Salvation

A few months back I got a(n unsolicited) envelope in the mail, from "G.O.D" (sic) at PO 1412 in Longmont. In it were two tracts, "HOW CAN WE KNOW WE'LL GO TO HEAVEN?" and "Are You Pro Choice?". I'd been meaning to post about this but other interests and events popped up. And my subconscious wrestled with how to deal with this farrago.

Also enclosed was a white cardboard square:

"Gods Chosen One"
President
Donald J Trump

Trump 2020

The reverse had Please Prey For The President And Our Nation ... God Says "If You Dont Support Our President You Are Committing Spiritual Treason... The President Is Our Only Chance To Deter The End Of The World.... But I shan't be talking about that here. As for the Tract League's play for NARAL I, er, agree with it. Although as usual it has that dissonance between "don't abort" and "come to Jesus! He will forgive anyway".

I'm interested here in the first tract. That's Randy Alcorn, author of Lord Foulgrin's Letters. It is what it says it is: assurance of eternal bliss, if and only if the reader accept the writer's premises. Here the canon is the Protestant scriptural canon as Alcorn interprets it - yes, Titus; no 1-2 Peter, Jude, nor James. If you don't accept that canon, the tract won't work.

Alcorn's main problem is the same problem of the mediaeval Church. By shifting your focus to the next world, Alcorn like the sellers of Indulgences makes a power-play for your life in this one. Extra ecclasiam nullus salus.

I, er, agree with that too. But the likes of Alcorn misunderstand it.

The gods who interact with this cosmos, to the extent they care about sentient life in it, enlist us, also, to care about sentient life in it. That is real, tangible caring - caritas in the Latin. Any god that enlists us for nothing more or less than "spreading His Word" - a slate of circularly-contained assertions - has motives other than our benefit. Especially if it involves accepting a flawed text, like the Qurân, as axiomatic. A god that would have us adopt lies is a demon. Alcorn, like too many Christians, is a diabolist.

Happily for us Catholics, we own the Truth. Our scripture, mostly shared with Protestants, is the foundation of living Tradition, inextricable from that. The letter of Saint Clement to the Romans, and the letters of Saint Ignatius, are not in the Bible - there being only so much room in a single codex we can physically carry about with us. But these "apostolic Fathers" were inspired by God in equal and, in places, even superior measure. That respect for unborn life, alluded above, is famously "only" implicit in basal Scripture but is made clear in the Didache and later Patristics.

We Catholics also own the Theodosian Creed and, more to the point, its formula for the Divine. That is what has saved us: that the Spirit flows from the Father and from the Son. Here is separated Security from Information, as software gurus like Yarvin have put it. Protestantism has tried, by canonising a book; here, only following the footsteps of Muhammad.

Without this creed, we don't own a Church to stand by itself through all ages. Like Alcorn we should be enslaved - or, like the "New Atheists", we escape our chains only to be lost in the desert.

Christianity is not about saving our own souls - although we are assured that will happen, that we will be saints like Kayla Mueller. Christianity is about saving humanity and human life right here, at home. God loves us here. It is for our happiness here that the Council of Chalcedon rediscovered the Creed. It is for our happiness here that we even had Chalcedon, or Nicaea before that. And it is for our happiness here that Christ instituted His Church.

If we are not saved inside this Church, headquartered at the Vatican presently, I am open to alternate options. But you'll have to show your work.