I Hated the Idea of Becoming Catholic

Aleteia ^ | JUNE 20, 2014 | ANTHONY BARATTA

[NYer]

It was the day after Ash Wednesday in 2012 when I called my mom from my dorm room at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and told her I thought I was going to become Catholic.

“You’re not going to become Catholic, you just know you’re not Southern Baptist,” she said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

A pause. “Oh boy,” she sighed.

I started crying.

I cannot stress enough how much I hated the idea of becoming Catholic. I was bargaining to the last moment. I submitted a sermon for a competition days before withdrawing from school. I was memorizing Psalm 119 to convince myself of sola scriptura. I set up meetings with professors to hear the best arguments. I purposefully read Protestant books about Catholicism, rather than books by Catholic authors.

Further, I knew I would lose my housing money and have to pay a scholarship back if I withdrew from school, not to mention disappointing family, friends, and a dedicated church community.

But when I attempted to do my homework, I collapsed on my bed. All I wanted to do was scream at the textbook, “Who says?!”

I had experienced a huge paradigm shift in my thinking about the faith, and the question of apostolic authority loomed larger than ever.

But let’s rewind back a few years.

I grew up in an evangelical Protestant home. My father was a worship and preaching pastor from when I was in fourth grade onwards. Midway through college, I really fell in love with Jesus Christ and His precious Gospel and decided to become a pastor.

It was during that time that I was hardened in my assumption that the Roman Catholic Church didn’t adhere to the Bible. When I asked one pastor friend of mine during my junior year why Catholics thought Mary remained a virgin after Jesus’ birth when the Bible clearly said Jesus had “brothers,” he simply grimaced: “They don’t read the Bible.”

Though I had been in talks with Seattle’s Mars Hill Church about doing an internship with them, John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life clarified my call to missionary work specifically, and I spent the next summer evangelizing Catholics in Poland.

So I was surprised when I visited my parents and found a silly looking book titled Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic on my father’s desk. What was my dad doing reading something like this? I was curious and hadn’t brought anything home to read, so I gave it a look.

David Currie’s memoir of leaving behind his evangelical education and ministries was bothersome. His unapologetic defense of controversial doctrines regarding Mary and the papacy were most shocking, as I had never seriously considered that Catholics would have sensible, scriptural defenses to these beliefs.

The book’s presence on my father’s desk was explained more fully a few months later when he called me and said he was returning to the Catholicism of his youth. My response? “But, can’t you just be Lutheran or something?” I felt angry, betrayed, and indignant. For the next four months I served as a youth pastor at my local church and, in my free time, read up on why Catholicism was wrong.

During that time, I stumbled across a Christianity Today article that depicted an “evangelical identity crisis.” The author painted a picture of young evangelicals, growing up in a post-modern world, yearning to be firmly rooted in history and encouraged that others had stood strong for Christ in changing and troubled times. Yet, in my experience, most evangelical churches did not observe the liturgical calendar, the Apostles’ Creed was never mentioned, many of the songs were written after 1997, and if any anecdotal story was told about a hero from church history, it was certainly from after the Reformation. Most of Christian history was nowhere to be found.

For the first time, I panicked. I found a copy of the Catechism and started leafing through it, finding the most controversial doctrines and laughing at the silliness of the Catholic Church. Indulgences? Papal infallibility? These things, so obviously wrong, reassured me in my Protestantism. The Mass sounded beautiful and the idea of a visible, unified Church was appealing - but at the expense of the Gospel? It seemed obvious that Satan would build a large organization that would lead so many just short of heaven.

I shook off most of the doubts and enjoyed the remainder of my time at college, having fun with the youth group and sharing my faith with the students. Any lingering doubts, I assumed, would be dealt with in seminary.

I started my classes in January with the excitement of a die-hard football fan going to the Super Bowl. The classes were fantastic and I thought I had finally rid myself of any Catholic problems.

But just a few weeks later, I ran into more doubts. We were learning about spiritual disciplines like prayer and fasting and I was struck by how often the professor would skip from St. Paul to Martin Luther or Jonathan Edwards when describing admirable lives of piety. Did nothing worthwhile happen in the first 1500 years? The skipping of history would continue in many other classes and assigned reading. The majority of pre-Reformation church history was ignored.

I soon discovered I had less in common with the early Church fathers than I thought. Unlike most Christians in history, communion had always been for me an occasional eating of bread and grape juice, and baptism was only important after someone had gotten “saved.” Not only did these views contradict much of Church history but, increasingly, they did not match with uncomfortable Bible passages I had always shrugged off (John 6, Romans 6, etc).

Other questions that I had buried began to reappear, no longer docile but ferocious, demanding an answer. Where did the Bible come from? Why didn’t the Bible claim to be “sufficient”? The Protestant answers that had held me over in the last year were no longer satisfying.

Jefferson Bethke’s viral YouTube video, “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus,” was released during this time. The young man meant well, but to me he only validated what the Wall Street Journal called “the dangerous theological anarchy of young evangelicals,” attempting to remove Jesus from the confines of religion but losing so much in the process.

Ash Wednesday was the tipping point. A hip Southern Baptist church in Louisville held a morning Ash Wednesday service and many students showed up to classes with ashes on their forehead. At chapel that afternoon, a professor renowned for his apologetic efforts against Catholicism expounded upon the beauty of this thousand year old tradition.

Afterwards, I asked a seminary friend why most evangelicals had rejected this beautiful thing. He responded with something about Pharisees and “man-made traditions.”

I shook my head. “I can’t do this anymore.”

My resistance to Catholicism started to fade. I was feeling drawn to the sacraments, sacramentals, physical manifestations of God’s grace, the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. No more borrowing, no more denying.

It was the next day that I called my mom and told her I thought I was going to become Catholic.

I didn’t go to classes on Friday. I went to the seminary library and checked out books I had previously forbidden myself to look at too closely, like the Catechism and Pope Benedict’s latest. I felt like I was checking out porn. Later, I drove to a 5pm Saturday Mass. The gorgeous crucifix at the front of the church reminded me of when I had mused that crucifixes demonstrated that Catholics didn’t really understand the resurrection.

But I saw the crucifix differently this time and began crying. “Jesus, my suffering savior, you’re here.”

A peace came over me until Tuesday, when it yielded to face-to-windshield reality. Should I stay or leave? I had several panicked phone calls: “I literally have no idea what I am going to do tomorrow morning.”

On Wednesday morning I woke up, opened my laptop, and typed out “77 Reasons I Am Leaving Evangelicalism.” The list included things like sola scriptura, justification, authority, the Eucharist, history, beauty, and continuity between the Old and New Testament. The headlines and the ensuing paragraphs flowed from my fingers like water bursting from a centuries-old dam. 

A few hours later on February 29, 2012 I slipped out of Louisville, Kentucky, eager to not confuse anyone else and hoping I wasn’t making a mistake.  

The next few months were painful. More than anything else I felt ashamed and defensive, uncertain of how so much of my identity and career path could be upended so quickly. Nonetheless, I joined the Church on Pentecost with the support of my family and started looking for work.

So much has changed since then. I met Jackie on CatholicMatch.com that June, got married a year later, and celebrated the birth of our daughter, Evelyn, on March 3rd, 2014. We’re now in Indiana and I’m happy at my job.

I’m still very new on this Catholic journey. To all inquirers out there, I can tell you that my relationship with God has deepened and strengthened. As I get involved in our parish, I’m so thankful for the love of evangelism and the Bible that I learned in Protestantism.

I have not so much left my former faith as I have filled in the gaps. I thank God for the fullness of the Catholic faith.

[Heart-Rest]

"1 John 3:21-23     Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us."

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Bible verses are honest and true, but they can be misused and abused in a variety of dishonest and untrue ways.

For example, one way to do that is the old "text-hopping", "cherry-picking" style of putting different, unrelated texts together to try to make some kind of point that was not intended in any of the cherry-picked texts, like these two Bible texts, strung together to falsely "prove" that the pure in heart should be stoned to death:

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"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
Matthew 5:8

"Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."
Deuteronomy 21:21

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Another blatant example of honest and true Bible texts being used in a thoroughly dishonest and untrue way is when Satan shamefully, disgracefully, and despicably quoted the scriptures [Psalm 91:11-12] to the Lord in a deceivingly dishonest and subtly untrue way, as shown here:

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Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 'He will give his angels charge of you', and 'On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.'"
Matthew 4:5-6

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(I also believe that the use of Bible texts in post #432 and post #433 in this thread are both egregious examples of abusively misusing the scriptures in unrelated responses like that.)

For one of the Bible texts you used in this post, 1 John 3:21-23, the very next verse says the following:

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All who keep His commandments abide in Him, and He in them.
1 John 3:24

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That of course is the plural "commandments", and I believe the only prudent way to interpret that is not that it means just one of His commandments, and not that it means just some of His commandments, but it really means all of them.    This includes the following commandments of Jesus Christ:

✝============================================================✝

Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said,

"Take, eat; this is my body."

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying,

"Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."
Matthew 26:26-28

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"I am the bread of life.    Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.    This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die.    I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh."

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"

So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.    For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.    He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him."

"As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.    This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever."

This he said in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.
John 6:48-59

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For someone to truly and honestly "believe Jesus" or "believe in Jesus" they have to believe every single thing He said, not just pick and choose among them.    Now some doubters and skeptics and unbelievers (or only partial believers) are confused because they have great difficulty distinguishing between the metaphors in the Bible and the literal declarations in the Bible.    They say things like, "Do you think Jesus is actually a door, and that we should eat doors?"    For those unbelievers, it might be helpful to ask, did Jesus command anyone to eat a door?    God also gives us much greater help in regards to that by the Holy Spirit inspiring St Paul later (long after the "Last Supper") to instruct all of us with the following:

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For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you.    Do this in remembrance of me."

In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood.    Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me."

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.    Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.    For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.
1 Corinthians 11:23-29

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Now, ask yourself honestly (without just trying to win an argument), does St. Paul ever say anything remotely like that about eating or drinking a door, or does he say that if you treat a door in an unworthy manner by not discerning the body of the Lord in the door, you bring judgment down upon yourself?

If a person lacks intelligence or wisdom, perhaps they will not be accountable for this plain teaching of Jesus Christ, but if it is just intractable stubbornness, or mulish ignorance that stops a person from believing all that our Savior has taught us, they may want to very carefully and prayerfully reconsider those words of Jesus Christ.

When we go before the judgment seat of Christ, we will not be bringing any kind of snide, snooty, snarky, know-it-all attitudes there.    If the Lord asks us why we claimed to believe Him, and why we claimed to believe in His Holy Written Word, but in reality we didn't really believe Him when He said, this, and we didn't really believe Him when He said that, and we just threw out seven books from His Holy Written Word, based only on the assertion of one very fallible man, we will not be giving Him some kind of smart-alecky reply, or some half-truth on that judgment day.    Those kinds of expressions won't be wise to assert at that point, in front of "The Truth", and whoever tries that kind of nonsense there will probably be heading on the "down elevator".

(I'll try to check back at a later time for any possible replies.    Goodnight to all.)

[Dajjal]

bumpus ad summum

[imardmd1]

The note to Antioch, a strong church without Judean oversight, was aware of the special role of the Apostles, but they understood Christ's authority was vested one by one, in the local church leadership. I take the grammar, since the verb was not in the imperative mode, to be a recognition of Antioch's autonomy in sending out their own disciples, and governing themselves under the Holy Spirit's guidance without crawling to the Jerusalem church for direction.

In fact, the Apostles wound up not doing what Jesus commanded them to do, and that was to go and make disciples of all ethnos. Instead, they built themselves a nice little nest, which God had to kick over and destroy to get them out into the fields white with harvest, as Paul and Philip were doing.

When Peter came to Antioch, he disgraced the gospel so blatantly that Paul had to publicly scold him for his behavior. This is why Peter was never permitted to lead the Jerusalem or any other church. I could keep on, but I just will never buy the whole Platonic catholic paradigm as it is always presented, but refused by the overall context.

The note sent to Antioch from Jerusalem was not an order. It was with verbs cast in the middle voice or middle deponent as a strong suggestion as to what they ought to adopt on their own decision, not on command by Jerusalem.

The church at Jerusalem did not reign over other churches, and the ministry to the gentiles was deliberately not allocated to Peter. Christ personally gave that to Paul.

The note was sent precisely because it was men going out from Jerusalem attempting to exert an authority over the Syrian and Cilician churches that they did not have that caused the Jerusalem leaders to unanimously retract any such presumed authority over the surrounding churches. The beginning of the Christian era was with churches planted by the Apostle-disciplers and their disciples, an association of coequal, like-minded constituents, with every regenerated believer a priest. It was not a revision of the old Jewish now-dead-to-God priest-over-the-lay people (nikao laoi) religion with a Christian flavor, governed by its own central Sanhedrin (Vatican) and residence of a Highest Priest, as the Romanists would desire.

The model you propose is not one that I see in the context of the New Testament. Believe what you want, but the other shoe will eventually drop. And the further I go in studying His Precious Word, the clearer the local-autonomous-church model becomes, where Christ is predominant and His Word the absolute authority for belief and practice.

As a last matter, my comment was actually to Elsie, and a cautionary note regarding the kind of translation she was using. Imposing your comment on it is exactly what I expected to occur. But it does not change the grammar of the Greek.

[imardmd1]

I said what I did because at he time I got it, it was in my tomorrow that you sent it onyour today. That is, uh, hmm —

[Mark17]

Yes, I understand. What is your opinion about who sired the Nephilim of Genesis 6?

[Springfield Reformer]

Obedience isn't really the issue. With the exception of a few very minor sects, all Christians everywhere observe the Lord's Supper on a regular basis.  But obedience to commands He has given us are not the efficient cause of our salvation.  As James says, true believers don't just talk about their faith, they live it.  But as Paul says, that obedience is a byproduct of God working in us "both to will and to do His good pleasure."   The efficient cause of our salvation is the faith God gives us to believe on Jesus as our crucified and risen Lord and Savior.

But obedience to man is not obedience to God. No Christian desiring to be faithful to Christ should engage in any practice based on one group's false interpretation of Scripture, no matter what claims of authority that group makes, especially if that obedience puts one at odds with other, obvious, basic commands of God, such as not worshiping made-made objects, even if some shaman tells them it's OK because the incantation turned the object into God.

The fact remains, none of the passages in the NT dealing with the Lord's Supper justify the sacramental approach to the bread and wine. The Lord's Supper is specifically set forth, not as a means of periodic refueling on grace, but as a way to remember what Jesus did for us in giving Himself to be both broken and spilled out to win our salvation, once and for all. And all we who believe are the living body of Christ,  and that is the offense Paul warns against in Corinth, that in what should be a celebration of Christian love for our Savior and each other, some were abusing it as a way to foster division in the body of Christ.  It is that cruelty of believer to believer that Paul warned would make one unworthy to partake, because we all should be one in Him, and no one should partake who is hard-hearted toward his brother.  That is the failure to discern of which Paul spoke, not some theoretical substance swapping magic "discovered" nine centuries later by Radbertus.

And John 6 isn't even about the Lord's Supper.  It's about feeding on Jesus by believing in Him.  The eating is spiritual, not fleshly.  The unbelievers in the crowd couldn't grasp the meaning of the bread metaphor, so they got stuck on a hyper-literal absurdity.  Jesus even told them this was about spiritual things, not physical.  They weren't going to have to break the law to obey the Author of the law.  But they stubbornly stayed stuck on physical.  It freaked them out and they abandoned Him, not because He was asking them to break the law and consume Him physically, but because down deep they were not being drawn to Him by the Father, and therefore they could not feed on Him spiritually, which is only to say, they could not believe on Him unto eternal life.  

Did a handful of the early Christian writers use "realistic" language to describe the elements?  Yes, that started happening.  Not right away (it is missing from the Didache, for example), but it began with a trickle and became more prominent as the centuries passed.  But even among those early mentions, many still qualify as the innocent use of direct metaphor and no more.  Others are casting the elements as platonic types to the archetype of the physical reality of Jesus, the purpose being polemic refutation of Docetism and other errors, and have nothing whatsoever to do with Radbertus' alchemy of substances.

But the fallible writings of fallible men are not on a par with the God-breathed Scriptures.  Such writings are instructive, and often beneficial, but not controlling, especially when they conflict with God's own words.  And in Scripture you will never find Christian theurgy, the use of sacramental ritual to connect with and draw resources from deity, thus you will never find Christians being urged to worship any supposedly transformed made-made object, though this was common among the pagan philosophies.  It took centuries of interaction with platonic and neoplatonic ideas to ween the Roman schism away from the simplicity of Scriptural worship and get fully caught up in superstition regarding the Lord's Supper.  It is the duty of all who would remain obedient to Christ to resist that corruption, and look to the words of God for the truth, which in the case of the Lord's Supper, is to remember Him by it, and to proclaim His death till He comes back for us.

Peace,

SR

[Springfield Reformer]

Useful analysis. Thanks.

[Elsie]

I have been to Punxsy... stayed in the hotel next door to their town square..

Me, too!

I drove over from Indy one day, and on the return trip my car (a 1970 Opel GT) bogged down and quit running.

After a half-hour or so it started ok; only to bog down again in a few minutes.

It was during a heavy, wet snowstorm at the time.

I found out later it was carburetor icing that was causing the problem. The moisture would freeze out of the air and close off the intake, choking the engine down.

After a few minutes, the heat from the engine would melt the ice and I could go again.

It was the weirdest problem I've ever had with an engine.

[Elsie]

wobble explained...

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/clisci100ka.html

[Elsie]

The problem with your posting those is that the Catholic Church has so corrupted...

Yeah!

Just look at those 7 Catholic churches in Asia John wrote about!

[Elsie]

One has to understand that sometimes it’s simply the mindset of the poster who typically uses scripture only as a weapon.

Works for me!

Hebrews 4:12
For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

[Elsie]

Most don’t really even read verse 8, because they are looking for things out of their own experience, that they can insert into the verse.

I just HATE when that happens!!

An ability to travel invisibly as the wind does eliminates the kind of birth Nicodemus was envisioning.

[Elsie]

I think you missed my point... I like your screen name!

[Elsie]

Dang!

I shudda read ahead!!

[Elsie]

Did you miss my point?

Seems to be a lot of this going on!

[Elsie]

Or we can go around thinking it’s Tiw’s day today and tomorrow is Woden’s day, etc.

And the FSM has Festivus.

[Elsie]

Actually Apparently Jesus was teaching His disciples the use of figurative-literal language, with which they were not acquainted, much less expert.

This is my body...

[Elsie]

We don't get to take back the words we say in person either.

But we can apologize for them.

It makes us better folks that way.

---

I hope 'us' fits everyone reading...

;^)

[Elsie]

NOW you’ve done it!

Isn’t arguing about the words that have been translated BORN AGAIN enough for one thread?

NOW we’ll get a big baptism thingy going!

[Elsie]

Give the guy some credit.

I'm merely showing my lack of credit.