Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Owing Catholics
Back in March, Joe Carter wrote at Evangelical Outpost of his appreciation for Roman Catholicism, not his conversion mind you, just his appreciation for the good things that faith tradition has brought to us. It should come as no surprise to regular readers that I really enjoyed Joe's post, and could not agree with it more.
Was this not what Christ did when he chose mere fisherman to be his apostles and hung out with "publicans and sinners"?
The second direction my thoughts move is towards the labels. We could accomplish almost nothing intellectually without labels. They allow us to categorize, organize, sort, store, and otherwise make great use of enormous amounts of information. And yet we fail to realize that no label can fully decribe that to which it is attached.
There is a label on a drawer in my house that says "tools." Now, in that drawer is everything from a cordless drill to a hammer, to a tape measure to a c-clamp. Yes, all those things are tools, but that does not mean that I should grab a tape measure when I need a hammer. Imagine now that I partition the drawer and provide sublabels as to the type of tool. Suppose I need the drill at the moment. Are all the other sublabels now bad? Of course not.
Labels, "Catholic," "Jew," "Mormon," "Prebyterian" are descriptive, but not utterly so. In some settings they are completely uninformative. For example, do the sublabels for the tools matter a whit when I am cooking dinner? (OK, well maybe if I am tired and want to use the drill to stir the red beans and rice, but you get the idea).
Even more, what are useful labels to some are pointless to others. For example, I encounter a pool of liquid in a client's facility. I examine it. I then describe it as slightly viscous, yellowish, corrosive, odorless, clear. Does that tell you anything? Not unless you are a trained chemist it doesn't. And as a trained chemist, it still doesn't tell me anything unless I know specifically what client I am at, in one if could be sulfuric acid, in another caustic soda, and in another "take it to the lab for further analysis."
Labels are useful, but so is education. Which brings me back to Joe's post. So many people are quick to condemn Catholicism without understanding what that label really means. As Joe points out, it means a whole lot more than "vile papist." If you are going to throw labels around, it would be wise to learn precisely what they mean.
Related Tags: labels, Catholics, depravity, prejudice, education, Joe Carter
Unlike Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Sen. Sam Brownback, and Professor Steve Bainbridge, I won’t be crossing the Tiber. Because the theological differences I have with Catholicism are deep-rooted and currently irresolvable, I’ll remain an unabashedly Reformed evangelical. Yet I, like many evangelicals, have a deep love, respect, and admiration for my fellow believers in the Catholic Church. However much we might disagree, we evangelicals owe them a debt of gratitude for being co-belligerents, fellow servants, and exemplars of the faith.On reading those words, my thoughts move in two directions. The first is the limitations of theology, and yet our theology should teach us that Joe's attitutde is a good one. Good Reformed theology teaches us that we are totally depraved, but not utterly so. Thus there is some good, some reflection of God's image, in all of us. We need but go looking for it.
Was this not what Christ did when he chose mere fisherman to be his apostles and hung out with "publicans and sinners"?
The second direction my thoughts move is towards the labels. We could accomplish almost nothing intellectually without labels. They allow us to categorize, organize, sort, store, and otherwise make great use of enormous amounts of information. And yet we fail to realize that no label can fully decribe that to which it is attached.
There is a label on a drawer in my house that says "tools." Now, in that drawer is everything from a cordless drill to a hammer, to a tape measure to a c-clamp. Yes, all those things are tools, but that does not mean that I should grab a tape measure when I need a hammer. Imagine now that I partition the drawer and provide sublabels as to the type of tool. Suppose I need the drill at the moment. Are all the other sublabels now bad? Of course not.
Labels, "Catholic," "Jew," "Mormon," "Prebyterian" are descriptive, but not utterly so. In some settings they are completely uninformative. For example, do the sublabels for the tools matter a whit when I am cooking dinner? (OK, well maybe if I am tired and want to use the drill to stir the red beans and rice, but you get the idea).
Even more, what are useful labels to some are pointless to others. For example, I encounter a pool of liquid in a client's facility. I examine it. I then describe it as slightly viscous, yellowish, corrosive, odorless, clear. Does that tell you anything? Not unless you are a trained chemist it doesn't. And as a trained chemist, it still doesn't tell me anything unless I know specifically what client I am at, in one if could be sulfuric acid, in another caustic soda, and in another "take it to the lab for further analysis."
Labels are useful, but so is education. Which brings me back to Joe's post. So many people are quick to condemn Catholicism without understanding what that label really means. As Joe points out, it means a whole lot more than "vile papist." If you are going to throw labels around, it would be wise to learn precisely what they mean.
Related Tags: labels, Catholics, depravity, prejudice, education, Joe Carter
