from comment 18 quote of Christopher Lake:
Thank you for your comment, and welcome to CTC. I am not one of the official contributors to this site, but all of them, and many of the regular commenters (including myself) are former Protestant Christians who held to the “Five Sola’s of the Reformation” and to five-point Calvinist theology. (In my case, I am a former “Reformed Baptist.”)
In your comment, you make a very serious assumption about Casey– that, in returning to the Catholic Church, he was going for doctrine which “tickled (his) own ears after (his) own desires.” How do you know that he was not returning to the Church which he honestly believes to be Biblically sound and faithful to the true Gospel of Jesus Christ and to all of the teachings of Christ and the apostles? Why do you assume that Casey was simply returning to the doctrines which tickled his ears after his own desires?
I used to be a Catholic, and I left the Catholic Church, partially due to challenges from non-Catholic friends that I could not answer and that shook my own faith (largely due to poor instruction that I unfortunately received from more than one person in the Church). I eventually became an evangelical Protestant, and when I found Reformed Christianity, in particular, it was as if a whole world of Biblical theology opened up to me that seemed (at the time) to make better sense of the whole Bible that anything else I had encountered. I jumped right in, joined a Reformed Baptist congregation, and happily found myself in an intense and joyful atmosphere of serious Bible study, prayer, fellowship, and evangelism. This was, it seemed, what I had been looking for for years, because I wanted nothing more than to trust in God alone for my salvation, and to follow hard after him, with the encouragement of brothers and sisters in Christ, growing in obedience and holiness, while spreading His Gospel of justification by faith alone.
I could not have been more happy as a Reformed Baptist Christian. I had no desire to “justify myself by my own works” or to go after “doctrine that ticked my ears.” I firmly believed that justification by faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone *was* the Gospel, and I shared this Gospel with others, including meeting with a Catholic man and his wife for months, trying to show them the “Biblical, Reformed Gospel” from the Scriptures and praying for them to “see the truth.”
As the years went on though, I began to be increasingly troubled by more and more Scripture passages that created serious problems for my Reformed, “faith alone,” “imputed righteousness,” “limited atonement,” “Perseverance of the Saints” Calvinistic Biblical paradigm. I could go into all of these passages in this comment, but to do so would require a virtual treatise. (I can go into *some* of them in subsequent comments if you would like).
Despite being troubled by these passages, I knew that Reformed exegetes knew more about the Bible than I did, and, thankful for their knowledge, I delved further into Reformed exegetical and apologetic works which dealt with these “problem passages.” After reading these works, with my Bible close at hand to make sure they were “Biblically accurate,” I would be encouraged and reassured that Reformed Protestant Christianity did, indeed, still make sense of the whole Bible. Through all of my study, I never doubted that justification by faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone *was* the Biblical Gospel– and it was my Gospel, the Gospel for which I lived, and for which I would have died, if I had been asked to do so.
Eventually, through continued Bible study, prayer, and the discovery of the writings of the early Church Fathers (which include Biblical exegesis that far predates the Reformation), I began to sense that if I wanted to be truly honest with what God was showing to me, I had to make a commitment to re-study the entire Bible– but this time, setting aside my cherished Reformed presuppositions which I had long brought to the texts.
To be clear, I had originally *come* to these Reformed views *through* Biblical exegesis (of my own and others), but now, Biblical exegesis (of my own and others) was leading me to question some of these Reformed views, so to be honest with God and myself, I felt that I needed to re-study the Bible without my “Reformed interpretive lenses.”
After a careful, even agonizing, process of this Biblical “re-study”– involving serious prayer, and regular, lengthy meetings with one of my Reformed elders, and study of both Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox sources–, I realized that I could no longer, in good conscience, be a Reformed Baptist Protestant, or *any* kind of Protestant. The Bible itself had convinced me out of my Protestantism. In particular, through study of the four Gospels, the letters of Paul, 1 John, and Hebrews, I had been convinced that both justification by faith alone and the “Perserverance of the Saints” (the “eternal security” of Calvinists) were/are simply not the teachings of the Bible.
I had not *wanted* to reach these conclusions. I *wanted* to be reaffirmed that the “Reformed, Biblical Gospel” that I had embraced and spread for years *was* the teaching of the Bible. Reaching a different conclusion, *from* the Bible, was severely humbling, and even shattering, to me on many levels. It meant that I had been wrong about very serious teachings of the Bible for years, and that I had spread these errors to other people. It meant that I could not stay in my current congregation. I already had a strong sense, from my experience with these friends, that in renouncing my former beliefs as “unBiblical,” I would lose most of these friends– and lose them I did (as well as many, many Reformed friends in other parts of the U.S.) . I also lost a hoped-for career in Reformed “Biblical Counseling.”
Even after reaching my carefully studied, and prayed-through, conclusion that Reformed Protestantism (and Protestantism, period) is not Biblically accurate, I still was not completely convinced of the claims and teachings of the Catholic Church. I knew, though, that I had to leave my Protestant community, in good conscience, so I painfully did. It hurt so much to leave, but being firmly convinced that I was following God and Scripture in doing so, I found a measure of peace.
For about two months, I didn’t know *where* I belonged, ecclesially speaking, so I stayed home on Sundays and continued to study. On about 85% of what the Catholic Church teaches, I had found her to be Biblically accurate– far more so than any Protestant congregation–, but I had to ask myself, how long was I going to continue subjecting every ecclesial entity in existence to *my* own Biblical scrutiny, when I had once been an Arminian, and then a Calvinist, and now, a “non-Protestant” of some sort, having reached these conclusions through *my* own Biblical study, with other Protestant Christians, and with other sources (including the writings of the early Church Fathers), but still holding the Bible to be my final authority (at least on the matters that I deemed to be “Christian essentials”)? Was this really the way that the early Christian Church operated?
From reading the early Church Fathers (not as opposed to reading Scripture, but *while* reading Scripture), I had learned that “Sola Scriptura” was most definitely *not* how the early Church had operated. It was not how Jesus and the first apostles had operated– so why should I continue doing so? From 189 A.D., the words of St. Irenaeus rang in my ears:
“It is possible, then, for everyone in every church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the apostles which has been made known to us throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the apostles and their successors down to our own times, men who neither knew nor taught anything like what these heretics rave about” (Against Heresies 3:3:1 [A.D. 189]).
“But since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the successions of all the churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the successions of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul—that church which has the tradition and the faith with which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the apostles. For with this Church, because of its superior origin, all churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world. And it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the apostolic tradition” (ibid., 3:3:2).
I still was not 100% convinced of some of the teachings of the Catholic Church, but again, I had found her to be far more Scripturally accurate than any Protestant denomination (or “non-denominational church”), and the early Church had not operated through “Sola Scriptura” anyway. In that light, was I going to heed what the Spirit had shown me in Scripture (which was, emotionally, *not* what I had wanted to find there), and in the early Church Fathers, and in Church history, or was I going to stay with Reformed Protestant doctrines that, in a sense. tickled my own human desires to not have my life be so incredibly disrupted (by returning to the Catholic Church)?
I knew what I had to do. I had to follow God, my own desires for career and comfort and the affirmation of friends be damned. Therefore, I returned to the Catholic Church. It was *not* easy, and it has not *been* easy. It was, and is, the right thing to do though, because this Church has the fullness of Christian truth– which is only fitting, because Christ Himself founded the Catholic Church.
and from comment 24 by him:
and from comment 24 by him:
I wrote of the early Church Fathers, “Did they do the ‘heavy work’ of bringing me to the point of seeing that justification by faith truly might be unBiblical? No. Jesus, St. Paul, St. John, the author of the book of Hebrews, and the Holy Spirit had to do that for me.”
However, I left out the word “alone”– and that makes all the difference, because the Biblical writers and the Holy Spirit brought me to point of seeing that justification by faith *alone* might be unBiblical. Now, I know that it *is* unBiblical. Luther’s misinterpretation of St. Paul in Romans led to the Reformed Protestant understanding of “Sola Fide.”
You have probably already heard this, but the only place in the Bible where the words “faith alone” are actually used (in James 2), they are *specifically denied, and specifically in relation to justification.* Now, as a former Reformed Baptist, I know very well that there is a Reformed explanation for this seeming exegetical dilemma. James is writing about about faith as pure “head faith,” intellectual, non-saving belief, and he is writing about works as simply being the “justifying evidence,” before man, of one’s already having been justified by God by faith alone. Meanwhile, Paul is writing about being justified before God by faith alone– even though he never *uses* the words “faith alone.” That is the Reformed explanation of Paul and James on justification, faith, and works that I was taught by my Reformed leaders, and I accepted it and believed it for years. However, after having made a conscious effort to re-study the Bible without those “Reformed interpretive lenses” (well before I ever returned to the Catholic Church), I could see that Reformed explanation as, unfortunately, little more than Reformed *eisegesis*, not exegesis. If God had wanted to tell us clearly in Scripture that believers in Christ are justified by faith alone, it is certainly perplexing that God, the Holy Spirit, inspired James to write man is not justified by faith alone.
I know that Reformed Christians love to read the letters of Paul. I certainly did, as a Reformed Baptist, and I still do, as a Catholic. The Church has been exegeting those letters for almost 2, 000 years. He is “St. Paul” in our Church after all– and I can assure you that we would *not* so honor Paul if he, in actuality, teaches things in Scripture that are opposed to Catholic doctrine! :-) In truth, he does not teach anything opposed to Catholic doctrine, because Paul himself was/is Catholic.http://pauliscatholic.com
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