"Are You Saved?"

Very good post by Father Richard Simon on how Catholics should respond to being asked "Are You Saved?" by Evangelical Protestants.

Edith Schaeffer, Requiescat In Pace

Edith Schaeffer, along with her husband Reverend Francis Schaeffer, founded L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland and were giants of Evangelical Christianity.  Mrs. Schaeffer passed away today at age 98.
Thanks to the Petinacious Papist.

Bad Catholic Book Review

The Bad Catholic reviews Joel C. Rosenberg's The Twelfth Imam at The Eclectic Reader.

Frank Schaeffer has Patience With God

Frank Schaeffer is a very divisive and controversial figure. For instance, I don’t agree with his outspoken left wing politics. However, I absolutely love to read Frank’s books. The semi-autobiographical Calvin Becker trilogy of novels were hilariously great fun to read as was Frank’s memoir of his time being raised to be a leader of the Evangelical Protestant world, Crazy for God.

For those that don’t know, Frank Schaeffer is the son of Evangelical missionaries and authors Francis and Edith Schaeffer. During the 1960's, the Schaeffer’s founded L’Abri, which means “shelter,” in the Swiss Alps. L’Abri was a place for young people who were trying to “find themselves” to come and study the Protestant Evangelical Christian world view. According to the book Hippies of the Christian Right Francis Schaeffer became one of the intellectual gurus of the so-called “Jesus People” movement.


Edith and Francis Schaeffer

Here’s my personal connection to Francis Schaeffer. Although Schaeffer died in 1984, he remains “a big name” in Evangelical circles. When I was in college at Mercer University Atlanta (formerly Atlanta Baptist College), I dated a girl who, besides being a staunch Southern Baptist and a member of Charles Stanley’s First Baptist Church of Atlanta, was very taken with the writings of the conservative Presbyterian Schaeffer. When my girl friend told me that Francis Schaeffer was her “favorite philosopher,” in order to impress her I immediately went out to the nearest “Christian Bookstore” and bought a five volume set of The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer (the girlfriend is long gone but I still have the books). The girl friend eventually broke up with me because I was too theologically liberal. However, I actually read most of the books.

In any event, before going to graduate school, my former girlfriend headed off to Switzerland for the summer to study at L’Abri. When she got back, I was fascinated to hear that Francis’ son “Frankie Schaeffer” was now alienated from the people who were running L’Abri and living down the road. She told me how when the students got there they were all told that Frankie’s house was off limits and that anyone caught going to Frankie’s house would be asked to leave. She then told me that this intrigued all of the students who all went to Frankie’s house anyway. Thus, the Bad Catholic’s “personal connection” with the Schaeffers.

Frank Schaeffer is a fascinating character. Once a leading Protestant Evangelical, he left that life in disgust and went to Hollywood to make his fortune making R-rated movies. After that career flopped, he began to write secular books and paint. Somewhere along the line, he converted to the Greek Orthodox Church. He also writes for the Huffington Post and occasionally goes on television to make outrageous left wing statements like “George Bush was the worst President of all times,” and stuff like that.

Frank’s last book (2009) which I recently read is Patience With God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism). To a certain extent, Frank likes to write the same book over and over again. Just like Crazy for God, this book is part auto-biography and part taking swipes at Fundamentalist Protestant Christianity. In this book, though, Frank begins by demolishing the so-called “New Atheists” (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett).



Richard Dawkins spreads his message.

First, the atheists. Schaeffer makes a convincing case that dogmatic atheism is just as much a fundamentalist belief as being a born again Fundamentalist King James Bible Only Baptist in Mississippi:

“What simplistic evangelical/fundamentalist theology tries to explain about creation, using God as the magical Big Thing, Dawkins does with brain-melting Big Numbers wrapped in meant-to-obfuscate and meant -to-intimidate science jargon. The problem is that neither religious fundamentalists nor Dawkins can explain any of what they claim they are explaining. Why? Because they are deep into the realm that Einstein was talking about: the realm “that our mind cannot grasp and this beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.”

It turns out that Dawkins agrees with creationists who say
that it’s nutty to credit pure chance as responsible for the design of something as complex as life. But Dawkins says that whatever that something is it can’t be God, because “Then you would have to ask, who created the creator?”

. . . So Dawkins has invented a theology with a scientific sounding name. . . . There is no reason to have a God because in our limitless universe (or universes) anything is statistically possible, except for their being a God. Why? Because Dawkins says so. . . . Dawkins big idea seems closer to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy than to science.”



Just like he did in Crazy for God, Frank takes no prisoners when it comes to Evangelical Fundamentalists. In a chapter called “Spaceship Jesus Will Come Back and Whisk Us Away", Schaeffer says of the authors of the Left Behind series, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye (both of whom Frank says he knew in the good old days): “If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine.”


Christopher Hitchens enjoys a cold drink!

I got a big laugh out of the part of the book where Frank talks about how Evangelicals love the writings of C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton:


C.S. Lewis lighting one up!

"Lewis was no American-style evangelical/fundamentalist but a high-church (in other words formal, liturgically inclined, and old-fashioned) Anglican with a strong bias in favor of the pre-Reformation Orthodox liturgy and Roman mass. He also had Hitchenesque appetites - lots of smoking and drinking that would have gotten him instantly dismissed from any American evangelical/fundamentalist institution. For instance, Wheaton College made faculty sign pledges to never, but never, smoke, drink, dance, or play cards, and it would never have allowed Lewis to work there. This makes the fact that The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College sells itself as a “tribute to the importance of the literary, historical, and Christian heritage” of C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and other assorted authors rather ironic. None of these smoking, drinking, and distinctly non-evangelical authors could ever have taught there."


G.K. Chesterton enjoying a smoke.

In the final section of the book, Frank tells us that although he borders sometimes on atheism and agnosticism, he inherently knows that there is something more to life than just what we see. When he plays with his grand daughter or listens to a beautiful piece of music or looks up at the night sky he knows that we are more than just a random collection of atoms. Thus, he holds on to his Christian faith as expressed through the liturgy of the Orthodox Church.


Frank Schaeffer

Frank Schaeffer’s books fall into the same category as drinking straight Bourbon whiskey. It’s an acquired taste which some may find too strong to tolerate. Reading Patience With God is like sitting down and having a long rambling talk with good old Frank who is brilliant but is also something of a crank. I loved it and can’t recommend it highly enough. However, fair warning, Frank Schaeffer likes to step on toes and demolish sacred cows. Just like straight whiskey, Frank Schaeffer books aren’t for everybody.

The Protestant Land Experience

On Friday of last week, Mr. & Mrs. Bad Catholic visited “The Holy Land Experience” in Orlando, Florida.

Like on many other subjects, the Bad Catholic has mixed feelings about this park. The Holy Land Experience was originally created by Zion’s Hope, Inc., a Protestant missionary organization which specialized in witnessing to Jews. Zion’s Hope, Inc. was founded by the Reverend Marvin Rosenthal, a Baptist minister who was reared as an Orthodox Jew and converted to Christianity as a teenager. In 2007, the park was acquired by the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). (1)

The park’s founding by Messianic Jews explains why all of the staff energetically greet the visitor with the word “Shalom!” The visitor enters The Holy Land Experience through the “Gates of Jerusalem” into what can best be described as the Bible according to Walt Disney. If Epcot Center had a world showcase display for ancient Israel, it would be The Holy Land Experience.

The centerpiece of “Jerusalem” is the Temple. The Temple, like all the rest of The Holy Land Experience, is a stage for Biblical based live action performances. In the “Shofar Theatre” we watched Jesus save the woman taken in adultery. The production appeared to be well done and well acted by professional actors. The actor who plays Jesus was particularly impressive.

The central production at the Holy Land Experience is the Passion Play. The Holy Land Experience’s Passion Play was well acted, tasteful and powerful. The violence and horror of crucifixion is skillfully evoked. The staff did the best that it could to make the Passion Play a prayerful experience. In this they were thwarted by the crowd. People were noisy, taking pictures, and one fellow was chastised by a member of the staff for happily munching on Holy Land Nachos while watching the death of the Savior.




My quibbles with The Holy Land Experience began when we first arrived and listened to a talk from a park “historian” about the Garden Tomb. As professor Branham says in her Harvard Divinity Bulletin article: “The Orlando passion culminates at a replica of the so-called Garden Tomb, the site in Jerusalem regarded by many Protestant Christians as the place of Jesus’ burial, in preference to the quite different Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the structure widely held by Catholic and Orthodox Christians to be the tomb of Christ.”(2)

According to The Holy Land Experience’s “historian” there’s no doubt that the Garden Tomb was the place where Christ’s body was placed. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is conclusively ruled out as being the site. Tourists are told that there is no doubt that the Garden Tomb was the tomb of Christ.

Since I worship a risen Lord who isn’t in a tomb, I was able to overlook this since it doesn’t matter which empty hole in the ground Our Lord rose from. But The Holy Land Experience’s historical errors didn’t end there. During the Passion Play, the actor playing Pontius Pilate loudly condemned Jesus “in the name of Augustus Caesar.” Of course, the problem with this is that Tiberius, not Augustus, was the Emperor of Rome when Jesus would have been crucified.

The worst part of The Holy Land Experience was the Evangelical Protestant version of Church history presented in the Scriptorium. Professor Branham’s description is still accurate:

“During the hour-long walking tour of the Scriptorium, guests encounter more than a dozen time periods and geographical settings crafted to support the history of Bible production. Guests are greeted by a lifelike talking “animatronic” figure of the Bible translator John Wycliffe. There’s a Babylonian courtyard dominated by a recreation of the impressive Ishtar Gate to give a palpable context to the clay cuneiform tablets in the exhibit. Visitors travel from an ancient rotunda echoing with “the voices of the prophets” to Egypt’s historic Library of Alexandria to view ancient papyri; from an early church bindery from Constantinople to Gutenburg’s fifteenth-century print shop in Mainz, Germany, including a working replica of his revolutionary printing press; from William Tyndale’s ransacked workshop in Cologne to London’s vast Metropolitan Tabernacle, a scene of nineteenth-century evangelical preaching; and from a simple prairie church on the plains of the American Midwest, where guests learn about missionaries to a rotunda for the tour’s finale, featuring major biblical personalities in an impressive laser show where tablets of the Ten Commandments are etched atop Mount Sinai. The lights go out and an enormous cross hangs suspended and illuminated overhead. Finally on their way out, Ex Libris, the Scriptorium’s book shop, offers guests an extensive selection of Bible and history related merchandise. . . . the Scriptorium represents the Protestant antidote to gesture, sacrament, and action in its presentation of words, ideas, and personal faith.” (3)

As one would expect, according to the Evangelical Protestant version of history, although Catholic monks copied the Bible during the “Dark Ages,” it was all written in Latin and they wouldn’t let the common people read it until Brother John Wycliffe, Brother William Tyndale and Brother Martin Luther came along and overturned all that evil tradition and got back to the Bible alone.

The message is definitely that the Bible created the Church. The inescapable conclusion from The Holy Land Experience’s version of history is NO BIBLE, NO CHURCH. Of course, we know that this is exactly backwards. As Father Joseph Nolan has said “What many evangelical Christians do not seem to understand is that the Bible found it’s existence within the context of a living community. That community’s lived beliefs - written down - formed the New Testament. In other words, the Bible did not create the Church; rather, the Church - that early community of believers - created the Bible.”

After a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Mary Queen of Universe, which should be the first thing the Catholic visitor does in Orlando, between trips to Disney World, Universal Studios and Sea World, The Holy Land Experience is worth a day. Just take the Protestant view of history with a grain of salt.



1. Branham, Joan, The Temple That Won’t Quit: Constructing Sacred Space in Orlando’s Holy Land Experience Theme Park, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn, 2008.

2. Ibid. p. 25.

3. Ibid. p. 28-29

Franklin Graham Says That Persecution of Chrisitans is Coming in the U.S.

Full story from NewsMax here.

Billy Graham's Son Is Too Christian For Barack Obama's Army

Billy and Franklin Graham

The Army has dis-invited Evangelist Franklin Graham to a prayer breakfast at the Pentagon after complaints by Muslims. Apparently, anyone who really believes in their religion, if that religion is other than Islam, is a crazed fanatic who must be banned. Full story here.