Every Wind Of Doctrine

"That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;" (Ephesians 4:14)

The funny thing about doing a series like this is that I find I have so much to that what started out as 3 articles has now become four. But there is so much to say about my time as an Evangelical Christian and the events that over a period of time led me closer and closer to the Catholic Church. For me to give it a paragraph would neither be accurate nor informative in such a way that others are helped by it.

One thing about being an Evangelical Christian, if you are truly a student of the Bible and of your faith, is that you go through stages. As a “babe in Christ” you desire the “milk” of the Word. This is the “simple, main and plain” doctrines such as the Five Solas of the Reformation: Sola Scriptura, Sole Fide, Sola Gratia, Solus Christus and Sola Gloria Deo. Its summarized by the phrase, “Only through the Bible are we saved: by grace alone, through faith alone, through Christ alone and to the glory of God alone”. If you are in a Calvinist church you learn “once saved always saved” and the Scriptures used to support that.

I became an eager student of the Bible, but one who wasn’t bound by denominational thinking. So many times God wants to show people something in the Bible but because of their denominational teachings they miss it and even if someone points it out to them will reject it. If it’s something that the Catholic Church teaches it will probably be rejected even faster. After all, the Catholic Church is the Great Whore of Babylon of Revelation 18 who will lead the whole into worshipping the Anti-Christ in the Tribulation. There are many Evangelical Christians, especially fundamentalist church, that actually believe that. I’ll talk about that more in another article.

But if you aren’t bound by those fetters and daily examine not only yourself, but your doctrines as well, you will do something that very few Evangelical Christians do: evolve. Over a period of time, I began to question and then discard the Calvinistic teaching of “Once saved, always saved”. I would say that probably the next thing to go was the denial that much of the churches are in concerning the place that Baptism has in the plan of salvation. The Bible makes it plai,, in both Old Testament types and in New Testament commands of the Lord Jesus, the preaching of the Apostles and the example of the Church in the book of Acts that Baptism is absolutely required.

Then Sole Fide went by the wayside. So many believe that the Bible says we the Old Covenant and it isn’t in keeping with the teachings of Paul and James in the New Testament…as well as the author of the Book of Hebrews. They misconstrue and misinterpret what Paul means when he speaks about “works” and they set James and him against each other on the subject.

Finally, Sola Scriptura began to look less and less a viable doctrine. The title of this article reflects exactly what Sola Scriptura has created in the 30,000+ Evangelical Christian denominations. A myriad of doctrine ALL derived supposedly by “allowing the Bible to interpret the Bible” In my dealings with other E.C. I also found that they were extremely unreceptive to correction even when it came from the Bible. So in fact what we have is not merely 30,000+ denominations’ interpretations, but 950 MILLION since that how many Evangelical Christians there are in the world.

At this point in my life some changes starting coming about. For one I met my wife, Rose, online and we began to get serious. But she was Catholic and I told her that I would never become Catholic again. As a result of our marriage, I began to carefully and seriously examine what I believed and what the Church taught on many of those points. In the final part of this series, I’ll deal with my final departure from Evangelical Christianity and coming home to the Catholic Church.