My Conversion: Searching for a Historic Faith
When I began college at the Moody Bible Institute, I arrived as a non-denominational Protestant, but by the time I graduated, I was a full-fledged, committed Anglican. I had become an Anglican because I believed (at the time) that the Anglican Church was the place where Western Christianity had been maintained both fully and purely. Raised as a Protestant, the tenants of the Reformation had been engrained in me, and I considered myself well attuned to the manifold errors of Catholicism. Safe to say, I had an unwavering conviction that true Christianity wasn't supposed to look like the Roman Catholic Church. Protestantism was the way to go.
Yet, as I came to discover throughout college, there were many valuable, essential beliefs and practices of Christianity that were left behind in the wake of the Reformation -- things that even Luther or Calvin (the two leading, influential figures of Protestantism) had held onto as vital aspects of historic and biblical Christianity. Many of these practices and belief of the Reformers (which had come from pre-Reformation Christianity) are rejected or are entirely forgotten by Protestants today -- things such as infant baptism, the real presence of Christ's body and blood in the Eucharist (communion), the priesthood of the Church, Sacraments, and more. For the first time, in my college classes, I was taught that these weren't just beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church but also of the Reformers (and, incidentally of the Church Fathers in ancient times).
Discovering this had a revolutionary effect on my faith. It didn't just change some of my theological convictions. It shifted how I viewed the entire Christian faith. Whereas I had previously been concerned with developing my own ability to study and determine the truth of Christianity for myself through my accurate interpretation of Scripture and a well-tuned theology, that was no longer the case. The practices and beliefs of Christianity were no longer just about me or what I was able to determine for myself. I realized that Christianity wasn't just about my faith because, as the Reformers showed, my faith was in fact our faith -- the faith of many -- an inheritance that had been passed down to me by generations upon generations of devout, faithful Christians who did their best to maintain and preserve true Christianity. Consequently, I couldn't just ignore what they had believed or how they had expressed that belief. At the very least, I had to start asking myself what their belief and practices were. As a result, I developed a concern for historic Christianity in addition to my previous concern for merely a biblical Christianity. What had Christians before me believed? How had they interpreted the Scriptures? How had they expressed the Christian faith? And did my beliefs and practices reflect this? If they didn't, why not? As a Protestant, these questions obviously required me to take a serious look at our Protestant predecessors like Luther and Calvin, but it also required me to care about far more.
The convictions of both Luther and Calvin were grounded in the theology and practice of the ancient Church. They weren't interested in creating a new Christian faith but in recovering the faith that had always belonged to the Church and which they claimed the Roman Catholic Church had failed to maintain. Accordingly, they referenced the Scriptures (of course) as the rule of Christian faith, but they also called upon the faith of the ancient Church. This allowed the Reformers to validate their beliefs as more than their own new, individual theological inventions because they were able to demonstrate that the ancient church had believed the same thing. But if the Reformers were claiming that our beliefs and practices, in accordance with the Scriptures, ought to be in line with those of the ancient Church, my search for historic Christianity meant I needed to look into the ancient Church and not just the Reformers. Thus, my search for a truly historic Christianity became a search for apostolic Christianity in accordance with the ancient Church. And that's why I became an Anglican.
During the Reformation, the Anglican Church concerned itself equally with the past as it did with the present moment. It heeded the calls for reform while simultaneously taking into account the significance of all that had been passed down from previous generations, both in practice and belief. They sought to throw out the bathwater, but not the baby, so to speak. What resulted was something oddly similar to Catholicism, but not quite Catholicism; it was a "Catholicism" reformed in accordance with Scripture and the faith of the ancient Church. This seemed to be exactly what I had been looking for. The Anglican Church was my gateway into truly historic, truly ancient, truly apostolic Christianity. Or so I thought. I quickly came to realize that while the Anglican Church claimed to be concerned for maintaining a truly, fully apostolic faith, in actuality it was hesitant to affirm and live out an ancient faith. It seemed far more concerned with simply being Protestant instead.
Meanwhile, I discovered Orthodoxy, and my love for this ever-living, ancient tradition grew ever stronger seemingly by the day. Here was a church that was truly ancient, truly apostolic, and that wasn't ashamed to live and talk like it. I eventually became certain that Orthodoxy was the fullest and purest expression of Christianity around today, and I longed so badly to be in a tradition like that. But I had absolutely no intention of converting. Orthodoxy was Eastern, after all, and I was thoroughly Western. I loved my Western Christian heritage, and I was committed to it through the Anglican Church. I was committed to recovering for myself and others the true, apostolic faith of the West which the Catholic Church had failed to maintain. And no matter how much I loved Orthodoxy, I wasn't willing to give up on that.
But it was only a matter of time before I realized I wouldn't have to.