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!
Lean back, close your eyes, and travel down the paths of your mind to your college days, back to Psych 101. For some of us, that will be a long mental hike, so allow me to refresh your memory. Psych 101 consisted of an introduction to the broad topic of Psychology, with all its various sub-fields such as Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology, and everyone’s favorite: Abnormal Psychology – the part of the course where you were granted insight into the behavior of certain family members for the first time. You learned to define such terms as operant conditioning, negative reinforcement, accommodation, catharsis, learned helplessness, actor-observer bias, and the hierarchy of needs. A lot of terminology that began as specialized psych vocab is now a part of our everyday way of expressing ourselves, terminology like “denial,” “fixation,” or “identity crisis.” A phenomenon that you encounter every day but don’t necessarily remember the psychological term for is “cognitive dissonance,” the “feeling of psychological discomfort produced by the combined presence of two thoughts that do not follow from one another.” You know, like when you’re a pulmonologist and a two-pack-a-day smoker – you’ve got some serious psychological discomfort going on there. In order to reduce that discomfort, you’ve got some choices to make. You can either quit smoking – easier said than done – or you can find some way to make yourself believe that smoking isn’t harming your lungs and shortening your life. Surprisingly, a lot of people go with the second option; the compulsion to continue smoking is that strong. So is the compulsion to continue doing a lot of other stuff. Self-justification is a very common way of dealing with a reality that just refuses to cooperate.
This is Part Ten of my series on the deuterocanonical books, or the “Apocrypha,” as Protestants call it. 
I was born and raised a Protestant. One question I never asked myself was “Where did the Bible come from?” I mean, I knew that God inspired men to write historical accounts, songs and letters that have been collected together in the Book that we call the Bible. But what was the collection process like? Who did the collecting, and how did they know which books belonged in the Bible, and which did not? I just never bothered my pretty little head about it….
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 