"Evangelical is not Enough"

[Lil Red]

i just finished reading this book, and quite simply, it's amazing! it's by Thomas Howard, who converted to the Catholic faith in 1985, after this book was written. i thought i would share some excerpts from this book that i've highlighted as interesting.

Chapter 1: [i]Protestant and Evangelical: Understanding Ourselves[/i]

-Evangelicalism's first and last instinct is to take the Bible at face value. What the Bible reports is true, we said. Morever, the Bible stories are in some sense true [i]as they are told.[/i] This holds not only for major doctrines like the Virgin Birth but for lesser stories as well.

-You cannot flag down busy modern people with a gospel that offers nothing but caring and sharing. Liberal Protestants are vexed when their churches dwindle, despite all their infinitely resourceful and energetic programs to update the gospel, while evangelical churches fill up and burst with converts.

-All tribes, cultures, and religions have known that taboo lies deep in the human grain. The absence of taboo means that human life has sunk to a bestial level.

Chapter 2: [i]Spirit and Flesh: Sundered Forever or Reunited?[/i]

-It is difficult to eliminate symbolism.

-We see the unseen in the seen. The surface of things bespeaks what lies beneath. Our postures, our dress, our gestures, and the artifacts with which we surround ourselves all cry out that we are creatures whose approach to the Most High, since it cannot be direct like the seraphim's, must be set about and assisted with symbols.

-These things matter. They create an ambience. They determine the environment in which our ordinary lives move.

-If someone is a child, an ignoramus, or a dunce, he may offer his adoration to the Most High just as acceptably as kings and philosophers may.

-If worship is to be rigorously detached from all sentiment, and even from sentimentalism, then we will all have to conclude that it is inaccessible.

-The Eternal Word became flesh. God became man. The spiritual became physical.

-The distance lay not between the "physical" and the "spiritual" so much as between the created and the Uncreated.

-But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves.

-The idea that there was a "secular" order of activity that would occupy us for most of our waking and sleeping hours, distinct from some fugitive "sacred" moments when we pray or worship, never came from God.

-The Incarnation reverses all of this. ...... Spirit and flesh are knit once more into perfect integrity.

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Are you guys interested for more?

[sweetpea316]

Sounds pretty cool.

[jmj]

Looks interesting!

[homeschoolmom]

HSdad read it during the whole conversion thing... Very good.

[journeyman]

Keep going . . . Is this from Evangelical Is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament published by Ignatius?

of course it is . . . look at the subject line !!

[Lil Red]

yes it is! silly! : and i will post more tomorrow.

[Lil Red]

Chapter 2: [i]Spirit and Flesh: Sundered Forever or Reunited?[/i]

-To be spiritual for St. Paul was to have brought everything back to God where it belongs and where it was in Eden.

-The Christian religion, knits the spiritual and the physical back together.

-The "carnal" spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God.

-The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse know what love is about.

-The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The difference lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.

-It is the [i]demand[/i] for things that Christ sets us free from, not things themselves. It is slavery and striving that cease when He comes with His freedom.

-Only in the Incarnation may we find the knitting back together of the fabric into its true integrity.

-It is false to pit the visible world of solid objects against faith. We never do this in other realms of our experience. Indeed, we cannot, since we are physical creatures and not angels.

-(speaking of sybolism) To excise all of this from piety and worship is to suggest that the gospel beckons us away from our humanity into a disembodied realm.

-It is Buddhism and Platonism and Manichaeanism that tell us to disavow our flesh and expunge everything but thoughts. The gospel brings back all of our faculties with a rush.

-But is protest enough? Can the heart of man feed on protest? Is it enough for our piety to say that because an idolator bows we will refuse to do so? On this accounting, prayer itself would have to go, since idolators pray. It is like saying that since gluttons eat too much food, we will eat none. What is needed is someone who will show what the right use of food looks like.

-We cannot nourish ourselves on generalities.

Chapter 3: [i]Christian Worship: Act or Experience?[/i]

-It is once again to locate faith and piety in a disembodied realm. We know that this is false.

-The outward posture actually helps to create the inner attitude.

-It may be that our bodies cry out for an attitude that will pluck us by the sleeve, as it were, and assist our inner-beings in the extremely difficult task of prayer.

-The phrase [i]worship experience[/i] missed the point. Worship, in the ancient tradition, was not thought of as an experience at all, it was an act. ...the people had come together [i]to make the act of worship[/i]. They had come to [i]do[/i] something, not to get something.

-We had come to this place to offer something to God, namely, the sacrifice of praise.

-The place of God's dwelling rings with these joyful antiphons of charity. Hell hates this. It can only hiss, [i]Out of my way, fool[/i]. But heaven says, [i]The Lord be with you[/i]. This is what was said to us in the Incarnation. This is what the Divine Love always says.

-I felt that the distrust of rigid forms of worship might spring from innocence if not from ignorance. Those who kept insisting that "the liberty of the Spirit" stood over such forms were forgetting the architecture of the universe. The liberating Spirit who brooded over chaos brought an exact, elegant, and mathematical order out of that chaos, and it was good.

-Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own. The prayers of the Church lead us into regions that, left to our own resources, we might never have imagined.

-...far from finding that this hampered the liberty of the Spirit, we found that our own capacity to give utterance to what was in our hearts was vastly enlarged.

-Gregorian chant lifts the texts away from this private milieu and arrays them, simply, out there, where we may encounter them the way we see the stars glittering on a clear night or hear the music of Bach, so utterly satisfying to our deepest imaginings.

-The attempt to make public worship personal, intimate, and informal is misbegotten. It confuses the public with the private, and in so doing it betrays both.

-But public worship, like the Sabbath itself, was made for us, not us for it.

-The worship of the Church is an act - a most ancient and noble mystery - and almost nothing is gained by endlessly updating it, streamlining it, personalizing it, and altering it. .... Like marriage and family, it stands at the center of the carousel of life, if we will only return to the center and find it.

-What is the touchstone of relevance: subjective sentiments or seventeen centuries of Christian worship?

-Their roots in history have been pulled up, and they are left with nothing but the Bible and the modern world. They forget that the Faith has been borne on human shoulders and in human hearts for two thousand years.
Evangelicalism, stalwart as it is, had in effect left me with nothing but the Bible and the modern world. It is to pit the Bible against the Church, which is heresy.

-(speaking of the vestments of the presider)It had something to do with things' being impersonal.

-When we come together in the special act of Christian worship, we long to be delivered from all that is random and chatty and fortuitous.

-There is a sacred and liberating anonymity here.

-Their garments were symbolic, to be sure, but they also cloaked the oddities that made Aaron Aaron, or Levi Levi.

[tojo]

I never did read that one, I wanted to but could never get my hands on it....

[RonRule]

This book changed my life. It's awesome. It's a great book for 2nd generation evangelicals especially (like me and my friends, who have all related to it!)

[homeschoolmom]

[quote name='tomasio127' date='Dec 7 2005, 11:26 PM']I never did read that one, I wanted to but could never get my hands on it....
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Inter-library loan... that's how we got it.