There and back again: My spiritual journey these past ten years, part III

Basically, between 1999 and 2001 I began to theologically and spiritually check out of American Evangelicalism. It was at this same time that I began to look for a new church home so to speak and immediately gravitated to the Roman Catholic Church. I read a fair number of Catholic apologetic works and began engaging in dialogue with Catholics and Protestants on the internet. This experience only pushed me further away from Evangelicalism and towards Catholicism. Evangelicalism simply didn’t seem to have any good answers to Catholic claims. I noticed that some of the strongest defenders of Protestantism were Calvinists, or Reformed. Yet I found it hard to take the Reformed too seriously or more importantly as a viable alternative to Catholicism. After all, they were blatantly wrong on the sacraments, not to mention predestination, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. But more on that later.

There were some Catholic doctrines that bothered me such as papal infallibility, indulgences, and what seemed to me as an overly complicated soteriology and overly speculative Mariology. But a return to Evangelicalism was out of the question. Also, John Henry Newman’s theory of “doctrinal development” quelled some doubts for a while. It was around this time that my wife and I began one of what would end up as a series of moves related to study and employment opportunities. Upon our first move we began attending a Roman Catholic parish and did so for about a year. It was at this parish that I learned to love liturgical worship and deepened my knowledge of Catholicism. I also found that many of my stereotypes about Catholics were laughably untrue.

While I was becoming more and more interested in Catholicism and expressed my interests in becoming Catholic, my wife was much more hesitant. In retrospect, she was very patient with me. I believe that she thought this was some temporary phase and that I would eventually snap out of it. That, however, did not happen. When we moved again, however, we found the Catholic parishes in our new town were a bit strange and seemed to resemble something out of mainline Protestantism. This was a bit disconcerting to me. It also provided the opportunity to try another church, this time the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Looking back, I had lived a very sheltered life within Evangelicalism. I was barely aware of the existence of other Christian traditions outside my Baptist faith, much less what they believed. There is nothing wrong with this. Most Christians live a fairly sheltered life and generally aren’t aware of that many Christian traditions outside their own. But exploring Catholicism made me much more aware of the existence of other traditions in general. More specifically, I became more aware of Eastern Orthodoxy. I began to read some Orthodox theology and apologetics. For the first time since I began to study the early church and had done a 180 in my theology, I encountered a non-Roman Catholic church with a plausible theology. Eastern Orthodox claims created some problems for Catholicism in my mind. As with the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church also taught that it was the one, true church-the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church as it goes in the Nicene creed. I spent a while anguishing over issues such as Tradition, church authority, papal infallibility, and which church was the one, true church. In time these issues would fade in importance to me and the Catholic case became less convincing.

Because of growing doubts about Catholicism and the abysmal condition of the Catholic parish nearest to us, my curiosity with Eastern Orthodoxy grew. We thus began to visit a nearby Orthodox parish. We found the people very friendly. The parish was a mix of ethnic Orthodox and converts from Evangelical Protestantism. I found the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom absolutely incredible and very centered on God. Orthodox worship was the complete opposite of the “contemporary seeker sensitive” pop music, secular entertainment style worship that was prevalent in Evangelicalism. I still think the Orthodox have probably the most beautiful liturgy of any Christian church. And I love the smell of incense in a church, candles, and icons.

To my delight, I found the Orthodox didn’t believe in some Catholic doctrines that bothered me such as indulgences or papal infallibility. All in all, Orthodox was even better than Catholicism. By the summer of 2004 I probably would have become Orthodox and indeed hoped to enter a catechism class with that purpose in mind. But my wife put her foot down. Although she found the people at the Orthodox parish nice, she simply couldn’t relate to their worship. She was tired of what had probably come to seem like a phase of mine gone horrible wrong and just wanted to go back to Evangelicalism. Returning to Evangelicalism, however, was out of the question for me. Oh sure, I could visit an Evangelical church from time to time. But I wasn’t remotely interested in attending one on a regular basis, much less joining. And taking communion at an Evangelical church was completely out of the question for me.

But what were we supposed to do? This brought me to yet another possibility. What if we could stay Protestant without returning to Evangelicalism? In short, what about Lutheranism?