A Convert Background
As is the case with many other Hispanics, some of my extended family left the Catholic Church and became evangelicals. When my nominally Catholic parents adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward my own Catholic upbringing, these earnest relatives filled the void, and for that I am still thankful. Later, as a teenager at a Jesuit high school, I would, on my own, decide to enter the Catholic Church — my nominal Catholic parents still knew the value of a Catholic education. And for that I am even more thankful.
Someone with this background has, in common with many other converts, a rich collection of memories and images that refuse to remain in separate compartments. We tend to see connections and similarities even in apparently alien religious customs and practices. And so, in my case, I tend to see Catholic echoes even in the Baptist churches of my youth. Theologically, it is not surprising. After all, we are talking about one Lord, one faith, at least in its fundamentals, and one baptism. Yet, it is still startling at times to realize how true it is that, as the saying goes, God writes straight with crooked lines.
The Catholic sacramental imagination sees meaning in the most unlikely places. Converts have a special insight into that Catholic sacramental imagination because we can see, in retrospect, the far reach and presence of elements of Catholicism even among those who may not even acknowledge that Catholics are Christians. It is certainly easier for a former Episcopalian or a former Lutheran, coming from liturgical denominations, to see the obvious connections. It is not so obvious for those of us with backgrounds in the so-called “free churches.” Yet, the connections are still there to be discovered. Given the demographics of twenty-first century America, stories similar to my own will likely become more common as the competition intensifies between Catholics and evangelicals over the rising tide of Hispanic immigration.
Catholic Elements in Surprising Places
Talking about “elements” of Catholicism in other Christian communities is, of course, language taken straight from the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium which speaks of “many elements of sanctification and truth” outside the Roman Catholic Church as “forces impelling towards Catholic unity.” Some have illustrated this language with the image of the Catholic Church — and, to be clear, I mean the Roman Catholic Church — as a sort of magnetic pole to which all of these elements point.
In speaking of “elements” pointing to the Catholic Church, Vatican II was true to the Catholic sacramental imagination’s habit of looking for the hand of God in every human reality. Just as the classical humanist could boast that “nothing human is alien to me,” so the Catholic is fully committed to the notion that nothing human is alien to God, except sin — and even the effects of sin were experienced by God on the cross. So to find Catholic echoes at the First Baptist Church down the street is a genuinely Catholic exercise.
In the course of the Protestant Reformation, the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church were eventually reduced to two: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Luther at first preserved the sacrament of penance, but it too was eventually dropped as a sacrament. And so historically the Catholic sacrament of penance, or what we all know as “confession,” was from an early date one of the distinctive Catholic practices strongly rejected by a Protestantism which would define itself theologically by this very rejection. By rejecting individual confession to a priest or minister, Protestants were seeking to take their version of the priesthood of all believers to its logical conclusion: no mere human being could act as mediator between the believer and God. The only mediator was the God-man Jesus Christ. The Baptist heritage, representing the “left-wing” of the Protestant Reformation, certainly embraced the abolition of individual confession and even refused to use the name “sacrament” for its observances of Baptism and the Supper. Baptists would unequivocally mark their distance from Catholicism by replacing “sacraments” with “ordinances.”
In spite of some confusion, especially in the late 1970s, Catholics have held to the necessity of individual confession to a priest for the absolution of grave sins. In the Catholic view, the priest acts here, as he does in all the other sacraments, in the person of Christ. It is actually Christ who absolves, not the human priest. As articulated by Aquinas, a priest is quintessentially a mediator. If this is so, then a Christian priest must be acting in the person of the one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ. In this way, the sacrament of penance is intimately tied to the theology of the priesthood. And so the typical Protestant view of the minister as a delegate or employee of the congregation is another reason why the sacrament of penance could no longer be understood by Protestants as being consistent with belief in Christ as the one mediator between God and man. A mere agent of the assembly could certainly not be a mediator. He or she can represent only the assembled believers and can bring believers no closer to God than the believers can already manage on their own.
Yet, if we look carefully at one particularly distinctive Baptist practice, we can see echoes of the sacrament of penance and its theology of a mediating priesthood, if we have the eyes to see it. This contention will surely be greeted with disbelief by many. But if we take a fresh look at Baptist practice and dare to undertake an unprejudiced analysis that brackets out encrusted historical assumptions and stereotypes, we may be surprised at what we find.
The Altar Call and Catholic Confession
The practice I am talking about is the familiar “altar call” routinely made at the end of Baptist services, at least in the South. It is familiar to television audiences nationwide because of Billy Graham crusades in which those who wish to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior are asked to get up from their seats, to come forward to the crusade stage, and to pray with Billy Graham (or now more likely his son). That same coming forward is part of the typical Southern Baptist service.
The name itself raises a question: where is the altar? As most know, Baptist churches do not have altars. The focal point of a Southern Baptist church is the pulpit. In front of the pulpit, usually at a lower level, is a plain but dignified table — the “Lord’s table” on which the communion bread and grape juice are duly placed during periodic celebrations of the Lord’s Supper. The rest of the time an open Bible and decorative flowers usually sit on the Lord’s table. It is definitely a table, not an altar.
So why an “altar call”? The name is a relic from a defunct liturgical past that merely serves to indicate the area in the vicinity of the pulpit and the Lord’s table. Yet, there is an Augustinian echo here that will become apparent when we focus on the altar call itself. At the end of a service, people, as in the Graham crusades, are asked to come forward to receive Christ as Lord and Savior. The preacher will pray with those who come forward, and the prayer will include a general admission of one’s status as a sinner, one’s repentance, and one’s desire for forgiveness. In effect, the converted come forward and “confess.” It is most likely not a specific listing of sins, but rather a general acknowledgement that one is indeed a sinner in need of forgiveness.
But it is not only those seeking to accept Christ for the first time who are usually called to the “altar.” Longtime church members may come forward to seek to rededicate their lives to Christ. Surely, in exchanging words with the minister, some of those seeking to rededicate themselves to Christ must make some reference as to why they see a need to start afresh — a failing marriage, a return to drinking, neglect of religious practice, etc. That need is related to “backsliding” — to failure to perform one’s Christian obligations. In other words, the already converted come forward to confess, in some way, their sins. And here is the Augustinian echo of Scripture that makes sense of the name “altar call” even if there is no visible Baptist altar: the believer is offering the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart on an unseen altar.
A similar scene, down to the physical posture, takes place in some Catholic communal penance services. In some of those services, several priests will stand at different parts of the church to hear confessions outside any confessional or reconciliation room. What the attending Catholic sees is his fellow Catholics coming forward and talking privately with bowed head to the priest listening to confessions. To an objective observer, the picture of Catholics going to confession in this way is strikingly similar to the private prayer that a Baptist preacher shares with those who respond to the altar call.
And the content is generally similar: both Baptist and Catholic come forward acknowledging their sinfulness and their desire to start anew in Christian discipleship. Of course, there is no absolution per se in the Baptist experience, but the preacher will surely assure the Baptist that his sins have been forgiven by the blood of Christ. In contrast, the Catholic will go into detail about his sins, and the priest will formally and authoritatively declare that the penitent is absolved. But the similarities are undeniably there between the Baptist altar call and Catholic confession.
Both practices fulfill the believer’s need to make a new start in a public and concrete manner. In both cases, the believer leaves with the intention to amend his past behavior. For Catholic theology, the two practices are certainly not equivalent. The priest by virtue of his ordination is an extension of Christ Himself and thus receives the power to declare the sinner forgiven. But in the Baptist practice there is an echo, an element of truth and sanctification that points to the Catholic sacrament of penance. The altar call is one of those elements spoken of by Vatican II that impel towards unity with the Catholic Church.
Certainly, an unwavering Baptist will disagree with my conclusion, but he will be hard-pressed to deny the similarities. The unwavering Baptist may even somewhat revise his view of that strange Catholic practice of confession — it is, in the end, not as alien to his own tradition as it at first appears. The Catholic, on the other hand, can also profit by the comparison. For the comparison points out what is at stake in the sacrament of penance: our continuing conversion. That is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to the sacrament of penance as the sacrament of conversion.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
Oswald Sobrino’s daily columns can be found at the Catholic Analysis website. He is a graduate lay student at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He recently published Unpopular Catholic Truths, a collection of apologetic essays, available on the internet at Virtualbookworm.com, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.
