Reasons I Could Not Remain Protestant | Conversion Story Background

The more I dug into the early Church, I found many early church teachings. When I say early, I mean John the Apostle was still alive and taught these men himself. If you couldn’t walk directly up to the physical Jesus because He’s in heaven and you needed to ask a question, I would seek out the one He taught. St. John wrote the last Gospel and his final sentence was “and there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen. ” [John 21:25]

The problem for me as a protestant was that the early church was Catholic. The Eucharist, bishops, the order of the Mass… It was there when St. John the Apostle was still here and he taught this to St. Ignatius of Antioch [who first used the term “Catholic”], St Polycarp, St Justin Martyr, St Irenaeus… that’s how the church was spread. Jesus told them to go out and make disciples and they did!

There wasn’t a Bible yet. There was a Church. Just one.

There’s a 1500 year gap in church history for protestants. It was started by some dudes who didn’t like the bad things in the Catholic church and instead of reforming it from within [like St Ignatius of Loyola] they created a new religion that had not existed before. The Bible that had been compiled in the late 300s was compiled by The Catholic Church. To create protestantism, Martin Luther had to rip books out. Seven of them. He also tried to get rid of the book of James, Romans and Revelation because it did not fit his theology. He also added the word “alone” to the Bible in Romans 3:28. I guess instead of tossing the whole book of Romans out, he thought it might be better to just add a word.

You cannot change God’s Word. Jesus is The Word in The Flesh.

I used to proclaim loudly, “Scripture Alone! Faith Alone!” But the Bible itself both refutes and does not teach this at all. If you only need the Bible alone, where is that in the Bible? It’s not there. So then how do we know what it teaches? By the Holy Spirit, of course! That’s the answer I was given. He guides us so that we know what it’s saying and revealing to us. I totally accept the The Holy Spirit prompts us. Absolutely! I also believe that people can be wrong and so I had a huge issue reconciling this : there are more than 30,000 protestant denominations.

But they all believe the same basic premises!!! Christ is our Lord and we all love him! But is it baptism at birth or baptism as the age of reason? Is it a sprinkling or a full dunk baptism? Is baptism essential for salvation? Jesus says yes! [read more here] The list goes on and on and everyone believes differently. There’s constant fighting over it. While writing the curriculum people inquired which church history we were covering in Year 1. Then when trying to find books on the topic for the children, I ran into a HUGE problem. In the reviews people argued over “flawed theology”

Oh boy. I couldn’t find ANY consensus among protestants anywhere.

I’m going to come back to this to add more. I just have 5 kids and can’t finish this blog post right this second, but I can’t post my conversion story until I post this one to link to what couldn’t fit in one blog post. It’s very detailed because I did a LOT of study on it.

To be continued.

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