Table of Contents:

  • Chapter 1: Reality
  • Chapter 2: About God
  • Chapter 3: The Doctrine of Man
  • Chapter 4: The Fall
  • Chapter 5: Myth and Man
  • Chapter 6: One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church
  • Chapter 7: The Trinity
  • Chapter 8: The Covenant and Achan
  • Chapter 9: The Judges and Jesus
  • Chapter 10: Atonement I
  • Chapter 11: Atonement II
  • Chapter 12: Atonement III
  • Chapter 13: Baptism
  • Chapter 14: Eucharist
  • Chapter 15: Marriage
  • Chapter 16: Confession
  • Chapter 17: Priesthood
  • Chapter 18: Unction
  • Chapter 19: Worship
  • Chapter 20: Beatitudes
  • Chapter 21: The Theological Virtues
  • Chapter 22: The Moral Virtues
  • Chapter 23: Liturgical Prayer
  • Chapter 24: Personal Prayer
  • Chapter 25: Meditation
  • Chapter 26: Contemplation
  • Chapter 27: Precepts of the Church

Chapter 1: Reality

Let me say by way of preface that I am not here to "explain" Christianity, for that isn't the problem. A person coming to this planet from Mars and landing among us wouldn't ask, "Why do you believe in the Trinity?" or "What do you mean by transubstantiation?" He would ask, "Why do the good die young? Why is there many a slip twixt the cup and the lip? Why do the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley? Why is it that it's the best puppy in the litter that gets run over? Why does a man's reach exceed his grasp? Why is there so much pain, sorrow, grief, misery, and ugliness in human life and human society? Why is everybody homesick, even when he's at home? Why does the happiest married man still scan the faces in the crowd?"

Let me carry the matter a bit further. Why should there be people on earth in the first place? Or, for that matter, why should there be an earth? Why should there be anything? These are the things that need explaining. The Christian religion seeks to ex- plain them. Sooner or later you will make up your mind, if you haven't already, that the Christian religion is true or false, not in terms of how persuasively I explain to you the doctrine of the Trinity, and not even in terms of whether or not the Christian religion makes sense, but whether or not the Christian religion can answer any of these other questions.

The church, for example, has a theory of creation found in the Book of Genesis. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. What are the other alternative theories of creation? There aren't any. All of the non-theistic theories of the origin of the universe begin with the universe already there. We either accept the Christian explanation or we leave it unexplained. Maybe we are willing to leave it unexplained. But we either accept the explanation that God created everything or we do without an explanation.

That brings us to a distinction and a couple of definitions before we really get started. There are two kinds of believing, which a certain tradition of philosophers distinguish from one another by calling them “doctrines” and “dogmas.” Interestingly enough those two terms are really synonymous; one is Latin and one is Greek, but they denote the same thing, a teaching. The word dogma unfortunately has an ugly connotation in the minds of modern Americans. When you see it in the adjectival form it’s “dogmatic.” We don’t like people who are dogmatic because that means they are going to shove their beliefs down our throats whether we like it or not. Nevertheless, the word dogma simply means a “teaching.”

Chapter 2: About God

Two thousand years of Christian history and man wants things to be simple. A preacher met a scientist on the train. "I'm not a religious man, I'm an astronomer," said the scientist. "Surely you could reduce religion to 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'" "Of course," answered the preacher. "I've always been interested in astronomy, and I am sure the essentials are Twinkle, twinkle, little star.'"

Any time someone says, "Christianity is really only. . ." what follows is sure to be a heresy. The devil is too smart to tell an outright lie. All heresies are half truths. Human affairs are complex, and if religion is the key that fits the lock, it is going to be as complex as the lock. If not, it's the wrong key. "Salvation in six easy lessons" just doesn't work.

In the early church, martyrs were popping up all the time. You literally had to renounce this world in order to participate. The church was, by and large, an underground organization opposed by the government. The world had very little to offer the Christian. He lived a disciplined, puritanical lire. 'Nevertheless, God created the world and called it good. He loved it enough to inhabit it in His own flesh. We must not condemn the world.

About 300 A.D. Emperor Constantine decided to join the Christians. With the consequent influx of thousands of members since the church was now respectable, the church's morals went downhill. Its message was still otherworldly: "I know it is good to be alive in God's world, but don't forget, you were made for more than this. Your home is in Heaven."

Then the barbarians overran the Empire (500-800 A.D.) and the church, went underground again and started producing martyrs and saints again. This was also a period remarkable for its production of monasteries. These communities were composed of society's "dropouts." Then, in about 800 A.D., Charlemagne accepted the church and the masses joined up again, and down went the morality. These new members were uninstructed and just members in form. This period ended about 1000 A.D, with what the church historians call the period of the Pornocracy, because every archbishop had a harem. Then came Pope Hildebrand who reformed the church because the Moslems were threatening to lake over Europe. Incidentally, the Moslems have as their emblem the crescent moon. If you'll look at Moslem territory about the year 1000, you'll note that they controlled Spain in the west around the southern part of the Mediterranean to the Balkans, and this formed a crescent. So Christianity rolled up its sleeves and we went to war and had the Crusades.

About 1300 the Crusades were over and the Renaissance began. Imagine a see-saw, with materialism on one end and idealism on the other, with Christianity as the fulcrum. So long as the church was in the middle, accommodating both of these extremes, it was flexible enough to survive intact.

In 1517, Luther, an Augustinian monk, tacked some papers on the door and started the Reformation. Men had begun lo tire of the "good life"' and there was sentiment for change. You really can have too much fun. But something happened that hadn't happened before. The change in men's tastes had always been accommodated within the church because the center of the church had always been the Incarnation, God-man. The fulcrum stayed in the middle. But in the 16th century the theologians decided to become relevant. They moved the fulcrum out to one end of the see-saw. I am not saying that the Protestant reformers denied the Incarnation, but they did deny its implication. They denied the Sacrament. Theology was adjusted to fit the mood, the temper of the times. The reformers failed in their primary prophetic mission, which was to swim upstream, to run counter to the popular will. (When we say we renounce the world, it means the "spirit of the age," the popular. If you are a Christian, you had probably better watch the popular.)

So we have, for 300 years, even in Roman Catholicism, a period of renouncing material things, of asceticism. After about 300 years, man grew tired of being so gol-darned holy. The world wasn't so bad when they looked around at it with open eyes.


Chapter 3: Doctrine of Man

In the civilizaiion in which the Bible and the church came into being, the word "soul" meant very much what we mean by "life." Proving the existence of the soul is like proving the existence of life. It's not as easy to do as you might suppose. No one can prove that you are not dreaming while I am standing talking to you. You know you're not, and I know you're not, but we can't prove it. You have to take it for granted, as an act of faith, the validity of sense experience. There is no way you can prove that what you see and hear is really there.

A spirit is an immaterial thing which is not located anywhere inside the body. While I am aware that I and my mind are different things, I do not say, "My will wills;" I say, "I will." I do not say, "My memory remembers," but I say, "I remember." What does the I stand for? It is that strange, curious, spiritual reality which is referred to by the letter I in a sentence: I think, I will, I decide, I choose, I grieve, I love, I rejoice. That I has no size, shape, or location. Clearly it is in some mysterious fashion associated with my body and I use my body to communicate with you. But I am not the samething as my body, not even the same thing as my consciousness. You run across such expressions in the English language as, "to possess myself in peace." Now the soul is the same thing as I; how can I possess my soul, or how can I lose my soul? The word "soul" refers to all of those psychic faculties which distinguish a living human being from a dead human being.

What docs the living person do that a dead person cannot do? Your soul and my soul have an identical nature. You and I are distinguished from one another by principles of differentiation. One is matter: my body doesn't look like any other body that ever lived. That's the way you recognize and distinguish me from Tom Selleck. We might be the same size and shape, and from a considerable distance someone might mistake one of us for the other, but swhen you see us side by side you will have no doubts. I remember when teaching in seminary, in the beginning of a class there might, be several people who seemed similar and 1 couldn't tell them apart, got their names confused. A month into class and I couldn’t believe that once I couldn’t tell them apart. They were sufficiently similar to confuse you at a glance, but after a while, physical individuating marks were sufficient. Our Lord says that the shepherd all of his sheep by name. Believe it or not, I have about a hundred homing pigeons out there in the back yard, and you probably couldn’t tell one from another, but I can. Even thought they are the same size and color, they have sufficient differences so that I can tell when one is missing.

There are other differences between one human being and another. My I, my spirit, is an individual substance of a rational nature. In respect to my consciousness of myself, you and I are as different as an antelope is from an alligator. The difference between you and me spiritually is not the difference between one alligator and another, although the difference between us physically is the same kind of difference. Spiritually there is a substantial difference. The substance is a unique kind of thing. This spiritual nature which is in man is the basis of his freedom.

For the past twenty years or so there has been an enormous amount of noise about liberty and freedom. It dates back to the beginnings of this country when we fought a revolution for "freedom and liberty." The French also fought a revolution to establish "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite." But unfortunately, today most of the people who make the most noise about freedom really don't have the foggiest notion what the word means. They begin by pointing out that although man is free, there are psychologists who claim that freedom is an illusion, that we are not really free. But tell me I'm not really free and I'll laugh at you, because I have this self-consciousness, this connatural awareness of my internal freedom. However, I will admit that there are limitations on my freedom:

  1. I am not free to do what I cannot imagine.
  2. I am not free to do what is intrinsically impossible. I can't sprout wings and fly. Not even God can make a square circle. However, the limitations of freedom are even more subtle.
  3. Every exercise of freedom is a limitation of freedom.

Chapter 4: The Fall

The doctrine of man's fallen state does not mean a fall from some material Utopia. What it does mean is that Adam and Eve had something that we've lost, a mystical union with God, an awareness of His presence, which means that they once had a good governor for their intellect. They were an ontological perfection. They were achieving their full potential as beings in the created order. Notice here that in the Jewish/Christian mythos, religion doesn't need to be explained. Life needs to be explained. The story of Adam and Eve explains such individual feelings as sadness at beauty and homesickness at home. We are not at home, and in our guts we know it. Great works of art do not completely resolve the complexities of life, and when they attempt to do so, the very nearness of their resolution pales after a while. We are not quite right for the times of this world.

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said unto the woman, "Yea, hath God said ye shall not eat of every tree of the Garden." I might mention here that the serpent was taken as a symbol of evil by the Jews, who worshiped a sky god, because the snake was a sacred animal to the neighboring pagans, who worshiped earth gods and regarded the snake, an underground creature, as magical and a sacred totem animal. Since the Jews warred with the neighboring peoples, they regarded their gods as enemies of the true God and therefore evil. That is probably the origin of the identification of the serpent with Satan. (It should tell us something about the pagan religions, because I am quite sure people felt about snakes then as we do now.)

The woman said unto the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but of the fruit that is in the midst of the garden God said we shall not eat of it. Neither should we touch it lest we die." And the serpent said unto the woman, "Ye shall not surely die for God does know that from the day that you eat thereof your eyes shall be opened and you shall be as gods knowing good and evil." To paraphrase, the snake says, "Hey, notice that you're not eating the fruit of thai tree. How come?"And she says, "God says if we do we win die." And he says, "Oh, come on, now. You know better than that. You'll just gain the knowledge of good and evil and be like God."

This is not the story of how sin came into the world, but the story of how sin comes into the world, and you and I are Adam and Eve. It has been noted that almost everything God commanded Adam and Eve to do in the garden was something they would normally want to do anyway. There was only one thing they should do just because He commended it: abstain from eating that fruit. It was apparently an entirely arbitrary prohibition. It was something they should do just because God asked them to do it.

Our Lord tells us in the New Testament that Satan is the deceiver. The Christian theologians tell us that Satan never tells a flat outright lie. He finds that half truth is a much more effective device for tempting, so he distorts the truth and tells a lie in such a fashion that it appears to be undeniably true. Jesus did not come to release us from the law. The real truth is more subtle and complex than that. The truth is that we are not absolved from obedience from the law. What St. Paul tries to tell us in several chapters of Romans is, not that we have to obey me law but rather, that the law comes to us free from any external constraints because we want to keep it. Suddenly, because we love God, we will keep His commandments. When we are motivated by love we no longer feel the law as a constraint. This business of Jesus freeing us from the law can easily be interpreted as, "Whee! We don't have to keep the law any more!"  People throughout history have interpreted it that way. At the time of the Reformation there were large numbers of people who interpreted it that way. There was one entire city in Germany in which the people were so taken with this notion of freedom from the law that they said, "If your heart is right, if your soul is pure, it doesn't matter what you do in the body." So they lived in one continual uninterrupted orgy of licentiousness, drunkenness, and adultery until Martin Luther (bless his puritan heart) called upon the German princes to launch a military crusade against these crazy people. Freedom from the law in the best sense is freedom to keep the law voluntarily, because you love. This misinterpretation is a good example of how the devil works. He takes something that is true and asserts it as truth, but notice that it’s never quite the whole truth. Heresy is erroneous because of what it leaves out. A religious fanatic is not a man with too much religion, but too little. He’s the guy who takes a partial truth and asserts it emphatically, dogmatically, enthusiastically, and insists that everyone adopt his insane simplification of the truth.  


Fr. Rogers