Where Are the Adults?
“I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not obtain the kingdom of God”
I have been listening to more theological debates lately, and something keeps striking me.
Sometimes the most revealing moment is not the answer.
It is the refusal to answer.
In one debate, the subject was whether a Christian can lose his salvation through grave sin. The Catholic apologist pushed the question into uncomfortable territory by naming a specific sexual act and asking whether it was sinful and whether a Christian who knowingly persisted in grave sin could still be saved.
Almost immediately, another argument appeared:
What if children hear this?
And part of me thought: Where are the adults?
Of course, Christians should have prudence. Children do not need to be dragged unnecessarily into adult subjects.
But this was an adult theological debate about sin, salvation, marriage, morality, and eternal life.
These are adult questions.
At some point adults have to be willing to discuss difficult things without pretending that merely naming an uncomfortable subject is worse than refusing to think seriously about it.
The question underneath the controversy was actually very simple:
Can someone truly belong to Christ and later choose grave sin?
And this is where I have watched certain Protestant explanations become strangely circular.
Imagine a man becomes a Christian.
For ten years he goes to church, professes faith in Jesus Christ, prays, studies Scripture, serves others, and is regarded by everyone around him as a faithful Christian.
Then one day he commits murder.
Was murder wrong?
Obviously.
Did he knowingly choose something gravely opposed to God?
Yes.
So what happened spiritually?
One answer says:
If he truly accepted Christ, he cannot lose his salvation.
But now we have a Christian deliberately committing grave evil without the possibility of being separated from God.
That is uncomfortable.
So another answer appears:
Then he must never have really been converted.
But wait.
What was the previous decade?
Were his prayers fake?
Was his profession fake?
Were the fruits everybody witnessed fake?
Did nobody—including the man himself—have any way of knowing whether his conversion was real until some future event revealed that the previous ten years never counted?
And if he later repents, what do we say then?
Was he saved, then revealed to have never been saved, then saved for the first time after all?
Eventually the conversation often retreats into:
“God knows his heart. It isn't for us to decide.”
That statement is true.
God alone knows the soul perfectly.
But it does not answer the question.
Because there is an enormous difference between saying
God alone judges an individual person's final culpability
and saying
God has told us nothing about what serious sin does to our relationship with Him.
He has.
Christian humility does not require us to pretend God has not spoken.
The Catholic Answer Runs the Other Direction
What surprised me when I began understanding Catholic teaching was that Catholicism did not respond:
You sinned badly. Apparently, you never belonged here.
It says something almost opposite:
You were united to Christ. You have seriously wounded that communion. Now come back and be reconciled.
That changes everything.
The Church is not a club where everybody currently inside gets to point at the person who fell and say:
See? He was never one of us.
Neither does the Church say:
You joined the club once, so nothing you do afterward really matters.
She says:
Grace is real.
Human freedom is real.
Sin is real.
Separation from God is real.
And therefore:
Reconciliation is real.
That last part matters tremendously.
The Catholic doctrine of mortal sin can sound terrifying when reduced to a rule chart. But put it back into the whole Christian story and something different appears.
God has left the door open.
Not because sin does not matter, but precisely because it does. The person who falls does not need us to rewrite his previous life and announce that he was secretly an impostor the whole time.
He needs Christ.
Come home.
Repent.
Confess.
Be reconciled.
Begin again.
The Outside of the Cup
And then I heard today’s readings.
Paul gives a remarkably direct warning. He names immorality,
impurity,
hatred,
jealousy,
fury,
selfishness,
factions,
drunkenness
and other works of the flesh and warns that those who practice such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
Then he immediately contrasts them with the fruit of the Spirit:
love,
joy,
peace,
patience,
kindness,
generosity,
faithfulness,
gentleness
and self-control.
Paul does not seem embarrassed to tell Christians that how we live matters. But the Gospel gives the other danger.
Jesus rebukes the Pharisees because they carefully tithe their herbs while neglecting judgment and the love of God. They love the places of honor. The scholars of the law place burdens on other people while refusing to help carry them.
“The Lord said:
“Woe to you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb, but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God. These you should have done, without overlooking the others.
Woe to you Pharisees! You love the seat of honor in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces.
Woe to you! You are like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.”
Then one of the scholars of the law said to him in reply, “Teacher, by saying this you are insulting us too.” And he said,
“Woe also to you scholars of the law! You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them.””
It is possible to become so consumed with measuring the outside that we forget what God is doing inside.
Did he wash correctly?
Did she touch the wrong person?
Did somebody eat at the wrong time?
Who is clean?
Who is unclean?
Who belongs with us?
Who obviously does not?
The external becomes the barometer of the soul.
And this is precisely the trap Christians can fall into when we begin measuring salvation primarily by who presently looks respectable.
The man in the pew looks faithful, therefore everything must be well.
The woman whose sins are visible looks scandalous; therefore, she must be far from God.
But Jesus repeatedly ruins that measurement system.
Elsewhere in Luke's Gospel, a woman known publicly as a sinner comes to Jesus weeping. Jesus does not pretend her previous life was good. He does not redefine her sins into virtues.
“Now there was a sinful woman in the city who learned that he was at table in the house of the Pharisee. Bringing an alabaster flask of ointment, she stood behind him at his feet weeping and began to bathe his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them with the ointment.
When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, that she is a sinner.”
He acknowledges that her sins were many.
And then He forgives her.
That is the scandal.
Not that sin suddenly stopped being sin.
That mercy was greater.
“I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love.
But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” He said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
The others at table said to themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
But he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
Christianity Is Not a Clean-People Club
This may be one of the deepest changes in how I now understand the Catholic faith.
Christianity is not:
Find the good people. Put them together. Keep the bad people outside.
Nor is it:
Say the salvation prayer once and everything afterward becomes spiritually irrelevant.
It is union with a Person.
Jesus Christ.
And because it is communion, communion can be embraced, wounded, rejected and restored.
That makes reconciliation beautiful rather than embarrassing.
I have experienced this myself.
There are sins I have had to bring to confession. There are times I have fallen and wanted to get back as quickly as I could.
The answer was never: Apparently, none of your previous faith was real.
Nor was it: Don't worry about it—you love Jesus.
The answer was simpler:
Repent.
Come back.
Receive mercy.
There is enormous hope in that.
Because God does not require me to pretend that my sin is harmless in order to believe that He is merciful.
He can say both:
That was wrong.
and
Come home.
Perhaps that is the adult conversation we sometimes avoid.
We do not need to protect God from difficult questions.
We do not need to stop reasoning when Scripture becomes uncomfortable.
We do not need to pretend He has not spoken simply because His answer disrupts our theological system.
And
We certainly do not need Christianity to become a club where everybody who falls badly is retroactively declared to have never belonged.
The Gospel offers something much greater.
You really can belong to Christ.
You really can fall.
Your choices really matter.
Sin really can separate us from God.
And because Christ came for sinners, the story does not have to end there.
Come and be reconciled.
The door is still open.