Out of the Labyrinth (1947)

OUT OF THE LABYRINTH BY L. H. LEHMANN Sequel to “THE SOUL OF A PRIEST” (By the same author) Ah, must-Designer Infinite-Must thou char the wood, ere thou cannot limn with it? FRANCIS THOMPSON AGORA PUBLISHING COMPANY 120 LIBERTY STREET NEW YORK , NEW YORK TO THE LORD AND SAVIOUR This work is thankfully dedicated Copyright, 1947, by Agora Publishing Company PRINTED IN U.S.A. With acknowledgment to Whose spiritual insight helped with many parts of it OUT OF THE LABYRINTH TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Into the Light 2. What Salvation Really Means 3. How Sins Are Really Forgiven 4. Counterfeit Christianity 5. Religion As a System of Power 6. False Loyalty 7. New Creation in Christ 8. Christ Jesus - As Sovereign Lord 9. The Impossibility of Purgatory 10. Pagan Origins of Purgatory 11. Keys for the Wrong Lock 12. How We Are Sanctified 13. Jezebel Abroad in America 14. Priests and Ex-priests 13. The Tyranny of Priestly Celibacy 16. By What Authority? 17. God Is Not a Backstairs Politician 18. The Bondage of Doing 19. Rome’s Salvation by Law 20. The True Priesthood of Christ 21. The Conversion of Martin Luther 22. What Would Christ Say Today? 23. The Fellowship of His Sufferings 24. What the Pope Refuses to Believe 25. The Roman Catholic Church and Marriage 26. The Problem of Mixed Marriages 27. The Real Catholic Church of Christ 28. The ‘A-to-Z’ of Salvation 29. Christ - The Only One 30. Five Basic Postulates of Protestantism 31. Evangelical Movements Within the Catholic Church 32. Since Luther 33. Hoof beat and Footfall 2 OUT OF THE LABYRINTH 1. INTO THE LIGHT “Our soul is escaped like a bird out of the net of the fowlers: the net is broken and we are escaped” (Psalm 124). THE CONVERSION OF A PRIEST is a special kind of conversion - something more than a ‘turning around’ as the word conversion signifies. It is rather a complete turn-over, a spiritual ‘somersault.’ It involves a descent from his false position as an alter Christus, “another Christ,” as he was formerly called, to a humble admission that he is but another sinner saved by Christ. As a priest, I was hailed as a “mediator between God and man,” offering sacrifices daily for the sins of men and forgiving them their sins in confession. I was regarded as indispensable to sinners, since without the priest in Roman Catholic teaching there is no salvation. The change that took place within me by my conversion required a complete repudiation of all this. From my sacerdotal eminence I had to come tumbling down upon my knees to confess that, like all other men, I myself was a sinner needing to be saved by Christ. Such a conversion is not as simple as it may seem. In the first place, it is entirely against the nature of man so to humble himself as to voluntarily renounce the privileges and power by which he is endowed in such a lofty estate. Nor is such a conversion attained merely by the act of just leaving the Roman priesthood. Neither is it arrived at by intellectual disquisition, the logic of reasoning or the metaphysics of argumentation. If it is hardly possible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, it is not at all possible to enter head first into the Kingdom of Heaven. Apprehension of the truth of Christ with acceptance of Him as personal Savior is by a sense other than pure intellect; different too from mere emotional affectation. My experience has taught me that it can only come by a spiritual sense, itself a gift of God first implanted in the soul as necessary for the reception of his supreme gift of eternal life-an “act of God which, like a bolt of lightning, everlastingly fuses the innermost being of a man with his Creator and Savior. There is nothing in human reasoning, or logic, or history that can otherwise explain it. How foolish appear now to me those little words, compounded of Greek and Latin to give them a sense of pretended importance, which I learned as a student and a priest and which were supposed to explain and dogmatically prove the mystery of Christian soteriology! As well try to measure the infinite with a twelve-inch ruler. In my book, The Soul of a Priest, I set down objectively the odyssey of my soul during the years of my life as a boy, a student and a priest. Therein were detailed the historical events that finally led to my break with the priesthood of the Church of Rome after serving it well and faithfully on three continents. It is to fill up that history of a soul’s further triumphant search for Christian truth that I publish this second book which contains the results of that soul’s spiritual development. These writings have been fashioned by my experiences as editor of The Converted Catholic Magazine and director of Christ’s Mission in New York during the past ten years. I cannot imagine any more objective or experimental way of showing how completely I have rejected the erroneous teachings and false pretensions of all that I was taught to believe and to teach as a priest. This is all the more clearly demonstrated by the method I use of contrasting the truth with the lie, the genuine with the counterfeit, in all that concerns salvation in the Christian dispensation. The method followed in these chapters is both legitimate and justifiable. For I soon learned that the Word of God is truly like a two-edged sword definitely cleaving apart the true from the false, the things of God from those of Satan. There are no nuances of Gospel truth as there are of colors. There are no mere half-truths concerning creation and salvation, no half-measures to God’s actions. Christianity, I have discovered, is an either/or religion. By it you are either saved or not saved, made alive or dead. To say or teach, as 1 used to in Roman Catholicism, that it is a religion that leaves you at death not good enough for heaven yet not bad enough for hell, is a mockery of logic as well as a mockery of Calvary. It is like squaring the circle to say that at the same time you can be saved and not saved. It is Satan who has thus made a labyrinth of the Christian religion, with himself as the false guide through the inextricable maze. On men’s nose he thrusts the spectacles of falsehood, through which they see everything entirely opposite to what God has ordained and accomplished for our salvation. Distant things appear near, near things distant, small things large, and large things small, ugly things beautiful and 3 OUT OF THE LABYRINTH beautiful things ugly, white black and black white, life as death and death as life-in short, the mystery of the Cross as foolishness and his own mystery of iniquity as wisdom. In very truth he has turned the truth of God into a lie. Like my work at Christ’s Mission, this book is intended to help both Catholics and Protestants. Catholics to arrive at the true knowledge of Christ as perfect Savior; Protestants to encourage them to defend, at all costs, the heritage of that faith into which they were fortunately born. May it serve, above all, to uphold Christ against everything that is not of Christ. 2. WHAT SALVATION REALLY MEANS THE DOCTRINE OF SALVATION as I now see and experience it in Evangelical teaching, is not only different from, but diametrically opposed to what was taught to me in the Roman Catholic Church. Looking back now I am aware that, although 1 had no direct knowledge of what salvation really means in Christian soteriology, I was conscious of the need for something like it. 1 was never content with the mere half-measure of salvation which the Roman Catholic Church had to offer. There was in me a yearning, as in all men of all times, for a Savior who really saves, and that “to the uttermost.” It was after this that my soul as a priest continually sought, and it was this unconscious longing that brought me through the historical events described in my former book, The Soul of a Priest. As I see it now, in all pre-Christian religions from the fall of man to the coming of Christ-there were two common elements: one was the need of a priesthood of men; the other the teaching of an incomplete salvation. The two were complementary of each other, since the only kind of salvation that sacrifices of men could offer must of necessity be deficient. As a result there could be no end of sin in this life, and it followed, as a consequence, that it was necessary to believe in a further round of existences after death wherein the still unsaved sinner would have to continue to suffer and expiate for his sins. This teaching, in various forms, is known under the general name of reincarnation. The Roman Catholic teaching of purgatory is but another name for this most common of all religious teachings. To this very day, about two thirds of the population of the world still believe in reincarnation of one kind or another. Now, Roman Catholicism, though it goes under the name of the Christian religion, possesses these two elements common to all pre-Christian religious teachings: the need of a sacrificial priesthood, and incomplete salvation, to which is added the corollary of purgatory where souls after death must suffer and expiate for sin.

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