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.

[editor-surveyor]

Actually I did use the abuse button; it was ignored.

[editor-surveyor]

Take out your calendar and count the days from dark to dark.
.

[Syncro]

What do you expect?

This is Free Republic, everyone here is dumb except you.

Or maybe you include yourself in your tagline?

[Religion Moderator]

It was not ignored.

The use of the word “Perhaps” made the rest of the sentence an opinion of the poster.

The not being pinged part was addressed also.

[trisham]

This is but one forum of many on this site.

[editor-surveyor]

So you’re saying he has more work to do?
.

[editor-surveyor]

Perhaps you’re an effective moderator.

[trisham]

So you’re saying he has more work to do?

*************************

He? To whom are you referring?

[Elsie]

Obama?

[trisham]

Oy vey.

[Springfield Reformer]

>> “14 For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end” <<

This clear statement, and the many similar ones spread through the epistles, is what they all are running from.

The fact that one can only be saved if he holds the faith unto the end, is what they want to hide, from themselves as well as others.

It puts churchianity out of business. The anything goes gospel, the prosperity gospel, and the grab it with your faith gospel, all preach a pre-trib OSAS lie with their money-sucking TV ministries.

They’re all going to fly to heaven in their luxury corporate jets. Their staff of accountants and lawyers will take care of the expenses

No hiding necessary. I don't know where you get that from.   As a Calvinist, but even more so as a Christian, I embrace this statement as much as any other in Scripture.  It fits the overall message of Scripture.  But it has been often misunderstood as placing a condition on salvation that in fact it does not.  No doubt there are some churches where your caricature of eternal security as a blank check to ignore godliness of life is true. In practice they are extremely hard to find.  I think I knew one person once who actually thought that way, and it was only hypothetical.  He didn't actually want to disobey anything from God.  But he did expect that someone else could, hypothetically, be saved and then be totally dismissive of righteousness till death. Extremely rare to actually find that.

Other than that, the preachers, teachers, authors of my acquaintance were all willing to preach just what Paul does in Hebrews, including 3:14, that we dare not take our salvation for granted, in the sense that if we do not live like new creations in Christ, we had better be worried we aren't. As Jeremiah says, the heart is deceitful above all things.  He's right.  Anybody can be self-deceived.  

However, our capacity for self-deception does not negate the unilateral nature of the covenant of salvation.  For example, in the passage you cite, the expression "are made partakers" is not a future state we achieve as a reward for enduring to the end.  You say these statements of Paul are hard to understand, and some of them are, as Peter said.  But not this one.  The verb tense is the perfect, a completed action in the past with ongoing present consequences.  A fully unfolded translation of the phrase might be "for we have been made and continue to be partakers in Christ ..." So the "if" following cannot be a future condition required for salvation.  

What else could it be?  Easy.  There are many false professors among the faithful.  Wheats and tares, which you cannot deny, and any address to the body of the faithful must account for the possibility there are some who have the appearance of being faithful but do not pass the test.  Many times with these conditional clauses the object of the condition is NOT the gaining or losing of salvation, by some work of devotion or human determination of will, which would void thew Gospel of God's grace, as you know full well from Paul's many other not so hard to understand writings.

Rather, the object of the condition is the truth or falsity of the profession of faith, as it is here in Hebrews 3:14.  You've been made partaker with Christ, His death and resurrected life, His power to heal and give comfort to His child, His eternality of life, His forgiveness, His holiness and purity, all accomplished, past tense, with ongoing effects in the present.  Perhaps in your imaginary Hebrew original that no one has it is something more accommodating to your theory.  But in the God-breathed Greek, Paul is saying these people are already partakers in Christ.  

But as is his pattern throughout this entire book, he does point to a condition, but not a condition to procure something in the future.  Instead, he uses conditionality to state a test of true versus false profession.  IF they do not endure, then we learn they were like those children of Israel that fell dead in the wilderness for their unbelief.  Unbelief is not the state of one who is spirit born, born from above, born again.

1 John 2:19  They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

Here we have John giving us a live demonstration of failure to endure, and what it meant.  It was not a loss of something they had, or the failure to procure something they were previously on track to obtain.  No, it was a manifestation of an ongoing truth, that they were, past tense, not of us. Hard words, but easy to understand, if one is willing.

BTW, I think I now understand why it is important in the Hebrew Roots scheme of things to separate Peter's "born again" from John's "born again."  Because if they are the same thing, then it is clear the new birth is, like partaking in Christ here, an accomplished fact, and holding out formal obedience as an incentive to and therefore effectual cause of salvation no longer works.  So the HR hermeneutic must first deconstruct John 3:3 as a completely out of place discussion about the resurrection body, which has the primary benefit of pushing the new birth off to the distant future, though it renders the discusion with Nicodemas bizarrely unrelated to both his need and his inquiry of Jesus. Once that "futurization" of the new birth is done, the HR interpreter can go back to Peter and turn that "born again" into a description of mikveh, baptism, and circumvent entirely the knotty problem of how anyone, once becoming a new creation in Christ through the present reality of the new birth, could still be waiting for that new birth contingent on endurance to the end.  Nice idea for an escape hatch, but it doesn't really work.

Anyway, much more could be said (especially about that nonsense about corporate jets - I don't know anybody at church like that - we are middle class & poor folk, and as a church, generous to a fault with the resources we do have), but I'm out of time for now.

Peace,

SR

[Resettozero]

I had a friend broadcasting the city’s Christmas Parade live back in the ‘70s on one of the two local rock stations. Midway through the remote, morning man Tim announced with the most believable alarm and sadness that the Associated Press had just confirmed Santa Claus had passed away.

It was the funniest thing I had heard on the radio since Imus came to Hooterville for a live remote.

Thousands of parents and their kids didn’t think so.

I really miss Tim; wonder where he got to.

[imardmd1]

The misquotes in the NT are due to the translator using the LXX instead of the true Hebrew scriptures in most instances.

You are wrong, and the reason you are wrong is because the "keepers" of the LXX were mostly Christians, and they rewrote the LXX with the passages taken from the New Testament writers to replace what would have been the actual Hebrew Scriptures translated into Koine. The LXX is so bad that Jerome, after working with it somewhat, rejected it as the supply of the text for his OT translation and used the existing Hebrew instead. YUou need to read Will Kinney on the Septuagint.

http://dorightchristians.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/will-kinney-kjv-index/

Particularly, his article on the question of a genuine Septuagint is here:

http://brandplucked.webs.com/nolxx.htm

NO LXX - The Fictitious Use of the so-called Greek Septuagint

(Will Kinney)

===========

I'm afraid your position on this is so naive and indefensible as to be sort of humorous.

[BlueDragon]

Perhaps you’re an effective moderator.

And perhaps you are a [........]

Woops, I'm an Indian

[Religion Moderator]

You’re opinion is duly noted and correct, thank you.

[editor-surveyor]

Now, don’t read things into this...

.

[editor-surveyor]

Coming from YOU, that has to be the best compliment that I have received in a long time!

And that is quite an imaginative, if far fetched, story that you have concocted.

Do you live in Colorado by chance?
.

[editor-surveyor]

Thank you for again re-writing the Bible in your post.

Unfortunately the New SR Standard Bible reads too many personal dreams into Paul’s unusually clear writing in Hebrews.

Is every passage that you disagree with “misunderstood?”

“are made partakers” refers directly to the knowledge by which we are to walk in faith, not to salvation, that Paul has stated in several epistles to be the event at the last trump.

The ‘condition’ on salvation of which you speak was first placed there by Yeshua in Matthew 24.
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[boatbums]

Still wresting with Paul’s “hard to be understood” phrases, I see!

Who is doing the "wresting" here? The verses Metmom posted say what they say - exactly what God wanted them to say. Perhaps you will only accept the unlearned and unstable Rood-wrested version, but that hardly means God's word is not perspicuous.

[af_vet_1981]

were all willing to preach just what Paul does in Hebrews, including 3:14,

The author of Hebrews is anonymous. One may imagine he is the author just as one may imagine it, and some other NT books were originally written in Hebrew before being translated into Greek. If God wanted us to know the author it would not be hidden. If God wanted us to have original Hebrew manuscripts they would not be hidden.

Anybody can be self-deceived.

If that were true then you cannot be certain you are saved. You may be self-deceived. The best you can be is self assured and that is no guarantee. On the contrary, we can know we are saved if we believe Jesus and keep his commandments, which is what our Apostle told us. 3And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. 4He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. 5But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. 6He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked. We do not need theology. We do not need Calvinism. We need to obey the LORD Jesus Christ, which we will only do if we believe him. Otherwise we do our own thing.

The verb tense is the perfect, a completed action in the past with ongoing present consequences. A fully unfolded translation of the phrase might be "for we have been made and continue to be partakers in Christ ..." So the "if" following cannot be a future condition required for salvation. What else could it be? Easy. There are many false professors among the faithful. Wheats and tares, which you cannot deny, and any address to the body of the faithful must account for the possibility there are some who have the appearance of being faithful but do not pass the test.

I have heard of by grace are ye saved through faith and that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. I have not heard of saved by grammar. Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus; I note the audience are already holy and partakers of Messiah.

But as is his pattern throughout this entire book, he does point to a condition, but not a condition to procure something in the future. Instead, he uses conditionality to state a test of true versus false profession. IF they do not endure, then we learn they were like those children of Israel that fell dead in the wilderness for their unbelief. Unbelief is not the state of one who is spirit born, born from above, born again. 1 John 2:19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us. Here we have John giving us a live demonstration of failure to endure, and what it meant. It was not a loss of something they had, or the failure to procure something they were previously on track to obtain. No, it was a manifestation of an ongoing truth, that they were, past tense, not of us. Hard words, but easy to understand, if one is willing.

This is the context in 1 John and we can compare it with the audience in the book of Hebrews. 18Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. 19They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us. 20But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. 21I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth. 22Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. 23Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: (but) he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also. 24Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning. If that which ye have heard from the beginning shall remain in you, ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father.

Now compare with the people in Hebrews. John warns of those who do not, or rather no longer believe Jesus is the Messiah. That antichrist refers to one who was enlightened and partook of Messiah and the Holy Spirit but then fell away is my hypothesis in this 1 John text. For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5 And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, 6 If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.

I know you are not denying the Holy Trinity. Therefore "partaking" in Messiah is the same as "partaking" of the Holy Spirit. Therefore those in Hebrews were those partakers who fall away and are not saved by grammar. "for we have been made and continue to be partakers in Christ ..." is not true. Conditions changed. They fell away. They were partakers but are no longer partakers.

You can say they are not the elect, but you cannot say they were never partakers of Messiah and the Holy Spirit.

Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. 39 But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul.