Saturday, December 17, 2011
A Personal Relationship With Jesus
I question whether it is meaningful or appropriate for a Catholic to speak of "a personal, intimate relationship with Jesus" for anyone NOT in communion with the Catholic Church. If it is possible for someone outside the Roman Catholic Church to be saved by this "personal relationship" then why is the Catholic Church necessary? And how does someone know that their personal relationship is not with a false angel of light which Paul mentions in the epistles?
The words "intimate", "personal" and "relationship" do not appear in Strong's Exhaustive Bible concordance.
Here is a search engine for the entire Catechism which yields only a few vague references to a relationship with God .
The closest thing I find in the Catechism pertains to the life of hermits and would not apply to a layperson:
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The eremitic life
920 Without always professing the three evangelical counsels publicly, hermits "devote their life to the praise of God and salvation of the world through a stricter separation from the world, the silence of solitude and assiduous prayer and penance."
921 They manifest to everyone the interior aspect of the mystery of the Church, that is, personal intimacy with Christ. Hidden from the eyes of men, the life of the hermit is a silent preaching of the Lord, to whom he has surrendered his life simply because he is everything to him. Here is a particular call to find in the desert, in the thick of spiritual battle, the glory of the Crucified One.
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Here is a page which is Roman Catholic and stresses an "intimate, personal relationship with Jesus" but it seems to be aimed at Evangelicals who try to win converts from the RC Church.
I see this "personal relationship with Jesus" as a recent Evangelical Protestant innovation and not something stressed in the first 1500 years of Christianity.
