Rorate note: Earlier this week, Pope Bergoglio signed the problematic “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together.” If you haven't read the full document, please do, then read the piece below which actually doesn't contradict the Church's teachings or mock the countless Christians martyred over the last 2,000 years.
Once again, we are honored to post this guest op-ed, submitted to us by His Excellency Bishop Athanasius Schneider. We not only allow but encourage all media and blogs to reprint this as well.
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By Bishop Athanasius Schneider
Special to Rorate Caeli
February 8, 2019
The Gift of Filial Adoption
The Christian Faith: the only valid and the only God-willed religion
The Truth of the
filial adoption in Christ, which is intrinsically supernatural, constitutes the
synthesis of the entire Divine Revelation. Being adopted by God as sons is always
a gratuitous gift of grace, the most sublime gift of God to mankind. One
obtains it, however, only through a personal faith in Christ and through the
reception of baptism, as the Lord himself taught: “Truly, truly, I say to you,
unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of
God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born
of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must
be born again.” (John 3: 5-7).
In the past
decades one often heard - even from the mouth of some representatives of the
Church’s hierarchy - statements about the theory of “anonymous Christians.” This
theory says the following: The mission of the Church in the world would consist
ultimately in raising the awareness that all men must have of their salvation
in Christ and consequently of their filial adoption in Christ. Since, according
to the same theory, every human being possesses already the sonship of God in
the depth of his personality. Yet, such a theory contradicts directly Divine Revelation,
as Christ taught it and His Apostles and the Church over two thousand years
always transmitted it unchangingly and without a shadow of a doubt.
In his essay “The
Church, consisting of Jews and Gentiles” (Die Kirche aus Juden und Heiden) Erik
Peterson, the well-known convert and exegete, long since (in 1933) warned
against the danger of such a theory, when he affirmed that one cannot reduce
being a Christian (“Christsein”) to the natural order, in which the fruits of
the redemption achieved by Jesus Christ would be generally imputed to every
human being as a kind of heritage, solely because he would share human nature
with the incarnated Word. However, filial adoption in Christ is not an
automatic result, guaranteed through belonging to the human race.
Saint Athanasius
(cf. Oratio contra Arianos II, 59) left
us a simple and at the same time an apt explanation of the difference between
the natural state of men as God’s creatures and the glory of being a son of God
in Christ. Saint Athanasius derives his explanation from the words of the holy
Gospel according to John, that say: "He gave them power to be made the
sons of God, to them that believe in his name. Who are born, not of blood, nor
of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1: 12-13).
John uses the expression “they are born” to say that men become sons of God not
by nature, but by adoption. This shows the love of God, that He Who is their
creator becomes then through grace also their Father. This happens when, as the
Apostle says, men receive in their hearts the Spirit of the Incarnated Son, Who
cries in them: "Abba, Father!" Saint Athanasius continues his
explanation saying, that as created beings, men can become sons of God in no
other manner than through faith and baptism, when they receive the Spirit of
the natural and true Son of God. Precisely for that reason the Word became
flesh, to make men capable of adoption as sons of God and of participation in the
Divine nature. Consequently, by nature God is not in the proper sense the
Father of all human beings. Only if someone consciously accepts Christ and is
baptized, will he be able to cry in truth: "Abba, Father" (Rom. 8:
15; Gal. 4: 6).
Since the
beginnings of the Church there was the assertion, as testified by Tertullian: “One
is not born as a Christian, but one becomes a Christian” (Apol., 18, 5). And Saint Cyprian of Carthage formulated aptly this truth,
saying: «He cannot have God for his Father, who has not
the Church for his mother” (De
unit., 6).
The most urgent
task of the Church in our time is to care about the change of the spiritual
climate and about the spiritual migration, namely that the climate of
non-belief in Jesus Christ, the climate of the rejection of the kingship of
Christ, be changed into the climate of explicit faith in Jesus Christ, of the acceptance
of His kingship, and that men may migrate from the misery of the spiritual
slavery of unbelief into the happiness of being sons of God and from of a life
of sin into the state of sanctifying grace. These are the migrants about whom
we must care urgently.
Christianity is
the only God-willed religion. Therefore, it can never be placed complementarily
side by side with other religions. Those would violate the truth of Divine Revelation, as it is
unmistakably affirmed in the First Commandment of the Decalogue, who would
assert that the diversity of religions is the will of God. According to the will of Christ, faith
in Him and in His Divine teaching must replace other religions, however not by
force, but by loving persuasion, as expressed in the hymn of Lauds of the Feast
of Christ the King: “Non Ille regna
cladibus, non vi metuque subdidit: alto levatus stipite, amore traxit omnia”
(“Not with sword, force and fear He subjects peoples, but lifted up on the
Cross He lovingly draws all things to Himself”).
There is
only one way to God, and this is Jesus Christ, for He Himself said: “I am the
Way” (John 14: 6). There is only one truth, and this is Jesus Christ, for He
Himself said: “I am the Truth” (John 14: 6). There is only one true
supernatural life of the soul, and this is Jesus Christ, for He Himself said: “I
am the Life” (John 14: 6).
The
Incarnated Son of God taught that outside faith in Him there cannot be a true
and God-pleasing religion: “I am the door. By me, if any man enters in,
he shall be saved” (John 10: 9). God commanded to all men, without exception, to
hear His Son: “This is my most beloved Son; hear Him!” (Mk. 9:
7). God did not say: “You can hear My Son or you can hear other founders of a
religion, for it is My will that there are different religions.” God has
forbidden us to recognize the legitimacy of the religion of other gods: “Thou
shalt not have strange gods before me” (Ex. 20: 3) and “What fellowship has
light with darkness? And what concord has Christ with Belial? Or what part
has the faithful with the unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God
with idols?” (2 Cor.
6: 14-16).
If other
religions likewise corresponded to the will of God, there would not have been
the Divine condemnation of the religion of the Golden Calf at the time of Moses
(cf. Ex. 32: 4-20); then the Christians of today could unpunished cultivate the
religion of a new Golden Calf, since all religions are, according to that
theory, God-pleasing ways as well.
God gave the
Apostles and through them the Church for all times the solemn order to instruct
all nations and the followers of all religions in the only one true Faith, teaching
them to observe all His Divine commandments and baptize them (cf. Mt. 28: 19-20). Since the
preaching of the Apostles and of the first Pope, the Apostle Saint Peter, the Church
proclaimed always that there is salvation in no other name,
i.e., in no other faith under heaven by which men must be saved, but in the Name
and in the Faith in Jesus Christ (cf. Acts 4: 12).
With the
words of Saint Augustine the Church taught in all times: “The Christian
religion is the only religion which possesses the universal way for the
salvation of the soul;
for except by this way, none can be saved. This is a kind of royal way, which
alone leads to a kingdom which does not totter like all temporal dignities, but
stands firm on eternal foundations.” (De civitate Dei, 10, 32, 1).
The following
words of the great Pope Leo XIII testify the same unchanging teaching of the
Magisterium in all times, when he affirmed: “The view that all religions are
alike, is calculated to bring about the ruin of all forms of religion, and
especially of the Catholic religion, which, as it is the only one that is true,
cannot, without great injustice, be regarded as merely equal to other
religions.” (Encyclical Humanum genus,
n. 16)
In recent times the Magisterium presented
substantially the same unchanging teaching in the Document “Dominus Jesus”
(August 6, 2000), from which we quote the following relevant assertions:
“Theological faith (the acceptance of the truth
revealed by the One and Triune God) is often identified with belief in other
religions, which is religious experience still in search of the absolute truth
and still lacking assent to God who reveals himself. This is one of the reasons
why the differences between Christianity and the other religions tend to be
reduced at times to the point of disappearance.” (n. 7) “Those solutions that propose
a salvific action of God beyond the unique mediation of Christ would be
contrary to Christian and Catholic faith.” (n. 14) “Not infrequently it is
proposed that theology should avoid the use of terms like “unicity”,
“universality”, and “absoluteness”, which give the impression of excessive
emphasis on the significance and value of the salvific event of Jesus Christ in
relation to other religions. In reality, however, such language is simply being
faithful to revelation” (n. 15) “It is clear that it would be contrary to the faith
to consider the Church as one way of salvation alongside those
constituted by the other religions, seen as complementary to the Church or
substantially equivalent to her, even if these are said to be converging with
the Church toward the eschatological kingdom of God.” (n. 21) “The faith
rules it out,
in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism “characterized by a
religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as
another' (John
Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris missio, 36).” (n. 22)
The
Apostles and the countless Christian martyrs of all times, especially those of
the first three centuries, would have been spared martyrdom, if they had said:
“The pagan religion and its worship is a way, which as well corresponds to the
will of God.” There would have been for
instance no Christian France, no “Eldest Daughter of the Church,” if Saint Remigius
had said to Clovis, the King of the Francs: “Do not despise your pagan religion you have worshiped up to now, and worship now Christ, Whom you have persecuted
up to now.” The saintly bishop actually spoke differently, although in a rather rough way: “Worship
what you burned, and burn what you have worshiped!”
True universal
brotherhood can be only in Christ, and namely between baptized persons. The full
glory of God’s sons will be attained only in the beatific vision of God in
heaven, as Holy Scripture teaches: “See what kind of love the Father has
given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The
reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know
him. Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has
not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like
him, because we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3: 1-2).
No authority on earth – not even the supreme
authority of the Church – has the right to dispense people from other religions from the
explicit Faith in Jesus Christ as the Incarnated Son of God and the only Savior
of mankind with the assurance that the different religions as such are willed
by God Himself. Indelible – because written with the finger of God and crystal-clear
in their meaning – remain, however, the words of the Son of God: “Whoever
believes in the Son of God is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is
condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son
of God”
(John 3: 18). This truth was valid up to now in all Christian generations and will
remain valid until the end of time, irrespective of the fact
that
some people in the Church of our so fickle, cowardly, sensationalist, and conformist time reinterpret this truth in a sense contrary to its evident
wording, selling thereby this reinterpretation as continuity in
the development of doctrine.
Outside the
Christian Faith no other religion can be a true and God-willed way, since this
is the explicit will of God, that all people believe in His Son: “This is the will of my Father,
that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should
have eternal life” (John 6: 40). Outside the Christian Faith no other religion is
able to transmit true supernatural life: “This is eternal life, that they
know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”
(John 17: 3).
+ Athanasius
Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana
