Journeys Home (19 page)

One thought, I believe, really helped to speed up my return home.
I heard Jeff Cavins -- a former Assemblies of God pastor and then
host of the
Life on the Rock
program on the Eternal Word Television
Network (EWTN) -- speak about living a life of rebellion during
his years away from the Church of his youth. I knew exactly what
he meant. Our stories were different, but this mindset of rebellion,
I believe, is true not only for me but for a whole generation
of former Catholics.

I had been limited in my ministry, my relationships, my joy, because
I was in rebellion. Once I understood this reality, accepted it,
and began to experience true repentance, my joy began to return
and my days away from the Catholic Church were numbered.

Jeannie and I began the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults
(RCIA) classes at our local Catholic parish in June, 1997. On
Saturday afternoon, August 9, I made a confession -- my first
confession in at least twenty years. Then on Sunday, August 10,
I received the Eucharist, legitimately.

On Saturday, November 22, 1997, I had the privilege of watching
my wife and her RCIA class make a profession of faith and receive
the Sacrament of Confirmation, and then First Holy Communion.
We were now able to receive the sacraments together as husband
and wife.

So much has happened in such a short time. There were many times
during this process that I became discouraged and wanted to forget
about it. "Do I really want," I asked myself, "to walk away from
this ministry for which I have devoted years of preparation?"

However, each time I doubted, God would send someone, usually
someone I didn't know, often over the Internet, who "just felt
led" to write me a letter sharing their story or to offer encouragement.
For all of you who made contact with me, thank you. God has truly
continued to bless my wife and me as we stepped out, leaving many
years of ministry and friends behind, but filling our lives to
overflowing with new friends, brothers, and sisters in Christ.

I had the privilege of serving under some godly men during my
years away from the Church. These men provided friendship, wisdom,
and many wonderful memories. These were close friendships with
men that I loved and still do. And each time I had to say goodbye,
I felt as if my heart was being torn out of my chest.

Today I have fallen in love with the Catholic Church. When I think
back to the words, "I was raised Catholic," I can only say, "Thanks,
Mom and Dad -- I love you."

Rick Ricciardi and his wife, Jeannie, live in Mesa, Arizona, where
he works for Boeing as a staff analyst. They have two grown children,
James and JoAnna. Rick has been a guest on
The Journey Home
and
other Catholic TV and radio broadcasts, and he serves as a lector
and an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist in his local parish.

former Presbyterian minister

THE ESSENTIAL ROLE OF LOGIC

LOGIC AND THE SOLA SCRIPTURA PRINCIPLE

CALVIN'S ATTEMPTED SOLUTION

As an active Protestant Christian in my mid-twenties, I began
to feel that I might have a vocation to become a minister. The
trouble was that I had quite definite convictions about the things
that most Christians have traditionally held in common -- the
sort of thing the Anglican writer C. S. Lewis termed "mere Christianity."

I had had some firsthand experience with several denominations
(Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist) and was far from
certain as to which of them (if any) had an overall advantage
over the others. So I began to think, study, search, and pray.
Was there a true Church? If so, how was I to decide which one?

The more I studied, the more perplexed I became. At one stage
my elder sister, a very committed Evangelical Protestant with
somewhat flexible denominational affiliations, chided me with
becoming "obsessed" with trying to find a "true Church." "Does
it really matter?" she would ask.

Well, yes, it did. It was all very well for a lay Protestant to
relegate the denominational issue to a fairly low priority among
religious questions: Lay people can go to one Protestant church
one week and another the next week, and nobody really worries
too much.

But an ordained minister obviously cannot do that. He must make
a serious commitment to a definite church community, and under
normal circumstances that commitment will be expected to last
a lifetime. So clearly that choice had to be made with a deep
sense of responsibility, and the time to make it was before, not
after, ordination.

As matters turned out, my search lasted several years, and eventually
it would lead me to a destination that I at first never suspected.
I shall not attempt to relate the full story, but rather focus
on just one aspect of the question as it developed for me -- an
aspect which seems quite fundamental. As I groped and prayed my
way toward a decision, I came close to despair and agnosticism
at times as I contemplated the mountains of erudition, the vast
labyrinth of conflicting interpretations of Christianity (not
to mention other faiths) that lined the shelves of religious bookshops
and libraries. If all the "experts" on truth -- the great theologians,
historians, philosophers -- disagreed interminably with each other,
then how did God, if He was really there, expect me, an ordinary
Joe Blow, to work out what was true?

The more I became enmeshed in specific questions of biblical interpretation -- of who had the right understanding of justification, of the
Eucharist, Baptism, grace, Christology, Church government and
discipline, and so on -- the more I came to feel that this entire
approach was a hopeless quest, a blind alley. These were all questions
that required a great deal of erudition, learning, competence
in biblical exegesis, Patristics, history, metaphysics, ancient
languages. In short, they required scholarly research.

But was it really credible (I began to ask myself) that God, if
He were to reveal the truth about these disputed questions at
all, would make this truth so inaccessible that only a small scholarly
elite had even the faintest chance of reaching it? Wasn't that
a kind of gnosticism? Where did it leave the non-scholarly bulk
of the human race?

It didn't seem to make sense. If, as they say, war is too important
to be left to the generals, then revealed truth seemed too important
to be left to the biblical scholars. It was no use saying that
perhaps God simply expects the non-scholars to trust the scholars.
How are non-scholars to know which scholars to trust, given that
the scholars all contradict each other?

Therefore, in my efforts to break out of the dense exegetical
undergrowth where I could not see the forest for the trees, I
shifted toward a new emphasis in my truth-seeking criteria. I
tried to get beyond the bewildering mass of contingent historical
and linguistic data upon which the rival exegetes and theologians
had constructed their doctrinal castles. Instead, I concentrated
on those elemental, necessary principles of human thought which
are accessible to all of us, learned and unlearned alike. In short,
I began to suspect that an emphasis on logic rather than on research
might expedite an answer to my prayers for guidance.

The advantage to this approach was that we don't need to be learned
to be logical. We need not have spent years amassing mountains
of information in libraries in order to apply the first principles
of reason. We can apply them from the comfort of our armchair,
so to speak, in order to test the claims of any body of doctrine,
on any subject whatsoever, that came claiming my acceptance.

Moreover, logic, like mathematics, yields firm certitude, not
mere changeable opinions and provisional hypotheses. Logic is
the first natural "beacon of light" that God has provided us as
intelligent beings living in a world darkened by the confusion
of countless conflicting attitudes, doctrines and worldviews,
all telling us how to live our lives during this brief time He
has given us here on earth.

Logic, of course, has its limits. Pure "armchair" reasoning alone
will never be able to tell us the meaning of life and how we should
live it. But as far as it goes, logic is an indispensable tool,
and I even suspect that we sin against God, the first Truth, if
we knowingly flout or ignore it in our thinking. "Thou shalt not
contradict thyself" seems to me an important precept of the natural
moral law.

Be that as it may, I found that the main use of logic in my quest
for religious truth turned out to be in deciding not what was
true but what was false. If someone presents you with a system
of ideas or doctrines that logical analysis reveals to be coherent -- that is, free from internal contradictions and meaningless
absurdities -- then you can conclude, "This set of ideas may be
true. It has at least passed the first test of truth: the coherence
test."

To find out whether it actually is true, you will then have to
leave your logician's armchair and seek further information. But
if it fails this most elementary test of truth, it can safely
be eliminated without further ado from the ideological competition,
no matter how many impressive-looking volumes of erudition may
have been written in support of it, and no matter how attractive
and appealing many of its features (or many of its proponents)
may appear.

Some readers may wonder why I am belaboring the point about logic.
Isn't all this perfectly obvious? Well, it ought to be obvious
to everyone, and it is indeed obvious to many, including those
who have had the good fortune of receiving a classical Catholic
education.

The Catholic faith, as I came to discover, has a quite positive
approach to our natural reasoning powers. It traditionally has
its future priests study philosophy for years before they even
begin theology. But I came from a religious milieu where this
outlook was not encouraged and was often even discouraged.

The Protestant Reformers taught that original sin has so weakened
the human intellect that we must be extremely cautious about the
claims of "proud reason." Martin Luther called reason the "devil's
whore," a siren that seduced men into grievous error. "Don't trust
your reason," I was told, "just bow humbly before God's truth
revealed to you in His holy Word, the Bible!"

This was pretty much the message that came through to me from
the Calvinist and Lutheran circles that influenced me most in
the first few years after I made my "decision for Christ" at the
age of 18. Of course, the Reformers themselves were forced to
employ reason, even while denouncing it, in their efforts to rebut
the biblical arguments of their "papist" foes. And that, it seemed
to me, was rather illogical on their part.

With my awakening interest in logical analysis as a test of religious
truth, I was naturally led to ask whether this illogicality in
the practice of the Reformers was perhaps accompanied by illogicality
at the more fundamental level of their theory. For example, as
a good Protestant, I had been brought up to hold as sacred the
basic methodological principle of the Reformation: The Bible alone
contains all the truth that God has revealed for our salvation.

Churches that held to this principle were at least "respectable,"
we were given to understand, even though they might differ considerably
from each other in regard to the interpretation of Scripture.
But as for the Roman Catholic Church and other churches that unashamedly
added their own traditions to the Word of God, weren't they self-evidently
outside the pale? Weren't they condemned out of their own mouths?

When I got down to making a serious attempt to explore the implications
of this rock-bottom dogma of the Reformers, I could not avoid
the conclusion that it was rationally indefensible. This is demonstrated
in the following eight steps, which embody nothing more than simple,
commonsense logic and a couple of indisputable, empirically observable
facts about the Bible:

1. The Reformers asserted Proposition A: "All revealed truth is to be found in the inspired Scriptures." However, this principle is quite useless unless we know which books are meant by the "inspired Scriptures." After all, many different sects and religions have many different books, which they call "inspired Scriptures."
   
2. The theory we are considering, when it talks of "inspired Scriptures," means in fact those sixty-six books that are bound and published in Protestant Bibles. For convenience we shall refer to them from now on simply as "the sixty-six books."
   
3. The precise statement of the theory we are examining thus becomes Proposition B: "All revealed truth is to be found in the sixty-six books."
   
4. It is a fact that nowhere in the sixty-six books themselves can we find any statements telling us which books make up the entire corpus of inspired Scripture. There is no complete list of inspired books anywhere within their own pages, nor can such a list be compiled by putting isolated verses together.
   This would be the case (a) if you could find verses like "Esther is the Word of God," "This Gospel is inspired by God," "The Second Letter of Peter is inspired Scripture," and so on, for all of the sixty-six books and (b) if you could also find a biblical passage stating that no books other than these sixty-six were to be held as inspired. Obviously, nobody could even pretend to find all this information about the canon of Scripture in the Bible itself.
   
5. It follows that Proposition B -- the very foundation of all Protestant Christian faith -- is neither found in Scripture nor can be deduced from Scripture in any way. Since the sixty-six books are not even identified in Scripture, much less can any further information about them be found there (for example, the statement that all revealed truth is contained in them). In short, we must affirm Proposition C: "Proposition B is an addition to the sixty-six books."
   
6. It follows immediately from the truth of Proposition C that Proposition B cannot itself be revealed truth. To assert that it is would involve a self-contradictory statement: "All revealed truth is to be found in the sixty-six books, but this revealed truth itself is not found there."
   
7. Could it be the case that Proposition B is true but is not revealed truth? If that is the case, then it must be either something that can be deduced from revealed truth or something that natural human reason alone can discover without any help from revelation.
   The first possibility is ruled out because, as we saw in steps 4 and 5, B cannot be deduced from Scripture, and to postulate some other revealed extra-scriptural premise from which B might be deduced would contradict B itself. The second possibility involves no self-contradiction, but it is factually preposterous, and I doubt whether any Protestant has seriously tried to defend it -- least of all those traditional Protestants who strongly emphasize the corruption of man's natural intellectual powers as a result of the Fall.
   Human reason might well be able to conclude prudently and responsibly that an authority that itself claimed to possess the totality of revealed truth was in fact justified in making that claim, provided that this authority backed up the claim by some very striking evidence. (Catholics, in fact, believe that their Church is precisely such an authority.) But how could reason alone reach that same well-founded certitude about a collection of sixty-six books that do not even lay claim to what is attributed to them?
   The point is reinforced when we remember that those who attribute the totality of revealed truth to the sixty-six books, namely Protestant church members, are very ready to acknowledge their own fallibility -- whether individually or collectively -- in matters of religious doctrine. All Protestant churches deny their own infallibility as much as they deny the pope's.
   
8. Since Proposition B is neither revealed truth nor a truth that can be deduced from revelation nor a naturally knowable truth, it is not true at all. Therefore, the basic doctrine for which the Reformers fought is simply false.