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Catholicism made me Protestant
First Things ^ | 9/11/2019 | Onsi A. Kamel

Posted on 09/11/2019 10:52:15 AM PDT by Gamecock

Like all accounts of God’s faithfulness, mine begins with a genealogy. In the late seventeenth century, my mother’s Congregationalist ancestors journeyed to the New World to escape what they saw as England’s deadly compromise with Romanism. Centuries later, ­American Presbyterians converted my father’s great-­grandmother from Coptic ­Orthodoxy to ­Protestantism. Her son became a Presbyterian minister in the Evangelical Coptic Church. By the time my parents were ­living in ­twenty-first-century Illinois, their families’ historic Reformed commitments had been replaced by non-denominational, ­Baptistic ­evangelicalism.

This form of Christianity dominated my Midwestern hometown. My parents taught me to love God, revere the Scriptures, and seek truth through reason. In middle school, my father introduced me to theology, and as a present for my sixteenth birthday he arranged a meeting between me and a Catholic philosopher, Dr. B—. From high school into college, Dr. B— introduced me to Catholic thought and graciously helped me work through my doubts about Christianity. How could a just and loving God not reveal himself equally to everyone? What are we to make of the Bible’s creation stories and flood narrative? Did Calvinism make God the author of evil? My acquaintance with Dr. B— set my intellectual trajectory for several years.

The causes of any conversion (or near conversion) are many and confused. Should I foreground psychological and social factors or my theological reasoning? Certain elements of my attraction to Catholicism were adolescent, like a sixties radical’s attraction to Marx or a contemporary activist’s to intersectionality: I aimed to preserve the core beliefs of my upbringing while fleeing their bourgeois expressions. When I arrived at the University of Chicago, I knew just enough about Calvinism to hold it in ­contempt—which is to say, I knew very little. Reacting against the middle-aged leaders of the inaptly named “Young, Restless, and Reformed Movement,” I sought refuge in that other great ­Western ­theological tradition: ­Roman ­Catholicism.

During my first year of college, I became involved in campus Catholic life. Through the influence of the Catholic student group and the Lumen Christi Institute, which hosts lectures by Catholic intellectuals, my theologically inclined college friends began converting to Catholicism, one after another. These friends were devout, intelligent, and schooled in Christian history. I met faithful and holy Catholic priests—one of whom has valiantly defended the faith for years, drawing punitive opposition from his own religious superiors, as well as the ire of Chicago’s archbishop. This priest was and is to me the very model of a holy, righteous, and courageous man.

I loved Catholicism because Catholics taught me to love the Church. At Lumen Christi events, I heard about saints and mystics, stylites and monastics, desert fathers and late-antique theologians. I was captivated by the holy martyrs, relics, Mary, and the Mass. I found in the Church a spiritual mother and the mother of all the faithful. Through Catholicism, I came into an inheritance: a past of saints and redeemed sinners from all corners of the earth, theologians who illuminated the deep things of God, music and art that summon men to worship God “in the beauty of holiness,” and a tradition to ground me in a world of flux.

Catholicism, which I took to be the Christianity of history, was a world waiting to be discovered. I set about exploring, and I tried to bring others along. I debated tradition with my mother, sola Scriptura with my then fiancée (now wife), and the meaning of the Eucharist with my father. On one occasion, a Reformed professor dispensed with my arguments for transubstantiation in a matter of minutes.

Not long after this, I began to notice discrepancies between Catholic apologists’ map of the tradition and the terrain I encountered in the tradition itself. St. Ambrose’s doctrine of justification sounded a great deal more like Luther’s sola fide than like Trent. St. John Chrysostom’s teaching on repentance and absolution—“Mourn and you annul the sin”—would have been more at home in Geneva than Paris. St. Thomas’s doctrine of predestination, much to my horror, was nearly identical to the Synod of Dordt’s. The Anglican divine Richard Hooker quoted Irenaeus, ­Chrysostom, ­Augustine, and Pope Leo I as he rejected doctrines and practices because they were not grounded in Scripture. He cited Pope Gregory the Great on the “­ungodly” title of universal bishop. The Council of ­Nicaea assumed that Alexandria was on a par with Rome, and Chalcedon declared that the Roman patriarchate was privileged only “because [Rome] was the royal city.” In short, I began to wonder whether the Reformers had a legitimate claim to the Fathers. The Church of Rome could not be straightforwardly identified as catholic.

John Henry Newman became my crucial interlocutor: More than in Ratzinger, Wojtyła, or Congar, in Newman I found a kindred spirit. Here was a man obsessed with the same questions that ate at me, questions of tradition and authority. With Newman, I agonized over conversion. I devoured his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and his Apologia pro Vita Sua. Two of his ideas were pivotal for me: his theory of doctrinal development and his articulation of the problem of private judgment. On these two ideas hung all the claims of Rome.

In retrospect, I see that Newman’s need to construct a theory of doctrinal development tells against Rome’s claims of continuity with the ancient Church. And at the time, though I wished to accept Newman’s proposal that “the early condition, and the evidence, of each doctrine . . . ought consistently to be interpreted by means of that development which was ultimately attained,” I could not. One could only justify such assumptions if one were already committed to Roman Catholic doctrine and Rome’s meaningful continuity with what came before. Without either of these commitments, I simply could not find a plausible reason to speak of “development” rather than “disjuncture,” especially because what came before so often contradicted what followed.

The issue of ecclesiastical authority was trickier for me. I recognized the absurdity of a twenty-year-old presuming to adjudicate claims about the Scriptures and two thousand years of history. Newman’s arguments against private judgment therefore had a prima facie plausibility for me. In his Apologia, Newman argues that man’s rebellion against God introduced an “anarchical condition of things,” leading human thought toward “suicidal excesses.” Hence, the fittingness of a divinely established living voice infallibly proclaiming supernatural truths. In his discourse on “Faith and Private Judgment,” Newman castigates Protestants for refusing to “surrender” reason in matters religious. The implication is that reason is unreliable in matters of revelation. Faith is assent to the incontestable, self-evident truth of God’s revelation, and reasoning becomes an excuse to refuse to bend the knee.

The more I internalized ­Newman’s claims about private judgment, however, the more I descended into skepticism. I could not reliably interpret the Scriptures, history, or God’s Word preached and given in the sacraments. But if I could not do these things, if my reason was unfit in matters religious, how was I to assess Newman’s arguments for Roman Catholicism? Newman himself had once recognized this dilemma, writing in a pre-conversion letter, “We have too great a horror of the principle of private judgment to trust it in so immense a matter as that of changing from one communion to another.” Did he expect me to forfeit the faculty by which I adjudicate truth claims, because that faculty is fallible? My ­conversion would have to be rooted in my private ­judgment—but, because of Rome’s claim of infallibility, conversion would forbid me from exercising that faculty ever again on doctrinal questions.

Finally, the infighting among traditionalist, conservative, and liberal Catholics made plain that Catholics did not gain by their magisterium a clear, living voice of divine authority. They received from the past a set of magisterial documents that had to be weighed and interpreted, often over against living prelates. The ­magisterium of prior ages only multiplied the texts one had to interpret for oneself, for living bishops, it turns out, are as bad at reading as the rest of us.

But I did not remain a Protestant merely because I could not become a Catholic. While I was discovering that Roman Catholicism could not be straightforwardly identified with the catholicism of the first six centuries (nor, in certain respects, with that of the seventh century through the twelfth), and as I was wrestling with Newman, I finally began reading the Reformers. What I found shocked me. Catholicism had, by this time, reoriented my theological concerns around the concerns of the Church catholic. My assumptions, and the issues that animated me, were those of the Church of history. My evangelical upbringing had led me to believe that Protestantism entailed the rejection of these concerns. But this notion exploded upon contact with the Protestantism of history.

Martin Luther, John Calvin, Richard Hooker, Herman Bavinck, Karl Barth—they wrestled with the concerns of the Church catholic and provided answers to the questions Catholicism had taught me to pose. Richard Hooker interpreted the Church’s traditions; Calvin followed Luther’s Augustinianism, proclaimed the visible Church the mother of the faithful, and claimed for the Reformation the Church’s exegetical tradition; Barth convinced me that God’s Word could speak, certainly and surely, from beyond all created realities, to me.

Catholicism had taught me to think like a Protestant, because, as it turned out, the Reformers had thought like catholics. Like their pope-aligned opponents, they had asked questions about justification, the authority of tradition, the mode of Christ’s self-gift in the Eucharist, the nature of apostolic succession, and the Church’s wielding of the keys. Like their opponents, Protestants had appealed to Scripture and tradition. In time, I came to find their answers not only plausible, but more faithful to Scripture than the Catholic answers, and at least as well-represented in the traditions of the Church.

The Protestants did more than out-catholic the Catholics. They also spoke to the deepest needs of sinful souls. I will never forget the moment when, like Luther five hundred years earlier, I discovered justification by faith alone through union with Christ. I was sitting in my dorm room by myself. I had been assigned Luther’s Explanations of the Ninety-Five ­Theses, and I expected to find it facile. A year or two prior, I had decided that Trent was right about justification: It was entirely a gift of grace consisting of the gradual perfecting of the soul by faith and works—God instigating and me cooperating. For years, I had attempted to live out this model of justification. I had gone to Mass regularly, prayed the rosary with friends, fasted frequently, read the Scriptures daily, prayed earnestly, and sought advice from spiritual directors. I had begun this arduous cooperation with God’s grace full of hope; by the time I sat in that dorm room alone, I was distraught and demoralized. I had learned just how wretched a sinner I was: No good work was unsullied by pride, no repentance unaccompanied by expectations of future sin, no love free from selfishness.

In this state, I picked up my copy of that arch-heretic Luther and read his explanation of Thesis 37: “Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; and this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.” With these words, Luther transformed my understanding of justification: Every Christian possesses Christ, and to possess Christ is to possess all of Christ’s righteousness, life, and merits. Christ had joined me to himself.

I had “put on Christ” in baptism and, by faith through the work of the Spirit, all things were mine, and I was Christ’s, and Christ was God’s (Gal. 3:27; 1 Cor. 3:21–23). His was not an uncertain mercy; his was not a grace of parts, which one hoped would become a whole; his was not a salvation to be attained, as though it were not already also a present possession. At that moment, the joy of my salvation poured into my soul. I wept and showed forth God’s praise. I had finally discovered the true ground and power of Protestantism: “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (Song 2:16).

Rome had brought me to ­Reformation.


TOPICS: Catholic; Evangelical Christian; General Discusssion; Mainline Protestant
KEYWORDS: catholic; charismatic; conversion; evangelical; kamel; onsiakamel; protestantism; romancatholic; romancatholicism; tiber
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To: Petrosius

As I figured, ignore the truth of the RC church.

I think you meant plain, not “plane”.


261 posted on 09/12/2019 4:57:17 PM PDT by Bulwyf
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To: Rashputin; boatbums
Heresy: That “special” moment when you have greater spiritual insight than the apostles, disciples, apostolic and holy fathers and the entire past and present ..

Actually in RC theology "the church" judges the so-called "church fathers" more than they judge her, and it is her who decides who is a valid church father and their teaching. Thus heresy according to Rome can be deciding that you better understand the ancients than she.

And the censure of those who dared contradict the magisterium was basically the response of those who sat in the seat of Moses to the common people who believed in the Messiah that Scripture promised.

Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, Why have ye not brought him? The officers answered, Never man spake like this man. Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceived? Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him? But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed. (John 7:45-49)

Yet in principal this censure also applies to your brethren who think they are the ones to determine the validity of church teaching and pope based upon their judgment of what historical teaching is and means. And it seems that these are the majority of vocal RCs here.

262 posted on 09/12/2019 5:00:28 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: Petrosius

Read Ephesians 2 and tell me that Catholicism has it right.

Oh wait, you did but you added words into it so you could justify your false beliefs.


263 posted on 09/12/2019 5:14:25 PM PDT by Luircin
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To: Mrs. Don-o

That much we can agree on, so I guess we’ll have to leave it there for now.


264 posted on 09/12/2019 5:15:43 PM PDT by Luircin
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To: ebb tide; All

http://www.the-bible-antichrist.com/roman-catholic-church-persecution.html

Nobody really wants to address this I suppose. This scratches the surface, but history is well documented even up to recently.

So all arguments aside, if we want to talk fruits again, let’s talk fruits.


265 posted on 09/12/2019 5:18:35 PM PDT by Bulwyf
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To: Mrs. Don-o; Luircin; fidelis; Salvation
Paul also says "If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." (1 Corinthians 13:2). So even "ALL FAITH' gets you "nothing" if you have not love. If we will allow Jesus to chime in for a moment here, He says: "If you love me, keep my commandments." So it seems the commandments still retain a tad bit of relevance, somehow, despite our advanced theology. I don't see where it says "Faith and bowl of pasta will get you eternal life," but we do have St. James saying "Faith without works is dead." (James 2:17). This is probably a good illustration of the insufficiency of trying to prove things via one-liner proof-texting. Paul made reference to "all of Scripture," not one-liners. So put that in your pasta-cooker, with a nice dollop of olive oil and grain of salt. Tagline, to see the only place in Scripture where it says "faith alone"

Are you serious or a sophist? Do you really believe after all this time that sola fide means that a faith that will not effect obedience is salvific, versus it being the faith that is behind works of faith that is was justifies, as explained and shown already?

As shown below, the idea of an inert dead faith being salvific is hardly one that is tenable according to Luther himself. However, you cannot confuse the effect of faith with its cause, any more than the effect of forgiveness in the story of the palsied man in Mk. 2 is to made the cause, even though as is sometimes the case with faith and works, to say one thing is to say the other.

And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts? Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house. (Mark 2:8-11)

Martin Luher: "it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire! "

266 posted on 09/12/2019 5:20:40 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: Petrosius
Yes, the plane meaning of the words of Scripture must be false since they contradict the opinions of a 16th German monk.


267 posted on 09/12/2019 5:23:00 PM PDT by aMorePerfectUnion
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To: Mrs. Don-o
But which does not mean that salvific faith is one that is inert, and is unrelated to obedience, but that it is expressive, effectual faith which effects obedience that is counted for righteousness, making the believer "accepted in the Beloved" (Eph. 1:6) on His account.

Truem good, and beautiful.

Good, but then somehow (which I find hard to believe) after years on FR, you must think this is contrary to the sola fide of Reformers or whom "Perseverance of the saints" is a requirement for claiming to be one of the elect.

Or were you mistaken in your affirmation of my description of sola fide?

268 posted on 09/12/2019 5:24:48 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: rollo tomasi
Is Charles Spurgeon committing a grave sin when he comments Matthew 10:22 by stating: Enduring to the end We must not enter the work of the ministry without counting the cost. I.Perseverance is the badge of the saint.

If anyone here disagrees with that then they disagree with me also, but not that the obedience of faith merits justification, versus living effectual faith purifying the heart and justifying the person, rendering him "accepted in the Beloved" on Christ's account.

269 posted on 09/12/2019 5:29:13 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: Mrs. Don-o
"Ye see then how that by works a man is * justified, and not** by faith only." - James 2:24 (KJV) Don't get me wrong, I can easily see how you can neatly interpret this in a quite opposite sense.

Which, if meaning that works of faith actually merit a right standing with God, versus the faith behind such being what justifies, then James is contradicting both Moses and Paul, who affirm

And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be. And he believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness. (Genesis 15:5-6)

And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara’s womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform. And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness. (Romans 4:19-22)

Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to him; But for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. (Romans 4:23-25)

While actually realizing the fulfillment of the promise of God required some response on the part of Abraham, and NT believers are exhorted to continue in obedient faith, and are to labor to please God, yet obtaining a justified state for Abraham and NT believers is by faith being counted for righteousness.

270 posted on 09/12/2019 5:41:08 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: metmom
It depends some on which Catholic you are talking to. For some FRomans on this board, not even other Catholics are Catholic enough for them.

You mean, like Pope Frank? You can’t even jokingly ask the question anymore, is the pope catholic, cuz many think he is not.

271 posted on 09/12/2019 5:48:00 PM PDT by Mark17 (Once saved, always saved. I do not care if some do not like that. It will NEVER be my problem)
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To: Petrosius
So we are not saved by faith alone: faith must be accompanied with changing our lives, i.e. good works.

That is actually how sola fide was described in no less a document than the Westminster confession:

Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and His righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification;(d) yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.(e) - https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/westminster-confession-faith/

What Catholics seemingly cannot comprehend or allow is that is it the faith that will effect obedience that is counted for righteousness, but the effect is not the cause, the means of appropriation, even though they are two sides of the same coin.

272 posted on 09/12/2019 5:53:49 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: Petrosius

The church fathers taught faith alone.

Your salvation through works nonsense was thought up over 1000 years after Christ.

Don’t blame Luther for going back to the faith of the ACTUAL Apostles and not the fake ones that Rome set up.


273 posted on 09/12/2019 6:03:58 PM PDT by Luircin
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To: metmom; Elsie
But that does not mean the works save someone. It simply is the FRUIT of the salvation, not the cause of it.

Hasn’t that been stated about 43.5 million times? I know Elsie told me a billon times, not to exaggerate, but it appears some just can’t quite grasp the concept. Do you suppose 1st Corinthians 2:14 is the reason? 😁

274 posted on 09/12/2019 6:04:58 PM PDT by Mark17 (Once saved, always saved. I do not care if some do not like that. It will NEVER be my problem)
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To: daniel1212
What Catholics seemingly cannot comprehend or allow is that is it the faith that will effect obedience that is counted for righteousness,...

Are not works counted for righteosness? Or are works all for naught?

275 posted on 09/12/2019 6:06:40 PM PDT by ebb tide (We have a rogue curia in Rome)
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To: metmom
Shall I get out the popcorn and lots of butter while we wait for an answer?

Or, you could wait till you need last rites. You will wait just about as long. 😁👎😆🤣🤗😂🙃

276 posted on 09/12/2019 6:09:12 PM PDT by Mark17 (Once saved, always saved. I do not care if some do not like that. It will NEVER be my problem)
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To: Petrosius
And since the Bible indeed does not contradict itself, James’ explicit statement that we are not saved by faith alone shows how the Protestant interpretation of Paul is false.

But if Abraham was not justified until he offered up Abraham then you have a clear contradiction btwn James vs. Moses and Paul. See also post 270

However, there can be no contradiction if James is wholly inspired of God, and while Paul is describing what actually appropriates justification before God for the sinner, with this being the contextual issue, and in which Abraham was justified by faith, not any works, though the faith of Abraham is shown to be an obedient one. Meanwhile James is contextually dealing with whether a fruitless or fruitful believer is justified, and in which it is a faith that works which justifies (and justifies one as being a believer), and not a bare faith. The plain teaching is that James is speaking

277 posted on 09/12/2019 6:11:03 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: Petrosius
Yes, the plane meaning of the words of Scripture must be false since they contradict the opinions of a 16th German monk. So much for the idea of sola Scriptura.

You mean Luther believed that a faith without works of faith was a living salvific faith?

278 posted on 09/12/2019 6:12:41 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: daniel1212; aMorePerfectUnion; ealgeone; metmom; boatbums; Iscool; Bulwyf; rollo tomasi
I wonder, that old Brick mason who built chimneys ... he had an iron L shaped bar that was absolutely straight which he would rest at the corner of a coarse of bricks then position up the edge of layers, to justify / straighten out of alignment bricks for the straightness. I wonder how he would read James?
279 posted on 09/12/2019 6:13:02 PM PDT by MHGinTN (A dispensation perspective is a powerful tool for discernment)
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To: daniel1212
Was not Abel's sacrifice a work?

Was not Jesus Christ's passion and crucifixion a work?

Are we not taught to be Christ-like?

280 posted on 09/12/2019 6:13:07 PM PDT by ebb tide (We have a rogue curia in Rome)
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