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theology
The first place to start in understanding how Catholics and Protestants differ is in how they view the Bible. Catholicism teaches that Scripture and Tradition have equal authority while the Protestant church has held that the Bible is the only authoritative standard by which everything else is judged. This is the difference behind all the other differences.
I was speaking to someone recently and I could see that they were struggling to understand what felt like mixed signals in the Bible. On the one hand, there are verses that speak of believers as being clean, washed of their sins, forgiven, and made holy. On the other hand, there are verses that speak of God being grieved by our sins and disciplining us for them. When the Bible speaks of our forgiveness and cleansing is God just trying to inspire us? Or when the Bible speaks of the ongoing presence of our sins is God just trying to scare us? When God sees His children is He shaking His head in frustration? Or is He graciously looking away from the areas where we still falter? How should believers understand God’s attitude toward them when they sin? Let me suggest that there are two hats that can help us make sense of the Bible’s competing descriptions of God’s attitude toward us.
Today, there’s a tendency to understand our sense of who we are in light of our feelings and ourselves. ‘The answer’s in our heart,’ we’re told, but many people don’t like the answers they find there. Our heart can be cruel and often it misleads us.
There’s a song by Casting Crowns called “Who am I?” that captures the comfort and reassurance of somebody who has built their sense of identity from the Bible. It says:
Who am I, that the Lord of all the earth
Would care to know my name
Would care to feel my hurt
Who am I, that the Bright and Morning Star
Would choose to light the way
For my ever-wandering heart
In a single stanza of their song, they express a number of unique aspects of the Bible’s perspective on identity. Notice that there’s no disguising the weakness. He can acknowledge his hurt and even admit to having a wandering heart. He can do this because he feels the care and attention of a God who sees him for who he is and still loves him. He can also do this because he sees Jesus ‘lighting the way’ and helping him to become all that he longs to be. These three aspects of a healthy identity come straight from the Bible. Let’s consider them.
Different versions of the following quote are attributed to Henri Nouwen. “We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth: I am the beloved child of a loving creator.” After almost two decades as a celebrated professor at universities like Yale and Harvard, he went to work with individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It was only natural that he thought deeply about identity. I want to consider what we need to learn from this statement, what we need to clarify, and what’s wrong with the popular alternative to it.
Today, the question of identity is bigger than it’s ever been. ‘Who am I?’ isn’t just a question for philosophers. It’s asked by the middle-school student trying to navigate the hierarchy of groups and friendships. It’s asked by the teenager as they experience their first feelings of romance and attraction. It’s asked by the young adult confronted with a myriad of choices for career and lifestyle. It’s asked by the person in midlife who’s struggling with the gap between their dreams and their reality. It’s asked by the person who retires and is trying to understand where they fit without the identity of their career. And it’s asked by the person who’s nearing death and wonders whether their identity still has significance in the face of the brevity of life. Who are you? And how can you know whether your approach to understanding your identity will help or hinder you as you go through life? Let me compare three options.
Have you ever heard Christians talking about predestination and wanted to object that they were only telling half of the story? Ever read that God chooses to save some people and not others and wanted to point the person to some verses they hadn’t considered? Do you find that people’s explanation of election doesn’t do justice to how you understand God’s working in the Bible? Let’s consider some of those verses together.
Have you ever thought about why you believed in Jesus when so many others don’t? Were you smarter? More spiritual? Were you just born in the right family or did you just meet the right friend? Was it luck, or was it something deeper at work? If you believe in Jesus, consider how the Bible says that took place.
Have you ever found yourself in an argument that never seemed to go anywhere? People dig in their heels and end up repeating themselves as they try to convince each other that they’re right. Often when that happens, we need to step back and look at the problem from a different angle. I think that’s the case with the question of whether God chooses to save certain people and not others.
Most people feel that God is angry and judgmental in the Old Testament but full of love and forgiveness in the New Testament. And they struggle to read the Old Testament as a result. But Jesus constantly quoted from it and Paul said that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Are we reading the Old Testament the way they did? I think that there are at least three things that can help us reconcile the depictions of God in the Old and New Testaments.
Over time, it’s easy for historical figures to be seen as caricatures. We’re not so concerned with the details of their lives so much as what we think they stood for. As a result, we can treat them as mascots for our cause, rather than hearing them on their own terms. That seems to have happened with Jesus in a number of different ways. Some people believe in Jesus, the moral teacher. Others esteem Jesus as a prophet. Some see Jesus as a champion of social justice. And still others see Him as an ally for conservative politics. What Jesus do you believe in? And more importantly, who do the Scriptures reveal Him to be?
