Part 1 of this letter asked you two imperative and inescapable questions to help pinpoint your life’s belief system. If you answered a Transcendent Reality and a Creative and Willing Purpose, you narrowed down your life’s selection to one of five major religions: Catholic Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, Calvinism, or Lutheranism.
After answering four more such questions here, Catholic Orthodoxy stands out as True. Furthermore, the answers from the other four religions stand out as heresies: systems that lazily reject the difficult parts of Catholic Orthodoxy, and, by unveiling new and easy parts, eventually threaten to devastate Catholic Orthodoxy altogether.
Islam
The third imperative and inescapable question is about Islam’s Creating and Willing God: “Are God’s laws changeable according to His will, or eternal according to His pre-design?”
Islam answers, “Allah’s will.” Catholic Orthodoxy answers, “The Holy Trinity’s pre-design.” Allah’s apparent divine will overtakes, and sometimes runs afoul of, human reason and Natural Law. But the Holy Trinity’s pre-design does not. In Islam, humans must jump in to interpret and resolve the varying and sometimes irrational declarations of Allah, leaving many opportunities for societal oppression. Thus, Catholic Orthodoxy regards Islam as a heresy. The Allah of Islam and the Holy Trinity of Catholic Orthodoxy are not the “same God.”
The “Moralistic” god of Moralistic Therapeutic Deist Universalism similarly instills a continually updating moral law. The heretical basis of that belief system runs back to Christian doubt in the 1300s, when (“voluntarist”) theologians labored to grant God the absolute power to change His laws on-the-fly.
But in Catholic Orthodoxy, God’s power subsists in His architecting an unchanging, rational, and perfect pre-design, both in Divine and Natural moral Law and in created nature. At times, God permits what appears evil. But on balance, God always grows the created world toward the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Judaism
The fourth imperative and inescapable question is about Judaism’s Creating and Willing God: “Do you believe that the historical death of Jesus Christ (God as man) enables your salvation, or not?”
Ever since Christ’s ministry on earth, Catholic Orthodoxy has disagreed with Judaism on many matters. But Judaism transformed over the centuries, from the destruction of the Temple to the Rabbinical medieval years to modernity. At this point in history, Judaism has evolved to agree with Catholic Orthodoxy on key notions like individual over ethnic-group salvation, immortality and the afterlife, and moral law based on cultivating internal dispositions instead of acting out hundreds of external rules. In fact, so many items in Judaism’s belief system have blurred and evolved that Judaism appears to accept the instability of God’s precepts, like the “doctrines and commandments of men” that Jesus blasted (Mt. 15:9). Islam and the “Moralistic” part of Moralistic Therapeutic Deist Universalism also adopt this changeability.
But the unassailable differentiator between Judaism and Catholic Orthodoxy remains Christ as the Sacrifice for human sin and the means to our salvations. That redemption occurs only if Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man. Judaism, like Islam, rejects Christ as God incarnate and as the Perfect Sacrifice. Instead, Judaism waits for a Messiah who will institute peace and the Kingdom of God on earth, which Jesus did not do. Despite objections by some Jewish scholars, Jesus’ claim to divinity was the foremost reason why the Sanhedrin and the Romans crucified Him, as the high priest’s enraged reaction to Jesus’ words at his trial demonstrates.
The teachings, liturgies, and overall belief system of Catholic Orthodoxy revolve around God’s Incarnation as the Second Person of the Trinity. Moreover, Catholic Orthodoxy uniquely fixates on and reveres the actual “re-presentation” of history’s most momentous event: the Passion and Resurrection. This Sacrifice in the Holy Mass occurs continuously, around the globe. Note that this point does not address a mere worship style. It establishes the “source and summit of Christian Life” and Reality.
Calvinism
The fifth imperative and inescapable question is about Calvinism’s Creating and Willing God: “Does God allow you to choose whether you can behave well and then dwell with God after death, or has God decided your fate already?”
Calvinists believe that God causes and affects everything, superseding real-time human choices as having any real force. In Calvinism, at its doctrinal end, if someone commits a horrible atrocity, God must have pre-designed it to happen. For Calvinism and its descendant denominations, humans cannot choose to be good or evil, to have faith or not, to be saved or damned. God grants salvation to an unknown set of predestined people. Calvinist heresy thus abandons people to their despair at making any good moral choices at all.
But in Catholic Orthodoxy, the Holy Trinity allots us free will: to choose to agape-love God and humans, or not. That is, God, in His absolute power, pre-design, and love, allows us that meager bit of control.
Lutheranism
The sixth imperative and inescapable question is about Lutheranism’s Creating and Willing humans: “Is your eternal life determined by your declaring your belief system, or by your preparing constantly to be capable of dwelling forever with God?”
Lutheranism and its descendant denominations narrowly interpret Scripture to declare that your internal faith alone dictates your salvation. As a result, the Lutheran belief system clears you to simply affirm your hope in salvation, then presume that salvation; God apparently overlooks or covers over any subsequent moral misbehavior.
The Universalist part of Moralistic Therapeutic Deist Universalism, which states “All good people go to heaven,” trickles down from this heresy. The definition of “good” even tracks closely to Lutheranism’s definition. Modern Universalist Christian life also plugs the widespread error that “Jesus has done all the work already,” thereby entitling us to heaven.
But Catholic Orthodoxy teaches that God commands us to nurture the grace God constantly showers on us, to groom the soul for the afterlife. St. Thomas Aquinas warns us that the moment the soul separates from the body, the soul’s disposition loses all ability to change, and “must rest for ever in the [good or evil] end already attained.” Remaining in a holy “state of grace” includes living out the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, avoiding mortal sin, and vigilantly repenting before God. This vigilance entails frequently partaking in Catholic Orthodoxy’s unique sacrament of Confession and praying Examinations of Conscience.
Conclusion
In summary, the answers to these six questions lead to the Truth of Catholic Orthodoxy:
- What one most true, significant, and authentic entity(ies) do humans encounter in existing? Answer: The Transcendent.
- What one function impels the universe, God, and/or humans within Reality to the most good and beautiful? Answer: Creating and Willing.
- Are God’s laws changeable according to His will, or eternal according to His pre-design? Answer: Eternal pre-design.
- Do you believe that the historical death of Jesus Christ (God as man) enables your salvation, or not? Answer: Christ as the Perfect Sacrifice enables human salvation.
- Does God allow you to choose whether you can behave well and then dwell with God after death, or has God decided your fate already? Answer: God allows you to choose whether to behave well and then dwell with God after death.
- Is your eternal life determined by your declaring your belief system, or by your preparing constantly to be capable of dwelling forever with God? Answer: Eternal life is determined by preparing to be capable of dwelling forever with God.
(Beyond the scope of this letter are the centuries-old layers and branches of equally serious questions, which end up differentiating between Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox, as well as a few Protestant adherents.)
The choices this letter unveils establish a stable foundation for rejecting not only the dominating (halfway-) belief system of our age, Moralistic Therapeutic Deist Universalism, but also Eastern religions, Islam, Judaism, Calvinism, and Lutheranism.
Embracing these answers primes you for receiving the Holy Trinity’s grace, thus enabling your salvation. That is, in order to become a true saint, and not “a saint by halves,” you must ask these questions, then resolutely live out your Catholic answers.
