My Journey

If you have read my blog, I hope you have understood it as a journey. I have for many years been on a spiritual quest; I have for a long time had the nagging feeling that there was something more than I had ever experienced. Please understand, I have had many Pentecostal experiences but even in that I always sensed that something was missing. I could not put my finger on it nor could I explain it. It was something that lingered in the back of my mind and at odd times emerged to occupy the center of my attention.

For the last few years, I have felt comfortable that my journey would end in Eastern Orthodoxy. I was prepared to make that leap. But there were some things (which I hated to admit to myself) that bothered me about Orthodoxy: (a) blatant lack of unity; (b) exclusivism; (c) ethnocentricity; (d) majoring on some very minor points; and, (e) competition between the various groups of Orthodox.

These things were very obvious to anyone who looks. Then, some other things began to surface—things that took me a while to see and longer to grasp. Two things that shook me the most: (a) the teaching authority and (b) praying for the dead.

The teaching authority issue started nagging at me when I realized Orthodoxy has no authoritative voice to speak to the issues of modern life. Let us suppose that some new thing comes out that is only tangentially related to the past, Orthodoxy has no way to speak to it. Sure, a plethora of bishops, archbishops, and even Patriarchs can offer their opinions but that is all they can do.

Since they believe that the unity of the whole church is required to convoke another Ecumenical Council, (like the seven they recognize) and since that has not and most likely will not happen, they have no mechanism to speak to the issues of today with authority.

The Orthodox teach and believe the infallibility of the Church in theory but it is since the 1054 A.D. split nothing but a theory; it has no method by which to operate. If a new heresy were to spring up, the Orthodox have no method to authoritatively combat it.

I have a great deal of difficulty with a theoretically infallible church that has no practical method to make infallible pronouncements. Does it seem reasonable that the Lord Jesus would build His church, invest them with infallibility by the Holy Spirit, and then leave them without a way to express that infallible authority for the last 1000 years? That certainly seems very ill conceived and almost cruel.

It also struck me that having an infallible Bible is useless unless one has an infallible interpreter of said Bible. No matter how right, good, and errorless one’s Bible is, he or she can certainly interpret it in the most fallible ways. The Orthodox offer the voice of the Fathers and the Tradition but what does one do when the Fathers disagree or are inconsistent and the Tradition is vague?

My other new difficulty with Orthodoxy came up when I was reading about praying for the dead and thinking about the Roman doctrine of purgatory. As a potential Orthodox convert, I accepted praying for the dead (see my earlier blog on the subject). Then I started to think about why the Orthodox prayed for the dead. They deny purgatory. So why do they pray for the departed? If there is no intermediate state and only Heaven and Hell are possibilities, then why would one pray for those who had fallen asleep? If they are in Heaven, they do not need our prayers (and in fact we need theirs) and if they are in Hell, our prayers will not be of any use to them.

There are many other Biblical arguments in favor of purgatory, which I will not get into, but this one thought was enough to make me give the doctrine a serious look. Prayer for the dead presupposes an intermediate state in which those prayers can be of some use OR prayers for the dead are just a pious piece of uselessness. The testimony of the Early Church Fathers is unanimous that these prayers are useful, thus, there has to be a third choice.

Once I read and studied the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) and understood what it really says about purgatory, I had no trouble accepting it. Then when I understood the problem of authority as outlined above and understood the Papacy, I had no trouble accepting it. For Protestants who think they know what papal infallibility means, I suggest that they read the CCC and the limits placed on it. Suffice it to say at this point that this idea is probably one of the least understood Catholic distinctives.

In case you have not garnered from what I have said, I am now convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic Church. I believe and confess that it is the Church that Christ founded and that it is the pillar and ground of truth (I Timothy 3:15). Now believing that and being certain of it, I must be obedient and submit to the Lord’s Church or be eternally damned for “Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin” (James 4:17 NRSV).