By Brian Cook
I stopped by a coffee shop today and was pleasantly surprised. I noticed three teenage or college age girls sitting, with Bibles open, reading First John out loud to each other. After a few minutes they stopped to ask and answer questions. Here I was on a random Tuesday afternoon being reminded that a love for Scripture is absolutely crucial for your spiritual life. It has led me to where I am today. I silently prayed for them and left feeling very nostalgic about by Baptist upbringing and my Calvinist years pouring over “the Book” as we used to say.
In my Southern Baptist church growing up, during VBS (Vacation Bible School), a child would march forward towards the stage at the front holding a large Bible. When there, the child would turn toward the congregation and hold up the Bible and we would all pledge allegiance to it. “I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God’s Holy Word. I will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, I will hide its words in my heart, that I might not sin against God” (Psalm 119:105 and 111). Great pledge, and I remember it forty years later word for word. The Bible would then be placed on a small pedestal that sat upon the table that sat in front of the Pulpit.
Becoming Catholic, for someone raised like me, is cataclysmic indeed. It’s a painful sifting that works its way down to every aspect of life. And because it gets down to the “nitty-gritty” of everything, it causes changes to everything at the surface level as well. That’s why Evangelicals and Catholics look so strangely at one another. Our view of Christianity is very different almost all the way down. Thus, it follows that some Evangelicals struggle to say that Catholics are Christians, and some Catholics can’t take Protestant theology seriously at all. And even worse, it’s based on what we are convinced the Bible teaches.
But Christian unity is coming. It’s already started. This very year we may witnesses the formal reuniting of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. This ancient theological split has almost healed completely at the leadership levels, and our new Pope Leo has made Christian unity one of his focuses. So much so that his Papal motto is “In Illo Uno Unum”, which means “In the One, we are one”. This sure sounds a lot like the prayer of Jesus in John 17 where in verse 21 Jesus prays, “that they may all be one, as You Father are in Me, and I in You, that they may also be one in Us, that the world may believe that you sent Me.”
What are we to do? Well, at a personal and local level, step one is to acknowledge Jesus’ prayer and not stand against it. It is He that says in Matthew 12:30, “Whoever is not with Me is against Me, and whoever does not gather with Me scatters.” And why are we so scattered? Because we have been prodded and pulled away from unity by two camps: those with a greedy lust for “ill-gotten gain” (power, fame, and fortune), and those with good intention but unwilling to submit to authority. What authority? The Word’s authority. The Book? No, the God-Man, “the Word” (John 1:1).
It is frightening to me that we who love the Scripture so much can end up so far apart. But for those “with ears to hear”, please listen. Either the Bible came from the Church, or the church came from the Bible. Either we live out our faith according to the Tradition of the Church (2 Thessalonians 2:15), or the traditions of man. Either we are building up His Church (Matthew 16:18), or we will just build another church down the street. Either His Word divides, or it unifies. And in a unified Church we will once again share in the “one faith, one Lord, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5). We will once again confess one Creed (Nicene Creed). We will once again be the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church”. One Church, one family, one Holy meal, one. And the world will believe.
