They were the very best that Christians could be, the fulfillment of Christ’s commands to love God and one another with all our hearts. As a questioning Protestant, I longed to love God as they did. Those whom the Church calls saints were men and women who loved God and who accepted his love in a way that penetrated every part of them. So as a Protestant, I felt good about calling myself and my Christian friends “saints,” and I may have even mentally canonized my faithful grandmother, but I was loath to apply that title in a way that the Bible did not explicitly set a precedent for.Ĭatholic saints had heroic faith in Jesus Christ and lived that faith in spirit and in truth. In Scripture, saints are not those Christians who have died and gone to Christ but the members of the Church still living their earthly lives.
I also knew that the Catholic usage of the word “saint” differs from what is found in the Bible. They all believed in papist rubbish-in the awful corruptions and accretions that the Catholic Church had added over the centuries, which a true saint would have been able to see through. I knew Augustine could not be on my team. The coup de grace was the unavoidable fact that he was a bishop of the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries, with all the trappings that go along with that: the Mass, hearing confessions, baptizing babies, ordaining priests, and so on. Augustine also erred on the canon of Scripture, wrongly including the seven Catholic deuterocanonical books as inspired he erred on baptismal regeneration, purgatory, and on his acceptance of the Church’s Tradition as an authority alongside the Bible. We can all go astray on one or two doctrines. If he had stopped there, all might have been well. Such then in number and importance are the precious ties belonging to the Christian name which keep a believer in the Catholic Church, as it is right they should.
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And so, lastly, does the name itself of Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep, down to the present episcopate. Augustine has to go and say things like this: By all accounts, he’s batting cleanup for me.īut then St.
He was a monumental influence on Western Christianity and in particular on the theology of John Calvin and Martin Luther. Augustine on my team for his great love of Scripture, the honesty of his Confessions, his Protestant-friendly ideas on justification and predestination, and his philosophical wisdom. If I were drafting baseball players as a Protestant Christian, I would want St.
#THERE ARE NO SAINTS READ ONLINE SERIES#
I had read most of the Left Behind series but nothing by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Athanasius, or Francis de Sales. When I first started reading the lives of the saints, I felt cheated: “Why haven’t I been told about all these amazingly faithful people?” Their books didn’t show up anywhere in the Christian bookstores I went to, nor very often in the secular bookstores. Yet, to my dismay, when I delved into the writings of these great Christians, I found them to have unabashedly Romish tendencies, leading me to conclude that they cannot be looked up to as true saints, no matter how holy they may have appeared. Stephen and many other faithful men and women from the Apostolic Age. They clearly loved Jesus and were given grace to be courageous and eloquent, following the example of St. They were heroic in their witnessing to the Faith, even to the point of torture and grisly execution. When I was a Protestant, I once referred to the saints as members of “the Catholic Hall of Fame.” But in reading about their lives, I also wanted them on my team.
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