A little about my background. My mother was Roman Catholic. My dad's family
is Ukrainian, and he was brought up nominally in a schismatic Ukrainian
Orthodox church. When he married my mother, he converted, at least formally,
though he is really an unbeliever. So I was born into the Catholic faith, but
my parents were not really religious and although occasionally we went to
church, none of it really stuck and I learned very little. (Not that I wanted
to learn.)
I remember when I was about eight years old, I decided I was an atheist, or at least as much an atheist as an eight year-old can be. I was into hard science and so forth. But when I was 13 years old, my mother passed away, and that got me thinking about God. I literally thought, "It would be nice to know I'll see my mother again when I die." Simultaneously my dad and I started going to church again. The Lord worked on me for several years, bringing me to a point where I could believe in God and began to trust him, and when I was 17 years old, I gave my life to the Lord and had what is commonly termed by evangelicals as a "born again experience." Literally, as I said a prayer dedicating my life to Christ, I felt this Power come down and enter the top of my head, and I became a chan)ged person. I got up saying, "I guess this means I'm a Christian now" (for before, if someone had asked me if I was a Christian, I would have hemmmed and hawed with disgust). Through that time, both before and after my conversion, the Lord worked in wonderful ways in my life.
After my conversion, I was somewhat frustrated because I knew almost no Catholics who really knew the Lord like I did — they were all pretty dead. So I developed an affinity for the evangelicals because I more closely identified with their spirituality, although I was fiercely independent about what I believed, and I wanted to determine from the Bible myself what I believed, without accepting anyone's word for it. Based on this evangelical influence, I began to question things about my Catholic faith. But I loved a lot of things about the Catholic faith, and I had a strong cultural tie to it, so I didn't reject it or leave the church — I figured we can all be Christians wherever we are anyway.
One of the things I treasure about this period is that I took my sola scriptura seriously — much moreso than I think many Evangelicals do. I think most Evangelicals hear what their church preaches (which is supposedly sola scriptura), decide it's plausible, and embrace it. Not me — I rejected what anyone else told me was true and looked only to the Scriptures. I still remember the time I read Exodus 23:24, which says you shall not make mention of the names of other gods, nor let them be heard out of your mouth. So I decided that the Gregorian calendar had to go, since all the months are named after pagan gods. Instead I adopted the Jewish calendar. (I even wrote Jewish dates on my checks.) The days of the week had to go, too; I used my knowledge of Latin to create new names based on what was created on each day. I rejected the Trinity since Jesus said "The Father is greater than I" and "No one is good but God alone". (Also, Jesus said, "I and the Father are one", not, "I, the Father, and the Holy Spirit are one".) In retrospect the experience showed me that people are more influenced by their tradition than they think they are. On the other hand it highlighted the "reinventing the wheel" phenomenon with Sola Scripture: what a waste of time it is to have to prove everything from first principles, starting from scratch, rather than building on what other people have done.
About this point I went to college, which was really the first time I got to be immersed in the evangelical culture. (I had largely come to the Lord on my own and had no group of Christians to speak of to associate with, although I had a number of Christian teachers that influenced me.) I met Christians of many different backgrounds from many different churches: talked with them, worshipped with them, and so forth, and in fact they formed my primary social group. I got involved in Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and met people through there. I also got into electronic discussions on the Internet with other Christians. But this exposure to other Christians proved to dispel a lot of my idealism about Christianity.
I believed the evangelicals and decided we should base our doctrine on "Scripture alone." Unfortunately, after a few years it became clear that there were hundreds of different groups all of which based their doctrines on "Scripture alone" and claimed to be "Bible-based" and have "Scriptural doctrine", but these "Bible-based, Scriptural doctrines" often conflicted sharply with the other "Bible-based, Scriptural doctrines" based on the same verses. You have groups using the same verse to "prove" two entirely contradictory doctrines. Everyone agrees that Scripture is infallible and the only authority, but no one agrees on its proper interpretation. Some folks believe Scripture clearly teaches predestination; others are convinced it teaches free-will. Some folks insist it teaches that baptism is a requirement for salvation; others conclude that it teaches that baptism is no longer relevant to the church. Some folks say it that eternal security is what Scripture teaches; others agree that Scripture teaches we can fall away. Scripture is used to justify all sorts of errors, too; I know a lot of Bible-based churches that mainstream evangelicals would regard as unorthodox. Basically I realized that in the evangelical world, each individual is responsible for judging doctrines according to one's own opinions. Sure, theoretically, we should seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit and he will explain to us the Scriptures, but obviously this doesn't work out in practice given the number of folks who do just this yet disagree with one another on significant interpetations. I also realized that as an evangelical, I, like all evangelicals, judged churches based on how close they came to what I thought was right, rather than submitting myself to the Church's doctrine and judgment. Finding a church is a matter of finding a group that mostly agrees with you. Naturally, it is evident that this is not the Scriptural model of a church. The Scriptural church had authority and said, "If you do not agree with our teachings, you are heterodox." The "New Testament Church™" told you what to believe; you didn't wander from Smyrea to Laodicea to Antioch to decide which church agreed with what you believed.
At the same time I grew disillusioned with the wide variety of doctrines and conflicting beliefs among Evangelicals and the serious lack of any real, absolute standard of orthodoxy. I had my standard of orthodoxy but I kept having to trim it until I realized I had almost nothing left. You know, "All Real Christians™ believe A, B, and C ... well ok, this Spirit-filled, sincere group doesn't believe A, so let's say B and C ... um, ok, then C...no, please don't tell me ..." The breaking point for me was when I heard "bible-believing" Evangelicals argue that baptism was not really necessary for Christians — it was a merely a cultural artifact.
Plus, I saw so many churches which were labelled "unorthodox" who nevertheless based their teachings on Scripture. Not that I sympathized with them, but I thought it was strange that so many "Bible-based" churches had nonetheless fallen out of even the wide definition of Protestant orthodoxy. It became clear that being "bible-based" was insufficient. Especially when so many hundreds of Protestant sects disagreed violently over basic doctrines of faith, all claiming that their view was "Scriptural" yet being entirely contradictory. I began to see Tradition not as an accretion that polluted the purity of "Biblical doctrine", but rather as a filter that allows us to "rightly divide the word of truth" and discern Apostolic interpretations of Scripture from spurious ones. Without Sacred Tradition, any spurious Biblical interpretation must be admitted as possible. Sacred Tradition does not add to our faith; rather, it restricts our faith to the right interpretation of Scripture. Especially today, I laugh cynically at evangelical books which proclaim "A Biblically based analysis of xxxxxx" or whatever. We have "biblically based" books covering topics never even mentioned in Scripture. We have new "biblical evidence" that contradicts beliefs that were previously believed to be "biblically based." (I recently read a "biblically based" book on why the traditional evangelical view of divorce should be modified.) Anytime an evangelical wants to push his own agenda, he just labels it as "biblically based" and it almost assumes the property of infallibility.
About the middle of my freshman year, I encountered another Christian group which was just starting and tried to get me involved with them. I didn't know a lot about them, but I came, because they were smaller than IVCF, didn't have the obnoxious foreign missions mentality of IVCF, and they made a greater effort to get to know me. They even fed me — invited me to dinner, and they took time to get to know me and be my friend. The group was primarily made up of adults; what they were doing was using the adults as a kind of leaven to get the group started. (IVCF is almost entirely student led, in contrast.) Well, as it turned out, the adults were all charismatic Catholics! I was amazed, because I had never met Catholics so on fire for the Lord, who knew the Lord as I did, read the Scriptures, had a personal relationship with Christ, and so forth. I was intrigued by this.
In contrast, my evangelical friends in IVCF exerted a kind of subtle pressure on me against Catholicism. A number of them described themselves as "ex-Catholics", and I began to see how evangelical Christianity really regards Catholics as second-class Christians, even if they do believe. I don't feel I was ever treated like an equal Christian because I refused to reject my Catholicism.
Anyway, through my exposure to my charismatic Catholic friends, not only did I see that it was possible to be both Catholic and Christian, but I began — after encountering some substantial anti-Catholicism among my evangelical friends — to investigate really what the Catholic Church taught, and why.
Then I had a close friend who was Pentecostal who publically announced that a newspaper editorial that said that the Catholic Church was pagan "did not go far enough". This angered me — while I was not a "loyal" Catholic I refused to renounce it — and motivated me to learn more about my faith. I started reading works about the Catholic faith taught in the Scriptures, but more importantly, I began reading what the early Christians wrote about the Christian faith. I was one of these people that felt we had to get back to "early Christianity" and what they believed and taught. I began reading works by Christians written in the 3rd, 2nd, even the first century, works written during the time when Christianity was still illegal and Christians were persecuted by the Romans. What I found really amazed me. What the early Christians believed and taught was nearly identical in essence with what the Catholic Church taught, and not at all what the evangelicals taught. We can see a strongly organized church, with local churches organized around bishops who regularly consulted with one another. We see that they believed that the Lord commanded that successors be appointed to the apostles, and we see that Peter's office had a specific successor, enumerated all the way back to Peter himself. Peter's third successor, St. Clement I, bishop of Rome, who died before St. John in the 1st century, even wrote a letter to the Corinthians (always troublemakers!) ordering them to obey their presbyters. We see that they believed that Christ was really and truly present in the Eucharist, and that by the prayers of the one presiding at the Sunday assembly (at this point nearly always the bishop), it changed into the true Body and Blood of Christ. We see that they identified Christian rebirth (i.e. being "born again") and "enlightenment" not with a mystical experience, but rather with baptism. We see that they regarded tradition as equally authoritative as Scripture (although not similarly inspired), and they regarded the center of unity of the church as the Church of Rome, which they believed could not fall into error. All of this really amazed me because people kept telling me this stuff was invented in the Middle Ages or, at the earliest, the 4th or 5th century or so. On the contrary, long before Christianity was legalized, there was a sacrificial priesthood with a division between lay and clerics, confession to a priest for "capital sins" was necessary, Scripture was not the only authority, the Church in Rome was considered infallible and incapable of error, and many other things considered "unscriptural" were not only present but defended from Scripture. I saw that the Catholic Church truly has not abandoned the teachings of the early church, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the church corrupted or abandoned the teaching of the Apostles. To the contrary, it appears obvious that the teaching of the Catholic Church throughout the years is the same teaching of the Apostles — as the Church teaches, public revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle and no new doctrine has been revealed since then. In this context, we see the infallibility of the Church (and the Pope) not as a way of inventing new doctrines, but rather of a means of authoritatively preserving what has always been taught — including the right and proper interpretation of Scripture. The job of the Pope is to preserve the teaching of the Apostles — or, as Jude puts in (Jude 3), "earnestly contend for the faith handed on once for all to the saints." This becomes clear when we see the teaching of Scripture where it says that the Spirit will lead the church "into all truth" (John 16:13) and "teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you" (John 14:26). The Word of God, as Scripture teaches, is not the Bible, although certainly the Bible is the inerrant written Word of God. Rather, first the Word of God is Jesus Christ (John 1:1), and secondarily what he preached — "the word of God stands forever, and this is the word that was preached to you" (1 Peter 1:25). Isaiah 59:21 tells us that in the New Covenant, the Spirit of God and "the words I have put in your mouth will not depart from your mouth, or your children's mouths, or from the mouths of their descendants for this time on and forever." Finally, "the gates of Hell shall not prevail" against the church (Matthew 16:19).
It becomes clear upon reading these promises that the idea that somehow shortly after the Apostles the truth was lost or corrupted for 1300 years until Luther is contrary to the promise of Scripture. God never intended Christians to be tossed about by "wind and wave of doctrine," never sure of just what the Apostle's taught. God did not take flesh and dwell among us to teach us His ways, only to have them lost sixty some years afterwards, with Christianity eternally condemned to bicker and argue over exactly what He taught.
I also began reading Scripture and saw some of Christ's promises: for example, he promised to reveal all truth to us (John 16:13), to teach us all things and to remind us of all that he taught while on earth (John 14:26), he promised that the preaching we received from the Apostles would last forever (1 Peter 1:25), that His word and His spirit would never depart from his New Covenant people (Isaiah 59:21), that the "pillar and foundation of the truth" is the CHURCH (1 Tim 3:15), that the Gates of Hades would never prevail against the church (Matthew 16:19), and all sorts of other wonderful promises. And I realized that, based on the consistency of the teachings of the Catholic Church between the early centuries of the church and the Reformation (despite sins and character flaws), if the evangelicals were even remotely right, then the Catholic Church was seriously wrong, and had been wrong for over one thousand years, during which time the true, authentic teaching of Christ was forever lost. It would basically mean that there were no Christians and no Christian church between whenever the Catholic Church allegedly lost the truth and the time it was recovered by Martin Luther. But this contrasted sharply with the picture painted by Scripture, which said that the teaching of Christ would never be lost at any time, and that the Holy Spirit would always be on earth to preserve the church, to reveal to it all truth, and to call to mind everything Christ taught.
I also found it somewhat ironic that many Christians regarded some of the decisions and teachings of the church in the 4th century — for example, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the dual nature and dual will of Christ, even the canon of the New Testament which varied from place to place until it was fixed in the late 4th century — was authoritative and beyond question, but at the same time all of these terrible errors we supposedly fell into were already strongly established in this same time period!
And so I realized that the teachings of evangelicals and the teachings of the Catholic Church were incompatible and could not be reconciled. To admit that one is right is to deny that the other is right — I could not pretend that it didn't matter what we believed, we're all just Christians anyway. I also realized that I would never be accepted as a full Christian by evangelicals if I didn't reject Catholicism. So I came back into the Catholic Church and embraced it fully. As time passes, the wisdom of my decision becomes more and more apparent.
I still like to fellowship with my evangelical friends, and I really admire evangelicals for their zeal and fervor, and sadly enough in many ways they put us to shame. I certainly have more in common with them than I do many people who call themselves Catholics. But I know that the evangelical faith is not the faith of the early Christians, and the Catholic faith is, and so here is where I am.
