Francis seems to have gotten this wrong. For this Pope, the past is at best a record of what was and is certainly not a guide for the future. Francis is all about doing things new and never looking back. It does not matter what you think about the Tridentine Mass, for a current Pope to say what served the Roman Catholic Church for 400 years is now verboten tells you more about him than it does about that Latin Mass. His common complaint about those who are backward looking is that they are a detriment to the forward movement of the Church just about says it all. God is doing a new thing and the Spirit is making a break with the past. But what does that mean? In all practicality, it means that nothing is sacred, nothing endures, and everything is open to change. Who can survive in a church or in a faith like this?
In every age the voice of hope for God's people was a voice calling them to return -- to return to Him, to return to the Scriptures, and to return to faith. But not now. Now, it would seem, the Spirit is looking to break with the past and to make a new beginning in which what was old heresy just might be new doctrine and what was old doctrine just might be new heresy While such a radical opinion might have lived on the fringes of the faith in the past, today it lives within the beating heart of Rome and Evangelicalism together. There is little stomach in much of Christianity for a yesterday, today, and forever faith but there is much interest in spirituality without religion and a faith without a doctrinal identity.
If you want to hear the voice of the Spirit, you need to listen to Christ and the voice of Christ is His Word. “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. . . . " John 14:23. The promise of the Spirit is not some guide to help us go where we have never gone but to bring to remembrance all that Christ said. (John 14:26) Alas, the reality is that we have itching ears which would rather listen to the thinly varnished echo of our own wants, values, and desires than to what our Lord has said of sin and forgiveness, loss and redemption, life and death. The message of God does not revolve around woke dreams of a new world in which happiness and personal fulfillment reign supreme but of the earthly struggle to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus to the everlasting life. The gospel of personal fulfillment requires little faith but the path of those who deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Jesus can only be lived by faith.
If you are going to church on Sunday morning and hear talk of God affirming your feelings or desiring your happiness or aiding your own ideas of personal fulfillment, you are not going to the Church our Lord Jesus established nor are you hearing the real Gospel of Christ crucified and risen. Such a church may help you feel better about yourself but it cannot redeem you from sin or rescue you from death or raise you to life. The Spirit does not have a new voice or an old one. Only the true voice of the Good Shepherd whom the Father has sent in His name to gather and redeem His lost sheep and lead them home to Him. The reality is that Francis, like much that passes for Christianity today, has become uncomfortable in the clothing of holiness and has decided to sell a gospel of self-indulgence in which truth is relative and the judgment of people is more important than the judgment of God. If this Pope wanted to visit the home of one of Italy's biggest voices for abortion to call her to repentance, God be praised. The fact that he brought her flowers and chocolates only compromises his own witness and leaves the rest of us wondering if he has drunk the koolaid of modernity and bartered the unchanging Gospel of Christ for what feels good in the moment. Such a Gospel will surely sell but it will not save.
No comments:
Post a Comment