Transcript

Good evening, everyone.

Thank you for coming out for our parish mission.

Really, thank you for coming out.

Everybody had some sweet bread, and it was good.

It was good, yes.

You told me so, Christine.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, we're going to play tomorrow night, same time, same station, and we'll have the soup and the bread, and then Dr. Jones is going to be giving me a second Catholic talk tomorrow.

So, first of all, thank you very much to Devin and Bella Luna for the suit.

Thanks to Father Matt, who is my senior male, to Mim and his set of guys, and especially Father Gordon, who said to me, in the usual funny style, baby, let's just hop on the radio.

When I saw him on the street.

For those of you who are Black and Indian scholars, they say how famous Papa was when the New Folk was elected, which hopefully will be soon.

So, thanks also to the Catholic Filipino Network, the Black Catholics, and Mary Fork, who put us together with our guest speaker here for this evening.

And his name is Dr. Jim Cochran-Graham.

He's a teacher, an author, a speaker, and a musician.

Jim holds a Ph.D. in History and Theology of the early Christian Church at Northwestern University, with secondary concentrations in the New Testament Interpretation and the History of the Roman Empire.

He has also studied Roman history at the American Academy in Bromley.

He is an Associate Professor of Church History at Garrick Evangelical Seminary on the campus of Northwestern University at the Nelson.

He also teaches for the lay formation programs in the Archdiocese of Chicago and the Diocese of Joliet, the Chicago Catholic Scripture School, and Deacon Formation Program in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Very busy guy.

Okay.

And his website is, we'll be on some promotional information that, there's information that will be in the back of the church after his speaking.

And at the end of Jim's talk, I know there will be time for Q&A. So, with that introduction, I will bring it over to our speaker, Dr. Jim Pomeroy.

I'm going to give a song to set the mood for this evening, so I hope that's okay.

I've got my dance I lift my dance I am a bender and my sins are like sand.

I need to feel your presence when I pray.

But I can't always find the words to say.

I ask you, thought and thought, He's on the ground when there's no one around And I just can't hear the sound Coming like the wings of a dove You're holding this piece of earth above I lift my head, reach out my hand, just like someone did for me.

Can I help you stand?

It's a Jesus to you I want to be.

And it's Jesus to you I want to be.

When you're lost and found, he's on the ground.

When there's no one around, and you can't hear a sound.

He's coming like the waves of a dove.

The Holy Spirit speaks his words of love.

And bow my head, you give me the strength that I've been speaking the prayers I have thought about.

He's on the ground when push comes to shove.

You're grateful to above, coming like the waves above.

Your Holy Spirit speaks Your words of love When I walk, I can be found With my two feet on the ground Thank you.

So, I'm Jim Patton Brown, and I'm here to annoy you.

It's okay.

We know.

And when I say we, I mean we converse.

We know how annoying we can be to those of you who are cradle Catholics, lifelong Catholics, and here we come with all of our enthusiasm for the faith.

Actually, technically I'm a revert, not a convert, because I was baptized at St. Lambert in Skokie.

Baptized in Roman Catholic faith, but then raised in a Protestant denomination.

Eventually ordained as clergy in a different Protestant denomination.

And now I'm happy to be a Roman Catholic again.

In fact, there are two things I hope to say.

There are two things I wish I could have done sooner.

Come back to the Roman Catholic Church and get a job.

I'll tell you all about my job some other time, but right now we're here talking about the church and faith.

And so now, interestingly enough, I teach church history and historical theology at a Protestant seminary.

The same front of the seminary where I got my Ph.D. But in the Roman Church, I teach at parishes, I teach to deacons, which I love to do.

In fact, concerning the deacons, there's a theology class next to me, so I'm looking forward to that.

I teach in scripture schools, theology in a task, I do concerts, and so I'm out and about a lot.

I'm very, very glad to be here at this equally beautiful place, and tonight's topic is Two Kinds of Faith, Two Kinds of Fear.

Now, throughout the history of the Church, there have always been the fear-minders telling us that the reason to behave is to avoid judgment.

And this idea goes all the way back to the beginning of the Church.

But if that's all it is, then religion is reduced a little more than fire insurance, right?

And is that what your Christianity is to you?

Just fire insurance?

Or is there something telling you that there should be more, too?

The early church theologian, Clement of Alexandria, wrote that there are actually two kinds of fear.

There is the bad kind and the good kind.

The bad kind of fear is fear accompanied by hatred.

This is the kind of fear that oppressed people feel toward a title.

But there's also good kind of fear.

This is the fear that is accompanied by drama.

The kind of respect, shall we say, that children want to show their parents.

The difference is that one is forced and the other is voluntary.

And we know that the kind of respect that children ought to show their parents is voluntary.

We know that's voluntary because either you are a parent, have been a parent, or you have had parents, and somebody in that relationship rebelled at some time or another and proved the point that respect isn't necessarily always shown.

In the New Testament, in the letter to 1 John, 1 John 4, 18 says, Perfect love casts out fear.

So this kind of fear is, Clement and Alex had this first kind of fear, the bad kind of fear, the forced kind of fear.

It's fear accompanied by hatred.

Why?

Because it's fear without trust.

And this is something God wants to do away with.

God's love, the Bible tells us, casts it out.

And this thing here is replaced, then, by God's love in a person's life.

But you may have also noticed that in the Old Testament, the Psalms and the Proverbs tell us, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Now this is Clement's other kind of fear.

Fear with reverence.

In other words, this is fear with trust.

And this kind of fear, or reverence, is actually a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Have you met people who have no reverence for God?

It's kind of a vicious cycle, really.

Because these are people who have rejected God in their lives.

By rejecting God, they've made no use of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

And since this reverence for God is a gift of the Holy Spirit, they're obviously not going to have it, because without the Holy Spirit in their lives, they're going to be lasting gifts of the Holy Spirit.

So, rejecting God leads to no Holy Spirit, leads to no reverence for God.

So you see, it's kind of a vicious cycle.

But the cycle can work the other way, move in the other direction.

Welcoming God into your life means you have the Holy Spirit in your life, which means the gifts of the Holy Spirit are available to you.

And there, the reverence will be increased.

So there are these two kinds of spirits, one without trust and one with trust.

Fear with trust is a healthy fear, though we might prefer to call it reverence, as in our culture they use the word fear quite the way we want to label it.

But healthy reverence for God, or healthy fear of God, reminds us of our place before God.

In other words, God is God, and we are not, right?

I can sum up all of Hebrew wisdom literature in one sentence.

You know, think back to the Psalms, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes.

It all boils down to this.

God is wise, and we're not.

God is God, and we're not.

And there's this beautiful paradox when it comes to wisdom.

If you think you're wise, you're foolish.

But if you admit you're not wise, now that's wisdom.

So God is wise and we are not.

God is God and we are not.

Actually, that's good news.

That's good news because it makes it easier to be us when we don't have to be transcribed with God, right?

And it makes it easier to trust God, because we can put our trust in a God who is all-powerful.

If we only had ourselves to trust, that'd be a lot of pressure.

I don't want that kind of pressure.

But it takes the pressure off of us.

We don't have to be our own higher self if we can put our trust in a God who is so much wiser than we are, so much greater than we are.

And so it's precisely because we are so small compared to God that we can put our trust in God, because God is worthy of our trust.

We trust in God because He is so far beyond us and beyond our comprehension.

I mean, imagine if you could have God completely figured out.

Wouldn't that make you smarter than God?

And if you were smarter than God, wouldn't that disqualify Him as God?

So, if God wasn't such a big, awesome mystery, He wouldn't be worthy of our trust.

But He is.

He is worthy of our trust.

Because He's so far beyond us.

And so we put our trust in Him, precisely because we can't fully understand Him.

As we approach Him with that healthy fear, that good kind of fear, reverence, reverence with trust.

Now, just as there are two kinds of fear, there are also two kinds of faith.

First of all, faith is belief.

In a sense, it is the content of our religion.

It is what we believe.

And when I think of it, my first thought is always, the creed.

The 19th creed is considered a hell of rosary people, you know, when I say the creed, the old man, the king of the clock, and the king of the church.

But I'm a Christian historian, so I don't have to think of the 19th creed.

Either one is fine.

But the point is that the creed is a statement of faith.

A creed is a summary of what we as Christians believe.

In the Old Testament, you could read the whole Old Testament.

It's a good thing to do.

But the Old Testament also contains summaries, doesn't it?

The Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments are basically a summary of the Old Testament.

There is a summary of the New Testament also.

The difference is that it isn't in the New Testament.

It has to be written after the time of the New Testament.

The summary of the New Testament is decreed.

It is what we believe.

It is what we mean when we talk about the faith.

So faith is belief.

But belief alone is not enough.

Faith has to be more than just belief.

Otherwise, it is a form of nonsense.

Now, I hope you know what Gnosticism is.

You may have heard the term Gnostic from around at one time or another.

I'll give you a very brief church history lesson.

In the early church, there was a group of folks.

We now refer to them as heretics.

They were also called Gnostics.

And the word Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, spelled with a G, you know, G-N-O-S-I-S. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge.

So just like in English our word knowledge has the silent K at the beginning, their word gnosis has the silent G at the beginning.

But these Gnostics believed that you were saved by knowledge, that it was your knowledge that saved you.

It was what you knew that would get you into heaven.

Now, you might guess that was rejected by the European church as a possible form of faith.

But you know what?

The writer of Ecclesiastes is right when he says there's nothing new on this earth.

And not because it's still around.

So, any time you hear someone telling you that what you really need is enlightenment, well, that's not a form of knowledge.

And any time you hear someone tell you that what you really need is to find the knowledge from the things, find the insight from the things, that's also a form of knowledge.

The problem with that is, if we make faith only about what we will see, only about a personal ascent to a list of propositions.

Then a couple of things happen.

First of all, faith can become very individualistic.

And it is for the Gnostic.

In fact, the modern version of Gnostic is basically the New Age movement.

And if you know anything about the New Age movement, you can basically be a religious one, see whatever you want, and that's fine.

So faith becomes way too individualistic.

The other thing that happens when we make faith only about knowledge is that we leave out people who don't understand what we understand or who cannot understand what we understand.

People with different abilities, they would be left behind.

In fact, if we were to say that our knowledge saved us, where would you draw the line?

How much knowledge would you have to have to be saved?

Would you have to understand Trinity completely?

Who busted that?

Because that puts us right back where we were, admitting that God is this great, awesome ministry that we can't get our heads around, because if we could completely understand God, then that would mean love God.

So our faith is not just about accepting doctrine.

Now don't get me wrong, accepting doctrine is good.

And I'm a big fan of doctrine because I teach historical theology.

I teach the time period of the church when the church is clarifying the doctrine.

And I'm also a big fan of catechism.

So I encourage you to read that.

Catechism is an amazing well of of everything that you possibly want to know about the Church and what we believe.

But at the end of the day, there's still an element of mystery here, isn't there?

And part of faith is accepting and even embracing the mystery.

In fact, I would say that real faith requires mystery.

If there wasn't ministry, it wouldn't be faith.

So, in addition to belief, faith is also trust.

You know, when we talk about someone being faithful, what we mean is that they are trustworthy.

With God, we believe God is trustworthy.

We believe God is trustworthy for, well, for many reasons, but for two reasons that I want to mention now.

Part of what we believe about God is that God is, I'm going to throw a theological word at you, omnibenevolent.

God is omnibenevolent, which is the best way to say that God is all good, always good.

We also believe, here's another one, we also believe that God is immutable, meaning unchanging, Which is good, because if God wasn't unchanging, we could say that God is all good today, but what about tomorrow?

Right?

So, with those two things put together, that God is all good, and God is unchanging, those two add up to God is trustworthy.

God is faithful.

Now we have to trust God, because God is a minister.

And we have to put ourselves in God's care without really any proof of it.

I mean, I can't prove to you that God will care for you in the future.

But part of our faith is that we believe that He will based on the fact that God has characterized our path, that there is a consistency to God, and God has been with me in the past, and so I believe God will continue to be with me in the future.

So faith, then, is this combination of belief and trust.

So when I say there's two kinds of faith, It's not like the two kinds of fear.

You know, with the two kinds of fear, there was bad and there was good.

It's not like that today.

In this case, they're both good.

It's just that the first one doesn't quite go far enough.

Faith as belief only isn't quite good.

But the second one, faith as trust, completes faith, completes the believer.

Now, I'm going to say that there are a couple of things we need to put aside in our minds.

Faith is not about quantity, and it's not about quality.

And what I'm going to talk about now for a few minutes comes from one of the books I was reading called Spiritual Blueprints.

And this book, I actually wrote it when I was sorting out my own life, and it turned out the publisher wanted to publish it, thinking it might help the books sort out their lives too.

And so this book has become sort of my own manifesto, so to say.

It's my own, maybe, faith journey.

And one of the things that we all have to get over is the idea that faith has anything to do with quantity or quality.

First of all, it's not a matter of quantity.

It's not a matter of how much faith we have.

A small amount of faith is still valid faith.

It's not about having enough faith.

Jesus said to himself that faith besides mustard seeds is enough.

Mustard seeds are small, tiny seeds.

Think of an investment.

Some of you may have much investment in the stock market, God help us.

We may have a retirement account.

Think about an investment, any kind of investment.

Does putting in more money make the investment safer?

Does increasing the amount of the investment have anything to do with how safe or reliable the investment is?

No, it doesn't. It only increases your possibility of getting the money.

It's not how much money you put into the investment, but it's what you put your money in that matters.

And it's the same thing with faith.

It's not about how much faith you have, it's what you put your faith in that matters.

It's the object of your faith.

Faith is also not about quality.

It's not as though there's a sincerity requirement on faith.

Have you heard this one?

It doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe with all your heart.

Have you heard that one?

Well, that's a lie.

It does matter what you believe.

In fact, you may not believe in something very strongly.

You may find that your faith is not as strong as your neighbor's. You may find that you have doubts, but that's okay, as long as your faith is the right object.

To say, it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe it with all your heart, would be like saying, it doesn't matter what you invented, as long as you put all your money into it.

How ridiculous is that?

Does the fact that you really want your money to grow sincerely make the investment any better?

It doesn't. The fact that it will make it hurt a little bit means you don't do what you want.

Again, it's not how sincere your faith is.

It's not how strongly you believe.

It's the object.

It's what you put your faith in.

I want to tell you a story.

This is the story of our ice fishing.

Anyone here ever gone ice fishing?

Yeah, me either.

I don't know why anyone would want to do this.

I've not told you the story on a personal experience.

The story is completely dated.

But you'll get the idea, even though you've never been ice fishing.

Um, but you know what ice fishing is, right?

I mean, ice fishing is you go out onto a frozen lake, you cut a hole through the ice, you drop a line into the water, and you quote, to catch fish this way.

Some people even put up a little shaft on the ice with a heater in it.

Thankfully, he's right.

Um... Okay, so you get the idea.

You know what light fishing is, right?

I went to college in Minnesota, so I get to do a lot of that.

So imagine two guys are going to go light fishing.

Let's call them Fred and Barney.

Fred and Barney are going to go light fishing.

Now, Barney...

Loads his gear into his pickup truck.

He's got his little shaft, loads that into that pickup truck.

He's got all his equipment, and he drives into the lake.

When he gets to the edge of the lake, he parks the pickup truck on the drive and he gets out of the truck and he goes and he walks over to the ice.

And he puts a toe on the edge of the ice to see if it cracks.

It doesn't. So he stands on the ice, but now he's still so close to the edge that if he broke through he'd put on his hanged feet.

So he stands on the ice, he kind of bounces up and down and taps the ice to see if it's going to fall in.

And it doesn't. He walks a little farther out into the icy ice than maybe where he felt when he was moving away from himself.

He's not in too much danger, but he walks very carefully, listening for cracks.

It doesn't hear anything, and it jumps up and down a little bit.

Okay, no problem, the ice seems to be safe.

He walks out farther to the place where he wants to fish, tests the ice there, it seems to be safe.

So he cuts a hole in the ice, and in cutting a hole in the ice, he finds that the ice itself is a toothpick.

Well thick enough to hold up his pickup truck at any time.

So he goes back to the shore, gets in his truck, drives his truck out onto the ice, sets up his shack, and enjoys the 90 days of ice fishing.

That's Barney.

Now, Fresh also wants to go ice fishing.

Fred loads his gear in his pickup truck, and he puts his little shack in the back of the pickup truck without equipment, and he drives to the lake.

When he gets to the edge of the lake, he rolls out of the window and sticks his head out, thinks, that looks okay, and he drives right out onto the ice.

And he gets out of the truck, and the next thing he hears is that great cracking sound, and he's just able to run away in time to see his pickup truck and his ice fishing shaft and all the gear sink to the bottom of the lake.

Now the question is, who had more faith, Fred or Barbara?

Whose faith was stronger?

The answer is obvious.

Fred had more faith.

Fred had more faith in that ice, and he had no doubt at all that the ice was going to hold him up.

But what happened?

It didn't. He put his faith in the wrong thing.

Now, far as he knew, his faith was more tentative.

But it grew by testing him, and over time, As he tested the ice and went farther and farther out onto the lake, his faith grew.

You know, it's true what they say, that faith is like a muscle, and it grows by stretching, right?

So a little bit of faith in the right object of faith will grow over time.

A lot of faith in the wrong object is like walking on thin ice.

So you see, you know, the moral of the story, of course, is that, you know, Fred had lots and lots of faith.

His faith was strong.

But he put his faith in the wrong thing.

Barney had a little bit of faith.

The size of a 100 feet, you might say.

But his faith was placed in something trustworthy.

And so he placed our faith in the one and only trustworthy God.

And so even a little bit of faith in our God, who is worthy of our faith, is better than a lot of faith in anything else.

And I know you know people who search and search and search for other things to put their faith in, like tarot cards, horoscopes, psychic readings, political causes, I just saw a commercial for a new one.

What was it called?

California Psychic, something like this.

And it had testimonies by people who were so happy about the psychic reading that they could just see it.

And, you know, thinking like, oh, my psychic.

I couldn't believe how much she knew about my future.

Or, you know, the usual, fair things that, you know, anyone can tell them what they want to hear.

And, you know, I met, first, my wife last week, because I'm jealous of her.

She's just so mad.

But they're looking for other things to put their faith in.

It's almost as though they're clawing over themselves to find anything else to put their faith in other than God.

Maybe it's because they're afraid of God, because they don't know the difference between the unhealthy fear and the healthy fear.

But remember, the healthy fear that we talked about, reverence, it's a fear that recognizes our place before God.

That God is an awesome mystery.

But it's a fear that also trusts in God, because we believe that God is good and eternally loving, unchangeably loving, unchangeably merciful and compassionate for us.

That's basically what faith is.

Believing in God and trusting in God.

So faith is belief, but belief alone is not good enough, because again, if we just make faith about knowing the right things, we don't know enough of the right things, and we're wrong half the time.

And we would leave behind those who don't know as much as we do.

So faith as belief is good, but faith as belief plus trust, that is more complete.

And this kind of faith leads to hope.

This kind of faith, faith with trust, leads to hope.

And hope is something the world needs more of.

We live in a world where there's far too little hope to go around.

Now tomorrow night I'm going to be talking more about immediate kinds of hope.

But for now, the hope I'm talking about is what I call big picture hope.

Big picture hope.

It's the belief in a God who is always good and always loving.

And it's putting our trust in the promises of that God.

Promises that lead to eternal life.

Eternal life You know, some of the greatest blessings that we can have in this life fall under the category of reconciliation.

Reconciliation with loved ones we haven't seen for a long time.

Reconciliation with people who we've had falling out, who have fallen out of heaven and we've reconciled.

The sacrament of reconciliation, where we experience God's grace and forgiveness, and the burden of guilt lifted from our shoulders.

But I believe that eternal life is reconciliation squared.

It is an exponentially greater form of reconciliation.

Because eternal life is reconciliation with our God, where, as Paul told us, we will know God the way God now knows us.

And eternal life is reconciliation with all those people who have gone before us.

Heaven is a reunion.

Did you know that?

You probably did, but maybe you haven't heard me say it quite like that.

Heaven is a reunion.

And so that's the kind of perspective that I'm talking about.

That's the kind of big picture that we can keep in mind that gives us hope.

And that's the kind of hope, based on God's love, that casts out fear.

I'm going to do another song, if that's alright.

I feel like you can listen to each gospel now, so maybe that's not better.

Be still and know that I am God.

Go refuge and pray when the life is lost.

There is no need to fear.

Music will be omitted.

In the eye of the Lord, there's a new quiet Lord.

We live and know that our God is God.

We live and act by His will.

There's a river of life that flows from on high.

Music will be omitted.

All creation proclaims the great work of the Lord, Music will be omitted.

Music will be omitted.

Music will be omitted.

All right.

I see a hand here, yes.

I was planning to take it away from you.

Thank you.

And I love that, and it talks about that, something you said earlier, it brings truth to me, why did they go on and not go and sin and end up doing just quieting down to that point of Godliness?

Well, yeah, right, right.

And I think you answered the question.

You're listening to the voice of God, not your own voice.

And so when you go within, in the way you're talking about it, you're connecting with the Holy Spirit within you, so you are listening to the voice of God.

But you have to acknowledge that it's not coming from you.

In other words, if I want enlightenment, what I want is something that comes to me from the outside, something that comes to me from God while I read scripture, I pray.

I don't presume to think that it's coming from me.

The Gnostic way of saying it, you know, it comes from you, within you, within me, anything outside of yourself.

But then it really originates with you.

So, again, it's a way of sort of making yourself your own higher earth, right?

Your own higher power.

So, but thanks for asking me to clarify that.

Um, I was planning on opening up for questions, and I'm happy to take questions.

Um, you don't have to stick with what I've talked about so far, because I'm pointing to that term, and I hope you do too.

Um, when I come back tomorrow, I'm going to pick up where I left off.

Would you just again repeat?

The two kinds of faith.

Well, the two kinds of faith are really one builds on the other.

So the first kind was faith as belief, accepting doctrine, accepting the content of the faith.

So when you say the creed, you're accepting the content of the creed.

The second kind of faith takes it one step further, builds on the other.

Is that another way of talking about what we used to think of as simple faith?

I can walk in, I bow my head, Forgive me a sin, as opposed to the intellectual faith of the intellectual systems and the belief.

But I've seen here, over the years, sort of a blind faith, sort of a simple faith, sort of a entrusting myself to God, but also seen, many times, as a superstition, or ritual, or just a custom, the way you do things.

And it seems to be very faithful.

The key that we're looking for here is balance.

So that our faith is more than just believing something about God.

But also, it is also more than just rituals and formulas, what that is.

It's built on tradition, it's built on the doctrines of the church.

But at the same time, we don't necessarily have to consistently understand all the doctrines of the church either, so it's a good thing that that is a part of it.

Yeah, questions?

Yes, it certainly can work the other way, in fact.

There's a famous statement that St. Anselm usually credited with, the statement is, faith-seeking understanding.

In other words, exactly what you're talking about, working in the other direction, starting with the trust and then trying to learn more about God.

And that really, in a way, is what the Christian life is about in a lot of ways.

We begin someplace, wherever we begin, and we try to understand it more as we go.

Like I said, St. Anselm was usually really critical of that, but St. Augustine said something very similar, simply that you can't learn about something and then hope that someday you'll know enough The death will turn into faith.

Not that knowledge will automatically turn into faith, but it could happen that faith can begin with faith and then knowledge grows from it.

So it can't work either way.

And it certainly doesn't. Doctor, if you could repeat the questions because they can't hear them from the back.

Alright, I always forget to do that.

I will try to repeat the questions.

Yeah, sorry about that.

Okay, so I see one here and one over there.

Okay, this is not a question from the heart of this conversation.

I wish to congratulate you, you are the one we need the most.

In our society, they have a singularity, wordly, and we only understand, we just have what our profession took us, and spread the word for our family and for our faith in something square.

God cannot change his ways to the unproliferable, holy works of the Holy Spirit.

What don't you believe?

Be not afraid.

Our enemy, John St. Thomas, is kingdom, the kingdom of God.

Well, let's take another question now, if you don't mind.

Okay, there was a question back there.

Yeah, let's move on here to the question in the back.

I was just a two years a little bit illiterate, so I didn't get any thank you questions before.

That was, in some things, my fault.

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community We talk about faith and content, and content is faith, and obviously someone who's nine months old has no content.

And so help me understand the Catholic view on that.

This is why we practice that now, and what we believe about that.

The question was about the Catholic understanding of baptism.

I'm going to answer this as a historian before then as an expert in liturgy.

There are clergy around here who can answer it in different ways from the perspective of the liturgy.

One of the things that you have to understand about baptism is that baptism is our sacrament of initiation.

So, whereas the Hebrew people had certain visions to initiate employees into their community, we have baptism to initiate people into our community.

And we don't wait until they are of the age of reason to do that.

And we don't have to because they're being initiated into a family.

Families exist on different levels, families of church, families of parents.

And in this case, this is interesting because we're talking about faith.

In the case of infant baptism, We are relying on what we call vicarious faith, in other words, we're relying on the faith of the parents and sponsors to raise a child in faith community and to get to the point where that child will accept faith for him or herself.

At that point, the child will be confirmed.

In the earliest days of the Church, Baptism and Confirmation were one thing.

A person was baptized, and then the baptism was confirmed by the bishop with the laying on of hands, and often with the sacred oil.

And so, once the church It had to do with more and more child children into baptism.

The decision was made eventually in the Roman Church to separate baptism and conservation into two separate rites, so that the conservation event would include the child old enough to make that choice for himself.

But, you know, in the early stages of the Church, the New Testament Church, there were a lot of anti-Baptisms because there weren't very many second-generation Christians.

I mean, people were coming to the Church as adults.

There are a couple of instances where we can see households or families or initiatives all together.

But for the most part, Baptism in children's instances There's a whole controversy over baptism in the 3rd century, which I can't get into now, it's very interesting, but ultimately our understanding of baptism Sort of going back to that, to some of the decisions that were made then about what baptism was going to be, that it was going to be available to people of all ages, and that it was not something that could be repeated.

So baptism to be done is never to be repeated, because even baptism to be done in and under the foundation Usually it will be valid when we have the church, and because there is one vaccine in the body of Christ across all denominations.

So this is about the best I can do now.

You said that you were defining faith as a belief, as in the creed.

You used the creed as an example, right?

You said the Nicene Creed, right?

So they had that council in Nicaea.

Can you tie what you're saying, just kind of briefly, to why you said that?

I mean, for the faith?

So maybe from that Council of Nicaea you're saying that's where we get our faith creed, that's where we defined our faith creed in the 4th century.

Yes, so the question was to go back to the 19 creed, which comes from the Council of Nicaea in the early 4th century, period 325, and to tie that back to what I was saying.

What the Council of Nicaea did In writing that creed, and the creed you know is that the 19th creed is actually a product of two separate calendars, one in 325 and one in 381. What the Council actually did though was to clarify what the Church had always believed and had believed all along, but had come under debate.

And it has a lot to do with the divinity of Christ and the relationship between God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son.

And, you know, that word that might seem new to you, the word, That is actually the linchpin of the entire priest, because it defines exactly the relationship between the Father and the Son.

The Father and the Son are not substantial.

Now, how many people were annoyed by the change in the priest?

Come on, pass up.

Subtitles by the Amara.org

community Honestly, that word is a gift to the church.

You may not think so, but it is, because as I talk to people, who have complained about it.

And I've had this conversation with friends over and over again.

They say, oh, consubstantial, nobody knows what that means.

And I say, wait, did you know what one is being meant?

And they say, sure.

And they try to tell me, but they really didn't know what it meant.

And I always say, the word consubstantial is a gift to the church because it forces us to talk about it and talk about what it means.

And it's really not that difficult, right?

Consubstantial means really one thing, but that's one additional thing, so two things.

Same divinity, same eternity.

That's it.

The Father and the Son, and a part of the Spirit too, but I haven't quite sorted that out yet.

The Father and the Son are the same to me through the same eternity.

And that wasn't new in the fourth century.

That is what the Church has taught from the beginning, but there had been debate over it, and some people wanted to question it, and this whole big thing, but it was terrifying.

In clarifying that relationship between Jesus Christ and God the Father, the Church defines its belief, and in putting it into a creed, the Council gave us something concrete that we now continue to say it has, and that we can memorize and try to understand.

Does that get at what you were asking?

I think what they were doing was they were trying to figure out whether God is fully human, fully divine.

You mean whether Jesus Christ is God or not.

Exactly.

Yes, but that isn't a question from the very beginning, from the earliest days of church.

The real question is this.

Wait a minute.

You say you're monotheist and you worship Jesus.

How does that work?

That was the real question that the church had to answer.

How do you claim to be monotheist and also worship Jesus?

And the answer So that question is the doctrine of the Trinity.

And so, you know, that was something that was understood early on, but only clarified at one time.

Questions?

Yeah.

Oh, okay, so there's two types of fear.

The one was fear...

Fear, well, the way Clement Alexander describes it, is fear with meekness, the kind of fear that an oppressed person might feel toward a tyrant.

But I describe it as fear without trust.

And then the other kind of fear, the good kind of fear, is fear with trust, which I prefer to call reverence.

The reference is the kind of fear that recognizes our place before God, that recognizes that we are near to God in time and all times.

And the fear without trust, is that related to like a person who is like a graceful walking by and telling you a graceful good and bad news?

Is that a fear without trust?

That's what I couldn't be enticing.

The question was, is this fear without trust, is that something that you might find, you know, in maybe a non-stuartist situation, like someone who's afraid to walk down the street alone?

Yes, that's a big version of it.

Well, any kind of fear that you have is because you don't trust.

That's the fear without trust.

Yeah, we'll all be in here.

I'm just asking you smart things.

So I guess that's why I'm going to turn it here to Reverend.

Yes, one here.

In watching the unfolding of the history of the Church, one of the things that comes to me, and I am a convert from Judaism to Atheism to the Catholic Church, and so as coming in from the outside, I get to see things in a remarkable way, and I come to see the Church the way you're describing it, It's an organic church.

It's a church where the truth never changes, but our understanding and our life in the truth, which is Jesus Christ, does change, does grow, does mature.

And when you talk about faith Music will be omitted!

I believe and I think as much as possible for my vocabulary, because I want God, in effect, to do my thinking and believing for me.

I want to conform myself, not form for myself.

And that's what I see as a beauty of the Church, is trusting in what God has given us.

I like the way you said that the church is an organic within which these things grow.

Faith grows.

Trust grows.

Hope grows.

And maybe that's a good way to sort of wrap it all up for now, and then we can pick this up again tomorrow.

But think of it this way, that the church is The place in which all of these things grow.

Resonance, even resonance grows.

Faith grows.

Hope grows.

And tomorrow we'll talk about peace.

So I'm going to close there and I'm actually going to watch out through the vestibule And I've got a playlist up there, so if you have more questions or want to talk to me, I've got books and CDs for sale if you want to buy anything.

I'll be out there.

Also, you were given a flyer when you came in.

That is the original flyer for my latest book.

That book is out, if you want it on Amazon.

But I actually wanted you to have that flyer because it has my website on it, and I'm on Facebook and Twitter and all those kind of things.

So you have all that contact information.

So that's just really for that.

Otherwise, again, I'll be outside the table.

Thank you.