BigTurkey:
There is a huge element of faith in me accepting Christ, there is an element of faith in accepting the Scriptures, and there is an element of faith in accepting the Church. I guess my difficulty is putting my faith in the Church even when faced with my Protestant upbringing and all the skepticism and fear of Catholicism (no offense).
Micah
The skepticism and fear of Catholicism is one thing. That is something that is very easily remedied by knowledge; more specifically through an experience of our presence, observing our ways.
But I suggest that there is a barrier to that knowledge coming home to rooste; a barrier to that experience of our presence, a barrier to observing our ways.
While that barrier is clearly a matter of faith,
it is most specifically and urgently a matter of trust.
Now, faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not. (Hebrews 11:1 DRC)
But what of trust? I will leave that as an open question for you to answer.
Luther was a man who found sanctuary, happiness, and peace in the Church and yet who carried the roots of a brutal childhood in his soul. Unrecognized, undefined, these roots took on a ghost-power over his life lying in wait for the Wittenberg plague to flower into full blown post-traumatic stress disorder.
The ‘adaptive child’ part of his personality caused him to assume the blame for the brutality inflicted on him in his childhood. By assuming the blame he gained a flawed yet serviceable ‘understanding’ and therefore 'control of that situation. Confronted with the suffering, death, and sorrow of Wittenberg, he resorted to an an old tape.
The result was a scrupulosity which drove him to become his own persecutor. He isolated himself from the comfort of his clerical community and inflicted extreme punishments and deprivations on himself which culminated in exhaustion and dissociative collapse. In that much trouble, with that much responsibility to which he was incapable of rising, he became his own counsel and Luther-Alone was born.
It was from Luther-Alone that all the other alones sprang as justifications for the one singular fundamental interpersonal error and that was the unwillingness of Luther to trust in the Church in which Christ has vested authority. Why? Because Luther was deceived into confusing the misuse of power in the form of a violent father with the legitimate uses of authority in the form of a loving Church. For Luther all forms of authority were suspect because they were wielded by persons. Do you not see the logic in vesting authority in an object made of paper, ink, and leather? Irrationality can be very logical.
Well, what is the import of this? If this was merely a question of recognizing and defining PTSD in Luther and acknowledging that we can treat PTSD in the 21st Century, then there would be no problem. But the problem of distrust is far more insidious than that. How many of us bring the baggage of brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters, cousins, even priests and nuns who have run amok in our lives and caused us harm?
The problem is seeing the Church through our eyes.
The solution is seeing the Church through God’s eyes.
How undeserving we are of God’s love. Yet how embracing, comforting, and satisfying is His love for each of us. It is not good for us to be alone. God does not intend for us to be alone. But he has given us free will. Therefore whether we see other people as hell as Sartre did or whether we choose to see them as the good wife as God does is entirely within our power to choose.
I will close by noting that trust is a decision only remotely related to the trustworthiness of other people. Of course we must avoid the occasion of sin. What I am drawing your attention to is that our very ability to trust is broken and it makes no difference effectively whether other people are trustworthy or not. As long as our trust is broken, we will wake up with our fingers pointing, poised to condemn with morbid perfectionism our neighbours and ultimately ourselves.
