TO ROME OR NOT TO ROME I, Why I Am A Christian

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Well, I'll open up a gigantic can of worms and begin to deal with the topic of why I am considering converting to the Roman Catholic Church. This might very well be the primary reason I have begun blogging again, and so it warrants a bit of an introduction.

About two or three months ago I broke the news to my wife, parents, Pastor, and a few close friends that I felt like I was being pulled toward the Catholic Church and that I could no longer in good faith keep it all to myself. I wasn't sure of all the answers to my questions and curiosities, but I did know that I felt like Christ was urging me to declare a sort of temporary denominational agnosticism in order to follow where He led.

To be sure, I have been more or less "Reformed" for as long as I knew what "Reformed" meant, but in the last few years, I have found myself having trouble refuting many of the arguments put forth by Catholic apologists against Protestant and Evangelical Christianity and for the Roman Catholic Church. For the longest time I just assumed this was mostly due to the fact that I was not a professionally trained theologian and that I was dealing with arguments from those who were. It was easy to brush aside the intellectual quandries and just sort of grin and bear it for a long time.

But over the past year, I also went through a deep and often dark spiritual crisis. This is the hardest part of my story to share, and I don't plan to dive into too much detail on it, because I have been able to attain for myself a sort of truce with it all for the last several months. Yet this same spiritual crisis was ultimately, I believe, the catalyst for the courage to step out of my comfort zone like I have.

With the darkness of my spiritual crisis came many temptations, but the most obviously deviant was the temptation to just drop the whole thing and give up on Christ. Praise be to the living God that as a young man He had stirred up a desire in me to not only hold the truths of the faith in the secret of my heart, but also to be able to give a well-reasoned account for the hope that is within me.

I have always felt a deep love for the person of Jesus, the empathetic God-man Who was willing to suffer agony upon agony for me. And I have always known His story was true because of the martyrdoms of the Apostles and other witnesses of the risen Christ, for though one man may be deceived by himself, for dozens to willingly lay down their lives over a lie they know to be a lie is simply ridiculous and unreasonable. If Peter and John and Stephen and countless others all bore witness to the risen Lord, if they ate and spoke with Him, if they touched His wounds and witnessed His ascension, and then laid down their lives, then what other testament to the "historicity", the REALITY, of the resurrection can we possibly need? Christ is Risen. I would be a fool to cut and run when the king has already been installed upon His throne of victory.

So I have always held to an historical faith just as much as I have held to a personal faith. Knowing this, one may easily understand the basic difficulty that led me question not Christ, but wherein He might properly be found. Notionally, every Christian should understand that the Bible is testament to all that we believe and hold dear. For Protestants, the Bible is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and as a child this was easy enough to accept.

Yet for years, the question of why and how bugged me about the Bible, not because I doubted, but because I knew in my heart of hearts that these questions mattered...

NEXT: The Bible's story