I grew up in the shadow of the East Tennessee Smoky Mountains. All my exposure to church was Southern Baptist. I remember my dad’s skepticism about local Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. They did not forbid alcohol consumption!
Except for some delinquency during my college years, I have always been a church attender actively involved in whatever church I was a member of and that was certainly true of the Baptist Churches I joined (except that one in my college town).
In my thirties, I questioned the Baptist policy of requiring Presbyterians and Methodists who had married a Baptist to be baptized by total immersion before being granted Baptist membership. In discussion of that with a friend, I recall him saying that it took more to be a Baptist than to be a Christian. Well, I knew that was wrong and was one factor that made transfer of membership to a Southern Presbyterian church easy.
I was quite happy in Presbyterian churches for a couple of decades until transferred to northern New York. I looked for a Presbyterian church there and found them all unwelcoming and uninspiring. A warm and enthusiastic welcome to a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, initiated a couple of decades as a Lutheran involving active membership in four Lutheran churches in different cities.
Upon retirement, I spent three years at a Lutheran Seminary, not seeking ordination but just staying busy, exercising the mind, and looking for information and understanding. I even took Greek and Hebrew and wish I could still remember what I had to remember then to pass the exams. That seminary experience was my first serious exposure to the history and theology of the first 1500 pre-reformation years of the church, and it made transfer to the Catholic Church easy when my ELCA Lutheran church started revising fundamental theological principles.
That is the short story of my journey through Baptist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches to the 2011 reception to the Catholic Church. I hope that sharing the story will lend some credibility to this current series of posts on Catholic theology.
I want to assure readers that I don’t question the professed faith of Christians outside the Catholic Church. I deplore the way some Protestants and Catholics view each other, sometimes with scorn or pity and, a few hundred years ago, even killing each other.
I suggest that a Catholic who does not understand the theology of a different denomination has no business criticizing it. And a Protestant who does not understand Catholic theology has no business criticizing it. Catholic theology is much more complex than Protestant theology, probably due to its 2000-year age, and needs some explanation. So that is what I hope to provide in this series of posts.
I’m not an authorized spokesman but will be expressing my opinions based on the education I have experienced, hoping that they are consistent with Catholic teaching. Let me know if you see an error.