Today also marks the 31st anniversary of my baptism and confirmation/chrismation, which occurred during the Easter Vigil at the Church of the Gesu, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, back in 1977.
from
the Fundamentalism of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, of the Wesleyan (sort of) Church of the Nazarene, of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God and the charismatic renewal of the "Jesus Revolution"
to
Roman Catholicism
to
Anglo-Catholicism
to
Byzantine Orthodoxy (almost)
to
the Antiochian Catholic Church in America
"What a long, strange trip it's been."
Thanks be to God.
5 comments:
Good for you Fr Greg! (BTW I know some great CMA folks and they don't really seem like fundamentalists to me...)
"Fundamentalist" may be too loaded a word; even then, for the most part, the C&MA folks were rather to the left-of-center on any Fundamentalist continuum. But, and again, this is many years ago, these groups were dominated by folks whose approach to Scripture resulted in their holding opinions like Young Earth Creationism. My father perhaps expressed it best in saying, "If the Bible said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it."
In any event, as I have written elsewhere, I am grateful for several things, the first being that I was led to make an intentional commitment to Christ at a very early age and second, that I acquired a very thorough knowledge of the text of the Protestant canon of Scripture by the time I graduated from high school. Also, as an adolescent, I was introduced to Ignatios of Antioch by a C&MA seminary professor who served as a pastor for a time in the little congregation in which I was raised. Finally, I am grateful for the exposure to Wesley which my father gave me as well as Tozer, all of whom taught me to settle for nothing less than communion with the living God. There are other people and events from my childhood and adolescence for which I am grateful as well, but these are the high points.
No Eastern Rite Catholicism in this spectrum?
Many Protestant converts to Orthodoxy and Catholicism (Latin) do credit their upbrining to a greater knowledge of scripture.
I am very fond of John Wesley.
If I recall correctly he liked a lot of Catholic pietistic spiritual reading like Kempis (Imitation of Christ) and others (maybe even Teresa of Avila but I can't remember)
Josaphat: No, I missed that. Maybe I'll post someday on my entry into, and my departure from, the Roman Communion.
Anonymous: Wesley was certainly a Patristics scholar, although IMHO, he got hung up in the whole Lutheran "justification by faith alone" paradigm which in turn impacted problemmatically on his doctrine of sanctification.
In any event, there is a story that once, when Wesley was preaching in the open air, some of his listeners loudly accused him of being a "papist." A Jesuit, also in the audience, replied, "No, he's not, but we wish he were."
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