No matter what age, or how great the darkness and ignorance, there have been people who have turned to Christ, and by faith have received the free gift of salvation through grace, not of works. How do I know this? Because God's word tells me so. I do not claim to know which ones, or who, but I do claim that God is faithful and merciful, and his word declares his salvation to the ends of the earth, to all those who trust in Him. Romans 2: 11-16

Moreover, there has always, so far as I can tell, been a very profound and living vein of evangelicalism, even mysticism, deep within the history of the Catholic experience. This gospel Catholicism, this religion of the heart, totally pervaded the church in the pluralistic period of the Apostolic Fathers. This era of Christianity has been dubbed by historians as the earliest days of the Patristic Age, and all Christianity would be better today were we able to embrace the living, evangelical spirit of that vibrant period.

The medieval Catholic church claimed to be able to name and identify who was hell-bound, and who would be saved. Yet this very church, often more a political power than a spiritual "ecclesia" -- did many things that were the very opposite of "Christian" and in fact were antagonistic to the actual teachings of Jesus. Claiming to have the keys of the kingdom, as given by Jesus, this church claimed to have the keys (and authority) to send people to hell, or to heaven, at their own whim.

In fact, while the Western and Eastern Catholics had under their wings faithful scribes and monks, hidden away generation after generation, who scrupulously guarded and preserved the Word of God (mostly in Latin, but occasionally in Greek), for the mass of the people, ignorance and illiteracy prevailed. Those in power who could have encouraged the lamp of learning -- generally preferred to allow darkness to reign. Access to the Bible was sharply limited.

Nevertheless, even in those dark ages, there were people who turned straight to God. There were people who reached out to Christ in faith believing, touching, as it were, the hem of the Saviour's garment. Shall we not believe God's promise that they, too, were saved? If evangelical believism is too mystical and relational, too filled with the personalism that Dr. Martin Luther King loved so much, remember that there have been believers all through the centuries who, in their hearts, touched the evangelical heart of God.

Could the Pope himself have known or named who and which persons truly believed, or whom the grace of Christ had touched? No. Though his promotion came neither from east nor west, he still is but a man. Though the high priest himself sat in Moses' seat, he still was just a man. My own pastor is every bit as much a shepherd and bishop, but he is not Jesus, the only final Shepherd and Bishop of our souls. I give respect to whom respect is due, and I grant the honor due to the Holy Father as a pre-eminent shepherd and bishop. Hebrews 13:17.

It is said that Dante himself was so burnt out on the corruption and avarice and "abuse of power" by Church representatives, that the only pope he placed in his fictional paradise besides the early martyr popes, was Gregory the Great, the sainted pope who truly lived a christ-like life. Our own age has been blessed with several exceptional popes. Good Pope John surely was a meek and godly man, who loved the Lord and had compassion of a world in pain.

Roland Bainton writes of the Catholic Church during Europe's period known as the Medieval: The Church had many faults and many failures, but in spite of them all, it was the greatest force for justice and order in the world of the Middle Ages. [Roland H. Bainton, 1941]

We honor someone like "Good Pope John" (XXIII) recently or Pope Gregory the Great, or even exceptional modern popes like Leo XIII, or the late departed Pope John Paul II. And we are right to recognize the light they have shown. Jesus said, "Ye shall know them by their fruit."

But Jesus Christ alone is THE Shepherd and Bishop of our souls. To Him alone may all creation one day bow the knee. Of Him alone may the angels sing out, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing."

The reformation and the puritan age have done a tremendous service in their unlocking of the treasures of literacy and access to God's Holy Word -- a bequest to our time from the medieval past. It is true that, for whatever reason, the medieval church behaved much like other nervous aristocracies (including the American South) in long combating openness and the light of science and the Bible. True, it was "Catholics" (in name) who faithfully copied the Bible, and preserved it from generation to generation. Tucked away in the many monasteries, these true servants of God did a work that went far beyond the narrow boundaries of a single creed. They preserved for all times and all ages those ancient writings which might otherwise have been lost.

Not that puritan attitudes were perfect. To the contrary. Puritans did not try to censor science or repress political involvement of the common man, at least not to the extent that the medieval Church of Rome did. And Puritans deserve much credit for throwing open the gates of access to God's Word. Yet, Puritan zeal also had its victims, including martyred Catholics, but also drama and art generally, aesthetics and belles lettres, humanism and theatre. In England, even the great Elizabethans (Shakespeare and others) were looked at askance by Puritans. And of course, plays or tales which touched on sin or sex, romance or "immoral" passions faced the indignant hate and religious oppression of puritan zealotry.

The Church of Rome began, deep in the middle ages, to claim an unbroken line of papal succession back to the Apostolic Age, to when Jesus himself putatively gave to Peter the keys of heaven and hell. Christ had asked the disciples, "Who do men say that I am?" They answered in various ways, then Jesus asked them: "Who do ye say that I am." Peter, ever outspoken and brash, came out with an answer that was dead on the mark. "Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God." At that point Jesus made the much disputed remark, "upon this rock I will build my church." Matthew 16:18.

Throughout the Christian Ages, at least after the established church began to argue and divide, this verse has been the subject of sharp controversy. Generally the several Catholic and liturgical traditions (including Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, even the Ukrainians and the Maronites) consider the "Rock" in Jesus comment to have referred to Peter himself, the first Bishop of Rome. The break away groups (protestants etc) generally focus more closely on the original phrasing in Greek, accepting the implied meaning that "Jesus is the Christ" is the foundational basis (the rock) on which all Christian belief is built.

It is human nature to attempt to bolster authority through the most illustrious pedigree possible. There is scarcely a kingly family anywhere in history that did not attempt to claim descent from either a Sun God, or from Adam, or from Mount Olympus .... or .... in the case of the Catholics, from Saint Peter himself. John Locke spent considerable effort demolishing the claims of the divine right crowd, that their kings were descended from King David, etc, etc.

The Catholic Church, beginning in the middle ages, claimed an unbroken line of succession all the way back to Peter, when, in fact, much of the early continuity there is not at all proved. Not that protestants are wholly exempt from this sort of pretension and ambitious claim. Certain Baptists have claimed a similar UNBROKEN line of succession all the way back to John the Baptist, and this lineal continuity is even less proved than the Catholic 'apostolic succession.'

John Locke, in questioning not only Catholic but Anglican assertions of this sort, asked about the primitive gospel simplicity of the Lord Jesus himself. In Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, he referred to Jesus statement that where two or three are gathered together in His name, that He is there in the midst. What if our vaunted European theologies have missed the mark, with all their exclusivity, their "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" (no salvation outside OUR particular church).

God is faithful. Why can't we believe that? Surely God has always preserved for himself a few in every land and in every time those who believe in him. It is not a denomination or a creed that saves us. Hebrews 2:10 is unequivocal that Christ alone, who suffered, and was made perfect by those sufferings, is the Captain of Our Salvation for all who believe in him, and accept his free gift, not of works, lest any man should boast.

Thus God has had sons (and daughters) in all times and in all lands. Supposed religious authorities have always expelled, or even murdered those it branded as troublemakers, heretics, mystics, pietists, heterodox, non-conforming, too judaistic, or even "sinners and Galileans."

From medieval days onward, Catholic apologists have tried to claim as their own the early Christian believers not only in the early Patristic Age and the ages of the martyrs, but even the Apostolic Days, and the very Gospel ministry of Jesus himself. In a sense, we protestants do, too. At least we tend to grant the late Roman Empire (Constantine onward) to Catholic history, tend to claim the Gospel and Apostolic Days as our own, and sometimes neglect taking a stand, or even bothering to study, the intervening Age of the "Fathers" (Patristic) and the overlapping Ages of the Martyrs.

In the Patristic Age, roughly beginning with the Apostles (and Paul) to the triumph of Christianity as the imperial religion of the Roman Empire, there were numerous of the fathers of the church who declared salvation to be in Christ alone, and only by faith in him, through repentance. The church itself is merely an aid, an instrument, and therefore nothing more than a servant of God to preach the gospel, and teach the truths of God's salvation in Christ Jesus.

Justin Martyr taught the baptism of repentance, not some magic act the itself confers salvation. He clearly saw baptism as a token of a repentance that had already occurred in a believer mature enough to understand the import of the change wrought in his life through faith in Christ Jesus.

Irenaeus rejected the socalled baptism that some Christians wanted to copy from the Gnostics, a "baptism" consisting of sprinkling. Irenaeus saw immersion, the Baptism of the scriptures, the Baptism of John, as the prototype for believers.

Clement of Alexandria went so far as to dissect and analyze the process leading to baptism when a believer turns to Christ. While I did not find that he used our word "saved" he was clearly talking about the same thing. Baptism is not the act of repentance, but it occurs afterward, and is a token of an act that has already occurred. We

1. repent of our sins
2. renounce our iniquities,
3. are purified by baptism

Tertullian, late in the Patristic Age, was the father of the church who laid out for future generations the first and probably best explanation of the doctrine of a triune God, the Trinity. Writing in Latin at a time when many points of doctrine had begun to rigidify, Tertullian believed there was no other acceptable "baptism" but the scriptural kind (immersion) of John. Time and again he had to battle Marcion and others over divisiveness and corruptions which he (Tertullian) felt were contrary to scriptures. While some of the church leaders pointed out that Jesus said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not," Tertullian suggested that baptizing infants was not as good as baptizing older children and adults.

Cyprian, for example, fully accepted the idea of baptizing infants.

Ultimately, the view of those who viewed Baptism as tantamount to salvation itself won out. The expression of medieval catholicism was that baptism was opus operatum. In essence, Baptism was sufficient to save you in and of itself (if performed by a priest, in an approved church, before the altar, etc). Carrying the logic one step further, the sooner a person is baptized, the better. It didn't take long, using this reasoning, to institute baptism (called 'christening') as a rite performed on all infants born to Christian parents, shortly after birth.

Gone was the biblical view that baptism is an outward token of an inward act of the heart already accomplished -- namely, repentance and faith in Jesus unto salvation, through grace, not of ourselves. Gone was even the common sense truth stated by Tertullian that a man becomes a Christian, he is not born one.

A number of pious fringe groups in the Jewish age held to some form of immersion or baptism unto repentance. We are told in the Westminster History (Brauer, ed.) that throughout the Hellenistic age (200 BC- 200 AD) there were scattered brotherhoods who adhered to baptisms or daily baths or washings. Several groups appeared and disappeared in the area of Palestine and Syria.

All were derived from either Judaism (or one of its offshoots) or Jewish Christians (or one of the varieties thereof). The members ceased to attend temple sacrifices and prayers. They adopted washings for purification or baptism as their central religious act. The most prominent of these were the Essenes. Philo estimated the existence of four thousand of these 'athletes of virtue' living east of the Jordan and committed to the most stringent, ascetic lifestyle. The Qumran community is generally regarded as a colony of Essenes.

Other similar ascetics are mentioned by the ancients: Nazarenes and Nasoreans, Hermerobaptists, Baptists of the Morning, the hermit Banus -- all of whom acknowledged a baptism unto repentance or cleansing, a sanctification of some kind, and a fundamental recognition of the importance of the personal will, as opposed to mere creedalism. Even if the early stress on the Holy Spirit caused some of these desert believers to drift toward an africanist or syncretist gnosticism, their light shone none-the-less. God's witness did not flicker even then.

Numerous modern critics of the Church have come from within the Catholic tradition itself, the sons and daughters of the Church. Rightly or wrongly, they have sought to demonstrate their loyalty not by ignoring errors, but by (gently) exposing them. "Being a former Catholic (and still a little bit of one in my heart), I sometimes mourn what the Church might have been, but I can't ignore the atrocities, the murders, corruption, and so on that it has performed in its long and troubled history. I just wish that the "big boys" of the Vatican would have been more honest. I've made friends with many nuns and priests over the years, and I know firsthand that these wonderful people selflessly try to help as many individuals as they can every day, while the power brokers spend their time covering up scandals. It makes me want to cry. [Sylvia Browne]

The example of Erasmus of Rotterdam is an important one. Criticism can be an act of love of concern. Criticism, as well as dissent, can actually be a high form of loyalty. Erasmus dared to (respectfully) reprimand the Church of his time for its abuses, for departing from scripture, for drifting away from the example and instruction of Jesus. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Today it is easy to say that had Erasmus been hearkened to by both the Church leadership, and by the breakaway churches of the Reformation, history may well have averted a great deal of suffering and bloodshed. For more on Erasmus of Rotterdam

Garry Wills wrote his book, "Why I am a Catholic" (which came out in 2002). Non-Catholics should, with an open mind, consider well the measured endorsement of Catholic faith not merely because of the heart-felt love which Wills (out of his deep personal devotion) reveals; but perhaps even more, because where he criticizes leadership, or concedes historic errors, or acknowledges the justice of some dissent .... his very honesty (including the negative) ought to lend credibility to his praise (ie, the positive). In a world of religious ego-mania, the humility and self-criticism of the modern Church is an example deserving of emulation not just by other Christian denominations but by non-western religions also ... and non-religions alike.

On the sex abuse scandals "I believe that the media have done a service to the church in this regard. The truth can be painful, but it can also be healing and liberating." His Eminence Cahal Cardinal Daly, Primate of All Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh

Here is a site, a bit off-topic to the foregoing, which Bob Shepherd recommends. Having a Large Family

Brennan Manning writes of the modern mystic (any of us) in our radical encounter with Jesus Christ. "Though confronted with an ethic so sublime and so demanding that it seems utterly impossible, we are not stupified by the lifestyle that Christ has set before us. He says that the standard for the Christian way of life is agape. Greater love has none than this, that he lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13) . . . . . The love of Jesus is a kenosis, a total self-emptying."

(agape.html)