by Matthew A. C. Newsome ©2002

    Mr. David Cloud is the founder of Way of Life Literature and writes brief articles for WOL's Fundamental Baptist Information Service.  It describes itself as "a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians" whose goal is to "provide information to assist preachers in the protection of the churches in this apostate hour."

    A friend who is on this list periodically forwards me the more anti-Catholic articles he receives.  For some reason, I felt especially inclined to respond to this one.  Perhaps it was because of the sheer lack of information it in.  Mr. Cloud requests that his articles not be reproduced on Internet sites, so unfortunately, I cannot reprint it here for you.  But the article was basically a lamentation that man Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are turning to some rather "Catholic" forms of spirituality.  Mr. Cloud condemned these, giving no other reason than the fact that they were Catholic and therefore bad.

    He ends with, "It is sad to see men who profess to be 'anabaptists' and evangelicals going back to this ritualism."
You can read the entire article on line at:  http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/manyevangelicals.htm
   I had to question him on this, asking him to explain further exactly what he objects to about forms of prayer such as the Liturgy of the Hours and the Rosary.

    Though his web site says that he receives over 2500 emails daily and cannot possibly answer them all, Mr. Cloud also says, "Though I do not expect all of my readers to agree with my judgments or doctrinal position, I do desire to present every statement accurately and factually. If you find what you believe to be a mistake, please take a few moments to write to me about it. Your challenge will not be ignored."

    So far every letter that my friend has written him has been ignored, and to date he has not responded to my questions either.  Maybe if a higher percentage of those 2500 daily emails were from concerned Catholics, he would be forced to address them.  You can read more of his anti-Catholic articles at: http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/fbns-index/rccfbns.htm

    (Among other gems, you will learn that Mr. Cloud believes Jerry Falwell is to sympathetic towards Catholics because he has dared to speak on the same stage as Catholic speakers, and that "In the December 1984 issue of Falwell’s Fundamentalist Journal, a Roman Catholic cardinal was given a forum to tell Fundamentalists what he felt they needed to hear. This is like asking the Devil what he thinks of Fundamental Baptists!")

Dear Mr. Cloud,

I read with interest your article, “MANY EVANGELICALS TURNING TO CATHOLIC ‘SPIRITUALITY’,” from March 20.  I have also noticed a growing trend in Protestant circles towards more traditional (you could say “Catholic”) forms of prayer.  I would like to ask you a few questions about your article, if you do not mind.

First, I noticed immediately a very anti-Catholic bias in your article that I would like some explanation of.  I realize that you are a Baptist, and that Baptists and Catholics believe different things.  I would not expect you to agree with Catholic doctrine or theology.  If you did, then you would be a Catholic, not a Baptist.

However, in your article you seem to be making the assumption that everything Catholic is bad.  I am afraid that if you cast aside everything that is associated with the Catholic Church, because you disagree with some of her doctrines, you will be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Just as a Catholic should not discount everything a Baptist preacher says simply because he is a Baptist, you should not discount a thing simply because it is Catholic.

Here are a few examples of what I am talking about.  First, in your title, you mention Catholic “Spirituality,” putting “spirituality” in quotation marks.  Likewise, later in your article when you mention Bernard of Clairvaux and Teresa of Avila, you say they are Catholic “saints,” and put “saints” in quotation marks.

The implication here is that Catholic spirituality cannot truly be spiritual, and that Catholic saints cannot truly be saints in heaven because they are Catholic.  Things like this do not serve a productive purpose in your article.  They only indicate that you are condemning the forms of prayer that you write about, not for any specific reason, but simply because they are “Catholic.”

You bemoan the fact that Baptist seminarians, in a course on “Classics of Church Devotion,” are reading books by primarily Catholic authors.  And why shouldn't they be?  There were 1500 years of Christianity prior to the Protestant Reformation.  Surely many of the writings that came out of this period are “classic.”  Should these be ignored by all Protestant Christians simply because the authors of these works were Catholic?

You complain that bookstores carry books on “pre-Reformation spirituality.”  Again, would you have Christians left ignorant of the rich treasury of prayers that were known and used by the Church for the first 15 centuries of her existence?

Surely you do not mean to suggest that everything in this period was bad.  To ignore all pre-Reformation history is to cut your self off from the original Christians.  Your church would have no continuity with Christ.

You seem to have specific complains about certain forms of Catholic devotion.  One of these is the Divine Office, or the Liturgy of the Hours.  This is one of the oldest forms of prayer and is still in use by the Church today.  I can't imagine any Christian having a problem with this form of prayer, and I wonder if you know exactly what it is.  This is what the Liturgy of the Hours consists of.

Scripture readings and prayer.

That is it.  For example, here is a sampling from today's Office of Readings, April 4, 2002.  First the prayer, “O God, come to my aid.  O Lord, make haste to help me.  Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Alleluia.”  Then a reading of Psalm 117.  Then a reading from 1 Peter 3:1-17.  Then a short meditation on Baptism as a symbol of Christ's passion.  Then a hymn in praise of God, followed by another recitation of the “Glory Be.”

My question, Mr. Cloud, is this.  What do you see wrong with this?  What is it about the prayerful reading of Scripture on a daily basis that you object to?

You object to repeating prayers, saying that Christ warned against it.  The Liturgy of the Hours, while it has some prayers repeated (such as the “Glory Be”) uses different Scripture readings every day, on a four-year cycle.  So there is not that much repetition.  I can only assume, then, that you are referring to the other great form of Catholic prayer, the Rosary.

I would challenge your assertion that Christ warned against repeating prayers.  Where did he say this?  The only passage from Scripture that I can think of that might support this is Matthew 6:7.  If you are reading the King James translation, it reads, “But when you pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathens do . . .”

I would only suggest here that the operative word is “vain,” not “repetition.”  Jesus himself was known to repeat prayers, as in the Our Father, which he taught us to pray.  Also, all Jewish children, Jesus included, would have been taught to pray the Psalms.  They would likely have all 150 Psalms memorized, and would recite them as prayers.  What is this but repetition of prayer?  We know Jesus wanted us all to be familiar with the Psalms for on the cross he cried out the first verse of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why hast thou abandoned me?”

His obvious intention here was to call to mind the entire psalm, which goes on to describe in detail the prophesied crucifixion (“they have pierced my hands and feet – I can count all my bones – they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them and for my raiment they cast lots” verses 16-18).  The Psalm, as you know, concludes with:

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord;
And all the families of the nations shall worship before him.
For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. (27-28).

So if Jesus himself repeated prayers such as the Our Father and the Psalms, then why would he not want us to also repeat them?  Let’s look again at Matthew 6:7.  In my Bible, the RSV, it reads, “And in praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.”

Interesting, there is nothing there about repetition.  If we look at the original Greek that Matthew wrote in, the word that gets translated in the KJV as “vain repetition” and in the RSV as “heap up empty phrases” actually means “to babble” or “to stammer.”  There is no mention of repetitious prayer at all in the original.  Jesus is just warning us to mean what we say when we pray, don’t just stammer out the words.  Also, to not confuse quantity of prayer with quality of  prayer.

Why would the KJV translators render this “vain repetition?”  Because when this translation was commissioned, Catholic piety was still extremely popular in England, and the English government and church authorities saw this a threat to the newly formed Anglican Church, which King James was the head of.  They wanted nothing to do with anything “Catholic,” much like you seem to indicate in your article.  One devotion that people had a special love for was the Rosary.  It had already been outlawed, but people smuggled rosaries in from France.  Or they simply said the prayers, counting them off on their fingers instead of with prayer beads.  So, these translators intentionally rendered this passage of Matthew’s Gospel in such a way that it could be twisted and used to condemn Catholic practices such as saying the Rosary.

But, as I have already pointed out, Jesus himself repeated prayers, so we know that is not what He meant by this.

Have you ever prayed the Rosary?  Do you know what those prayers are?  Take a look at them, and see what you object to.  First, you recite the Apostle’s Creed.  This is a Creed shared by Catholics and Protestants alike.  I cannot imagine that you would object to anything contained in the Creed, so we will move on.

The next prayer is the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father.  Again, I cannot imagine that you would object to saying the Lord's Prayer.  It’s listed twice in the Gospels, once in Matthew 6:9-13, and again in Luke 11:2-4.

The next prayer recited is the Hail Mary.  Now I imagine you will object to this, thinking that Catholics are worshipping Mary with this prayer.  But, as I am sure you have been told, Catholics do not worship Mary.  They worship no one but God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  So what is the Hail Mary prayer about?

The prayer begins, "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee." This is nothing other than the greeting the angel Gabriel gave Mary in Luke 1:28. The next part is, "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." This was exactly what Mary’s cousin Elizabeth said to her in Luke 1:42. The only thing that has been added to these two verses are the names "Jesus" and "Mary," to make clear who is being referred to. So the first part of the Hail Mary is entirely biblical.

The second part of the Hail Mary is not taken straight from Scripture, but it is entirely biblical in the thoughts it expresses. It reads, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

Some Protestants do object to saying "Holy Mary" because they claim Mary was a sinner like the rest of us. But Mary was a Christian (the first Christian, as she was the first to accept Jesus (Luke 1:45), and the Bible describes Christians in general as holy. In fact, they are called saints, which means "holy ones" (Eph. 1:1, Phil. 1:1, Col. 1:2). Furthermore, as the mother of Jesus Christ, Mary was certainly a very holy woman.

Some Protestants object to the title "Mother of God," but suffice it to say that the title doesn’t mean Mary is older than God; it means the person who was born of her was a divine person, not a human person. (Jesus is one person, the divine, but has two natures, the divine and the human; it is incorrect to say he is a human person.)

The last part of the Hail Mary prayer is “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”  In 1 Timothy 2:1-4, Paul tells us Christians to pray for one another.  And in Revelation 5:8 we see the saints in heaven offering their prayers to the Lord.  So asking a fellow Christian, a saint, to pray for us is certainly biblical.

So, I really cannot see anything in the Hail Mary that you would object to.  The other prayer used in the Rosary is “Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and every shall be, world without end.”  I can’t imagine you would have an objection to that prayer, either.

So what are you objecting to?

You say Jesus gave no liturgy to the Church.  I wonder if you have ever attended a Catholic mass?  The first part is scripture reading, interspersed with hymns.  Again, there is nothing with reading Scripture and singing God’s praises that a good Baptist would object to.  The second part, the liturgy of the Eucharist, is by and large a re-reading of the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper.  Jesus, after all, said “do this in remembrance of me.”  We are only following His command.

If one reads the book of Revelation, with an understanding of the mass, what one sees in John’s vision is the celebration of the liturgy in heaven, in perpetual worship of God.  You will certainly find liturgy in the Bible, if you look for it.

I could ask you just as easily, where do you see Baptist worship services, tent revivals, or altar calls mentioned in the New Testament.  You don’t.

You say that Rome supplanted “New Testament” spirituality with “dead” liturgy.  Why do you think that the liturgy is dead?  Surely this is nothing more than your opinion.

You complain about the use of special clothes worn by the priests, of bells and candles and the like.  What is there that is unholy about priestly robes?  The Jewish priests of the Old Testament had specialized garments (similar, I might add, to the seamless tunic that Jesus wore at the crucifixion).  Is there something ungodly about certain people having a uniform of the trade?  Do we not expect police officers to wear a uniform, or firemen?  Do we not expect our doctor to wear a white coat?  Our lawyer to wear a suit and tie?  Why the objection to a priest, or member of the clergy, having a special uniform to denote his office?

Why the objection to bells ringing in celebration and praise of our Lord?  Why the objection to candles?  Why do you call the traditions of the first 1500 years of Christianity “false?”  Why do you think your more recent traditions are any more true?

In short, Mr. Cloud, what exactly are you objecting to?

Sincerely,
Matthew Newsome