Catholicism made me Protestant

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By the time my parents were living in twenty-first-century Illinois, their families’ historic Reformed commitments had been replaced by non-denominational, Baptistic evangelicalism.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).

All sins are forgiven with baptism.

Nope.

All of our sins are forgiven....period.

If not, anyone dying without benefit of baptism doesn't have their sins forgiven.

And please don't trot out the non-biblical "baptism of desire".

Paul noted the following:

13When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, 14having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

Colossians 2:13-14

Your thought life has to taken into account. It’s not just the actual acts. It includes thinking about them.

Agreed, because thoughts are human acts.

Even if just for a moment.

Disagree. Although thoughts can be a human act, to be so they must be deliberate and willful. Stray or spontaneous thoughts that come to mind, which we do not choose, are not sins; they are only temptations. If, however, we recognize that this thought is sinful and despite that judgment choose to engage in it, then we have indeed sinned.

It demonstrates the impossibility of being able to keep the Law.

By God's grace, all things are possible. That we fail is because we choose to do so. But then that is why Jesus gave the Apostles the authority to forgive sin. We can also see the need for sin to be forgiven after baptism in James:

Is anyone among you sick? He should summon the presbyters of the church, and they should pray over him and anoint [him] with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed any sins, he will be forgiven. (James 5:14-15)

So there is sin of the believer that needs to be forgiven with the prayer and anointing of the presbyters (priests) of the church.

Now let me ask you a question. One of the replies I get is that for the faith of the believer to be real it must be a saving faith, i.e. one that turns away from sin and produces good works; that if one remains is sin that his faith is not real, not a saving faith. At the same time I am told that it is impossible to remain free from sin. So then what amount of sin would render one's faith false and not a saving faith?

Wow, so many twists!~ First, in the sequence is what causes repentance: believing you ARE a sinner with a death sentence. Then repentance. That is the evidence of belief which is what activates GOD doing for the sinner what he/she cannot do for their self. THEN being baptized is the outward evidence that the belief is sincere. You Catholics are so wedded to works that you even twist that passage to support works for righteousness, speciously.

Thr poer you focus upon was given to the Apostles. Your religion's priesthood IS NOT Apostolic regardless of your insisyence. And again, you are so wedded to works to obtain righteousness thast you focus upon penance.

Catholicism is another religion. It is NOT Christianity.

>>Even if just for a moment.<<

That's Roman Catholic dogma...not NT teaching.

The passage from Colossians I posted prior has the following verb.

exaleipsas

As used in the passage it is an aorist, participle, active.

The aorist tense has no time associated with it. It generally conveys undefined action other than the action has happened. In this case blotted out is the action and refers to the decrees against us.

The voice is active indicating who is doing the action. In this case it is God Who is doing the action.

The participle indicates an ongoing action.

The next key verb to look at is "He has taken" ērken.

This is a perfect, indicative, active verb.

The perfect tense indicates an action that occurred in the past has ongoing impact from the time of the speaker/writer.

Paul is noting that God has perfectly removed the decrees against us....all of them. And He continually does this.

The word for transgressions includes those that are unconscious, non-deliberate ones....what RCs might call "venial". It also includes all transgressions including what RCs might call "mortal" sins.

The meaning of blotted out means they are completely removed...rubbed out....gone.

As Paul notes...they have been nailed to the cross.

Our sins....all of our sins, are completely forgiven when we profess faith in Christ.

You asserted, “Not at all. It is a miracle from God received through the Church.” Knowing what ‘church’ you reference, your assertion is heretical in the main. The body of believers in the first 100 years after the Resurrection were already passing around all the portions of the New Testament. Domitian almost got hold of and destroyed all the copies, but he failed. The Holy Spirit has given us the New Testament GOD wants for our faith foundations. The current Catholic ORG (rhymes with Borg) is another religion, not the Christianity Jesus established as His Body of Believers.

So now you go for the “I’m persecuted for being a RC” route? Seriously, dude, it’s ludicrous that you STILL haven’t grasped my initial point! You were scolding people for making what you said were “personal attacks” when YOU were the one calling people names and making it personal. Then you double down here by calling them “mad ramblings
of the spiritually blind phantoms and trolls of the interwebs”! Here’s a thought...why don’t you ruminate on THAT for a while and decide if you need to reconsider your own biases and prejudices and whether or not you are glorifying Jesus when you do so? I think it may take some time.

And yet Jesus himself is quite insistent that we will be judged according to our actions. A challenge: prove “by faith alone” by the words of Jesus in the gospel. Remember to include all the times that he warns us about being judged. It will not be good enough to show the we need faith. That is not in dispute. If salvation by faith alone were the message of the gospel, then it should be clear by our Lord’s words alone.

It is clear...if the Bible is read in context.

In your position Jesus had to have left out something in His discussion with Nicodemus.

18“He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. John 3:18

And He left out something in His discussion with the unbelieving Jews.

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. John 5:24

>>IF it were possible to keep the Law perfectly Christ died needlessly.<<

Before Christ we did not have access to God's grace merited by Jesus on the Cross.

Yet the Law was still there.

No one in history had been able or is able to keep it.

Scripture is clear every created being has sinned.

I’m not *interpreting* it. People only interpret stuff they don’t like the meaning of to make it say what they want it to say and not what it really says.

I’m reading it and taking it at face value. It says what it says.

By grace through faith not of works so that no one can boast.

End of story.

When I fail I have recourse to the sacrament of Penance where I can have my sins forgiven, as Jesus tells us. The residue for any remaining sins God will cleanse in Purgatory.

Scripture tells us this....

1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

We don't need penance and there's no such creature in the NT. All we need to do is confess to God and He promises to forgive ALL our sins.

There is no residue for remaining sins when the blood of Jesus is applied.

Suffering in purgatory or anywhere else has NO effect on sin and the removal of it. Suffering is not the means by which sins are forgiven.

The only mechanism for cleansing of sin is the shedding of blood.

Hebrews 9:22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

A Sacrament, as you well know, is an outward sign, instituted by Christ to give grace....remember???

Sacraments do not confer grace.

Grace comes through Jesus Christ.

John 1:14-17 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

A Sacrament, as you well know, is an outward sign, instituted by Christ to give grace....remember???

Sacraments do not confer grace.

If you have to do an act or perform some act to access grace, you are earning it, and it ceases to be grace but rather wages due for work performed.

God is not a giant slot machine in the sky who dispenses stingy parcels of grace when the right sacraments are plugged in.

He LAVISHES His grace on us.

Ephesians 1:3-10 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

You do understand what the meaning of the word *lavish* is, don't you?

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