My Decision Made

The story of my decision winds down now. Having committed to going to Mass and falling in love with the passion for God, my heart had almost decided to be Catholic. I had jumped off the cliff. However, I wasn’t ready to tell anyone, and I still had doubts. My heart and intellect had to be on board, because I had to know if my decision was what God wanted me to do. No doubt he would pull me back from the edge in one way or another if he wanted me to stay Protestant.

In early January I was reading a book called the “Dictionary of Christianity.” Terms started to blur together, but I was fascinated about all the things about Christianity I still did not know. I found an entry on a group of heretics in the middle ages. These heretics were a precursor to Anabaptists in one way but also a remnant of a more ancient heresy in another (heresies in the first four centuries after Jesus tend to run together in my mind, but they centered on the divinity of Jesus, and their conclusions caused further theological breaks with the church).
For some reason, I was surprised to think of a heresy in the Middle Ages. Before, I had thought that any “heresies” the Catholic Church had “crushed” were legitimate protests, and that the response was a power struggle. While I don’t condone the church’s more violent responses, as I read about this particular heresy, I found that it was, indeed, a heresy.

The heresy, based on Jesus’ divinity, was an old one that the church had been fighting for years. In the 4th century, they had defined Jesus as fully God and fully Man. Either / or was not a possibility for them. And ever since they had defended what they knew to be true about Jesus – what all Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike, who believe the Apostles Creed or Nicene Creed believe. Emotionally I was struck – the Catholic Church had been defending not just Christianity but the very essence of Jesus since it was started!

My mind raced on, as I remembered what I knew about early church history. The church had defined what we call “Christianity” in the 4th century in the Nicene Creed and through the assembly of the New Testament. With all due respect, people who are followers of Jesus but do not believe in the Apostles Creed which explains his divinity, are not necessarily Christians – or not what I would call Christians. This is why Catholics believe Protestants receive many graces and are saved through Jesus, while some Christ following sects are not given titles within the fold (Islam could be called a great Christian heresy – Muslims believe in, and to some extent follow, Jesus, but do not believe him to be God).

In addition, for us to believe the Bible that we have, to know that is complete and made up of the best books, to know that God’s word is in it, we have to trust that God helped the assemblers of the New Testament to create an authoritative source.
As such, anyone who believes in Christ and calls themselves a Christian must believe in what the Catholic Church was in the 4th century, or they must re-evaluate if they believe the Gospel at all…

And so I did. Because I cannot separate myself from Christianity, I realized that it was necessary to delve in to Catholicism. Many of the practices that Protestants oppose today were set in place when the Catholics created the creeds and the Bible. In addition, the church had 1800 years of near-continuous history to record its rationale for certain beliefs, so we can always test things we don’t understand.
In the year since I made my decision, I have joined the RCIA (Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults) program, and I feel even more confident in my choice.

Although I dived in, I had lingering doubts about certain things, but one-by-one the doubts were erased. Beliefs that seemed hard before now seem clear as day, and morality that had astonished me now makes sense from a life-loving perspective. If I found something hard to swallow, I would set it aside in trust, and in time, I would see how it fit into God’s plan.