Hello everyone! Jessica has been kind enough to allow me to post on this blog, which I am excited to do. I’ve been enjoying reading her posts, as well as others here on a regular basis.
That’s not just me being pleasant. The site has pulled me back to it a number of times and has given me a lot of food for thought.
I wanted to share a little bit about my own faith background in my first post here (and would love to read any of yours). I am a convert to the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). My wife and I, along with our children, converted around the time Pope Francis became pope.
I grew up what you might call a Fundamentalist, though we never labeled ourselves anything. “Nondenominational” or “Baptist” might be a better description, actually. I don’t know for sure.
Whatever I was, though, I grew up in an environment that had no warm feelings for the RCC. A few misconceptions I had included the following.
1. The pope was probably the anti-Christ (or would be in league with him whenever he showed up).
2. Roman Catholics worshiped Mary. Worship of her echoes the worship of some goddess in ancient Egypt.
3. Everything written in Chick Tracts about Roman Catholics.
I ended up falling in love with and marrying a young woman who grew up Anglican, which is a bit ironic. I was as clueless about Anglicanism as I was about Roman Catholicism. I somehow missed the memo that, as she put it later, Anglicans are basically Roman Catholics, just without the pope.
When we got married, she followed me into the nondenominational, happy-clappy church I was a part of, trying to be the dutiful wife. But secretly, she missed the smells and bells of liturgical life.
The Eucharist also meant a great deal to her, which I did not understand at the time. After one of our church services, she was shocked and horrified when a friend of ours took some left over bread we had used for communion (which we considered entirely symbolic), and used it as a snack afterwards, dipping it and chewing right in front of her.
On another front, my sister and brother-in-law shocked us by leaving their nondenominational (gosh, that’s a long word) church to join the RCC. My brother-in-law had spent ten years flirting off and on with the idea of converting. Finally he did, and it was like a nuclear bomb went off in our extended family.
So many nights, all of us were up late debating Mary, the Eucharist, the pope, everything. I was not as vehement with him as others in our tribe, but I did take it upon myself to convince him he was wrong. Anybody who understood the Bible could not possibly become Roman Catholic, right?
Well, as I did my own research, visiting sites like Catholic Answers and especially delving into articles on Called to Communion, I found, to my surprise, that Roman Catholics actually do read the Bible – very much so. They had very good reasons not to believe in Sola Scriptura and to view the Gospel differently than I did.
What really threw me across the Tiber, though, was the idea that to remain a protestant, I had to believe that God abandoned his church for 1500 years until Martin Luther came along. The more I thought about this, the more it unsettled me.
Imagine the priests, theologians, and saints coming together for Ecumenical Councils through the ages, seeking to know the Holy Spirit’s mind on issues of Christology, the Bible, icons, and all sorts of other issues that were rending the church in two. The Apostle James says that if we ask for wisdom, the Holy Spirit will give it to us. Am I to believe these holy men, and by extension the church that relied on their teaching, were abandoned by God in their hour of direst need?
That was too much. It took an unbelievable amount of hubris on my part to think that fervent, praying Christians for the first millennia and a half got it wrong while we “modern” Christians for some reason managed to get it right.
It came down to Easter Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in the end. I would go into what made us veer west, but I think I have gone on long enough for one post.
At any rate, that is my story. Again, thank you for allowing me to write here. I look forward to continuing to read what everyone else posts!
All Along the Watchtower 
Welcome, Cath-anon! I’m relatively new to this site myself. Nice bunch of people here. I think they’re Christian (wink)
Looking forward to more of your writing.
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Thank you! I look forward to yours as well.
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“On this Rock I will build My Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” According to the Protestants, the gates of hell must have prevailed against the Church for at least one thousand years. The Oriental Orthodox Church broke off in the fifth century over the miaphisite controversy and they still accept the True Presence.
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It’s lovely to have you here 🙂 xx
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cath.anon – well, thanks for this. On the one hand, I’m happy for you that you left the happy-clappies.
I don’t really understand the point that threw you, though. `What really threw me across the Tiber, though, was the idea that to remain a protestant, I had to believe that God abandoned his church for 1500 years until Martin Luther came along.’
Have you ever read T.F. Torrance `The Trinitarian Faith’?
The reason I ask is that 1) He argues that the Nicaean creed and the theologians who came up with it were thoroughly evangelical and 2) T.F. Torrance really is the face of `protestantism’.
What I mean is that he was the most influential guy in the Faculty of Divinity at University of Edinburgh during his time and, as far as theology went, he was (basically) the Church of Scotland. Certainly, all the Church of Scotland clergy passing through Edinburgh were forced to attend his systematic theology lectures whether they liked it or not.
TF Torrance was (of course) a student of Karl Barth and Barthian through and through. The idea that you suggest is absolutely not Barthian – the Barthian view is that the church was in very healthy shape – as the Nicaean creed and, later, Council of Chalcedon demonstrated, went gradually through the centuries `off the rails’ and had to be brought back.
I’m not indicating whether or not I agree with this – I’m probably not a Barthian myself. The point is that this really was main-stream protestantism at least during the second half of the 20th century – so the view that threw you over the Tiber doesn’t seem consistent with `protestantism’ (at least mainstream Presbyterianism of the variety that they had in the Church of Scotland) as I saw it.
A foot-note: I think that TF Torrance might actually have had sympathies towards the Holy Rollers – my mother once saw him in the Holy Roller book-shop (she isn’t a Roller herself – she only went in there to buy some greetings cards) when he was already in his 90’s and it was clear from his cheerful familiarity with those who were looking after the shop that he was a frequent visitor. Also, his `The Apocalypse Today’ (from the mid 60’s) suggests that he had a dangerously `Holy Roller’ view of the book of Revelation.
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Thank you for the book suggestion. No, I have never read him. Honestly, I probably need to write less and read more! 🙂
I think we have different conceptions of what ‘protestantism’ means. When I say “protestantism”, I mean all the groups in the last 500 years that have split off from the Roman Catholic Church and then others that have split off from those groups. This would encompass Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Assemblies of God, Holly Rollers and at least hundreds of other groups that hold differing beliefs when it comes to issues I think are really important like the Eucharist, how we get to Heaven, whether we are predestined or not, and so on. So for me, there can be no one face of protestantism. It’s too diverse.
I’m a little confused by one paragraph, where you wrote about the Barthian view. Are you saying Barth thought the church was healthy today because it came back from going off the rails over the centuries? Or are you saying he thought the church by and large never went off the rails?
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cath.anon.
No – neither of these. I get the impression that Barth was quite egotistical in some sense. He certainly thought that The Church was healthy at the time of Athanasius and that crowd (Nicaea); he certainly thought it was healthy at the time of Anselm, he thought that the Reformation at the time of Luther, Calvin and that crowd was necessary …..
…. and he thought that a similar reformation was necessary in his own day – and I get the impression (maybe I’m being mean about him here) that he really believed that he had a major role in bringing it about!
If you’re interested in an overview, then one book I read was by Torrance, `Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian’
But I’m not at all sure that this would be relevant for you. For me there is some connection, in the sense that I’m interesting in knowing what was happening at our own Divinity faculty (i.e. University of Edinburgh) while I was studying science at the Science faculty two miles down the road at Kings Buildings (i.e. at the time of TF Torrance).
I’m not sure I would be so interested in these guys if there wasn’t such a connection.
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