Updates from the life of Keith Major
Category: Church unity
You are invited to experience a love that has no limits, no end, no strings attached. Come join over 40,000+ teens at Steubenville Conferences as we discover the reality that nothing can separate us from this love.
Videographer: Keith Major
Video editor: Cory Heimann @Likable Art
Matthew Leonard and I share about a renewed understanding of fasting when observed through the lens of Catholicism via voluntary penance and redemptive suffering. The son of a Protestant pastor, Matthew served as a missionary in Latin America previous to his conversion to Catholicism in 1998.
After entering the Church, he obtained a Master’s degree in Theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville and is now is the Executive Director of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (http://bit.ly/nD86jb) and you can follow Matthew on Twitter @MattSLeonard.
Fr. Dennis Gang, a TOR Franciscan Friar, shares what fasting does for him as well as some the spiritual direction that he gives students and spiritual directees concerning fasting.
God pulled them out of a Catholic Church and put them into a Protestant sect because God is spiritual gravity and God pulls us towards Himself, like a massive sun. If His rays are blocked in one place, we must go elsewhere to find them, for find them we must! They draw us, they give us life. They are a matter of life or death, not a religious shopping mart. You may think this God-Gravity somewhat speculative, but why should God have less gravity than the sun? Why should there be less gravity in grace than in nature? Why should the spiritual universe be less united by gravity than the physical universe? The parallel works perfectly.
Look at physical gravity carefully. It’s like love. It brings together. Time and space are principles of dispersion, separation that prevent complete union. Time disperses our being out into past and future. Space disperses matter out into various places. Those two dispersions make death possible. Time and space enable death to insert its destructive sword between one year, when you live and one year, when you die. And between one material part of you, let’s say your head, and another, your body.
Yet, despite these dispersions, the physical universe is still united by a universal, gravitational attraction which is a real force of love and union. A non-random, directed, purposive movement or tendency towards all other matter. All matter is in love with all other matter. That is, the universe wants to return to the big bang unity, the one divine source of the many. In the act of creation, the physical universe runs by the love of God. “The love that moves the sun and all the stars,” in Dante’s words.
For gravity is not just like love, but gravity is love on a material level. In fact, it has two movements: one is towards union, back to the center, the big bang, the past by gravity. And the other is to give itself out to all other beings, out into the future, the expanding universe, by energy, and by entropy, which is energy giving itself out to the empty places. Aquinas says, “The good is diffusive of itself.” On every level, from the Trinity to subatomic particles.
Thus the light that leaves the star goes everywhere in the universe forever. A dropped rock on earth goes to the moon and makes the rocks on the moon shudder just a little. We can calculate how much, it’s a function of the two variables of mass and distance. Every mass at any distance exerts some gravity. When I drop a pebble into a pool, I make ripples all the way to the shore. And when I drop a good deed into another person’s life, those ripples, tiny and imperceptible though they may be, do not stop short of the shore of death. And even then, they proceed on to the “third and fourth generation of those who hate God and goodness onto thousands of generations of those who love God and keep His commandments.”
God is the source of all spiritual gravity and God touches us only through Christ. “No one can come to the Father but by me.” Thus all spiritual gravity, including ecumenical gravity is through Christ. All return, all homecoming, all reconciliation, all mutual understanding, all healing of wounds in the body of Christ, is through the gravity of grace in the body of Christ. Now this is a largely unconscious and invisible thing, this gravity of grace. We don’t see it and we don’t even know what is happening when our spirit is drawn, just as we don’t know when our body falls. It’s not our conscious knowledge that is the prime mover of spiritual events.
When the human race first learned the law of gravity through Newton, it was a scientific and technological revolution. When we will learn the law of spiritual gravity, when we learn that it is a person and His name is Jesus, there will be a greater revolution. He promised that revolution. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all men to myself.” “Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” Those are divine promises. Why do we limit them to what we have already seen, or to what we can imagine or comprehend?
All God’s deeds transcend our vision, our imagination, and our comprehension. Christ is the golden key to all of history and therefore, to future ecumenism. Let us not dare to cut down the full Christ into understandable and predictable pieces. That’s exactly what all the heresies tried to do.
I think this ecumenical unity must wait until Christ in Protestants and Christ in Catholics see each other. That is, until they see the same Christ, until you have what you might call “evangelical intimacy.” And see more Christ in the other. The same is true of Eastern Orthodox. They must see the adoration and the beauty of Christ in us or else reunion will be a watering down. And with the Jews! The Jews must see us as more Jewish, more faithful, more martyrs, than the Jews. The same with the Muslims. They must see their “islam,” their absolute submission to God in us, and their spiritual warfare, their right jihad. And the Buddhist must see in us a greater peace, a greater mindfulness. And even the worldings and sex maniacs. They must see in us the joy that they’re seeking and not finding.
That’s necessary, that’s not an option, not an ideal, it’s necessary because of gravity. There’s not choice, it’s the nature of things. Like physical gravity. It can be impeded, just as gravity can be impeded by a hand catching a falling apple, but only temporarily. Art can’t change the nature of things, nature always take over eventually. Grass grows through abandoned buildings, and Christ is more like grass than like buildings. So let’s not limit His growth.
Those are some bold and speculative thoughts, and I would appreciate your reactions to them in questions.
Let’s go through the whole thing one more time in a somewhat different way because it’s an apparently an impossible, unbelievable point: this hope for ecumenical reunion without compromise.
Already ecumenism has defined predictions and expectations. Apparently easy bridges have not been built, for example between Catholics and Orthodox. While apparently impossible ones have been built, for instance the Catholic-Lutheran agreement on Justification.
In my individual experience I find the same surprising principle to be true. I often find more mutual understanding between myself and a fundamentalist Southern Baptist who sincerely believes I am worshiping the great whore of Babylon and on my way to Hell, or with a Muslim who uncompromisingly rejects my belief that Christ is Lord as utter pagan blasphemy, than I find with some active Catholic laity, nuns, especially ex-nuns, priests and even bishops! As fellow Catholics we may agree on more articles of faith than I do with the Protestant or the Muslim, yet I sense we disagree more fundamentally than I do with the Protestant or the Muslim, and not just by personal temperament. Here’s a mystery and when I try to unravel it, here’s what I came up with.
Let’s begin at the beginning with God, and the nature of God, and the will of God. God is Love and God wills above all for us all to enter into that Love forever: to incorporate us into the very mystery of the life of the Trinity. Everything that God does, from banging out the big bang, to incarnating His own Son, to arranging for each and every hair that falls from our head, everything He does is done for that end. Now with this general and very Heavenly principle in mind, let us look at something very earthly and very particular.
Let’s look at the ecumenical situation in a very local time and place. Latin America today. Catholics are complaining that Evangelical, Fundamentalist, and Pentecostal sects are stealing sheep. Protestant sects are growing and Catholic percentages are declining. Well, instead of complaining, let’s look deeper at the reality. Why is this happening? I think the ultimate reason is because God is Love. Because God wills to draw all men to Himself. Because of that spiritual gravity, because nature abhors a vacuum, spiritually as well as physically, and because the Catholic Church has been so remiss in giving God’s children the fullness of the spiritual food that God has given the Church to give out, therefore, the children have been going elsewhere to eat it.
And God has allowed this because God is a good father. And a good father would rather see his children go away from home and live, than stay home and die. Of course things are not that simple, of course motives for leaving the Church and joining the sects are many and mixed and some are simply bad, but still I think the main force that’s driving these events is in the realm of the spirit is the Spirit. When these sheep find little or no Christ in the Catholic Church, whoever’s fault that is, and find Christ more really in a sect, more really objectively and not just subjectively, and certainly not just emotionally, then they’re moving closer to and not farther from the fullness of the Catholic faith. They may have left the Eucharist, the real presence of Christ in the Catholic Church, and that is the fullest presence of Christ in this world, but they did not know the Person who is present there, and whose body they ate with their bodies, but not with their souls.
When these starving sheep leave home to find the manna of Christ in the sects, they are learning the lesson one that should have learned as Catholics but didn’t. And that lesson one is the only possible foundation for lesson two and three and four. That is, the fullness of the faith that the Catholic Church has, the building, rests on one foundation. As Catholics, these people may have gotten the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but they didn’t get the real presence of Christ in their hearts and in their lives. They got the upper stories of the Catholic skyscrapers, but not the foundation. Not the faith and the hope and the love relationship with Christ as Lord and Savior. Therefore, in order to become good Catholics, they must first become good Protestants.
“Ecumenism Without Compromise” by Peter Kreeft
Let’s go through the whole thing one more time in a somewhat different way because it’s an apparently an impossible, unbelievable point: this hope for ecumenical reunion without compromise.
Already ecumenism has defied predictions and expectations. Apparently easy bridges have not been built, for example between Catholics and Orthodox. While apparently impossible ones have been built, for instance the Catholic-Lutheran agreement on Justification.
In my individual experience I find the same surprising principle to be true. I often find more mutual understanding between myself and a fundamentalist Southern Baptist who sincerely believes I am worshipping the great whore of Babylon and on my way to Hell, or with a Muslim who uncompromisingly rejects my belief that Christ is Lord as utter pagan blasphemy, than I find with some active Catholic laity, nuns, especially ex-nuns, priests and even bishops! As fellow Catholics we may agree on more articles of faith than I do with the Protestant or the Muslim, yet I sense we disagree more fundamentally than I do with the Protestant or the Muslim, and not just by personal temperament.
Here’s a mystery and when I try to unravel it, here’s what I came up with.
Let’s begin at the beginning with God, and the nature of God, and the will of God. God is Love and God wills above all for us all to enter into that Love forever: to incorporate us into the very mystery of the life of the Trinity. Everything that God does, from banging out the big bang, to incarnating His own Son, to arranging for each and every hair that falls from our head, everything He does is done for that end. Now with this general and very Heavenly principle in mind, let us look at something very earthly and very particular.
Let’s look at the ecumenical situation in a very local time and place. Latin America today. Catholics are complaining that Evangelical, Fundamentalist, and Pentecostal sects are stealing sheep. Protestant sects are growing and Catholic percentages are declining. Well, instead of complaining, let’s look deeper at the reality. Why is this happening? I think the ultimate reason is because God is Love. Because God wills to draw all men to Himself. Because of that spiritual gravity, because nature abhors a vacuum, spiritually as well as physically, and because the Catholic Church has been so remiss in giving God’s children the fullness of the spiritual food that God has given the Church to give out, therefore, the children have been going elsewhere to eat it.
And God has allowed this because God is a good father. And a good father would rather see his children go away from home and live, than stay home and die. Of course things are not that simple, of course motives for leaving the Church and joining the sects are many and mixed and some are simply bad, but still I think the main force that’s driving these events is in the realm of the spirit is the Spirit. When these sheep find little or no Christ in the Catholic Church, whoever’s fault that is, and find Christ more really in a sect, more really objectively and not just subjectively, and certainly not just emotionally, then they’re moving closer to and not farther from the fullness of the Catholic faith. They may have left the Eucharist, the real presence of Christ in the Catholic Church, and that is the fullest presence of Christ in this world, but they did not know the Person who is present there, and whose body they ate with their bodies, but not with their souls.
When these starving sheep leave home to find the manna of Christ in the sects, they are learning the lesson one that should have learned as Catholics but didn’t. And that lesson one is the only possible foundation for lesson two and three and four. That is, the fullness of the faith that the Catholic Church has, the building, rests on one foundation. As Catholics, these people may have gotten the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but they didn’t get the real presence of Christ in their hearts and in their lives. They got the upper stories of the Catholic skyscrapers, but not the foundation. Not the faith and the hope and the love relationship with Christ as Lord and Savior. Therefore, in order to become good Catholics, they must first become good Protestants.
Well, if God can do this, if God can effect an ecumenical reunion, why not now? Why does he delay? God never delays. Well then if the teachings of the Church are true, why doesn’t God convince Protestants of those truths? I think the reason is spiritual and personal, more than theological.
Why should God let Protestants become Catholics when many Protestants, perhaps most, already know Christ more intimately and personally than many Catholics! How can God lead Protestants home to the fullness of faith in the Catholic Church until the Catholic Church becomes that fullness that they knew as Protestants plus more, not any less! When Catholics know Christ better than Protestants do, when Catholics are better Protestants than Protestants, then Protestants will become Catholics in order to become better Protestants!
When Catholics are evangelized, Protestants will be sacramentalized. But not before! Evangelizing comes first.
So I think we Catholics have to change first. But that change involves not the slightest compromising with anything Catholic: no dumbing down of the faith and no addition from without, no paganization nor secularization nor negation not weakening. Only a rediscovery of our own essence from within. Frankly, it is the Protestants who are going to have to add to the doctrines they rejected by seeing them differently. What we have to add, or rather, rediscover is something even more important then doctrines: namely the relationship that we have neglected. A truer relationship with a person is even more important than a truer concept about him. So that point will probably make many Protestants cheer.
But any good Protestant who is hearing this ought to protest one thing I said a few moments ago: namely that Protestantism is essentially a protest movement, essentially negative. Protestants defend Protestantism as essentially positive. Why? Not because it doesn’t have a pope or Transubstantiation or purgatory or rosary, that is negative. But because it knows Christ, because its essence is the absolute all-sufficiency of Christ.
But that means that good Protestants are Protestants for exactly the same good reason that good Catholics are Catholic: out of fidelity to Christ. So if the Protestant and the Catholic are both totally sincere about this Christocentrism, If both sections of Christ’s orchestra want only to follow the baton of Christ the one conductor, and if they never yield on this holy fanaticism of love and loyalty to Christ, then they will play in harmony. For we know that Christ’s will is harmony, and unity. Look at that most intimate glimpse of the inner life of the Trinity that we have in Scripture: Christ’s high priestly prayer to His Father just before His death in John 17. Unity is central to it. Departure from Christ was the fundamental cause of the Church’s tragic divisions in the first place. Another word for departure from Christ is “sin.” Therefore, return to Christ will be the cause of the Church’s return to unity. That is simple logic. I could put that into a syllogism. It is also simple sanity and sanctity. Another word for “return to Christ” is “sanctity.”
When bishops and theologians become saints, then Catholics will become Evangelicals and Evangelicals will become Catholics. When both Protestants and Catholics become saints they will become one. For a saint means only an “alter Christos,” another Christ, a little Christ, and Christ is not divided. Christ’s body is not divided. When Christ comes at the end of the world to marry His Church, He will not be a polygamist. The Church will not be His harem.
The Golden KeyThere is a golden key! His name is Jesus Christ. We can’t do it. And He can. We must be very clear about those two truths. The main reason it hasn’t happened is that we do not fully believe both those two truths.
Christ Himself is the most powerful source of reunion in the world because it comes not from the world but from Heaven. And He will have His way with us sooner or later, one way or another. We don’t know whether it’s going to be sooner or later, and we don’t know if it will come by one way or by another. But we do know that it will come because it is his will. We don’t know when and we don’t know how, but we know who.
Pope John Paul II has voiced the bold hope that as the first thousand years of Christian history were the millennium of Christian unity, and the second thousand years were the millennium of Christian disunity, 1054, 1517, and the over twenty-thousand denominations that came from 1517, so the third thousand years may be the millennium of Christian re-unity, reunification.
But how? The deepest division is obviously between Catholics and Protestants, for the Eastern Orthodox Churches have all remained one, not split into twenty-thousand in creed, code, or cult. They have preserved the fullness of Catholic faith. Except for universal papal authority, but that has changed its form quite a bit throughout Christian history, though not its reality, and it can change again. The pope himself explicitly said that in Ut Unum Sint. But how can Catholics and Protestants achieve reunion? I will prescind entirely from the question whether Anglicans are Catholics, Protestants, both, or neither. Well it cannot be by yielding or weakening or compromising one iota of divinely revealed truth!
All the serious differences between Protestants and Catholics concern how much territory this category of divinely revealed truth covers. For instance, the Church’s doctrines about Mary, and the saints, and the seven Sacraments, and Transubstantiation, and purgatory, Catholics accept them because they believe they are true and divinely revealed. Protestants reject them because they believe they are not true and not divinely revealed. Protestants say Catholics believe too much. Catholics say Protestants believe too little. Protestants say the Church added to Christ’s original, pure and simple revelation in the New Testament. Protestantism is thus Catholicism stripped down: the Catholic Ark with what Protestants claim are the non-scriptural barnacles scraped off of it.
When I was at Calvin College and investigating things Catholic and falling in love with them and feeling guilty about it, because this was the wrong church, I took a course in church history to try to get things clear. And the very first day of the course, the wise-old professor said, “What is the Church?” And we were all just freshman, we didn’t know for nothing so nobody answered. So he said, “Well, you’re going to meet a Roman Catholic someday and he’s going to say, ‘You’re in the wrong church! You’re a Calvinist, you’re in the church John Calvin founded 500 years ago. We’re in the church Jesus Christ founded 2000 years ago.’ What do you say to him?” Nobody had an answer. I said to myself, “I’m in the right class.”
He said, “Well, here’s what the Catholics will say: the church today is a great big thing and it looks very different from the simple thing you read about in the New Testament, but it’s the same just as that oak tree is the same organism as that little acorn. What’s wrong with that picture? The Catholic will say that Luther and Calvin broke off some branches of the church because it was really rotten and they tried to start a new one, but that can’t be done cause there’s only one Jesus. And therefore, only one church. What’s your answer to that? What’s wrong with that picture?” And nobody had an answer. I said to myself, “I’m in the right class!”
And he said, “Well, here’s what’s wrong with that pictures, here’s what happened: Jesus founded one church indeed and it is the church described in the New Testament, and it’s like Noah’s Ark, and it did get rotten, and Luther and Calvin and Knox and others said, ‘Gee, this Ark is sinking! We gotta scrape the barnacles off!’ So they scraped the barnacles off and restored it to its simple, pure, primitive, New Testament essence. So we’re in the right church! It’s the Catholics who are the upstarts. They’re the ones who added all those pagan barnacles.” I said, “Oh that makes me feel good.” I remember asking a question, I said, “Professor, do you mean to tell me that, if my Catholic neighbor and I both found a time machine and went back to the first century,” I still remember his look, “What’s this guy, a weirdo? Science fiction?” “…and worshipped together, that I as a Protestant would feel more at home in that church than he as a Catholic would?” And then he smiled. He said, “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” I said to myself, “Good, that means that I don’t have to be a great theologian to figure out who’s right. All I have to do is read the Church Fathers to prove to myself that they were all Calvinists.” Well, I read the Church Fathers and proved to myself they were all Catholics, so that’s why I’m here.
But the very word “Protestant” means protesting, refusing some of the Catholic whole because they think it’s anti-scriptural and unscriptural barnacles added to what Christ gave us. While the very word “Catholic” means universal, or whole. The whole deal. So this has a problem, apparently without a possible solution because no faithful Catholic could dream of unity with Protestants except on Catholic grounds. For to be a Catholic is to believe that those grounds are holy grounds, divinely revealed. It is the Protestants who must remove their shoes. Catholics cannot negotiate away any of the deposit of faith because it is not theirs, it is Christ’s! The divinely appointed mail carriers may not edit God’s mail.
MajorChange 