FAST FOOD (2014): Twenty-First Helping

Again, “We adore God Who is love, who in Jesus Christ gave Himself for us, Who offered Himself on the Cross to expiate our sins, and through the power of this love, rose from the dead and lives in His Church. We have no God other than Him.”(Pope Francis, 6/21/14)

It is noted in the first FAST FOOD Helpings of this year that the Gospels proclaim that Jesus comes to save and does save. The question is “How does Jesus save?” In yesterday’s FAST FOOD: Helping the Catholic Biblical scholar, Rev. John L. McKenzie, noted, “We know Jesus only in the proclamation and tradition of the primitive Church. “We know what he said of himself only as the Church reported it. If the Church did not tell us what he was, then there is no way in which his true identity can be ascertained…We know Jesus only through the witness of the primitive Church, to question that witness is to make it impossible to share the faith of the primitive Church” Later we noted what he said about Jesus as presented to humanity by the primitive Church: “If Jesus did not reject any type of violence for any purpose, then we know nothing of him.”

Since most of the Churches that designate themselves Christian today believe and teach that they “share the faith of the primitive Church,” a great and grave crisis of truth exists—and is being ecumenically and deceitfully swept under the ecclesiological carpet—because the overwhelming majority of Churches today, and for many yesterdays, believe and teach that they and their membership can share in the faith of the primitive Church, the Church made visible in the Gospels, and still engage in the carnage and human butchery of war and the spirits and acts that war absolutely requires. Such teaching and belief is in contradiction to what we know of Jesus is left to us “through the witness of the primitive Church,” the primal and irreplaceable source and witness to the true identity of Jesus. Remembering always, the primitive Church is the source and witness without which Jesus is a mere vapor, a person with no ascertainable content or identity.

If by some process the ascertainable content and identity of Jesus to which the primitive Church is the witnesses is altered and thereby replaced by its direct opposite, then it cannot be logically or truthfully maintained that those who accept this alternative content and identity share in the faith of the primitive Church. Must it not now be said that those who do this are proclaiming and following a Jesus and a tradition of Jesus that is simply something of their own creation and imagination? Can such a Jesus save? And who or what are such Christians worshiping? What would it mean to say, “We have no God other than Him.”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy (To be continued)

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