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By the time my parents were living in twenty-first-century Illinois, their families’ historic Reformed commitments had been replaced by non-denominational, Baptistic evangelicalism.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.
Who said anything about Luther? Why you trying to change the subject?
All I did was tell you that the Lord commands perfect holiness, and point out that you admit that you failed at doing so.
Why on earth do you think God should save you if you haven’t kept his Word?
PS: Whoever told you that we Christians preach to go out and sin all we want is either an idiot or a liar.
May God rest all of their souls.
Grandpa(Pat) County Cavan, for years we thought he was from Cork but when we visited in 2012 they explained that at the time 1910 there was probably a rumor that the only hard working Irishmen came from Cork so it could have been a wee bit o-strechin-the-truth. There is some disagreement regarding whether he (and his brother) left or were asked to leave. I only vaguely recall my fathers claims that Grandpa could drink a case of whiskey in a sitting and nearly drank the tavern he worked at (the Rotterdam in Belfast) across from where the Titanic was being built, out of business.
Grandma is from the Madden's of Glass Island fame in County Mayo and there is a possibility that Owny Madden is a distant cousin, at least the family resemblance is striking.
Anyway upon hearing my Doc say that I have a high performance liver that can even turn lettuce into cholesterol I started believing the rumors.
7
uhhhh, the Catholic bible was about 1,600 years old when Luther was born, and there were millions of hand written copies in every country on Earth by the 1600's
Catholic reasoning: The reason evangelicals have such a bad reputation in the leftist media for being moralizing killjoys is because they’re such wanton libertine hedonists.
Uhhhh you don’t know what the word translation means do you?
You are probably right concerning the title "Pope" but the men who fulfilled that obligation for those early years are nonetheless referred to as Pope.....they were doing what the Pope does.
PS: Whoever told you that we Christians preach to go out and sin all we want is either an idiot or a liar.
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Nobody ever told me that. But a person would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to know that countless so-called “born-again, already saved Christians” frequent the dens of iniquity in ever-increasing numbers. And why not? After all they’re ALREADY saved! People who are responsible for preaching that heresy will be joining the fallen angels the second after they draw their last breath!
The only way a dead soul will allow you to hear that is as nonsense, yet it aptly describes the sacramental highway of the religion of Catholicism. ‘drip drip drip, yeah, we’re getting a portion of righteousness to add to the accounting’ ... catholiciism in action, empowering a faux priesthood and rushing souls to hell.
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Well all I can say is thank God that after over 1500 years of failure by Catholics and the Orthodox to properly understand the fundamentals of Christianity Luther and his ilk FINALLY appeared to enlighten the unwashed masses! Imagine all those deluded souls who were lost before that insane Augustinian monk ferreted out the truths of the REAL Christian faith!
LOL!!!
Examples, please.
Just where do you see this happening?
Or perhaps it's more like this.......
Matthew 9:10-13 And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said,“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Are you throwing stones at Jesus to for hobnobbing with the unwashed?
Honestly, Catholics are such elitists.
All I did was tell you that the Lord commands perfect holiness, and point out that you admit that you failed at doing so.
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The perfection to which you refer is a matter determined by the Lord in regard to each soul, not by you my dear.
Nobody ever told me that. But a person would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to know that countless so-called “born-again, already saved Christians” frequent the dens of iniquity in ever-increasing numbers.
***
Two words: Prove it.
And even if you somehow manage to bring up a bunch of left-wing ‘denominations’ that are rejected by most Christians, this is coming from the guy whose church leadership has sodomy orgies in the Vatican and has covered up for priests who rape children for decades.
I reject the so-called Christians that ‘affirm’ sodomy. Your leadership buggers each other and children, and you’re accusing ME of sin. That’s hilarious.
Care to try again?
The perfection to which you refer is a matter determined by the Lord in regard to each soul, not by you my dear.
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That’s a very snooty way of evading the question.
You outright admitted that you aren’t keeping God’s Commandments. Why should God save you from damnation?
Oh please.
How many Roman Catholics drink alcohol to excess?
The bars in areas populated by Roman Catholics are filled night in and night out with Roman Catholics.
How many Roman Catholics hit the bars on the weekends, get drunk, and then go to the priest week after week after week asking for forgiveness for an on-going sin of being drunk.
For that matter, how many priests get drunk?!
At the University of Notre Dame....how many co-eds are "hooking" up?
How many Roman Catholics have we seen on these threads that resort to profanity when they lose the argument....which is often for both.
How many Roman Catholics keep financially supporting the Vatican sodomy orgies and sex trafficking?
Actually no.
Rome's Bible wasn't declared dogmatically until the Council of Trent.
Most Roman Catholics don't know their denomination's history.
IF this were happening in the church I attend I can assure all the following would happen:
The police would be contacted.
They would be fired.
There would be no cover up as we're witnessing in Roman Catholicism.
Apparently the majority do.
IF they were trying to stop it the money flow would cease.
Examples, please.
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I’ve lived most of my life around such people, i.e., liars, thieves, and all manner of fornicators who waltz in and out of the honky-tonks and whorehouses and casinos and crack houses whenever they’re not busy waltzing in and out of the jails and prisons! Of course, not to worry, they’ve all been assured that they’ve already been saved!
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