The story of an indoctrinated Jehovah’s Witness who became a fervent Catholic.
Then Jesus said to him: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
Matthew 16:17-19
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”.
Ecclesiastes 3:1
What I have written here is very much like a travel journal. On that journey there were and will be many stations and, so as not to make it longer than necessary, I have decided to mention only the most important stations. One needs to take some distance from things before describing them in full, and I have not yet been able to do so; what I recount here is quite recent, although the beginnings of the process may go back several years into the past.
It is not my intention to enter into polemics with anyone; my decision is firm and limited only by my capacity to understand things honestly. Nor do I wish to offend anyone. I understand that in anyone’s mind there are prejudices, fears, false information. The world bombards us daily with concepts we barely have time to digest intellectually. That is why I ask those who find in this document some cause for displeasure to allow themselves to reflect on these things with composure and to weigh them with a cool head. I have found that this is a very scarce virtue these days; nevertheless, I also believe it can be cultivated, and I encourage those who feel troubled to examine my case with the greatest impartiality.
Thirty-odd years ago…
When I was about twelve or thirteen we lived in a house in the Agronomía neighborhood of Buenos Aires, on the corner of Quirós and Bucarelli. Across the street, diagonally from the corner, stood a Catholic church, the parish of Santa Teresita del Niño Jesús (St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus). My parents came from Catholic families, both of them baptized Catholics but estranged from the Church for various reasons there is no need to mention. Neither I nor my brothers were ever baptized because of that estrangement. My parents’ thinking at the time was “let them choose their religion when they are older and can make their own decisions”. In my case today, that is a prophecy fulfilled.
Around 1965 a lady of Polish origin began to visit my mother regularly to talk to her about religion. No one at home had any idea what religion that good woman practiced (her name was Catalina Karpowicz), but my mother would receive her for a few minutes every two weeks and buy two magazines from her: “The Watchtower” and “Awake!”. Both magazines usually ended up in a drawer where my mother collected all kinds of old papers, newspapers and magazines. Curiously, the nuns of Santa Teresita collected that paper from the neighborhood houses at the end of every month to recycle it, thus raising some funds for the parish school then under construction.
My mother recalls that the only one in the family who read those blessed magazines was the aforesaid, who at the time devoured books avidly and left no label unread in the house. The reading material consisted generally of explanations of various parts of the Bible. At home there was a good library, a Bible, and some publications that explained Bible stories in terms young people could understand. By the age of twelve I had a fairly complete idea of the structure of the Bible, the history of Israel and the life of Jesus.
I was in the midst of those readings when one fine day another of those “Watchtower” ladies happened to come by the house and began holding weekly Bible study sessions with my mother and my sister. Eventually my father, my brothers and I joined the study. That was the end of the last happy year of my childhood and youth. The seemingly harmless teachings of the “Watchtower” ladies were going to change our life completely. But that part of the story is perhaps an excuse for controversy, and I am not going to tell it in detail. The fact is that barely a few months after the study began we were baptized, having begun to live our “new life” as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
For those who do not know who Jehovah’s Witnesses are, I recommend reading Raymond Franz’s books “Crisis of Conscience” and “In Search of Christian Freedom” and James Penton’s book “Apocalypse Delayed”. Apart from those publications there are many good works written by members of different Christian confessions, sociologists and scholars of comparative religion that will give you an idea of the beliefs and mode of operation of this powerful American sect, founded at the end of the last century by a storekeeper from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania named Charles Taze Russell.
Our life in the “truth” left much to be desired. Jehovah’s Witnesses place a marked emphasis on knowledge of their doctrines, which are beyond question for the membership, as in almost every religion. The difference from other religions is the oddity and social hostility of the teachings of the Watchtower Society, publishers of “The Watchtower” and spiritual directors of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The indoctrination leads the average Witness to live in a kind of marketing-plan twenty-four hours a day. Many things are forbidden or frowned upon: dating between single young people, birthdays, participation in sports, Christmas, patriotic or New Year’s celebrations, blood transfusions, and countless other things too numerous to list here. You can already imagine how much fun things got around the house at Quirós and Bucarelli.
“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide”. John 15:16
By the age of twenty-five my repulsion toward the Watchtower system reached its peak. That eventually brought on my family’s rejection and my consequent departure from home. For about twelve years I had no contact whatsoever with my parents or siblings. I got married, moved with my wife to the U.S., lived in different parts of the country: Boston, Houston, San Antonio, Miami. After seven years of marriage my wife and I decided to separate; we divorced a year later. Now, for the first time, I was alone in the world and in a foreign country.
It was then that news reached me that my brother Mario was deeply troubled. Mario worked at the Witnesses’ headquarters in Buenos Aires as a graphics technician. He began to suffer from acute depression and had to be placed under treatment. I found out through friends and decided to give him a call, thus resuming the relations that had been severed for so many years. In disobedience to the express command of the Watchtower, my parents and my siblings would chat with me about biblical subjects. My mother prayed that I would become a Jehovah’s Witness again.
In 1991, when I was living in Charlottesville, in the state of Virginia, I began to take stock of my experience; my failed marriage and an erratic career in the tourism industry in the U.S. left me not very satisfied. In the midst of that review the local Witnesses showed up at my house, and I promptly resumed studying the Bible with them. At the end of that summer I moved to Boston, where I was assigned to a Spanish-speaking congregation in Back Bay.
Among the members of that congregation I experienced the effects of depression for the first time. The congregation and its activities had a depressing effect on me. I prayed to God for relief, but things did not improve. I began to think about moving to another, English-speaking congregation. I finally did, and there I met James, an “elder” (as the Witnesses call their presbyters) who had served at Watchtower headquarters in New York.
For about a year I had weekly meetings with James to read the Scriptures setting aside the “helps for understanding the Bible” provided by the Watchtower. As a result I began to read classic Bible commentators: Scofield, Matthew Henry, Spurgeon, Jamieson, Brown and others, whom I procured at the bookstore of the Massachusetts Bible Society, the library of Harvard Divinity School and from catalog bookstores and other sources.
Eventually rumors and suspicions of apostasy (deviation from the beliefs imposed by the Watchtower Society) began to become evident. In the winter of 1993 I left the Witnesses, convinced that they were not Christians but rather a group of people under the influence of a doctrine whose purpose is the creation of a “corporate imitation of Christianity”. Without knowing where I was going I withdrew from there, and I was promptly cut off completely from these people whose company I had kept for three years.
“When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to thee, into thy holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their true loyalty. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to thee; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord! And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.”. Jonah 2:7-10
My first hours after freeing myself from the ideological oppression of the Watchtower were hours of relief. The days suddenly seemed long and full of possibilities now that the endless “theocratic” obligations no longer had to be attended to.
My first reaction was to try to put “the house in order”. As I have always done, I began looking for books that would explain things to me from different points of view, and day by day I devoted myself to the study of the Scriptures with renewed eagerness and without the old shackles. I began to breathe fresh air.
By then I was living in an apartment building in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston. In those days one of my neighbors, Mary Ellen, used to chat with me whenever we met in the hallways of the building. One day, while we were having a cup of tea, Mary Ellen began browsing my library. Running her eyes along the spines of the volumes she asked me: Do you have anything by C. S. Lewis? I answered that I had no idea who C. S. Lewis was. In retrospect, I had indeed heard of Lewis, through Jorge Luis Borges, but only as a commentator on English literature.
A few weeks later Mary Ellen gave me a volume of selections from C. S. L. I liked the book very much. Iron sharpens iron, and truly my mind, grown stiff from lack of exercise in the field of theology, began training daily in Lewis’s vigorous calisthenics. Today I admire Professor Lewis as the most effective Christian apologist the twentieth century has had. Soon I realized that there were many things no one had ever explained to me. The vast expanse of the Christian doctrinal edifice opened up before me like a valley of immeasurable treasures. From Lewis I moved on to Chesterton and read Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Soon came the patristic writers, whom I had consulted before but never studied in depth: Origen, St. Augustine, Chrysostom, but chiefly St. Augustine, another of the gifts in the form of men that the Church has produced down the centuries. From Lewis I also received Baxter, George MacDonald, Bultmann, and from Bultmann, Heidegger. Meanwhile I became interested in the work of Buber, and to educate myself in Jewish customs and history I read Josephus (‘Antiquities of the Jews’) and Edersheim (‘The Temple’ and ‘Life of Jesus the Messiah’). To Mary Ellen I owe having been handed the key to enter this whole world through C. S. Lewis.
If anyone wonders why I give Lewis so much importance, they do well to ask. Professor Lewis was a man of deep Christian knowledge but also someone who practiced Christianity charitably. I recommend reading any of his biographies; there are several. His apologetic work is a tour de force for Christians of all confessions. Especially his book “Mere Christianity”, which is a true pearl.
Re-education in the faith
In time, as I read all these things, I began to notice a change in my view of the Scriptures. I began to read ALL of Scripture without discarding the passages that did not suit my preconceived ideas.
When one is brought up by a fundamentalist sect, the clear message of the Scriptures gets distorted, and one ends up seeing the Bible as an operations manual and the human soul as a machine that must conform to this manual. While our life must indeed conform to the Scriptures, the fundamentalist process always begins with the instruction of rules and rarely grows beyond that. In the Bible there are many rules, all good and clear. When one accepts Christianity, the moral limitations we impose on ourselves give us peace and allow us to concentrate our effort on spiritual growth, but the rules are a means and not an end. They are a help that must be transcended once one is spiritually mature. The rules are the milk of doctrine: when we grow to maturity no one has to tell us what to do, because we ourselves know why we do what we do.
But the process does not go from inside man outward, but quite the opposite. It is God who gives the growth, and the function of the Bible is to familiarize us with the mind and heart of God by giving us an idea of how men of other times acted when moved by that same force.
For example, the Witnesses never pay any attention to Mary. She is simply mentioned as the mother of Jesus, and from then on she is given no importance whatsoever. Yet when we read impartially the account of the Annunciation or that of the wedding at Cana, we see that Mary’s role in the Bible is not a minor one. This and many other things arose in my mind as new questions. The chapters that follow are the answers I have found to the various problems that presented themselves to me. The conclusion will be evident at the end, and I hope these reflections may be of some use to those who find themselves at different points along the same road.
- S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton
Here are two people who converted (the first to Anglicanism, the second to Catholicism) in adulthood. When I read the account of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity I was struck by the total lack of argumentative resistance on the part of someone who knew classical Greek well and who probably had little trouble familiarizing himself with biblical Greek. I recommend that those who wish read Lewis’s confession and meditate on it. For me it was a great education to read it in his work “Surprised by Joy”.
What I really could not understand when I read Lewis’s spiritual autobiography was the lack of arguments against the formal Christianity of the Catholic or Anglican churches. I posed the problem to myself this way: here is a trained and intelligent man, versed in ancient languages, the interpretation of texts, logic, etc., and also someone who (we know it from his own confession) did not want to be a Christian.
How is it possible that this man did not see the tremendous doctrinal holes that fundamentalism unmasks in the formal religions? It was obvious that the man was equipped to withstand the onslaughts of Christian logic better than anyone, and yet never, in his months of resistance and struggle, did he stop to look at the things that are normally “unmasked” or “exposed” with regard to the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, etc. Quite the contrary: there is an almost absolute acceptance of ritual and doctrine. In fact, the only case of resistance I have read in Lewis places him in the line of the Anglican “conservatives” and not among the “vanguard”.
This made me think. Two privileged minds (one of the books I most admire is “The Man Who Was Thursday” by Chesterton) agreed in governing their lives by the most rigorous orthodoxy. Both had embraced the change in adulthood, Chesterton when he stood at the peak of his fame as a writer and journalist. Obviously there was something here that deserved a second look.
When I was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness I was taught to think that the other Christian religions, especially Catholicism, had been adulterated by meddling in the political affairs of the world and by mixing original Christianity with the pagan rites prevailing in the countries into which they kept expanding through evangelization or colonialism. Thus it was common among the Witnesses to believe (I do not know whether they still declare it so) that the churches of Christendom (all of them, except themselves!) were represented in the Bible as the scarlet-clad harlot who appears in Revelation and whom the apostle John calls “Babylon the Great”. According to the Witnesses, everything was so contaminated that God, in order to preserve the faith, had had to choose a new people and reveal to this people his eternal truths.
Doctrines such as the Trinity, the existence of the soul, heavenly life for faithful Christians, the cross, the virginity of Mary and many others that it would take long to mention and describe one by one are toppled by quoting various biblical texts which, at first glance and out of context, seem irrefutable.
Thank God one does not read the Bible in separate three-line texts at a time. Eventually we all end up reading large portions, and over the years there are those who read the whole Bible again and again. Such is surely the case of Professor Lewis, who never found in his Bible, despite being armed with a fine intellect and a sure knowledge of Greek, the “ancient” dogmas that the Watchtower Society claimed to have revealed to us. There is a reason for this, and it is this: the theology of the Watchtower Society is false, as is the theology of many fundamentalist sects that have manipulated and even modified their particular versions of the Scriptures to achieve their own ends.
What follows I set out in logical order, and to do so I must take it out of the plane of temporal experience. Here the anecdotes end and a bit of serious reasoning begins.
Sola Scriptura
From Luther onward a number of people, sometimes followed by great multitudes, other times entirely on their own, have challenged this and other doctrines of the Catholic Church, basing their reasonings on private and very personal interpretations of what is written in the Bible. There are many examples, and I am sure we will deal with several of them, so I will not expand on this.
The basis of all this reasoning is what Luther and others have called the doctrine or dogma of “Sola Scriptura” which, in short, says that only the Bible may be used to establish Christian doctrine and that every other source is suspect of being spurious (oral or liturgical tradition, for example). This apparently makes a lot of sense, but it is actually a fallacy, since it is not something the Bible itself upholds. Where in the Scriptures, Hebrew or Christian, is it stated that the Scriptures are the only source of doctrinal truth? Careful what you quote… because “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable” says no such thing — look carefully… “thy word is truth…” does not say it either. A careful examination of the Scriptures shows, among other things, the following:
- The Scriptures are inspired by God and therefore truth
- The Scriptures form a perfect body in total agreement
- The Scriptures are a useful instrument to teach and discipline in the Christian life
- Traditions that invalidate Scripture are traditions of men
But there is not a single biblical text that says that Scripture is the only authoritative source in matters of doctrine. We all remember the biblical confirmation of this, the day when Jesus, confronting the Pharisees and Sadducees, tightened the rule on divorce that had been given to Moses, by quoting to them a text from Genesis and reasoning out with them the formula that has been repeated ever since in every Christian marriage: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder”. It is a curious fact that, in this case, a commandment is made stricter by citing an earlier intention of God and Moses’ concession to the hardness of men’s hearts. Both things are in Scripture, but what finally determines the new commandment is the authority of Jesus. Jesus used the text of Genesis to logically validate his new commandment, which annuls, but does not contradict, the commandment of Moses.
The doctrine of Sola Scriptura is therefore self-contradictory, since it cannot be proven from the Bible. Soon we shall see how wise God was in not putting “all the eggs in one basket”.
Cases of oral tradition or of unknown origin that exist in the Bible
The celebration of Yom Kippur
As we become familiar with the Old Testament, the observant eye finds surprising things. An evident case, for those who wish to study it, is the observance of the Day of Atonement. There is no way to reconstruct the observance of Yom Kippur starting from what is written in the Pentateuch. Try to reconstruct the ceremony of the sin offering relying exclusively on the Scriptures. You will soon realize that you cannot even begin without having to refer to Jewish traditional sources. Alfred Edersheim’s book “The Temple” is a good help for comparing the ceremony with the biblical precedent. It is quite clear to me that someone must have passed on all these details by way of oral tradition (the High Priest when training his successor, or the Levitical priestly body perhaps). If we look, we will find many similar examples.
The teachings of the Pharisees, the opinion of Jesus
In the well-known passage of Matthew 23:2-3 Jesus himself says” “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you”
What is the chair or seat of Moses? There is certainly no biblical record to tell us, but it is clear that what Jesus is referring to here is the collection of traditions handed down through the centuries from Moses onward. Today in universities all over the world it is not unusual to find a chair dedicated to the memory of one of its founders, upon which its new holders enrich and expand the general knowledge that the founder began. (The Lucasian Chair of Physics, which has been held by Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking among others, is an example of this).
What Jesus condemns here is not tradition itself. In fact, he tells the Jews of his time that they must “practice and observe whatever they tell you”. What Jesus condemns is preaching one thing and not practicing it, that is, religious hypocrisy, but not tradition. The only exception (exemplified in the case of Corban) is when tradition invalidates or is squarely opposed to express commandments in Scripture. If we believe in the books of the Old Testament because Jesus quoted from them, we should not overlook traditional teaching. Not all traditions are objectionable, and it is evident that Jesus found them useful.
To finish off the point, please read 2 Thessalonians 2:15 in your own Bible.
“I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel”. 1 Corinthians 4:14-15
One Authority, One Church
In the world we live in, where the honorable keeping of one’s word is ever scarcer, we take good care to put important agreements or contracts in writing. That does not guarantee there will be no problems of interpretation when a disagreement arises. Whoever does not believe me can stop by the nearest courthouse and chat a little while with the judge about the matter. I mention this because Jesus left his legacy in men and not in ink. Is it not true that it is very striking that we do not have an autobiography of Jesus instead of having four Gospels? The truth is that if one trusts the basic premises that God is in control of the situation and that nothing can be lost or spoiled while He is busy with something else… what prevents us from believing that the Holy Spirit can keep the basic traditions of the faith alive through time? That happens even if we distrust everything that has not been put down on paper. In good faith one can easily find one’s way through an oral tradition. It is quite possible that many things we have today in the Bible lived on orally through centuries in which the Hebrews lacked scribes and a fixed place in which to dwell. In fact, the Christian Church has existed since before the canon of the Scriptures was completed. The Church and the Scriptures validate each other, and not one first and the other afterward. In the infancy of the Church there was no need to prove that the Church was the true way to worship; the only thing that had to be proven was the messiahship of Jesus — everything else followed of its own ripeness. One must read that chapter 2 of the letter to the Thessalonians to realize that it is necessary that the Church be attacked by the Antichrist, who sets himself up as the judge of the world, as the god of the world. It is at that moment that Scripture serves us to identify the Church, but that is not all: because of what Paul says in 2 Thess 2:15, oral tradition is also an authoritative source. It all goes together and validates itself together; Church, Tradition and Scripture are a united and harmonious whole and not a series of contending parts like Congress, the President and the Supreme Court, which must limit one another to avoid absolutism. When someone asks us: Where is that doctrine in the Bible? it is legitimate to answer: First show me where the Bible says that all Christian doctrines must be in the Bible. Game over.
The monarchy of Christ is not a democracy
Well, when were there elections to choose a Messiah? I did not vote in the general elections, but I have indeed accepted him as my King, Savior and Protector. What a good arrangement that is! Because I know that the Father has granted the Son to reign over me, but I am free to reject him or accept him, and I have accepted him. In that one sees the humility of both and the very great respect that God and his Son have for our freedom. But that is not all: they send us a Helper, the Holy Spirit, and they give us a place to dwell, the Church. This is not a perfect place, because it is temporarily in the hands of men. When Christ delegated his authority to Peter, not a minute went by before Peter made a mistake and had to be rebuked by Jesus for having “the thoughts of men”; then came the sad episode of Peter’s three denials “before the cock crows”. Someone will say to me: “yes, of course, that happened before he received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost”; granted, but his scandalous and sinful pretense he committed after having received the Holy Spirit (see the fact in the letter to the Galatians). And yes, the Church, founded on such a man, has denied Christ many times by her actions, like Peter; she has been at once sublime and ignominious.
But let us think… no man can claim credit for having sustained her. Said with all due respect: a team of simpletons that wins the championship has to have a great coach; that is why the glory for the persistence of the Church through the centuries goes to the one who deserves it: not Peter or his human successors, but the Master, Founder, Sustainer, Protector who guides her invisibly and also admonishes her and corrects her in the same way that Yahweh guided and admonished Israel in ancient times. Let us remember that Israel is not only the Israel of Samuel, David (the hero), Solomon (the wise), Daniel and Isaiah. It is also the Israel of Saul, David (the adulterer, the murderer), Solomon (the lustful) and other not very brilliant characters. Nevertheless, sacred history is a school that teaches us two beautiful lessons: the irredeemability of the human being fallen in the flesh and the glory of God’s mercy in the Spirit. It is such a clear lesson that at times it slips past us unnoticed. Behold it there in all its glorious majesty. On this rock I will build my Church — which is like saying: on this thing so common, so coarse, so alien to my glory and my perfection; on you, little Peter, rests my earthly Church; bind and loose, open and close; no matter what you do she will survive until I come, and she will be the home of millions of men. The gate of the stars rests on the shoulders of a poor Galilean fisherman; that is possible only because Someone is holding it up from heaven.
If we read Acts 1:20, where it says “His office let another take” (and nothing less than to fulfill a prophecy), and then read 2 Timothy 2:2, we see that there are two incontestable things: authority and succession. Christ did not found a hundred-year Church, nor did he found it on immortal flesh; nevertheless he said that the gates of Hades (or the grave, or hell — the destructive powers of Satan) were not going to prevail against it. Authority laid upon the shoulders of Peter, the Twelve and the Seventy is passed on by the laying on of hands to their successors. In the case of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) we see those men in action before the apostles died. Already at that early time there was a group of men with authority to issue rulings and settle matters of doctrine; James is one of them (Acts 15:2, 4, 6, 22), but he is not an apostle, although he is chosen by the apostles. Who can read the New Testament and not notice that there is a hierarchy with responsibilities?. We see it there in incipient but fully functional form. When someone says “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…” and they do not bother to ground the decision in biblical texts (though they use biblical texts to elucidate the matter under debate), we are in the presence of an authority that has no equivalent in the Jewish system. We are facing a case very similar to that of Jesus in what I quoted earlier about the tightening of the law on divorce. The primitive Church is a simple but well-defined structure. Like a baby that shows perfectly the limbs and basic features of a grown man or woman. There are the brain, the heart, the arms, the legs. Would anyone judge as sane a man who had known me when I was only a year old and now denies that the adult is me because I do not wear diapers or babble like a little child?
The Church is dynamic and is in the world to grow and develop; she is free to choose (to bind and to loose, to open and to close), to try things, to learn by experience and to develop. Always under God’s just principles, she will find blessings when she does well and trouble when she does wrong. She will be disciplined, not because God hates her, but because God loves her and has made her a school of immortals.
As early as between the years 92 and 101 A.D., Clement, bishop of Rome, writes an epistle to the Corinthians (and it is not a letter of friendly greetings; it is a solid letter, disciplinary and doctrinal in nature). Ignatius of Antioch writes in 98 A.D. in his letter to the Philadelphians: “there is one bishop together with the presbyters and deacons”. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Christians of the first century decided for themselves their doctrine or manner of worship. Certainly the Church did not have a dictatorial character but rather an exhortative, encouraging one. And what about the authority to forgive sins? Many deny that such authority was ever delegated to mere men (as was already happening in Jesus’ time! Mt 9:1-8). But in John 20:22-23 it is crystal clear that Jesus grants that authority to his disciples after his resurrection and together with the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
Thus while the Jews demand signs and the Greeks seek wisdom we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.1 Corinthians 1:22 and 23
The Canon of the Scriptures
An old professor used to tell us that there are three kinds of History: the one that remains in the books, the one that really happened and the one that is suffered. The History of Humanity has many chroniclers, but not all of them are disinterested, neutral people of crystal clarity. Quite the contrary.
Nevertheless we can learn about many things and judge them by rule of thumb, trying not to fall for the coloring the narrator gives his characters and situations. In that sense History becomes ever clearer with the centuries, for the vested interests that distorted it die off, and the great currents that pushed the historical course in one direction or another can be defined. Another book I recommend to Christians willing to examine things with dedication: A Study On History by Arnold Toynbee and the already mentioned The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton. While good faith is enough to set oneself on the right course in Christianity, and it is not necessary to start digging up manuscripts or learning Greek in order to be a Christian, it is important to inform oneself in this search. Bad maps take us to places where it may not suit us to go… such has been the case with Jehovah’s Witnesses and my family. If I had known then what I know now, they would never have deceived me like that.
The first step of the deception is to limit the understanding of the Bible to a single kind of interpretation. The word hermeneutics does not appear much in the writings of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is not a very well-known word, anyway. Others have dealt with the hermeneutics of the Witnesses, calling attention to the peculiar interpretive style of the Watchtower Society which jumps from the historical antitype to the simple narrative, from symbol to literalness without any sort of problem. The twelve tribes of the Israel of God in Revelation are symbolic, but the sum of the members of the tribes is symmetrical and literal. That detail always struck me when I was a Witness, and back then I thought that perhaps someday a somewhat more palatable explanation would become evident to them.
The problem of the canon of the Scriptures is one of the most important. I have already dealt with the cases of ecclesiastical authority, apostolic succession and the doctrine of “Sola Scriptura”
When one examines the history of the Christian church, what appears first is Jesus. Then an incipient group of followers, four (the Zebedees, Peter and Andrew), from there the Twelve, and after the Twelve the Seventy. They number about five hundred at the time of Jesus’ Ascension, and they keep growing in number until we hear of congregations scattered throughout the whole Roman Empire barely forty years after Jesus’ death. With what did the first Christians preach? The Bible, in the format we have today, was not available to the apostles; in fact it took quite a long time until the canon of the Scriptures was decided. On this Catholics and Protestants differ. I take the liberty of transcribing from the book “Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic” by David Currie:
“Another common example of this problem contained in the very root of a definition or system is that of the person who states: “All generalizations are false”. This statement is, of course, a generalization, and it follows that it is therefore false by its own definition. It self-destructs. The person is really saying “All generalizations are false, except this one.”
The Protestant is in this same position, invalidated by his own logic […]
There is no part of the Bible where it is explicitly taught that the Bible is the final [sole, absolute] authority of faith. Is the Bible the Authoritative Word of God? It certainly is!. Only the Bible? No! It is not just that the words [sole and final authority] are not in the Bible; the very concept is alien to the Bible. The Protestant is really telling us: “Only doctrines explicitly founded on biblical teaching are fully trustworthy – except this doctrine [of Sola Scriptura]”. This system cannot be truthful with an inconsistency like this.
The Bible does give us a good indication of where the final authority lies, in 1 Timothy 3:15: “the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth”. Christ arranged his Church so that she would live from generation to generation, so that she would be the guardian of the truth. The Church is the arbiter of what is true or not. She uses and venerates the Bible, but she cannot put the Bible in a position from which the Bible itself excludes itself – that of being the sole and final source of authority in the Christian life.
The problem is not to put the Bible “above” or “below”, but rather to determine whether our view of the Bible is biblical. Unless someone shows me where I am wrong, I can only point to what is really obvious: that the Protestant view of the Bible is antibiblical. If this conclusion is true, the entire Protestant [theological] system collapses, falling upon its adherents with eternal consequences”.
If this is true, the original Christian Bible is available to everyone in any Catholic bookstore, and the Bible in Protestant format, from Luther onward, is nothing more than a truncated Bible. This is very serious, and I invite everyone to investigate it carefully and personally. Do not let yourself be guided by what people say or what is written in this or that manual, but seriously go on to examine things as close to the source as necessary, with good faith, honesty and without pride. At first I too believed that Catholic theology was a meaningless jumble. Today I repent of my foolishness and confess my ignorance. The magisterium of the Catholic Church has issued very little material considering the long years of its existence, but as far as I know no “new light” has been received to correct Ignatius, Clement or Augustine of Hippo; they are still there in the same place, saying the same things for twenty centuries.
Why I accepted Roman Catholicism
But avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels over the law, for they are unprofitable and futile. As for a man who is factious, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful; he is self-condemned. (Titus 3:9,10)
Having reviewed the doctrines of Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide and having determined the role that the Christian community under apostolic authority plays in the preservation of the faith, it no longer surprised me that Chesterton and Lewis joined the nearest liturgical church. Lewis became Anglican, I believe, because being from an Ulster family and a professor at Oxford, the Christian field was more fertile for him in that confession. Adopting Catholicism in those circumstances would have been suicidal; what is more, it would have been totally useless from the point of view of fruits. I believe that Professor Lewis has made more Catholics than Anglicans through his books, but that is only a personal impression. As for Chesterton, his position was different, and he had no trouble accepting Catholicism once his reasons were satisfied by the study of the doctrine, to which Chesterton applied himself diligently, as we can see in his books.
When I briefly review the fundamental tenets of Protestantism, I conclude that I had no choice but to be reconciled with the Church.
- The Scriptures are the sole authority of faith; there is no such thing as apostolic tradition.
False according to what has been expounded at length in previous paragraphs.
Contradictory with 1 Timothy 3:14 and 15 (see especially v. 14!) and 2 Thessalonians 2:15
Contradictory with the historical records of Christianity from the 1st to the 4th centuries (see bibliography at the end of this article)
- Faith in Jesus Christ is the only thing needed for salvation.
Luther said that he could commit adultery twenty-four times a day and that this would neither add nor take away one gram from his chances of salvation. I have to agree with that statement, though not for the same reasons that Luther would have had for asserting it. This may well be one reason why Melanchthon and Luther are not in heaven right now, if you will allow me the irony.
False and contradictory with the following biblical texts and their general context. Salvation is obtained or results…
- Through believing in Christ (John 3:16; Acts 16:31)
- Through repentance (Acts 2:38; 2 Peter 3:9)
- Through baptism (John 3:5; 1 Peter 3:21; Titus 3:5)
- By the working of the Holy Spirit (John 3:5; 2 Corinthians 3:6)
- Through the declaration of our faith (Luke 12:8; Romans 10:9)
- Through knowing the truth (1 Timothy 2:4; Hebrews 10:26)
- By works (Romans 2:6,7; James 2:24)
- By keeping the commandments (1 Corinthians 7:19)
- By undeserved kindness or grace (Acts 15:11; Ephesians 2:8)
- By the sacrificial blood of Christ (Romans 5:9; Hebrews 9:22)
- By the righteousness or holiness of Christ (Romans 5:17; 2 Peter 1:1)
- By the sacrifice on the cross (Ephesians 2:16; Colossians 2:14)
Twenty Centuries of Doctrine
Whatever may follow from this: infant baptism, veneration of Mary, veneration of the saints, prayers to the saints, the use of icons or images, the presence of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, apostolic authority and succession, the sanctification of certain formerly pagan customs, the incarnation, millenarianism, papal authority, the forgiveness of sins, confession, absolution, the use of contraceptives in marriage, the sanctity of life, purgatory, hell, how to deal with the present and past faults of the Church (inquisitions, excommunications), the resurrection of the flesh, the exercise of charity, the nature and relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit… etc. all these doctrines flow from our capacity to assume that there is a magisterium with authority given by Christ to understand the whole of doctrine, and not, as is customary outside Catholicism, to decide the truth on one’s own by the mere reading of the Bible and in total ignorance of what our brothers and spiritual elders of times past heard from the mouth of Our Lord and his Apostles.
To those who judge me ill for submitting to the magisterium after this long study, I challenge you to read these books and notes with honesty, and to ask with humility those who know the truth of what the Church teaches. You will discover, if you act with humility and with intellectual and emotional sincerity, a truth that has already lasted twenty centuries and is entering its third millennium; you will join the brotherhood of the saints who were capable of dying and even more capable of living for the glory of Our Lord, King and Savior Christ Jesus, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.
(Revelation 22:20,21)
Author: Carlos Caso-Rosendi / USA
Bibliography
- STEPHEN K. RAY, Crossing the Tiber
- EUSEBIUS, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine
- GRAHAM HENRY, Where We Got the Bible
- THOMAS HOWARD, Evangelical Is Not Enough
- JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN, An Essay On The Development of Christian Doctrine
- JOHANNES QUASTEN, Patrology
- LUDWIG OTT, Fundamentals of the Catholic Dogma
- WILLIAM JURGENS, The Faith Of The Early Fathers
- CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS, Surprised By Joy, Mere Christianity, God in the Dock
- GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, Orthodoxy, St. Thomas Aquinas The Dumb Ox, The Everlasting Man
- ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, Against the Donatists, The City of God
- CHARLES KEATING, Catholicism and Fundamentalism
- PATRICK MADRID,Surprised by Truth
- SCOTT HAHN & KIMBERLY HAHN, Rome Sweet Rome
- DAVID B. CURRIE, Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic
- MARK P. SHEA, By What Authority?
Information from both sides of the controversy
- EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS: The Didache, Epistle of Clement, Epistle of Ignatius, Epistles and Martyrdom of Polycarp, Epistle to Diognetus, Epistle to Barnabas Translated by Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin Books 1968
- LA BIBLIA DE NAVARRA, 1990 Universidad de Navarra
- THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH
- VALIDITY IN INTERPRETATION, Hirsch
- THE ANTE-NICENE FATHERS, Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson
- THE NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS, Eerdmans Edition 1983
- CATHOLIC AND CHRISTIAN, Alan Schreck 1984
- INSTITUTIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH, Calvin
- THE COMPACT HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH , Alan Schreck
- COMMENTARY ON THE PSALMS, Martin Luther
- FACTS ABOUT LUTHER, O’Hare
- DISENT AND ORDER IN THE MIDDLE AGES, Jeffrey Russell
- THE SPIRIT OF PROTESTANTISM, Robert McAffee Brown
