Tonight At Bible Study...

Tonight I was at bible study with a fellow Roman Catholic. We were studying St. John's Gospel 11-14 and when he was asking about mortal sin and contrition, after outlining what the Catechism taught on the subject I just said "we can't even know our own contrition and whether it is perfect or not, as all human love is in some way self-interested" or something to that extent. I looked it up in Pelikan's Reformation history and that was a preliminary thesis of Martin Luther against Penance/Confession and the same idea that Abp of Canterbury Rowan Williams taught in his sermon on loving God and why the Catholic doctrine of "Pure Love" was wrong.

I told him that Scripture is all about Law and Gospel and that the Law is supposed to bring us to repentance knowing that there's no way we can earn our way to Heaven, and that the Catholic theology of the cross was empty and that Catholicism glorifies and protects "Free Will" to the point of idolatry and that this is the Jesuits fault. So basically I taught Lutheranism and Jansenism, I don't know what's happening to me.

I also said that God didn't have to respect anyone's free will when we discussed Judas and that he was an unelect reprobate whom God had not chosen and had been a thief anyway and that when he took communion it said "satan entered him" and that when we take communion unworthily (I might've said 'when the reprobate' take communion) it is drinking God's wrath upon themselves (Jared's/Reformed theology).

I mocked the necessity of Marian Dogmas and said they were superfluous.

I told him that all the canon law in the world was meaningless if we didn't have a positive and living faith rather than just a set of rules.

I've been hugely influenced by Luther's dichotemy of the Theologian of Glory versus the Theologian of the Cross.

I'm still a Catholic I guess, and I can refute all of my own arguments. But it just made me sick to think how unsure our salvation is in Catholic soteriology, how all of it depends on man's will and not God's grace. Even now I could argue against it in my head with Catholic/Arminian prooftexts but it just feels wrong. In the end I just want to have the Christianity of St. Augustine...

Sorry I'm probably committing the sin of scandal, and making the Catholics angry, but such is the reality of my life, I'm constantly unable to figure out how on earth I'll ever be sure about my theology...at least I know I'll never be an Anabaptist again.

I think I was just really tired, and the fact is that I read and heard so much from Reformed, Arminian, Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox sources that they all start to blend and make sense in their own ways and I lose my dogmatism.

I took some theology tests and I got St. Augustine as my #1 and then Karl Barth (whom I've never read).