What kind of Evangelical Was I?

1) Does the Catholic Church Approve of the Timothy Test? Or Not? Answering a Point by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati! · 2) What kind of Evangelical Was I?

The usual Evangelical has some relation to the Reformers, and these Reformers are described by Chesterton like this:

To this I owe the fact that I find it very difficult to take some of the Protestant propositions even seriously. What is any man who has been in the real outer world, for instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic traditions are condemned by the Bible? It indicates a jumble of topsy-turvy tests and tail-foremost arguments, of which I never could at any time see the sense. The ordinary sensible sceptic or pagan is standing in the street (in the supreme character of the man in the street) and he sees a procession go by of the priests of some strange cult, carrying their object of worship under a canopy, some of them wearing high head-dresses and carrying symbolical staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred records, others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them, others sacred relics in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand the spectator saying, "This is all hocus-pocus"; I can even understand him, in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession, throwing down the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on the priests and anything else that might express that general view. I can understand his saying, "Your croziers are bosh, your candles are bosh, your statues and scrolls and relics and all the rest of it are bosh." But in what conceivable frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the scriptures of this one particular group (a scroll which had always belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was hocus-pocus); why in the world should the man in the street say that one particular scroll was not bosh, but was the one and only truth by which all the other things were to be condemned? Why should it not be as superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues, of that one particular procession? Why should it not be as reasonable to preserve the statues as the scrolls, by the tenets of that particular creed? To say to the priests, "Your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense," is sensible. To say, "Your statues are condemned by your scrolls, and we are going to worship one part of your procession and wreck the rest," is not sensible from any standpoint, least of all that of the man in the street.

From : THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION
BY G. K. CHESTERTON

Nihil Obstat: Arthur J. Scanlan, S.T.D. Censor Librorum.

Imprimatur: Patrick Cardinal Hayes +Archbishop, New York.

New York, September 16, 1926.

Copyright, 1926 by MacMillan Company
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/conversion.txt

In fact, Chesterton, is not just describing Reformers, but even some Evangelical controversialists and on top of that some Liberal ones too. Yessir, there are Liberals who will not admit the Bible condemns their own Old Age Theistic Evolutionism or their own sayings like "Christ shared some ignorance of His times, we need not take all He says literally". But who will still say that Bible condemns the Catholic habit of calling certain priests "Father".

But the point is, though I was in the main an Evangelical believer back after starting out as explicitly Christian (including handing my life over to God), I was never in the habit of defending particulars of this in controversy with Catholics.

Nor was I in the habit of refraining from all contact with Catholicism. On the contrary, mother being High Church, believing in Branch Theory, believing RC was right branch for Latins (and extreme south of Germans) like Orthodoxy for Slavs and Protestantism for Germanic nations (Swedes, English, Dutch, most Germans), when in Austria she sometimes went to Mass.

And so, I cannot confess to having been the kind of Evangelical who had this very illogical proposition about the procession which among other things included certain scrolls.

I was not. When "fellow" Protestants other than ma tried to foist an Anticatholic attitude on me, I resisted it. I still do, for what is NOT simply products of the very recent apostasy which had a real heyday from Vatican II to Liturgic Reforms, but which started earlier in high levels under Pius XII or even through him and developed after Liturgic Reforms, like in the readjustment of 1994 of Christmas proclamation (Christ is born 5199 after Creation, or sth very similar to that, not "unknown ages" after Creation, especially not after a Creation process longer than all the centuries after its completion).

So, I cannot identify with certain other converts, of whom I read one just today, saying

I was the one watching the Catholic procession go by and saying, “All of that is bosh, except those scrolls.”

Catholics Got It Wrong (Except for the Bible)
on the cordial catholic
March 15, 2016 by K. Albert Little 7 Comments
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/albertlittle/catholics-got-it-wrong-except-for-the-bible/

And therefore I cannot identify my Tota Scriptura with a Magisterium rejecting and Tradition rejecting and in some versions even Logic rejecting Sola Scriptura.

It is a great pity that people on CMI, attached, and rightly, to Tota Scriptura (though it is as Chesterton noted inconsistent to worship the scrolls after wrecking for one's own country or soul the rest of the procession - which will not be wrecked completely even by Antichrist, see Matthew 28:20 - this is a blessed inconsistency). Oh, yes, it is a pity that people rightly attached to Tota Scriptura should entagle that with unnecessary appeals to Sola Scriptura.

It is an even greater pity that they do not distinguish the two things they cling to, and that they when expressing, as most often the case, an appeal to Tota Scriptura, which St Robert Bellarmine would have lauded (and certainly did laud in his conroversies with King James the VI and I), they shroud this appeal in a purely decorative or "patriotic" attachment to Reformers with their infidel and illogical Sola Scriptura.

But, greater than these pities it is, when Catholics, rejecting, and rightly, in their oral confession, the heresy of Sola Scriptura, deluded by this bad Protestant habit and inane through insufficient traditional catechism, or even insufficient-LY traditional catechism, but plenty of it, shall mean by this verbally correct rejection in their minds a rejection of the Tota Scriptura, which was indeed part of this "procession" from Pentecost to Harmageddon. And remains so, despite the apostates who changed liturgy in 1994.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
St Joseph's Day
19.III.2016