MGEISING:
Catholics not only have a Personal Relationship With Jesus - we have an intimate one - through the celebration of the Eucharist.
It is much more than just a personal one …
Ah, yes! I read/heard this same thought of sorts recently. One may have a “personal relationship” with their neighbor or teacher or friend, but the terminology just doesn’t do justice to the deep intimacy that we must have with Jesus Christ!
He, in every way, is my Savior and Lord, but to limit our relationship as a “personal” one doesn’t seem to fit into the Biblical model for what our relationship truly is supposed to be.
Beginning in the Old Covenant, God promised his people a Messiah that would come to redeem the whole world. He was never meant to be solely a “personal Lord and Savior”–that is true, but not the whole sense of his mission of salvation. He came to make us FAMILY.
I have five siblings. I can not imagine talking to one of my siblings and saying “Dad is my personal Father.” To claim my Father as my own would be true in a sense, but it doesn’t recognize that he their Father, too. In the same way, to speak of Christ as “my personal Lord and Savior” is sometimes to ignore the beautiful relationship of family that Jesus Christ won for us through his death and rising!
There is nothing, in my mind, intrinsically wrong with the words of “personal Lord and Savior,” but I think it is a more a cultural term than a Biblical one. It, in essence, is a “tradition.” It is not a bad one, nor one that I would reject totally, but I do feel that it is somewhat lacking and evidence of a man-made cultural divide.
That being said, I think the idea of God becoming a “personal” One rather than the Old Testament idea of the God of our fathers (the Old Covenant communal sense) has a good rooting in the New Testament when the Gentiles were brought into the New Israel, the Church. The Gentiles had long been practicing their religion with the recognition and worship of “personal” lords and gods. They, in their homes and temples, would construct altars for worshipping and honoring their “personal” favorite gods–fertility, harvest, etc–who they depended on in a very personal way for prosperity and health. This was not always the common communal worship often seen in Judaism, but a more private and “personal” approach to seeking divine mediation (albeit, false in the case of the Gentiles and pagans). In fact, St. Paul recongizes this practice among the Greeks and tells them in Acts 17, that the altar that they have for “A God Unknown” is actually going to be made know to them as the One true God, Jesus Christ. In this way, St. Paul helps build the bridge between “God’s offspring” (Acts 17:28-29). It puts God in familiar terms for the Gentiles and introduces a new perspective for the Jewish Christians.
This personal approach to lordship certainly influenced the early Christians in many ways. The melding of Old Testament Judaism and the new Gentile converts to Christianity certainly has provided us (some 2000 years later) with a broader perspective of who Jesus Christ is and how we come to know Him as Lord of all AND our personal Savior!
As a Catholic, I appreciate our Church’s comprehensive teaching and great latitude in allowing us to develop the relationship with Jesus Christ that fulfills His will for our lives!
