Digging at the Roots of My Faith
by Kathryn E. Stuart
Growing up in an Evangelical and Reformed church in Coshocton, Ohio, it seemed to me to be the safest place in the world. My ancestors had been German Reformed for several generations, and some had been founding fathers of their congregations, including the church I attended. I always used to think that going to a covered dish supper at church was like going to a family reunion because also in attendance were my grandma, mother, aunts, great aunts and uncles, and first, second, and third cousins.
Every year we celebrated Reformation Sunday. As I got older I realized that sometime back in history, some men rose up as heroes and stood their ground against the Catholic Church. I heard the words “courageous,” “faithful,” and “genius” in connection with their efforts.
When I got to catechism class in my teens I learned a bit more, but it was all rather vague. At that time I found out that the names of these men were Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, and that our particular denomination followed their teachings, particularly those of the last two. I still didn’t know what that meant. As for “doctrine” and “dogma,” I wouldn’t have known them from applesauce and cherry pie.
When I married, we attended my husband’s family church, the Church of the Nazarene, when we went. The teaching there was different than that of my childhood church, and I learned to like most of it. But there came a day when I wanted to go back to my own roots. After a time back at St. John’s (by this time a part of the United Church of Christ), I took on the task of teaching the young adults Sunday school class.
My plan was to teach the Bible as I’d learned it at the Nazarene church. The pastor had other ideas. He introduced me to the curriculum that I had to somewhat follow, and I learned that it was of a Calvinist bent. What was that? Who knew? So I set about trying to fit the Calvinist curriculum into the Bible studies that I had planned. It didn’t work well—it seemed like trying to fit size-10 feet into size-6 shoes—you had to shove and squeeze and cut off a couple of passages to get it into even a precarious fit. I tried hard, but became more and more confused.
For a couple of years I went on working with the curriculum in one hand and the Bible in the other. This was the first time I even considered questioning our faith. What were these discrepancies? Were they inconsistencies or was it my lack of knowledge? I had to find out. So in 1979 I picked up my first books on the Reformation—a book on Martin Luther and a very old, yellowed tome on John Calvin—and began a study that has spanned nearly three decades and continues to this day.
The first phase of my investigation we could call the romanticized period. For months I read romanticized versions of Reformation literature. There was no real depth to it except that it reinforced what I’d heard of heroes and geniuses and brave souls taking on the Catholic Church. It left me with the idea that the Reformation was a wonderful time and that all the “reformers” were working hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder.
But I was also getting small glimpses of things that didn’t seem just right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the picture was getting slightly soiled, and it piqued my “dig-to-the-depths” curiosity. As the study proceeded, I went back to books I’d read before to find the more scholarly works mentioned in the bibliographies and I tried to find them at the library. The majority of them had to be ordered through interlibrary loan.
For over 20 years I systematically read 50-some of the 63-volume set by Erlangen of “Luther’s Works.” I read some of the set of Luther’s writings compiled by Dr. Jaroslav Pelikan and some of the Holman editions. These were primarily Luther’s writings translated from German.
What I found shocked and disappointed me at first, and gradually I began to experience a crisis of faith. When I tried to discuss what I was learning with my Evangelical friends, they had various reactions—none of them positive. They said things from “Surely you have misunderstood” to “Are you becoming apostate?” In the 1980s I talked with an Episcopal priest who said, “Surely there was some good that came out of the Reformation.” I was becoming persona non grata, so in the mid-’80s I took a detour for a couple of years and studied the dangers of the New Age movement from Helena Blavatsky to Constance Cumby.
Protestants were eager to talk about the New Age movement, but they held in suspicion any questioning of the Reformation. It was holy ground, and I was in it up to my ears—alone. A Presbyterian minister friend told me once, “You have more books on the Reformation than any minister that I know.” Yet my knowledge of the Reformation was suspect.
After a few years, the teachings of the Reformation lay so hard on my heart that I felt that I could not in good conscience remain a Protestant. Learning the roots of the doctrines sickened me, and I became angry that I—and so many others—had been lied to; I could no longer look at the umbrella of Protestantism as having any ability to cover and protect.
At the same time I had given a couple of talks on other spiritual subjects to groups like Women’s Aglo and at a women’s day of prayer, and I’d joined an inter-denominational women’s Bible study. That added a bit of “show and tell” to the study; so often when someone would want to share some teaching that she was excited about, another person would come along and snatch the rug out from under her. I saw the scripture played out in which Paul warned Timothy, “For among them are those who make their way into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and swayed by various impulses, who will listen to anybody and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:6–7). What I thought I’d learned one day, I was disabused of the next.
The day came when I gave up my Sunday school class at St. John’s, walked down the stairs to the side door, and wiped my feet on the rug going out.
For a decade after that I was a member of the Continuing Episcopal Movement. I thought it was a “middle way” and never expected to go the full distance to the Catholic Church. This didn’t occur to me until one day in the early 1990s when my mother and I were living in Savannah, Georgia. EWTN came on part of the day and I had been injured and was off work, so I watched as Mother Angelica taught on suffering. She got me through a difficult time in my life with the Catholic doctrine on suffering. But I soaked up much more because I was hearing from these Catholic broadcasts the Gospel that brought the scriptures to life in ways that I’d never found in all my years of studying the Bible. It was like a mild Mediterranean breeze, and I basked in it. So did Mother. This little old German Reformed lady was praying the Rosary with the Catholics twice a day!
Then we learned that our friends Fr. Grover Tipton, an Episcopal priest, and his wife, Lois, were watching EWTN as well, and drawing the same conclusions. For a couple of years we got together and tore apart Catholicism stem-by-stem and put it to a very Fundamentalist test. It passed on all points.
In 1993, I came into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. I just celebrated my 14th anniversary and I have never for a split second regretted my decision. Fr. Tipton and his wife had to wait to come into the Church until his rescript from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) came through in 1996. I was in the front row with the family at his ordination at St. Patrick’s in Gainesville, Florida, and a proud and happy day it was.
Father passed away in 2001, but before he died he said to me with tears in his eyes about his ministry in the Catholic Church, “I am finally able to do the work the Lord called me to do.”
After I had been a Catholic for over two years I read my first Catholic book on the Reformation; all those I studied before becoming Catholic were from a Protestant perspective. I’ve now added the four-volume set, “Luther,” by Hartmann Grizar, S.J., to my library and am re-reading Pelikan and Holman’s volumes. The very scholarly works of Erlangen seem to be so scarce and expensive that they are no longer available through interlibrary loan.
I continue to study the Reformation and share what I know with those who will listen. I believe that Catholics need to add this dimension to their knowledge of Catholic apologetics because I’m convinced that no one who knows the origins of the man-made Protestant doctrines will be intimidated by the other side’s arguments, nor could he or she ever be taken out of the Catholic Church. I also wish that more Protestants would make a point to study of the roots of their faith tradition.
It was painfully demonstrated to me long before I heard the statement made by Cardinal John Newman, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”
Kathryn E. Stuart is a mother of four, grandmother of seven, and great grandmother of two. She leads a study called “Covenants of the Bible” on Yahoo Groups and owns the “Catholic Discussions” list. Her interests include Bible study, Catholic apologetics, lectio divina, genealogy and reading historical works about her ancestors.
