The older the truth, the truer it probably is

I find it easier to believe the teachings of the Catholic church BECAUSE it is so old, mostly unchanged, and not subject to constant re-evaluation.  I would much rather trust something that is 2000 years in the making than the opinion of one man who has been pondering such things for a mere 2 decades as Martin Luther had when he alone decided that words should be added to scripture and that some books should be deleted.

 

Basically, I'm saying that I can believe what the church believes because the church (billions of people throughout history) is smarter than I am (one person in the present age).  Can the Holy Spirit act in the life of an individual?  Of course He can but that doesn't mean that we were each meant to work out our salvation in isolation.  Working it out means working together with others.

 

The method of my experiment has been to tackle each roadblock with a scale - Catholic thought on one side, Protestant thought on the other.  In nearly every case the side of Catholic thought has tipped the issue its own way.  I think for many Protestants, the Protestant side tips because of an ignorance of Catholic teaching.  Even before you can weigh their differences you must first cancel out their similarities.  You will then be left with the meat of the issue, where the two sides differ.  The first shock for me is usually discovering how much the doctrines are the same as what I already believe.  With Catholic teaching, there are so many fewer negotiables and this opens up time to put those non-negotiables into practice.

 

By this time of my life I have already spent many years trying to decide what I believe rather than trying to believe something that is true.  I have probably spent more time (as a percentage of a lifetime) than most - being the son of a book-loving, knowledge-hungry Minister. But I have been seeking truth rather than meditating upon truth already accessible to me, truths that were already discovered for me before I was born.  The Protestant process is to sample the various generally acknowledged best - and too often, sadly, that just means "best-selling" - Protestant thinkers/authors and cobble together a set of personal beliefs that encompasses as many of their divergent thoughts as possible.  This leaves the oft-appealed-to habit of choosing  the one that sounds best to us when met with a challenge on which they disagree.  Therefore we become John MacArthur men or Swindoll men or, heaven forbid, Bill Gothard men.  These are terms we use as Protestants to describe the main structure of someone else's beliefs; our own beliefs are always described as "Biblical". 

 

It is going to be difficult for many of you to consider this, but take some time to allow the Church and faithful Catholics to answer in their own defence.  All we have seen to this point in our lives is ardent Protestants (or worse - JACK CHICK) declaring Catholicism "The Whore of Babylon" but we have never taken the time to get to know even one faithful Catholic.