catholicism 101 -- part 5/8

CATHOLICISM 101

(the outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion)

Church of the Holy Cross
February 17, 2008

Part 5
What is the Church FOR?

- The Church is the Sphere of Grace

• Man is created by God and endowed with reason (you can think), emotions (you can feel), and a will (you can choose).

• What happened through the fall is that these powers are corrupted.

• St. Paul writes (Romans 1.20ff): “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they [idolaters] are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became FUTILE IN THEIR THINKING and their SENSELESS MINDS WERE DARKENED. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and SERVED THE CREATURE RATHER THAN THE CREATOR, who is blessed for ever! Amen.”

• The whole problem is that we are not now NATURALLY ordered toward God. We are NATURALLY ordered toward what he has created (“the creature”) rather than Him, the Creator – who alone is worthy of service and honor and who alone is blessed forever. And that’s why things, and especially people, are so mixed up. That’s how sin is perpetuated.

• And St. Paul in the passage that follows gives a whole litany of the messed-upness and disorder of nature (and human nature). (This passage has become very unpopular among Episcopalians): Romans 1.26ff – “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.”

-Catholic Christianity isn’t about singling out a group of people who are predisposed toward corruption in one of these particular avenues. The point is that we are ALL born into a situation of being corrupted in our nature. Therefore to be a human with integrity, reoriented toward God (and therefore toward life and grace and fulfillment) means to STRUGGLE. Because we are ALL found in that catalog of disorder.

• Since NATURE is corrupt and disordered, it takes something SUPERNATURAL to fix it. It takes GRACE – which is what God alone (who created Nature and who, as Nature’s creator, is ABOVE NATURE – is supernatural) has and what he gives.

• Acceptance of the gift of God’s grace lifts man out of the domain of the merely natural, and places him in the sphere of the supernatural. The Church often calls life in the sphere of the Supernatural being “in a state of grace.”

• Only in a “state of grace” can man know, love, and serve God. Because only in a state of grace do we have a kinship with God – by abiding in grace we become sons.

• St. Paul writes (Galatians 4.4ff): “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir. Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings [Greek “ousin” – things, existences] that by nature are no gods; but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits [Greek = “stoicheia” = “basic elements”, “elementary things”] whose slaves you want to be once more?”

• If we desire to be supernatural beings – humans full of grace, fit for divinity (Greek = “theosis” = “deified”), oriented toward God (and therefore oriented toward life and fulfillment), then we must go to the place where grace is, the sphere within which God gives what he has, where being supernatural (which God alone is “naturally” – that is God alone is “naturally supernatural”) is possible.

• And recall what we said last time -- St. Paul calls the clergy – i.e. ministers in succession from the Apostles – “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4.1), that Christ made the Apostles the ministers of divine grace: the Eucharist, the offering of his own body and blood; the absolvers of sin (that is those who loose members of the body from the things that bind them to the domain of the natural – and thus prevent them from becoming supernatural beings); baptizers, bestowers of the Holy Spirit, etc.

• The Church is therefore the sphere within which we have access to all these things: to the gift of God in Christ (the essence of Grace – Grace itself – because Christ was FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH (John 1)) in Baptism and Eucharist; the grace of being set free from those things that bind us to the domain of the natural – in the sacrament of reconciliation / confession; the bestowal of the Holy Spirit in confirmation, etc.

• So it becomes clear how it is that the Church is the “12 Lane Superhighway to Heaven” – it is the arena within which we have access to Grace – what God gives. He gives it within this sphere. Can he give it outside Church? Of course. John 3.8: “the wind (Greek = “penuma” = “spirit”) blows where it wants to blow, and you hear the sound of it and do not know where it came from or where it its going”. But God DOES (and does want to) give it within the Sphere of the Catholic Church. And he wants us to have recourse to it here. God MAY give grace wherever he wants – but he ASSURES us that he DOES give it within the sphere of the Catholic Church.