Let's
talk about this. I've never been a free-wheeling evangelical. I believed in
Christ at the age of 18. I spent some time in Churches of Christ; I found my
way to the Reformed. I can even say that I was the theologian before I was a
Christian. In my senior year of high school I studied European history. One
cannot help but note that the disputes between Protestants and Catholics form a
large part of what drove that history forward. Simply out of curiosity and
intellectual honesty I delved into those issues as best I could at the time,
because if it mattered to people, then it should matter to me as someone who
aims to chronicle the lives of people. All that is to say that at no point in
the last 15 years have I been casual about doctrine. After college, I spent six
years at a Reformed seminary learning intently something that purports to be
the very historic Protestantism that is the antidote to allegedly becoming
Catholic. There's only one problem: I'm Catholic. I wonder if this author would
care to revise her thesis?
Frankly, you can
blame the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapters XI and XV, and Heidelberg
Catechism question 78 for me being Catholic. To be confessionally anything only
invites the questions of historical continuity and authority that we (former)
Protestants would have liked to avoid.
It seems to me that in the absence of some objective criteria that
establishes theological continuity to be measured in any century, we would have
to arbitrarily assume that some confessional document, some monument to an
allegedly historic Protestantism, was synonymous with the word of God. In a
real sense,--you must forgive me--there is nothing "historic" about
those documents at all. There is a presupposition that the Fathers gradually
erred in their holding of gospel truth, depending on who we ask. Somewhere, as
the story goes, the courageous reformers recovered the gospel from the clutches
of the Pelagian medieval Roman Catholic Church. Pick a reformer; it doesn't
matter. The story is the same. Except that in the mercy of God, I saw this
story to be a lie. In fact, taking the reformers at their best and boldest to
claim that they had better recapitulated the Church of the Fathers, the lie is
demonstrated even faster. To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,
to paraphrase John Henry Newman, and it's true as far as I can tell.
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