Of Cabbages and Kings

Here’s another long-overdue installment in the series on my selection of a Christian church, continued from the previous post on sola scriptura.

Related to sola scriptura is the idea that every Christian has the right and responsibility to interpret the Bible for himself. This becomes necessary if you reject the authority of a formal hierarchy of Church leaders, e.g. if you are Baptist or Evangelical. Someone has to interpret the Bible, and if you don’t recognize any church leaders to interpret the Bible for members of that church, then interpretation falls to the individual. Even among denominations or local congregations that hold their members to a particular interpretation of the Bible, the right of interpretation still ultimately falls to the individual, because anyone can leave these churches for another Protestant church at any time. As mentioned in part 1, few Protestant denominations claim a monopoly on the truth, and to do so would be problematic for a denomination that was founded in the last few hundred years, over a millennium separated from Jesus’ time on Earth.

Certain Protestants claim that the Bible is self-interpreting, but by this they mean that the interpretation of the Bible is self-evident upon comparing certain passages to each other—and their particular interpretation is the one that’s self-evident. In other words, the “self-interpreting” interpretation is simply another individual’s interpretation of Scripture.

But this doctrine of the ultimate right of private interpretation of the Bible is not supported by the Bible. In fact, it is explicitly condemned:

His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

Anyone can use the Bible to distort the truth and, as evidenced in Peter’s letter quoted above, this has been happening for the entire history of the Church. For passages that give rise to doctrines of the Christian faith, there is a correct interpretation, and there are incorrect interpretations. To claim anything less would be to yield to relativism and claim that even fundamental doctrines of the faith are mutable, subject to each Christian’s opinions.

So how can we know whether a particular Bible passage has been interpreted correctly? As is often the case, the Bible itself provides a clue:

if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the Bible itself is the pillar and foundation of the truth—rather, the Church is. This does not mean that the Bible is somehow lacking in the truth, but that the Bible by itself is not and was never meant to be the only means by which we learn about who God is what what he asks of us. To know the fullness of the truth, we need to look to the institution that God himself set up for us: his Church.

Certainly the Bible contains much truth, and in theory it may be possible to come to a knowledge of all of the truth revealed by God using only the Bible. After all,

All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

But as is abundantly clear, not everyone who sits down with a Bible and a desire to be led by the Holy Spirit comes away with an understanding of the truth and “thoroughly equipped for every good work.” We must remember that it is the Church which is the pillar and foundation of the truth, thereby not falling prey to our own opinions and becoming “ignorant and unstable people” as warned against in 2 Peter 3:16.

A frequent charge leveled against some non-Protestant Christian doctrines is that “they’re not in the Bible.” Of course, the fact that a given doctrine (say, the perpetual virginity of Mary) is not explicitly stated in the Bible does not of necessity make the doctrine untrue. Furthermore, it certainly does say in the Bible that the Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth. As a result, determining the veracity of the doctrines taught by a given denomination or church is closely related to the question of whether the organization in question is the true Church founded by Jesus (see part 1 of this series).

It is indeed important to test doctrines against the Bible, but means that doctrines must not contradict the Bible, not that we should condemn a particular doctrine if it is not stated explicitly in the Bible. Any stronger requirement is not supported by the Bible. For example, Paul instructs Timothy to pass on his oral teachings, not simply preserve copies of his letters:

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.

My point here is that God chose to reveal his will through more than simply publishing a book. While he was on Earth, Jesus could have written a book himself and simply left instructions for his followers to read it and follow its directions. Instead, Jesus founded a Church, chose his Apostles, and equipped them to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). This same Church exists today, in accordance with Jesus’ promise: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

This Church began at Pentecost after Jesus’ ascension (Acts 2), not decades later once all of the books of the Bible were written, or centuries later when the canon of Scripture had been decided. To insist today that the Bible in itself forms the foundation of the truth (recall 1 Timothy 3:15 above), and that the Church Jesus founded is wholly dependent on this subset of its own writings, is, in the light of history, a non sequitur.

All verses are from the NIV.

This post is part of a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days.

Back in the days of the Protestant Reformation, one of the rallying cries was sola scriptura, “scripture alone.” This is the doctrine that the Bible is the only infallible guide to the Christian faith, that whatever the early church fathers or modern day theologians have to say, however insightful or helpful, it is always entirely subordinate to the Bible. This foundational tenet of Protestantism can be an appealing idea, but on closer inspection I believe it has some fatal weaknesses.

The weakness I will discuss in this post is the question of which books are in the Bible. The almost universal Protestant answer to this question is that the Bible consists of 66 books: the 27 books of the New Testament and the 39 books that formed the Hebrew Scriptures, called the Old Testament. But why these particular books?

Nearly every Christian church or denomination agrees on the list of books in the New Testament, but in the first centuries of Christianity various books were proposed or called into question before the New Testament canon was finalized. More recently, Martin Luther questioned the books of Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation, apparently seeking to remove these books from the Bible but ultimately just moving them to the end of his Bible. Most notably, Luther considered the book of James an epistle of straw because it appeared to directly contradict one of his other doctrines, sola fide, “faith alone” whereas James emphasizes the necessity of having faith and works together.

While the books of the New Testament were written during roughly the first half century since the establishment of the Church, even the most recent of the books of the Old Testament had been written centuries earlier. But the Hebrew canon in Jesus’ day had not yet been formally closed, so the early Church had to decide which books belonged in the Old Testament also. In the first century AD, no books had been added to the Hebrew language Scriptures for some 400 years, but the Greek Scriptures, the Septuagint, had some newer books written in Greek. The Septuagint was in widespread use among the Jews in Jesus’ day, and the New Testament authors frequently quoted the Septuagint.

To my knowledge, most of the extra books of the Septuagint were recognized as canonical from the early days of Christianity until the Reformation. (Some of the Septuagint books were not universally recognized as canonical—the Catholic Church recognizes seven books, and the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox recognize those books plus a few more.) At the Reformation, Martin Luther moved these books to their own section in between the Old and New Testaments. They were later cut from Protestant Bibles entirely.

This is the first difficulty with sola scriptura: how can you know that your Bible is complete, and contains no extraneous books? The 66-book canon is a product of Protestant traditions, descended from the Catholic New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, with no place for the books of the Septuagint. If one of the Apostles, for example, had written a table of contents for the Bible, there would be no trouble here. But as it is, there is no avoiding the fact that the list of books that get included in modern Bibles was developed by the church over time.

So in whichever version of the Bible you have, the table of contents has been passed on to you by church tradition. Protestant Bibles were edited by the reformers, so how can you know they were right and nearly everyone else was wrong for the first 1500 years of Christianity? Martin Luther, as I mentioned previously, had little enough faith in the Catholic Church and enough faith in himself that he took it upon himself to decide which books were canonical and which were not. But most Protestants would agree that some of his decisions were questionable: perhaps he went too far in demoting some of the New Testament books, or did not go far enough in not expunging the apocrypha (called the deuterocanon among Catholics). So Protestants are forced to accept the canon as formed by the Catholic Church, modified by Luther, and then re-modified by other reformers.

But what if a Protestant disagrees with the list of books in his Bible? Is it every Christian’s right to unilaterally decide which books make up the word of God, those books upon which everything rests if sola scriptura is true? Or was it just Luther et al who possessed this privilege?

The answer to this problem presumably appeals to the Holy Spirit: Luther was led by the Spirit to make corrections to the canon, and others were led by the Spirit to correct Luther. The Holy Spirit won’t lead anyone else to make corrections, because (hopefully) we have the correct canon now. As for the rest of Christendom, they must have stopped listening to the Spirit sometime around the year 400, when the canon was decided the first time.

I suppose that argument is at least somewhat plausible, but there’s a problem: the canon of the Bible was originally decided by ecumenical councils, but the Protestant revisions were decided by individuals. And if Luther can claim to be sufficiently guided by the Spirit as to overrule an ecumenical council and a thousand years of consensus as to the canonicity of particular books, then who has the authority to prevent other people from doing the same thing? Today’s independent street preacher or TV evangelist can claim to be led by the Holy Spirit just as easily as Martin Luther did. The fact that the 66-book Protestant canon enjoys widespread popularity today is no guarantee that it isn’t missing some books.

So those who accept sola scriptura have some difficulty defending their particular choice of canon. This is the first problem with the doctrine: the Bible is supposed to be the sole rule of faith, containing everything we need for salvation, but in the Protestant tradition it isn’t clear at all why the 66 books that fell out of the Reformation are the correct books. Arguments can be made in favor of those 66 books and against the books considered canonical in other traditions, but in the end there can be no certainty. All that’s left is to choose a Bible for yourself and hope that your choice is correct, or to appeal to the tradition of your choice as to which books were considered canonical by previous church leaders or reformers. Already, you have based your faith on a line of reasoning or a tradition outside the Bible.

This post is part of a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days.

A note on terminology: in this post I use the words denomination and church (lower case) more or less interchangably. I mean to refer to those groups of Christians that hold to a common set of teachings and are in communion with each other, e.g. Catholics, Southern Baptists, Lutherans, the Russian Orthodox Church or Eastern Orthodoxy taken as a whole, etc. A more precise system of categorization is not necessary for my purposes here.

There are quite a few Christian denominations and churches in the world, all of which profess to follow Christ and hold the Bible in high regard as the Word of God. Meanwhile, in the Bible we see Jesus founding a single Church and promising that it will never fall, even when attacked by the full fury of Hell:

I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.

—Matthew 16:18

One of the most important questions a Christian can ask is, where is this Church that was founded by Jesus? Everywhere you look there is another local congregation with its own brand of Christianity. Are all of these part of this one true Church? Some of them? How can you tell the difference between a local church that teaches the truth and one that teaches error?

Few Protestant denominations claim to have exclusive ownership of the truth, that their denomination forms the entirety of the true Church founded by Jesus. This, I imagine, is because most Protestants recognize that their particular brand of Christianity can be traced back to the sixteenth century at the earliest, well over a thousand years after the original Christian church formed in Jerusalem. (The Landmark Baptists, and perhaps other Protesant groups, hold that their denomination has been in existence continuously from the time of Jesus, but they frankly don’t have a leg to stand on.) So, there are a few options:

1. The true Church that Jesus founded has been on earth visibly since the beginning of Christianity, around the year A.D. 40. In this case, the true Church must certainly be wider than Protestantism, or at least it was prior to the Reformation.
2. The true Church disappeared or went underground sometime in its first few centuries, and has resurfaced. This, as I understand it, is the Mormon view.
3. The true Church disappeared and has not resurfaced. In this case, there’s little point in reading the rest of this series of posts; we’re just out of luck if we want to join the Church founded by Jesus.

I don’t know of any groups that hold to the third option above. I would argue that the second option requires the Church to fail, at least temporarily, which contradicts the promise of Jesus that “the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” The Church may well suffer setbacks, or have revivals or reformations from time to time, but there must nevertheless be some continuity in Church lineage all the way from Jesus’ day. If there was a period in history, however short, where there was no true Church on Earth, then the gates of Hell (or Hades) did in fact overcome the Church. If this were the case, then it would call not for a re-founding of the Church, but for an abandonment of Christianity as a failure.

So what remains is the first option, that Jesus founded a Church which has never failed. For this to be the case, there must be an unbroken lineage, however thin, of Christians in the true Church that stretches back to the first century. Until the sixteenth century, the true Church could not possibly have had Protestants in it, since that particular movement started in 1517 with Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. A typical Protestant understanding of the true Church is that the various Protestant denominations, along with other Christian churches such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, form branches of one Church. Opinions vary on how important it is to choose the “correct” branch, i.e. the one closest to the truth and most faithful to the Bible, but ultimately everyone who is a Christian is part of the same Church.

This is an appealing idea, but I believe it has some flaws. For one thing, in John 17:20–21, Jesus prayed for unity in the Church: “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” However, there is little apparent unity among the major branches of this hypothesised tree, e.g. between Catholics and Protestants. I will discuss this topic in a later post.

Another problem with claiming that all of the major Christian traditions form a single Church is that every denomination teaches different doctrines. In some cases, these doctrinal differences are substantial, indeed fundamental to the Christian faith. Consider this passage from Isaiah, quoted by Jesus in Matthew 15:8–9 (ESV):

This people honors me with their lips,
    but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
    teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

To teach false doctrines and present them as the teachings of the one true Church is not only a matter of being correct or mistaken in some point of theology; it is to risk teaching something that takes our attempt to worship God and reduces it to vanity, something that threatens to separate our hearts from God and to turn them toward ourselves. It is of central importance to discover any and all truth that has been revealed to us by God, and to hold to it unswervingly. This is our best chance of knowing the heart of God, to the extent that we can understand it, and of knowing how God has called us to live.

In the Protestant view, God has given us all the revelation we need in the 66 books that make up the Protestant Bible, and we are to some extent on our own from there. Certainly the Holy Spirit can guide us into all truth (c.f. John 16:13), but in practice, study of the Bible with illumination by the Holy Spirit is no guaranteed path to doctrinal unity among Protestant denominations. Sincere followers of Christ have come to widely varying views on all sorts of theological questions. What are we to think of this?

One possibility is that the answers to many of these theological questions cannot be known, because God has not definitively revealed them to us. The answers to many questions may well be in the Bible, but given the variety of interpretations of virtually every Bible passage, it would seem in this view that the Holy Spirit does not see fit to lead everyone into the correct interpretation. This leaves only the fundamentals of the faith, those doctrines held by virtually every Christian everywhere. (See Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.) The problem here is that this list of common beliefs is quite short, compared to the list of beliefs almost any given denomination will present as a fundamental component of the Christian faith. But “mere Christianity” cannot contain the entirety of beliefs that can be held as doctrine, because it is not complete enough to base a denomination on it. At minimum, you have to decide who has the authority to make decisions in questions that cannot be answered by appealing to a universal consensus of Christians, and you have to decide which of the early Ecumenical Councils to hold to, if any. Upon making a choice on either of those issues, you have already contradicted the doctrines of at least a few major groups of Christians around the world.

Again, to make the wrong decision regarding these fundamental questions about the Church is tantamount to “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” But how can we know the correct doctrine? Independent Bible study isn’t enough, because it’s plain to see that well-meaning people have interpreted the Bible in all sorts of ways. But consider again the words of Jesus: “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” Jesus appointed Apostles to be leaders of his Church, and taught them personally before ascending to Heaven. If any group of Christians throughout history has had at least a kernel of truth and has had the protection promised by Jesus, that they would not be overcome by the gates of Hell, it was the early Church in the time of the Apostles.

Therefore, if the early Church led by the Apostles held a particular teaching to be doctrine, then we must embrace it still today. To teach false doctrines is to risk worshipping God in vain, as stated in the passage above. If the early Church had already fallen prey to “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men,” if the Apostles themselves passed on what was contrary to God’s plan of salvation, then Christianity as the world has always known it is a stillborn religion, and Jesus was either powerless or unwilling to fulfill his promise: “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Those Evangelical Protestants uncomfortable with the word religion may wish to consider how non-evangelicals use the term.)

So choosing correct doctrines is largely a matter of finding the church or denomination that has held to the doctrines of the early Church continuously since the first century. It will do little good to decide in advance what you believe and find a church that matches your doctrines; instead, we must discover what the early Church believed and hold to that, regardless of what our personal beliefs were previously. It is my intention in the following posts to show that the Catholic Church is the Church that has best held to these ancient beliefs, the doctrines given to us by Jesus and his Apostles. Stay tuned.

All verses are from the NIV except where indicated otherwise.

This post is part of a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days.

I was raised mainly in American Baptist churches. In high school and college, I attended non-denominational Evangelical churches, including Calvary Chapel. The teachings of all these churches were largely compatible, but the non-denominational churches tended to be less formally organized. That is, there was no particular oversight of the church or the pastor that influenced the churches’ teachings, and the order of the service was structured according to practical considerations and the leadership’s preference. Some of the Baptist churches I attended were more traditional in the structure of their services (robes for the pastor and choir, hymns rather than modern worship songs, etc.), but none of the churches had a formal liturgy.

In 2006, I moved to Newport News, Virginia to go to grad school and started attending Calvary Chapel Newport News. Sometime in 2008, I started looking into other forms of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Mostly unrelated to this, near the end of 2008 I began to be more and more dissatisfied with the Calvary Chapel I attended. (See this post for my view of that church from a year ago.)

In July of last year, I left the local Calvary Chapel because of my growing list of objections to that particular church. (My specific reasons for leaving this church are beyond the scope of this series.) Given what I had been learning about the various forms of Christianity and my unwillingness to remain at Calvary Chapel, I was essentially forced into a decision about what sort of church I wanted to attend. My decision was based on what I had been learning about various Christian denominations and churches rather than simply choosing a church that was like the ones I had attended before.

In this series, I will describe how I decided where I fit within Christendom. I have definite reasons for believing in Christianity, but I will not list my reasons or discuss any non-Christian religions in this series. A defense of Christianity will have to wait for a later time.

Those of you who know me personally most likely know by now that I have decided to become a Catholic. I was confirmed as a full member of the Catholic Church on April 3, the day before Easter. This decision has come with its share of challenges. For one thing, I have had to completely reevaluate my religious beliefs; for another, my choice has strained my relationships with many of my friends and family. But in this series of posts I hope to demonstrate that I have important reasons for my choosing Catholicism, and that it wasn’t done on a whim or for any reason other than sincerely seeking the truth about God and our relationship with him.

Confronted with the things I learned about Catholicism, with my growing conviction that it was the truth, I had to make a decision. It would have been easier in some ways to stay as a Protestant, but what could I say other than to echo the words of Peter in the prologue to this series? “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68–69) So come what may, I have acted on my convictions and joined what I believe to be the Church founded by Jesus, who is the only one who can say, “Take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

This post leads into a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days. For background on my situation, see the post titled Mere Christianity. For my viewpoint from around a year ago, see A Calvary Chapel heretic.

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.”

From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

—John 6:53–69

“Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

—Matthew 10:34–39

“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

—John 16:33

All verses are from the NIV.

This post is a response to another post, which presents an argument for why there can be at most one god. I recommend reading it first: Unstoppable Objects, Immovable Walls, and Omnipotence by JC.

I agree that having two truly omnipotent gods is logically impossible, and of course the Christian view is that God has such power that there is no room for another god: “I am God, and there is no other.” (Isaiah 45:22) But what about weaker gods, such as the Greek pantheon, or the Mormon view (if I understand it correctly) where each god has his own universe? And what exactly does it mean to be omnipotent?

The regional gods that nations previously worshiped are easy to dismiss, because even if they existed and one was mad at you, you could just move somewhere else to escape him—hardly a fearsome god. And any god with demonstrably finite power warrants only limited respect, because in theory you could defy such a god and still escape. (Whether such beings deserve to be called gods is simply a matter of terminology.) I’m not inclined to worry about gods like these, not only because I don’t believe they exist, but even if they did, maybe I could ignore them and still evade their finite reach.

Harder to discount is the concept of one god per universe. In such a system, we would see the effects of a god who is apparently omnipotent but is in fact limited to perhaps a four-dimensional subspace of a wider multiverse. The only non-biblical argument against this that comes to mind is the odd situation that would result: many, perhaps infinitely many gods and universes, all isolated from each other. But where did this community of gods come from? That would raise the question of whether there is a God above all these gods. Perhaps the gods of the universes are merely a very powerful race that owes its existence to the true, omnipotent God. So again, the remaining options would be one true God or no truly omnipotent gods at all. But an observer in any given universe might see the effects of a what appears to be an omnipotent God but is actually a finite being.

I still have some lingering questions about what it means to be omnipotent. As JC’s post rightly states, God cannot will a condition that logically contradicts itself, such as placing himself both inside and absolutely not inside of a wall at the same time. This does not lessen his omnipotence, because the requirement to be somewhere and also not somewhere at the same time is a nonsense statement. But was God able to choose his own nature? For example, according to the Bible, God is infinitely good. For this to be true, God can never perform an act which is not good, such as lying. So God cannot be both infinitely good and a liar, but did he have the opportunity to choose between these two options? If we take God to be infinitely good, then if there was ever a choice, it has already been made and cannot now be reversed. This would mean that God, although omnipotent, is incapable of lying. But is this restriction intrinsic to God’s nature, or did he choose to be this way? In other words, is God unable to lie because a lying God is a logical contradiction, or because he once chose that he would never lie?

As for why the universe (or multiverse) should have exactly one God, I have one observation. Either the universe has always existed (so that energy and the laws of physics are eternal), or it was created somehow. This creator could be a single God or a community of gods who are all eternal but are all bounded by their allocated subspace of the multiverse. The latter option seems implausible, and I see no reason why the laws of physics should have existed from eternity of their own accord. Even if all of the material universe and the laws of physics can be explained and summed up in a single, all-encompassing Law, why did this law ever exist, and what gave it the opportunity to act? Did this Law of Nature contain the impetus to create a universe to exert itself upon? In other words, did the Law of Nature will the universe into existence? I find it much easier to accept that the source of this ultimate will is a living being: a single, infinite, omnipotent God who is the Source of all other things, the God who, when asked to give his name, needed only to say “I AM.” (Exodus 3:14) His eternal nature is still unexplainable, but I think this is the most likely option.

I might go so far as to say that this single God, the I AM, is in a sense the ultimate Law of Nature—not that God is a mere force, but that the fundamental workings of the universe ultimately stem from God Himself. The laws of physics tell us of forces that drive the universe (gravity, electromagnetism, etc.) but can tell us nothing of why they exist. I contend that God upholds these forces and laws by his will, that it is God who gives spacetime its breadth, the forces between galaxies their strength and the laws of physics their authority, that God, although not the most detailed answer to the scientist’s basic question, “How?” (math does that job already), is forever the answer to the basic human question, “Why?” And this is one of the reasons why the primary goal of my life is to learn more about this God and to love and serve him.

In my last blog post, I listed a few quotes including this one:

There are certain doors you have to go through alone.
—Joe Banks (from Joe Versus the Volcano)

For one thing, I find it interesting that such a profound quote came from a movie that has such a ridiculous title. (By the way, if you haven’t seen that movie, you should watch it.) In response to a question from a friend of mine, JC, I’d like to explain what prompted me to post that quote.

A few years ago I read Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis. In this book, Lewis attempts to explain the basics of Christianity, those beliefs which are common to all Christian denominations and churches. Christianity, as the word implies, is about following and worshipping the Christ (“the anointed one”), Jesus. It is possible to be a follower of Christ without being a member of any particular church – not a member of Catholicism, Protestantism or Orthodoxy, for example, but subscribing only to “mere” Christianity.

After my last blog post, JC asked if the quote I posted above refers to this passage in Mere Christianity:

[Mere Christianity] is…like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms…it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in…. [While in the hall] you must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: “Do I like that kind of service?” but “Are these doctrines true: Is there holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?”

I remembered this passage immediately, and although I was not consciously thinking of the passage when selecting the quote from Joe Banks, this idea is precisely what I was referring to. At the moment, I consider my religion to be roughly “mere Christianity.” In the terms of the analogy above, I have stepped into the hallway, which is a place unsuitable for any long stay. What remains, therefore, is for me to choose a door. And this is where the unexpectedly profound wisdom of Joe Banks, battler of volcanoes, comes in: I can seek advice from any number of people, read a library full of books, and pray for guidance, but in the end, only I can make a choice for myself, and I must do it alone. By “alone,” I mean that I could ask people of various denominations for their opinion on which variety of Christianity to choose, but practically everyone would favor their own denomination. Whichever door I choose, the decision will be mine alone.

My parents raised me as a Christian, and for this I am deeply grateful. They showed me where to look to find life for my soul, which is a greater gift than anything else I could ever receive. Now I think it’s time for me to find the style of Christianity that I believe is closet to the ultimate Truth. I haven’t yet made my decision, but I think I’m getting close. I hope that whatever choice I make doesn’t alienate me from any of my friends and family, but again, I have to choose the door and walk through it alone. One thing’s for sure: it’s drafty out here in this hallway. I want to find a room and go inside.

Here are some quotes that I like or that seem relevant to my life at the moment:

There are certain doors you have to go through alone.
—Joe Banks (from Joe Versus the Volcano)

Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!
—Jesus

I am the way and the truth and the life.
—Jesus

Kamikaze, my death is gain
I’ve been marked by my Maker, a peculiar display
The high and lofty, they see me as weak
’Cause I won’t live and die for the power they seek
—dc Talk

Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!
—John the Baptist

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
—Walt Whitman
YOP!
—A Who from “Horton Hears a Who”