#carl olson

A Word That Every Catholic Needs to Know

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my wife and I entering the Catholic Church from Evangelicalism. My upbringing skewed strongly the Fundamentalist end of the spectrum, while hers was more mainstream-Evangelical. Both of us were graduates of Evangelical Bible colleges, so we had a fairly in-depth understanding and experience of American Evangelicalism, which is a complicated and even bewildering world of numerous denominations, para-church organizations, and movements.

My interest in apologetics started when I read works by C.S. Lewis, whop played a significant role in our journey into the Church. Like so many other Evangelicals who “poped,” I worked through a wide range of questions about Mary, the Saints, authority, the sacraments, purgatory, and Tradition. In fact, the very first article I ever had published was a detailed account of that search and study for This Rock magazine, titled “Joining the Unsaved” (June, 1998). The experience could be likened to being dropped into a huge and exotic forest and spending countless hours studying the flora and fauna, trying to grasp the curious and often surprising details found therein.

During that time, I ended up writing a lengthy letter to my parents. In a way, it was like sending them a box with samples from the forest, with a mixture of tree leaves, flowers, and rocks. A few years later, when I re-read the letter, I saw that my explanation of Catholicism, while still quite correct and on point—and there were many points—lacked a sense of the big picture. Although I was able to defend against the negative stereotypes and false concepts which good people like my parents were tossing at me, I did not and I could not provide a positive, succinct picture of the essence of Catholicism.

Something was missing

This sense of incompleteness was especially strong when it came to the Church’s teaching about salvation. I knew the Church did not teach that our works alone save us, but I also knew that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:20). How so? I understood the importance of the sacraments; it was, after all, the reality of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist that drew my wife and I so powerfully to the Church. But how did that fit into the bigger picture of the forest of Catholicism, to continue the analogy? In what way could the forest be brought into focus and best understood?

The answer is theosis. It is also known as deification, divinization, participation, and divine sonship. The essence of Christianity and the gospel is that the triune God, who is perfect communion, “in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life” (CCC 1). The Father desires to gift us with his actual life and make us, through the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit, true children of God. “See what great love the Father has lavished on us,” states St. John, “that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1).

Now, as a young Evangelical Protestant I never questioned the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation—but I also rarely contemplated in depth what those two great Mysteries had to do with me. Sure, I knew God created me. Check. I accepted that God became man. Check. But these were more points of doctrine than realities to be contemplated, considered, pondered, and explored. And, to be both fair and blunt, that says more about my own personal failings than it does of failings in Evangelical theology. When I finally began to grasp the startling truth of theosis, I began to understand and see the details of the forest in an even more vibrant and life-changing way.

Considering this, how do essential but often overlooked truths—the subject of a detailed book that I co-edited with Fr. David Meconi, S.J.—help the apologist? Here are three basic ways:

1. Personal relationship

Most Fundamentalists and many Evangelicals see Catholicism as a religious system based on works, ritual, and “doing stuff.” What they don’t see, first, is that they themselves—for all the talk of a “personal relationship” with Christ—actively take part in a system based on works, ritual, and “doing stuff.” After all, they insist on the necessity of going to church, participating in some form of communal worship, doing good works, and so forth.

The heart of Catholicism is having a personal relationship with Christ. Yes, there is a lot of debate over whether or not Catholics should use such language, but to me it’s quite simple: the triune God, who is Creator of all, is perfect communion and love. He is relationship. And Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, is one of three divine persons. So, yes, having a personal relationship with each person of the Trinity\ is the very essence of being a Catholic:

“O blessed light, O Trinity and first Unity!” God is eternal blessedness, undying life, unfading light. God is love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God freely wills to communicate the glory of his blessed life. Such is the "plan of his loving kindness", conceived by the Father before the foundation of the world, in his beloved Son: "He destined us in love to be his sons" and "to be conformed to the image of his Son", through "the spirit of sonship". (CCC 257)

2. Rules, rules, rules?

Catholicism, being deeply communal, familial, and covenantal, is never satisfied by a mere legal or juridical understanding of salvation. The irony is that some Fundamentalists and Evangelicals insist that salvation is juridical and reflects a sort of divine courtroom, denouncing Catholicism for being impersonal and devoid of relationship. That’s absurd. As Catholics, we always understand that laws and rules are rooted in the familial, communal nature of God, as they orient us toward our final beatitude, by God’s grace.

3. The reality of grace

The biggest divide between Catholics and many Protestants is the nature of grace. “Grace,” as the Catechism so succinctly states, “is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life” (CCC 1997). This is why Catholics can say that the sacraments aren’t just symbols, but signs that really accomplish, by the power of God’s grace, what they signify. We insist that we don’t receive bread at Holy Communion, but the very body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ.

Because we are filled, animated, and joined by the trinitarian life of God, we participate in the heavenly realities, being truly part of Christ’s body—not just in a metaphorical sense, but in a way that is truly real.

Robert Hugh Benson, in his 1903 collection The Invisible Light, has an elderly man explain to a younger man that the word imaginative is often used in referring to something unreal or untrue, which is a misuse of the term. “It seems chiefly,” the man asserts, “the function of the imagination to visualize facts, and it is an abuse of that faculty to employ it chiefly in visualizing fancies.”

More than a century later, the abuse of imagination—both as a word and a reality—continues. How often, for example, do we hear it said, “Let your imagination run wild!” as an exhortation to drum up fantasies and illusions that usually have nothing to do with things as they really are. Grand prize for such misappropriation goes to John Lennon, whose famous, treacly tune “Imagine” blithely urges listeners:

Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people living for today

That Lennon wrote this after decades of Marxist poison and Communist rule demonstrates how he lacked true imagination, which is always rooted in reality. As Dr. Holly Ordway argues in her splendid new book Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith, both “reason and imagination are modes of communicating and encountering truth.”

For men such as Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, “and other medieval scholars and theologians,” Ordway explains:

[T]he imagination has a cognitive function: it mediates “between sense and intellect” by conveying “data to the intellect.” According to St. Bonaventure, the imagination both stores images for later recall and also interacts with the intellect by supplying the intellect with sensory data that has been “put into a form that the intellect can act on and use to understand.” Imagination is the human faculty that assimilates sensory data into images, upon which the intellect can then act; it is the basis of all reasoned thought as well as all artistic, or what we would call "imaginative," exercise.

Ordway, who tells her full story in her book Not God’s Type, is a former atheist who became Catholic by way of Evangelicalism. As she explains, both

Tolkien and Lewis had been shaping my imagination for years. . . . Christian fiction and poetry gave me an alternative vision of the world, one that was meaningful and integrated in a way that my atheist view wasn’t. My conscious philosophy was that there is no such thing as objective truth and beauty, but Tolkien and Lewis said, "Yes, there is: come and see." If there is no such thing as meaning and purpose, why should I be so deeply moved by these stories? My very enjoyment of literature undercut my atheism.

This vision of objective truth, goodness, and beauty is the focus of “imaginative apologetics,” which seeks to bring the faculty of the imagination into alignment with reason and fact, thus guiding the will toward Jesus Christ. One of the many strengths of Ordway’s new book is how it shows the many different and complimentary forms apologetics can take. Some approaches focus on facts about history and theology, whereas others have a more experiential and subjective quality, but always at the service of objective truth.

The fact is, most people aren’t convinced by facts alone; they need to see—to imagine!—those facts in the context of a story and a narrative. And this makes perfect sense, as we are relational creatures existing in time and space. We need to see how, for example, the fact of the Trinity and the Incarnation (which are the two central mysteries of the Faith) relate to us in the present day.

“The senses bring the data,” explains Ordway; “the reason makes the identification; the imagination mediates between the two.” One challenge, of course, is to get people to see and consider the data. Another is to encourage reason to be actually employed. Increasingly, the response to data and facts is to treat them as either political weapons—as “multiculturalists” often do—or subjective constructs—as the deconstructionists and their progeny are wont to do. Which is why reaching the imagination through story, narrative, art, and even music can be so helpful in subverting such pseudo-intellectual perspectives, which are often employed more as infantile defensive mechanisms than as rooted, coherent beliefs.

Since reason is actually dependent on imagination, works of imagination have the power to free us from our limited viewpoints and to consider other possibilities:

Through the God-given faculty of imagination, we can enter into other perspectives, and through the faculty of reason, we can assess the truth or falsity of what we discover. A holistic, fully integrated approach to apologetics helps people to make both those moves: first to enter into the Christian perspective, and then to recognize it as true (Apologetics and the Christian Imagination).

Essential to imaginative apologetics is a keen sensitivity to language and meaning, which Ordway writes about at length. As she points out in a new interview at Catholic World Report, apologists and evangelists must ask: “What do our words mean to the people who hear them? How can we help them appreciate the significance of our Christian words, so they aren’t just jargon?” Christians, more than anyone else, should appreciate the power and place of words, especially since we accept and proclaim the Word of God, while following and worshipping the Incarnate Word of God.

34 ORCHARD ISSUE 3 IS NOW AVAILABLE!

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Sharing some of what I have been reading this week:

Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory and Practice (2006), by Howard Gardner.

Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (2011), by Howard Gardner.

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2006), by Daniel Goleman.

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (2006), by Daniel Goleman.

Religious…