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Jolted into Dealing with the Historical Reality of Christ

My wife, Kerri, and I began our journey to God after we had already arrived at the destination many people strive to reach. We were in our eighth year of marriage, and our second child had just been born. We had a beautiful suburban house with a big yard, a bright kitchen, and diplomas of higher degrees on the wall for each of us. Kerri stayed home with the kids while I commuted fifteen minutes to an executive job that provided sufficient money so that we never had to save before indulging ourselves.

I had been raised Methodist and went with my family to church every Sunday, but I lost that habit my first year at the U.S. Air Force Academy. My academic advisor encouraged me to take a “Great Religions of the World” survey course my senior year. The class ridded me of the last vestiges of my Christian upbringing as I eagerly absorbed the idea that all religions are, at the core, simply competing philosophies. What makes these philosophies “religious” is that they are expressed through imaginary stories or myths that attempt to address mankind’s deepest questions of existence. It became to me that Western Christianity was the most undeveloped and superstitious of all these philosophical frameworks, intellectually overshadowed by the richness and sophistication of the Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism.

I won a Rhodes scholarship, so the fall after graduation I began a three-year degree at Oxford University, where I accumulated an extensive library of Eastern mystical books. I prided myself in my ability to see through the many myths and rituals of Western and Eastern religions to the essential common truths that animated them all. My new religious ideals made no demands on me, moral or otherwise, beyond living up to my own self-defined and self-measured moral code.

Was there a God? Yes, but he was not personal or personally demanding, merely a “consciousness” to be recognized as always existing at the center of us all. I thought Jesus was a great example to follow, as one who had been “in touch” with the divine in himself, but I’d learned through my “spiritual” reading that he did not consider himself in any way different from other “self-actualized” people before or since. Indeed, I thought he would have been dismayed to discover that his followers had so misunderstood his philosophy that they had created the last thing he intended: an organized religion.

Meanwhile, my wife-to-be was traveling a different route away from God. She was born into a Catholic family, was baptized, and made her First Communion. Being born in 1962, by the time she was confirmed the American Church was arguably at its nadir in the quality of CCD instruction. There were no books, no prayers-just a bunch of kids sitting around chatting, making collages, and singing “Kumbaya.” (It’s a cliché, but that’s actually what she did.) After confirmation, she had no more instruction in the faith, so she assumed there was nothing to know that she hadn’t learned.

At the age of fifteen she was soured on the religion of her youth. Almost everything that Kerri encountered in school and in the world was contrary to what little she knew that the Catholic Church taught. It seemed the Catholics she knew personally were not only living lives contrary to the many of the well-known teachings of the Catholic Church, but none of them seemed any happier or in any way better off than anyone else.

After two years in a small Catholic college, Kerri was disgusted by the hypocrisy of the staff and students who purported to be Catholic yet ignored the clear moral teachings of the Church. She transferred to a large state university where she could forget about God, abandoning herself to the material world and what passes for its morality.

We met in England as we were both finishing up graduate degrees. We both felt an inner emptiness despite our apparent worldly success, but neither of us recognized the source of our discontent. Kerri was a feminist, telling me that even when she married she wouldn’t change her last name for any man. That worked out fine, since God in his providence had given us both the same last name.

We were married in a Catholic Church only by coincidence-the West Point Catholic chapel was available on short notice and, as a military academy grad, I was allowed to use it. Kerri wanted a public wedding that was blessed by a higher authority than the state, but she was open to any church of any denomination. Of course, we had to agree to raise the children Catholic, which raised my hackles, but since Kerri wasn’t particularly interested in practicing the faith, it was no big deal. We had our first child baptized but rarely went to church.

When we moved to Minneapolis and made the acquaintance of an Evangelical Christian homeschooling family, for the first time we witnessed people living a radical Christian life-radical to us-guiding their day-to-day activities by the teachings of Christ. They were personable and friendly, and soon the wife was regularly carrying her Bible down the street to have tea with Kerri. No one had ever talked to Kerri about Christ, and the embers of Christian belief in her soul were rekindled.

For purely social reasons I went along with Kerri’s interests, paying little attention, but we were both soon invited to an evening seminar at our new friends’ church where a scientist was to discuss the Bible. This man challenged us to confront the New Testament descriptions of Jesus Christ not as philosophy, as I had always done, but as history, since the Gospels were written to be accurate recordings of Christ’s life, words, and works. Since Kerri and I both had history degrees, this appealed to us.

The scientist reminded us that scholars assess the reliability of ancient histories through standard analytical techniques, which they apply to the manuscripts attesting to the events. These techniques enable us to determine whether these manuscripts are accurate, contemporary records of the events or simply stories and myths made up later.

There are three tests one must perform: first, determine how many copies of the manuscript exist (more copies mean more reliability); second, measure the gap between the production of the manuscripts and the events they purport to record (the closer to the actual events, the less the chance of embellishment and outright fabrication); and, finally, compare the consistency of the different copies of the same manuscript, since over time various scribes intentionally or inadvertently introduce errors or alterations.

On the basis of these three tests, the New Testament Gospels are overwhelmingly more trustworthy than any other ancient manuscript-ancient manuscripts that we had always accepted as undeniably accurate. To recreate the texts by Plato, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and others that I had read in college, scholars often had only tens of existing manuscripts to refer to. Yet for the New Testament we have over five thousand manuscripts in Greek plus an equal number in various translations-not to mention all the quotations of it in letters and other writings from the first centuries after Christ. Additionally, the earliest New Testament manuscripts we have were written within decades of Jesus’ ministry-close enough to the actual events that the possibility of fabrications having crept into them was statistically insignificant.

In contrast, the purported copies of most ancient manuscripts that we have today were created centuries after the death of the author. Finally, while in even the limited numbers of copies of other ancient texts we can see significant variation from manuscript to manuscript (chapters may be missing in one, sentences and paragraphs conflict, entire sections are clearly edited, et cetera), the variations in the thousands of manuscripts for the New Testament are less than one percent and never interfere with the sense of the passage. Clearly, the New Testament is more accurate than any other history from antiquity.

Suddenly I was jolted into dealing with reality of the historical person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was not a philosophy or a “consciousness” or a collection of myths. The Gospels-which I now had to recognize were historically accurate-recorded that he indeed lived, died, and rose again; that he walked the earth healing people and raising some from the dead; that he miraculously controlled nature and otherwise did things that were never in actual fact claimed of any guru, philosopher, or religious teacher; and, more importantly, that he clearly claimed numerous times and in numerous ways to be God himself. He further demanded that we analyze his actions, his miracles, as proof of that claim.

Trying to learn more about what Jesus said we must do became the central occupation in our lives. We opened our house to our Evangelical neighbors to host Bible studies, and we attended studies in their home. These people told us how to pray, which we did, and we felt God was responding. I went to Promise Keepers, answering the altar call, and we took other neighbors with us to hear Billy Graham.

We became strong “Bible Christians,” convinced all that we needed to learn and follow what was revealed by God in the Bible. Looking back, I realize that this was an easy transition for me: I was asked to trade in my individualistic non-Christian notions for an individualistic Christianity. I still did not have work with others or even belong to a church: All I had to do was work on my personal relationship with Christ. I could still keep him at an intellectual arm’s length. After accepting him as personal Lord and Savior, all that remains for this sort of Christianity is to develop (or not) a deeper personal understanding of the Bible and to apply that understanding to one’s life in whatever way is personally appealing.

I liked the academic approach of reading and discussion groups and didn’t see the need to go to church. But Kerri did, so I accompanied her weekly to the neighborhood Catholic church, holding the kids while she received Communion. In the back of her mind Kerri was troubled by what she was now being told by our Evangelical friends about Jesus’ message: What you do does not matter, for if you truly accept Christ you are saved and cannot lose your salvation.

These and other interpretations seemed to contradict the many things Jesus said you must do for him, and she was uneasy about how the Catholic perspective fit into these Christian ideas. She sought out the local priest and deacons to question them about these ideas and what she remembered about the Catholic faith, but they were no help.

We both began to notice historical inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies that arose during our Bible studies with our friends. Most urgently, there were two obvious questions about the biblical basis for our faith that our Evangelical friends and the Bible studies we used could not answer. Yes, it was abundantly clear that the Gospels were saved meticulously by hand for fifteen hundred years until the printing press could mass-produce them. But who saved and copied those manuscripts, and-even more fundamental-how did they know which ones to keep?

I had in my eclectic “great religions” library a number of other Christian writings that are not part of the Bible: the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Dialogue of the Savior, and others were ancient documents that had been ignored by those who generated the mountains of copied manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. But who determined what books went into the Bible? When did they do it? How did these widely dispersed early Christians get the list so they knew what to keep copying-and what to ignore?

At this point my wife took the step that propelled us the rest of the way into the Catholic Church. Kerri wanted our family to be part of a church community, so to determine whether that church should be Baptist or Catholic or something else, she went to a Catholic bookstore and asked what one book she could buy to understand the difference between Catholics and Evangelical Christians. The proprietress recommended Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic by David Currie.

Kerri bought it, read it, and wouldn’t stop talking about it. So I read it. That book was the best recommendation that bookstore owner ever made, because we began to spend hundreds of dollars there on books about Catholic history, theology, and especially the writings of the Fathers of the Church, all of which convinced us that the true “Bible Christian” is a Catholic Christian.

The early Church was clearly Catholic in its understanding of Christ’s words. It’s obvious that without the Catholic Church to discern which writings were inspired (and which were not), without Catholic monks copying those inspired writings (and ignoring those that were not), and without Catholic bishops maintaining the traditional understanding of Jesus’ teachings that were handed down to them from the apostles, there would be no Bible today.

We continued in our Protestant Bible study, but soon found the weekly meetings unfriendly and uncomfortable as we questioned inconsistencies in interpretations and pointed to Bible verses that struck at the heart of individualistic Protestant religious belief. We weren’t invited back to the next Bible study, but we did find a Catholic church with a priest who could answer our questions and help us complete our journeys into full communion with the Church.

We found we couldn’t follow our individualistic way to salvation. Instead, we found we needed to become fully incorporated into the Body of Christ-a living, growing body in which to live we need the support of all the other parts of that body, just as we support the other members with our prayers and our daily pursuit of holiness.

Because we lived most of our lives as materialists and jealous individualists, we’ve lost some friends who still maintain these attitudes. Kerri’s “reversion” and my conversion have also caused family friction, because the non-Catholics on my side do not understand our faith, and some of the Catholics on her side resent that we accept all the teachings of the Church.

But God has given us great joy and peace as he revealed to us his truth and graciously welcomed us into the larger family of his Church. Looking back, I see how the grace that flowed from the Church prepared our hearts more than our minds to leap at the truth: our Catholic wedding; our first child; the Sunday Masses at which I was only a spectator; those friends of ours along the way, some of whom were or are now Catholics; and-most of all-my confirmed Catholic wife, who was destined to be the finger of God’s love touching me and our family. Kerri and I traveled different roads away from God, but he brought us together to accompany each other along the avenues of that same grace back to him.

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