Back when my husband and I lived in Taiwan, we had the privilege of living next door to a very nice man who also happened to be a real-life nuclear physicist. He didn’t speak English, and my Chinese didn’t extend much beyond “Hi, how are you?” and “What’s for lunch?” so he and I didn’t talk a lot, but he was a good neighbor, and obviously no slouch in the Brains Department. That’s why I will never forget the morning when he knocked on our door, asking my husband to come look at his car which was cranking, but wouldn’t start. My husband didn’t have to be asked twice; he immediately followed our neighbor and set to work determining the problem. The two men discussed the possible causes of the car’s failure to start. As my husband opened the hood and then sat down in the car to turn the key in the ignition, the nuclear physicist suggested several mechanical scenarios which would require repairs. He was clearly worried. It was then that my husband looked up at our neighbor and uttered the Chinese equivalent of the phrase, “Dude, you’re out of gas.”
And so he was. He was one seriously embarrassed nuclear physicist.
I mention this because I recently reread Russ Rentler’s conversion story. By way of introduction if you don’t know Russ, he’s a medical doctor specializing in Geriatrics. He’s also a revert to the Catholic faith after decades spent in Evangelicalism. In his conversion story he admits:
I was embarrassed that as a relatively bright person with the ability to obtain a medical degree, I had never considered reading history and instead based my understanding of Church history from a 16-year-old “Bible Scholar” thirty years earlier. How could I be “so smart” and yet be so close-minded about something so important as my faith?
Call it the “Nuclear Physicist phenomenon,” if you will. Even very bright people overlook the obvious sometimes, NOT because they’re stupid. But why then?
I don’t consider myself a total idiot, yet for 45 years I believed that every Evangelical church I attended was preaching the same Gospel that the first Christians preached. It never occurred to me to question this, despite the fact that I attended churches that taught that you could never lose your salvation, and churches that taught that you most certainly could lose your salvation. Now, really, you’d think that it would have dawned on me that the two were mutually exclusive, that the first Christians must have believed one or the other, and that, ergo, some of the 20th-century churches I was attending had strayed from the Faith once delivered!
But it didn’t. Conflicting doctrines are the status quo in Protestantism, and having been raised a Protestant, it was business as usual as far as I was concerned. Of course different denominations believe opposing doctrines. Why would anybody have a problem with that? As long as you can “prove” your beliefs from Scripture….
Think of it as a blind spot in your visual field. A blind spot is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and it doesn’t mean that you’re blind. There’s just one tiny little area in which you can’t see. We all focus on certain things, and while we’re focused like that, we can’t see what’s in our blind spot. We need to step back and look around – in doing that we may discover things that were right under our nose all along.
Inherent in the practice of “proving” one’s beliefs from Scripture are certain obvious drawbacks. The fact that non-Christian groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses can “prove” straight from the Bible that Jesus was created by God (Col 1:15, Heb 1:5, Rev 3:14), is inherently inferior to God (Jn 14:1, 28, Jn 17:3, 1 Tim 2:5), and therefore under no circumstances should be considered or referred to as “God” (1 Cor 8:6) should tell you something. An old joke warns Evangelicals that quite a few flaky doctrines can be “proved” from Scripture, such as the fact that Jesus is not with believers when they fly in airplanes – Matthew 28:20, “LOW, I am with you always!”
As a Protestant I laughed at that joke. Ironically, when I first heard it I was attending a missionary conference with representatives from 50-some Protestant denominations present, some teaching that you can lose your salvation and some that you can’t, some teaching that baptism actually regenerates and some that baptism is merely a symbol, some teaching that speaking in tongues is what real Christians do and some that speaking in tongues is at best goofy and at worst demonic. I don’t think that one single person in that auditorium understood that the joke was on us.
Evangelical believers in sola Scriptura are taught that their beliefs must come straight from Scripture, and that Scripture must be used to interpret Scripture; in other words, they are taught to focus steadily on Scripture, and Scripture only. Glancing at the historical record, at the extrabiblical writings of the early Christians, just to see how one’s own modern-day beliefs line up with those of the people taught by the apostles themselves, is the spiritual equivalent of ceasing to focus single-mindedly on an object and taking a moment to look around the room. In doing so, something that may have been right in front of us, yet hidden in our blind spot, jumps out at us. How could I not have noticed that? – we ask ourselves. It was when I stepped back and looked around the history of Christianity that I realized that the Catholic Church was right there in front of me in that Bible that I had been so focused upon.
So, no, you don’t have to be an idiot to not realize that your Christian beliefs just don’t add up. You may be excelling in your profession. You may have earned a Ph.D. You may be a nuclear physicist.
But at the same time, your belief system may be out of gas.
On the memorial of St. Isabelle of France
Deo omnis gloria!
Catholicism is soooo countercultural. On the day that the world unwraps the presents and then packs all the decorations away for another year, declaring Christmas to be OVER, Catholics unwrap the presents and then trot off to Mass to declare to the world that Christmas has finally BEGUN. I have to admit, the world’s fierce determination to institutionalize the insane commercialization of the holiday, and then toss the whole thing out with the empty boxes and used wrapping paper on the 26th is pretty discouraging; I long to live in a world where my neighbors understand why I answer the question, “Did you have a good Christmas?” with a hearty “I’m still having a good Christmas!”
Ridley stared at me as if I had suggested betraying atomic secrets to the Soviets. “There’s no need to panic, Renée. I’ve got this. The instructions are quite clear – we just need to work our way through them in a calm and orderly manner!”
Ridley stared at me as if he were Winston Churchill and I had snatched his cigar right out of his mouth. He sat fuming as I plowed ahead.
Ridley stared at me as if I’d had one too many butter-rum jelly beans in the run-up to New Year’s Eve, but I was undaunted.
I often wonder if some people who stumble across this blog aren’t tempted to believe that I might be presenting a caricature of Evangelical Protestantism. As I have stated before, when I write about the Protestantism I left behind, I write about once-saved/always-saved, nondenominational churches and charismatic assemblies: Bible-alone churches. I’m really not qualified to discuss things from the perspective of a former Lutheran or former Reformed Presbyterian, since I was neither. I did attend Presbyterian churches when I lived in Taiwan, but those churches were led by lay-preachers who delivered a gospel indistinguishable from the one preached at nondenominational churches of my acquaintance in the U.S. My only exposure to real Lutheranism or Presbyterianism would have come from visiting my college friend’s Lutheran church, where I was exposed to Ash Wednesday, and from the one Lutheran and two Presbyterian pastors who, with a Baptist, co-pastored the church I attended right after marrying my Baptist husband – pastors who, because of the extreme ecumenical nature of the church, were not in a position to teach any distinctively Lutheran or Presbyterian notions – once again, it was a lowest-common-denominator kind of Christianity. 
Like a fish, spawned in water, hatched in water, swimming in water, dying in water – a fish that never in its entire existence will be aware of that element called “water,” as an Evangelical there were certain “givens” that I never contemplated. They formed the basis of my belief system, without them the system would crumble – and they were never investigated, never questioned. They simply “were.”
As we all know, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli relied on individual guidance by the Holy Spirit in their attempts to recreate the Church that Jesus established but apparently allowed to fail. Calvin made individual guidance the cornerstone of his theory on the discernment of the canon of Scripture:
Sounds good, but way back in the 80’s when I discussed the reliability of the Book of Mormon with LDS missionaries who came to my door, they assured me of exactly the same thing that Calvin was advocating: that they felt a “burning in the breast” when they read the book of Mormon, and thus knew that it was God-breathed. Following Calvin’s directions, Mormons “authenticate” a 19th-century book of fiction as Holy Scripture.
Yes, but what does that prove? – they aren’t Christians! All right then, let’s stick with Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, all definitely Christians, all relying on the individual guidance of the Holy Spirit as they discerned the canon of Scripture. Luther, as is well known, declared that certain New Testament books did not “preach the Gospel” as he understood it, and so he felt led to shunt the books of Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation to an appendix in his Bible. John Calvin could not have disagreed more; concerning the epistle of James he wrote that it was “without doubt among the Apostolic Epistles; nor do I doubt but that it was through a device of Satan that some have questioned its authority(!)” Calvin, while endorsing the books of James, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation, however, apparently only accepted the inspiration of the first epistle of John, since he referred to it as THE epistle of John, and wrote no commentary on 2 or 3 John. And Zwingli decided (after a debate in which his opponent used a quote from Revelation to prove a point) that Revelation was “not a Biblical book.”
Three sincere, “Spirit-led” men of God – three different New Testament canons (as well as three different views on a number of other Biblical issues as well). How can that be, if the Holy Spirit leads each believer individually into all truth?
My view of the Protestant denominations was that they were all different facets of the beautiful gem of Christianity. I never lay awake at night worrying about denominationalism, just as, I’m sure, most slaveholders had no problems sleeping at night – it simply never occurred to them to question the ethics of keeping human beings enslaved. Most folks never do question the status quo. Denominationalism was of course my status quo – I had never lived in a world without it, and I never thought of it as a good or a bad thing. It just was. Of course there are hundreds of different denominations. Different people have different opinions. So what?
Forget The Roads 