“I don’t care what the Scripture says.”
“What?! How can you SAY that?” I thought I was going to fall over from shock when our friend Andrew said he didn’t care what the Bible said. We were, after all, having a spiritual discussion. He was, after all, a Catholic, and Catholics are at least supposed to believe what the Bible says. The seminarians from Rome had given us a new respect and interest in Catholicism (though not enough to consider converting yet), and here Andrew was blowing up that newly formed mental image of Catholicism.
Andrew and Jennifer were our first, honest to goodness, Catholic friends. We’d met them through political activities, and along with a few other couples, we shared a deep, philosophical and political bond. But since we generally agreed on politics, sometimes we’d venture into other taboo subjects, like sex, whether or not South Park has any comedic value (it doesn’t), and religion. This group of friends consisted of four Protestant couples, and one Catholic couple, and since Protestants rarely agree even with each other, throw a Catholic into the mix and you’ve got quite a recipe for interesting discussion.
I have no idea what we were discussing, but I do remember feeling almost like Andrew had uttered a blasphemy, and I wanted to scoot my chair away.
“I don’t care what the scripture says because there’s a dozen different ways to interpret that scripture and you guys can’t even agree on what it means.”
He was right about that. We were all taking a different angle, even Lukus and I didn’t agree. It was the first time I’d ever heard the phrase “Sola Scriptura” (only Scripture”) even though “Sola Scriptura” was what I essentially practiced. I believed the Bible – how could any Christian argue with the Bible? But it’s not that Christians were arguing with the Bible, we were arguing about the Bible. We all claimed that the Bible was all one needed, and yet no one could agree about what the Bible meant in any given passage. I generally trusted my spiritual instincts. It had never occurred to me that a historical, traditional, faithful interpretation was necessary (or even available) to examine the Bible properly because, clearly, each of our spiritual instincts were disagreeing with one another.
Andrew then presented an entirely new concept to me: Scripture AND Tradition. He went into how the Church existed before the official canonization of the Bible as we know it – about 360 years before. The Church preceded Scripture, interpreted Scripture, and canonized Scripture. Had God just left the Church without His Spirit or His Word for 360 years? If we trust the Holy Scriptures, can we not also trust the entity that, through the work of the Holy Spirit, preserved and canonized the Scriptures? Both Scripture AND Tradition had upheld the Church for 100′s of years. My mind was officially blown. Andrew had knocked out our arguments in a single blow, leaving us perplexed and stuttering. And in case you were wondering, yes, it was extremely painful to realize how ignorant I was.
Suddenly, it began to make sense why there were so many denominations out there and why the Catholic Church still stood as the same, 2,000 year old institution. It began to make sense why Lukus and I could never fit in anywhere, never find a place that seemed to share all the same beliefs we did. Shouldn’t Christians be able to have the same, consistent spiritual foundation of solid doctrine the way we shared with our friends that solid, consistent political doctrine? It was through libertarian thought and the Non-Agression Principle that we came to find a basic philosophical foundation for political thought. Outside of libertarian thought were holes and inconsistencies and contradictions galore. But now, it was like we had discovered a map that made the whole world make sense. Shouldn’t Christianity, if it’s THE Truth, be the same way?
And yet, there we were, attending a church that we were in agreement with only about 70% of the time. It seemed like the best we could find, and we dragged ourselves there each week trying to find some way to make ourselves fit. I found myself biting my tongue every Sunday and resisting the urge to argue theology with my pastor. He was a brilliant theologian, and who was I to think I could even begin to debate him? And yet, one night at a supper, I couldn’t help but bring up a point about free will, which he countered, to which I then made a point that made him completely stop in his tracks. He was a well-published author on this subject, and yet, he had no rebuttal. Surely it couldn’t be this easy? Surely the peg upon which one holds all of their theology should not be so easily knocked down by the likes of me!
Not long after that mini-debate with my pastor, my mom got really sick from her 7-year battle with cancer, and I was a wreck. With as much love and grace that one can possibly have to say such a horrific thing, my pastor emailed me to encourage me to “be thankful for the gift of cancer that God had given my mom.” I loved this man, but what he had written made me want to throw up. That wasn’t the God I served! How could so many Christians who read the same Bible and prayed to the same Jesus have such drastically different views of who God is? We affectionately left that church and began searching for a new one.
But that experience was the first time the question really hit home for me, “How do we know that what we believe is true?” I knew I believed in God, I knew Jesus was the only way, but beyond that, how did I know that who I perceived God to be was the right perception? How could I trust the Bible when I was the one reading it? Was Andrew right, and Tradition was necessary in order to interpret the Scriptures? This question would linger as I washed dishes and did laundry, but we quickly discovered a new church in the area that our best friends wanted to check out, and somehow those thoughts got pushed to the back of my mind for another couple of years. But they never went away.
