Christ's Superabundant Cross

I'm currently reading through 1 Corinthians and the other day I read this verse:

"For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid;
that foundation is Jesus Christ." - 1 Corinthians 3:11

St. Thomas Aquinas describes Christ's sacrifice on the cross as superabundant, it's like the famous evangelical worship song lyrics 'All of you, is more than enough for all of me, for every thirst and every need, you satisfy me with your love, and all I have in you, is more than enough'.

This morning I was thinking about the motto of Notre Dame University, crux spes unica 'the cross is our only hope'. It was then that I learned this is from an ancient latin hymn called "Vexilla Regis" dating back to 6th century Rome written by the Bishop of Poiters. (now aside from a debate about St. Helen and the True Cross, I want to include a portion of a translation of it)

Vexilla Regis

"Abroad the regal banners fly,
now shines the Cross's mystery:
upon it Life did death endure,
and yet by death did life procure.

Who, wounded with a direful spear,
did purposely to wash us clear
from stain of sin, pour out a flood
of precious water mixed with blood.
...

Blest Tree, whose happy branches bore
the wealth that did the world restore;
the beam that did that Body weigh
which raised up Hell's expected prey.

Hail Holy Cross, our only hope!
Now, in the mournful Passion time;
grant to the just increase of grace,
and every sinner's crimes efface.

Blest Trinity, salvation's spring
may every soul Thy praises sing;
to those Thou grantest conquest by
the Holy Cross, rewards supply. Amen."

This hymn reminded me of another hymn I heard the other day, which I am not trying to commit to memory. It was written by Annie Johnston Flynt who was extremely sick and frail for most of her life, and wrote this wonderful hymn in spite of everything she endured:

He Giveth More Grace

He giveth more grace as our burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength as our labors increase;
To added afflictions He addeth His mercy,
To multiplied trials He multiplies peace.

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.

Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision,
Our God ever yearns His resources to share;
Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing;
The Father both thee and thy load will upbear.

His love has no limits, His grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again."

May you find hope in the glorius Cross of Our Lord, who provided more than enough grace for everyone to be washed of their sins in. May Grace lift us up, help us stand, and lead us on the path to Heaven. Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Luther and the Refuge of God

Hey folks, this is kind of a personal post, I'm really struggling in my own spiritual life and things are incredibly busy so I can't really post alot, but I read this the other day which I think is absolutely beautiful, even a Catholic - I think - could respect this particular passage, and I think Luther wrote many great works out of his love for God that both sides of the Tiber should revere. I also included a few other quotes that have helped me lately.


"Faith is a divine work in us, which transforms us, gives us a new birth out of God (John 1:13), slays the old Adam, makes us altogether different men in heart, affection, mind, and all powers, and brings with it the Holy Spirit. Oh, it is a living, energetic, active, mighty thing, this faith! It cannot but do good unceasingly. There is no question asked whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked the works have been done, and there is a continuous doing of them. But any person not doing such works is without faith. He is groping in the dark, looking for faith and good works, and knows neither what faith is nor what good works are, although he indulges in a lot of twaddle and nonsense concerning faith and good works. Faith is a living, daring confidence in the grace of God, of such assurance that it would risk a thousand deaths. This confidence and knowledge of divine grace makes a person happy, bold, and full of gladness
in his relation to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit is doing this in the believer. Hence it is that a person, without constraint, becomes willing and enthusiastic to do good to everybody, to serve everybody, to suffer all manner of afflictions, from love of God and to the praise of Him who has extended such grace to him. Accordingly, it is impossible to separate works from faith, just as impossible as it is to separate the power to burn and shine from fire. Accordingly, beware of your own false thoughts and of idle talkers, who pretend great wisdom for discerning faith and good works and yet are the greatest fools. Pray God that He may create faith in you; otherwise you will be without faith forever and aye, no matter what you may plan and do" - Martin Luther preface to Romans Commentary

"God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way...The LORD Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress." - Psalm 46:1-2, 11

"Lord, you have been our refuge in all generations."- Psalm 90:1

"All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." - John 6:37 KJV

"A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing; our helper he amid the flood of mortal ills prevaling." - Martin Luther

"Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars...I will not forget thy Word" - Blaise Pascal after a near death experience

Funny and Good Chesterton quotes I've encountered so far.

" The nineteenth-century neglect of tradition and mania for mere documents were altogether nonsensical. They amounted to saying that men always tell lies to children but men never make mistakes in books." (On Sola Scriptura)

"A young man will suddenly become a Catholic priest, or even a Catholic monk, because he has a spontaneous and even impatient personal enthusiasm for the doctrine of Virginity as it appeared to St. Catherine or St. Clare. But how many men become Baptist ministers because they have a personal horror of the idea of an innocent infant coming unconsciously to Christ? How many honest Presbyterian ministers in Scotland really want to go back to John Knox, as a Catholic mystic might want to go back to John of the Cross?"

"What is any man who has been in the real outer world, for instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic traditions are condemned by the Bible? It indicates a jumble of topsy-turvy tests and tail-foremost arguments, of which I never could at any time see the sense. The ordinary sensible sceptic or pagan is standing in the street (in the supreme character of the man in the street) and he sees a procession go by of the priests of some strange cult, carrying their object of worship under a canopy, some of them wearing high head-dresses and carrying symbolical staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred records, others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them, others sacred relics in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand the spectator saying, "This is all hocus-pocus"; I can even understand him, in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession, throwing down the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on the priests and anything else that might express that general view. I can understand his saying, "Your croziers are bosh, your candles are bosh, your statues and scrolls and relics and all the rest of it are bosh." But in what conceivable frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the scriptures of this one particular group (a scroll which had always belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was hocus-pocus); why in the world should the man in the street say that one particular scroll was not bosh, but was the one and only truth by which all the other things were to be condemned? Why should it not be as superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues, of that one particular procession? Why should it not be as reasonable to preserve the statues as the scrolls, by the tenets of that particular creed? To say to the priests, "Your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense," is sensible. To say, "Your statues are condemned by your scrolls, and we are going to worship one part of your procession and wreck the rest," is not sensible from any standpoint, least of all that of the man in the street."

Jansenism Pt. 2 and Emphasis in Theology

Emphasis is important in theology. A church can believe in a doctrine but not emphasize it over a period of time. An example is 'sola gratia' - grace alone. Dr. R.C. Sproul is a very honest Reformed theologian and he says in his book "Faith Alone" that the Catholic Church has always fought to maintain that salvation is by the grace of God alone (though obviously not by faith alone, hence the Reformation). Louis Bouyer writes that if the Church focussed more on Grace Alone during the time of the Reformation, it is probable that the issues would have been settled. This is quite a claim of course, and easily debatable, but the general principle is that emphasis matters.



Jansenism is intriguing to me because I like it's emphasis, in only a few ways does it contradict Church teaching (possibly teaching limited atonement, and irresistible grace), but it places great emphasis on Election and the sovereign grace of God and faith in the work of Christ. It never denies that works justify or the nature of the communion or anything else like that (from the little of what I've read), but it does emphasize what I think at least is the 'best' of Protestantism and Catholicism.



Jansen himself wrote that if his doctrines were offensive to the Church that they should of course be disposed of and that he wished to be faithful to the Church, and I believe that is the point. The point is that emphasis needs to be reformed at times or shifted depending on the situation. Baptists for example believe in an eternally Hell for all believers which they will be conscious during, but I've never heard a sermon on it, because it's just alluded to briefly or like an 'unwritten law' that it exists. Thus if their churches start to doubt Hell, they should emphasize it.



Thus while I am not a Jansenist because it has been declared heretical, I definately agree with the emphasis and that the good parts of it's theology should be emphasized more. I don't know why people think Election is such a horrific doctrine, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and alot of others are in agreement that it is a beautiful thing. Active reprobation...is another story.

Jansenism Pt 1

I've realized that I like 2 systems of Theology greatly and agree with them. The systems are Catholicism and Calvinism. The problem is that they are contradictory. Blaise Pascal always seemed like a great man and I am reading Pensees right now, so I wikipedia'd him. As I read descriptions of his theology I realized I really agreed with alot of it. It was a form of Catholicism that didn't teach the Semi-Pelagian error of Trent to believe in Resistable Grace.

It seems very good as it blends alot of the truth about the fall, the gospel, predestination, and grace together and presents a truly Augustinian theology. I am planning on reading alot more of it.

Wikipedia says it well here:

"Jansen also insisted on justification by faith, although he did not contest the necessity of revering saints, of confession, and of frequent Communion. Jansen’s opponents (mainly Jesuits) condemned his teachings for their alleged similarities to Calvinism (though, unlike Calvinism, Jansen rejected the doctrine of assurance and taught that even the saved could not be assured that they were saved). Blaise Pascal's Ecrits sur la Grâce, based on what Michel Serres has called his "anamorphotic method," attempted to conciliate the contradictory positions of Molinists and Calvinists by stating that both were partially right: Molinists, who claimed God's choice concerning a person's sin and salvation was a posteriori and contingent, while Calvinists claimed that it was a priori and necessary. Pascal himself claimed that Molinists were correct concerning the state of humanity before the Fall, while Calvinists were correct regarding the state of humanity after the Fall.

The heresy of Jansenism, meaning here its denial of Catholic doctrine, is that it denies the role of free will in the acceptance and use of grace -- that God's role in the infusion of grace is such that it cannot be resisted and does not require human assent. The Catholic teaching is that "God's free initiative demands man's free response" (CCC 2002) [3] that is the gift of grace can be resisted and requires human assent."

Even if one is not allowed to believe in Irresistible Grace and be a Catholic, at least this shows me you can still believe in Total Depravity and Unconditional Election. Augustinian Thomism still offers some hope for me yet.

God is good - a simple observation

God is good. Among every other attribute the scriptures tell us this fact. They even implore us “taste and see that the Lord is good”. Today in mass everyone around me was doing just that (partaking in the Eucharist), and as I walked up I grudgingly wondered how much longer it would be till I was ‘in the club’ so to speak, until I got to join in, until I could taste and see that the Lord is good myself. But as I approach Fr. Peter he put down the Jesus/wafer and smiled while giving me a blessing. “The Lord be with you Andrew” and he signed the cross on my forehead. As I walked back to my pew I felt so much better, I don’t know how to describe it, it was like when I was baptized at my Baptist Church and I felt this overwhelming feeling of grace, today I felt some sort of grace. It was for me a beautiful image of a priest acting in persona Christi. I was always taught that the curtain ripping in the temple meant that we never needed a priest again, that any man who tried to claim spiritual authority was a heretic or worse a Catholic. But today I saw the beauty of spiritual fatherhood and it coincided perfectly with a verse I read in the bible.

“Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel” (1 Cor 4:15).

I understood what St. Paul was to the Corinthians now, he was an example in faith, a Bishop who corrected their errors, but more than that, a father in the gospel who showed them in some small way the Fatherhood of God. Of course if a person abused this position (as has occurred in many sex scandals, etc) the image could be the exact opposite, but it can also be of great encouragement. I guess I was just writing this story to say that the Lord is good, and is teaching me this through his servants.

God is good, and I will live with that. In the triumphal entry in St. Luke’s gospel it describes Jesus entering the town, and the Pharisees are upset, the people are crying out hosanna (‘save us’) and other cries that anticipated the messiah, and this would probably not escape the notice of the Roman guards. Jesus has this entry in fulfillment of Jewish scriptures (Zechariah) and people are crying to them as their king. This is when the pharisses say “Teacher, rebuke your disciples” (Lk. 19:39) and this I guess was a reasonable request, for if he did not rebuke them he risked causing a riot and a rebellion with Roman force to crush it. But the Pharisees miss the cosmic significance, they miss the God they worship, even though he is standing in front of them (and we probably would too). But Jesus says this classic line to them, “If they kept quiet, the stones will cry out.” (Lk. 19:40). It’s as if Jesus is saying: ‘I am Good, I am God, this is the day Israel has been waiting for since God first called Abraham, but if you miss this, if you refuse to recognize the significance of this, Creation itself will speak be your witness’.

Even in the bad times of life I must always remember the simple truth I sung to kids in Church of England schools over and over again during outreach: “our God is a good God, he’s a good good good good God”.

The Walking Wounded and the Wounded Healer

My Principal Rob Whittaker at Capernwray Bible School in England used to talk about Christians who struggled with sin as they went through life, he used this poem - or at least the phrase 'the walking wounded' to describe us. Here is a part of the poem.

"And crimson crosses on the dirty white...
The mist still hung in snags from dripping thorns;
Absent-minded guns still sighed and thumped.
And then they came, the walking wounded,
Straggling the road like convicts loosely chained,
Dragging at ankles exhaustion and despair...
Remembering after eighteen years,
In the heart's throat a sour sadness stirs;
Imagination pauses and returns
To see them walking still, but multiplied
In thousands now. And when heroic corpses
Turn slowly in their decorated sleep
And every ambulance has disappeared,
The walking wounded still trudge down that lane,
And when recalled they must bear arms again" - "The Walking Wounded" By Vernon Scannell

"When he saw the crowds, he had compassion (splagnidzomai) for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd...." - Matthew 9:36

The Gospel is our only hope to heal the walking wounded, with the wounded healer

"But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed." -Isaiah 53:5

"‘Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.’" - Wisdom of Solomon 2:12-20