A commenter on yesterday’s post writes:
I’ve lately felt something of a pull towards Christianity, Catholicism, in particular. (I’ve generally believed in the existence of a God but haven’t gotten serious about it, in part due to my religious upbringing).
However, seeing things like this, as well as the general convergence of churches, while not making me hesitant to become Christian, DOES make me wonder how I can go about learning and finding my way to God and finding like-minded people.
A blog post about this, assuming you don’t already have one, would be much appreciated.
Helping others clear away intellectual obstacles to faith in God and His Church is every theologian’s solemn obligation. You have asked me to perform this spiritual work of mercy, and charity demand that I answer.
Defining God
The first obstacle that must be surmounted is the generally debased state of contemporary philosophy and language itself. Let’s start by defining the key term God, as far as is possible for limited beings.
When Christians–and some theist philosophers like Aristotle–say God, we don’t mean an old man on a mountaintop composing a global naughty/nice list when he’s not conjuring boulders he can’t lift. Such a being would fall into the category of a creature, albeit a powerful creature, existing within the material, temporal order.
What we mean by God is the uncreated, all-powerful, and absolute Being who transcends the created order.
Proving God’s Existence
Anyone who says God’s existence can’t be proven is either ignorant or lying. The deception usually lies in moving the goalposts regarding what constitutes evidence. Materialists are fond of demanding physical proof of God while they themselves required no physical proof for materialism.
The claim that God’s existence can’t be proven contains another subtle a priori bias. It assumes that God exists in the same way that a hydrogen atom, a pencil, or an aardvark exists; that is, contingently within the order of creation. God does not have existence per se. It’s more accurate to say that God is Being. The Bible sees eye to eye with Aristotle here. “I Am that I Am.”
In truth, absolute, uncaused, necessary Being is self-explanatory. The physical universe is more in need of an explanation–both from its origins and at every moment–than the eternal, transcendent God.
Christians are sometimes accused of begging the question by positing a self-necessary Being from the start and declaring God’s existence a fait accompli. That accusation gets the process backwards. Theologians and philosophers start from evidence gathered through observation, experience, and reason and conclude to absolute Being.
The most elegant and time-tested arguments for absolute Being are the cosmological arguments refined by St. Thomas Aquinas. Moderns and Postmoderns will glibly scoff that these arguments have long been discredited. But each attempt to refute the classical arguments from cosmology, such as David Hume’s, is revealed as a straw man under scrutiny.
Here’s a common cosmological argument. An apple ripens on a tree branch. That means the apple had the potential to move from unripeness to ripeness, and that potential was put into act. We can rightly ask where the impetus to actualize that potential came from. Apples aren’t self-sufficient. They need water, sunlight, and a host of other conditions to grow. You can try locating the source of the apple’s actualization in any or all of these contingencies, but that just kicks the can a little farther down the road since water, the sun, etc. all contain potentialities requiring external contingencies to actualize.
Positing that it’s contingent beings all the way down doesn’t do any good. That just gets you an infinite train of boxcars with no locomotive. Such a train would be incapable of motion. Similarly, an infinite chain of contingent causality could never move the apple from unripeness to ripeness.
We do see apples that ripen and myriad other examples of actualized potential, yet an infinite chain of contingent beings would be absurd. The only logical conclusion is that a being which is pure act with no unrealized potential is the ultimate source of all being. Since existing potentially instead of in actuality is a limitation on being, that which is pure act must be unlimited being and is therefore Being itself. And that is what Christians call God.
Finding God
Men of intellectual honesty and sound mind can conclude to God’s existence through reason alone. But because God is transcendent, entering into a personal relationship with Him requires that He take the initiative. The means by which God has initiated relations with mankind is called divine revelation. There are three major revealed religions, but you expressed an attraction to Christianity, so I’ll restrict myself to that subject.
Christians believe that God revealed Himself in stages, starting with His revelations to the Hebrew people and culminating in His Incarnation in the Lord Jesus Christ. No serious scholar denies that Jesus lived, and it is a matter of historical record that He founded a Church. St. Irenaeus, a student of St. Polycarp, who himself learned at the feet of the Apostle John, wrote in ca. AD 180:
Since, however, it would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; [we do this, I say,] by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority.
Irenaeus wrote those words within eighty years of the last Apostle’s death. The same span of time separates us from Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler and Orson Wells’ notorious War of the Worlds broadcast. In the life of the Church, eighty years isn’t a day. It was five minutes ago.
Jesus founded a Church and clearly expressed His desire that men come to know God through its ministry. St. Irenaeus, writing too recently to have gotten confused, affirmed the succession of apostolic authority through the Church’s bishops. Furthermore, he upheld the bishop of Rome’s preeminent authority in the strongest terms.
In summation, God fully revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. Jesus founded a Church to bring people into personal relationship with Him. Scripture and history testify that the Church Jesus founded can be recognized by an episcopate with valid apostolic succession headed by the bishop of Rome.
Only one church existing today meets these criteria: the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. To reject her is to Reject Christ, and to reject Christ is to reject the One who sent Him.
Christian Fellowship
In all honesty, demonstrating God’s existence and the doctrine of petrine primacy is easy compared to giving advice on Christian fellowship. The Church on earth is populated with human beings, and people are inevitably influenced by their environment. In the Postmodern world, our environment pressures us to be atomized, consumerist, individualists.
The Church has been affected by these destructive social trends, but she also offers the antidote. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote about how people need communal ritual to apply the power of myth to their daily lives. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, Christianity is a myth that happens to be true.
Many have suggested that the changes to the Mass after Vatican II have impaired the power of Catholic ritual to build and maintain the relationship between God and man and the individual and the faith community.
In my experience, seeking out parishes that offer the traditional Latin Mass is a reliable first step toward finding communities of younger Catholics who are serious about their faith. Find a Latin Mass near you here.