Making Things Simple…

 

            It’s often a temptation to try to oversimplify things.  In an age of push-button technology and quick chemical relief from so many discomforts, moderns, more than people of the past, are prey to the overly simple.  One sees it in religion, my chief concern here where so many are led astray.  For example, a prominent Englishwoman with connections to the royal family converted right after 9/11, strangely enough, to Islam.  Her reason?  “It’s so much more simple.”  Yes, indeed.  No more Trinity, Incarnation (and Christmas), Christ as fully God and Man, no more communion of the Saints, Redemption and Resurrection, transubstantiation of bread and wine, etc; but then, no more chant and polyphony, intricately carved statues, heartbreakingly beautiful portraits of Madonna and Child, traditional stained-glass windows, peaceful oases of monastery and convent, cultures known for their civility (and popular with tourists, Italy, for example)… nor even a full-bodied Provencal red wine on the dinner table – all complex fruits of the very complicated religion of Catholicism.

 

            How often I’ve listened to the one-time Catholic turned “non-denominational” (denominations, you see, only complicate things) who says something to the effect: “I left the Catholic Church because it has made everything too complex; all those sacraments, feast days, fast days, disciplines, obligations and convoluted doctrines, devotions and distinctions… All one needs is the Bible and” – here comes the simple formula – “to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.”  This attractively simple formula, used so often as bait for the unwitting, is, according to its proponents, the key to eternal life:  once one goes through the experience of this formula, one is “saved,” and there is nothing that one does or fails to do that can in the least effect a change in one’s now secure destiny of heaven.  It’s all so very simple.

 

            Strange, though, that those who claim the Bible as their only authority would then erect a formula that is not even in the Bible.  And it’s even more peculiar that they would adhere to the Bible alone as their authority, when the Bible itself makes no such claim.  On the contrary, St. Paul informs us that it is the Church that is the “bulwark and support of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).  Yet, one can understand the urge to so “formulate” the message of Christ if one insists that things be really simple, given the fact that the Bible is beautifully multifarious and, yes, even complicated, so much so that some 27,000 different Christian groups cannot even agree on what it means and are thus the heirs to one fractioning after another of Christianity due to disagreements over interpretations of the Scriptures.  Confronted with such confusion, the temptation to take refuge in a simple formula is almost overwhelming.  In fact, the Church herself – acting on the authority that St. Paul claimed for her – has proposed and promulgated certain “simplifications.”  We call these creeds (or symbols of faith), catechisms and approved exercises of devotion that are all accurate explications of biblical revelation.  The problem, then, with formulas such as “accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” as the one secure means of being “once saved, always saved” is that it is an over-simplification; and more:  it is not biblical and is even contrary to clear biblical teaching.  But it is simple, so easy and offers immediate and “lasting” consolation.  Thus its attraction.

 

            Certainly, the Catholic Church teaches that the way of salvation is only in and through the one Savior, Jesus Christ, a Catholic belief reiterated so lucidly in the official document, penned a few years ago by then Cardinal Ratzinger, Dominus Iesus.  Our Lord Himself made this quite clear in His own words recorded in the Gospels.  But the securing of that salvation that comes through Christ is not accomplished by the formulaic experience of merely accepting Him as one’s “personal Lord and Savior.”  Christ warned against such a reductionist approach:  “Not every one who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). 

 

            And the simplification “once saved, always saved” (as the result of accepting Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior) is even more problematic… especially in the light of the teaching of the Bible.  Repeatedly, Christians are warned in the New Testament about falling away from faith in Christ, being led astray to utter destruction by false teachers.  Almost every one of St. Paul’s letters in the New Testament is a warning of this ever-present danger.  In his letter to the Christians of the church in Galatia, Paul presents this danger as a dreadful possibility for the Christian, when he admonishes the Galatians to adhere to the Gospel already preached to them and that if they begin to seek to be justified before God by keeping the Jewish law, then, Paul writes, “you are severed from Christ… you have fallen away from grace” (5:4). 

 

            The pernicious effect of oversimplifying the Gospel and the Christian life is that it leads the would-be believer to trust in a formula and in the experience the formula dictates rather than to trust in Christ Himself.  The Catholic Church offers only Christ and Him crucified and raised up on the third day; all her doctrines and disciplines center around Him and lead to Him, who leads us to the Father.  It is Christ who is communicated to us in the holy Eucharist.  It is Christ’s words of forgiveness heard in the confessional.  It is Christ’s voice proclaimed in the Scriptures at Mass.  “Accepting” Him, as the formula goes, is only the beginning of our possible salvation; He demands much more, as He Himself made clear in the Gospel from the Feast of St. Lawrence (August 10):  “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.  Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be.  The Father will honor whoever serves me” (John 12:24-26).