noticed the Isaiah citation. And you don’t have to be a scholar to notice that Matthew is filled with quotations, citations, allusions, and echoes from the Old Testament.

I felt I had a fresh insight, however, in seeing how the citation helps us understand Matthew’s meaning and Jesus’ intention. As I saw it, the passage depicted Jesus as the new Davidic king and the Church as the restored kingdom of David.

It was this conclusion and others like it that eventually led me to become a Catholic. I thanked God for the grace. But I also congratulated myself for conducting such an impressive work of scholarship. My classmates and professor may have been impressed, but not half as impressed as I was.

Yet it was only a short time later that I encountered those same two biblical passages again—in a setting I was hardly expecting.

It happened at Mass on the twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time. The first reading was taken from Isaiah 22, the same obscure oracle I’d studied in such detail for my paper. It is such an odd passage that I didn’t expect to hear it included in the liturgy. But then, a few minutes later, the priest proclaimed the Gospel—and it was Matthew 16, the story of Jesus giving the keys to Peter!

What were the odds of those two Scriptures being read at the same Mass? I asked myself. I felt as if I’d won some kind of lectionary lottery.

Only later did I discover that the readings we hear at Mass aren’t chosen by holy happenstance. My innovative interpretation of Matthew 16 was one that Catholics had been hearing in the liturgy for years—and not only scholars, but laborers, merchants, and the poorest of the poor.

It’s more than twenty years now since I became a Catholic, and I’ve had this experience again and again at Mass.

Sunday after Sunday, the Church gives us a pattern of biblical interpretation, showing us how the promises of the Old Testament are fulfilled in the New Testament. And the Church presents the Scriptures this way because the New Testament writers did. And the New Testament writers learned it from Jesus.

The Evangelists understood the Old Testament as salvation history, the patient unfolding of God’s gracious and merciful plan to fashion the human race into a covenant family—the family of God that worships and dwells in His kingdom.

Surely it was that promise of divine sonship that captivated me and held me, all those years ago, when I first went searching after reasons to believe, when I first sought the deeper meaning of the Church’s baptism.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God…Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (Jn 3:3,5).

I learned from my first teachers that baptism is a christening. It is an anointing. It confers a kingship that Christ has seen fit to share with a beggar like me. More than that, it is a kingship that He wants us all to share with everyone we meet, especially those who are most hostile. Always with gentleness and reverence. And full of hope.