The Christian Vanguard

I want to compare two personalities: Rush Limbaugh and Ravi Zacharias. Both were loved and hated intensely by many people. Both were involved in the public sphere. Both were involved in an arena where emotions can run high. Both wrote books. Both were heard on air. Both had speaking engagements. And both battled with sin. One with sexual perversion, and the other with drugs. But Rush made his sin public, and publicly repented. He left his show, entered rehab, even turned himself in to the authorities, damaging his reputation. Ravi hid his sin, denied it, attempted to destroy peoples lives in order to cover it up, for fear of what it would do to his reputation. We endearingly remember Rush. We now despise Ravi. Be sure that your sin will find you out. My point being: do not fear confession and repentance!

Why do lingering feelings of guilt, shame, doubt still haunt us after we have confessed our sins which we think are the cause for such feelings? St. Thomas Aquinas may have some insight into the issue here when he says, "...passion is properly to be found where there is corporeal transmutation." Which is just basically to say that when you have a certain emotion, there is a corresponding bodily change. When you feel fear, your heart races, you begin to sweat. When you see the woman you are infatuated with, you have a slight pain in your stomach. When you see your wife walk over to the bed to fulfill marital duties, you also have an appropriate physical response.  And is well known, there is a difference between your passions and your intellect, or your will, in this case. When our intellect craves for something, we don't "feel" it like we feel our emotions. If I feel hungry, I have a bodily reaction to it, and is very immediate. When I feel sad, I have an ...

I was in line at the confessional last week or so. I was towards the end of the line, and the priest had already begun hearing confessions. Another priest then came and directed some of us to another room where he would also be hearing confessions. So I go, and so do a few others. We realize that his confessions will be face to face, and not behind a veil. This isn't a problem for me, and never has been. It seemed to be a problem for the lady behind me. Now, it's usually bad manners to chit chat while in line for confession, since that's a time to prepare and meditate upon our sins, but apparently she didn't get the memo. "Oh dear," she says to me, "he's doing face to face. That makes me nervous." "It shouldn't." I tell her.  "But he will know who I am."  "That's right. And when you die, and you see God in the face, God will know who you are and what all your sins were, and you will have nothing to hi...

Chapters four and five deal with the same theme: soteriology, or, salvation, and the relationship between faith, works, grace, repentance, etc. I’ll be dealing with chapter four and appendix II here, and chapter five in my next post. It doesn’t take a paragraph before Ferguson begins to salivate at the thought of straw-men. He writes, “Although their theologians can quote certain writings which seem to support a more biblical position regarding works and grace, the average Catholic has little grasp of the biblical message.”