When I was 26, I had never once believed in God. Raised entirely without religion, I was a contented atheist and thought it was simply obvious that God did not exist. I thought that religion and reason were incompatible, and was baffled by why anyone would believe in God (I actually suspected that few people really did). After a few years in the Bible Belt, I became vocally anti-Christian. Imagine my surprise to find myself today, just three years later, a practicing Catholic who loves her faith (I entered the Church at Easter 2007). This is the chronicle of my journey.am asked with increasing frequency why I converted to Catholicism as opposed to one of the other Christian denominations. Though this blog is sort of one long conversion story, I've never put together a post summarizing that part of my journey because that subject matter can be a hot (and divisive) topic.
My search for God really began in earnest when I started reading up on Christianity. For a couple years I'd been making half-hearted attempts to open my mind to the possibility of God's existence but it never really went anywhere. And then I stumbled across some reasonable Christian writers who laid out a logical case for Jesus having actually existed, the events as described in the New Testament having actually happened, and for Jesus being who he said he was (former atheist Lee Strobel's Case for Christ has a nice, quick summary). Not that these authors "proved" their case irrefutably or that no arguments could be made against them, but they had a much more compelling, evidence-based case than I'd thought they had. I was intrigued.
I decided to see what it meant to be a Christian. Some bad childhood experiences had left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the religion, but I decided to give it my best effort to start fresh, exploring this belief system with an open mind. I bought a copy of the Bible.
Before I even opened the cover, we had a problem.
I wanted to know if the people who did the English translation of this version were said to have been inspired by God as the writers of the original texts were. When I found out the answer was no, I was concerned. Translators have a lot of leeway and can really impact a text. If this book could potentially be the key to people knowing or not knowing God, I was uneasy about reading a 21st century English version of texts that were written in far different cultures thousands of years ago, translated by average people. Could God not have inspired all translators? Though I was concerned, I decided to set the issue aside for the time being and move on.
So I started reading. I decided to skip ahead to the New Testament since that's where Jesus comes in. And, as with the Old Testament, we quickly had a problem. Here is a sort of sample discussion I'd have with whatever Christian I could find to pester with questions:
ME: Ack! I just read this part in the New Testament where Jesus tells some rich dude he has to give away all his stuff! If I decide this Christianity thing is true am I going to have to give away all my stuff?! [Worried glace at brand new Dell Inspiron laptop.]
FRIEND: Hah! No, don't worry, Jesus was just talking to that one guy.
ME: Where does it say that? Does he later clarify that that instruction was only for that one guy?
FRIEND: No, but that's clearly how he meant it.
ME: That's not clear to me. Anyway, there's this part where he tells this woman Martha that her sister Mary did the right thing by putting Jesus before trivial stuff. Was that only a lesson for her?
CHRISTIAN: No, that's a lesson for all of us.
ME: [Flipping to last page to look for answer key.] Where is that clarified?
This usually ended with my Christian acquaintances telling me to let the Holy Spirit guide me (and probably making a mental note to find less annoying friends).
My confusion about all of this made me wonder how people who are severely unintelligent could use the Bible as their guide. I'm probably in the middle of the Bell curve on intelligence, and I was really struggling. For that matter, what about the illiterate? Widespread literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, yet people who couldn't read couldn't use the Bible as their guide. They'd have to go through another, fallible person, which seemed dangerous.
Taking all of this as a whole, the writing was on the wall, so to speak. Christianity did not seem to be the path to God, if he even did exist. At least not for me. I was just too sinful, too selfish to trust myself to get it right. I felt as adrift as ever in terms of the big ethical questions of our day. Though I thought I might have "experienced" God or the Holy Spirit or something from outside the material world a few times in my exploration, using the Christian holy book to find out how God would want me to live was just not working. I was leaning towards moving on to the next religion, seeking God through some other belief system. I prayed for guidance.
Around this time someone told me that one of the Christian denominations claimed that God did leave us this "answer key" I'd been yearning for. I found out that the Catholic Church claimed to be a sort of divinely-guided Supreme Court, that God guided this Church to be inerrant in its official proclamations about what is right and wrong, how to interpret the Bible, how to know Jesus Christ, and all other questions of God and what he wants us to do.
That got my attention.
Clearly there was a need for this. Surely I was not the only person to ever feel lost in the world, unable to trust myself to objectively interpret the Bible to discern what God wants from us, unable to clearly tell which of my conclusions about right and wrong were guided by the Holy Spirit and which were guided by deeply-rooted selfishness (or perhaps something worse).
Now, obviously I wasn't going to become Catholic. I mean, the Catholic Church is weird and antiquated and sometimes the people in it do seriously bad stuff. But I was interested to at least explore this line of thinking and see what I found.
I could have never, ever imagined what I'd find. Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church was like nothing I'd ever experienced. This was truth. I knew it. I'd finally found it. It described God, our relationship to him, the Bible, Jesus, moral truths -- the entire human experience -- in a way that resonated on a deep level.
I could have never, ever imagined what I'd find. Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church was like nothing I'd ever experienced. This was truth. I knew it. I'd finally found it. It described God, our relationship to him, the Bible, Jesus, moral truths -- the entire human experience -- in a way that resonated on a deep level.
Funny, reading the catechism had the opposite effect on me. It was a dead document that provided more questions than answers and drove me to read the bible. The bible, being the Very Word Of God, was life transforming for me.
I realize now that God had illuminated my mind to understand His Word and His "Good News". I shortly there after gave My Life to Christ believing by Grace alone, thru Faith alone, in Christ alone.
Tradition was always subordinate to Scripture as an authority, and the Word of God itself never teaches that tradition is inspired. The Scriptures give numerous warnings against tradition, ('See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ' (Col. 2:8); 'Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition....They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.' (Matt. 15:6, 9; cf. Mark 7:3-13; Gal. 1:14; Col. 2:22; 1 Peter 1:18) and the Fathers rejected the teaching of an apostolic oral tradition independent of Scripture as a gnostic heresy. For the church Fathers apostolic tradition or teaching was embodied and preserved in Scripture. The teaching of the Fathers is this: What the apostles initially proclaimed and taught orally, they later committed to writing in the New Testament.
Irenaeus succinctly states it in these words:
We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.1.1, in Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaugh, trans., in The Writings of Irenaeus (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1874)